Dan

Oh, me | Curious about life, universe and sometimes computers, too

[Cointelegraph @Cointelegraph]

🇨🇳 NEW: Chinese cities are rolling out AI-powered robot barber kiosks that scan customers in 3D and cut hair with millimeter precision for just 60 yen per session.

[Harry May @Beckenh4m]

The Chinese actually get to see where their taxes go

[tmuxvim @tmuxvim]

I put a prompt injection into my LinkedIn bio and recruiters are messaging me in Old English and calling me Lord.

[Dan @schiavuzzi]

@DublinAirport Dublin Express. Zero fun chasing buses departing five minutes or so earlier than expected. I’m wondering if something similar happened or contributed in this case. RIP

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

It’s totally incredible they were able to fly this beast in from space as an unpowered glider.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The signal strength hitting Earth from Voyager 1 is less than one trillionth of a watt.

To put that in perspective, your phone’s WiFi signal is roughly 100 billion times stronger, and it drops a connection walking between rooms.

NASA picks up Voyager’s whisper using arrays of 70-meter antennas, then reconstructs coherent data from it at 160 bits per second. That’s slower than a 1990s modem. Downloading a single photograph at that rate would take weeks.

The spacecraft itself runs on 8.8 kg of decaying plutonium-238 that generated 470 watts at launch in 1977. Today it produces roughly 200 watts, losing about 4 watts per year. NASA has been shutting down instruments one by one since the 1980s to keep the math working. They turned off the cosmic ray sensor just this year.

And here’s the part nobody’s talking about: there is exactly one antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager. Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra. It went offline for major upgrades from May 2025 through early 2026. During that window, if Voyager had a critical fault, the team would have had to wait months to respond.

A 48-year-old spacecraft built on 1970s computing, running on a plutonium battery that’s lost 60% of its output, transmitting at a power level that barely qualifies as existing, from a distance where light itself takes 23 hours to arrive. And a German observatory just casually picked up its carrier signal on a live stream.

The engineering margin NASA built into this mission was designed for 4 years to Saturn. Everything after that is borrowed time the engineers keep extending by doing math with 200 watts.

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

🌍 Top 10 contributors to global real GDP growth (2026)

1．🇨🇳 China — 26.6%
2．🇮🇳 India — 17.0%
3．🇺🇸 United States — 9.9%
4．🇮🇩 Indonesia — 3.8%
5．🇹🇷 Türkiye — 2.2%
6．🇳🇬 Nigeria — 1.5%
7．🇧🇷 Brazil — 1.5%
8．🇻🇳 Vietnam — 1.6%
9．🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia — 1.7%
10．🇩🇪 Germany — 0.9%

📌 China + India alone = 43.6% of global growth
📌 Asia-Pacific accounts for ~50% of total growth

Source: IMF

[Nabeel S. Qureshi @nabeelqu]

On a train in UK (was visiting for the holidays). Quiet car. Woman sitting behind me starts playing loud videos on her phone, no headphones. No one says anything. Goes on for ten minutes.

Eventually I ask her to stop bc it’s the quiet car and I was trying to work. She looks confused, loudly demands to know what “quiet car” means (English isn’t her first language), I point to a sign which has a clear picture of a mobile phone. Disgruntled, she grabs her bag and leaves.

People around me shoot me grateful looks. Car is quiet again.

Literally 10 mins later a guy walks in and starts conducting a loud phone conversation, also not in English. Nobody says anything. There’s the usual passive-aggressive Anglo routine from people around him — loud sighs, rolled eyes, etc. Eventually I walk over to him (I was trying to do something complicated, and random noise blaring makes this hard… which is why I picked the quiet car) and point at the “no phones” sign, luckily he says sorry and stops.

More grateful looks.

I’ll probably get killed for saying this, but I think people in the UK are far too nice for their own good. If you want people to obey social norms you have to be willing to call out antisocial behavior, or it all falls apart and you don’t have nice things anymore. This goes for many things, not just quiet cars on trains.

Anyway, the snow looked lovely on the countryside fields. Back home to NYC I go.

[Elaine Mullally ☘️ @mullallyelaine]

If you work your whole life and pay PRSI in Ireland, and you are not in a pension scheme you reach 66 years of age, you are entitled to €299 per week of a pension.

If you never worked a day in your life and you reach 66 years old……. You are entitled to €288 per week!

So you work 40 to 50 years of your life AND pay PRSI every week for a pathetic €11 per week!

Make it make sense!

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

There was a time you could travel from New York to London in 2 hours 52 minutes.

This was Concorde.

Nothing replaced it yet.

[Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン @rakyll]

People who haven't coded a single day in the last 10 years are the experts on what it means to be a programmer.

[Jenni @hashjenni]

1. HR is not there to protect you. They are there to protect the company.
2. Document EVERYTHING.
3. Food is not a reward for hard work.
4. Do the bare minimum, or you'll get rewarded MORE work.
5. Use them sick/vacation time.
6. Everyone is replaceable.
7. Keep them emails.

[Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン @rakyll]

TIL: I'm a dinosaur because I like solid and high quality engineering artifacts. Societal decline is real.

[Lord Bebo @MyLordBebo]

🇨🇳 In China a robot dog now walks... a real dog.

[Manya Koetse @manyapan]

A noteworthy moment during Saturday's meeting between Xi and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung. China gifts South Korea Chinese Xiaomi flagship phones for Lee and his wife (with a Korean-made display). When Lee Jae-myung jokingly asked, “How’s the telecommunication security?” Xi Jinping replied: “You can check whether or not there’s a backdoor.”

So what do we see?

➡️China gifts South Korea, smartphone powerhouse and home of Samsung, a Xiaomi — signalling symbolic confidence of China while also acknowledging interdependence in smartphone technology development 👉 great technological diplomacy and a really "smart" gift!
➡️ Despite this being the first 🇨🇳🇰🇷 meeting in 11 years, the atmosphere was relaxed enough for Lee to playfully address geopolitical sensitivities around Chinese technology.
➡️ Xi replied with quick wit, which showed a good sense of humor.
Overall, I'd give this moment a "12 out of 10" 😂

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

Why is this man smiling? Because his initials 'MZ' are the first two bytes of every PE header since MS-DOS 2... Mark Zbikowski!

[Paddy Cosgrave @paddycosgrave]

If the Irish government wanted a metro built rapidly, they’d pick up the phone to the country that does it faster & lower cost than anyone else: China. But Irish government spending is mostly a concealed wealth transfer to insiders (water meters, hospitals). So it’ll never happen

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

What a Boeing 747 looks like at cruise speed from another plane.

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

Countries that rank #1 in different stats

🇯🇵 Japan – #1 in Life Expectancy
🇫🇮 Finland – #1 in Happiness
🇮🇸 Iceland – #1 in Gender Equality
🇳🇴 Norway – #1 in Human Development
🇸🇬 Singapore – #1 in Health Quality
🇨🇭 Switzerland – #1 in Quality of Life
🇳🇿 New Zealand – #1 in Freedom
🇨🇭 Switzerland – #1 in Safety
🇮🇩 Indonesia – #1 in Kindness
🇮🇳 India – #1 in Population
🇺🇸 USA – #1 in Tech Innovation
🇨🇦 Canada – #1 in Education Satisfaction

Source: UNDP, World Happiness Report (2024)