Czech Republic Provides T-72 Tanks and Armoured Infantry Vehicles to Ukraine
April 6th, 2022Via: Daily Mail:
The Czech Republic has become the first NATO country to send tanks to Ukraine, providing T-72 and armoured infantry vehicles following President Zelensky’s plea for help.
Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, howitzer artillery pieces and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Slovakia where they are expected to head on to Ukraine, footage run by public broadcaster Czech Television showed.
Manure Supplies Run Short as Fertilizer Prices Soar
April 6th, 2022Just pull up to a Biden press conference and haul off as much as you need.
Via: Reuters:
For nearly two decades, Abe Sandquist has used every marketing tool he can think of to sell the back end of a cow. Poop, after all, needs to go somewhere. The Midwestern entrepreneur has worked hard to woo farmers on its benefits for their crops.
Now, facing a global shortage of commercial fertilizers made worse by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, more U.S. growers are knocking on his door. Sandquist says they’re clamoring to get their hands on something Old MacDonald would swear by: old-fashioned animal manure.
“I wish we had more to sell,” said Sandquist, founder of Natural Fertilizer Services Inc, a nutrient management firm based in the U.S. state of Iowa. “But there’s not enough to meet the demand.”
NVIDIA Instant NeRF: 2D Photos to 3D Scenes in the ‘Blink of an AI’
April 5th, 2022Via: NVIDIA:
When the first instant photo was taken 75 years ago with a Polaroid camera, it was groundbreaking to rapidly capture the 3D world in a realistic 2D image. Today, AI researchers are working on the opposite: turning a collection of still images into a digital 3D scene in a matter of seconds.
Known as inverse rendering, the process uses AI to approximate how light behaves in the real world, enabling researchers to reconstruct a 3D scene from a handful of 2D images taken at different angles. The NVIDIA Research team has developed an approach that accomplishes this task almost instantly — making it one of the first models of its kind to combine ultra-fast neural network training and rapid rendering.
NVIDIA applied this approach to a popular new technology called neural radiance fields, or NeRF. The result, dubbed Instant NeRF, is the fastest NeRF technique to date, achieving more than 1,000x speedups in some cases. The model requires just seconds to train on a few dozen still photos — plus data on the camera angles they were taken from — and can then render the resulting 3D scene within tens of milliseconds.
“If traditional 3D representations like polygonal meshes are akin to vector images, NeRFs are like bitmap images: they densely capture the way light radiates from an object or within a scene,” says David Luebke, vice president for graphics research at NVIDIA. “In that sense, Instant NeRF could be as important to 3D as digital cameras and JPEG compression have been to 2D photography — vastly increasing the speed, ease and reach of 3D capture and sharing.”
The Next Google
April 5th, 2022Via: DKB:
DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google.
The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. We need new thinking to create something much better than what came before.
In the last few years, different groups of people came to the same conclusion, and started working on the next generation of search engines.
For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads are not an option. But that’s where the commonalities end. Beyond that, they’ve all taken the idea of a search engine in very different directions.
Starlink: Roaming = True
April 5th, 2022Via: MikeOnSpace:
Drone Flight Through Tesla Gigafactory Berlin
April 5th, 2022Via: Tesla:
Pentagon Releases 1,500 Pages of Secret Documents About UFO Program After Four Year Battle
April 5th, 2022Via: The Sun:
THE PENTAGON has released 1,574 pages of real-life X-Files related to its secretive UFO programme after a four-year battle.
The Sun Online first requested a copy of all “files, reports or video files” related to the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) on December 18, 2017.
We filed an a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) just days after the existence of the shadowy programme had been made public.
Finally after more than four years, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) released more than 1,500 documents.
U.S. Stops Russian Bond Payments, Raising Risk of Default
April 5th, 2022Via: Reuters:
The United States stopped the Russian government on Monday from paying holders of its sovereign debt more than $600 million from reserves held at U.S. banks, in a move meant to ratchet up pressure on Moscow and eat into its holdings of dollars.
Under sanctions put in place after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, foreign currency reserves held by the Russian central bank at U.S. financial institutions were frozen.
But the Treasury Department had been allowing the Russian government to use those funds to make coupon payments on dollar-denominated sovereign debt on a case-by-case basis.
On Monday, as the largest of the payments came due, including a $552.4 million principal payment on a maturing bond, the U.S. government decided to cut off Moscow’s access to the frozen funds, according to a U.S. Treasury spokesperson.
Elon Musk Appointed To Twitter Board Of Directors; Vows To Make “Significant Improvements To Twitter”
April 5th, 2022Hmm… I doubt it, but who knows. It’s hard to imagine that Twitter can get any worse.
Via: ZeroHedge:
There was uncharacteristic radiosilence out of Twitter all day Monday following the news that Elon Musk has accumulated a 9.9% “passive” stake in the stock, with the clear intention of making substantive content changes in what has become a platform rules by snowflakes for snowflakes. Well, moments ago that silence was broken when TWTR dropped an 8K, in which it announced that the company will appoint Musk to the Company’s Board of Directors.
Transhumanism, Biofascism Are Tools of the Technological Elite
April 4th, 2022Via: The Defender:
“What scientists and engineers are telling us more and more is that if we only have enough data and enough computing power, we can create algorithms that understand humans and their feelings much better than humans can understand themselves.”
