I have an external DVD-RW on a shelf just in case. Every once in a while I need to bring it out and I wonder if a giant boulder is going to start rolling at me when I grab it.

Good to know. Thanks for the breakdown.

Our nearest Pizza Hut delivers via Doordash whether you order direct or through DD, but if you order direct its 30% cheaper. I’m not sure who’s eating the markup.

I recognized the name AU10TIX, because I half-joked on Lemmy about a potential mass doxxing of Xitter’s most vile users back in September when they announced the partnership. I assumed they’d be a target for ransomware/hackers, not that they’d just leave their admin creds out in the open.

taking plant waste from timber companies and farmers, drying it, compressing it, and wrapping it “into Lego-like bricks,” and storing it 10 feet underground.

So it’s effectively the astronaut ice cream version permafrost?

Immediately I wonder how much the process of transport -> drying -> compressing, wrapping, transporting, and storing + storage site prep and maintenance eats into savings.

Clearly that’s what blu-tack is for.

S. Korea sent propaganda balloons, so N. Korea sent trash. Now people in S Korea think the answer is more propaganda balloons?

“Secure that SSD in a bay and get the faceplate off my butterfly, you monster!” -Buster

I’m taking note of that that combo feather teaser / ball track / butterfly toy. I think my big orange boy would lose his mind over that.

I can sort of see the appeal, but its not for me. If anything is ever going to rename files for me its going to be a script that I’ve either written or at least read top to bottom. Not a blackbox inference engine, and especially not one based on an LLM.

Yeah, the headline sort of reads like Ars is daring Google to remove the flag.

I don’t know how EU grids interoperate so this could be irrelevant:

There is a fear, with this sort of thing, of falling into the innovators curse. By moving first/fastest (especially when it comes to infrastructure) you make all the mistakes, have the oldest equipment, and the most technical debt. Now if Germany is able to make a market (that didn’t previously exist) out of this excess daytime generation they could get undercut by a neighbor who learned from all of Germany’s mistakes and who bought newer, more efficient panels. Which would effectively take Germany’s costs associated with making the new market and set the money on fire.

Basically the fear of capitalism can be as detrimental as the capitalism.

I don’t know specific temps, but graphite forms a hexagonal lattice that is highly stable on 2 dimensions. The bonds between layers of hexagons are weaker which lets it be brittle in all the ways we love graphite. I’m not sure how this specific geometry changes the affinity to bond to oxygen.

Carbon, compressed hard enough it becomes diamond, forms a square crystal lattice that is so crazy stable that it’s very resistant to change (including from burning).

Defense contractors want to grow diamond computer processors. Because silicon breaks down at high temperatures.

Either JPL or LM (I can’t remember which) was working on a HTHP system with the goal of being able to grow diamonds with ICs built in. I wonder if this has that potential.

But they specifically said in their blog post that it has “privacy you can trust.” Just imagine all the trust you have in Microsoft plus all the trust you have in the accuracy of AI and rest easy. Plus the AI runs locally so they can trust you to pay the power bill.

Don’t think about how much money they could make with their business customers, based on telemetry alone.

The Brennan monorail rides again!

Some of this technology may sound a bit “over-ambitious,” but keep in mind the project was inspired by a fully functional self-balancing monorail that mechanical engineer Louis Brennan designed and demonstrated back in the early 1900s.

Are we taking bets on how long it will be before Google Search ends up on killedbygoogle,com?

When I was running a site, I had special rules in my firewall to look for things that said they were googlebot but which didn’t come from one of googles published public IPs.

I mentioned this in another thread, but I do worry that google is eventually going infect the APIs that metasearch engines like DDG, Kagi, searchxng, etc depend on.

In my experience, a lot of the sysadmins who run high traffic sites will treat all bots as scrapers that have to be blocked or slowed to a crawl. Then they make special allowances for googlebot, bing/msnbot, and a few others. That means there is a massive uphill climb (beyond the technical one) to making a new search engine from scratch. With Google and MS both betting the farm on LLMs I fear we’re going to lose access to two of the most valuable web reverse indexes out there.