A high temperature superconductor!
Last Thursday some Korean researchers released a pre-print paper that they'd discovered a high temperature superconductor - and by high temperature they mean above the boiling point of water. Furthermore the recipe was not exotic or difficult to make so it started a race as labs around the world rushed to try to replicate their results.
Derek Lowe has a good overview of how this has progressing. and I've been watching this lab leaderboard as people try to reproduce
I haven't really seen this in any of my non-technical feeds so I don't know how much people realize what a world changing event a room temperature superconductor would be - I've seen comparisons to the invention of the transistor.
The past thirty years efforts to produce a 'high-temperature' superconductor meant -200C and breakthroughs have pushed this up by 5-10 degrees at a time. LK-99 seems to push this temperature up to 127C.
The skeptics are calling this a repeat of the cold fusion claims but the scientists behind it continue to put out more information - basically staking their entire careers on this claim. It's super exciting to watch unfold in real time and the possibilities that we might be able to manufacture this stuff are dazzling.
This image, incidentally is the highest resolution available at time of writing.
Update:
The material scientists did some work and discovered ferrous impurities in the samples made it look like it was diamagnetic. The authors of the original paper still claim this mixture could work but their claims have largely been dismissed. I still hope they prove everyone wrong.
Like a Turtle
From the 10th victim (1965) - Basically John Wick with Marcello Mastroianni
helix the editor
I currently use neovim as my editor of choice. It has served me well until the latest release removed cscope support. Apparently I was the only one using cscope to navigate unfamiliar code.
cscope let me do two things: it let me jump to the source of a function with a single keystroke (opening the file and moving my cursor) and it lets me take a function and ask 'where is this function called elsewhere in the code?' Other people dismayed by the loss of cscope asked about plugins to re-enable this feature and the general advice was to use 'universal-ctags' and 'vim-gutentags'. With this I can do the jump to the source of a function but it doesn't let me ask where this function is called. So my editor lost a little utility and I started eyeing helix again.
helix is written in rust. It's a vim variant with a multi-selection process based on an editor called kakoune
I've been keeping a sharp eye on it for a while now. It's written in rust, it's very fast, and it comes with LSP support built in. For a while I've been keeping a list of features I needed to see before I attempted to jump ship and start the tedious process of rebuilding my muscle memory. The list of features I needed looked like this:
- soft word wrap has been merged but it's not convenient. There's no way to toggle soft word wrap.
- spell check seems to be blocked by multiple language server support
- A built in file explorer is about to be merged
- Session support is being discussed
- VCS integration while not super important is being discussed
- Plugin support is being discussed
They've been releasing every 3-4 months and the last release was in March which brought soft word wrap.
The last thing I need is session support. Being able to close the editor with three hundred open buffers and have them all open again when I start it again is critical.
I'm excited see how quickly I will be able to pick up the editor once it matures. Losing cscope was like the first pebble of an avalanche.
The infrequently updated blog.