but it literally is just Thacker Pass.

This isn’t Thacker Pass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thacker_Pass_lithium_mine

The Thacker Pass lithium mine is a lithium clay mining development project in Humboldt County, Nevada

The location being discussed:

McDermitt Caldera in Oregon

It looks like there was some discussion that there might be lithium there a bit back, like in 2023, but this is not decade-old news.

If people keep coming back to see a fifth of the list at a time, it costs a fifth as much to produce the content per view.

It’s not that they lasted longer, but that it was considerably less expensive to recharge them than to buy and throw out a new set of batteries for each session.

That thing drank 6x AA batteries like there was no tomorrow.

There were NiCad rechargeables. I didn’t own a Game Gear, but a friend did, and I remember him using NiCads for that and RC vehicles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO8jCls8F24

I mean, I’m not coming back on Thursday. There are plenty of sources out there on the Internet with their Top N rankings other than The Guardian.

Unless it’s baked into non-rewriteable ROMs, I imagine that someone might come up with a way to stick whatever scream you want into the thing.

And…let me make it even more concrete. I’d say that there are basically two scenarios:

1. We establish that AI — for some definition of AI — is simply too dangerous for humanity to have. In that case, the right path is to ban AI globally. That means that nobody gets it. Some coalition of countries is going to have to be willing to attack anyone who tries developing it. In that case, what we have is effectively an arms control restriction baked into customary international law. It is not optional to participate. And, for all the future of humanity, we need to be willing to enforce that. It means that we need a viable verification protocol to ensure that nobody is developing it, as is normally the case for arms treaties. And everyone has to submit to that verification protocol.

2. We don’t. In that case, we want to develop AI sooner rather than later.

I am certainly not willing to say that #2 is the “right” scenario and #1 is the “wrong” one. But if we decide on #1, that comes with a lot of things that we need to be doing as a species. It’s not just going to be the pre-computer-era status quo persisting, where our limited state of technology was what maintained the situation.

EDIT: I’d also add that, just as that I’m not sure that Friendly AI is a solvable problem, I’m also not sure that it’s really viable to have a verification protocol where we can prevent development of AI. Past arms control treaties where I think that verification was likely much easier — it’s hard to hide development of major warships under the Washington Naval Treaty, for example, yet there were still parties evading restrictions — were not always successful. #1 comes with its own set of hard problems too. Are parallel compute processors legal? What about their development and production? Under what restrictions are they used? Is it possible to achieve advanced AI using CPUs (my guess is that it likely is)? If so, what new restrictions will need to be placed on use and access to CPUs? How will we identify entities building production facilities to build CPUs and GPUs? Will we need to track all existing CPUs and GPUs, to try to identify entities who might be stockpiling them? How will we monitor what the great stores of those out there now are being used for?

If we go with #1, that also entails a different world from the one that we live in today.

I’ve got some pessimistic views as to long-term AI concerns — I’m not sure that aligning advanced AI goals with human goals in the long run is a viable problem to solve. We may not be able to achieve Friendly AI. I could believe that.

But I certainly don’t think that AI development is “moving too fast”. Not really anything to gain in slowing down development. I remember Elon Musk proposing a six-month moratorium on development — that doesn’t make any sense, only would be something that you’d want to do if you had an immediate milestone that you believed that there was major risk attached to. In general, either AI is something that you should ban globally because it’s too much of an existential risk for humanity, and halt all development and enforce that halt, or you’d like to achieve it as soon as possible. We are not at a point where there is a consensus that that level of unacceptable risk exists and there is a global commitment to enforcing such a global prohibition.

I can believe that there might be an excess of infrastructure development in particular, that we might not have the research side moving as quickly as need be to support that. Like, we might be doing misallocation in buying a lot of specific chips without establishing that those chips are going to provide a worthwhile return. But in terms of the technology advancing…no, can’t agree there.

I also don’t think the average American who is struggling to buy food

While I do take your point that what Trump’s talking about may or may not matter to a given individual, I’d also point out that the average American isn’t struggling to buy food.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-prices

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/42c81299-bad4-4140-a849-c79a4515e402.png

The US has about the lowest percentage of expenditure going to food in the world, and that’s been true for a long time.

“Anybody that wants them to have a nuclear weapon is a stupid person. So we said we’re going to take the greatest stock market in history and we’re going to go down a little bit. And actually that turned out to be incorrect, because our stock market is now at the highest point in history, which frankly, surprised a lot of people,” he said.

The stock market is up because of the AI boom. Trump didn’t have much to do with the AI boom.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/ai-stocks-drive-nearly-p-094305210.html

AI Stocks Drive Nearly All of S&P 500’s Gains, Data Reveals

The S&P 500 has surged to fresh record highs in 2026, powering through milestone after milestone as Wall Street toasts another banner year.

Strip out the artificial intelligence stocks, though, and the rally all but disappears, leaving a market that has gone essentially nowhere since February.

S&P 500 ex-AI Index Flat Since February as Benchmark Climbs 8%

BeInCrypto recently reported that AI-linked stocks now account for a record 45% of the S&P 500’s market capitalization. Strong rallies in hyperscalers and AI-related stocks have helped push the index higher, as investors continue betting on the sector’s long-term growth potential.

The S&P 500 has climbed nearly 7% since early February. While the war-driven volatility caused notable losses in March, the rally accelerated in April, with the index gaining 15.5% since March 30.

However, the gains have not been evenly distributed across the market. According to Google Finance data, the US 500 Excluding Artificial Intelligence Enablers Price Return Index (SPXXAI) has fallen 1.84% since its February launch.

For Trump, that was luck — he happened to be in the right place at the right time to benefit from that.

Does Kickstarter have liability in general for Kickstarted projects? I’d kind of assume that that’s on the specific project. I can’t imagine that Kickstarter is in any kind of position to really do a domain-specific evaluation of whether a given project is in line with local regulations.

SATA drives ain’t dead

Who was saying that they were?

Rotational drive demand is way up due to AI, which is why prices are way up, and for rotational drives, the SATA interface is just fine.

EDIT:

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/

Hard Drive - 3.5" SATA 16 TB (Average price in USD over last 18 months)

“Observe my anus. I will place it directly in front of your eyes to facilitate inspection.”

“I was feeling under the weather and wanted to find a safe place to hide, so I threw up in various nooks and crannies around the house.”

“I want to go out. Actually, I want in. Actually, no, I want out. On second thought, I want in.”

“I just thought I’d drop by and check to see whether I could get food a few hours early. No? Okay, how about now? No? How about now?”

“As a sign of my undying loyalty, I have placed a dead mouse on the foot of your bed.”

“A new pleather couch? Oh, you shouldn’t have! Permit me to extend my claws and take a jaunt to enhance its breathability.”

they are impervious beasts

Try sticking some Raid into whatever they’re chewing into.

https://www.amazon.com/Raid-Wasp-Hornet-Killer-33/dp/B000BQMOF2

It’s possible to get keyboards with an integrated pointing stick, which is how I think most people use them. It’s just that most laptops don’t provide it as an option, so your options are very limited if you want that.

https://www.amazon.com/HHKB-Hacking-Keyboard-Wireless-Bluetooth/dp/B0DGR1JD36

or:

https://www.pckeyboard.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=UB40PGA

(I own one of the latter, and can’t recommend it; while the buckling spring keyswitches are pretty much immortal, the mouse button switches wore out long before they did.

Honestly, what I’d really like is for a non-all-in-one form factor to be available. Like…laptops are intrinsically limiting, because I have to take what the laptop vendor chooses. That selection is limited. And today, laptops aren’t very modular. With a laptop, I can’t pick whatever touchpad or keyboard or whatever I want in the way that I can a desktop unless I haul both the built-in one and an external USB one.

I’d like to see something where there’s just a standard frame that opens that a display, keyboard, and touchpad/trackball/nipple mouse can be mounted on and then have the body of the PC separate, on a cable, so that the weight and heat isn’t there. That provides a lot more flexibility as to options. Mini-PCs can kind-of sort-of do the separate PC, though there’s no standard for attaching the input and display stuff, but there isn’t a convention for them having a battery whose charge they can monitor and act on.

I don’t personally care for the Thinkpad-style pointing stick, which is what this is aimed at addressing. But I damned well do want a touchpad with three physical buttons, which Thinkpads also have had. I can get external USB devices like that, but for integrated stuff, I’m pretty much at the laptop vendor’s mercy.

First, Peltier elements are pretty inefficient. Second, I’m dubious about the design — a Peltier element moves heat from Point A to Point B, and the whole device appears to still sit beneath the shirt. I suppose that the hot side is the outer side, but what you’d ideally want is to have hot air blowing as far away from you as possible.

I’m skeptical that it’s better to carry a battery-powered Peltier element than to carry something like an evaporative cooler. That’s more-energy-efficient, and you don’t have the problem of part of the device getting hot.

EDIT: Or, if you can’t leverage phase-change from liquid water to water vapor because of high humidity, cooling vests that leverage solid to liquid phase-change.

How a Cooling Vest Invented by a Furry Made Its Way Into the U.S. Military

China’s special for controlling a very high proportion of the processing infrastructure that converts the lithium ore to batteries, rather than the extraction. There are a bunch of places that have substantial known lithium reserves.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lithium-reserves-by-country

Australia does the most extraction:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lithium-production-by-country

I think that 2026 is doing okay.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/d7886499-5a38-4fc6-bf28-d350d836e6d5.png

Given that the Metaverse stuff hasn’t been commercially successful thus far, burning a lot of money.