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Solar-Charging Backpacks Are Helping Children To Read After Dark

3 months 2 weeks ago
A Tanzanian entrepreneur is transforming cement bags into solar-powered backpacks, helping students study after dark in areas without electricity. Innocent James's company, Soma Bags, sold 36,000 solar backpacks across Africa last year, with prices ranging from 12,000 to 22,500 Tanzanian shillings ($4-8), according to CNN. The innovation comes as 600 million Africans lack electricity access. In Tanzania, fewer than half of mainland households have power, forcing families to rely on expensive kerosene lamps. The backpacks, manufactured in James's Bulale factory employing 65 staff, feature flexible solar panels that charge during students' walks to school. One day of sunlight provides six to eight hours of reading light, making them more cost-effective than kerosene lamps commonly used in Tanzania, where fewer than half of mainland households have electricity access.

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Exploring LXC Containerization for Ubuntu Servers

3 months 2 weeks ago
by George Whittaker Introduction

In the world of modern software development and IT infrastructure, containerization has emerged as a transformative technology. It offers a way to package software into isolated environments, making it easier to deploy, scale, and manage applications. While Docker is the most popular containerization technology, there are other solutions that cater to different use cases and needs. One such solution is LXC (Linux Containers), which offers a more full-fledged approach to containerization, akin to lightweight virtual machines.

In this guide, we will explore how LXC works, how to set it up on Ubuntu Server, and how to leverage it for efficient and scalable containerization. Whether you're looking to run multiple isolated environments on a single server, or you want a lightweight alternative to virtualization, LXC can meet your needs. By the end of this article, you will have the knowledge to deploy, manage, and secure LXC containers on your Ubuntu Server setup.

What is LXC? What are Linux Containers (LXC)?

LXC (Linux Containers) is an operating system-level virtualization technology that allows you to run multiple isolated Linux systems (containers) on a single host. Unlike traditional virtualization, which relies on hypervisors to emulate physical hardware for each virtual machine (VM), LXC containers share the host’s kernel while maintaining process and file system isolation. This makes LXC containers lightweight and efficient, with less overhead compared to VMs.

LXC offers a more traditional way of containerizing entire operating systems, as opposed to application-focused containerization solutions like Docker. While Docker focuses on packaging individual applications and their dependencies into containers, LXC provides a more complete environment that behaves like a full operating system.

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George Whittaker

AI Mistakes Are Very Different from Human Mistakes

3 months 2 weeks ago
Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders, writing in a post: Someone who makes calculus mistakes is also likely to respond "I don't know" to calculus-related questions. To the extent that AI systems make these human-like mistakes, we can bring all of our mistake-correcting systems to bear on their output. But the current crop of AI models -- particularly LLMs -- make mistakes differently. AI errors come at seemingly random times, without any clustering around particular topics. LLM mistakes tend to be more evenly distributed through the knowledge space. A model might be equally likely to make a mistake on a calculus question as it is to propose that cabbages eat goats. And AI mistakes aren't accompanied by ignorance. A LLM will be just as confident when saying something completely wrong -- and obviously so, to a human -- as it will be when saying something true. The seemingly random inconsistency of LLMs makes it hard to trust their reasoning in complex, multi-step problems. If you want to use an AI model to help with a business problem, it's not enough to see that it understands what factors make a product profitable; you need to be sure it won't forget what money is. [...] Humans may occasionally make seemingly random, incomprehensible, and inconsistent mistakes, but such occurrences are rare and often indicative of more serious problems. We also tend not to put people exhibiting these behaviors in decision-making positions. Likewise, we should confine AI decision-making systems to applications that suit their actual abilities -- while keeping the potential ramifications of their mistakes firmly in mind.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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