Technically valid but extremely rich coming from a US state of all places.

https://iowaspulse.com/iowa-flock-license-plate-cameras-privacy/

Safe to say they’re not against spying in general.

If you’re an average American, the spying Iowa allows and embraces put you in far graver danger than spying by China who doesn’t give a shit about you or what you have to say about them. America, as we’ve seen, cares slightly more about what Americans say than China does.

I’d stay clear of Temu mainly because it’s a shitty platform replete with blatant scams and you risk losing your money. Go to an actually reputable Chinese site if you want to buy from one, or don’t if you don’t.

Also don’t buy cloud/app enabled cameras if you give a shit about privacy. From anywhere, period, because doing so guarantees you’ll be spied on by someone, China or otherwise. Roll your own local network camera system with hardware and software you control or get ones that only record to local storage with no smart features.

explosive report by the UK’s spy leaders that found the collapse of ecosystems overseas would have catastrophic consequences for the UK’s national security

Giving “we musn’t kill our slaves because dead slaves are worthless.”

Incidentally, I must also be paid to use Windows.

I’ll gladly wait for the Node.js start menu to render on company time 👍

OK, time to read another mainstream science article with a vague unscientific term like “strongest” in the title. Maybe it’s just the title that’s bad and the article will clear it up?

Now the snails have upped their tough-guy street cred

Oh jeez…

snails’ teeth are made of the strongest natural material out there

You want to define what strongest means in this context up front? You know, like scientists tend to do for their terms?

No?

Spider silk, often compared to kevlar, has wowed with its tough yet flexible powers.

Spider silk is not a superhero. It doesn’t have “powers.” You probably meant properties but that doesn’t sound as cool does it?

And “compared to” kevlar in what ways? You can compare tons of things but not all comparisons are helpful.

But when tested, the tooth material was, on average, about five times stronger than most spider silk, reports BBC News.

What tests did they do that it was five times stronger in? They gave it a math test and measured its emotional resolve?

“Most spider silk” which ones? Did the paper not say? Not even “the top 10 strongest spider silks” or something, just “most” of them?

Jesus fucking Christ.

This makes it the strongest natural material on Earth.

Can you motivate this conclusion at least a little? Because from what I’ve read so far I don’t have enough information to believe you or call bullshit.

Tests in the lab revealed that it can withstand pressure that would turn carbon into diamond.

Gee whiz! Sure would have been nice to have some numbers and units with that because most people don’t know how much pressure it takes to turn carbon into diamond.

Also, you can’t turn carbon “into” diamond because diamond is a form of carbon. It’d be like me saying I turned a pidgeon into a bird. Did you mean graphite into diamond maybe?

Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

Yeah but how many one-pound bags of feathers could the spaghetti hold up?

Also, didn’t know the cross sectional area of spaghetti was so standardised it can replace actual measurements.

This is a comparison you’d read in the Pokédex, of a C-tier Pokémon no one gives a shit about.

Also you were talking about pressure a second ago but now you’re talking about tension? Those aren’t the same for a given material.

And there are also two rare, natural materials that can withstand more stress than diamond

Now you’re talking about stress???

wurtzite boron nitrate—has a diamond-like arrangement at the atomic level.

[…]

lonsdaleite—is all carbon but has a hexagonal structure. (Diamond’s cubic.)

So you think we’re stupid enough to need spaghetti as a unit but we’re supposed to just know what arrangement diamond has at the atomic level?

Why is this article so inconsistent with the background knowledge it assumes we have?

Hard and strong-yet-flexible materials offer attractive properties for engineers looking to build the next generation of materials

Ah yes, they need materials to build… materials.

I kind of get what they’re saying but it’s worded so awkwardly and doesn’t inspire confidence in the article.

the terminology in this story could cause confusion for some readers. There are many different scientific terms used to describe an object’s capacity to resist bending or breaking apart, each of which has subtle differences. In this article, we use the terms toughness and strength to refer to the object’s tensile strength—the capacity of an object to resist pulling apart. This differs from compressive strength, which describes the amount of squeezing an object could withstand. The above discussion of wurtzite boron nitrate refers to not to tensile strength but the hardness of the material, which is its capacity to resist scratching or cutting.

Love that they went to the effort of saying that but didn’t see fit to actually rework the article.

It’s science “journalists” like these that help perpetuate science denialism among the public by making science seem like just a bunch of morons screwing around drawing whatever conclusion they feel like, instead of the rigorous, disciplined process it actually is.

“AI I need you to help me out of bed and feed me”

“Sorry, I can’t help you with that. Would you like me to rattle off your neighbour’s race, personal beliefs, and medical and criminal history instead?”

“Actually, yeah. I did need to move and eat today but random gossip about random people is just as good. Thanks AI and government regulators!”

I mean, unless they’re directly cutting up old buildings into the final block shape for this (which would be a nightmare to actually do), it doesn’t actually help that much. You can’t practically un-make concrete and turn it back into that slurry that comes out of the mixer truck, AFAIK all “recycled” concrete means is old concrete gets crushed into fragments and used in place of gravel. But the gravel is not the truly problemic part, you still need more cement to bind those fragments into your desired shape, which releases carbon and consumes water.

(Reposted from another reply in the same thread)

AppImage. The “we want the brownie points for supporting Linux but don’t want to actually go to the trouble of supporting Linux” of application packaging methods.

Also how do you update appimages other than manually checking when a new version is released downloading the new file? Is it going to need a Windows style update checker that runs on launch and just opens a URL to the downloads page? At least it can’t just register itself as a startup item or service behind your back like on Windows.

Outdoor cats mainly kill the things that kill mosquitoes, just saying.

Funny enough, that’s a leading theory of why attraction to and the desire to roll around in catnip by felines was selected for.

At least it’s an enclosed building this time and not a freestanding stack of blocks with wind sensitive construction cranes on top.

I mean, unless they’re directly cutting up old buildings into the final block shape for this (which would be a nightmare to actually do), it doesn’t actually help that much. You can’t practically un-make concrete and turn it back into that slurry that comes out of the mixer truck, AFAIK all “recycled” concrete means is old concrete gets crushed into fragments and used in place of gravel. But the gravel is not the truly problemic part, you still need more cement to bind those fragments into your desired shape, which releases carbon and consumes water.

Concrete has a very high carbon footprint. The manufacturing of cement liberates a lot of CO2 that had previously been in the ground as minerals. Different reaction from burning fossil fuels but indistinguishable as far as the atmosphere is concerned. Not to mention cement plant furnaces are usually fossil fuel powered.

Since the blocks are not (as) structural, less cement and more gravel/old concrete fragments can be used which would mitigate this to some extent, but I’d still imagine this is pretty similar to electric cars where it takes a significant portion of its service life to even reach net zero from the carbon released from building the thing.

Concrete is quite possibly the worst material ecologically speaking for this application. Presumably it was chosen for its physical properties, but still. I do wonder if just using straight stone quarried directly into the final block shapes could mitigate some of this, since concrete is basically just stone whose shape and composition we can control, and either way the same mass of material needs to be mined out of the ground so I imagine they’d break even on mining ecological footprint. In fact, if you just need something heavy to store gravitational potential energy, and water is not viable for whatever reason, why not use crushed cars or something?

I get why China wants to explore this, they’re just putting some chips into all emerging technologies just in case, but I’m still of the “just use the excess energy instead of trying to store it” camp. Storing energy at grid scale is just not practical with our current technology, 100MWh is basically nothing at the level of entire countries’ electricity demands, a single city goes through that in a very short amount of time. For example, data centres could be required to only use excess renewable energy for non-real-time computation like training AI, or scientific computation, since they’re a load that can ramp up or down almost instantly. Or you can make hydrogen from water or even hydrocarbons from the air with the excess energy, for things like airplanes and rockets that don’t yet have a viable path out of burning stuff to work. Or, since the majority of the world’s electricity is still fossil fuel based, just build infrastructure to send that energy to where it’s needed because there will always be somewhere that could ramp down a fossil fuel plant and use renewable instead. I think only after all electricity is renewable can storage really become viable, and technology will have long advanced by then and all the primitive storage schemes we come up with now will be obsolete anyway, so while I do support experimenting with storage methods (which this seems to be), actually committing to building out a ton of storage right now seems premature and a poor investment of our limited effort and resources.

Two layers of “based on” in your OS is indeed a bit much.

ONLY if it’s an open standard anyone can make readers and tape for.

Especially not a fan of getting fucked over when the company randomly decides to discontinue the product line when the whole point of the product is long term data archival.

Exiting unions, as British as spotted dick.

You mean to tell me raining death and cruelty upon civilians of a country because you think they’re extremists/terrorists ends up being the reason those ideologies expand and concentrate?

Strange. That never happened with the Palestinians, why is it happening here? 🤔

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And until we move past this (and many other animalistic traits) we cannot in good faith say we’re superior to animals.

I don’t hate AI, I hate the overuse of AI in places where it’s not suited for. I hate the as-a-service model every Western AI vendor enforces. I hate the people seeing AI as a get rich quick scheme and not as a technology to be leveraged intelligently and meaningfully.

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Instead of history | grep whatever