ChatGPT isn't a search engine Or is it?

One of the kids' and my great consternations around large language model (LLM) AIs is the variety of claims that they can't match the performance of a search engine, and well yeah, They're Not Search Engines! They're a completely different thing. They're sentence completion engines that have the entire Internet at some set date at their disposal. They organize the information they were trained on into a greater than 1,000 dimensional space (in most cases) and then do a dot product of what you've told them so far with that space to determine what they should say next.

Having said all that, after performing the following search on Google this morning:

"what do you call a cross frequency radio contact"

and getting no useful results, I headed over to ChatGPT to chat with the app about our fictional friend, Penelope. She's a programming and ham radio expert who went away on an expedition. The kids and I are communicating with her via ham radio (all of this is fictional). Here's how I started my conversation with the AI this morning:

Penelope and I frequently make amateur radio contacts where I transmit on one frequency, but then receiver her signal on another frequency. What whould she call those kinds of contacts? I'm trying to describe them to my team members, and I know there's a name for them, but I can't remember what Penelope called them.

and I immediately got back:

It sounds like the type of contacts you're referring to is known as "split operation" in amateur radio. In split operation, the transmitting and receiving frequencies are different. This technique is often used in situations where the frequency congestion is high, and it allows for more efficient use of the available spectrum.

For example, if you're operating on a frequency to transmit, but there's a pile-up of stations trying to contact you, you might receive the incoming signals on a different frequency. This helps to organize and manage the communication flow, allowing the operator to transmit on one frequency while listening on another.

If Penelope used a specific term for this type of operation, it might vary, as different operators sometimes have their own colloquial terms for certain practices. However, "split operation" is a widely recognized term in the context of amateur radio.

Which, then, searching Google for

split operation

gave a long list of useful results:

Not bad!

Comments

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog