@fearout@kbin.social
@fearout@kbin.social avatar

fearout

@[email protected]

Professional industrial and jewelry designer (here's my Bēhance portfolio), hard-sci-fi enjoyer, cat lover and procrastinator. Started a few communities on kbin: Urban Details, Industrial Design and Jewelry Design, feel free to join if you find those interesting.
You can tip me if you like or use something I made.

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fearout,
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It’s in development btw

fearout,
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I have never met anyone who has read Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series. It’s one of my favourite sci-fi’s and I can’t even get someone I know to read it, everyone thinks it’s boring :)

fearout,
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How come no one mentioned it yet?

Guys, check out this short film :)

fearout,
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This is amazing :)

fearout, (edited )
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Of course they do, better than ever actually. Google OpenType ligatures, for example. You can even use those on the web using CSS.

Some fonts have hundreds of different ligatures.

fearout,
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It’s what should have been expected though. Lots of people check it out during the hype, and later only those who actually found it useful/interesting/fun remain.

Most of the hype-launched services should have similar numbers.

fearout,
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I don’t understand how Chinese room is a valuable argument. To me, while the person inside the room doesn’t understand Chinese, the system room-person-instructions does. You don’t argue that you don’t understand your language because none of your individual neurons understand it.

I don’t claim that chatGPT “understands” the language, I just don’t think that this argument applies in general.

fearout,
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Are there any good iOS Tor browsers? All that I’ve seen are either shit or require some insane subscription.

fearout,
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Both are broken as far as I know. First one hasn’t updated for years, and recent reviews for the second one claim it crashes on startup.

fearout,
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That’s a stupid reason for banning people, but weren’t those just propane torches? You can buy one at any hardware store and tape it to a nerf gun to make a similar toy. While they do “throw flames”, I wouldn’t really call those flamethrowers, which usually utilize liquid fuel and are actually weapons.

fearout,
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We were doing stupid shit with regular propane torches as kids. Doesn’t mean those were flamethrowers tho.

fearout,
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I guess that depends on your definition of a flamethrower. To me, a flamethrower is primarily a weapon. And what you are describing is a roofing torch. Googling it now, I can’t seem to find anyone calling them “roofing flamethrowers”. Flame gun — sometimes — but never actually a flamethrower.

So the legality is probably an issue with not being specific enough with the tool/weapon differentiation. I don’t think actual flamethrowers should be legal.

fearout,
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Same. I’ve only ever seen this error after some time of inactivity, and reloading the page always helps.

fearout,
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I’ve had this happen on kbin quite a few times as well, but even if it redirects to a new page with an error message, it always saves the text in the input field. Haven’t lost a single letter once.

Does it work differently for you? At what point does it lose some of your content?

fearout, (edited )
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I had a CT scan after an accident, and no one told me what contrast is going to feel like, the nurse simply injected me without any explanation.

And omfg, that might’ve been one of the scariest 30 seconds of my life. It felt like I was injected with straight up lava. My whole body was burning from the inside, and I felt like I would just spontaneously combust any second. It very quickly subsided though and there was no negative reaction overall, just higher sensitivity than average. But holy shit, I would want to know about stuff like this beforehand.

fearout,
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His pigments are pretty cool. I’ve used several over the years and quite liked them.

fearout, (edited )
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At this rate, he’ll also copy musk’s advertiser turnaround and changes in company valuation

fearout,
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F

Tesla exaggerated EV range so much that drivers thought cars were broken (arstechnica.com)

Tesla has consistently exaggerated the driving range of its electric vehicles, reportedly leading car owners to think something was broken when actual driving range was much lower than advertised. When these owners scheduled service appointments to fix the problem, Tesla canceled the appointments because there was no way to...

fearout,
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How often do you take road trips? The vast majority of trips taken by car are within 20–30 km. An average EV range can easily cover most people’s daily driving needs.

fearout, (edited )
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Why do you feel like matrix has failed? I joined it recently and to me it looks like it’s kinda growing.

fearout,
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Idk, that’s more of a “not yet finished” thing rather than “failed” imo

fearout,
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You know scientists always trying to make things happen but never asking if they “Should”?

I’ve never seen someone use this as an argument, only as a joke. Can you provide some examples of the things that you think scientists tried to make happen without thinking whether they should or not?

Also, how is user-specific trust at play here? I never even look at usernames, instead I will upvote or ignore posts based on their content. I don’t think you can really ease Lemmy/kbin users into believing some divisive nonsense that easily.

fearout, (edited )
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“I’ve been very interested in things like universal basic income and what’s going to happen to global wealth redistribution,” Sam Altman, Worldcoin’s cofounder

Holy crap it’s Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. After that recent article about his $2 Kenyan workers it’s much harder to believe in benevolent intentions.

fearout,
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With stuff like “act of god” clauses and limited liability bankruptcies it might not really bother them that much.

fearout,
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Mostly because august hasn’t started yet.

Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints (www.reuters.com)

About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters. The automaker last year became so inundated with driving-range complaints that it created a special team to cancel owners’ service...

fearout,
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It's amazing what one person's actions can do to an entire brand. For the first several years after the Model S release I was sure that my next car is going to be a Tesla. Now, I'm 100% sure that I'll never buy one.

fearout,
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Not surprising really. Google has decided that it really doesn't want me to use it so I switched to DDG a couple of years ago. And it doesn't feel like I've lost anything of value.

fearout,
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It’s quite different, and your purchase seems more sensible to me.

When you buy a skin, you’re buying an asset that you’ll see and use in your game. Sure, it’s just cosmetics, but it’s kinda usable cosmetics. If the game goes down, your skin is probably lost as well, but at least you had some fun with it.

When you buy an nft, you buy your rights to a link to an image. It’s way more “protected” than simply buying a skin, in a similar way to how owning crypto works. Your right to that link is saved on a blockchain and you become the sole “owner” of that link. You could technically resell it (not sure if it’s allowed on Reddit though), but if a server hosting that image goes down, you’re left owning a broken link.

And while there’s no other way to get an asset into a game other than to buy it (or mod the game), you could just save an image you like and use it as an avatar anyway, so you’re not even required to buy nfts to use those as an avatar/banner. It’s more of a trading service.

That technology seems great for proving your rights to some documents or IDs, but it’s still weird to me that people decided to use NFTs for selling link rights to generated jpgs. You don’t even get the licence or usage rights to an image itself, it could be copyright-protected and owned by someone else.

fearout, (edited )
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Mostly because hosting an image within the blockchain would require so much computational power and excess energy usage, that it wouldn’t be profitable even for the most successful scams.

And I’m not sure whether calculating proof of work for a blockchain that holds images within is even possible using the current algorithms. But I’ve looked at it a while ago, could be that some updated system already exists. But it’s still very much not free, and quite damaging environmentally.

fearout,
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It’s a reference to this, not a literal suggestion

Brands that don't buy enough Twitter ads will lose verification (www.theverge.com)

Starting August 7th, advertisers that haven’t reached certain spending thresholds will lose their official brand account verification. According to emails obtained by the WSJ, brands need to have spent at least $1,000 on ads within the prior 30 days or $6,000 in the previous 180 days to retain the gold checkmark identifying...

fearout, (edited )
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He’s playing with his new middle age crisis toy. Cars and spaceships got boring.

fearout, (edited )
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Locking social norms at some predetermined stage is a great way to curb all progress. Like, slavery was a social norm at some point.

fearout,
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Texas charges prisoners for water? What the fuck, how is this even remotely legal?

fearout,
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Just wanted to comment that your cover image is great and on point :)

fearout,
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Reposting my comment from another thread to add a bit of context in case anyone’s curious.

So I read the paper, and here’s a tldr about how their material apparently gains its properties.

It is hypothesized that superconductivity properties emerge from very specific strains induced in the material. Hence why most of the discovered superconductors require either to be cooled down to very low temperatures, or to be under high pressures. Both shrink the material.

What this paper claims is that they have achieved a similar effect chemically by replacing some lead ions with copper ions, which are a bit smaller (87 pm for Cu vs 133 pm for Pb). This shrinks the material by 0.48%, and that added strain induces superconductivity. This is why it apparently works at room temperature — you no longer need high pressures or extreme cold to create the needed deformation.

Can’t really comment on how actually feasible or long-lasting this effect is, but it looks surprisingly promising. At least as a starting point for future experiments. Can’t wait for other labs’ reproduction attempts. If it turns out to be true, this is an extremely important and world-changing discovery.

Fingers crossed :)

fearout, (edited )
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Long-distance energy transfer without energy loss will make it possible to connect more energy grids and sources together, so stuff like the saharan desert providing solar power to Europe, for example, suddenly becomes feasible. Maglev trains will no longer require lots of power to run, since they could utilize superconductor magnetic levitation. You could make super-efficient processors that wouldn’t really heat up at all. Superconductors are also key to quantum computers, so expect lots of advancements in that field as well. They will also make it much easier to build and run fusion power experiments.

Lots of tech in general would benefit from this discovery, stuff like MRIs, electric vehicles, space telescopes or particle accelerators would become way more efficient, cheaper and easier to produce.

Edit: also, check out this video by Isaac Arthur for some more sci-fi examples of what this tech can be used for in the future (discussed in the second half). It’s more space-colonization-focused and kinda like a thought experiment, but interesting nonetheless.

fearout,
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Looks like a non-native speaker misread the title and jumped straight to some weird conclusions from there.

fearout,
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Not really. If that turns out to be true (nothing is guaranteed yet), the processes described are pretty straightforward and don’t require any super-advanced tech to be reproduced. Full-scale production could be rolled out in mere years. That would become beneficial for stuff like MRIs or electric cars as soon as production starts.

After that, my guess would be that some large-scale energy infrastructure projects, for example, could be completed in about a decade.

fearout,
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You still need a magnet-superconductor pair for quantum locking and magnetic levitation. This is called the Meissner effect and it seems like it has been confirmed for this material. Here’s a video showing an example of such a system.

Before, the best way to scale this up might’ve been to make permanent magnet rails and run a superconductor train along those rails, but that would have been totally infeasible and inapplicable in real life, since building rails out of permanent magnets is expensive and dangerous, and the train would need to house a really large superconductor chilled to liquid nitrogen temperatures. You couldn’t have built a track out of superconductors irl because good luck keeping those at the temperatures required for superconductivity to kick in.

If this material turns out to actually work as claimed and to be producible at scale, you can switch those and make an electromagnetic train that travels along superconductor tracks. Which is way easier, cheaper and much more doable in general.

But the earth’s magnetic field is extremely weak, and even the tiniest pieces of superconductors are unable to lock with it. So no, it does not allow for trackless levitation.

But a cool new train system design becomes possible though!

fearout, (edited )
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You're right, haven't heard about that one. They actually do use superconducting magnets on a train that runs along a magnetic track.

But I feel like my feasibility comment still stands. It seems like all they had built is a 18km test track, and there's some info about extending it to 48 km, but it doesn't seem like the extended part uses superconducting tech yet, it only mentions regular maglev. The Tokyo — Osaka line is planned for 2037. So yeah, its technically possible, but it's not like you can cover Europe or the US with this type of track for any sensible amount of money.

That's the cool part about room temperature superconductors, they make this type of tech possible on much larger scales.

fearout,
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Here’s the full paper

fearout, (edited )
@fearout@kbin.social avatar

So I read the paper. Here’s a tldr about how their material apparently gains its properties.

It is hypothesized that superconductivity properties emerge from very specific strains induced in the material. Hence why most of the discovered superconductors require either to be cooled down to very low temperatures, or to be under high pressure. Both shrink the material.

What this paper claims is that they have achieved a similar effect chemically by replacing some lead ions with copper ions, which are a bit smaller (87 pm for Cu vs 133 pm for Pb). This shrinks the material by 0.48%, and that added strain induces superconductivity. This is why it apparently works at room temperature — you no longer need high pressures or extreme cold to create the needed deformation.

Can’t really comment on how actually feasible or long-lasting this effect is, but it looks surprisingly promising. At least as a starting point for future experiments. Can’t wait for other labs’ reproduction attempts. If it turns out to be true, this is an extremely important and world-changing discovery.

Fingers crossed :)

fearout,
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Oh I bet there are several labs that are already on it :)

fearout,
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Better late then never. Glad to see the message is so clear :)

fearout,
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They have clearly demonstrated that they do not. But like 70+% of the federal budget is pumped, dug or mined from the ground, and the needed workforce for that is rather small, so it’s not like they give a shit.

fearout,
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Holy crap. So coral bleaching in that area is basically guaranteed at this point. And some plankton and algae can’t really survive if those temperatures persist.

Also, as temperature rises, water holds less and less dissolved oxygen. At the same time metabolic rates of fish increase, which makes them require even more oxygen. The scary thing about that is at some point they lose the ability to get enough oxygen to sustain life, and then bam — the whole species dies in a day.

Remember those rivers of millions of dead fish? Yeah, it’s like that.

fearout,
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That’s a great write up, thanks. Haven’t heard about the connection between the Amazon rainforest and African diatoms, that’s fascinating.

I thought lake Chad started to dry up mostly in the 60s. I went to read some more about that and I just can’t not mention that the original lake is apparently called Mega-Chad :)

Anyway, in case anyone else is interested to read about ancient microorganisms fuelling Amazon’s growth, here’s a really interesting paper that describes this system in great detail.

fearout,
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Yeah, it’s definitely very rare. I can’t seem to find that article right now, but I remember reading that these events account for something like 0.1–0.3% of all wildfires. So while insignificant as an actual cause in general, with 100k+ wildfires happening each year it means that a couple of hundreds per year should still be caused by those. Which is still like one every 1-2 days on average.

Not enough to be a noticeable threat, but enough to cause a pedantic comment mentioning those as existing :)

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