Dave5

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  • Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems and Agroecology: Synergies and Convergences

    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…

  • Report: Black market keeps Nvidia chips flowing to China military, government

    “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…

  • ‘It hasn’t delivered’: The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology

    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…

  • You Should Daily Drive Haiku OS

    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/

  • PSA: Wear fake fingers to make real photos look AI generated.

    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 Rolls Out X-59 QueSST NASA’s Newest X-Plane

    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.

  • A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest and the revitalization of the Salton Sea

    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…

  • How Changing Military Technology Has Contributed To End of Empire

    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,…

  • LLM links

    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

  • RISC-V Assembler: Arithmetic

    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…