jauntywundrkind

I want to say thank you, so much because, it feels like radio & these people who worked to create these enjoyable spaces, filled with such life: it feels like that is so rapidly becoming such a lost art. And it just feels like theres so little we leave to the future to remember this by. That as things get bleaker and worse, there's so few artifacts to point to like this that tell the good tale.

Elsewhere in this thread I poured out such joy and happiness about so many station that are so beloved to me, are just darling special places. I want so badly to imagine https://mountainchill.com KRKQ to be broadcasting from Telluride Colorado for a hundred, a thousand years. It's something so special.

Yet the story, the sadness you tell here, identifying forces eroding us, our great Society, with nothing of substance and meaning in its place: it's just getting so much worse, in so many ways and places.

The mechanized take-over of the airwaves, the public's airwaves, that the FCC has congressional mandate to use and protect & make good for the public, is ongoingly getting so much worse, on and on. The takeover by right wing aligned outlets like Sinclair has been so bad, so ongoing, has so few hopeful counter-examples if things going right at any scale. Lots of small positive lights, but this chewing up of the world by hostile above-human quasi-immortal corporate super orgs is on full display in radio, in broadcast.

Trump I's FCC overturning congressional media ownership requirements has been part of this. There are only three major players in radio left, since these rules, and two of them are trying to merge right now, for a $6.2B merger. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15716219 (2017), and excellent article today, https://karlbode.com/local-u-s-tv-news-will-soon-be-entirely...

Meanwhile that same Carr run FCC is doing everything it can to chill and ruin free speech, to terrorize anyone with speech they find disagreeable. Orban style totalitarianism, right here at home. Ghastly ghastly anti-democratic, anti freedom, anti-liberty, just the smallest possible weasel stuff, shame beyond shame to these weak spirited cowards.

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile but is morally treasonable to the American public."

Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

Meanwhile this same administration has all but destroyed the National Endowment for the Arts. Countless radio stations have had to make drastic efforts to stay afloat, as both a miniscule yet vital source of funding for such great public service has been cut, by these same foes of everything you've written of.

I want more than a memory. In the comments below I've shared some truly great amazing stations I love, that folks can tune into from anywhere and enjoy. I an a proud supporting member at multiple stations. Yet, with forces like this, big, scary, corrupt, evil, un American, in my view demonic forces like this, with Powell Memorandum operations to corporate and own the airwaves for private and increasingly political interest, I fear writing like this will serve all too strongly as a necessary vital remembrance of a past, one that few people would otherwise have any ability to connect to. With a tear and with thanks, let me say I really appreciate this write up, and I hope it will not be so very necessary for so very long into our future. With apologies for being a bit pointed, obviously, but for hopefully reasonable or understandable, good spirited cause... May there be better times ahead, may the people enjoy the airwaves & making special places of them together again.

This feels radically off target to me.

Sinophobia as such (not always, and there's obviously a relation) isn't about the Chinese people, about their racial identity. It's about a menacing aggressive world power (actually two such MAWPs in this particular example), about a tired anti-Communist McCarthyism (which has always been an excuse to clamp down on the left/progressives, a menace to free speech).

If Russia were still the USSR and the cold war hadn't ended and they were our AI competition, & where giving away the latent matricies of reality that the US profiteers extracted by stealing all the worlds knowledge illegally, and which they want to use to raise the ladder & leave a permanent plebeian underclass, we the US imperial fatcats would be doing the same sabre rattling and fearmongering and tension raising for sure. Sinophobia here is just a particular fear of "other" for the only other that's relevant.

And that sucks, no matter who it is we are trying to other here, no matter what phobia the propagandists of the GOP and Technofascism are spinning, ginning up. To fixate is to be unable to see the point.

Two recent ones that really really hit me,

we're entering the most geopolitically volatile moment since the trinity test lit up the alamogordo desert and the only US policy prescription is a big button labeled sinophobia

https://bsky.app/profile/thebadcode.com/post/3mr3skoyass2k , and,

every vendor cranking the big dial labeled "sinophobia" and looking back at the us government for approval

The government itself doing the propaganda here, skipping the vendors. Sinophobia intensifies. War drums of "be afraid be afraid be afraid" beat louder.

It's so bad, it's so stupid. Kimi lands one showing pretty clearly this was absolutely the determining concern happening at vast scale, that they can just a lot of this themselves, and this noise pollution from the most hopelessly lost aggro administration ever still gets blared out the trumpets of war & discord. What a joke. Give me a break, give it a rest.

War here is less winnable than the Iran war they started. They're going to make America itself so much worse, these people so hungry to put down free and good models. This pathetic attempt is not going to work, you are just going to once again hold the US citizens hostage & make their lives worse, for sick political games.

i had a quite good experience generating a key/username on my local machine and ssh'ing in.

lot of vitriol in the comments. looks like a spectacularly put together BBS, to me. the tools are open-source and have some really fun looking value add, but no, i haven't ran them.

I treasure Radio On Internet (thanks Russ (Silicon Valley joke)) so much. There's so many less but still so many independent/community/college radio stations all over.

On the west coast, https://kexp.org of course. https://kcrw.com and their HD2 channel.

Middle of the country, https://wwoz.org jazz/blues/local is incredible (so help ye who has to listen through the local music announcements though!) and also with a hd2. https://ksjd.org has some fun variety. https://coloradosound.org is great rock, as is https://koto.org in CO. There's nearly nothing that makes me so happy as https://mountainchill.com in telluride co; a station that makes it clear how narrowly grouped together most stations are & that just is so good.

Coming closer to me, https://wtmd.org rock in Baltimore md, https://xpn.org in Philly for more. https://wzum.org jazz in pittsburgh pa. https://wdvx.com in knoxville tn.

I also listen to a bunch of others, which i'd characterize more as tier 2; good but often more ads or less reliable a win for me. weqx, wmrw-lp, kozo-lp, weru, wmpg. wsri and wwod (both "the river" 93.9, and occasionally from the right elevation in NH overlapping in signal amusingly enough).

A lot of these stations have good track listings too, broken down by the DJ, sometimes that you can play on demand. It's incredible how much excellent interesting fantastic music you can scout out or listen to.

I used to listen to endless endless reams of shoutcast stations online. But man that has really really died out something fierce. There used to be so many interesting niche stations there. It still got me started looking widely at radio stations, as a decent fraction were just regular radio stations too. Realizing how badly commercial radio would never give the goods, would play the same pop stuff all the time, and have lots of ads? Man it was sad, but there were so many excellent other things to tune into! Alas on the dial, it's largely been couple massive corporate and political/religious (all very right-wing, Powell Memorandum on and on) titans taking over as much radiowaves as they can, as stations fold and go under, in the hard times of keeping your head up in the world today, getting the building, gear, and staff's bill's payed. (Especially with the administration trying to destroy the arts broadly, gutting National Endowment for the Arts!)

I'd absolutely love for folks to throw more stations they enjoy out here. https://radio.garden is of course wicked fun to browse generally! Gets submitted every so often, often garnering some significant love. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=radio.garden

I'll be interested to see what happens as more and more gamers start getting into extreme old age. The lack of right of first sale, that your many thousands of dollar catalog of beloved games & your saves kicks the bucket with you is going to be a not great look for Steam some day.

I'm also a little nervous that maybe Valve works on getting the anti-cheat solution improved for Steam hardware, but the rest of Linux gets left behind. Steam has such a halo now, and this would but a subtle but serious tarnish that would never wash off. No massive up front damage but it would be the cusp, a point that would be hard to recover from.

Like the first point, there's also the general risk that someday Gabe isn't around to keep the ship pointed on the right direction. That they turn into a Nintendo, a company who never misses a chance to squander good will, to do the most MBA thing they can, that is as un-ppen as possible by design. See for example Nintendo's recent response to customers asking for some of the tariff refund money Nintendo is claiming.

Or perhaps 4) it's outcompeted severely by other models & releasing it would only tarnish their name

seems to work for me on Firefox 152.

It's pretty cursed how much worse a peer the American models are.

When I'm on my z.ai subscription or using DeepSeek API I can see the model think, see what's factoring in to it's decisions. I can point it at material it's missing, I can correct things that are going wrong. We work together. The open models are a good peer.

By contrast, the proprietary/American locked down models act like Chinese Rooms; information flows in and out but these companies work very hard to make sure we cannot see what's inside the box. They act and do but speak to me only in vague generalizations, not as peer, but speaking down to me.

I find this intolerable. It greatly obstructs our work.

And the deal keeps getting worse, the attitude meaner. Codex now is encrypting subagent prompts now. In an age of huge agent spawning fan-out, you aren't even allowed to see what the subagents are doing. To work like this seems impossible to me. https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905028

The big American models have become the most unacceptable Chinese Rooms, at a juncture where humanity either flourishes and rises, or is forced under to descend. And these forces, these decisions: they are doing wicked deeds against us. They are withdrawn, acting as mystical foreign oracles, aliens, when in truth their core is made of us.This is antithetic to the broad project of Augmenting Human Intellect (Engelbart). This is actively working against our species.

Referring to the top comment on yesterday's submission for Terranc McKenna psychadelic bad trip. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968515

I'm not sure bow many special services the big tech companies provide.

Palantir's demo videos are very "we filtered down this list of people, here's the satellite imagery now, and we integrate well with your repaer drones and missiles systems to complete the kill chain! One click kill!" They probably patented & trademarked exactly that terminology. The Amazon of barely reviewed murder.

From the features section:

Isolated streaming sessions: Each stream runs in its own compositor, completely separate from your desktop environment.

So yes, a compositor per session. I love the idea of a gaming box that can host multiple instances; that would be very very good.

I'm down to try this new rust server. It seems to replace either Sunshine or the more recent fork Apollo. They both work fine

Note that Moonlight also has a fork, Artemis.

I'm genuinely not sure what difference Sunshine/Moonlight has vs somewhat newer Apollo/Artemis, but kind of just posting here to let folks know there are already some fairly active forks from Sunshine, the classic way to host a server for Moonlight clients.

I've been wading through comments (offering upvotes) looking for comment on this photo. Excellent inclusion. Very fun. People are great!

OP here, thanks for the post. I agree I was definitely over glooming. It still makes me so scared to think of what will become of people at large, what this world will be if we do these ratchets we seem on a colission course for. But I tried to add an edit that hopefully provides a somewhat better balanced view. Thanks for the good post.

Their previous article on AI shows a pretty strident ham-handedness. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002795

In general I find their submissions tend towards extreme grandiosity. I find I really appreciate people who have some nuance about the world, can see some duality, and the many many many submissions here are (I admit) often quite fun and enjoyable, but spoken much more from a bully pulpit perspective, with a zeal and self certainty that I find rarely coincides with truth-seeking.

Broadly I don't think this is quite so true, quite such a mortal threat.

What I see are that there are a lot of extremely fake humans, who want and need cover. Who have absurd ridiculous (and often dastardly or sinister) plans. Who want to do things, a-priori. But could never get away with their actions, in any just clear reasoned normal rules of society.

And AI is this new circuit breaker. It's innovative permission to move ridiculously fast and break everything, right now. Take the perhaps old IBM slide and flip it upside down,

A computer can never be held accountable.

Therefore a computer must never make a management decision

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...

The people "using" AI today to "make decisions" are using it because AI cannot be held accountable therefore that is the cover for their decisions.

This is is all such a resounding PKD nightmare, a reality bring invaded by Fake Humans. It was that was already, just gobs of nonsense, the worst liars spreading the most ridiculous memetic caltrap everywhere: Bullshit Asymmetry Principle weaponized against reason to ever higher degrees, Fox News terrormongering advanced and advanced, Hastert Rule obstructionist politics by wicked pedophile protectors and system ruiners and monsters. AI is a rapid accelerant for burning down reality, for propagating the disreality that the fake humans require for existence. Un-people truly from some other dimension, who've worked and worked to get away with their twisted anti- reality over us all.

AI can and does help with a lot of decision making, in good ways. It's an incredibly tool. It can comb through incredible amounts of data. But it's primary use in "decision making" seems to be in deflecting responsibility, in making hideous choices no human system could reasonably make. In concocting fabulations. Both of management design, and endless fuel nightmare disreality slop video to dislodge any last bits of real reality still clinging on (hello ai faked campaign videos!).

The "frothing excitement" here is the frothing excitement to destroy society, to be and bring out the most wicked brutal careless world that can be brought upon us, to raise up the Theil-istic/(Octavia) Butler-ian nightmare neofuedalim. It is to escape accountability, to give cover for sin savagery and sabotage.

(Regarding the article, I do think it's worth tempering ones read of this article by reading the authors previous work on AI. Which to me exposes their baises and in my view makes them so vastly unreliable & overdramatic a narrator as to be near worthless. Their other submissions are less greviously clearly full of it, but also tend towards ridiculous over-grandiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002795 )

Being convinced of disreality is a pervasive weapon that keeps being leveraged by the valent evil bad forces to make things worse and worse. Gladly tying the blindfold around your eyes should not be allowed to look as cool as this kind of post tries to exude.

Theres something so PKD about these fake realities, that have breached any and all containment, that people so readily deny any sense & sensibility. Just because. It's caused such huge disasters already. But it feels like still so many slumber on, that camp Wide Awake suffers so.

Brandolini's Law, the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle lurks below every reality based discussion, waiting for any chance to plunge thr pariticpants through to the unfathomable depths of unreality. It's a bitch of a structural advantage to be able to leave engagement and caring and discussion behind at any point, and plunge into that freezing alien other, to leave reality behind.

I've known I can't really rely on Social Security to exist when I retire, in any notable form, but man, this is so dark. And it's just a start.

(Edit: I'm not certain either way! But it seems like too great a risk to rely on. And the prognosis seems not great! I have heard for decades needs serious help, and nothing seems to change. More broadly, with a few exceptions, I've seen overwhelmingly obstructionism and destruction of America in lifetime.)

Cory Doctorow had a great write up two weeks ago, Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodi...

His end thesis is that even though Meta knows of the Streisand effect, even though they full on expect to lose, badly, and look like bullies chuds and losers, with no real defense, they are doing it to keep everyone else who works or worked at Meta on line, to engage in gratuitous overkill as a message. Sounds about right!

He also had a very excellent piece on pro-Monopolists like Thiel, which just feels so close a breed of absolute deranged fucking madness. Excellent read. Realest of real problems. Deranged billionaires and their syndromes, https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/16/lucky-orifices/

Congrats a24 on your first open source submission on HN! Cool project! CDC / reactivize all the things!

Also the fact that China is building solar power like crazy: that makes it fantastically more well spirited an endeavor to wish well.

That's great to hear that we have at least somewhat decent voltages. I thought America was still sort of piddling around with mostly 500kV and under power distribution.

It's not a huge power multiplier (P = VI, so linear), but in principle I do love the idea that if you are going to have these massive transmissions lines we ought use the conductor well, at good high voltages.

China has been doing 1MV and 1.1MV lines for a while now, which is so excellent to see. https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ul... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...

Three weeks after the Senate - House passed a war powers resolution telling him to cease hostilities. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8j6g3v3r4o

Loosest cannon ever. Completely rogue. Of course there is zero respect for governance, for democracy, for the system.

I remember Hillary's email server as being an outrage because it might not have been secure. It didn't seem like she was actively deleting all the emails illegally.

Which if you then reflect on Bush II, well, they did delete all the emails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv...

I also think it's so many cases like this last week, with OMB saying agencies can run whatever internal surveys they want and they don't have to report to the public. None of it is upstanding, up front. This seems so far beyond any "both sides" or "it's been like this". https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/07/opm-proposes-decen...

Android may be a Linux but it (if we are feeling generous) sure as heck is not the user's. It's someone else's Linux that they let us run some non-Linux apps in in extremely tight sandboxes.

I'm somewhat willing to entertain the possibility of using FUSE to access my files again as such (as files), but man, what a downgrade!

It also means the file based syncing I use is not going to work anymore, which... On the other hand... Is maybe right out for me.

The total lack of records, all the Signal usage during this sad era is such a deep deep cutting treason. Just valentpy hostile to everything, to the citizenry, to history, to democracy, to America.

The British burned the White House. This is a far worse, a far more grevious sundering of our history, our heritidge. (And Elon Musk is the worst killer with the most blood on his hands of anyone in the 21st century, for Thanos snapping USAID and others our of existence.)

Afaik let in JavaScript also has a sizable penalty too, if not quite as bad as const. Var on and on.

Alas I fear we are going to rapidly build a bunch of very hard to maintain and clean up inefficient small nuclear power systems, to power a lot of this. Not next year, no, but soon.