Article note: Good. Recognizing that the compelled consent of leaking location data to providers and services doesn't count as meaningful consent is really good for the landscape.
I imagine cops are going to try to obscure dragnet behavior by buying the data through a commercial broker rather than officially compelling it, unless we put some actual restrictions on data brokers.
Article note: I had to go to the Nature article to figure out why they weren't just talking about a photodiode (I've done quite a bit of fiddling with bidirectional use of photodiodes, some of which is published). They're doing crazy plasmon shit to get phase and polarization control. Relevant and neat.
Researchers affiliated with ETH Zurich have devised a multifunction picture element, or pixel, that can both emit and measure light. Traditional pixels generally do one or the other – illuminating a display screen or capturing light in a camera sensor. A team led by David Norris, professor at ETH Zurich's Optical Materials Engineering Laboratory, has found a way to combine the two functions. The research raises the possibility of two-way screens that take and present pictures, holographic displays, optical communication systems, and quantum information processing. As described in the Nature article "Fourier pixels for bidirectional light control," the ETH Zurich boffins developed a technique that involves measuring light wave interference patterns over a metallic surface. By doing so, they're able to generate "Fourier pixels" that can create and detect the amplitude, phase and polarization of optical fields. The Fourier transform is a mathematical technique that takes a function like a sound wave and returns a function representing the specific frequencies present in that sound. A Fourier pixel represents the spatial frequency of light rather than the specific brightness at a given point in an image. "Thanks to the fact that the relevant surface profiles of the pixels can be determined using Fourier analysis, we can combine the control and analysis of amplitude, phase and polarisation on a single pixel," said post-doc Sander Vonk in an ETH Zurich press release. In the near term, Norris expects to put Fourier pixels into a matrix that can be used to construct more sophisticated camera displays. The other authors included Yannik M. Glauser, David B. Seda, Hannah Niese, Boris de Jong, Matthieu F. Bidaut, Daniel Petter, Erwan Bossavit, Gabriel Nagamine, and Nolan Lassaline. ®
I decided it was time for a 3D printer upgrade recently. I did some playing with my old Kossel, adding braces and changing some tuning since it runs Klipper, and while it continues to be a fine machine for small PLA parts, and a fun project, I wanted more volume, more speed, and an enclosure so I can run a wider range of materials. Instead of doing something reasonable and spending O($500) on one of the various commercial options that meets the “Enclosed, Larger, Faster 3D printer that I can run a wider range of materials on” prompt (the Qidi Q2 was a close contender) I decided I wanted to build a Voron Trident.
I did “some” reading so I had opinions on mods I wanted out of the gate… and ended up buying one of the ‘roided out Siboor Voron Trident “June ’24” 300mm CNC/AWD kits for (once import duties were paid and such) about $1500. That includes their “Booster Pack 1” option, so it has steel backers on Y, aluminum gantry corner braces (this was the feature I cared about – triangles are good), and TMC5160Ts on the X/Y motors, in addition to the kit standard CNC gantry with double-shear mounts and AWD (they nicely include the 2WD idlers as well, but don’t document the belt path using them), 9mm belts, inverted electronics, clickyclack door, fume pack, and (frankly kind of questionable) side booster fan. I thought I was getting a CB2 for the computer, but it came with a Pi CM4 (CM4102032), which I’m pleased about. I went for Siboor’s kit despite the Trident R2 already being partially announced because I wanted several of the nonstandard features they bundle, and I wanted to be sure I had it while I had time to spend the several-tens-of-hours to build and tune it before I had academic year obligations.
I ordered the kit via Siboor’s Aliexpress storefront May 14, it was delivered June 10, and printing June 20. It’s currently built essentially to kit instructions, and I’m very pleased with the build process and result. Since so much knowledge about these things is disappearing into search-proof proprietary silos (lookin’ at you, Discord), too much detail below.
Article note: Happy to see they're finally making progress to fix it, that was a bad-but-expedient decision over a decade ago, which has become steadily less justifiable.
Article note: Experimental code appears to be wildly incorrect, some of it in a way that looks like the people writing it _may_ have been trying to hide that it's bogus (or it's just bad code that produced something appealing, and they got excited, it happens). Array indices do in fact correlate with... themselves.
Published without anyone internal noticing to much hype, now people can see the code and call BS.
The fabulous state of the Quantum field, on display.
Article note: New #1 is a Chinese machine made from Chinese manufactured ARMv9 parts (Custom cores on LingKun's Architectural license, not just Cortex cores). Custom interconnect, HBM memory, all CPU, no dedicated GPU/SIMD/Vector/Whatever co-processors.
That's one hell of a sign of the times.
Article note: Of course people are whining about the price. A year ago that $1050 price would be bad, right now adding up a Ryzen 7 7600 + RX 7600 8GB + 16GB of DDR5 + 512GB of SSD + any AM5 motherboard comes up over $900, and that ignores case and PSU and such.
Probably fairer to compare to some of the MiniPCs from Minisforum and Beelink and whatnot with a broadly-comparable APU, but the approximately-a-RX7600 is like 3x the GPU of the Radeon 890M out of the best of those, and by the time you have comparable RAM and SSD a Ryzen AI 9 APU Mini PC will also be over $1k.
I certainly don't need one, but it's not an un-compelling offering, especially considering the apparent/likely build quality and support. I'm certainly optimistic about the directions it will continue to distort the ecosystem in.
Article note: Affordances! Consistency! Discoverability! Representational Transparency!
Now we just build capricious magic mirrors to prey on the unwary.
