I find it satisfying to see the graph come down :)

Yes, sorry, there was some serious lagg in fetching posts from Lemmy World that persisted for several days and accumulated a 1-week delay.

But after upgrading Mander it is now fetching data from LW quite rapidly and it should be back in-sync in about a day and a half from now.

If you are curious about the ranking algorithm, there is some info here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

From the title I thought that the UV opsin itself was also performing the pressure sensing function… Which would be fascinating to me, as I have worked with viscosity and pressure-sensitive fluorophores in the past (BODIPYs and DCDHF), and I would love to see living things making use of this molecular sensor design.

But I now see that it is a different molecular sensor that is also present in the UV sensing cell:

Our results indicate that the ciliary opsin required for detecting UV light is not essential for pressure sensation.

So, today is not the day we find pressure-sensitive fluorescent sensors in a living organism, but that is still a fascinating finding. I will have to read more about those “TRP channels”, the “ultimate integrators of sensory stimuli”. They seem like a very interesting class of bio molecules that I still know too little about 😁

Really nice work, thanks a lot for sharing it here!!

That is amazing! Thanks for sharing!!

If the timing is right, I would bring a mushroom grow bag with mushrooms sprouting.

If not… probably my radiacode gamma spectrometer and some of my radioactive items. Maybe a clock with radium painted dials and a piece of trinitite. I think that there are many different points of discussion that can be of interest to a broad audience (radioactivity, spectroscopy, electronics, US labor law story of the radium girls, nuclear explosions, background radiation… etc). As a bonus I can bring a UV flash light and show the radium fluorescence. Adults love UV flash lights.

First of all, congratulations for bringing a baby girl into this world!! You must be really excited! I am very happy for you!

This looks very cool. I set up a wiki (https://ibis.mander.xyz/) and I will make an effort to populate it with some Lemmy lore and interesting science/tech 😄 Hopefully I can set some time aside and help with a tiny bit of code too.

Thank you for the positivity 💚 I wholeheartedly agree!

Drama and negativity drives engagement, and this form of engagement can easily trigger a feedback loop in which negativity keeps piling on and voices of support are practically muted.

We are participating in an open source project that has some very ambitious goals. Things can be messy, mistakes happen, there are risks, and people have many different opinions and moods. Heated discussions can be a healthy part of the process. But, once the dust is allowed to settle for a bit, it is good to remember that we are humans and that we are here because we have some shared goals.

I think the majority of people around here are kind and have a positive outlook, but perhaps it is more motivating to speak out when we have negative comments than positive ones. So, thank you for taking the time to write this positive message!

I think that’s unlikely, but you’re very kind to phrase “no, dumbass” in that way.

Not at all!!! I like to make an effort to be helpful and learn myself in the process, but I also don’t understand all of the details and I don’t want to mislead others by saying something wrong with confidence 😄 I think that adding a disclaimer is a reasonable middle-ground. If an actual expert can chime in at some point it’s always appreciated - even if (or, especially if!) they call me out on how mistaken I am.

Kind of. I understand it a bit differently, but I might misunderstand some details. This is what I understand:

they successfully created a solid state oscillator

The resonator is a silicon nitride membrant with nanopillars grown on top to modulate its resonant properties. Here is an image from the supporting info showing how these are made, and the silicon nitride membrane that oscillates is the purple part:

where vacuum fluctuations become an important thermal factor, and overcame those factors to produce a (relatively short lived at thirty cycles) wave?

I think this is a mixture of two concepts that are mentioned, but the thermal influence and the vacuum fluctuations play different roles.

The noise comes from thermal fluctuations that are transmitted through phonons - no need to invoke vacuum fluctuations yet. At this large scale, the random phonons that naturally exist at room temperature will interact with the membrane as it oscillates, and so its motion over time is unpredicatable. Since the motion of the membrane is described in terms of its quantum-mechanical vibrations, the loss of this phase information means that the “quantum coherence” is decays very quickly due to noise. They have suppressed the noise by engineering the cavity in a way that specifically filters out the phonons that are most likely to interact with the membrane in a way that disturbs its oscillations.

The vacuum fluctuations were mentioned in the context of the fluctuations in laser intensity that are responsible for pushing the membrane such that it vibrates.

What was the medium of the wave: air seems incorrect… light, I suppose?

In the supporting info they mention that the device is in a vacuum chamber:

We also cannot exclude a small contribution to the observed dissipation due to collisions with the residual gas molecules in the vacuum chamber where the MIM cavity is located [19].

So it is not air. The membrane is the vibrating object. A laser provides the driving fields:

From the text:

In the textbook description of cavity optomechanics, the mechanical motion is driven by the vacuum fluctuations of the laser amplitude and transduced by the linear response of the cavity into phase fluctuations of the light field. The induced phase–amplitude correlation of the light field manifests as a noise reduction below the shot noise level (squeezing).

What would one use such an oscillator for, or is this more a demonstration of what is now possible in optomechanics?

In the introduction they specify a few examples. I quote from there:

Cavity optomechanics, in which the mechanical oscillator is dispersively coupled to an optical cavity, has enabled numerous advances, including ground state cooling, optomechanical squeezing of light and entanglement of separate mechanical oscillators. Yet, all these advances necessitate cryogenic cooling to reduce thermal fluctuations. Room-temperature operation is beneficial to the accessibility and widespread adoption of technology, as witnessed in other branches of physical science. Developing room-temperature quantum optomechanical systems would imply a drastic reduction in experimental complexity by removing the limitations imposed by cryocoolers such as poor thermalization, excess acoustic noise and limited optical access. Room-temperature operation could stimulate applications such as coupling to atomic systems, force microscopy and variational displacement measurements.

I am also quite interested in this. It is not something that keeps me awake at night, and I am not particularly paranoid about it. But I find that working towards answering this question is a fun frame from which to learn about electronics, radio communications, and networking.

Since this appears to be something that is causing you some anxiety, I think it is better if I start by giving you some reassurance in that I have not yet managed to prove that any electronic device is spying on me via a hidden chip. I don’t think it is worth being paranoid about this.

I can explain some things that could be done to test whether a Linux computer spying. I am not suggesting that you try any of this. I am explaining this to you so that you can get some reassurance in the fact that, if devices were spying on us in this manner, it is likely that someone would have noticed by now.

The “spy” chip needs some way to communicate. One way a chip might communicate is via radio waves. So, the first step would be to remove the WiFi and Bluetooth dongles and any other pieces of hardware that may emit radio waves during normal operation. There is a tool called a “Spectrum Analyzer” that can be used to capture the presence of specific radio frequencies. These devices are now relatively affordable, like the tinySA, which can measure the presence of radio frequencies of up to 6 GHz.

One can make a Faraday cage, for example, by wrapping the PC with a copper-nickel coated polyester fabric to isolate the PC from the radio waves that are coming from the environment. The spectrum analyzer antennas can be placed right next to the PC and the device is left to measure continuously over several days. A script can monitor the output and keep a record of any RF signals.

Since phones are small, it is even easier to wrap them in the copper-nickel polyester fabric alongside with the spectrum analyzer antenna to check whether they emit any RF when they are off or in airplane mode with the WiFi and Bluetooth turned off.

What this experiment may allow you to conclude is that the spy chip is not communicating frequently with the external world via radio frequencies, at least not with frequencies <= 6 GHz.

Using frequencies higher 6 GHz for a low-power chip is not going be an effective method of transmitting a signal very far away. The chip could remain hidden and only emit the signal under certain rare conditions, or in response to a trigger. We can’t rule that out with this experiment, but it is unlikely.

A next step would be to test a wired connection. It could be that the spy chip can transmit the data over the internet. One can place a VPN Gateway in between their PC and the router, and use that gateway to route all the traffic to their own server using WireGuard. All network packets that leave through the PC’s ethernet connection can be captured and examined this way using Wireshark or tcpdump.

If one can show that the device is not secretly communicating via RF nor via the internet, I think it is unlikely that the device is spying on them.

Fair enough. I just looked it up and if the scale in this image is correct, I agree that the size of the hole looks small in comparison. I also looked at the security video of the crash itself and it is frustrating how little we can see from it.

Since this was such an important event and there seems to be a lack of specific pieces of essential evidence - either because of bad luck or because of a cover-up - I understand the skepticism. And I am not a fan of blindly believing any official narrative. But, without any context, if I see that photo and someone tells me that a plane crashed into that building, I would find it probable simply because the shape is so similar to the photo of the Bijlmer accident that I’m familiar with. A plane crash seems to me like a very chaotic process, so I don’t have a good expectation of what the damage should look like.

Maybe I’ll look for a pentagon crash documentary some time.

I don’t have much of an opinion on this topic, I haven’t really looked into it.

But as soon as I saw this image, the El Al Flight 1862 which crashed in the Bijlmer in Amsterdam in 1992 immediately came to mind. The shape of the hole is very similar!

This image shows the likely position of the Bijlmer plane during the crash:

The image you posted of the Pentagon seems to me consistent with what I have seen of the Bijlmer accident, and so the shape of the hole and the absence of wings in the photo does not persuade me personally that no plane was involved.

And the audacity to talk about metadata when Telegram accounts still require a phone number today (as they did five years ago when this post was written) is just… 🤯

Not only that, but I believe that they actively try to prevent VoIP numbers from being used to create accounts.

Almost all countries require official authentication to activate a SIM card.

Fortunately not in the Netherlands. I don’t think that’s the case in the rest of the EU. I can use free sim cards as much as I want!

When communicating with cell towers, a phone will also broadcast its unique IMEI identifier. So, even if you swap the SIM card every day, your IMEI is still being broadcast the same.

Changing the IMEI of a phone in the EU is illegal, unless the manufacturer consents: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/31/section/1

So… I have a Chinese 4G mobile router, and the manufacturer gives me the permission to change the IMEI as it is an integrated feature of the device. I use that for my data. The data codes I purchase small quantities in bulk with cash, and I can access the router via its ip from my phone’s browser to send the SMS messages to activate the data codes as needed. Since WiFi connections are abundant around here I keep these codes for emergencies. I can go a few months some time without activating data codes. I mostly use them when traveling internationally.

Thank you for that reference! Very interesting

I can tell you one benefit: Money. Most of my server’s costs come from storing federated content. Federating with threads would likely be expensive.

At least for the Netherlands… For orders under 150 €, VAT is paid directly when paying via AliExpress. If the total cost is >= 150 €, then customs is supposed to charge the VAT to the buyer directly. However, for this to happen the person shipping the order needs to report the value correctly on the package. Often sellers will report a lower than 150€ for the package, and customs lets it pass through without charging VAT as it should have already been paid.

Usually if you create an order from multiple shops and the total for the order is >= 150 €, the VAT is removed from the total order, but since the packages are often shipped separately by the different shops (except when AliExpress combines the shipping) none of the individual packages gets charged the VAT.

Yeah, I found out only after choosing that domain name… This TLD also gets penalized by the automatic e-mail spam detectors (like SpamAssassin). I wouldn’t pick the “.xyz” TLD if I were picking today 😅

Sure.

If I make my own AI image generator and create a nice image with it, or use some AI engine that gives me full ownership of the output, I can choose to share it online with whatever license I want to share it with. I don’t see why the regular copyright rules for digital images and photographs would not hold… If someone shares their AI creation online and wants others to share with attribution, or not share at all, what is wrong with that?

I can take a ton of photos of objects with my phone, upload them to Flickr, and they are all copyrighted. That doesn’t mean that other’s can simply take similar photos if they wish to do so. The same with AI. One can decide whether to share with attribution, pay someone to let them use it, or to generate the image themselves using AI. It does not seem like a problem to me.

The human Y chromosome has been notoriously difficult to sequence and assemble because of its complex repeat structure that includes long palindromes, tandem repeats and segmental duplications. As a result, more than half of the Y chromosome is missing from the GRCh38 reference sequence and it remains the last human chromosome to be finished

Oh wow. This is surprising! I thought the full human genome had been sequence a while ago.