• 16 Posts
  • 40 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: February 20th, 2021

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  • I’m just tempering the headline, not throwing doubt at the research and development possibilities.

    I got excited about the headline, thinking they’d experimentally achieved ore-melting temperatures with a heat pump (“Ultra-hot heatpump breakthrough paves the way […]”).

    I guess I perceive 270°C as below the threshold of “ultra hot”.

    Later in the article it’s revealed that the breakthrough experiment is paving the way to the (as yet unrealised) ultra-hot (“Luo summarised various research fronts […] promising pathways towards the realisation of ultra-high-temperature heat pumps.”)

    Still – 270°C! Commercial/domestic baking ovens when?


  • Probably yet another overblown headline.

    Does anyone have access to the full text of the paper?

    https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adv7434

    Abstract

    Large-scale generative artificial intelligence (AI) is facing a severe computing power shortage. Although photonic computing achieves excellence in decision tasks, its application in generative tasks remains formidable because of limited integration scale, time-consuming dimension conversions, and ground-truth-dependent training algorithms. We produced an all-optical chip for large-scale intelligent vision generation, named LightGen. By integrating millions of photonic neurons on a chip, varying network dimension through proposed optical latent space, and Bayes-based training algorithms, LightGen experimentally implemented high-resolution semantic image generation, denoising, style transfer, three-dimensional generation, and manipulation. Its measured end-to-end computing speed and energy efficiency were each more than two orders of magnitude greater than those of state-of-the-art electronic chips, paving the way for acceleration of large visual generative models.


  • For over a century, the dream of efficiently concentrating low-grade heat into high-temperature industrial energy has been constrained by a stubborn ceiling: 200 degrees Celsius (392 degrees Fahrenheit).
    Now, a team from China has shattered that temperature limit. Using a revolutionary heat pump with no moving parts, they achieved an output of 270 degrees with a 145-degree heat source to drive the cycle.

    …so a modest but significant improvement has been achieved, but nowhere near the temps required for melting ore.

    But maaaaybe, theoretically, with materials and technologies not yet developed, possibly by 2040:

    In a December 5 article in Nature Energy, Luo summarised various research fronts, including his team’s thermoacoustic Stirling heat pump, as promising pathways towards the realisation of ultra-high-temperature heat pumps.
    He also suggested development directions for materials and technologies needed for future ultra-high-temperature heat pumps operating from 600K to 1,600K, or 327 degrees to 1,327 degrees, saying these could be achieved by 2040.






  • I prefer browser(web)-based banking apps which work well on a phone UI without the info-access creep.

    UBank (NAB subsidary) and Wise (not a bank) both support passkeys for login in the browser. Most other banks here seem to have regressed from hardware tokens to SMS codes or proprietary apps for their MFA.

    Passkeys are only as secure as your passkeys – I use Bitwarden with master password re-prompt checked for bank credentials, but I should probably switch to a hardware based passkey (at least for unlocking Bitwarden itself).

    The phone apps are sometimes required to do some things (like managing passkeys for UBank, verifying ID in Wise). They work on LineageOS without the google stuff, but might be worth installing only temporarily in a separate profile or phone.

    Retail payments – just use a physical card if you’re not using cash.


  • rcbrk@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlPhone Purgatory
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    2 months ago

    I don’t want an even higher level spyware device.

    but I use […] AirTags regularly

    Hmm…

    Alfred is disappointed.

    wide shot of alfred looking at the bank of hijacked mobile phone echolocation surveillance monitors

    It might be time to move on from the mass-surveillance-on-every-single-device style of object location tracking.
    Are there localising/tracking bluetooth tags available which only connect to your network/devices?







  • rcbrk@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlAlways happens
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    3 months ago

    Trollies are usually plastic-coated. If you’re gonna do this please burn it off first with a nice hot fire, then scrub off all the plastic residue before cooking food on it.

    If it’s tin- or zinc-plated you run the risk of metal fume fever if you breathe the fumes, but once-off it’s probably not much of a hazard. Unless it’s cadmium plated (peculiar yellowish hue), in which case the fumes and residue are quite hazardous.

    It’s also worth bringing a spanner to remove the castors – they’re usually decent quality and can be used for better purposes than a shopping trolley.

    Not sure if any of this advice transfers with the programming analogy.





  • Huh, first I’ve seen that writeup. First in-depth well-reasoned set of criticisms I’ve read on the XMPP+OMEMO setup, which is my goto and usual recommendation (and what I still find most power-efficient on a degoogled phone, most usable and reliable despite its stagnation).

    Gives a good overview of the accumulated technical debt/chaos beneath the surface. Really hope that conversations and omemo can sort out their mess, or that other clients like kaidan can rise up and push omemo forward, because xmpp itself has been a solid foundation.







  • Really interesting proposal! To a degree the structure of Lemmy/Mbin/etc may be quite close to the categorising and moderating aspect, and might be a good place to start collecting URLs to crawl.

    Each community could be considered analogous to a (rather chaotic) webring. When an instance doesn’t meet your moderation expectation, defederate; if a MengZi user wants to see search results from different defederated segments, use a MengZi instance that federates with both, or just have both plugged into a searx instance.

    The categorising side of MengZi could be (from an activitypub perspective) like a very cut down version of lemmy –each webring/category being a community, each website being a post, comments disabled or limited/filtered to hashtags.

    A webring could be a specific sort of category/community, where a submitted website’s url’s page must contain specific metadata definining its membership in that ring or it is automoderated and removed. Such a category could automoderate the url and title to be the default page defined by its membership metadata. Existing webring html element standards could suffice.

    A website could be crossposted to other categories, including to other instances, even to/from lemmy or other compatible activitypub sites. If a (cross)posted post is not a url returning the correct mime type for a category then it can be automoderated and deleted; same for other arbitrary criteria a category could define.

    A website/post on MengZi could be accompanied by relevant crawling metadata, even full search database data available via the api for sharing to other MengZi instances to save duplication of crawling effort while distributing the database.