I desperately want to be able to get a concrete amount of tokens for my prompt before making a call - things like this make it very hard to request the right amount of max_tokens from longer prompt/generation pairs.
We're actually working on a product right now that helps integrate this into your worldbuilding tools - we pull in relevant information from your campaign and world, then add a slick AI user experience that gets really quality generations for worldbuilding, session prep, etc. The end result is this experience where GPT has learned your world, and you don't have to do any of the tinkering with getting the prompts just right. Ask for an encounter table, get an excellent, lore-consistent encounter table.
We're going to be launching soon (days, not weeks)! If you're interested in being in the first wave feel free to jump on the beta list: https://www.carbonquill.com/
In fact, it's SO knowledgeable, that if you tell it to talk in the accent and slang of people from Sigil, the feature city in the Planescape D&D Setting from the 90s, it will perfectly adopt the character.
Does anyone have any data on how much use Morse Code still gets today? Are there any people still using it actively for communication, or are there literally zero practical applications anymore?
Morse code (aka continuous wave/CW) is in very common use in amateur (ham) radio, predominantly in CW Contesting [0], DXing, and low power (QRP) and portable operations (like parks on the air/POTA, summits on the air/SOTA [1]) as CW an extremely robust, efficient modulation.
In other words, a 5w CW signal is roughly equivalent to a 100w voice signal -- more miles per watt. Plus you can fit a lot of signals in less spectrum. It's slower than voice or data modes but you don't need to say much to exchange enough information for a valid contact. And learning Morse code is just fun and a superb mental exercise; amateur radio enables Morse code to be actually useful and enjoyable in the modern era.
It's also used for:
* amateur radio direction finding/ARDF (radio orienteering) [2]
* High speed CW competitions (which used to be much more popular in Eastern Europe) [3]
* automatic identification of radio beacons and repeaters (e.g. aviation Navaids like NDBs and VOR, EMS/fire/police/business radios)
* backup/emergency communications for governments & armed forces
clarification: CW is a modulation type, on which Morse code is encoded using an on/off carrier wave. Much like how Amplitude Modulation/AM is a modulation on which voice is encoded by changing the amplitude of the carrier wave.
About ten years ago I set custom vibrations for my top contacts on my phone to be the Morse code representation of their initials. Ever since, I’ve had the super power of knowing who is texting or calling me without pulling out my phone. I’d say that alone has made a quick memorization of the alphabet worth it.
More specifically, it is a rocker switch. One side is for dit, the other for dah. It makes the dits and dahs unambiguous, and easy for someone to quickly learn to use. I don't know of any phones with a rocker switch on them.
I thought it would be a fun thing to have on a phone.
Koch method is to do "full speed" Morse code from the beginning, but only learn 1 or 2 letters at a time.
This Javascript page starts with the letters "k" and "m" for Lesson 1. Then, in Lesson 2, you learn "k, m, and r". Etc. etc.
The way the app works is click on the "k" to hear how "k" sounds. Then click on "m" for its sound. Finally, hit the "Start Lesson" button, and the computer will make a random mix of k and m (and extended pauses, which means "space").
You type in "k m k mm mmkkm" or similar into the textarea, and the computer then sees how accurate you were.
Less than six months ago I found this same site and I was practicing religiously multiple times a day. Several weeks ago I interrupted my practice for one reason or another and last time I tried my score had dropped to below 40%. I need to start practicing again.
I haven't learned the full alphabet yet. I'm still missing letters q, g, h, z, x,c, v and all the digits.
Something I've found interesting is how much difference it made changing the tone frequency. My brain definitely got used to a certain tone initially, and when I first tried changing the tone my recognition ability dropped quite a bit. So now I change it occasionally to keep my brain on its proverbial toes.
I wish there was a way to practice just the letters I have more difficulty with; namely, the ones which were added later.
Plenty of use today in amateur radio, especially amongst QRPers (low power enthusiasts, signals <= 5 watts). It's easy to build transmitters/receivers for, and it's more efficient than, say, voice modes like SSB in terms of spectrum usage and how far you can get per watt.
NDB stations, an even older type of radio navigation beacon, also broadcast their identifier like this. I fancy they might even outlast VORs due to how much cheaper they are to operate. The real survivor though might be the ILS (Instrument Landing System): ILS transmitters broadcast their identifier in Morse code, as did the prototypical Lorenz systems, making them very nearly a century old already (Lorenz systems were first installed in the 1930s). ILS approaches are the most common type for commercial aviation in most countries.
The one navaid likely to be around for the foreseeable future is DME. Which sounds slightly strange if you know a bit about aviation, you probably know it as slightly subservient to VOR as in VOR/DME. However, taking a number of DME fixes is a common (though slightly outdated) way of updating a fix for an aircrafts inertial navigation system.
2. communicating with the team trying to rescue you in your sunk submarine
3. any place where you're trapped but can bang on something
4. keeping your comms secret because nobody will even know you're using morse
5. secretly communicating with others during class (I knew two sisters in high school who would jibber jabber all through class by signing letters with their hands under the desks).
6. blinking in Morse when the terrorists put you under the TV cameras for your confession
7. your radio setup can only do on/off
8. you cannot remember how smoke signals worked
9. you need to flash a lamp at the airplane who might rescue you
There has been a bit of a revival in CW since the pandemic in ham radio. Lots of hams took the time to finally learn it with the extra free time they had. So as far as amateur radio goes, it’s more popular now than it has been in a long time.
For anyone looking to get serious about learning CW including the "protocol" for using it on amateur radio bands, check out CWAcademy. It's like a group class setting led by volunteer "old timers" who are passionate about the technology and community. I had no prior morse code experience and successfully made my way up to about 15 words per minute over the course of about 5 months. It takes work and patience, but it's a lot of fun. There's a bunch of arduino-based gizmos and other software that hams have made to simulate and teach morse-code-heavy interactions (shout-out to Morserino, Morse Runner, and Morse Code Ninja).
That, or Long Island CW Club [0] - highly recommend either one. Or Learn CW Online/LCWO [1] for self-led drills and practice in addition to those apps.
And definitely avoid charts, graphs, mnemonics, memory hacks, visual aids -- at all costs -- if you want proficiency.
Morse code is alive and well, especially during contests where efficiency means performance. There are a few reasons:
It has high spectral efficiency; a CW transmission is only a few Hertz wide on the spectrum, whereas even SSB voice needs several kHz. This lets you use very narrow receive filters, to cut out adjacent noise and make contacts in difficult conditions.
It can achieve useful communication at very low power, with very simple equipment. Look up "qrp cw kit" and you can get $15 transmitters that you solder together from parts in a few minutes, and these aren't VLSI parts like some wifi chip or whatever, these are single discrete components. Hams love hand-built equipment, or at least the theoretical ability to use hand-built equipment, and QRP (low-power operation) is a hugely popular challenge.
It occupies a sweet spot where it's simple enough to encode by hand and decode by ear, but also easy enough for computers to operate. So there's a wide range of automation available, from whole-band decoders to keyboard-interactive QSOs, or you can go completely bare-handed if you prefer. That makes it appeal to more people than a more modern computer-required mode like PSK31 or FT8. (Those have even higher spectral efficiency, though, so they're popular in their own way.)
Out of curiosity, what does the CQ in your username refer to?
A nice thing with CW is that you can get it through some really impressive noise floors. I personally never use it outside of contesting though and that barely counts since it tends to be macros.
Also, all amateur stations are required to identify regularly. Relays will ident quietly in morse so it doesn't interrupt the voice comms happening on that channel.
It works great for zero dimensional displays that are far away in brought daylight. For example, the Chaos Computer Club used to hack some rental bikes which had an LED that indicated whether the bike was available or not and the hacked bikes would flash "CCC" in morse code, so you could easily identify the hacked bikes from a distance.
I'm not sure about audio morse though, I'd guess voice would be better in all cases there.
It's not. Combine a loud emergency whistle with Morse Code, and you have the ability to signal without any electric power over much longer distances than voice.
Really interesting, I appreciate Neil writing more about the process and philosophy than simply "we are banning AI tools."
As these models improve, I'm skeptical that we'll be able to differentiate human-written works from an edited work generated by a skilled LLM operator. It's already trivial to generate fiction content that scores as "100% human" on analysis tools.
However, sci-fi short stories are a particularly interesting case - by their very nature they are about investigating uniquely human experiences by using speculation to amplify things humans think, feel, and experience. A machine can never do that wholesale. But, what about a machine in tandem with a human that is articulating how they feel, and a premise?
I think what we're going to see is that all the small startups going for big, broad ideas ("we do AI writing for anything", "your one-stop marketing content automation platform", etc) are going to flat out lose to the big companies. I predict that the startups we'll see survive are the ones that find tight niches and solve for prompt engineering and UX around a very specific problem.
Congrats on the launch. I've been looking at Intercom and considering integrating it with our product, and I hadn't considered the issues you brought up. We're a B2C company, does that mean we aren't a good fit?
