This one and Sid Meier's "Memoir!" are two of my favourite software dev stories. Both are quick easy reads / and from the same era... code-nostalgia and hard- business mixed together.
“These are meticulous, unequivocal measurements, yet made on a device of incredibly modest scale by traditional fusion standards,” describes Ben Levitt, VP of R&D at Zap. “We’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us, but our performance to date has advanced to a point that we can now stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the world’s pre-eminent fusion devices, but with great efficiency, and at a fraction of the complexity and cost.”
“Over many decades of controlled-fusion research, only a handful of fusion concepts have reached 1-keV electron temperature,” notes Scott Hsu, Lead Fusion Coordinator at the DOE and former ARPA-E Program Director. “What this team has achieved here is remarkable and reinforces ARPA-E’s efforts to accelerate the development of commercial fusion energy.”
They're clearly doing something concrete and good and less ephemeral than most charities, so I say go for it. I did for ages and they never spammed me. Only stopped because my payment details changed and I never quite got around to updating them.
My only complaint is their use of kg instead of tonnes to let them use big sounding numbers. You don't need to do that guys. It's lame. We can see the photos. It's clearly worthwhile even if it is only a small part of global waste.
I like the work they're doing, they seem well managed, the guy who founded the project, Boyan Slat, I follow on twitter and he seems very competent. I did some research into this and various other orgs when YouTube focused on Ocean cleanup a few years ago, and was impressed by ocean cleanup. Donations are also tax deductible in a few countries.
I found a vietnamese blogpost [0] seeming to say he was active until 1975? But also mentioned at the end:
"Then the boy seemed silently disappeared from the Saigon newspaper village.
No one knows the fate of What about the special reporter later"
There's also a comment saying that someone worked with him in San Francisco later on.
"That young reporter, also known as Hole M Cuong. Me and Cuong, worked in a San Francisco Wash Lab in 1977 until 1981, when I On vacation, I still work there and now I have the pleasure of mastering the Pentax-shaped machine that Cuong used to take pictures of at that time."
Perhaps someone more familiar with Vietnamese names could work out if he pops up somewhere else.
Thanks for this link! That 2016 comment appears to say he was known alternatively as Lỗ Mạnh Hùng or Lỗ m Cường. "Cường and I worked in a photo developing lab in San Francisco (image processing lab) … Cuong still works there". I'm not sure how many photo labs were still operating in the city in 2016 but Google Maps is listing only 20 there now. If he was 12 in 1968 he would be around 68 today.
"Hung eventually left Vietnam and ran his own photo shop in San Francisco, where he met former AP photographer Horst Faas in 1998, according to the San Francisco Examiner. 'They paid me $10 a picture,' Hung told Faas. 'It could support my whole family for one month.' A selection of Hung’s photos follows."
Amazing find. That mention of the Examiner led to the June 22, 1998 edition, front page of the Style section by Vietnam veteran Edvins Beitiks ("Ed"), "'Requiem' for A War, An Era":
"And at each exhibit, Faas has been approached by people with their own memories, people wanting to talk. In San Francisco, he was surprised by Jimmy Lo Hung, who took pictures for AP as a 12-year-old during the Tet offensive and now runs his own photo shop on Ninth Street.
Hung had brought a picture of himself in a helmet with PRESS across the front, and a laminated story headlined 'Boy, 12, in Dangerous Jobs'. 'They paid me $10 a picture,' he said, 'and that was big money in Vietnam. It could support my whole family for one month.'
Hung lost all his pictures and negatives when the North Vietnamese invaded the South. 'I only had a few minutes to escape,' he said, remembering that 'I was pulled aboard a helicopter filled with soldiers. They held my leg while it took off. So many soldiers trying to get on… some didn't, some dropped down.'
Faas, sitting beside Hung, said 'This kid, I didn't even know he was alive. I'm happy, really happy, to see him.'"
I wonder if the lab might have been Newtec Color Lab Inc at 122 9th St which appears to have been run by a Jimmy H Lo (Jun 1956–Jan 2018). There's also a tribute to Horst Faas at the Vietnam Reporting Project here: https://vietnamreportingproject.org/2012/05/remembering-hoor...
The article isn't saying that he was active until 1975, but only indicating that it is talking about history that precedes the surrender of South Vietnam to the North in 1975.
he probably left the camera behind for a steady job as soon as circumstances allowed for it. that would be quite in line with vietnamese work ethics. maybe even got a degree given that his father was also a scholar and switched to photography only for the sake of making a living in times when his academic education was not in demand. he also probably suffered from traumatizing experiences.
I would be interested in an answer here!
Many years ago (when LLMs were mere RNNs), I tried to do so electronic music generation[1]... the aim was to eventually try to do exactly this. But not a project I followed through on...
At the risk of self-promotion, this is my take on Borges and AI... which is a song/video made by AI (jukebox and various previous-generation image generators), and based on Borges' fantastic essay "A New refutation of time."
The authors' own intention is to "understand.. LLMs and their
connection to AI through the imagery of Jorge Luis Borges, a master of 20th century literature, forerunner of magical realism, and precursor to postmodern literature." In that spirit, I throw my hat into the ring too!
This, as I understand it, being the closest approach to our orbit, not our atmosphere or so. To put this in perspective, the Earth is some 6.4 Mm in radius, so that's 40-6.4 = 33.6 Mm above the surface.
MOID being minimum orbit intersection distance, for anyone else wondering. Sounded like someID (identifier) to me, was wondering why that value was given in AU
