femto

A complete USB voltmeter/ammeter costs $1.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/MX17-Current-and-Volt...

Ignore the case and connector, on the basis that the circuit will be integrated into a larger scanner, and the cost will be substantially less. Most USB controllers already monitor current, so even the <$1 circuit probably would not be needed. The main cost would be the manufacturer putting together a database of power consumption figures to allow a pass/fail test.

Law enforcement, airports and so on already boxes to scan USB devices. They don't use them for every USB drive, just those that they decide they have cause to scan.

If I was building a black box to detect hidden data on a USB stick, I'd include a feature whereby it measures power consumption and flags USB drives that don't consume the expected power for that type of drive.

Conventional wisdom is to use a bound notebook, as a court will discount reliability if pages can be removed without leaving a trace.

Where I live, it was front page news four weeks ago.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-16/nsw-bureau-of-meterol...

Not that it lead to any particular action or recognition.

Online retailers are also responsible under the law, as the laws apply to all retailers.

In practical terms, if it's an online business with no Australian presence it makes it hard to apply the law. Overseas online companies with an Australian presence, such as Amazon, have been successfully prosecuted [1,2,3]. The ACCC is still working through responsibility for third-party sellers, but it seems to be the case that if it is fulfilled by Amazon then it is responsible.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/amazon-in-court-for-in...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-29/accc-sues-amazon-butt...

[3] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-issues-takedown-r...

[4] https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/consumer-rights-and-advic...

I'd encourage Australians not to muck around in this regard. Fair Trading gives explicit instructions:

1) Contact the organisation

2) Suggest a resolution

3) give them a reasonable time to respond (ie. not forever)

4) Be polite

5) Lodge a complaint with Fair Trading

The more people that do this, the less sellers will try to do people over.

https://www.nsw.gov.au/legal-and-justice/consumer-rights-and...

If an LLM was a person, it would be known as a "bullshit artist". I've worked with bullshit artists (people) before, and its exhausting trying to separate fact from fiction. It's a reason to avoid working with such people.

A good coworker will admit not knowing something, or if unsure give their best guess but discuss its limitations and why they might be wrong.

Question: Has anyone experimented with using voice to directly prompt an LLM, without doing speech-to-text? If an LLM can pick up on the skeptical nuances in a person's response, it might be prompted not to be overconfident in its subsequent output.

I did something like that for my local area (in about 2012). It turned into a hobby, whereby I spent a couple of years on foot exploring the local bush in minute detail and used OSM to document what I found. There are features on OSM that exist on no other map, especially off-road. I know other people do this too, as similar obscure tracks have appeared in neighbouring areas.

I've been on a number of orienteering or rogaining events where the maps look familiar, and it turns out they have used my OSM data. It's been great to see something lasting come from that mapping effort. (It's also a nice bonus in such events to be that familiar with the map and its covered area!) I suspect some local bush fire brigade members might also be looking at OSM, as a number of the fire trails I mapped seem to have had names added.

I used to use OrganicMaps. When coMaps forked, I changed to it. From my perspective there were no negatives. If anything, coMaps looked to be under more active development.

Yep. That topology is called a gyrator. Often used in IC's where it is hard to make an inductor.

A problem with metric-imperial conversion in the article? Based on having seen them in the bush, wombat poo is a 4 centimetre cube not a 4 inch cube. That would be a Diprotodon sized wombat. Lucky we're only talking about wombat poo, and not something important like a space craft...

An Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing fax machine!

Source code: https://github.com/populationgenomics/talos

Paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.19.25327921v...

My prediction is that in the not to distant future solar/wind + storage will be able to replace nuclear in most areas on Earth. The growth of solar has historically been underestimated [1], and it will continue to be underestimated. Even if nuclear gets cheaper, solar will get cheaper faster.

The development of storage has a long way to go. Outside batteries, there are other options, such as pumped storage. Even then, battery prices might go down enough to make other forms of storage uneconomic.

I also predict that a revolution is yet to happen in the transport of energy. For those areas that can't be self-sufficient in solar/wind, it may turn out to be cheaper to capture renewable energy elsewhere then transport it to where it needs to be used (we already do that with fossil fuels).

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...

I got 97/100 (80.5k) by picking the answer that has no relation to the word. Most of the incorrect answers bore some relation to the word, whether that be phonetic or a similarity to a root word.

Something like that exists with the RECCO system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECCO

Not quite an arbitrary Personal Locator Beacon, but it can help rescuers home in from a distance. It's cheap because the tag is just an antenna and a diode.

I'm thinking passive, as in using only acoustic energy that is already present. Partly it's about minimising irradiation, which you are saying is not a concern.

The more interesting aspect to me is whether the ambient emissions carry useful information. I recall a paper from a few years ago about yeast emitting sounds (mechanical vibrations) in the kHz range. I guess the question I am interested in is "what does life sound like at the cellular level?" Maybe it is silent, but my gut says it's probably making some sound, even if it's very weak. The questions are then along the lines of "What does a healthy cell sound like?", "Do different cells make different sounds?", "Do sick cells make different sounds to healthy cells?". It's absolute pie-in-the-sky stuff, but it would be fascinating to know.

My background is radio communications (with some acoustics) and radio comms has a history of things that used to be considered random noise turning out to be useful signal as processing has developed to the point where signals can be resolved. For example, multipath reflections used to be considered just random interference until the invention of MIMO, at which point they became useful signals and comms systems took a leap forward.

As someone in the medical imaging field, are you aware of anyone working on passive sonar for medical imaging? I'm curious, as it's something that I've always thought would be fun to work on.

Likely the continued existence of taxis are keeping Uber's prices in check in the Australian market.

Uber will be running an optimisation model and be charging the maximum market can sustain, with additional goals such as eliminating competition and not being shut down by regulators.

I agree. We are in danger of arguing about semantics/language, despite the effects of the words we are using being the same. I guess that's why Information Theorists use mathematics over words.

The concept is similar, in that with MPEG it is the encoder that is the harder of the two, since it has to deal with the noise and real-world effects in the source image.

What I should have written is that the "hard" part, which is generally left unspecified, is the part that removes redundancy. An MPEG encoder removes redundancy whilst its decoder adds redundancy. An FEC/communications encoder adds redundancy whilst its decoder removes redundancy.

It's worth noting that most communications specifications that involve an encoder/decoder pair communicating over a channel only specify the encoder. Standards purposely leave the decoder open to allow systems to progress as technology develops and to allow competition between implementations. This also makes a standard simpler, as a decoder is usually more complex than an encoder since it has to deal with noise and other effects introduced by the channel. Consequently, implementing a competitive standards compliant decoder involves R&D and is not a case of following a predefined path.

I've always seen Bellard as an engineer who programs rather than a pure programmer.

At least here in the EU they do

In that case it was a cheap USB supply, though there are other reports of similar. "Good" consumer power supply are designed to IEC standards, but to keep the cost down they are different standards to those used for wearable medical equipment. Medical equipment has to conform to IEC 60601, which governs things like electrical isolation and safe failure modes.

i feel pretty safe

So be it. It is unlikely, but even a good power supply can fail in the face of a voltage surge on the mains. Absolutely don't wear it plugged in if there is any hint of a thunderstorm!

so i used it plugged into the wall.

Careful using body-worn devices when plugged in. Medical power supplies have special requirements to avoid electrocution, because they are often powering equipment in contact with a person's body. Consumer power supplies probably don't, on the assumption that the device will not be charging whilst being worn.

People have died from using headphones plugged into USB chargers.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/faulty-usb-phone-charger...

The electricity infrastructure where I was live was owned by the government. It's only in the last 15 years it was sold off to private interests [1]. I suspect you will find that the electricity systems in many regions are still government owned.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Commission_of_New_...

There's an argument that Earth, as a biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere, also isn't self sustaining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day

I'd keep the Moonraker film in mind as a metric for self sustaining colonies created by billionaires. They can't be trusted unless they are also working to fix what we already have.

Sobriety is just factor to be weighed in an emergency situation. 30 years ago I was at a ski resort with about 50 friends having a drinking competition in the resort's main bar. Late that night two ski lodges collapsed, trapping people inside. Around midnight, soon after the winner was announced, the police entered and asked "who's able to drive a crane truck?" The winner of the competition put his hand up and informed them of how much he had had to drink. Don't care they said, so he drove a crane big enough to lift a building up a single lane 35km mountain road in nighttime ice conditions. (The crane made it, but sadly most of the people in the ski lodges didn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Thredbo_landslide )

As for fish, we prefer to maintain sustainable local fish stocks, and choose import.

There's hard evidence for this in the form of a map [1]. The light pixels close to the Australian coastline are Australian vessels fishing close in. The solid light areas further from the coast are other countries' vessels stripping the ocean bare. It's particularly obvious to the north east of Australia, where the solid line is the edge of Australia's exclusive economic zone. Minimal activity (dark) inside the zone, being stripped bare (light) outside the zone.

China may be listed as self-sufficient in fish, but its fish are not coming from near China [2]. Mind you, Australia's not helping if it's just buying from countries that are stripping stocks.

[1] https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/index?longitude=126.00884...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-19/how-china-is-plunderi...

We're screwed on coffee and chocolate.

If things get desperate, AU does have small coffee and cacao goring industries!

https://www.agca.au/

https://www.thechocolateprofessor.com/blog/australian-cacao

I think it's because LLM output tends to be snippets of truth, connected in such a way as to be subtly false. It leaves you disoriented because it is in the uncanny valley of truth: you know it's not right, but can't put your finger on why it is not right. It's made worse buy its asymmetric nature: it takes seconds to generate pages of words and hours to figure out what is wrong with them, for little to no gain to the reader.

Full liability. It's a machine with predictable performance.

The law applied to humans needs to account for their fallibilities. Not so with a machine.