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Note for my own weekend watching…
This makes me borderline giddy… I fucking love it! Here’s a project that demonstrates the advantage of having an opensource instruction set (RISC-V) along with the power of being able to wire an FPGA into one. This project implements a minimal RISC-V core in an iceFUN FPGA board. While having a license-free instruction set is nice,…
We are living in the age of the monopoly. In the 1930s, the top 0.1% of US companies accounted for less than half of America’s GDP. Today, it’s 90%. And it’s accelerating, with global mergers climbing from 2,676 in 1985 to 62,000 in 2021. Monopoly’s cheerleaders claim that these numbers vindicate them. Monopolies are so efficient that everyone…
Building a bridge between now and later is often a challenge when we seek to rewire our tech. The internet only arrived because DARPA and others kept it going for more than twenty years before it clicked. Refocusing on the ‘we’ is a powerful way for us to get from here to there.
This guys work is a pleasure to watch. I saw his PS3 video and was hooked.
Nature always bats last… On a really bright front, if AI/ML drives innovation in power generation, I’m there for that. It’s no secret that AI models like those behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT require an astronomical amount of electricity. The process is ludicrously energy intensive, with experts estimating that the industry could soon suck up as much electricity as an…
When your enemy dupes you into compounding your mistakes, without achieving your military objectives, he is leading you into an escalation of force which will defeat you, sooner or later. Later is more costly, defeat more ruinous, so the Arab-Iranian alliance against Israel and the US is waging the long war they were never before…
For the step by step instructions: https://makezine.com/projects/this-zodiac-embroidery-lights-up/
When I started training models in 2021 I joked to my wife that I had found something more computationally expensive than crypto mining. Whenever I was asked about AI and the risk to humanity (2023), I would point out that there were very real physical limits to what was going on. AI training is eye-bleedinglying…
Indigenous food systems are systems of production, distribution, and consumption of foods based on Traditional Knowledge and practices of Indigenous Peoples. These systems are characterized by their diversity, sustainability, and resilience, which makes them preferable to conventional industrial food systems. In a webinar organized by the Agroecology Fund (AEF) in November 2023, representatives of Indigenous Peoples and non-governmental organizations…
“Nice sanctions you’ve got there, be a shame if some one routed around them.” As a friend pointed out, black market Nvida chips are probably easier to get than black market pseudo. China is still finding ways to skirt US export controls on Nvidia chips, Reuters reported. A Reuters review of publicly available tender documents showed…
Self-checkout is one of those consensual hallucinations that you see in tech a lot. People see a leader implement it and then follow like sheep… “no one gets fired for buying IBM”. In the US these machines can lead to really dire legal trouble if you get pinged for theft. “It hasn’t delivered anything that…
I’m kinda excited by this… BeOS was my lusted-after OS in college. I have been watching Haiku development for years. Their progress has been super impressive. For more details: https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/haiku-os-the-open-source-beos-you-can-daily-drive-in-2024/
I LOOOOOOVE the cultural weirdness of this. It’s an unintended consequence of GenAI systems when they bump into legal systems. https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/15/24038880/psa-wear-fake-fingers-to-make-real-photos-look-ai-generated
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works rolled out the X-59 on Jan. 12, 2024, a unique experimental aircraft designed to quiet the sonic boom, at a ceremony in Palmdale, California. The ceremony marked a significant milestone in Lockheed Martin’s and NASA’s decades-long journey to solve one of the most persistent challenges of supersonic flight – the sonic boom.
Casey’s writing on solar power has transformed the way I look at at power related problems… when you realize we have an unlimited amount of power raining from the sky (that we can capture) then it changes the economics of problems. Cheap and power inefficient becomes the play of the day. The advent of cheap…
It was always clear that drones were not going to be weapons of the powerful. What matters for weapons systems is who can afford them. If you need aircraft carriers and you’re not a major country, you’re shit outta luck. The end of medieval nobility arrived with gunpowder weapons, specifically cannons. King could afford them,…
A really great summation of some of the leading ideas from the past week or so. I suggest subbing to Arnolds newsletter. The Zvi on problems with LLMs; Ethan Mollick on impact of LLMs; Noah Smith on techno-optimism; Bill Gates on same; Sergey Levine and Karol Hausman on robots; Venkatesh Rao draws a map https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/llm-links-383
I truely believe that RISC-V is in the process of turning the computing world on it’s head… the combo of open source design and easily grokkable instruction set is a killer combo. I grew up with ARM processors (I had an Acorn 410 as a kid and a BBC B before that), but I do…
Dave5 