[spidersouris]

Thanks for the wiki -- I have always been interested in hardware hacking but I have always felt overwhelmed as I didn't know where to start. I believe this kind of resource can greatly help with that, especially the case studies.

However, I can't help but feel that a major part of the content is LLM-generated, or at least LLM-rewritten. It feels off and uninteresting to read, honestly. Is it the case? To support my case, I see that the case study page (https://www.hardbreak.wiki/introduction/case-study-led-to-a-...) has very similar paragraphs next to each other, the second one seemingly being the "genuine" one, and the first one being the LLM-rewritten version.

I'm not against using LLMs to help fix typos or reformulate things, but you should definitely keep some of your style. The LLM that you used (if you used one) made the content super bland, and as a reader, I'm not really incentivized to browse more.

[Joel_Mckay]

Get a ham radio technician license, and you may develop an intuitive perspective on most electrical engineering concepts.

i.e. the physics lab derivation of the core EE tool set is unnecessary if you understand what the models are describing.

AI is slop in and slop out... and dangerous to students... =3

John Shive's Wave Machines is where every student should start:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DovunOxlY1k

[TeMPOraL]

> Get a ham radio technician license, and you may develop an intuitive perspective on most electrical engineering concepts.

May. I managed to get one without developing much intuition for most EE concepts, unfortunately.

[0xEF]

Were you also completely turned off by the community?

I ask because I got into it about 15+ years ago for the purposes of helping with emergency comms and learning more about electronics, but found the community extremely hostile toward new comers that did not have money to burn on expensive gear. I ended up just giving up on it after a few years after investing in a bunch of Arduino stuff and learned far more about EE than I ever did playing at radio. The concept of the Elmer seemed dead, leaving nobody who wanted to show the new guys the ropes.

From what I understand, maybe that has changed in recent years?

Weirdly, I did take something away from my experience with ham radio; I know an awful lot about the weather and atmosphere now, which has turned into a lasting interest.

[cushychicken]

Ham radio's decline is more than explainable as a cultural issue.

The culture of every internet forum I've ever visited for it is absolutely deplorable. It seems like each one has a handful of really grouchy old gatekeepers who lie in wait to absolutely dunk on newcomers.

[0xEF]

We agree, but I suppose my next question would be why? What happened to turn these guys (or ham radio culture at large) into grouchy old gatekeepers? I'm generalizing, of course, but they were like that when I arrived. I can't imagine the hobby was always like that, especially seeing some of the old literature from the 50's and 60's in the US, which was very encouraging of mentoring and sharing info.

If it's still the same today as it was back when I tried it out, that's a shame, because ham radio is absolutely full of hardware hacking opportunities. Heck, you can make an antenna out of a retractable tape measure.

[TeMPOraL]

> What happened to turn these guys (or ham radio culture at large) into grouchy old gatekeepers? I'm generalizing, of course, but they were like that when I arrived.

My bet would be, the Internet. Mailing lists and then discussion boards (and then group IMs) allowed for deeper, topical conversations, with much lower barrier to entry, so everyone left the radio spectrum - everyone except those already used to spending time on it, and not interested in moving on to the new thing.

[wpm]

Amateur radio has always self-policed to a large extent. Mostly to keep the FCC off their backs, and I'm sure the internet has made it worse, but it's always been there.

[btreecat]

Lead paint probably

[TeMPOraL]

Maybe, but the problem I see with HAM is that no interesting discussion is allowed to happen in the first place. Between the legal rules, cultural rules, and the expectation to avoid niche topics that would bore out 90% of participants, there's hardly anything left to talk about.

[doubleg72]

The overlap of hams and preppers is pretty large.. Most of those guys are of a particular mindset that only meshes with other like minded individuals.

[TeMPOraL]

> Were you also completely turned off by the community?

I was never turned on :). I got my license partly because other people at our local Hackerspace were getting it, and partly because I imagined it'll be useful to have the knowledge and ability to build and legally operate my own radio hardware.

I never got the whole HAM talking over radio thing. Between the legal and cultural restrictions on the topics, and the expectations of not taking up the airwaves too much, I can't see how you could discuss anything interesting or worthwhile this way. It's no surprise that there seems to be nothing going on other than boring and obnoxious rag chewing - interesting conversations aren't allowed to occur in the first place.

I mean, the intersection between "non-commercial", "non-religious", "non-controversial/non-political", and "interesting to any HAM" is... basically just saying hello, weather, trash talk, and self-referential showing off.

[Joel_Mckay]

Did you mean you don't understand the equations/theory, or are having difficulty applying the concepts to design circuits?

In the first case, install LTSpice (free from Analog Devices), and head here to run down the basics:

https://www.youtube.com/@FesZElectronics/videos

And in the latter, go though common basic designs analyzing how they work:

https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofelectroniccircuits...

https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofel02graf

https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780070110779

https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofel0006graf

Then try your own designs combining properties of several designs. Start with simple blinkers and buzzers at first... Try to avoid Arduino designs until you've done a few 555, transistor, and opamp circuits first. =3

[TeMPOraL]

Most of my issues seem to be about power - I have no feel for the relevant math, so even as I remember the basic equations and methods, I never feel certain I'm calculating it right. So in terms of hands-on experience, I pretty much jumped straight from burning through-hole resistors with 12V battery to ignite rocket motors made of PVC and caramel fuel, to Arduinos and RPIs and NodeMCUs -- basically, stuff that comes with an USB port it can draw power from...

Thanks for the links, I'll work through them and hopefully come out with some understanding at the end of this process :).

[Joel_Mckay]

Note, part of the fun is the forensic analysis to figure out why stuff didn't work the first time... Maybe a LDO Voron 3d printer kit would be a fun project too =3

[otteromkram]

I mean I'm a dummy who just wanted to listen to ISS static and trucker jargon.

[Joel_Mckay]

Indeed, we also end up learning about our sun in levels of detail no person should find enthralling... lol =3

[RobotToaster]

At least in the UK you can't if you're a linux user, the software they use to spy on you while taking the test is windows only.

[Cthulhu_]

Well first off, the certificate comes with certain guarantees, and they can't give those guarantees if they can't prove you didn't cheat on the test. "spy on you" is absolutely correct, but a bad faith phrasing. That said, I did my AWS test at a test / exam center where there's isolated computers and cameras to validate that there was no cheating.

[CamperBob2]

dangerous to students

It's fatally dangerous to students who ignore it or dismiss it out of hand. That much is already certain.

[Joel_Mckay]

How so?

[CamperBob2]

Wait and see. You're not paying attention now, but it's not too late to start.

Go to your favorite programming puzzle site and see how you do against the latest models, for instance. If you can beat o1-pro regularly, for instance, then you're right, you have nothing to worry about and can safely disregard it. Same proposition that was offered to John Henry.

[Joel_Mckay]

Please reformulate your argument, and I will check back tomorrow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ

LLMs are rules based search engines with higher dimension vector spaces encoding related topics. There is nothing intelligent about these algorithms, except the trick ones play on oneself interpreting well structured nonsense.

It is stunting kids development, as students often lack the ability to intuitively reason when they are being misled. "How many R's in 'Strawberry'?" is a classic example exposing the underlying pattern recognition failures. =3

[Lerc]

I have never understood why the failure to answer the strawberry question has seen as a compelling argument as to the limits of AI. The AIs that suffer from this problem have difficulty counting. That has never been denied. Those AI's also do not see the letters of the words they are processing. Counting the letters in a word is a task that it is quite unsurprising that it fails. I Would say it is more surprising that that they can perform spelling tasks at all. More importantly the models where such weaknesses became apparent are all from the same timeframe where the models advanced so much that those weaknesses were visible only after so many other greater weaknesses had been overcome.

People didn't think that planes flying so high that pilots couldn't breathe exposed a fundamental limitation of flight, just that their success had revealed the next hurdle.

The assertion that an LLM is X and therefore not intelligent is not a useful claim to make without either proof that it is X and proof that X is insufficient. You could say brains are interconnected cells that send pulses at intervals dictated by a combination of the pulses they sense, and there is nothing intelligent about that. The premises must be true and you have to demonstrate that the conclusion follows from those premises. For the record I think your premises are false and your conclusion doesn't follow.

Without a proof you could hypothesise reasons why such a system might not be intelligent and come up with an example of a task that no system that satisfies the premises could accomplish. While that example is unsolved the hypothesis remains unrefuted. What would you suggest as a test that shows a problem that could not be solved by such a machine? It must be solvable by at least one intelligent entity to show that it is solvable by intelligence. It must be undeniable when the problem is solved.

[CamperBob2]

(Shrug) If you're retired or independently wealthy, you can afford that attitude. Hopefully one of those describes you.

Otherwise, you're going to spend the rest of your career saying things like, "Well, OK, so the last model couldn't count the number of Rs in 'Strawberry' and the new one can, but..."

Personally, I dislike being wrong. So I don't base arguments on points that have a built-in expiration date, or that are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of whatever I'm talking about.

[raywu]

Case in point, under Case Study > Reconnaissance > OSINT, these two paragraphs follow one another - same content but different wording.

> The first step in any hardware hacking project is research. I started by Googling the router model number, "ASUS RT-N12 D1", and came across an article about a similar model, the ASUS RT-N12+ B1. The article mentioned that the device had an open UART interface allowing unauthenticated root access. However, it provided no exact details on how to exploit this or where the UART interface might be located. Could my router model have the same vulnerability?

> In the first step I googled the model number for my router "ASUS RT N12 D1" and I came accross this article. It shows that a similar model the "ASUS RT N12+ B1" appears to have an open UART interface, which gives unauthenticated root access. It does not show how to exacltly abuse this or any details where to find the UART interface. Let's see if our router model may have the same vulnerability!