LK-99 is a room temperature superconductor. It’s a big deal, because it means that energy can be transferred with 0 loss and it doesn’t require loads of cooling to maintain that property (unlike “traditional superconductors” that need liquid nitrogen and other cooling to have that property). An analogy would be like if you got paid all of your paycheck all the time instead of having taxes taken out. The money you get paid is energy and the loss is taxes

There’s controversy that LK-99 can’t be replicated

Going over to the programming side, sometimes you’ll work on a feature and when others go test it, it doesn’t work. A common excuse heard is “well, it works on my machine”. Docker containers solve that problem by essentially (but not really) making a copy of “my machine” and letting people run the program/feature on that copy

So the joke is, if the korean researchers were able to create it in their lab environment (their machine), why don’t they just make a copy of their lab and let others use it

this is a very gross oversimplification, so feel free to suggest any corrections

Docker containers in programming are reusable environments. Basically instead of manually setting up an operating system environment from scratch - you give your program this extra layer where you specify each and every thing that will be on the environment.

If your program was always tested on windows 10 instead of windows 9 - you basically have a way to guarantee it always has windows 10. If your program always used x version of Linux a boom, guaranteed. It adds some complexity but reduces and removes randomness from the concept of deploying applications you’ve created.

If you know what a virtual machine is, a docker container is like a virtual machine that has a curated environment for running a specific program.

To get more technical, they are distinct from VMs in that they share the host machine’s kernel, so they are not as isolated as a VM. Docker (the program used to build or deploy Docker containers) has an internal network it manages, mostly automatically, which contributes to the ease of deploying containers and having the curated environment that makes containers work out of the box on whatever host they’re deployed.

So let’s say you wanted to run a Wordle clone website. You could find a “docker-compose” file online, change the configuration parameters to your liking, tell Docker to boot it, and the application and all its dependencies will be downloaded and built into a ready-made server with Wordle, the same as it works on every other machine with Docker.