"Due to the emergence of low cost renewable electricity from solar and wind, there is renewed interest in decentralized opportunities for electricity-driven nitrogen fixation."
"This analysis shows that the energy consumption for NOX synthesis with plasma technology is almost competitive with the commercial process with its current best value of 2.4 MJ mol N−1, which is required to decrease further to about 0.7 MJ mol N−1 in order to become fully competitive"
Note that this measure of competitivity is based on energy, not cost. So the (intermittently) ultra-low cost of electrical energy generated by modern PV installations (where substantial overprovisioning is becoming normal) has not been taken into account.
An Agri-PV installation that produces all the fertilizer it needs from its own surplus electricity would be cool indeed.
You might find Stanislav Lem's Golem XIV worth a read, in which a what we now call an AGI shares, amongst other things, its knowledge and speculations about long-term evolution of superintelligences, in a lecture to humans, before entering the next stage itself.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10208493
It seems difficult to obtain an English edition these days but there is a reddit thread you might want to look into.
Interestingly, owning even a small PV setup like these "balcony solar" devices, and monitoring its output, causes many people to think more about their grid power consumption, and to reduce it or adapt their usage pattern to solar energy availability to some extent. There is something like gamification going on.
Good job indeed.Started happening some time in Novenber, and they merrily keep rolling out this buggy Google Authenticator update after people reported the lock-out behaviour you encountered. Apart from corrupting the TOTP seeds for some users, this update also introduced the splendid new feature of backing up those secrets in, of all places, the Google cloud, opening up new vistas for hackers to take over your Google account completely. Which apart from being a rather catastrophic issue in general for many people is a very good starting point for emptying your online bank or crypto exchange account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42450221
So farewell, Google Authenticator, won't miss you.
Google rolled out that hare-brained "improvement" in an update to Google Authenticator a few months ago, with the nice extra that for some users, when you dared unselecting the new cloud backup checkbox, the secrets stored in the app were instantly corrupted in some way, so you were locked out of your Google accounts immediately as a bonus <chef's kiss>. Happened to a family member, luckily they had a working emergency access method.
We will never use Google Authenticator again.
My first impulse after ruling out Google Authenticator was to simply switch to Microsoft's Authenticator app (which I already had to use for a work-related thing anyway), thinking "of course MS would not make the same stupid mistake". Turns out they would, and they did. So alternatives from smaller vendors were the only option. In evaluating them, I focused on popular open-source solutions that had the features I deemed important (notably, local backup), and looked into the history, provenance and reputation of their vendors. Nevertheless, some risk will always remain.
I was one of the fools who installed the iOS 7 beta onto a phone that I depended on with Google Authenticator. The app had a compatibility issue with that beta release that caused it to disappear all my 2FA seeds except, very fortunately, for my Gmail. There was a bit of a ruckus about this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6112077.
Since then, I always use at least two 2FA apps at the same time.
I used andOTP for years, until the author stopped working on it. While it still likely works fine, I've switched to Stratum, which likewise supports import from the Google Authenticator export QR codes as well as from andOTP, authy, and others.
I wish this had come up on HN (or I had had that idea myself) some years ago when my mother suffered from that same cruel condition, for the last four years of her life. With her body, all her older memories and her considerable intelligence largely intact, she had multiple moments of clarity every single day, in which she fully realized the terrible and hopeless situation she was in. But of course, within seconds this thought and any decisions she might have derived from it dissolved in the black hole of her defective short-term memory. So she would not even have had the ability to take her own life to end this if she wished so.
My brother and I tried many things to improve her life somewhat, only very few of those were actually a bit succesful. Two of them were digital gadgets, which we selected to provide some benefit without or at least with just very simple interactions: The best one was an LCD "picture frame" the only feature of which was to show an infinite loop of family photos stored on its SD card - she came to really like it and have it switched on quite consistently. The second one was an MP3 speaker which had a few hours of her favorite music on an SD card as well, and which could be used largely like a radio, just by pressing its play/stop button and volume buttons. This latter one she managed to enjoy at least from time to time.
Best wishes to the author and his mom, and everyone in a similar situation.
Outside of the fact that afaik they didn't, I would think this is intended to anyone who may contact the author as it is a personal blog. This is the comment section on a post shared by someone else as I understand it.
If you are a fan, be prepared for quite some unpleasantness. Turns out, the story isn't even about topology. No, Feynman was, in his own words, "flabbergasted" that women were able to grasp and explain to each other rather basic matters of analytical geometry.
That's a similar but different anecdote. The one I am thinking of he specifically is talking to someone's wife while she is crocheting. It may not have been Feynman though, I CTRL+F'ed "Surely You're Joking" and wasn't able to find it or I would have cited my sources in the parent comment.
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