drosophila
@drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Applying 'extreme heat' to lithium-ion batteries reportedly restores their capacity, and I think it's the sustainable tech breakthrough of 2025 4 hours ago:
I think its less the quality of the research and more this:
Image (This comic is a bit outdated nowadays, but you get the idea).
Except the headlines say “scientists report discovery of miraculous new battery technology using A!”.
Also people don’t realize how long it takes to commercialize battery technology. I think they put them in the same mental category as computers and other electronics, where a company announces something and then its out that same year. The first lithium ion batteries were made in a lab in the 1970s. A person in 2000 could have said “I’ve been hearing about lithium ion batteries for decades now and they’ve never amounted to anything”, and they would be right, but its not because its a bunk technology or the researchers were quacks.
- Comment on Applying 'extreme heat' to lithium-ion batteries reportedly restores their capacity, and I think it's the sustainable tech breakthrough of 2025 4 hours ago:
With electric cars you might not even need a special charger so much as a special charging cycle. Its already the norm for cars to tell the charger what voltage and current they want, and its already the norm for cars to carefully control their battery’s temperature during charging.
That’s not to say you’d necessarily be able to do this with just a software update, but its not too far off from the current paradigm.
- Comment on How a false X post about pausing tariffs led to multi-trillion-dollar market swings. 2 weeks ago:
IDK, it wouldn’t be the first time a news org published some random shit as fact because they’re too eager to be the first to report on something.
- Comment on YSK that if you lose your Social Security Card (USA) more than 10 times, the Social Security Administration will have to, by law, refuse to issue anymore replacement cards, for the rest of your life. 4 weeks ago:
How can the same SSN be issued twice?!?
The SSN system is bad in almost every way it is possible for an ID system to be bad. If you ask “does it really do this dumb thing?”, the answer is probably yes.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 5 weeks ago:
I think they’re both better and worse.
In the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s AAA games were becoming increasingly hollowed out husks, with dumbed dumbed down paint-by-numbers gameplay and tons of QTEs. And its not like their narratives or art direction were any good either (it being the brown piss filter era). In the same time period we saw the rise of predatory practices like day one DLCs and preorder bonuses.
In more recent times I think we’ve actually seen a reversal of the gameplay hollowing out trend, and an improvement in art direction. However with the rise of lootboxes, trading, and gatcha, monetization schemes are more predatory than they’ve ever been (though these are mostly concentrated in multiplayer games). Its also really common now for games to release in an completely broken and unplayable state.
- Comment on In Vermont, an ultralocal social network is as popular as Facebook 1 month ago:
If someone were to visit Vermont is there anywhere you’d recommend they go?
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 1 month ago:
The way coil stoves cycle their power on and off is incredibly dumb IMO.
Induction cooktops don’t do that, but it blows my mind that it took as long as it did to get a duty cycle frequency somewhere above ‘once every 30 seconds’.
- Comment on Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic 1 month ago:
Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable)
So in other words we sell your data and get paid for it, and some countries won’t let us lie about it.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 1 month ago:
Not lying makes zero sense to you?
- Comment on The Algorithm 1 month ago:
Apparently that’s (quasi polynomial time)[quora.com/Is-O-n-log-n-polynomial-or-exponential], which grows faster than polynomial but not quite as fast as exponential.
- Comment on Countries across the world use more land for golf courses than wind or solar energy 1 month ago:
You’re strawmaning your opponent so hard that you’re the one that’s coming off as dumb.
Its kinda like someone saying “maybe if they didn’t all have garages we could fit more houses in the same space” and you just keep replying “WHAT!?! You want me to park my car in my living room!?!?” over and over again.
- Comment on Xenon 2 months ago:
Don’t listen to the people who say it works by displacing oxygen. It would never be used as a general anesthetic if that was the mechanism of action.
Xenon has been used as a general anesthetic, but it is more expensive than conventional anesthetics.
Xenon is a high-affinity glycine-site NMDA receptor antagonist.[155] However, xenon is different from certain other NMDA receptor antagonists in that it is not neurotoxic and it inhibits the neurotoxicity of ketamine and nitrous oxide (N2O), while actually producing neuroprotective effects.[156][157] Unlike ketamine and nitrous oxide, xenon does not stimulate a dopamine efflux in the nucleus accumbens.[158]
Xenon has a minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) of 72% at age 40, making it 44% more potent than N2O as an anesthetic.[164] Thus, it can be used with oxygen in concentrations that have a lower risk of hypoxia.
- Comment on Single-photon LiDAR delivers detailed 3D images at distances up to 1 kilometer 2 months ago:
So, keep in mind that single photon sensors have been around for awhile, in the form of avalanche photodiodes and photomultiplier tubes. And avalanche photodiodes are pretty commonly used in LiDAR systems already.
The ones talked about in that article collect about 50 points per square meter at a horizontal resolution of about 23 cm. Obviously that’s way worse than what’s presented in the phys.org article, but that’s also measuring from 3km away while covering an area of 700 square km per hour (because these systems are used for wide area terrain scanning from airplanes). With the way LiDAR works the system in the phys.org article could be scanning with a very narrow beam to get way more datapoints per square meter.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the system is useless crap or whatever. It could be that the superconducting nanowire sensor they’re using let’s them measure the arrival time much more precisely than normal LiDAR systems, which would give them much better depth resolution. Or it could be that the sensor has much less noise (false photon detections) than the commonly used avalanche diodes. I didn’t read the actual paper, and honestly I don’t know enough about LiDAR and photon detectors to really be able to compare those.
But I do know enough to say that the range and single-photon capability of this system aren’t really the special parts of it, if it’s special at all.
- Comment on Even better than a cart of apples 4 months ago:
- Comment on AND THEY DIDN'T STOP EATING 4 months ago:
One of the issues with cryonics in large animals is sufficiently saturating all of the tissues with cryoprotectants to prevent frostbite. Some have speculated that it might be possible to engineer an organism to produce it’s own cryoprotectant proteins inside all of its cells, as some arctic fish and insects do.
That wouldn’t help with getting even heat into all of the tissues for thawing though.
- Comment on Conclusions 5 months ago:
It’s not ai generated for what it’s worth, it’s a really old meme image that’s been badly ai upscaled for some reason. Image
- Comment on "What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, questions include "What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?" 5 months ago:
I asked them to support JPEGXL by default.
- Comment on ‘It should not taste marine-like’: Would you eat a burger made from processed sea squirts? 5 months ago:
I feel like we should be trying to engineer fusarium venenatum to express various animal proteins.
It already does a really good job as a meat substitute, and (unlike lab grown meat) the process for culturing it is very well understood and mature.
I don’t know if trying to genetically engineer a fungus would present any special challenges vs a plant or bacteria though.
- Comment on 🍃 🐑 5 months ago:
The really interesting thing about costasiella kuroshimae is that its digestive system branches and goes up into all of those ‘leaves’, which is how the algae makes its way there to have its chloroplasts extracted.
- Comment on Womp womp 5 months ago:
So, I think the whole “well intentioned but hubristic scientist goes too far, tramples on the feet of god!” trope is pretty stupid in a lot of stories (although if executed correctly I think it can still be very good, even if i don’t really agree with the theme as applied to real life). But I also think you really have to consider where the “mad scientist” archetype comes from before you write it off as purely anti-intellectual:
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To a large degree the mad scientist is an updated version of the evil wizard. Victor Frankenstein, the prototypical mad scientist, was trained in alchemy as well as chemistry and biology. Very often (such as in this very post) their laboratories are depicted as being in castles or even wizard towers.
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Frankenstein was partly based on the sort of people who robbed graveyards. The more modern ‘howie lab coat, rubber gloves, and goggles’ mad scientist exploded in popularity after WWII, probably because of people like mengele and the invention of the atomic bomb.
There’s other themes present in the archetype of course (I already mentioned hubris and man’s vs god"s domain above, but there’s all the other stuff going on in Frankenstein too), but yeah. The ‘mad scientist’ archetype is a little bit like taking a normal scientist and removing their humanity and morals, leaving only their intellect and ambition/ego behind. A little bit like how a warewolf is a man stripped of all morals and self control, leaving only bestial impulses behind.
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- Comment on Is it normal to feel tired of technological progress? 5 months ago:
Humans need to move around to be healthy regardless, any energy consumed to pedal a bike is immaterial.
Though I guess if the person in question just died that would be even more pollution free.
- Comment on You'll have to use pto time to drown, but make sure it's approved first 6 months ago:
This story and the Triangle Shirtwaist factory should be a reminder that almost every large business owner would kill you if it meant they could make slightly more money.
How much extra value do you think they generated in a couple of hours of making plastic pipes? That’s what their lives were worth to the factory owners.
