If the electricity for a vertical farm is supplied by solar panels, the energy production takes up at least as much space as the vertical farm saves. Urban agriculture in vertical, indoor “farms” is on the rise. Electric lights allow the crops to be grown in layers above each other year-round. Proponents argue that growers can save a lot of agricultural land in this way. Additional advantages are that less energy is needed to transport food (most people live in a city) and that less water and pesticides are required. Which crops? The vertical farms that have been commercially active for several years all focus on the same crops. These are agricultural products with a high water content, such as...
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/02/vertical-farming-ecosystem-services.html
"It's the kind of technology challenge that NASA was built for."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/report-nasas-only-realistic-path-for-humans-on-mars-is-nuclear-propulsion/
Mozilla has always championed the open web. So why is it abandoning desktop web apps, the most powerful alternative to proprietary App Stores?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90597411/mozilla-firefox-no-ssb-pwa-support
I run a Matrix chat server for my friends, family, and friends-of-friends. I called it Gossip Land and whilst there are a few different apps you can use to join a Matrix server, Element is a good starting point. You can grab an account on the main Matrix server, meaning your username will be @username:matrix.org … Continue reading "How to find and join new Matrix chat rooms"
https://coxy.co/2133/how-to-find-and-join-new-matrix-chat-rooms/
A nice list of matrix servers, for reference
https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-world/
Congrats to the Rust team and Mozilla for this milestone! I wonder if Mozilla could further its mission better by being an incubator instead of trying to develop its own products. They could develop technologies and build them into sustainable foundations. I trust Mozilla to think about the right things when starting a new technology, but I'm not so sure about their expertise to develop end-user products.
The CDC ordered software that was meant to manage the vaccine rollout. Instead, it has been plagued by problems and abandoned by most states.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/30/1017086/cdc-44-million-vaccine-data-vams-problems/
For some people, it's apparently easier to manage your own browser than port some web forms from Flash to HTML.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/south-african-government-releases-its-own-browser-just-to-re-enable-flash-support/
Pinecone, a new startup from the folks who helped launch Amazon SageMaker, has built a vector database that generates data in a specialized format to help build machine learning applications faster, something that was previously only accessible to the largest organizations. Today the company came o…
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/27/pinecone-lands-10m-seed-for-purpose-built-machine-learning-database/
searchmysite.net is a bootstrapped side-project, so currently receives no external funding. This post contains a quick review of current and expected future running costs, along with a summary of the plan to pay these running costs.
https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/searchmysite.net-the-delicate-matter-of-the-bill/
http://len.falken.ink/web/perceived-relations-between-gopher-gemini-and-http.txt
The argument which is then made (and acknowledged by the FAQ) is: why not just use a subset of HTTP? It seems the answer boils down to enforcement. I don't see why this is a problem though, because people need to force themselves to use Gemini clients.
This is one of my biggest frustrations with Gemini. There's no reason all of the development that is going into it couldn't happen in the Web space. You could build your own tiny browser that work with a subset of the web. Other people could build really basic, text-only sites for your browser's users to visit, and they would still be available for anyone else using other browsers. Building Gemini servers/sites is just a lot of work to build another niche silo.