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“The Story of Mel” is a legendary USENET story of “Mel”, a Real Programmer from back in the day, performing a truly impressive piece of optimization; a “paean to seat-of-the-pants machine coding”, as Micheal puts it. This site is a little shrine to Mel’s life and history from a MeFi user. (Via Meehawl)
(tags: mefi hacks mel usenet history computing-history via:meehawl machine-code)
Why the United States should prioritize autonomous demining technology
Excellent “AI for good” idea from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
Investments in and development of technologies for autonomous demining operations, post war, are long overdue and consistent with the White House’s push for a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which vows to use autonomy for the public good. Alas, while the Defense Department has pursued autonomous systems for the battlefield and the unincentivized private sector has focused on producing dancing robotic dogs, efforts to develop autonomous demining technology have stagnated. The United States should provide funding to energize those efforts, regardless of what decision is made in regard to sending cluster bombs to Kiev.