This was an yet another glorious episode from veritasium.

I hope we get well past UVC LEDs. (i.e., shorter wavelengths) UV LEDs are already available. Unfortunately, this progress will stop before X-ray light. With +1 KeV energy, you pretty much must blast off the electrons from the atoms to emit X-rays, which an x-ray tube already does. Or by peeling off a piece of scotch tape.

arxiv.org: a pre-print source, this is not peer-reviewed yet. So, until other papers refer to this paper, it has low significance in the literature. The paper has references to other papers and to previous corpus of knowledge on the subject, which is good. However, this paper is based on simulations only.

Crucially, the scheme identified here does not negatively impact electricity production, and is also compatible with the challenging tritium breeding requirements of fusion power plant design because (n, 2n) reactions of 198Hg drive both transmutation and neutron multiplication

Monte Carlo transport calculations show that neutrons produced in a tokamak power plant can convert the abundant isotope 198Hg to stable 197Au via the (n,2n) channel, yielding several tonnes of gold per plant-year without compromising the tritium breeding ratio.

The decommissioned blanket material would increase in value, and the Mercury-198 in the blanket doesn't majorly impact its effectiveness in transmuting lithium to tritium.

The "worst" gold isotope half-life is less than a year, so only a modest cool-down is needed for the output:

197Au to be Class 7 when activity concentration is > 2700 pCi/g, which is reached after 13.7 years for the initial concentration listed.

An even more stringent constraint can be applied for any gold that will be regularly handled by the general population. As a highly conservative requirement, we can stipulate that this gold must be less radioactive than a banana. Due to 40K content, bananas have an activity of ∼ 3520 pCi/kg, or about 420 pCi for a single banana. To meet this requirement, a troy ounce of gold with the initial isotope mix shown in Table 2 must sit for about 17.7 years to be below a banana equivalent level of activity.

What strikes me here with this paper is the suggested liquid blanket, so this would be a kin of D-T Fusion MSR. We now have two proposed technologies behind being able handle hot radioactive liquids.

The backdoor has existed for a month at least. Yikes.

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4

I hope we eventually get a copyleft lisence that states: "by using this product in a comercial product you have commited to supporting it, either by monetary fee or doing development work for it behalf, otherwise this product is entirely free of cost and is provided as-is".

Edit: and the developers can freely reproduce the GPL license exception for all their products:

// Under Section 7 of GPL version 3, you are granted additional
// permissions described in the GCC Runtime Library Exception, version
// 3.1, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

Currently, and I don't know why, this extremely useful license exception for (C++) headers, which is meant for compiled down to machine-code is not usable for anything else. If your library is not part of GCC, the GPL does not help you here. As such, if you publish a header only library under GPL, you cannot state that the code using your code is not under "API" boundary, ie. free of GPL, while keeping your precious header under GPL. And no, LGPL, does not save you here.

You only have non-copyleft lisences like MIT (disgusting), Apache (shitly less gross), BSL-1.0 (still non copyleft) or LGPL (not gross, but extremely limiting.)

And, if you still publish something, I plead it is at least under GPL, since this guarantees a life for the produce, non-negotioable, forever, which I think is still better than dying and giving up to pooh of public domain.

I once helped a person with their computer. They complained the they cant save the their photos. Well, their onedrive was filled to brim with crap, while the local 1Tb disk was empty because they had zero idea how storage and folders work. I had to explain her there is literally 1000x more fast disk space available, so please dont save into onedrive.

Completely missing from the article is the syscall user dispatch being utilized finally: hardcoded NT syscalls can be handled instead of crashing. So, a program which didn't work previously or crashed often may very well now work with Wine 11.5

Fire.

The fucked up thing with phones is the locked boot loaders. Locked boot loaders should not exist because this seriously restricts the driver and OS development.

Maybe not in a flashlight, but the scientific industry would be very pleased with them. Sterilize water and all surfaces in a second? Flash with 200nm light.

This was truly a wtf moment of the month.

Last time I spent time watching him was when he freaking fixed the kexec syscall for IBM PowerPCs. for free

This honestly improved my day 200% :3

Any new battery technology news needs to be taken with a grain of salt. They are highly likely over-hyped and the actually realized products will have more problems than the current established tech initially.

Quantum computing is going to make it possible to solve problems that normal computers simply cannot do.

Most of these are optimizing problems like "compute the best solution to traveling salesman" or "find a molecule that binds to this receptor".

On normal computers solving such problems "perfectly" takes^exponential^ amount of computing time vs. the size of the problem.

Quantum computers are going to chop down that exponential thing a little, so we can see the results before the sun burns out. The reason QCs are theoretically able to do this is that each added qubit improves the machines performance exponentially.

However, the qubit state is so fragile that we need hundreds of them to make a single "stable" logical qubit that can do operations repeatedly. What the quantum computer uses as qubit (photons, super-conducting wire) is irrelevant as long as the system can do useful work.

Because of the fragility, the results are gathered using thousands of runs on the quantum machine and measured statistically.

We are not quite there yet to solve any useful sized problems.

Shorter version: Operating systems set up hardware locks and protections to confine processes, and once set up, they cannot be undone. (the hardware + OS denies modifications to the security policy)

• Attacker broke out from the app sandbox. (attacker can run code in the infected process)
• Broke out of the process. (gained root access; attacker can run anything)
• Broke into the kernel space (gained 100% control over the hardware)
• Corrupted some kernel memory via a damm magic MMIO accesses nobody knows (hardware vulnerable)
• Bypassed protections that kernel set up earlier such that it cannot accidentally modify itself.
• Finally broke the kernel via hardware exploit thus the attacker got rootkit level access.

Getting arbitrary code execution and root access is one thing, but breaking out from the damm kernel configured hardware protections is insane.

They basically managed to flip a "read-only" switch to "modify-as-much-as-you-like". The infected device at this point is broken beyond repair, as the firmware(s) may have been tampered with. End result is a terrestrial spy brick.

All I see is cybertrucks. You missed the potential.

Based on the article the satellites are not staying 100% on their intended spectrum spec and are bleeding some unintended interfere noise. I hope the starlink cloud doesn't interfere so much that it excludes possibility of some research. On earth, if you transmit even slightly out-of-spec radio signals, the government agencies will get mad and really really fast.

ELI5: Low earth orbit is becoming over crowed "FM radio station", with regulation lacking who can broadcast and at what frequency.

I know two friends.. who would absolutely lynch you for doing this.

Anyway, it has been fun following them and occasionally ask "whats this card worth?" and general answer has been 5-50€ a card. The cards can be worth more than literal money.

I yesterday logged into my very old and dead M$ account. Holy fuck the experience of forced ads, timed pop ups, and thank good all of this fucking sloppy shit will be now deleted on my part. I'm not going near that diarrhea shit anymore unless paid.

I would put my code in a def main(), so that the local names don't escape into the module scope:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    def main():
        print('/s')
    main()

(I didn't see this one yet here.)

Can I have some default juice? I think I glitched the matrix (again) today.