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Joined 5 months ago
Cake day: July 13th, 2025
  • blueworld@piefed.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Q&A: Why Don't People Care About Privacy?English
    56·
    1 month ago

    Beyond my frustration at this being buried in a video podcast, I also would rather promote why people should be worried about privacy in a concrete and direct way.

    The Cascading Impact of Privacy Loss

    Concrete Example: A 10-Year Timeline

    Year 0: You’re a healthy middle-class person who “has nothing to hide”

    Year 3: Your insurance premiums inexplicably rise. You don’t know your fitness tracker data was sold and correlated with your grocery purchases.

    Year 5: Passed over for promotion. Algorithm flagged social media posts about work stress as “low resilience indicator.”

    Year 7: Attend peaceful protest. Face-recognition adds you to databases. Now randomly selected for “additional screening” at airports.

    Year 9: Can’t get affordable loan. Your zip code + purchase history + social network = high risk score. The specific formula is proprietary.

    Year 10: Chronic condition develops. Can’t get treatment covered - insurer says it’s “pre-existing” based on data you didn’t know they had from a DNA test you took for fun in Year 2.

    Your lifespan: Statistically reduced by 5-10 years compared to privacy-protected cohort.

    Privacy isn’t about “having something to hide.” It’s the immune system of human dignity, economic fairness, political freedom, and literally - survival.

    Without it, you become a data object to be optimized for others’ profit and control, not a human with agency over your own life.

  • blueworld@piefed.worldtoScience@lemmy.ml•Why Scientists Are Obsessed With Finding a Room-Temperature SuperconductorEnglish
    9·
    2 months ago

    While the article itself is a great intro into the engineering history of conductors, this is what the title refers too and is sensationalist at the least. IMO scientists are searching for a bunch of things and don’t necessary think of it as a holy grail.

    …

    This non-peer-reviewed preprint, boldly titled “The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor,” ignited a firestorm last month—both online and in physics departments around the world—as experts and laboratories rushed to recreate the material and reproduce these amazing results. But even from the very beginning, most condensed-matter physicists, including Mason and Greene, were skeptical.

    “Even though they’ve shown levitation and resistance versus temperature curves in their paper … none of those measurements seem to have the reliability that a typical paper reporting superconductivity would have,” Greene says. “For example, one of the papers shows electrical resistance versus temperature, and when it comes to superconductivity there’s a very sharp drop in the resistance … the drop is much too sharp. It wouldn’t happen that quickly.”

    Greene and Mason also mention some graph inconsistencies that make it hard to discern if this material is even a superconductor at all.

    “I think one thing that’s exciting about this paper is that they were very clear about how they made the material. It’s a material that many people can make and reproduce,” Mason says, but he also points out a few red flags. “The resistivity plot is troublesome to me … if you took their plot of a superconductor, and just put gold on the same plot, gold would look like there was also zero resistance.”

    At first, for every validation study that showed promising results, another study took the wind out of Ahab’s metaphorical sails. Finally, two weeks after its arrival, the International Center for Quantum Materials—an influential Chinese superconductor lab—confirmed that LK-99 wasn’t a superconductor at all, but instead displayed a kind of ferromagnetism.

    So for now, the dream of room-temperature superconductors is on pause. But despite LK-99’s unfortunate fate, the dream has never been so tantalizing.