Lifeboat Foundation

It’s getting close to the time of year when we need to start carefully vetting projects here at Hackaday. After all, nobody likes to get punked by an early April Fool’s joke. But as silly as this outsized PC fan looks, it sure seems like a legit build, if a bit on the pointless side.

Then again, perhaps pointless is too harsh a word to use. This 500-mm fan is by [Angus] over at Maker’s Muse, and it represents a lot of design work to make it buildable, as well as workable and (mostly) safe. Using both CNC-cut MDF and printed parts, the fan is an embiggened replica of a normal-sized case fan. The fan’s frame had to be printed in four parts, which lock together with clever interlocking joints. Each of the nine blades locks into a central hub with sturdy-looking dovetails.

Continue reading “3D-Printed Parts Let You Assemble Your Own Biggest Fan” »

We promise, this isn’t a joke.

A Seattle-based startup called Cybercat developed an aftermarket kit that will convert your shiny new Tesla Cybertruck into a catamaran, and there’s even an option for a hydrofoil extension, a report from InsideEVs reveals.

Continue reading “Say hello to the Cybercat, a modded amphibious Cybertruck with 335 hp” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yn5wdQac7Xg

There’s an old joke about the Thermos bottle that keeps things hot and cold, so someone loaded it with soup and ice cream. That joke is a little close to home when it comes to FDM 3D printers.

You want to melt plastic, of course, or things won’t print, so you need heat. But if the plastic filament gets hot too early, it will get soft, expand, and jam. Heat crawling up the hot end like this is known as heat creep and there are a variety of ways that hot ends try to cope with the need to be hot and cold at the same time. Most hotends today are air-cooled with a small fan. But water-cooled hotends have been around for a while and are showing up more and more. Is it a gimmick? Are you using, planning to use, or have used (and abandoned) water cooling on your hot end?

PolyAI Ltd. is an ambitious startup that creates artificial voices to replace call center operators. Based in London, it has raised $28 million to bring AI-powered customer service to Metro Bank Plc, BP Plc and more. The idea is that instead of the nightmare of dialing random digits in a decision tree, you can instead ask to, say, book a table and a voice — with just the slightest inflection of its machine-learning origins — responds with great civility. That’s nice. But there was a brief moment two years ago when it wasn’t polite at all.

A software developer with PolyAI who was testing the system, asked about booking a table for himself and a Serbian friend. “Yes, we allow children at the restaurant,” the voice bot replied, according to PolyAI founder Nikola Mrksic. Seemingly out of nowhere, the bot was trying make an obnoxious joke about people from Serbia. When it was asked about bringing a Polish friend, it replied, “Yes, but you can’t bring your own booze.”

Full Story:

Continue reading “Did That Chatbot Just Make A Rude Joke?” »

Humor can be quite useful.

Let’s see how.

Suppose you are having a bad day (I realize this seems a bit dour and gloomy, but the venerated gallantry of well-placed humor will turn this around, wait and see).

Continue reading “AI That Tries To Be Funny Is Not Necessarily A Laughing Matter, Especially When Used By Self-Driving Cars” »

The concept and technology behind Neuralink are so far ahead of what we’ve grown accustomed to that it might as well be magic. Make no mistake Neuralink is happening and it’ll be here sooner than you think…

I remember the first time I heard about Neuralink. I thought it was a joke or something far off in the future. Then I heard Elon Musk was behind it and immediately knew that this bonkers technology would be with us a lot sooner than any of us imagined.

Continue reading “Is Neuralink Real? Yes — Human Trials Start In 2020/21…” »

Huge thanks to:
Blue Origin: https://www.youtube.com/c/blueoriginchannel/featured.
Everyday Astronaut: https://www.youtube.com/c/EverydayAstronaut.
ULA: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnrGPRKAg1PgvuSHrRIl3jg.
Lab Padre: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFwMITSkc1Fms6PoJoh1OUQ
NASA: https://www.youtube.com/c/NASA/featured.
Evan Karen: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDN1X8Fz1oAXX-rBcOWjzmg.
Ocean Cam: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF8IYFF60clbbznjvJ7qoTQ
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Source of thumb:
Blue Origin: https://twitter.com/blueorigin.
Alexander Svan: https://twitter.com/AlexSvanArt.
Izan Ramos: https://twitter.com/IzanRamos2002
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Our video content is referenced by video sources at these sites:
https://en.wikipedia.org.
https://twitter.com.
https://arstechnica.com.
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Raptor and BE4SpaceX and Blue Origin have been competing with each other for many space crafts and commercial contracts. We have also talked about their rivalry many times but today is all about their engines that fire up the massive rockets both the companies are developing. SpaceX, the leading space company has made many rocket engines since its launch in 2002. A few months ago, SpaceX completed its 100th Raptor Engine. This extraordinary milestone was achieved in just 29 months. Blue Origin’s rocket engines game started work on the BE-4 in 2011. Importantly, they said the “BE-4 would be ‘ready for flight’ by 2017″, but at this moment Blue Origin’s powerful BE-4 engine is more than four years late. The first flight test of the new engine is now expected no earlier than 2022 on the Vulcan rocket. This is a big problem and we need to talk about that.
So, How did Blue Origin’s BE-4 turn into a joke whereas SpaceX’s Raptor is the leading example?
Let’s find out:
Firstly, how has BE-4 gone through almost a decade of failure?
This was their first engine to combust liquid oxygen and liquified natural gas propellants. It was initially planned for the engine to be used exclusively on a Blue Origin proprietary launch vehicle New Glenn, the company’s first orbital rocket. However, it was announced in 2014 that the engine would also be used on the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle, the successor to the Atlas V launch vehicle. This was labeled “a stunner” choice. The company planned to begin full-scale engine testing in late 2016 and expected to complete the development of the engine in 2017.However, the first engine was not fully assembled until March 2017. Also, in March, United Launch Alliance indicated that the economic risk of the Blue Origin engine selection option had been retired, but that the technical risk on the project would remain until a series of engine firing tests were completed later in 2017. A test anomaly occurred on 13 May 2017 and Blue Origin reported that they lost a set of powerpack hardware.
SpaceX’s Raptor Engines completely HUMILIATED Blue Origin BE-4 Engines!!
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Camp Peavy, what do you think?

#OpenFembot Can a Robot Have a Sense of Humor? Can we build AI with a sense of humor? Thomas wants Simone to re-enact a scene from 2001 a Space Odyssey, but Simone wants to tell jokes.

Circa 2000

A 1940 paper by Gamow and Mario Schoenberg was the first in a subject we now call particle astrophysics. The two authors presciently speculated that neutrinos could play a role in the cooling of massive collapsing stars. They named the neutrino reaction the Urca process, after a well known Rio de Janeiro casino. This name might seem a strange choice, but not to Gamow, a legendary prankster who once submitted a paper to Nature in which he suggested that the Coriolis force might account for his observation that cows chewed clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

In the 1940s Gamow began to attack, with his colleague Ralph Alpher, the problem of the origin of the chemical elements. Their first paper on the subject appeared in a 1948 issue of the Physical Review. At the last minute Gamow, liking the sound of ‘alpha, beta, gamma’, added his old friend Hans Bethe as middle author in absentia (Bethe went along with the joke, but the editors did not). Gamow and Alpher, with Robert Herman, then pursued the idea of an extremely hot neutron-dominated environment. They envisioned the neutrons decaying into protons, electrons and anti-neutrinos and, when the universe had cooled sufficiently, the neutrons and protons assembling heavier nuclei. They even estimated the photon background that would be necessary to account for nuclear abundances, suggesting a residual five-degree background radiation.

Continue reading “The Big Bang and the genetic code” »