The crux of most supercomputers is the ability to operate on many pieces of data at once — something video cards are good at, too. Enter T1 (short for Torrent-1), a RISC-V vector inspired by the Cray X1 vector machine.
T1 has support for features, including lanes and chaining. The chip contains a version of the Rocket Core for scalar operations, but there’s no official support for using it. The project claims you could easily replace that core with any other RISC-V CPU IP.
We may have found the killer app for AI. Well, actually, British telecom provider O2 has. As The Guardian reports, they have an AI chatbot that acts like a 78-year-old grandmother and receives phone calls. Of course, since the grandmother—Daisy, by name—doesn’t get any real phone calls, anyone calling that number is probably a scammer. Daisy’s specialty? Keeping them tied up on the phone.
While this might just seem like a prank for revenge, it is actually more than that. Scamming people is a numbers game. Most people won’t bite. So, to be successful, scammers have to make lots of calls. Daisy can keep one tied up for around 40 minutes or more.
Continue reading “A Great Use For AI: Wasting Scammers Time!”
[Editor’s note: This video disappeared, but it has been archived here. We’re leaving the original links as-were in case they come back up.]
The aptly named [LightingOnDemand] has created a Lorentz cannon that can fire a lightning bolt. Honestly, as you can see in the video below, it looks like something from a bad 1950s science fiction movie. The inspiration was researchers using rockets trailing thin wires to attract lightning.
How does the tiny wire carry that much juice? It doesn’t, really. The wire vaporizes into plasma, and if the pulse is fast enough, the Lorentz force hold the plasma together. The rest is non-trivial high-voltage engineering.
While we aren’t heavy-duty woodworkers, we occasionally make some sawdust as part of a project, and we admire people who know how to make wood and do what they want. We were surprised when [Newton Makes] showed a wooden dowel that was quite long and was mostly hollow. The wall was thin, the hole was perfectly centered, and he claimed he did not use a drill to produce it. Check it out in the video below and see what you think.
We don’t want to spoil the surprise, but we can tell you that making something that long with a drill or even a drill press would be very difficult. The problem is that drills have runout — the bits are usually not totally centered, so the bit doesn’t spin like you think it does. Instead, it spins and rotates around a small circle.
The invention of the computer is a tricky thing to pinpoint. There were some early attempts that were not well known and some early attempts that were deliberately secret. [Alan Turing]’s efforts with Colossus were top secret for years, and while that work built on earlier efforts in Poland, [Turing] has as much claim to be the father of computers as anyone. But [Jack Copland] points out in a recent post that the famous computer scientist was also involved in another secret project: Delilah.
While [Turing] is best known for his work breaking ciphers at Bletchley Park, he also put time in on a second project about ten miles away in a secret electronics lab at Hanslope Park. There he worked with an assistant, [Donald Bayley] on Delilah — a portable system for encrypting voice transmissions.
If you watch the New Year’s festivities from New York, you know that they mark midnight with the dropping of a big, gaudy ball. You might assume this was just an arbitrary gimmick, but it turns out dropping balls has a place in the history of timekeeping, especially for ships at sea. The New York ball doesn’t work precisely the same, but it was clearly inspired by an ancient method of indicating the time.
Apparently, even the ancient Greeks used ball dropping to indicate time. But the modern ball got its start with [Captain Robert Wauchope], who installed one at Portsmouth, England, in 1829. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich got one in 1833, which you can see working in the video below.
It isn’t that hard to make an electronic rain gauge if you have a steady source of power or you don’t mind changing batteries often. But [Matthew Ford] offers a third option: a simple device with a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) module that can get a few years of a pair of AA batteries.
The approach has several advantages. Batteries make the device self-contained, and changing them infrequently is an obvious win. In addition, the BLE allows the device to be wireless and send data directly to an Android device. Thanks to a WH-SP-RG rain gauge, there’s not much to that part. The smart part is an nRF52832 module and some minor parts. The phone side uses an off-the-shelf Android app.
In a project like this, it is critical to have timers that really put the CPU to sleep. [Matthew] had to modify the Arduino libraries to allow the lp_timer objects to make it to an hour. Without the modifications, the timer can only reach 8.5 minutes. Sure, you could stack them, but that means taking a power hit multiple times an hour which would affect battery life.
Not the most complex project, but more complexity would mean lower battery life, so — as they say — less is more. We couldn’t help but think that with rechargeable batteries and a small solar panel, this could last a very long time.
LoRa, of course, is another choice. You can make 3D print a tipping bucket device, too.
