It's probably nothing... ⚛️ Revolutionary Science ⋆ 🎨 AI Artistry and ⋆ 🏋️ the Sweetness of Struggle

Welcome to today's eclectic roundup of

• promising but skeptical scientific breakthroughs
• artificial intelligence with an artistic streak, and a
• philosophical musing that might just change how you view your next obstacle.

Intrigued yet?

Thing 1 - LK-99: A New Material That Could Change Everything!

How Bing imagines LK-99 looking

This might be the most important discovery of our lifetimes! 🤯

Researchers from Seoul, Korea claim to have synthesized a new material, LK-99.
LK-99 is superconductive above 127 °C (260 °F) and ambient pressure.

Why should you care?

If the claims of the researchers are true, LK-99 would be a remarkable material that can conduct electricity without any resistance under everyday conditions.

This means these potential benefits

• Ultraefficient electricity grids
  Transmitting power without any losses or waste
• Ultrafast and energy-efficient computer chips
• Ultrapowerful magnets that can be used to
  - levitate trains and
  - control fusion reactors.
• More efficient Maglev trains that can travel faster and smoother
• Cheaper and more ubiquitous use of MRI technology that does not require expensive cooling.
• ...

If I seem skeptical...

...it's because I am. (pretends to be shocked)

Alex Kaplan's summary:

• The paper has some clearly weird inconsistencies, including nonsensical graphs and odd diagrams
• This group has limited if no publications in superconductivity research
• This material seems so simple we should've found it earlier

Until someone replicates it, we can't be sure it's legit. It looks promising and sketchy at the same time but it would be out of this world if it's real.

(source)

Thing 2 - New OpenAI image generation - Sneak preview (NOT RELEASED YET)

Prompt: a group of farm animals (cows, sheep, pigs) made out of cheese and ham on a wooden board. There's a dog in the background eyeing the board hungerfully (screenshot from the video below)

400 people total have access to this at the moment!

Midjourney is the best of the best available to you right now.

This is better at producing realistic and convincing images with lighting, reflections, paintings, logos, hands, and backgrounds that mimic real photos.
The AI also achieved reasonably good spelling in rendered text.

OpenAI removed its safety filters to test the model’s full potential, so it's nowhere near the final release yet.

But you can check out more in the video 👇

Video from MattVidPro AI (22 min)

Thing 3 - Struggle for Meaning

There are many reasons to do hard things and break down the obstacles on your way. Here's another great one.

Perhaps in our obsessive quest to remove all friction we will eventually come to realize that friction was what created meaning.

- Sahil Bloom

it’s as if we only remember time that has texture. even though we try to iron out struggle, it’s texture that keeps memories in grasp (ex: hard to remember beach vacations, but arduous adventures stick with us).

and if life feels long the more we remember, texture extends life.

- Scott Belsky

So if you seek out and do difficult, challenging things, and struggle through them, your life is going to feel longer and more fulfilling in retrospect. Isn't that the main measure, anyway?

Movie isn't interesting if the main character isn't struggling.

Cheers, Zvonimir