### Issue 1901 - Wednesday 2nd August, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- LK-99 might be a legit room-temperature superconductor
- CSIRO maps out Australia's tech industry clusters
- Discourse gets a range of AI/LLM powered features
- ESPHome lets you use those cheap Aliexpress sensors in Home Assistant
- Cheap E-mount camera lens, Boost Mobile SIM, Samsung & Silicon Power SSDs, QLD energy efficient appliance rebate

## The News

### LK-99 might be a legit room-temperature superconductor

From Science.org (also a more layperson take on Tom's Hardware): "preprints appeared last week making the remarkable claim of a well-above-room-temperature superconducting material at ambient pressure, dubbed LK-99. This is one of the most sought-after goals in all of materials science and condensed matter physics, something that until now has only been found in (numerous!) science fiction stories". Why is this a big deal? Imagine a wire that doesn't get hot or lose energy regardless of how much electricity you put through it or how thin it is. Zero loss intercontinental electricity grids, quantum computers, maglev trains - it would be a revolution if LK-99 ends up being the real deal. According to two other research labs that have tried to re-produce the South Korean lab's LK-99 material in the last 24 hours, "this looks like it could be a really good superconductor".

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### CSIRO maps out Australia's tech industry clusters

CSIRO and the Tech Council of Australia have published a report exploring the geography of Australia's digital industry. They found that there are "96 digital technology industry clusters" across Australia accounting for 62% of the nation's tech jobs and 4 "super-clusters" - The Sydney Arc (20% of Australia's digital occupations employed here), The Melbourne Diamond (16%), The Brisbane Corridor (5.6%) and the Canberra Triangle (3.3%). The top suburbs for software programmers are Lavender Bay & Redfern in Sydney, Docklands in Melbourne and Greenway in Canberra, all with over 6x the number of people calling themselves programmers than the national average. Interesting report to flick through, but I don't know what this means in the age of remote working. The phrase "remote working" isn't mentioned once in the entire document.

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### Discourse gets a range of AI/LLM powered features

Discourse, the software package I use to run The Sizzle's forums, my personal blog and the communities of 3 other groups, got a new major update overnight. Version 3.1 of Discourse's main feature is a new AI/LLM plugin that can summarise threads, find related discussions, help users compose posts, translate different languages and assist in moderation that can "potentially toxic content for review and detect the use of NSFW images in posts", as well as "automatically classify the sentiment and emotion score of every new post". I won't use it on any forums I run as I don't trust the AI to do a good enough job on the edge cases, but I can see why Discourse would provide these features, particularly for bigger, less personal communities.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### ESPHome lets you use those cheap Aliexpress sensors in Home Assistant

ESPHome looks like a really handy way to get configure ESP8266, ESP32 and Raspberry Pi RP2040 boards with various sensors and then get them integrated with your Home Assistant setup. The sensors and boards are configured with relatively simple YAML. It's obviously more difficult than buying something from the one ecosystem (i.e: Xiaomi or Google or HomeKit whatever) but by choosing the boards and sensors yourself, you can get exactly what you want, at a low price, without having to do any coding. This blog post has a good explanation of the different ESP chips and boards out there.

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## Bargains

- QLD is giving its residents $300 to $1,000 in rebates to buy energy efficient whitegoods, air cons and hot water systems
- Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8 DC DN E-mount lens & Sandisk Extreme Pro 64GB SD card - $563.57 from DCXpert's eBay store
- Get $14 cashback when you buy a $12 Boost Mobile 28-day SIM with 50GB data, unlimited calls & SMS via ShopBack
- Samsung 870 QVO 4TB 2.5" SATA SSD - $299 from Shopping Express
- Silicon Power UD90 2TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD - $114.43 from Amazon Japan

## Image Of The Day

Growing Up With The Telephone. A children's book about telephony, etiquette and systems from 1980, published by Telecom Australia (cuddlyloner)

## The End

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