smiley1437

"to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." - Voltaire

I agree with you, I can't stand ads

However, I believe an ad it still influences you subconsciously as long as it is in your sight line.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a lot of investigation into subtly slipping advertising in the LLM responses the way Korean dramas have product placement right in the storyline (Subway, bbq chicken, beverages, makeup, etc).

CATL claims 10,000 cycles for the Naxtra:

https://battery-news.de/en/2026/01/26/catl-presents-sodium-i...

Out the gate, sodium ion advantages are so significant that unless there is some surprise show-stopper it will likely become the dominant energy storage medium.

Crustal abundance up to 1000x that of lithium - pretty much every nation has effectively unlimited supply, it's no longer a barrier or a geographically limited resource like lithium.

No significant damage going down to 0V, can even be stored at 0V - much safer than lithium which gets excitable once out of its prefered voltage range.

Cold weather performance down to -30C - northern latitude users don't have as much range anxiety in the winter.

Basically, the only problem I see is that companies that have made significant long-term investments in lithium could take a big hit. Countries that banked on their lithium reserves as a key future resource for will have to adjust their strategy.

Lithium batteries will likely still have a place in the high performance realm but but for the majority of run-of-the-mill applications - everything from customer electronics to EVs to offgrid storage - it's hard to see how sodium-ion wouldn't quickly replace it.

Strangely, this made me think about the recurrent laryngeal nerve in giraffes.

The nerve takes a 15-foot detour down the long neck and loops under the aorta near the heart before it travels back up because evolution needed to stay backwards compatible with previous iterations of protogiraffes as environmental selection pressure lengthened the neck.

Because you need to use your other hand to press that button, instead of the adjacent finger.

Funnily enough, I've used my nose to tap my watch when my hands are full

Yes, I've gotten some strange looks

mid-level -> senior-level transitions will leave a hole behind that can't be filled internally.

Tech companies are betting that in 5 years, AI should be good enough to replace mid-levels.

Rinse and repeat with seniors 5 years after that.

Hard to say if that bet will pay off, or what the endgame would be; just the CEO commanding an company of AIs?

Alliance Laundry which makes Speed Queen recently IPOed:

https://ir.alliancelaundry.com/news-events/press-releases/de...

Once a company goes public they tend to focus more on earnings per quarter, causing decision making to be more short-term.

Not great when, as a consumer, you hope to get a product that will last 20+ years.

The pods cost about 6x as much per load as powder.

So, even if they had equal cleaning performance, economically the powder would come ahead.

As it turns out, the 1/6th-as-expensive powder does an even better job than the pods, making the powder an even more obvious choice

(Unless you really value the handling convenience of using a pod and were willing to accept poorer results at a higher expense)

Not the GP, but do you think Serena Williams - world number 1 womens tennis player for 319 weeks, who trained for 5 hours per day at her peak - has insufficient grit?

Because she went on GLP-1 to lose weight.

How do you just start on retatrutide? Did you sign up for a Phase 3 trial?

I value my time as well that's why I have 2 Synology devices, one at my home, one at my sibling's home.

Both on Tailscale and we use Hyperbackup between them.

It was very easy to set up and provides offsite backups for both of us.

Synology very recently (a day ago) decided to allow 3rd party drives again with DSM 7.3.

Conversely, entire branches of knowledge can be lost if not enough people are working in the area to maintain a common ground of understanding.

Especially if the work is classified.

The manufacture of FOGBANK, a key material for a thermonuclear weapon's interstage, was lost by 2000 because so few people were involved with its manufacture and the ones who knew retired or moved on. It's thought to be an aerogel-like substance.

5 years and millions in expensive reverse engineering was required to figure it out again.

I'm guessing they documented it this time.

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

Instructions on Vine-glo grape concentrate during prohibition: "Do not place the liquid in this jug and put it away in the cupboard for twenty-one days, because then it would turn into wine."

One useful addition for text file users: on Windows, create hotkey\macro timestamps using something like Autohotkey (https://autohotkey.com/)

3 letter hotkeys seem to work well - long enough to be unique without overlapping real words.

for instance, when I type ddd it automatically stamps this:

20250811 10:57 AM

then I type my note and can look back at what time\date it was.

sometimes I just need the date so that is dds (date-date-short) which gives

20250811

occasionally I just want the time so that's ttt

11:02:02 AM

I have many other 3 letter codes using Autohotkey to bring in frequently typed things too, useful in emails and such.

Since I think through typing, autohotkey has been a QoL helper.

Google was not marginally better Yahoo, their implementation of Markov chains in the PageRank algorithm was significantly better than Yahoo or any other contemporary search engine.

It's not obvious if a similar breakthrough could occur in AI

Tirzepatide (and likely other GLPs) have limitations that are rarely brought up in the general media

- Patients have about 72 weeks to reach maximum loss, they don't lose any more weight after 72 weeks even on the highest dose.

- Patients appear to immediately gain the weight back as soon as they stop taking it.

It's right in the phase 3 trial outcomes paper:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10667099/

I suspect that this info is intentionally down-played so that it doesn't affect sales.

people aren't aware of how wrong they can be, and the errors take effort and knowledge to notice.

I have friends who are highly educated professionals (PhDs, MDs) who just assume that AI\LLMs make no mistakes.

They were shocked that it's possible for hallucinations to occur. I wonder if there's a halo effect where the perfect grammar, structure, and confidence of LLM output causes some users to assume expertise?

I went through manually and these appear to have the highest volumes:

H1

H2

CPM Magnacut

Sandvik 12C27

Interestingly they are all weak on Edge Retention.

Be careful - those magnetic adapters can fry your port

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2307079/dont-buy-these-dange...

Did you know you can buy an Oxford Nanopore sequencer for about $2000 euro? It sits on your desk and it will sequence DNA or RNA at about 450 bases per second

https://nanoporetech.com/platform/technology

It somehow grabs a free strand of DNA\RNA and pulls it through a specially constructed pore on a membrane. It reads the voltage change as it goes through because each type of base (ATGC) changes the voltage differently, and interprets the sequence and outputs the data in a file.

Doesn't even need PCR amplification because it reads a single strand.

I thought it must be fake because it sounds like something out of science fiction but Nature did an article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-01108-x

Mind blowing

Some pools use a electrolysis system to generate chlorine for the pool. They'are marketed as salt-water chlorinators.

It splits the sodium chloride in the water into chlorine and sodium hydroxide so you don't have to keep buying solid chlorine tablets.

For the electrolysis to work, it needs bout 3000ppm to 5000ppm of salt, for a pool this could be hundreds of pounds of salt.

As an aside, the ocean is about 35000 ppm salt so this is about 1/10th the saltiness of the ocean.

You actually don't have to power it down. If you hold the power and volume buttons for 2 seconds and reach the "slide to power off" screen, the phone is already hard locked. You then always have to enter the passcode to unlock it.

Iphones have 2 states when it comes to encryption:

Before First Unlock (BFU) - everything is encrypted. The most difficult state to hack.

After First Unlock (AFU) - data isn’t fully encrypted. Maybe it's for performance reasons. In this state exploits exist which police can use to get data.

Your suggestion of getting to the 'slide to power off' screen does NOT hardlock the phone (it does not put it in BFU).

It just means it requires a passcode. However, since it is in AFU mode, data can be exfiltrated with the right tools.

You should definitely power it down to be secure.

What about highly intelligent psychopaths?

https://www.spring.org.uk/2022/12/high-functioning-psychopat...

Maybe some of those highly intelligent people are good at pretending to be generous, thoughtful, and kind because it helps achieve their goals.

IPU6 for image sensors feels so much like GDI print drivers from the 90s

thanks for the link! A great read as promised

Over time, the explosive chemicals in the both the detonator and the main charge can frequently get MORE sensitive to disturbance, which is kind of perverse.

That's why if you ever come across any old UXO (UneXploded Ordnance) you should call the bomb squad and never touch it

modulate our own weight, up to 0 -- or even negative.

Wolff's law suggests that if you set your own weight to zero or negative, your bones would become fragile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff%27s_law

Something I've been thinking about, and then I noticed this essay.

Probably Baader–Meinhof

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

Any chance it's a legitimate screw up but they don't want to cause any Streisand effect?