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Silicon Valley loves to disrupt and innovation – mostly to make a lot of money. One of the more innovative ideas I’ve seen involves changing things for those with disabilities. Counter to modern thinking that illnesses and limitations are purely something to be blotted out, some brave innovative folks are tackling the problem and making everyone’s lives better. Not just those with disabilities.

One example is the success of OXO/Good Grips kitchen utensils that were created when his wife’s arthritis made them hurt her hands. Now they are popular with everyone for being easier to use.

Another is a set of restaurants called Dans Le Noir. I went to the one in Paris and have recommended it widely. At Dans, people have dinner completely in the dark – and the servers are blind people who are completely at home in the dark. They even teach you some of the techniques blind people use for dining.

Japan just recently had this restaurants called Dawn Avatar Robot Cafe (〒103-0023 Tokyo, Chuo City, Nihonbashihonchō, 3-chōme−8−3, Nihonbashi Lifescience Building, ３ １). The servers are all robots – but they are all controlled by people who have disabilities (often ALS). It allows them to have jobs, talk, and interact with people even if they cannot leave their homes.

These kinds of innovations are not just great for those with disabilities – but as in the case of OXO – improve the lives of able-bodied people as well.

This is why there is no such thing as a life is not worth living. We simply must value it higher than productivity and inconvenience.

Artificial intelligence has already been being used for chip design. During it’s first integrations, it generated a lot of acadmic controversy. Despite the early pushback from the entrenched chip design players, new developments are showing that AI silicon development is here to stay by dramatically speeding up design and creating better chips than traditional methods.

Most recently, we see that AI is revolutionizing wireless chip design. It is dramatically reducing costs by cutting design times from weeks to hours, and it’s also generating unconventional designs that are faster and have unexpected circuitry patterns that are significantly outperforming traditional chip designs. Even the researchers aren’t sure how they are so much better.

We are coming up with structures that are complex and look random shaped and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance. Humans cannot really understand them, but they can work better.

lead researcher Kaushik Sengupta

Circuits are engineered to be more energy-efficient or operable across wider frequencies. Conventional algorithms sometimes take weeks to solve the complex and opposing structures. Some combinations do not have traditional solutions. Yet, new AI methods are solving these structures in minutes – and even solving problems that have previously been impossible.

This work presents a compelling vision of the future. AI powers not just the acceleration of time-consuming electromagnetic simulations, but also enables exploration into a hitherto unexplored design space and delivers stunning high-performance devices that run counter to the usual rules of thumb and human intuition.

Uday Khankhoje – associate professor of electrical engineering at IIT Madras

They also have discovered that AI started generating complex electromagnetic structures that are co-designed with circuits to create broadband amplifiers in a unique discovery. Beyond discovering new patterns, these tools are also improving designer’s lives by removing the more mudane, utilitarian work.

The researchers note that like many AI algorithms – they aren’t perfect. The AI often hallucinates faulty elements that don’t work are very inefficient and require human intervention. But the time saved far outweighs the cost.

Articles:

• Deep-learning enabled generalized inverse design of multi-port radio-frequency and sub-terahertz passives and integrated circuits” by Emir Ali Karahan, Zheng Liu, Aggraj Gupta, Zijian Shao, Jonathan Zhou, Uday Khankhoje and Kaushik Sengupta, 30 December 2024, Nature Communications.
  DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-54178-1
• https://scitechdaily.com/ais-strange-chip-designs-are-faster-smarter-and-game-changing/

Oasis is a free to play online Minecraft clone built by an Israeli AI startup called Decart in collaboration with Etched – a company that designs custom silicon to demonstrate hardware optimized transformer-based AI algorithms.

Minecraft clones aren’t anything new, but Oasis is. That’s because nobody programmed it. It is completely AI generated rendering – just like the realtime AI generated Doom clone I wrote about earlier. Everything is generated via realtime AI rendering via transformer based network trained to generate minecraft-like output. No gameplay was programmed.

Like a lot of generative AI, it has a tendency to hallucinate when you look at things you have looked at before (textures will change, blur, etc). It certainly won’t be replacing minecraft anytime soon, but these kinds of projects show how one might use AI to do proof-of-concept work.

Go play it for free yourself at oasis.decart.ai

Links:

• https://oasis.decart.ai/welcome
• https://www.wired.com/story/first-entirely-ai-generated-video-game-weird-and-fun/

Misha Charoudin is an excellent driver who drives people’s cars crazy fast around the Nurburgring. This had me smiling the whole time because he isn’t driving a Porche, M5, or Lamborghini – he’s driving an absolute boat – a 1970’s Cadillac Coupe DeVille. They even lose a hubcap on a tight turn just like in an old Hollywood chase scene.

The author of this article uses various methods to find hidden cameras in a hotel/AirBnB rooms and tests the effectiveness. Methods used:

• Naked eye: 1 of 27
• Mobile phone app: 3 of 27
• RF detector: 0 of 27
• Cheap $50 lens detector: 2 of 27
• Advanced $400 lens detector: 11 of 27

In short, they were all not very good and techniques and searching styles mattered.

Article:

• https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/22/how-to-find-a-hidden-camera-in-a-hotel-room-or-house-we-tested-5-ways-.html

Two buddies go to a truck pull to see if electric beats diesel. The diesel pulled 251 feet and the dual-motor cybertruck didn’t do too bad at 207 feet. The cybertruck definitely didn’t with as a crowd favorite though.

That’s not too bad considering the cybertruck is one of the first commercial electric vehicles and things are likely to get better.

People should pay attention though; because electric motors can potentially put out more torque than an internal combusion engine could ever hope to generate. That’s probably why the diesel engines in a locomotive don’t turn the wheels – they turn a generator that feeds the electric motors that turn the wheels. It makes me wonder if you could Frankenstein locomotive electric motors to a vehicle and see what is possible.

Scientists may have accidentally stumbled upon a potential new treatment for the most common form of baldness. It even works as well as commercial hair loss treatments.

It all started with research on deoxyribose sugar that naturally occurs in the body and helps form DNA.

While studying how these sugars heal the wounds of mice when applied topically, scientists at the University of Sheffield and COMSATS University in Pakistan noticed that the fur around the lesions was growing back faster than in untreated mice.

Together, the team designed a biodegradable, non-toxic gel made from deoxyribose, and applied the treatment to mouse models of male-pattern baldness.

Minoxidil was also tested on balding mouse models, and some of the animals received a dose of both sugar gel and minoxidil for good measure.

Compared to mice that received a gel without any medicine, those that received a gel with deoxyribose sugar began to sprout new hair follicles.

Both minoxidil and the sugar gel promoted 80 to 90 percent hair regrowth in mice with male pattern baldness. Combining the treatments, however, did not make much more of a difference.

Articles

• https://www.sciencealert.com/surprise-hair-loss-breakthrough-sugar-gel-triggers-robust-regrowth

He doesn’t have the energy and runs out of gas at the end of lines (Project Pabst in Portland 2024), but pretty good for a 68 year old.

He’s definitely holding out better than others his age that are touring.

Despite the claims to the contrary, protests, violence, and protest damage is still very much alive in Portland in 2024. Protesters showed up at a local AI meetup in August I attended. In all cases, people trying to get around/past roadblocks are threatened with violence and physical assault.

In January 1/2 – protesters blocked roadways to the Portland Airport causing people to miss flights.

In February and March, protesters blocked the I-405 Fremont bridge and numerous other interstates and major city bridges. Protesters threatened violence to other drivers if they tried to drive around them.

In May, Protesters did almost $1 million in damages to local Portland State Library after a week of protester occupation and mass destruction. It resulted in a mob that attacked police when they cleared the building and arrested protesters still in the building. Many of whom were not Oregon residents.

Far from indicating a reduction in protest violence, city buildings in 2024 are now installing new steel shutters on government buildings.

Articles:

• https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/protests/protesters-block-entrance-portland-airport/283-d7d45930-735d-4e2f-b97f-05cf326d4e42
• https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2024/05/walk-through-of-portland-state-universitys-library-after-three-night-occupation-reveals-damage-its-ugly.html
• https://www.koin.com/local/multnomah-county/free-palestine-protest-blocks-i-405-traffic-at-fremont-bridge/
• https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/us/portland-state-university-library-protest.html