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jquinby

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Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies 5 months ago

When I was in formation a couple of years ago, I showed our homiletics instructor a ChatGPT-generated homily for our assigned text. He read through it and put his head on the desk. Then he handed it back to me and said it was as good as good as anything you'd hear from the ambo that Sunday.

By this, he meant that it was ok-but-not-great, and there's a lot of weak preaching out there. And your point is dead on: the text and the assembly are the primary considerations. I preach on the same readings to 4 different masses, but the 4:30 Saturday Vigil folks are a different group than the 11:30 Sunday Morning crowd, so the message is tuned accordingly. Different emphases, different touchstones, differing exhortations, etc.

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Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death 12 months ago

That’d be Guinea fowl, but all you’ve done is created a new problem unless you have a large area for them to range and a high tolerance for bird guano.

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Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe? 1 year ago

Can confirm. Grew up in suburban Atlanta during the period depicted, including getting caught in the first big Freaknic blowout he describes. It’s so dead-on it made me homesick.

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LibreOffice 400M Downloads, and Counting 1 year ago

I used it exclusively for my graduate theology studies - all my papers, presentations, and so on. Along with Zotero, I had everything I needed.

Just for fun, I did a few papers in LaTex, but I ran into a minor footnote formatting issue that I couldn't fix, so I didn't use it for my closure projects. LibreOffice was fine.

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FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters 5 years ago

Also an Extra. I actually delayed renewal this year, but then re-upped when I remembered that I'd been using the callsign@arrl.org email forwarded for a bunch of stuff and shelling out for one more year was easier than hunting down all the places I'd used it. I'll probably address that soon and let it go for good after this year.

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Clayton Christensen has died 6 years ago

I don't do a ton of business reading, but Christensen's stuff was top-notch and always on the short-list of recommendations I'd make to others.

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Amateur Radio 7 years ago

With a handheld radio and a Technician License, you can get on the air via local repeaters, work the VHF/UHF satellites, tinker with APRS (using something like this: http://www.mobilinkd.com/).

$500 will get you a good HF rig, but as another comment mentioned, you'll need to factor in the cost of a DC power supply, some decent coaxial cable and something to use for an antenna. Antennas can be dirt-cheap - just wire cut to length and lofted however you can.

/r/hamradio is a solid online resource. There's a semi-official IRC channel too.

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Amateur Radio 7 years ago

Don't forget low-cost SDR dongles - great for introducing digital signal analysis, satellite communications (wxsat, etc), ADSB aircraft tracking, HAB, and other ham-adjacent topics. This sort of thing was unimaginably expensive when I was first getting interested in radio. The first WinRadios I saw advertised in hobbyist magazines were, what, $700 or more?

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Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst? 7 years ago

Man alive I lived on that site during those years. If you don't remember or if it was before your time: people anonymously posted internal emails, layoff notices, and so on. Some of them (the Cerner "tick-tock" email comes to mind - though it looks like it appeared on a Yahoo board first) were legendary. And the FC forums...oofah.

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10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (2012) 7 years ago

Nice. This brings back some great memories. I used to do a similar one-liner that alternated between white and black blocks, which created crossword-puzzle-like patterns. I'd sit across the room and squint at the display, hoping to see some sort of emergent pattern.

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FT8 – Tipping Point for Ham Radio? 8 years ago

Exactly so, and moreover, during a solar minimum, when HF propagation is sub-par even in OK conditions. The weak-signal stuff is what got me interested in upgrading from tech to general, and then extra. Every new thing over the decades has been met with the same "this is killing ham radio" response.

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Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk? 8 years ago

Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows

Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury

ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications

ARRL Antenna Book

American Heritage Dictionary, 5th Ed.

Bible/Lectionary, Breviary, and Catechism

If fiction counts, I will probably never delete Flatland or the complete Joseph Conrad from my Kindle.

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