YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Listen and read USA nuclear forces Emergency Action Messages, heard on 11175 kHz

70 points liotier 2 hours ago 33 comments

jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent

Nice and soothing for when you're already a bit nervous about what the next 13 minutes might bring.

yread 1 hour ago | parent

Reading this comment when it was exactly 13 minutes old

markus_zhang 1 hour ago | parent

It shows 13 mins ago for me.

stackghost 1 hour ago | parent

Is there something extra scary happening?

Usual news headlines on the sources I frequent.

jacquesm 1 hour ago | parent

> Is there something extra scary happening?

You might get something out of how frequently there are announcements on this channel. That's the only real info you're going to get out of this unless you're in a very select group.

0manrho 25 minutes ago | parent

My understanding is that this is just showcasing a website that introduces/makes it easy to digest the EAM as a concept, not that there's anything particularly worrying happening on these frequencies in the present moment.

I don't monitor these regularly so perhaps I'm wrong, but given it's encrypted (likely with a OTP), you'd have to be mining metadata and making some second order dot connections to really get anything meaningful out of this without the cipher/OTP/some way to decrypt it and understand it.

qaz_plm 2 hours ago | parent

“Skyking, Skyking, do not answer…”

paaloeye 1 hour ago | parent

Founding Listener :)

FrankWilhoit 1 hour ago | parent

Latency.

londons_explore 1 hour ago | parent

So these messages are presumably encrypted with a one time pad, and some lookup book of what each message of just a few characters means?

And I assume there are also a high bandwidth comms channels, and this is just the backup which is presumably tested each day.

jacquesm 1 hour ago | parent

I think this is the primary.

High bandwidth comms are likely a lot more fragile than this. At the same time: there will be many different transmission channels, and I would expect this one to be useless immediately if someone really did something nasty.

notadev 38 minutes ago | parent

Back in my Navy days, we were taught HF is the less susceptible to jamming so is used for critical comms like these in serious situations. My ship performed in one exercise related to a doomsday scenario. We sat all day listening to an HR receiver until we heard these same messages, and we would then record the characters spoken. The message was repeated so we could make sure what we wrote was accurate. We never responded. Instead, we then repeated the same messages on an HF transmitter, presumably as part of some relay.

throwaway89864 1 hour ago | parent

You can probably just point Claude or ChatGPT to decrypt it, it would find that there's some silly and obvious cipher is used that survived from the 60ies, with a 56 bit private key. /this is a wild guess, I don't have any special clearance or access/

jacquesm 1 hour ago | parent

Not a chance. OTP for sure.

rvba 1 hour ago | parent

I also dont know anything but Im sure AI / cloud / blockchain / mongoDB / (insert fad here) will solve it due to synergy and other buzzwords.

netsharc 1 hour ago | parent

Sheesh, hopefully a governmental department that has the NSA nearby would've been warned about this...

Then again, it is the government...

rcxdude 38 minutes ago | parent

Some of the comms channels are even lower bandwidth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency (Though, apparently the US no longer uses this)

ytxm 1 hour ago | parent

More on "Skyking" here: https://lswilson.dewlineadventures.com/skyking/

rafram 1 hour ago | parent

> Mostly static. The net is quiet until it isn't.

> Preformatted is what you can hear: the same shape every time.

> hearing it is all anyone outside the force can do.

> The day has a shape.

I would recommend switching to a newer Claude model.

cowlby 58 minutes ago | parent

Everyone worried about AI detectors and here I am thinking I can spot Claudenglish in a sentence or two.

bragr 47 minutes ago | parent

>Mostly static. The net is quiet until it isn't.

Having tuned in myself with a SDR, it isn't that quiet. There's pretty steady rate of messages.

jpablo 32 minutes ago | parent

Which newer Claude model doesn’t do that? Fable 5.1 still writes like that for me. I have to fight against it to write proper software labels, or (the horror!) rewrite things manually.

kccqzy 30 minutes ago | parent

In my humble opinion Opus 5.5 has surpassed Fable 5.1 in terms of both writing style and actual capability. Like I would give the same task to both models and Opus 5.5 consistently produces better results and explains itself better than Fable 5.1.

rafram 17 minutes ago | parent

Fable is inappropriate for the vast majority of tasks (yes, including yours!), and it is quite obnoxious. Opus 5.5 writes concisely and almost sounds like a human.

vorpalhex 1 hour ago | parent

Some context for those not exposed to this previously.

Messages usually mean nothing. An uptick in activity means.. nothing. We're on the tail end of a major exercise so upticks in chatter are probably related to that.

Anyone who posts anything along the lines of "but there were 5x more messages or a really big message so N is going to happen!" is a crazy person. Ignore them.

It's neat, but it's not prophetic.

jasonjayr 28 minutes ago | parent

Riiiiiight. That sounds like something spooks would say to throw you off the trail...... :-) /s

dist-epoch 1 hour ago | parent

> Skyking, Skyking, DO NOT ANSWER

This might be the source of the "DO NOT ANSWER" phrase from Three Body Problem.

LeoPanthera 1 hour ago | parent

This is a cool idea. I'm actually quite glad that AI generated stuff is still so very obvious. The world will be a darker place when it isn't.

skygazer 1 hour ago | parent

My worry is that what we recognize is the unstylized default, but it might be very easy to emulate any particular human easily enough with some examples and a prompt and n-gram/style template biasing token selection, or iterative generation-scoring loops.

rcxdude 41 minutes ago | parent

Yeah. The big LLMs have fairly idiosyncratic writing styles. Smaller finetuned LLMs can be quite different (and you can also tune them on a particular person's writing). I think some of the confidence in this is because there's plenty of cases which just don't get noticed.

none_to_remain 32 minutes ago | parent

A weird little trivia: for some time period the Skyking test messages used band names and other pop culture references as the content of test messages. Iron Maiden, The Cure, Duran Duran, Rush, Hansen... And of course test messages may be sent erroneously so we end up with the nuclear command channel carrying messages like "DISREGARD 'THE CURE' TRANSMITTED AT 19" (https://eam.watch/view/d4272f25-fd33-47a4-9b37-6c55a8ea3d0e)