#makeShitMonday, #meshtastic edition, in which we made #mesh #radio connections... in a #cave!!

@mbroome and I just completed a weeklong vertical cave rescue certification course, complete with a full-day simulated rescue scenario at the end. Standard comms for cave rescue is over wired field phones - but for this one, we had mesh radios all the way down to one of the main caverns that needed vertical rigging for the rescue.

I was Entrance Control (tracks who goes in / out of the cave, relays comms from the cave to Incident Command on the surface) and had my new MeshPocket on their dark mesh, based on [Vangelis]( https://github.com/semper-ad-fundum/vangelis). @mbroome was on comms *in* the cave - and also had my little Muzi R1 mesh radio.

It's definitely not ready to be primary comms - the radios struggle with low-airspace passages and corkscrews - but it's pretty darn close! Need to add some wired bridges like [the Flamingo project](https://github.com/rbreesems/flamingo) - that project has a really [neat video](https://youtu.be/R3LtLcnrpAk) from a test in Tumbling Rock...

Mesh radio is definitely a new paradigm for cave rescue, and I think doing it in parallel with existing field-phone tech will need separate operators. I had a pretty comfy setup with a field phone to the cave in one ear and an FRS radio to Incident Command on the surface in the other - which was fine, they're both auditory processing and push-to-talk so the only challenge was making sure I pushed the right button each time. 😁 Taking notes was additional cognitive load, and adding mesh comms (visual processing / type to talk) pushed it well beyond anything I could have tracked in a real emergency!

Which is great to know in advance, and I really do think that when this tech matures, it will make a solid replacement for the field phones and comms wire that's been used for the past several decades...

@cannibal

My biggest problem with the concept of LLMs, even if they weren’t a giant plagiarism laundering machine and disaster for the environment, is that they introduce so much unpredictability into computing. I became a professional computer toucher because they do exactly what you tell them to. Not always what you wanted, but exactly what you asked for.

LLMs turn that upside down. They turn a very autistic do-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean commmunication style with the machine into a neurotypical conversation talking around the issue, but never directly addressing the substance of problem.

In any conversation I have with a person, I’m modeling their understanding of the topic at hand, trying to tailor my communication style to their needs. The same applies to programming languages and frameworks. If you work with a language the way its author intended it goes a lot easier.

But LLMs don’t have an understanding of the conversation. There is no intent. It’s just a mostly-likely-next-word generator on steroids. You’re trying to give directions to a lossily compressed copy of the entire works of human writing. There is no mind to model, and no predictability to the output.

If I wanted to spend my time communicating in a superficial, neurotypical style my autistic ass certainly wouldn’t have gone into computering. LLMs are the final act of the finance bros and capitalists wrestling modern technology away from the technically literate proletariat who built it.

Fighting back the male gaze by Yuko Shimizu

#Art