Lifeboat Foundation

Germany’s COVID infections are now higher than ever. And the numbers keep growing.

That’s despite a relatively high vaccination rate. Almost 70 percent of Germans are fully vaccinated against the virus.

Continue reading “COVID-19 infections are rising dramatically in Germany | COVID-19 Special” »

Brent Oster is the President and CEO of ORBAI. He has 28 years experience in 3D computer graphics, animation, simulation, and AI with Bioware, Electronic Arts, Autodesk, and NVIDIA. He was the co-founder Bioware and Check Six, and he has completed the Stanford Continuing Studies curriculum of classes in entrepreneurial business, along with his degrees in Aerospace Engineering at University of Toronto and Scientific Computing at UC Santa Barbara.

As a Sr Solution Architect at NVIDIA, Brent helped Fortune 500 companies (and startups) looking to adopt ‘AI’, but consistently found that DL architectures tools fell far short of their expectations for ‘AI’. Brent started ORBAI to develop something better for them.

In 2,020 several powerful AI programs were developed which have the potential to alter many aspects of our everyday life. What are these programs, and who is behind them?

Discord link: https://discord.gg/bQrBVb6

Continue reading “Progress Towards an Artificial General Intelligence” »

Last week, TechCrunch ran my TC-1 about Bowery Farming. What began as a piece about a heartily financed New York startup ballooned into an exploration about an emerging field with a rich and fascinating history. I sought to answer some big questions about the efficacy, profitability and sustainability of vertical farming. I would be lying if I told you that I emerged from the other side with satisfactory answers — no doubt all of the above will be clear over time.

I did, however, get the opportunity to talk to several fascinating folks with myriad views on all of the above. One of the folks I kept coming back to was Dickson Despommier — widely regarded as the godfather of vertical farming. It was in his Columbia University courses that many of the fundamental concepts around vertical farming were developed over a number of years.

Billionaire Elon Musk on Saturday asked his Twitter followers to decide whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock, promising to “abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.”

“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock,” the electric car maker’s CEO said. He did not directly specify where that 10% would go.

This isn’t the first time Musk has taken aim at proposals in Washington that would tax billionaires’ net worth gains. Under current US tax law, assets like stocks are taxed only when they’re sold — what’s called a capital gain. But the richest of the rich in America probably aren’t selling off their massive stock portfolios; instead, their main form of income is the value that those assets accrue, or unrealized gains.

This beer is truly out of this world.

A DDoS attack essentially tries to down a website or internet service by bombarding the system with a flood of data traffic. To do so, the hacker can sometimes harness botnets, or armies of malware-infected computers, to generate the traffic.

In this case, the attack originated from “70,000 sources” based in countries across Asia and the US, Microsoft says. Whether the hacker used a botnet was left unsaid. But the UDP protocol was exploited in what’s known as a “reflection attack” to amplify the data traffic to 2.4Tbps.

Fujitsu and the Riken research institute ended up packing 152,064 A64FX chips into what would become the Fugaku system, which is now the world’s fastest supercomputer.

Gallium arsenide (GaAs) has long been touted as the best material for making high-efficiency solar cells because of its extraordinary light absorption and electrical characteristics. It has most notably been put to use in space solar panels.

These GaAs solar cells, however, are extremely pricey to produce resulting in a demand for methods that cut down on the material usage. That’s where nanowire structures come in. These elements can potentially enhance solar cell efficiency compared to standard planar solar cells while utilizing less material.

By using GaAs in the nanowire structures, the team of researchers has found a new way to make an ultrahigh power-per-weight ratio solar cell that is more than 10 times more efficient than any other solar cell.