[-] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 2 points 56 minutes ago* (last edited 55 minutes ago)

Harada-san (creator of Tekken) sent Fuzuki Miki a message for her debut stream, sasuga nanba wan fan.

https://xcancel.com/SmolMouseDesu/status/2002565195978453162

So glad to have her back. That's my president! catgirl-salute

[-] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 4 points 4 hours ago

It's amazing the stuff that slips by you when you use an adblocker and don't watch broadcast or cable TV (I also had no idea)

[-] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 2 points 20 hours 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@hexbear.net 7 points 21 hours ago

When I extracted it it was only 492 kB, so I'm not sure why this image ended up being 854 kB. They're the same image, ultimately: when I used ImageMagick's compare tool it showed them as being pixel-identical, and they optimized down to bit-identical files after running them through Efficient Compression Tool with the flags -9 -strip .

What method did you use, out of curiosity? I used mutool extract on the PDF, which spit out the single PNG.

[-] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 28 points 22 hours ago

Original paper data is from (available on Sci-Hub):

https://doi.org/10.1086/386272

I'm actually not sure where this specific figure was taken from (the one in the original paper is greyscale), but I found a version in this paper (open access):

https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-020-00071-7

Unfortunately, the diagram is a raster image rather than a vector image, so I can't make an arbitrarily high-resolution version, but I rendered the PDF to a PNG, brought down the page header, and added the DOI so that people can easily find the full paper in the future:

[-] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago

I think this more of an emperor's new clothes shtick to cover for his boss that relies on widespread innumeracy rather than Lutnick genuinely not understanding percentages. Still infuriating, though.

[-] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 11 points 1 day ago

Full textFor 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@hexbear.net 5 points 1 day ago

I learned that in middle school on account of someone coming up behind you and jamming their fingers in that precise spot being a common prank. It ain't pleasant, I can tell you that much!

[-] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I love classic Web 1.0 sites like this—thank you for sharing! And holy crap, the "bridge's song" took me tf out...not remotely what I was expecting lmao

[-] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day 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).

[-] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 23 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'm also happy to very publicly point out that Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers. And that is really sad, because Nvidia tries to sell chips, a lot of chips, into the Android market, and Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with. So Nvidia, [emphatically flips the bird] fuck you!

– Linus Torvalds torvalds-nvidia

[-] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago

Mega mega THREAD THREAD stalin-heart

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submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by AernaLingus@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net

Great video for obscure retro gaming aficionados chock-full of brand new information—as usual, the VGHF has done some stellar preservation work. Bonus amazing fanart that some kids sent in ("VICTIM DISPOSAL" goes hard)

edit: article version for those who prefer a quick summary (it also includes links to relevant resources)

2

New Edge of Emulation just dropped, hell yeah! If you're at all interested in reverse engineering and/or emulation, shonumi's website is an absolute treasure trove.

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by AernaLingus@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

Xcancel link

Image descriptionA Twitter screenshot which shows a quote-retweet and a reply to said QRT.

The quoted tweet from Alex & Books (@AlexAndBooks_) on November 5, 2025 reads,

Books men like to read vs. Books women like to read:

and has an image of a graph titled "Goodreads reviewers by genre and sex (Thelwall M., 2017)"; the data seems to be from the 2017 paper "Reader and author gender and genre in Goodreads" by Mike Thelwall. The graph has a list of Goodreads genres on the Y-axis and percentage of readers on the X-axis, with bars for "Males" and "Females" (representing the gender proportion of reviewers in a sample of books within each genre), and the list of genres sorted from highest male readership to lowest male readership. The most striking thing about the graph is that females overwhelmingly dominate in nearly all genres, with only four genres having more male than female readers (and only relatively small margins even then). The genre with the highest male-to-female ratio (roughly 59% to 39%) is philosophy.

I have provided tabular editions of this data below in two versions: an abbreviated version with only the genres and percentages, as in the graph, as well as a full version with all the data from the paper plus the percentages (since the percentages were not in the original paper, only raw numbers).

The QRT from august (@regularagust) on November 8 reads,

This becomes way funnier to look at if you know what the philosophy section in the average bookstore looks like.

The reply from 滿帖子乖謬之言觀汝似有瘋症 (@remmettmaxwell) on November 8 reads,

what we imagine: "phenomenology of the being and cognition" by j. j. r. von Grosseschleichen (1889)

what they mean: "locking in: 12 lessons on the meaning of life i learned from being with the operators in the coast guard auxiliary"

Data (abbreviated, percentages only)

Genre^[The symbol > indicates that the category on the right has been classified by Goodreads as being a subcategory of the category on the left.] Male % Female %
philosophy 59.1% 40.9%
sequential-art>comics 57.8% 42.2%
politics 56.4% 43.6%
sequential-art>graphic-novels 54.9% 45.1%
science-fiction 49.8% 50.2%
history 46.9% 53.1%
religion 42.0% 58.0%
science 41.4% 58.6%
literature 40.9% 59.1%
horror 40.8% 59.2%
classics 36.5% 63.5%
non-fiction 35.8% 64.2%
reference 35.0% 65.0%
novels 34.6% 65.4%
biography 34.2% 65.8%
adventure 33.9% 66.1%
psychology 33.7% 66.3%
short-stories 32.7% 67.3%
thriller 32.2% 67.8%
travel 30.9% 69.1%
mystery>crime 30.4% 69.6%
poetry 29.8% 70.2%
art 29.4% 70.6%
fantasy 27.8% 72.2%
autobiography>memoir 24.9% 75.1%
christian 24.4% 75.6%
fiction 23.9% 76.1%
humor 23.1% 76.9%
thriller>mystery-thriller 22.9% 77.1%
mystery 21.8% 78.2%
sequential-art>manga 21.1% 78.9%
suspense 21.1% 78.9%
historical 17.8% 82.2%
historical-fiction 16.9% 83.1%
fantasy>magic 16.8% 83.2%
romance>m-m-romance 15.8% 84.2%
young-adult 15.0% 85.0%
childrens 13.1% 86.9%
food-and-drink>cookbooks 13.1% 86.9%
animals 12.6% 87.4%
adult 12.3% 87.7%
fantasy>paranormal 11.7% 88.3%
contemporary 10.4% 89.6%
childrens>picture-books 9.8% 90.2%
adult-fiction>erotica 6.3% 93.7%
romance 5.4% 94.6%
romance>paranormal-romance 4.0% 96.0%
womens-fiction>chick-lit 3.6% 96.4%
romance>contemporary-romance 2.7% 97.3%
romance>historical-romance 2.5% 97.5%

Data (full)

Genre* Books Ratings Male reviewers Female reviewers Male % Female % Reviews for RQ5^[Review Question 5: Are there differences in the types of things that male and female reviewers write about male and female authored books in specific genres?]
philosophy 5131 95606 11234 7772 59.1% 40.9% 857
sequential-art>comics 8567 166331 13334 9749 57.8% 42.2% 1263
politics 3894 34030 12657 9790 56.4% 43.6% 490
sequential-art>graphic-novels 6961 169828 13204 10828 54.9% 45.1% 878
science-fiction 9967 261253 22221 22363 49.8% 50.2% 1614
history 16315 199503 33017 37310 46.9% 53.1% 4033
religion 5056 54552 11505 15890 42.0% 58.0% 676
science 4463 71467 9908 14006 41.4% 58.6% 938
literature 3697 77384 9679 13979 40.9% 59.1% 92
horror 5545 161636 9923 14398 40.8% 59.2% 914
classics 5187 664000 10818 18831 36.5% 63.5% 556
non-fiction 40208 507491 69899 125264 35.8% 64.2% 8215
reference 6039 27524 8862 16453 35.0% 65.0% 580
novels 4564 52933 11389 21551 34.6% 65.4% 76
biography 7925 103156 18571 35705 34.2% 65.8% 1627
adventure 4822 83352 13506 26298 33.9% 66.1% 180
psychology 3259 49520 6378 12558 33.7% 66.3% 617
short-stories 7834 96615 8555 17644 32.7% 67.3% 758
thriller 5003 86473 12521 26326 32.2% 67.8% 453
travel 2941 31811 4369 9781 30.9% 69.1% 654
mystery>crime 4786 72899 11691 26793 30.4% 69.6% 272
poetry 7011 111621 5686 13389 29.8% 70.2% 1943
art 4469 30879 4043 9718 29.4% 70.6% 876
fantasy 19909 1057426 26409 68596 27.8% 72.2% 2758
autobiography>memoir 3673 67055 8576 25807 24.9% 75.1% 480
christian 4356 45478 7915 24530 24.4% 75.6% 796
fiction 41475 1218673 69470 220826 23.9% 76.1% 5187
humor 6409 87725 10417 34633 23.1% 76.9% 516
thriller>mystery-thriller 3167 26621 7562 25407 22.9% 77.1% 30
mystery 13093 389375 20210 72440 21.8% 78.2% 3645
sequential-art>manga 6623 285353 349 1306 21.1% 78.9% 162
suspense 3829 41560 6874 25647 21.1% 78.9% 79
historical 8654 137803 12514 57776 17.8% 82.2% 260
historical-fiction 9243 309406 12213 60237 16.9% 83.1% 1909
fantasy>magic 3028 60821 3188 15762 16.8% 83.2% 70
romance>m-m-romance 5729 125520 1100 5847 15.8% 84.2% 525
young-adult 11286 621919 10739 60915 15.0% 85.0% 1943
childrens 14147 163267 11264 74404 13.1% 86.9% 1989
food-and-drink>cookbooks 3642 36381 1183 7833 13.1% 86.9% 899
animals 3280 29674 3501 24264 12.6% 87.4% 294
adult 7043 72240 7151 50876 12.3% 87.7% 101
fantasy>paranormal 9094 261909 4556 34374 11.7% 88.3% 599
contemporary 13853 204599 8471 72730 10.4% 89.6% 227
childrens>picture-books 7410 131850 4754 43752 9.8% 90.2% 2945
adult-fiction>erotica 6981 78255 906 13487 6.3% 93.7% 427
romance 29205 676026 6805 119519 5.4% 94.6% 3342
romance>paranormal-romance 4239 110105 706 17100 4.0% 96.0% 288
womens-fiction>chick-lit 4072 91559 1318 35144 3.6% 96.4% 481
romance>contemporary-romance 7403 91478 868 30965 2.7% 97.3% 212
romance>historical-romance 3767 103730 555 21370 2.5% 97.5% 872
44
1
submitted 3 months ago by AernaLingus@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net

Emudev sickos get in here sicko-crowd

1
submitted 3 months ago by AernaLingus@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net

One key finding of the analysis is stunning: A large swath of the U.S. currently does not have the basic, ground-level immunity medical experts say is necessary to stop the spread of measles, which had once nearly been eliminated. The data further reveals that:

  • Since 2019, 77% of counties and jurisdictions in the U.S. have reported notable declines in childhood vaccination rates. The declines span from less than 1 percentage point to more than 40 percentage points.
  • Vaccine exemptions for school children are rising nationwide: As many as 53% of counties and jurisdictions saw exemption rates more than double from their first year of collecting data to the most recent.
  • Among the states collecting data for the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, 68% of counties and jurisdictions now have immunization rates below 95% — the level of herd immunity doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak.

[...]

Student enrollment in Saint Louis Public Schools has been declining as a growing number of people are moving out of the city or choosing to send their children to charter schools.

That puts tremendous financial strain on the school system. Average daily attendance primarily determines school funding, according to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. And the board of education is considering a proposal to close half of its schools for the 2026-2027 school year.

Boleyjack blames steep budget cuts for lax vaccination enforcement. She said that some administrators allow noncompliant children to stay in school to keep enrollment up to be eligible for tax money.

"They got to get their dollars. So they're going to let in students who may not be completely compliant," she said. "I don't agree with it, but that's what it is."

40
submitted 3 months ago by AernaLingus@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net

Found thanks to a Video Game History Foundation tweet (Xcancel link, Bluesky link); you can browse the magazine (the November 1983 issue of Electronic Games) and do full text searches in their archive.

21
submitted 3 months ago by AernaLingus@hexbear.net to c/anime@hexbear.net

spoilerFrom Bad Girl S01E10

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by AernaLingus@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net

Interesting quantitative look at web performance and how designs made for people with high-end devices can be practically unusable for people on low-end devices, which disproportionately affects poorer people and people in developing countries. Also discusses how sites game Google's performance metrics—maybe not news to the web devs among ye, but it was new to me. The arrogance of the Discourse founder was astounding.

RETVRN to static web pages.^[Although even static web pages can be fraught—see his other post on speeding up his site 50x by tearing out a bunch of unnecessary crap.]

Also, from one of the appendices:

In principle, HN should be the slowest social media site or link aggregator because it's written in a custom Lisp that isn't highly optimized and the code was originally written with brevity and cleverness in mind, which generally gives you fairly poor performance. However, that's only poor relative to what you'd get if you were writing high-performance code, which is not a relevant point of comparison here.

44
submitted 4 months ago by AernaLingus@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net

TL;DR: they were just vibing

17
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by AernaLingus@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net
30

I feel a bit silly posting something this trivial in this comm, but I know I'm not the only one with an absurd number of browser tabs open—in my case, the figure is around 1500 tabs open across all my devices, and it's constantly growing. Every once in a blue moon I'll go and close like 50 of them in one day, but it's not frequent enough to reverse the trend. It's to the point where it's a coin flip whether a new tab in my mobile browser will actually work, and I have genuinely run into out-of-memory issues on my fairly beefy PC where stuff will straight-up crash. Beyond the technical issues, it's overwhelming, especially on the PC where I'm actually confronted with the staggering quantity of the tabs whenever I'm actually using it and I have to sift through them to find the few tabs I use frequently (idk what I'd do without the tab search function on modern browsers).

I thought it might be neat for other people with the same issue to congregate and work together to make incremental net reductions in our tab counts (so you can't just close 10 tabs and then open 15 more!). I was thinking that 10 tabs per day might be a reasonable figure—small enough to be manageable, but big enough that even with a few thousand tabs you could still make significant progress. Everyone is free to set a goal that fits their parameters, although I'd err on the side of caution. If you set a goal that's too ambitious, you could quickly miss your target and get frustrated. Slow and steady wins the race! Of course, with this sort of thing it will tend to get harder as you go along, since you'll go for the low hanging fruit first and then need to either make tougher decisions or have tabs that take longer to resolve (e.g. "am I gonna spend 15 minutes reading this article or just close it?"), so adjustments may be necessary later in the process. And if you do miss a day or a target, don't beat yourself up about it—it's a marathon, not a sprint, and sometimes you need to a take a breather. Just make sure to get back in there.

We could each make posts in the weekly self-improvement thread^[I'd also encourage you to post any other self-improvement things you're working on while you're at it!] and edit them daily, posting our new totals as we go. For instance:

Monday: 1500 (-10/10, -10 total)
Tuesday: 1490 (-10/10, -20 total)
Wednesday: 1475 (-15/10, -35 total)

and so on. It doesn't have to be in that precise format, but it's important to keep track of your total open tabs to ensure you're really making a net reduction, and I think it would be nice to show your accumulating reduction to show the progress you've made as the weeks go on.

Anyway, I'd love to hear from anyone who's interested in participating and get feedback on how this idea could be improved!

view more: next ›

AernaLingus

joined 3 years ago