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Saviano is exactly one of the "antimafia professionals" that Sciascia complained about.

Sciascia Died in 89, Saviano was 10 years old and wouldn’t start writing until the early 2000s.

It's not about the year of birth, it's about the role. Saviano creates his own career with mafia and now is acting as opinionist to any other option (i.e. now about the constitutional referendum that "will enforce the mafia").

Falcone, Borsellino, Livatino, Don Puglisi (just to mention people that paid with their own life) fight heavily against mafia, but they never converted this fight in a career.


This is an unrealistic argumentation, usually deployed to paint contemporaries in a bad light by comparing them to "saints" who are, conveniently, always dead. And it's particularly funny that Borsellino is now in the "saints" category, when he was explicitly namechecked by Sciascia himself in the newspaper column that originated the term "anti-mafia professional". Falcone also got extremely close to becoming the national anti-mafia czar, because his career had been defined by that very subject. Both were killed precisely because they specialised in this area and refused to move elsewhere.

Sciascia was 67 when he wrote that column, and was likely just aggrieved by the fact that national response to the mafia was escalating to levels before unseen (for a number of reasons). He might have had a point about another name-checked personality, the politician Leoluca Orlando, who survived those terrible times and ended up ruling Palermo for more than 20 years - something a lot of people see as realistically incompatible with actually being the anti-mafia hardliner he is supposed to be.

Saviano, however, is just a specialized journalist.


> And it's particularly funny that Borsellino is now in the "saints" category, when he was explicitly namechecked by Sciascia himself in the newspaper column that originated the term "anti-mafia professional".

If you read the original article from Sciascia [1], you can understand that he was complaining about the risk of judge appointments drived by anti-mafia positions, more than competence.

> Saviano, however, is just a specialized journalist.

If Saviano is only a specialized journalist, why is invited in many public talk-show where the topic is different from Mafia?

[1] https://www.archivioantimafia.org/sciascia.php


Because that's just how media works. It's like asking why sportsmen and scientists are invited to Big Brother VIP.

> ou can understand that he was complaining about the risk of judge appointments drived by anti-mafia positions

But if you read it all, you can clearly see that he was mostly pissed off at the risk of identifying the entirety of his beloved Sicily with the mafia; and in this context, that everything about the island would be judged in relation to that phenomenon. In addition, he was worried at the fact that many in the ruling political party had started using antimafia as a shield; that's a veiled reference to Giulio Andreotti, who around that time shifted his positions and passed antimafia laws to shore up his support in the party (which is why the mafia moved their votes to the Socialist Party in '87).

People obviously misread that column (willingly or otherwise) and proceeded to use it as a bat to beat any specialized anti-mafia figure, starting from the very person mentioned in it, Borsellino, who would end up isolated and assassinated by the mafiosi.


Maybe it’s lost in translation but my argument is semantic.

Saviano may be the type that was warned about but not the one.


Is there any info about the modulation/encoding/frequency? It would be great to have an open source decoder for RTL-SDR like we have for NOAA or METEOR.

Why not using MQTT? A Lambda that fetch new comments from HN, parse them into Markdown and push into MQTT; the ESP only needs to subscribes a topic on MQTT and render the messages.

The snarky answer is that MQTT doesn't require the author's UDP to AWS Lambda gateway SaaS⁰.

I did find MQTT flavors that support UDP but neither MQTT/UDP nor MQTT-SN seem concerned with WireGuard-level security.

⁰(This article is AI-assisted content marketing good enough that I didn't realize it until ¾ through.)


Fair point that yes I’m eating my own dog food here. And I’ve been called a robot enough times maybe I should keep track.

To the question, UDP is easier on a battery than MQTT.


To be clear I understand you are not a robot, but the article reads more as LLM generated especially toward the end which is why I said "AI-assisted".

Thanks for sharing this project; TIL about AliExpress Dollar Express tiny touch screen ESP32 dev kits for first-time buyers for $9 including shipping.


I have been worked for a regional ISP 10 years ago and having an architecture like that one, would be a godsend. With centralized BNGs we were not able to apply upstream QoS policies for subscribers on the backhaulings and we had to apply policies on DSLAM access ports.

We ended using a couple of cheap Mikrotik as PPPoE concentrators for every access room, in a similar way as you did. But the reliability of Mikrotik routers was not the best


OpenWISP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953414

From "Open Hardware Ethernet Switch project, part 1" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43969857 :

> There are 48+2 port switches with OpenWRT support

Are there 48 port switches with 8 or more cores?

Edit:

From "Show HN: Spliff – Correlating XDP and TLS via eBPF (Building a Linux EDR)" (2026) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663446 :

> the current "Golden Thread" correlation architecture fundamentally requires userspace + kernel cooperation that can't be fully offloaded.


On a similar situation, someone try Meshtastic and it works great

https://old.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1qd2z97/mestast...

I doubt that BLE can propagate well over a cruise ship.


A walkie-talkie requires a big antenna and consume a lot more power than a cellphone.


Both not true.

Both European PMR446 and the US FRS are limited to 0.5 W; GSM uses four times that. There are walkie-talkies with very small antennas too. The limiting factor is line-of-sight, in any case.

If you're fine with less than real-time audio, you can get much, much smaller and low power.


1) LTE frequencies are in the frequency intervals 600—900Mhz, or over the Ghz. Higher frequency means smaller antennas.

2) 5G cells are small and very dense, this means less power consumption.

3) LTE and 5G are based on CDMA, a technology that is way more efficient in term of bandwidth efficiency than the FM modulation used by a walkie talkie


> 5G cells are small and very dense

Not necessarily. In rural areas and using low frequencies, I believe they can even be larger than GSM.

> LTE and 5G are based on CDMA

No, the last CDMA based cell standards were 3G/UMTS and the Qualcomm equivalent (CDMA2000 or what it was). From then on, it’s all been OFDM.


> In rural areas and using low frequencies, I believe they can even be larger than GSM.

In Europe GSM is going to be dismantled. And techniques like beamforming and radio resource management reduce the power consumption for 5G base station and phones.

> No, the last CDMA based cell standards were 3G/UMTS and the Qualcomm equivalent (CDMA2000 or what it was). From then on, it’s all been OFDM.

Even if 5G is using more advanced modulations like OFDMA or NONA, the concept is the same if you compare the with FM used by walkie talkie: those are modulations way more effective in term of energy and information effiency than a traditional FM transmission


For a dasaset that live in RAM, the best solution are DuckDB or clickhouse-local. Using SQLish data is easier than a bunch of bash script and really powerful.


Though ClickHouse is not limited to a single machine or local data processing. It's a full-featured distributed database.


Another alternative is Exasol that is factors (>10x) faster than Clickhouse and scales much better for complex analytics workloads that joins data. There is a free edition for personal use without data limit that can run on any number of cluster nodes.

If you just want to read and analyze single table data, then Clickhouse or DuckDB are perfect.

Disclaimer: I work at Exasol


That's really interesting. One of my unfinished projects it's a system that take input from ADSB data and from a microphone and get a picture of a flying aircraft (I am living under the approaching path of a regional airport)


I have done some experiments with nomic embedding through Ollama and ChromaDB.

Works well, but I didn't tested on larger scale


I don't know about AI antennas, but smart antennas[1] are a things since more than 15 years. Basically they are array of antennas that can change via software the directivity (mainly used in radar systems) or increase/reduce power transmission and direction (this is used in 5G cell).

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_antenna


There's also this, from long before the gen AI era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna


This is probably one really fascinating projects, but there is no AI behind this kind of things. It's just randomly trying new configurations and select the best ones in an evolving way.

During my master degree, I attended an antenna design course and I almost burnt my laptop trying to optimize a dipole array as a side project.


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