Solar-powered desalination system requires no extra batteries | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology — For brackish water not seawater. Reverse osmosis is the basis for scaled up industrial desalination but projects like this show how electrodialysis can lean into the inherent variability of solar with good results. (2024-11-22 · climate-hope, desalination, mlp, solar )

Robot Jailbreak: Researchers Trick Bots Into Dangerous Tasks - IEEE Spectrum — "showed that he could get the Thermonator robot dog from Throwflame, which is built on a Go2 platform and is equipped with a flamethrower, to shoot flames at him with a voice command." (2024-11-21 · genai, llm, mlp, robot, what.could.possibly.go.wrong )

A Star Battle Guide — Star Battle Go can be thought of as “binary Soduku”. It’s deep as game/puzzles go and this guide helps you appreciate it. (2024-11-15 · games, mlp, puzzle, soduku, star.battle.go, strategy )

Deprogramming Kin Lane | Kin Lane — Good list of books, a few of which I've read, more which I still need to read, on understanding power when you're part of the dominant group. (2024-11-12 · books, capitalism, culture, mlp, patriarchy, power, racism, reading )

Pluralistic: Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever (01 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow — "A newly finalized Personal Financial Data Rights rule (from the CFPB ) will allow you to authorize third parties – other banks, comparison shopping sites, brokers, anyone who offers you a better deal, or help you find one" -- now do this with energy usage data! (2024-11-01 · banks, cfpb, hope, mlp, money, open.data )

Using Rust in non-Rust servers to improve performance — “This is yet another reminder to me that I need to get over my cgi-bin era bias that says that shelling out to another process during a web request is a bad idea. It turns out modern computers can quite happily spawn and terminate 2,500+ processes a second!” —- I have these same instincts and was shaking my head in disapproval until I read this paragraph. 30 years into doing this work and the rate of change remains the hardest thing to wrap my head around. (2024-10-29 · change, computers, mlp, moores.law, performance, programming, progress, rust )

A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design — "The current standards of evaluation in the PL community are set from a masculine perspective as well, valuing formalism and formal methods over user studies, quantitative over qualitative work, and the examining of technical aspects over context and people." (2024-10-24 · feminism, mlp, pdf, programming, science )

Solar-powered, self-hosted website — Intermittently available — not everything needs to be 5 nines (2024-10-20 · hosting, mlp, raspberry.pi, solar )

Turns out the "October Surprise" is crime — “Elon’s secret is and always has been playing the game on easy mode while his opponents struggle with complex ruleset.” (2024-10-20 · easy.mode, elections, elon.musk, mlp, silicon.valley )

Bop Spotter — "a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below." (2024-09-30 · culture, hack, hacking, mlp, music, sf, surveillance )

Seawater electrolysis that also acts as CO2 removal technology — “last year, a startup called Equatic made a breakthrough that not only solves the chlorine problem, but has the potential to deliver a two-for-one solution: commercial hydrogen production and carbon removal. an “oxygen-selective anode,” from the lab to the factory. On Thursday, it announced it had started manufacturing the anodes at a facility in San Diego.” (2024-09-20 · climate-hope, hydrogen, mlp )

Scientists calculate Earth’s temperature changes over 485 million years - The Washington Post — “ At its hottest, the study suggests, the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) — far higher than the historic 58.96 F (14.98 C) the planet hit last year.” … Unlikely we'll destroy all life on earth, just ourselves. (2024-09-20 · climate, mlp )

‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman — “82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead … In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war … With the Greeks, at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or pension-fraud cases.” (2024-09-16 · aging, blue.zone, ig.nobel, mlp, science )

‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine — Four Thieves Vinegar Collective makes DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible with open source software and hardware — their course of Sofosbuvir, a medication that cures Hepatitis C but costs $84,000 at $1,000/pill, can be produced for only $700 or $0.83/pill (2024-09-08 · anarchism, big.pharma, chemistry, hacking, health, healthcare, healthtech, medicine, mlp, pharm )

Dervos 2024 - Distributed energy one day conference — October 25, 2024 in Brooklyn, New York. (2024-09-02 · brooklyn, climate-hope, conference, energy, mlp )

Halide can now strip away (almost) all the iPhone's processing: Digital Photography Review — "Halide iOS alternate-camera app that tries really hard to reproduce the actual data the sensor saw, with no smoothing or color-tweaking or AI voodoo." (2024-08-26 · camera, halide, ios, mlp, photography )

Vocabulary for describing whisky varieties — Stumbled over this today, a URI vocabulary for use in things like RDF for describing whisky. Posting just to remind myself how weird the standards communities are as I poke at adjacent things. (2024-08-26 · data, mlp, rdf, standards, whiskey, whisky )

Y Combinator is backing a weapons company for the first time, entering a sector it has previously shunned. — “Specifically, it’s a low-cost cruise missile startup, which the Financial Times reports would be suitable for use in a potential war between the US and China. The cruise missiles are 10x smaller and 10x cheaper than today's alternatives, but presumably still murder people.” (2024-08-25 · ben.werd, military, military.industrial.complex, missiles, mlp, us-china, war, ycombinator )

COVID-19 Home Treatment and Prevention - mostlyobvious - Perlite — LHL’s roundup of what’s known for preventing and mitigating COVID-19 (2024-08-25 · covid19, health, lhl, mlp, research )

feedsin.space — A service that allows you to publish a RSS feed to the Fediverse. And in particular the one I use to publish these links. (2024-08-18 · atom, fediverse, feed, links, mastodon, mlp, rss, rust, syndication )

Hugo 2024 Best Novella: Thornhedge by T.F. Kingfisher — I immediately read anything Vernon writes under her Kingfisher pen name, but even as an avowed fan this felt inventive and delightful. (2024-08-18 · books, fantasy, hugo, hugo.2024, kingfisher, mlp, scifi )

Hugo 2024 Best Novel: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh — It was great. Recommended. (2024-08-18 · books, emily.tesh, hugo, hugo.2024, mlp, novel, scifi )

U.S. to Announce Prices for First Drugs Picked for Medicare Negotiations - The New York Times — One of the nice little side provisions tucked into the most substantial climate bill ever is also to put PBMs out of business. This is step 1. (2024-08-15 · healthcare, ira, medicare, mlp, pbm )

Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders — I've been eagerly awaiting Camille and Ian's new book. An understandable push by many companies in response to growing software development costs and challenges has been to embrace platforms. But platforms are hard. And there hasn't been a good book before now on how to build and operate them. (2024-08-13 · books, camille.fournier, engineering, ian.nowland, mlp, platform )

FLUX from Black Forest Labs — “Flux, 12b parameters open source text-to-image model to date, developed by Black Forest Labs—the original team behind Stable Diffusion.” (2024-08-05 · ai, genai, mlp, stablediffusion )

Introducing SAM 2: The next generation of Meta Segment Anything Model for videos and images — Expands Meta’s SAM model to video for effectively identifying which pixels belong to which objects. Open code, weights and dataset (2024-07-31 · ai, meta, mlp, opensource, video )

Saltwater Farming (Youtube) — How to use the two of the most abundant resources on the planet, saltwater and degraded farm land, to grow crops and ecosystems. (2024-07-27 · agriculture, andrew.millison, climate-hope, farming, mangroves, mlp, permaculture, video )

Pace of decarbonization in the US is accelerating — In 2023, US green house gas emissions were 18% lower than they were in 2005. In addition, US is on track to reduce its GHG emissions by 38-56% below 2005 levels in 2035, representing at least a doubling—and potentially as much as a four-times increase—from the pace of annual emissions abatement from 2005 to 2023. (2024-07-27 · climate, climate-hope, ghg, mlp, rhodium )

Earth’s Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes We’re Only Starting to Understand - The New York Times — "Like the many tiny organisms in the ocean and atmosphere, the unique microbes within Earth’s crust do not simply inhabit their surroundings; they transform them. Subsurface microbes carve vast caverns, concentrate minerals and precious metals and regulate the global cycling of carbon and nutrients." (2024-07-24 · biology, geology, mlp, nytimes, science )

Simon Willison on andrej-karpathy — I saw a quote flow through Simon's blog by an Andrej Karpathy that made a strong claim, but not knowing who Andrej is I couldn't evaluate it. Thankfully I can read over Simon's archives on Andrej (2024-07-24 · ai, andrej.karpathy, mlp, simon.willison )

Stamp Productions' Road to an Olympic Campaign - YouTube — Frame.io customer case study -- I love the work our production team does. (Especially enjoy the shout out from the customer using Frame to reduce their carbon footprint) (2024-07-23 · climate, dayjob, frameio, mlp, youtube )

Kamala Harris and Her Climate Positions - The New York Times — I remember her as one of the original sponsors of the Green New Deal. Good to see her get some credit for that. (2024-07-23 · climate, harris, mlp, nytimes, politics, uspol )

jiff: A date-time library for Rust — Temporal inspired. From the person who built ripgrep and Rust’s regex (2024-07-23 · burntsushi, calendaring, datetime, library, mlp, rust, temporal, timezone )

1-bit LLMs Could Solve AI’s Energy Demands - IEEE Spectrum — “researchers are finding ways to reduce their size by quantization - representing model parameters with only 1 or -1. The two main approaches are post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT).” (2024-07-23 · ai, climate, energy, llm, mlp )

Does Science Fiction Shape the Future? - Nautilus — Spectacular group interview with many of my favorite science fiction writers. Jemisin, Bujold, Brin, Doctrow, Stross and Weir. (2024-07-18 · andy.weir, authors, books, bujold, charlie.stross, cory.doctrow, david.brin, future, mlp, nk.jemisin, scifi )

Quamina Diary - Tim Bray — This ongoing (no pun intended) series by Tim Bray on building Quamina, a finite automaton for pattern matching, is immensely satisfying, focusing as it does on the role of craft and design in software, factors rarely actually that important in the day to day of the work. (2024-07-15 · code, craft, golang, mlp, programming, tim.bray )

Q Numbers - Tim Bray · — Love this latest short entry in Tim's Quamina series - "describes how to match and compare numbers using a finite automaton, which involves transforming them into strings with the right lexical properties. My hope is that there are at least twelve people in the world who are interested in the intersection of numeric representation and finite automata" (2024-07-15 · code, craft, finite.automata, golang, mlp, pattern.matching, programming, tim.bray )

Interesting Volts interview of Kobold Metal CEO. — Company just had their first big find. Worth listening to this interview from last December. Addresses well the concern of whether we have another of the metals needed for the climate transition. Doesn't solve the other challenges related to mining of course. (2024-07-14 · climate, kobold, metal, mlp )

KoBold Metals identifies "largest copper deposit found in decade" in Zambia - The New York Times — First confirmed success for the company. (2024-07-14 · climate, kobold, mining, mlp, tech )

Pictures of people scanning QR codes on Tumblr — No posts as of February 2012. I scanned dozens of codes yesterday from previewing firework to ordering coffee. But there was a time, in the US, when QR codes were silly tech hype and this Tumblr was hilarious. (2024-07-08 · adoption, history, mlp, qrcodes, tech, tumblr )

TikTok users love to watch this guy's drawing robots screw up — As I started saving links again I was wondering in a desultory way what Joshua was up to these days, and the answer apparently is helping plotting robots go viral on Tik Tok. (Article is from 2022) (2024-07-08 · art, joshua.schachter, mlp, robots, tiktok )

Will We Ever Get Fusion Power? - by Brian Potter — Excellent in depth article on the history, science, funding and politics of fusion as we enter a new phase of expanded private funding in the search for a practical reactor. (2024-07-07 · climate, climate-hope, energy, fusion, longreads, mlp, power, science )

True Rate of Unemployment - LISEP Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity — “defined as the jobless, plus those seeking but unable to find a full-time job that pays above poverty wages (pegged at $25,000 a year in 2024 dollars) – stands at 24.6% for the month of May, a 0.4 percentage point increase over the April rate.” (2024-07-07 · economics, mlp, unemployment )

At 100, the Intergalactic Jazz Hero Marshall Allen Is Still on a Mission - The New York Times — We saw Marshall Allen and band play Opus 40 last week, and serious goals to be still performing experimental jazz, on a hot Summer stormy night in a semi-abandoned quarry at age 100. (2024-07-05 · jazz, marshall.allen, mlp, music, sun.ra )

You (obviously!) can’t control your kid’s every actions; the best you can do is provide solid, consistent examples of appropriate behavior...and hope for the best. — Adrian Holovaty - Thoughts on my first machine learning project (2024-06-20 · adrian-holovaty, ai, ml, mlp, music, omr, parenting, quotable, sheet-music )

The ‘Godfather of AI’ emerges out of stealth to back climate focused startup for material science — “Humanity will face many challenges in the coming decade. Some will be caused by AI while others can be solved by AI,” Hinton said.  “I’ve been very impressed by CuspAI and its mission to accelerate the design process of new materials using AI to curb one of humanity’s most urgent challenges—climate change.” (2024-06-19 · ai, climate, cuspai, geoffery-hinton, material-science, mlp )

Big tech’s great AI power grab — Admittedly the Economist are pro-capitalist lapdogs, but as we worry about the energy consumption being driven by AI, in the US context at least, it's worth remembering that big tech is one of the largest drivers and investors in green energy. Including informing Georgia Power, one of the worst utilities, that data centers are unlikely to come to their region, citing data centers near nuclear, and being important early customers from green energy startups like enhanced geothermal startup Fervo. (2024-06-18 · ai, big-tech, climate, datacenter, green-energy, mlp, power )

Super wonky podcast on Boston Metal's "molten oxide electrolysis" process for producing carbon-free steel. — Beyond the huge impact of decarbonizing the 10% of current emissions that today go to producing steel, this technology feels like it has the shape of something that could get on learning curve with modular technology, and have the sort of classically disruptive impact of e.g. moving steel production up the production chain to the people who are producing the ore reducing global shipping and giving the people impacted directly by resource extraction a higher value product. (2024-06-16 · Tadeu-Carneiro, climate, climate-hope, co2, david-roberts, industry, mlp, steel, volts )

University of Cambridge demonstration of a zero carbon technique for recycling cement — When recycling steel in an electric arc furnace if you replace the lime flux with recycled "cement paste" then rapidly cool the resulting slag you not only get purified steel you also get new Portland cement, without releasing additional carbon. (Cement of our course being a classically "hard to decarbonize" process as the carbon isn't just a byproduct of the need to generate heat, but a core part of the chemical process.) (2024-06-16 · carbon, cement, climate-hope, co2, construction, materials, mlp )

"AI is to Google what meth was to the Juarez cartel" — Greg Wilson's call for someone to write, "Narconomics and Big Tech" (2024-06-15 · addiction, business, google, greg-wilson, mlp, quotable, tech )

Randomized study of hybrid work (3 days in the office) vs in office (5 days) at a Chinese online travel agency. — "The authors found that the hybrid workers generally had increased job satisfaction and reduced resignation rates, and were as productive as those who worked entirely in-person, as measured by performance reviews. The reduction in resignation rates was particularly pronounced for those with longer commutes and for women. Reduced attrition rates were not seen for managers." While I am grateful everyday for flexible work it is absolutely harder to do the manager job in this new world. (2024-06-15 · hybrid, mlp, office, productivity, work )

The Green Wall - a low tech, community centered approach to land recovery in Senegal along the border of the Sahara — The kiddo and I have been working our way through Andrew Millison's reporting on permaculture(-ish) approaches to reclaiming land and dealing with the impacts of climate change. This is our favorite. (2024-06-11 · africa, agriculture, climate-hope, farming, mlp, nature, permaculture, senegal, unwfp, video, youtube )

Volts inteview with Caroline Spears, founder of Climate Cabinet — Good information on what it means to "moneyball" climate important elections. (2024-06-10 · caroline-spears, climate-hope, david-roberts, mlp, politics, us, volts, voting )

Climate Cabinet - Moneyball meets climate policy — An advocacy group focused on finding high ROI races to ranked by "greenhouse gases under legal authority". (2024-06-10 · climate-hope, mlp, policy, politics, us, voting )

Postmarks - a single-user bookmarking website designed to be easily hosted on Glitch — Going to look at this as an approach to adding ActivityPub support to MLP. But also looks like a good option if you don't need to indulge in the quixotic undertaking of writing your own. (2024-06-09 · activitypub, mlp )

Canopée: the sailing ship for Ariane 6 transport — Hybrid wind and diesel cargo ship -- something folks have talked about but Canopée is operating today. (2024-06-09 · climate-hope, mlp, transportation, wind )

Save congestion pricing! — Fight isn’t won and not lost, more work todo. And thank you for everyone who has already acted to make NYC safer, healthier and more sustainable. (2024-06-09 · activism, climate-hope, mlp, nyc )

A Link Blog in the Year 2024 — Thoughts on starting a link blog in 2024. (2024-06-09 · meta, mlp )

Voynich manuscript - an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown script by an unknown author — I'm going to be honest, I just learned about this using Simon's "fascinate me" prompt to make sure I had `llm` installed correctly. (2024-06-08 · article, cryptography, history, llm, mlp, wikipedia )

ASML and TSMC Can Disable Chip Machines If China Invades Taiwan — That’s a peak 2024 headline if you ever needed one. (2024-05-22 · china, chips, mlp, taiwan )

TL;DR: In my previous post, I used local models with PyTorch and Sentence Transformers to roughly cluster ideas by named topic. In this post, I'll try that again, but this time with Llamafile. — Clustering ideas with Llamafile (2024-05-13 · ai, llamafile, llm, lmorchard, mlp, quotable )

RAG fails on global questions directed at an entire text corpus, such as “What are the main themes in the dataset?”, since this is inherently a query-focused summarization (QFS) task, rather than an explicit retrieval task. ... Our approach uses an LLM to build a graph-based text index in two stages: first to derive an entity knowledge graph from the source documents, then to pregenerate community summaries for all groups of closely-related entities. Given a question, each community summary is used to generate a partial response, before all partial responses are again summarized in a final response to the user. — GraphRAG (Graphs + Retrieval Augmented Generation) (2024-05-11 · ai, microsoft, mlp, paper, python, quotable, rag )