If they haven't been scammed, there would have to be a belief the originating economy has countermeasures or some belief it can sustain across its use.
If they have been scammed, it wouldn't be the first time. Those carbomb detection broomstick handles come to mind.
For those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadro_Tracker Though the later rename is the one that really took off internationally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651. Its really a stranger-than-fiction story, a used-car salesman sells to governments a dowsing rod that you can program to find anything by sticking a polaroid in. Pretty grim though when you consider all the people that died from bombings trusting these worthless things, and the money pocketed by corrupt buyers along the way. Only 12 years for the guy at the top too.
We used to have a term for a world where the "cost" of things wasn't measured in money, and abundance implied general living conditions were amicable and mutual.
Somehow I don't think this very stable genius has walked far through the consequences for his personal wealth, freedoms and his influence, in a world where money has no strict meaning.
On the delivery rate for FSD and Mars, I suggest people currently working who can do so, Ignore Musk and continue to contribute to retirement savings and that part of the state savings economy which supports their future retirement well-being. It's arguable their great-grandchildren will still be working, in a money based resources and goods rationing system like we have now.
If Musk paid himself less and paid more tax, we'd all be better off. If most of Musk's endeavours didn't have him, they'd also probably be better off.
to deploy a 2nd hand Cray-1 at UQ, we had to raise the ex-IBM 3033 floor, it turned out the bend radius for flourinert was NOT the same as a water cooled machine. We also installed a voltage re-generator which is basically a huge spinning mass, you convert Australian volts to DC, spin the machine, and take off re-generated high frequency volts for the cray, as well as 110v on the right hz for boring stuff alongside. the main bit ran off something like 400hz power, for some reason the CPU needed faster mains volts going in.
The flourinert tank has a ball valve, like a toilet cistern. we hung a plastic lobster in ours, because we called the cray "Yabbie" (Queensland freshwater crayfish)
That re-generator, the circuit breakers are .. touchy. the installation engineer nearly wet his trousers flipping on, the spark-bang was immense. Brown trouser moment.
The front end access was Unisys X11 Unix terminals. They were built like a brick shithouse (to use the australianism) but were a nice machine. I did the acceptance testing, it included running up X11 and compiling and running the largest Conways game of life design I could find on the net. Seemed to run well.
We got the machine as a tax-offset for a large Boeing purchase by Australian defence. End of life, one of the operators got the love-seat and turned it into a wardrobe in his bedroom.
Another, more boring cray got installed at department of primary industries (Qld government) to do crops and weather modelling. The post cray-1 stuff was .. more ordinary. Circular compute unit was a moment in time.
I used a Cray C-90 and T3D 256-core machine from 1995-1999. The T3D used commodity Alpha 21164, and was already behind the T3E when we got it (Cray refurbished.) By the end it was outclassed by an SGI Oxygen box with 8 CPUs. I’d already ported a lot of software from SunOS and HP-UX to Irix and Unicos (Cray) and it was easy to move it to Linux in the end.
IIRC the desk side onyx had the royal purple stripes and only accepted one CPU board, the rack mount version were that blue-purple color, more indigo (color)
So there were two computers made with the same bits mid 90s. Origin(compute, blue) and onyx(graphics, purple). Both had deskside and rack systems.
Onyx had a few slots reserved for graphics, original could have more compute boards. But you could certainly put two couple cpu boards in an onyx deskside or rack.
> the main bit ran off something like 400hz power, for some reason the CPU needed faster mains volts going in.
Aerospace originally did that to reduce component size, CDC and IBM took advantage of the standard in the early 60's.
Strangely, it seems mainframes didn't adopt switching power supplies until the end of the 70's, despite the tech being around since the end of the 60's.
There a lot of discussion here https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7412/why-... but nothing seems conclusive.. I would wager the last answer, "IBM was using 400Hz", to be most directly causal reason. The motor-generator configuration might provide galvanic isolation and some immunity to spikes and transients as well?
Smaller transformers and capacitors in all the linear power supplies.
400Hz is still common in aircraft. Distribution losses are higher, but you're going across the room, not across the country.
There you go. Not to doubt what you say, but we definitely had the love seat yet we also had a tank of vaguely flourescing green liquid. Maybe we had some intermediate state, the cray-1 cpu form but the cray-2 upgraded coolant.
It wouldn't surprise me if we had the bastard love-child of leftovers from Boeing.
The GP also mentions X11 Terminals. My wiki-fu shows the X Windowing System came about on or around 1983, while Cray-1 was 1970s vintage. I assume that was an upgrade at some later point.
X Window Release 3 (X11R3) was introduced on Cray into UNICOS (a UNIX variant of Cray OS, COS) in late 1989 using ported 64-bit Xlib. But it was not widely used within small Cray community.
But MIT cooked up X11 "PROTOCOL" of Xlib in late 1985 to 1986 on Univac and Unix in C with many other X libraries written in Common Lisp.
X10R3 mostly stabilized the Xlib around a few platforms and CPU architecture (DDX) in a"long" preparation for X11R1 in September 1987.
400 Hz is really the next best thing to a switching supply, as the transformers and filter capacitors can be smaller than they would need to be at 50/60 Hz. It can save cost and space for filter capacitors, especially in a three-phase system where there's not as much ripple to deal with.
Another rationale may have been that the flywheel on the motor-generator would cover a multitude of power-quality sins.
Without wishing to doxx you, if we don't know the approximate period in years we cannot tell if this is good or bad profit. If you started when you were 13 in 2004, this means they made significantly less than $1k/year from you, and P/E would be terrible.
If you are 14 in 2026 and should be picking your clothes off the floor and helping dad with the laundry, thats pretty good return on your data, sold to the ad-men. And, it's probably illegal for them to profit off a kid's online time like this.
Anecdotally I am told placement for high net work goods to prospective buyers are significantly more valuable to a website placing ads, than runescape ads. But, there are far less BMW drivers seeing those HNW ads, than kids seeing runescape so it kind-of evens out. That's probably why on the (now rare) times I am in business class long haul jets, I get told I should be using swiss banking, and invest in property in dubai, rather than being told to buy burgers, which frankly is much more likely to happen.
To make $14k off your facebook time, either you paid some FB coin to do mafia wars, or they shopped you to a lot of ad sellers. If you actually bought anything, especially if it was expensive, then everyone (including you) in the deal might be cool with this.
All DCs should be assessed for their impact on power supply and related utilities, and regulated to reduce impact on the community. All of them.
There's some potential to use aspects of temperature control to manage power if you can e.g. soak energy into heat or coolth, and time-shift the energy investment. Regarding electrical power to racks, I don't thing DC's have much options for load shedding or surge, but perhaps hyperscalers do actually have a way to do this?
I did marine biology field work almost 5 decades ago as a lowly junior lab tech. Work always has downsides, for me it was not really the Scots winter, cold feed, chapped hands, the land-rover having to reverse up steep icy roads to get back from the harbourside: it was washing the glassware and dealing with sodium hydroxide weighing (it absorbs moisture from the air so its a fools game). But, field work also brought amazing experiences, I visited the seaside 70+ times over a year, and got an insight into what a time series really means when you cover the tidal and weather and seasonal cycles.
It's also always error-prone. Nothing in the field is perfect. Reality is a bad approximation for your model at times, if you take a model centric view.
I would be immensely skeptical that field work is ever going away. There may be aspects of truth in this around cost of travel, risk, seniority.
I've always enjoyed field work, much of the code I've written has been well outside of any office.
Exploration geophysics paid for me to travel to and across more than half he countries on the planet, calibrating old maps, datums, projections against the 'new' WGS84, scaling peaks to stage base stations, getting familiar with the ins and outs of tides, magnetic fields, gravity, radiometric backgrounds, finding a good band in Mali ...
Douglas Mawson ("home of the blizzard") had a rich life after Antartica as a field geologist, exploring the flinders ranges. He found a radium mine and was shipping ore to Europe for a while. He led students on field trips, one of whom, Reg Sprigg caught the bug, explored as much as he could, persuaded the Australian petro and uranium sector to fund pushing tracks into his favourite spots, and then converted the landscape into the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary. I got to spend a night there last year on a flight safari to Lake Eyre, it's an amazing place, dark sky with a big telescope, wildlife, well worth a visit.
Mawson had the field trip of a lifetime (for his two mates, it was the end of their lifetime!) and it didn't end his bug for the outside. I don't think he was made to sit in a lab.
I'd say your Mali trip was the same: it hasn't made you want to stop being outside from the sound of it.
I've "retired" to argriculture tech and labour support for W.Australian family grain production. We've almost finished harvest and I've been doing a lot of scrolling and posting here while hanging about near idle "on call" fire tenders (we had a hundred fires, mostly from lightening strikes, in a single week just recently)
The Mali trip was notable for random types firing weapons at our aircraft while we were running lines with 80m ground clearance - we had to armour the cockpit bellies and stuff the fuel tanks with mesh.
> The Mali trip was notable for random types firing weapons at our aircraft while we were running lines with 80m ground clearance - we had to armour the cockpit bellies and stuff the fuel tanks with mesh.
Datums can get dull fast but there's adventure inherent in surveying. You should write a book, or at least a chapter or two. "Nadir Point" has a nice ring to it...
There was always something happening, whether it was shipboard fires in the disputed parts of South China Sea or India / Pakistan engaging in cross border nuclear tests in our survey zone.
That last one followed several of us about for years, anytime we crossed a US controlled border they got interested in how we knew what they didn't ...
.. look, we just happened to be there with a 42 litre doped Sodium Iodide crystal pack and 256 channel gamma ray spectrometer just as the tests kicked off ...
I also have spent quite awhile as an exploration geophysicist. I miss it! I work purely with satellite data now, which is decidedly less tangible.
I've done a fair bit in the field, but a huge part of my career has been mining old datasets and reinterpreting things in light of new data/etc.
What the article is describing isn't new in any way. But it also doesn't remove the need for fieldwork or the need for the experience of having done fieldwork to use existing datasets. Observational sciences (e.g. geology, biology, etc) where you can't easily replicate the environment you are studying in the lab are always going to hinge on some sort of fieldwork.
Finding creative ways to use existing data doesn't change that.
I worked in a research lab like 30 years ago and it was all on computers. We had loads of generic data collected by someone somewhere and we just looked for patterns to infer sequences. I wrote Java and C++ and got my name on a paper. There were maybe a dozen scientists in the lab and they were all just coders with expertise in one or another field of biology. It was called a "dry lab".
I don't do research that requires fieldwork, but even in office and industrial settings, I notice that there's less need and interest in visits.
Of course, in-person exchanges still happen, but there's something of a default to do most things remotely because it's more efficient (and honestly, easier for all parties involved). The result is that you don't get to see cool or unusual machines/setups that often, and some flair of doing research is lost.
I can imagine that that's especially painful for new ecologists, because fieldwork is also a way to experience things that you otherwise wouldn't. Hopefully, we can bring some of it back with edge devices and models.
It’s been sad seeing journalism in the online era, where so much (not all!) content is produced without really visiting or researching things. Often it’s based only on statements / tweets, sometimes more seeping based on phone calls, sometimes reading a book on the topic, but rarely do journalists seem to show up anywhere.
When reading something like Didion’s piece on the LA highway central command, it shows how irreplaceable lived experience is.
> But, field work also brought amazing experiences, I visited the seaside 70+ times over a year, and got an insight into what a time series really means when you cover the tidal and weather and seasonal cycles.
I’m not exactly sure if we share a similar experience, but living on a trail in the Santa Cruz mountains affords me the opportunity to hike the same trails every weekend, year round (or even daily).
I’m not taking measurements, but it’s incredible to witness the effect of seasons on familiar territory just a few miles outside town. The weather changes, the wildlife changes and the air changes (moist to dry and back).
It’s an incredibly special experience to revisit the same place time and time again and witness the impact of … time. I hope you found something else to replace your familiar seaside.
I think this is a classic old-vs-new tale. I started my PhD in biochemical research where analyzing data by hand was definitely a "craft" in some aspects. Later I forewent going to the lab entirely and instead spent all my time on developing machine learning for automated data analysis. But just like field work, you still need people in labs who can continue the craft.
The article should perhaps introspect a bit more instead of setting up a false dichotomy between "rainforest field work or computers".
Field work is likely to become less common, because ‘ground truth’ (as error prone as it may be), is an existential threat to a lot of people’s comforts and state of mind right now.
After all, if you want a different answer, you can easily tweak a model.
Much harder to force a bunch of people in the field to not see what they see. Certainly not impossible, however!
The article said (if I read it right) direct application of the algae demanded high pressure pumps and so power, and water and came with downside costs.
They seem to be packaging the algae into balls/pellets with a lot of other organic matter, and "seeding" the desert with them to take advantage of weather conditions which will encourage plant growth. This means it's really as much about the organics, as the blue-green algae to me.
The article also suggests this research institute knows what they're doing, they've a good track record of reversing desertification with other techniques.
I kind of hoped it was a workable spray solution (hah) because that felt like it might be tractable for UAV to distribute, but they need higher pressure to penetrate the cracks in the surface at volume.
I think we're all familiar with BG mats when temporary water dries up. Nice to see something positive being made of them.
If they have been scammed, it wouldn't be the first time. Those carbomb detection broomstick handles come to mind.
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