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The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind

https://gcaptain.com/the-return-of-sail-power-cargo-ships-are-turning-back-to-the-wind/
17•gumby•1h ago

Comments

fsckboy•22m ago
Growing up as I did in an old seafaring town, quite near Ahab's ports of call, I love the romance of the sea and I listen exclusively to sea chanties.

For low-value and bulk cargo, ships make sense, and modern computer-controlled sail trim and wind energy harvesting probably makes a great case. But high value cargo is largely today shipped by air. Nvidia wants money for its chips ASAP, too valuable to sit around non productively while being steamered. Maybe with surplus wind energy they could mine bitcoin while en route?

A sort of related topic, about 20 years ago during peak farm-to-table "buy local" fashion, the NY Times pointed out that lamb shipped from New Zealand (where is that on a map, I can't find it?) to New York City arrives with a lower carbon footprint than lamb delivered by trucks from nearby upstate NY farms, such are the economies of scale in shipping.

But now, blow me down me hearties, I look forward to dining on New Zealand lamb carried to my door by the winds of fortune!

3eb7988a1663•14m ago
If anyone else was confused why those pictures were of giant tubes and not canvas sails, you are not alone. Apparently those are some version of "Suction Sails". The vendor's website has a graphic that explains it, though it was fighting my ability to scroll.

https://bound4blue.com/esail/

jstanley•6m ago
Possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship ?

Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/introducing-cuda-rust-two-tracks-for-writing-gpu-kernels/
318•nonmaskable•15h ago•125 comments

Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres

https://rohanbansal.com/qorl
412•polyphilz•7h ago•84 comments

Xiaomi Mimo 2.6 live post-training dashboard

https://mimo.xiaomi.com/rl/
273•krackers•6h ago•67 comments

Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16338
147•matt_d•5h ago•20 comments

Backups Aren't Simple

https://filipovski.net/2026/09/16/backups-arent-simple.html
95•afilipovski•5h ago•43 comments

Small programming tricks

https://will-keleher.com/posts/small-programming-tricks-matter/
409•signa11•10h ago•185 comments

The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve

https://johnjwang.com/post/2026/09/15/engineering-behind-us-strategic-petroleum-reserve
116•johnjwang•1d ago•38 comments

Developing provably correct Rust code with Verus

https://www.amazon.science/blog/developing-provably-correct-rust-code-with-verus
24•Betelbuddy•2d ago•1 comments

OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

https://openspec.dev/
74•etoxin•3h ago•27 comments

The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind

https://gcaptain.com/the-return-of-sail-power-cargo-ships-are-turning-back-to-the-wind/
20•gumby•1h ago•3 comments

Performance Improvements in .NET 11

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvements-in-net-11/
185•soheilpro•1d ago•36 comments

Reversing Factorio's RNG

https://gegell.github.io/posts/factorio-rng/
148•jheitmann•4d ago•19 comments

HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?

https://harnesstax.github.io/
44•matt_d•4h ago•14 comments

Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/canda-eu-membership-australia-us-trade-b3050...
157•doener•3h ago•98 comments

Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries

https://untranslatedjp.substack.com/p/japans-book-scene-is-quietly-moving
124•herbertl•4d ago•46 comments

Reverse-engineered Jev-like model

https://github.com/vinnylarouge/jevlike
81•rochansinha•7h ago•12 comments

Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme
2096•arnemunthekaas•1d ago•240 comments

AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/aws-says-it-cant-restore-some-data-from-mideast-facilities-...
247•berkeleyjunk•1d ago•221 comments

OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/technology/openai-model-safety-guardrails.html
42•jbegley•1h ago•32 comments

Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"

https://evanhahn.com/posts/2026-09-13-programmers-dislike-reduce/
102•vinhnx•2d ago•164 comments

Mapsnap: Automated Georeferencing for Historic Sanborn Insurance Maps

https://www.danvk.org/2026/09/10/mapsnap.html
3•evakhoury•1d ago•0 comments

Why Does the Universe Expand?

https://cosmicave.org/2026/09/15/why-does-the-universe-expand/
35•the__alchemist•6h ago•23 comments

Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14858
181•bananaflag•12h ago•49 comments

Anatomy of a Texture

https://agentlien.github.io/texture/
79•Agentlien•11h ago•14 comments

Accurate Models of AMD Matrix Cores

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14845
63•matt_d•7h ago•7 comments

The DeepMind Institute

https://institute.deepmind.com/
152•vertigoruntime•11h ago•45 comments

Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

https://www.wired.com/story/hackers-flock-camera-data-shows-how-system-works/
474•driverdan•13h ago•219 comments

I replaced my brown-noise browser tab with a menu bar app

https://oldmanrahul.com/2026/09/14/hush/
24•oldmanrahul•13h ago•10 comments

Training Text-to-Image Models 3.6× Faster

https://www.linum.ai/field-notes/jit-ddt
36•schopra909•9h ago•8 comments

WalShadow: Sub-second Postgres replication to ClickHouse from physical WAL

https://clickhouse.com/blog/introducing-walshadow
45•spathak•5d ago•5 comments