The structural impossibility is upsetting.

deleted by creator

Asbestos can be used by kids as chewing gum:

Wittenoom’s roads were paved with asbestos tailings from the nearby mines and workers went home covered in a layer of deadly dust.

Children played in the lethal mineral, and some even stuffed it in their mouths as a substitute for chewing gum.

I wonder if a smartphone with e-ink display would be a good solution.

Good enough for secure messaging & calling apps, usable with their existing touch-UIs, yet devoid of the addictive potential enabled by vibrant colour, smooth-scroll, and video.

Can even still use the camera – just need to wait until you ‘develop’ them by transferring to another device/medium with full colour or a video-capable display.

Incorrect:

Thicket thickest throughout that thought

Þey don’t count because the actual spellings are:

• Ðicket ðickest ðroughout þat ðought

Anyway: taint.

Thermoacoustics.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbenv.2023.06.006

American dialects often omit the “out” for the same meaning.

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.

• Unexpected Keyboard - also has a vertical cursor slide key.
• Thumb-Key - optional setting. Also works intuitively for text deletion on backspace. Text selection too but that’s buggy.

Huh. Popular name:

• https://github.com/dropbox/lepton
• https://github.com/microsoft/lepton_jpeg_rust
• https://github.com/lepton-eda/lepton-eda
• https://hackjutsu.com/Lepton/
• http://www.leptonica.org/
• https://github.com/BinaryResearch/lepton
• https://github.com/lpotthast/leptonic
• https://github.com/leptonai/leptonai

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.

cumulative downloads

…since Dec '23

Yes: https://prosody.im/doc/turn

Further notes on implementing calling with XMPP: https://gist.github.com/iNPUTmice/a28c438d9bbf3f4a3d4c663ffaa224d9

…seems like things may have stagnated around group calling; for now probably need to consider something more video conferencing specific like jitsi or bigbluebutton.

Yeah, it’d be a live monitoring footprint limited to, say, wherever you have/bring a personal device plus maybe wherever there’s a wifi network it knows. But you’d be able to see where the tag was when it last pinged you, so you could return to that location to search for it and get a more accurate location fix.

The only case my example doesn’t cover is if a third party moves the tag away from your typical footprint and networks.

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

but I use […] AirTags regularly

Hmm…

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?

The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi. First of a trilogy.