Monday, March 13, 2023

13: News Bulletin

The US Treasury, Federal Reserve, and the FDIC say all Silicon Valley Bank depositors will be “fully” protected, and their money will be available on March 13
HSBC plans to acquire Silicon Valley Bank UK for £1, citing “strategic sense for our business”; as of March 10, SVB UK had ~£5.5B loans and ~£6.7B deposits
Having perfected the art of using hype to move markets, VCs managed to hype their own rumors to collapse SVB, accidentally slaying a much loved accomplice
SVB draws support from 500+ VCs, including General Catalyst and Sequoia, while 5,000+ founders and CEOs sign a Y Combinator petition asking US Congress to act
Sources: long before its collapse, SVB remained technologically stagnant, including failing to integrate Stripe's tech and biometric authentication on mobile



CNN wins its first Oscar for Navalny, in the documentary feature film category, about Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and commissioned by CNN Films and HBO Max
New York shuts down Signature Bank as US regulators cite a “systemic risk exception” like for SVB, announcing all of Signature's depositors will be “made whole”
The closure of SVB, Silvergate, Silvergate Exchange Network, and Signature adds stress to a troubled crypto industry; fiat conversion costs may rise by 20%-40%
Signature closing means its real-time payment platform Signet can no longer serve crypto clients, a blow after SEN closed; BTC jumps ~7% and USDC regains peg
As AI explodes, humanity must accelerate its adaptation or reach a collective, enforceable decision to slow the development of these technologies

A YouTuber who went viral as a toddler says she resents her family for monetizing her childhood, as some influencer parents take their children off social media
Netflix wins six Oscars, including the Best International Feature Film for All Quiet on the Western Front and the Best Animated Feature Film for Pinocchio
A developer runs Meta's 13B LLaMA model, considered to be competitive with GPT-3, on his laptop, showing local language models are feasible on consumer hardware
Meta plans to block Canadians' ability to view or share written and broadcast news on Facebook and Instagram if the country passes its proposed Online News Act
A look at the unprecedented level of executive turnover at Apple, which lost 11 key people, most just below Senior Vice President, since the second half of 2022

Twitter is in decline and less stable under Elon Musk, echoing LiveJournal and Tumblr falling apart under new ownership that didn't understand their communities
Worried that cloud giants offer concentrated hacking targets, the US plans to regulate the security practices of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and others
An interview with Gowalla co-founder and CEO Josh Williams as he re-launches his location-based social networking app at SXSW, 14 years after its debut



Sunday, March 12, 2023

Rapid Reforesting With Drones

Rapid reforesting with drones is only one of many good options. The traditional method of getting people out there in large nubmers can be great for raising consciousness. Mass action can have other positive fallouts.

Drones can survery large tracts of land at a rapid clip. They can access slopes that might be hard or at least dangerous for humans.

The pods might have the seed and the nutrients. But the young trees also need some water. They might get eaten. But then those issues are also there if you plant the trees slowly.

DroneSeed uses swarms of drones to reseed forests after devastating wildfires “We’re a one-stop shop for reforestation,” said Grant Canary, CEO of DroneSeed. ...... Since the start of this year, 32,247 wildfires have burned over 3.3 million acres in the United States. .

THE MECHANISM OF DRONE SEEDING TECHNOLOGY: A REVIEW
Seed Plant Drone for Reforestation

End-to-End 3D Drone Mapping Software
https://earthly.org
https://sea-trees.org



Autonomous seed-shooting drones can plant 40,000 trees a day That's 25 times faster, at 80 percent the cost of conventional means.
This seed-firing drone can plant 40,000 trees a day The objective is to sow the seeds for 100 million trees by 2024



How this Aussie start-up is using drones to replant the world
Arbor Day: These drones can plant trees faster than we can In a bid to restore forests and fight climate change, Canadian startup Flash Forest aims to plant 1 billion trees by 2028, using drones and aerial mapping.

How to think creatively on command
AI's Next Big Takeover: Audiobooks
Making Deepfakes Gets Cheaper and Easier Thanks to A.I. Meme-makers and misinformation peddlers are embracing artificial intelligence tools to create convincing fake videos on the cheap.