I agree. The concept is simple, and it's not perfect, but it isn't dumb either. This is basically recreating how coal and oil got in the ground in the first place. Plants absorbed carbon from the air as they grew, then they got buried in a way that prevented them from decomposing and re-releasing it into the atmosphere. My main question here would be whether burying it only 10 feet under ground is really enough for long term storage. The other big elephant in the room with carbon capture is that it can be a convenient excuse for companies to avoid doing work towards actually decarbonizing their operations. If, as the article suggests, this is used primarily by industries like cement making that don't currently have a way to become carbon neutral then it's a good thing. If it's just used as cynical green washing by companies who could be doing better, then it's at best a wash, and arguably a net negative.
I know there's some controversy surrounding Brave as a company, and I'm not a fan of everything they do, but the goggles feature in their search engine is a really interesting attempt to give users more control over their search results.
The tool allows you to re-rank your search results according to custom rule sets. Each rule contains a regex style string to check against webpage URLs, and an instruction for what to do when a match is found. There are four basic types of instruction:
- Exclude matching URLs from your search results.
- Boost matching URLs so they appear higher in your search results than they otherwise would
- Downrank matches, causing them to appear lower in the results than they otherwise would.
- Highlight matches so they stand out in the list of results.
Brave has provided some premade rule sets (called goggles) that you can use right away, such as one that automatically removes all pinterest links, or another that boosts posts from tech related blogs. It's also relatively straightforward to create your own goggles, which you can either keep private or make public for others to find and use as well.
If you want to try it out for yourself you can go to search.brave.com and do a normal search for whatever you want. Then, on the results page, click the little "goggles" button just below the search bar. You'll be presented with a variety of premade filters along with a "discover more" button which sends you to a page with more information and filter options.
After explaining the destructive force of a single raindrop over a kilometer in diameter:
Fear reigns supreme as the world fears rain supreme
Poetry. True poetry.
I second weawow. It's got everything I want in a weather app: clean UI, customizable homescreen widget, and you can pick which provider it uses for the weather data.
This is a new twist on a long history of law enforcement misunderstanding and misusing geolocation services.
Just ask the little old lady in Kansas who has 600 million ip addresses in her front yard https://theweek.com/articles/624040/how-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-kansas-farm-into-digital-hell
Out of curiosity, what software is normally being run on your clusters? Based on my reading, it seems like some companies run clusters for business purposes. E.g. an engineering company might use it for structural analysis of their designs, or a pharmaceutical company might simulate the interactions of new drugs. I assume in those cases they've bought a license for some kind of high-end software that's been specifically written to run in a distributed environment. I also found references to some software libraries that are meant to support writing programs in this environment. I assume those are used more by academics who have a very specific question they want to answer (and may not have funding for commercial software) so they write their own code that's hyper focused on their area of study.
Is that basically how it works, or have I misunderstood?
This actually came up in my research. Folding@Home is considered a "grid computer" According to Wikipedia:
Grid computing is distinguished from ... cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed (thus not physically coupled) than cluster computers.
The primary performance disadvantage is that the various processors and local storage areas do not have high-speed connections. This arrangement is thus well-suited to applications in which multiple parallel computations can take place independently, without the need to communicate intermediate results between processors.
I'll have to look a little more into the AI stuff. It was actually my first thought, but I wasn't sure how far I'd get without GPUs. I think they're pretty much required for Stablediffusion. I'm pretty sure even LLMs are trained on GPUs, but maybe response generation can be done without one.
I’m not sure what you’d want to run in a homelab that would use even 10 machines, but it could be fun to find out.
Oh yeah, this is absolutely a solution in search of a problem. It all started with the discovery that these old (but not ancient, most of them are intel 7th gen) computers were being auctioned off for like $20 a piece. From there I started trying to work backwards towards something I could do with them.
I was looking at HP mini PCs. The ones that were for sale used 7th gen i5s with a 35W TDP. They're sold with a 65W power brick so presumably the whole system would never draw more than that. I could run a 16 node cluster flat out on a little over a kW, which is within the rating of a single residential circuit breaker. I certainly wouldn't want to keep it running all the time, but it's not like I'd have to get my electric system upgraded if I wanted to set one up and run it for a couple of hours as an experiment.
A university near me must be going through a hardware refresh, because they've recently been auctioning off a bunch of ~5 year old desktops at extremely low prices. The only problem is that you can't buy just one or two. All the auction lots are batches of 10-30 units.
It got me wondering if I could buy a bunch of machines and set them up as a distributed computing cluster, sort of a poor man's version of the way modern supercomputers are built. A little research revealed that this is far from a new idea. The first ever really successful distributed computing cluster (called Beowulf) was built by a team at NASA in 1994 using off the shelf PCs instead of the expensive custom hardware being used by other super computing projects at the time. It was also a watershed moment for Linux, then only a few yeas old, which was used to run Beowulf.
Unfortunately, a cluster like this seems less practical for a homelab than I had hoped. I initially imagined that there would be some kind of abstraction layer allowing any application to run across all computers on the cluster in the same way that it might scale to consume as many threads and cores as are available on a CPU. After some more research I've concluded that this is not the case. The only programs that can really take advantage of distributed computing seem to be ones specifically designed for it. Most of these fall broadly into two categories: expensive enterprise software licensed to large companies, and bespoke programs written by academics for their own research.
So I'm curious what everyone else thinks about this. Have any of you built or admind a Beowulf cluster? Are there any useful applications that would make it worth building for the average user?
Searx is a search aggregator. It masks your identity from the search providers, but under the hood it's still just a middle man for google/bing results. I don't see how this helps if the results themselves are getting worse.
I've been aware of pi-hole for a while now, but never bothered with it because I do most web browsing on a laptop where browser extensions like uBlock origin are good enough. However, with multiple streaming services starting to insert adds into my paid subscriptions, I'm looking to upgrade to a network blocker that will also cover the apps on my smart TV.
I run most of my self hosted services on a proxmox server, so I'd like something that'll run as an LXC container or a VM. I'm also vaguely aware that various competing applications have come out since pi-hole first gained popularity. Is pi-hole still the best thing going, or are there better options?
You might be interested in the pop-sci book Soonish: ten emerging technologies that'll improve and/or ruin everything. I haven't read it myself, but I've read the authors' other book about space colonization, and it was excellent so I would expect this one to be as well.
I mean, this is definitely going to be a disaster but I think the title and article here are a little misleading. The author implies that Warner Brothers is spearheading (and paying for) this venture, but I just read through the buzzword salad of a press release and it barely mentions them. The project is driven by an independent company that licensed the ready player one IP from WB. The whole thing very carefully avoids any details about money changing hands, but my guess is either that WB is getting paid, or they've negotiated a cut of any theoretical future profits. Of course, the chances of there ever being profits are slim to none, but I'd say at worst they're net $0 on the deal, and at best they actually made some money by getting paid up front. They might suffer some reputation damage if it becomes a real catastrophe, but as the author of the article mentioned they are billions in debt, so its probably a risk they're happy to take.
Suddenly I want to see a super smash bros knockoff where all the playable characters are public domain, and every January 1st they release an update with new characters that lost copyright protection in the past year.
I believe that, legally speaking, a company making a public effort to maintain their trademark counts for a lot. The company that makes Velco may not care at all whether this video convinces anyone to actually change their behavior. It exists so that they can hold it up in court and say "look, we have been putting real time and money into defending this thing, therefore we should be allowed to keep it."
I'm aware that the plastic handles probably disqualify these from being true "buy it for life", but the exciting thing for me is that they are relatively cheap and can be found on the shelf in most stores with an office supply section. It's an unfortunate reality that the vast majority of BIFL items are special order and cost several times more than their mainstream equivalent, so I wanted to shout out Scotch brand for maintaining such good serviceability on an item you can literally pick up at Walmart.
I just pulled apart a pair of these which was cutting horribly, gave each blade a couple passes on an oil stone, then reassembled and tightened them up with a drop of oil in the joint. They cut as well as the day they were bought, and the handles are still in good shape so I could see doing this several more times before I even have to consider replacing them.
This is the one I came here to say. For anyone living in or visiting Chicago, the Garfield Park Conservatory is a lovely place to spend a few hours on a cold winter day.
Youtube in has done a remarkably good job carrying the torch of high quality documentaries and educational content beyond the realm of traditional media. Science, art, technology, history. It's all there, and much of it meets or exceeds the quality of anything the old guard of cable TV channels ever managed to produce.
I'm actually only now realizing that some of the most established channels have been reaching a wide audience with consistent and high quality content for the better part of a decade, and yet I can't think of any who have successfully broken into more "traditional" media such as television or or even streaming services. That seems exceptionally strange to me. I mean, last month there were headlines about Netflix giving $55 million to an unproven director who proceeded to blow it all on expensive cars instead of filming the show he was hired to make. Who decides to hire that guy over any number of youtube creators who have spent the last ten years cranking out a short video a week along with occasional longer form projects, all with a small crew on a shoestring budget. I can imagine three possible reasons for this. No idea which one(s) could be the real reason, or if there's something else entirely going on.
- Hollywood1 is so insular that they don't even realize these people exist.
- Hollywood is so stuck in its ways that they refuse to believe these people could be successful running a larger production.
- Offers have been made, but those offers have been so restrictive that any number of youtubers have turned them down despite, one would assume, a large amount of money being on the table if they go along with it.
That last one in particular seems unlikely, but I do recall that the popular Primitive Technology channel went quiet for a year or more before abruptly coming back to life. Rumors swirled that he had been hired to turn the concept into a TV show, but the production company kept trying to change things and he eventually gave up and went back to doing it his way on youtube.
1 used here as shorthand for the more corporate and structured entertainment industry at large.
Are there any viable alternative sites you're aware of?
Turning your perfectly unnatural (yet impressively green!) lawn into an imperfectly wild(ish) piece of land requires a little time and energy at first. And then...a lot less mowing.
>A garden that’s planted purely by aesthetic decisions is like a car with no engine. It may look beautiful, the stereo works great, but you’re going to have to push it up the hill.
This is a really informative article by Popular Mechanics describing how to effectively landscape with native plants, as well as the long term benefits you will see as a result.