iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

A guy gets isekai’d to the bottom top floor of the dungeon, where he starts to level up fields and grow stronger vegetables. He meets a series of girls cute animals most of whom wind up in love with him each other, while he focuses on rescuing helping the princess dragon from the who is a dragon princess. It's a lot not quite like I was expecting.

h/t Lorc for getting me back over to Webtoon!

Here's a fun little browser game. Click and drag to move, and press space (or the button in the bottom corner) to deploy your grabber wire thing, and optionally again to throw stuff you grab

It's "radically different from other quantum computers" reports Phys.org. The Helios system uses trapped ions — charged atoms suspended in free space using electromagnetic fields.

But it operates with 98 qubits — making it the largest trapped-ion quantum computer built so far.

Quantinuum, the company behind the device, is based in Cambridge, U.K., and Broomfield, Colorado. It demonstrated earlier machines operating on 32 qubits in 2023 and 56 qubits in 2025...


It relies on two major advances — one in hardware and one in software. First, the four-way X junction lets the system handle several tasks at once rather than one at a time, which is much faster. That was impossible in earlier QCCD [quantum charge-coupled device] machines, which could only move data back and forth in a single line or loop. Second, judicious use of the freedom offered by the two dimensions of the X junction relies on new classical control software called Helios runtime, which plans the smartest, fastest route for moving and processing the data. Together, these represent a substantial advance in the engineering of quantum computers.

An important consequence is that Helios can perform computations that cannot be performed even on the largest supercomputers using known methods within reasonable amounts of time and power consumption. This demonstrates the ability of this device and its successors to surpass the computational prowess of classical computers — although their algorithms and hardware are rapidly advancing, too. Having said that, Helios' computations have just been random benchmark tests, so the practical importance of this leap forward is still limited. To perform quantum computations of practical importance in science and commerce, even the most optimistic estimates suggest that quantum computers must be enormously bigger and better — of the order of a million qubits.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Diplomaat, VN-gezant en voormalig vicepremier Sigrid Kaag was de vijfde Zomergast. Ze koos „menselijkheid” als rode lijn: van de geopolitiek, van haarzelf en als iets om naar te streven.

US agency releases plan to lease millions of hectares of seabed off the coast of the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam

A US government plan to lease out millions of hectares of seabed near the Mariana Trench for deep sea exploration has drawn opposition from US territories in the Pacific, as the Trump administration remains locked in a race with China for control of critical ocean minerals.

On Tuesday, the Marine Mineral Administration (MMA), an agency under the US department of the interior, released a proposal to auction deep sea mining leases for 28m hectares (69m acres) of seafloor off the coast of the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam.

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