AernaLingus [any]

  • 32 Posts
  • 1.14K Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: May 6th, 2022
  • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.nettoChapotraphouse@hexbear.net•Joseph Stalin - Novo General Megathread for the 18th-24th of December 2025English
    1·
    10 hours ago

    Yeah, the VShojo thing in particular was an unbelievable fucking mess…the depths of their malfeasance and incompetence boggle the mind. And while obviously Nijisanji EN has had the most abrupt and headline-grabbing implosion in the past few years, Hololive EN and JP have been seeing a steady trickle of departures, too. I’ve actually been meaning to make an effort post to ask Hexbears about what VTuber labor organization would look like because I think the power dynamics are pretty unique and I’d love to hear from people with more knowledge of the theory and praxis. Without intervention, I think conditions are going to continue to deteriorate for corporate VTubers, and I don’t see a way out of it beyond labor organizing or forming cooperatives. Well, that, or the eventual crumbling of VTuber corporations and a release of everyone into the indie sphere, which wouldn’t such a terrible outcome even if we’d lose out on some of the capital-intensive projects only possible with pooled resources.

  • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.nettoChapotraphouse@hexbear.net•Joseph Stalin - Novo General Megathread for the 18th-24th of December 2025English
    1·
    13 hours ago

    Long story short: she streamed as Fuzuki Miki for about a year, “graduated” (i.e. retired/went on indefinite hiatus) to join a corporate VTuber company under a new identity (standard practice for the industry), “graduated” from that company four months ago, and finally returned as Fuzuki Miki with a shiny new model yesterday. She’s a total goofball, very fun to watch, good vibes.

    edit: Wait, you’re the one who mentioned watching Iroha and Koyori! Well, you may not have needed the VTuber 101 stuff, but it might be useful for anyone else browsing the thread.

  • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.nettonews@hexbear.net•US DOJ just removed a photo of Trump from the Epstein file dump websiteEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I did some digging and it looks like lossless images aren’t really stored as PNGs, per se:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF#Raster_images

    FlateDecode, a commonly used filter based on the deflate algorithm defined in RFC 1951 (deflate is also used in the gzip, PNG, and zip file formats among others); introduced in PDF 1.2; it can use one of two groups of predictor functions for more compact zlib/deflate compression: Predictor 2 from the TIFF 6.0 specification and predictors (filters) from the PNG specification (RFC 2083),

    pdfimages hints at this when all the other images output options say things like “write JPEG images as JPEG files” but then the PNG output option says “change the default output format to PNG” (if you don’t supply any arguments it spits out raw PPM files).

    In fact, if you look at the size of the original PDF, it’s 385 kB—more in line with the optimized filesize I ended up with. My guess is that mutool extract simply makes a bit more of an effort to recompress the image than pdf2images, but in both cases they’re falling short of the original compression (at least for this PDF).

    (completely unrelated, but I found it funny that the PDF uses the woke sans-serif font Helvetica)

  • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.nettotechnology@hexbear.net•China’s ultra-hot heat pump breakthrough paves way for melting ore with sunlightEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago
    Full text

    For over a century, the dream of efficiently concentrating low-grade heat into high-temperature industrial energy has been constrained by a stubborn ceiling: 200 degrees Celsius (392 degrees Fahrenheit).

    Now, a team from China has shattered that temperature limit. Using a revolutionary heat pump with no moving parts, they achieved an output of 270 degrees with a 145-degree heat source to drive the cycle.

    Developed by a team led by Luo Ercang at the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the technology could generate high-grade heat from modest sources, such as solar collectors or industrial exhausts, for applications in ceramics, petrochemicals and metallurgy.

    This could lead to solar farms directly producing the intense heat needed to smelt iron ore or refine aluminium, and chemical factories recycling their own waste warmth for splitting or combining molecules.

    The breakthrough comes at a pivotal moment in the global energy race. Nearly half the world’s final energy consumption is devoted to heating and cooling, and industry accounts for almost half of that usage.

    Much of this energy is generated by burning coal, oil or natural gas. In China alone, between 10 per cent and 27 per cent of total energy is lost as waste heat.

    Capturing and upgrading even a fraction of this dissipated energy could transform China’s industrial efficiency, slash carbon emissions and drastically reduce manufacturing costs.

    Luo’s team envisions that, by 2040, ultra-high-temperature heat pumps could deliver zero-carbon heat of up to 1,300 degrees, ushering in a green industrial revolution powered by sunlight, nuclear reactors and waste heat.

    At the heart of this breakthrough lies a novel heat-driven thermoacoustic heat pump.

    Unlike conventional pumps limited to heating homes or powering refrigerators, this system leverages the physics of sound and heat resonance, also known as thermoacoustic Stirling principles, to amplify low-grade thermal energy into ultra-high-temperature output.

    Converting heat into powerful acoustic waves to drive a closed-loop thermal upgrade could bypass the mechanical and material limitations that have long plagued compressors and turbines, according to the researchers.

    The innovation was quickly published in top international journals, including Nature Energy, Applied Physics Letters, and Energy.

    A December 3 article in China Science Daily quoted Luo as saying that the development of ultra-high-temperature industrial heat pumps for efficient energy use would be “a key pathway towards achieving carbon neutrality goals”.

    Accordingly, the CAS research team developed a prototype of a new Stirling thermoacoustic ultra-high-temperature heat pump.

    This device combines the principles of the Stirling cycle, patented by Scottish inventor Robert Stirling in 1816, with thermoacoustics. The heat pump operates by using acoustic energy – intense standing sound waves – to pump heat from a lower-temperature source to a higher-temperature sink, making it an efficient, acoustically driven heat pump.

    The prototype can absorb heat from a source as low as 49 degrees. When the heat source temperature is 67 degrees, the system provides heating at 214 degrees.

    The thermoacoustic heat pump has no moving parts, making it inherently reliable for long-term operation and capable of achieving a high temperature lift with the potential for high efficiency.

    Currently, advanced absorption heat pumps provide heating at about 100 degrees with a temperature lift of about 50 degrees. Absorption heat transformers can achieve temperatures below 200 degrees, also with a 50-degree lift.

    In industrial processes, sectors like papermaking, dyeing, brewing and pharmaceuticals require heat of between 100 degrees and 200 degrees, while ceramics, metallurgy and petrochemicals need high-temperature heat from 200 degrees to over 1,000 degrees.

    In a December 5 article in Nature Energy, Luo summarised various research fronts, including his team’s thermoacoustic Stirling heat pump, as promising pathways towards the realisation of ultra-high-temperature heat pumps.

    He also suggested development directions for materials and technologies needed for future ultra-high-temperature heat pumps operating from 600K to 1,600K, or 327 degrees to 1,327 degrees, saying these could be achieved by 2040.

    Luo said his team would next “focus on heat pumps for processes like petrochemicals, metallurgy and ceramics that require even higher temperatures”.

    He explained that a heat-driven pump could use a thermal source, such as a nuclear pressurised water reactor (about 300 degrees) or a solar trough collector (400 degrees to 500 degrees), as the energy input.

    “Using ultra-high-temperature thermoacoustic heat pumps, this could be raised to 500 degrees to 800 degrees, offering a new technological pathway for zero-carbon high-temperature heat in heavy industry,” Luo added.

  • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.nettoGames@hexbear.net•What are you gonna play during the Holidays any plans ? Tell me :3English
    3·
    3 days ago

    It’s also got an extremely granular assist mode which you can adjust on the fly to do things like slow down the game in 10% intervals, give yourself an extra jump, or give yourself unlimited stamina. I haven’t used it myself, but the devs put the feature in there so that no one will be deterred from finishing the game out of frustration. So if you get to a point where you’re feeling like throwing in the towel, don’t hesitate to test it out!

    What’s nice about it being something you can change at will is that you can use it just to give you that extra push past difficult spots, which is something you can’t do with a difficulty mode that is locked in at the start. But it’s equally valid to just take the edge off of it the whole way through if you’re not the kind of person that enjoys bashing your head against the wall (for better or for worse, I am that kind of masochist).