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.

The Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club indicates they support cleaner energy but believe drilling must not come at the expense of fragile habitats.

Foreign lithium isn’t magic, zero-footprint lithium. We are a major consumer of lithium, and will probably increase if we’re going to move to BEVs. If we’re going to consume it, it only seems fair to the rest of the world to have some of the footprint in our own territory.

I’d kind of expect more than that.

Meta’s said that they’re going to to be shifting focus from VR to AI.

It looks like Meta’s VR wing employs 15,000 people:

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

Number of employees: 15,000 (2026)

Though…hmm. It says that there are some AI things under that as well, so maybe that’s not all VR:

Reality Labs, formerly Oculus VR, is a business and research unit of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook Inc.) that produces virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) hardware and software, including virtual reality headsets such as the Quest, and online platforms such as Horizon Worlds. In June 2022, several artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives that were previously a part of Meta AI were transitioned to Reality Labs.

I use AMD GPUs.

And then the wave exploded into a fireball.

Frankly, being taken for $100 on a phone is probably a lot better than putting your life savings into one of Trump’s memecoins or Truth Social, which some people did.

My impression is that Trump mostly just licenses his name to these ventures for a payment and isn’t affiliated with them otherwise. I don’t think that he likely cares much what happens to the phone buyers or sellers. He’s made his money either way.

EDIT: Yeah:

https://www.trump.com/lifestyle/trump-mobile

Trump Mobile, its products and services are not designed, developed, manufactured, distributed or sold by The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals. T1 Mobile LLC uses the Trump name and trademark pursuant to the terms of a limited license agreement which may be terminated or revoked according to its terms.

It’s some third-party fly-by-night organization doing the actual deal.

Truth Social?

Patrick Lynett, a USC civil engineering professor, said when it comes to natural disasters, training people how to react is important, and one way to do that is through digital work like the simulation and video game he created that depicts what happened.

I think that if you’re in a boat right next to the initiation of a 328-foot-high megatsunami, going 1,578 feet up a rock cliff, as the video portrays in the game, you’re probably just pretty much boned.

EDIT: Not nearly as big, but:

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

The Vajont Dam as seen from the village of Longarone in 2005, showing roughly the top 60–70 m (200–230 ft) of concrete. The wall of water that overtopped the dam by 250 m (820 ft)[1] and destroyed this village and all nearby villages on 9 October 1963 would have obscured virtually all of the blue sky in this photo.[4]

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/1eb406f1-849d-4e96-b89a-78f9ace2911f.jpeg

Like, someone standing there and looking up at that wave is just pretty much boned.

“The inability to access the content of encrypted communications constitutes a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services,” the delegation wrote, framing end-to-end encryption as a problem to be solved rather than a protection to be preserved.

Senator Cédric Perrin, who chairs the foreign affairs committee and sits on the intelligence delegation, has been pushing this fight for over a year. During debate on a narcotrafic bill, he secured an amendment that would have forced messaging platforms to “implement the necessary technical measures in order to allow intelligence services to access the intelligible content of communications and data passing through them.”

I mean, I can send a GPG-encrypted message over a messaging platform and you can recover it if you want even if that platform’s native encryption is backdoored, but you’re still just looking at an end-to-end encrypted message.

$ gpg -q --quick-gen-key tal@lemmy.today
About to create a key for:
    "tal@lemmy.today"

Continue? (Y/n) y

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world:

$ gpg -q --quick-gen-key doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria
About to create a key for:
    "doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria"

Continue? (Y/n) y

$ gpg -a --export doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria >doctor-doom.public-key.asc

Back at tal’s computer:

$ gpg --import <doctor-doom.public-key.asc
$ echo "Hey, Doctor Doom!  The time is right to initiate our secret plan!" >message.txt
$ gpg -a -r doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria -u tal@lemmy.today -e message.txt
$ cat message.txt.asc
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

hF4DjahcIPqAf9cSAQdA/itkkQNubd3l6V1Rs1c00Z4zDquk9PrK1Z65VzNogzsw
8ypbEn0B145fyyfyeAc8r72J51qJbcTXVGQkb9JWXoLMh/irZZkYrUbuaBXephsm
0oQBqv6JgWc8kpeFKSihu69EXG/kEcHpOyCBb2nGOerHM1VzERdTdcfkgEQQYfYF
sPXVfRxGgJbGtkoyRGDGZCEnOpGDsQSCX8I8KkUfPALAqhBSmYbAa5lg0jWNiAQL
J4rrXGQiVCPC5Dr45KIEswddFI1oGhqZo16SgEGILcTiY4gN6yI=
=4RyB
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

tal sends the message to Doctor Doom over the backdoored messaging system. French intelligence watches closely. They break the platform-native encryption, but all they can see is the above text.

On Dr. Doom’s computer:

$ gpg -d message.txt.asc 
gpg: encrypted with cv25519 key, ID 8DA85C20FA807FD7, created 2026-05-10
      "doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria"
Hey, Doctor Doom!  The time is right to initiate our secret plan!
$

I remember reading, a while back, that something like 15% of Taiwan’s total electrical power usage goes to chip fabs.

What I read was saying that TSMC probably has a ton of room for electricity optimization, but it’s just not worth it. Like, what I was reading was talking about how they never shut off machines, even if they aren’t making chips, because just introducing temperature variations is enough to add more variables that might screw up yield rates.

Desktop PC with a lotta hard drives in it and big fans that don’t have to spin fast and make a lot of noise.

I use a USB DAS JBOD enclosure with fans, which is also an option if you have a mini-PC and just want a bunch of drive space.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCDDGHMJ

This particular enclosure has physical buttons that lock in place so that the power state is restored on power loss, something that (to my surprise) a number of USB DAS enclosures apparently don’t do.

You could try reducing the fan speed. That might be okay, if the hardware doesn’t actually need the cooling. If the BIOS has fan curves, go fiddle with that. If it doesn’t, dedicated fan controllers do exist.

If the server is a standard ATX motherboard and if your rack has vertical space, you can also probably get a new ATX case of whatever sort you want, preferably taller, and get something with larger, slower fans and transplant the hardware. A lot of rack servers are vertically-cramped to let a datacenter put as many in a rack as possible, so you get stuff like 1U machines with those dinky 30mm fans. In general, the larger the fan, the less noise per airflow.

searches

https://www.amazon.com/RackChoice-Mini-ITX-Rackmount-Chassis-Standard/dp/B0D296DVD8

I’ve never used that, but it’s a 3U and has three 120mm fans.

If you don’t care about cost, there are also sound-isolated racks. These have some sort of sound-blocking material like plywood on the outside and sound-absorbing foam on the inside. I have been interested in these in the past, because I would like one, but everything I’ve seen has been absolutely obscenely-priced, probably because datacenters don’t care about noise, and few people are running racks in homes or offices. I doubt that the people that sell them get much volume.

EDIT: Example sound-isolated rack:

https://tripplite.eaton.com/smartrack-quiet-server-rack-18u-sound-suppression~SRQ18U

I’m pretty sure that most developers that use web UIs do so for portability.

There are non-Web-based cross-platform GUI toolkits, like Java’s Swing.

As to why cross-platform desktop toolkits haven’t really caught on…I’d say that it’s because there are things that you can’t really abstract all that well. There are ways that a well-written MacOS app should function, ways that a well-written Windows app should function, ways that a well-written GTK app should function, and so forth.

EDIT:

I dread writing any native GUI that I got desperate enough to try writing a TUI but that’s unbelievably worse!

Honestly, the same is true of TUIs, too. Like, MS-DOS/Windows TUI conventions and Unix TUI conventions aren’t really the same. Like, in a typical Unix TUI program, I expect “q” probably quits. At text prompts, I expect that I probably have readline support and likely the vi/emacs key support there. It probably defaults to white-on-black. In an MS-DOS TUI program, Escape probably exits, and I’m probably using white-on-blue. I’m probably using Code Page 437 box-drawing characters.

EDIT2: ncdu on Unix:

WordPerfect for DOS:

I don’t think I’d say “inevitable”. Possible, maybe.

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

The splinternet (also referred to as cyber-balkanization or internet balkanization) is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. “Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it”, wrote the Economist weekly in 2010, arguing it could soon splinter along geographic and commercial boundaries.[1] The Chinese government erected the “Great Firewall” for political reasons, and Russia has enacted the Sovereign Internet Law that allows it to partition itself from the rest of the Internet.[2][3] Other nations, such as the US and Australia, have discussed plans to create a similar firewall to block child pornography or weapon-making instructions.[1]

Clyde Wayne Crews, a researcher at the Cato Institute, first used the term in 2001 to describe his concept of “parallel Internets that would be run as distinct, private, and autonomous universes.”[4] The concept itself dates back at least to pair of articles in the journal Science and at the International Conference on Information Systems by Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson in 1996 and 1997.[5][6] They argued that it the Internet and related technologies “have the potential to fragment interaction and divide groups by leading people to spend more time on special interests and by screening out less preferred contact.” They dubbed this effect “cyberbalkanization” and developed a set of formal measures.[7]

Crews used the term in a positive sense, but more recent writers, like Scott Malcomson, a fellow in New America’s International Security program, use the term pejoratively to describe a growing threat to the internet’s status as a globe-spanning network of networks.[8]

Virtually all of these are temporary moratoriums, most-likely to let the city examine impact of some proposed development and gather feedback.

There are three permanent bans in force:

• Pemberton Township, New Jersey (27k people)

• Warrenton, Virginia, specific 42-acre area (10k people)

• Weaverville, North Carolina (4.5k people)

St. Charles, Missouri is also listed as permanent, but the text says that there is a temporary moratorium with a proposed permanent ban.

Note that this and most of the others do not appear to be specific to anything AI-related; this is all data centers.