phodo

Imagine you are tasked with a step function (10x, 100x, 1000x) improvements in fire safety, containment on a large scale basis. What would you dream up? Cost is not a factor in this case. Imagine fire becomes the existential threat. Imagine that climate change continues to be getting worse, and root causes for addressing climate change are being handled in another project.

Yes, there are political, economic, societal, forest management and current technological other factors that can be instituted today for fire safety, or that are preventing better fire management, but I'm looking for the dream scenarios, not the former.

Some examples I can think of:

* Preventing Ember Propagation: - large shields made of nano insulating materials deployed from drones, blimps, balloons, helicopters that attract and extinguish embers. They would form "walls" around fire hotspots, and provide containment of embers. They would be net attractors of embers. Can be deployed at mega scale.

* Wind prevention - Wind control/ wind shaping - Ability to alter the direction of winds, even on temporary basis.

* Rain formation - Ability to trigger rain (I think they experimented something like that in the UAE), even on a temporary basis.

* Terraforming of fire trenches - Ability to "instantly" deploy or instantiate trenches and ravines around perimeter, and have material and technology within to extinguish. Imagine for example, ravines opening up on demand.

* Animal safety - I would be remiss to ignore this safety of living things, including animals. Maybe there is an attractor that attracts living creatures, and funnels them into massive temporarily holding areas.

etc.

(disclaimer: I am far from an expert on this topic)

As the title says, I have many PDFs - mostly scans via Scansnap - but also non-scans. These are sensitive in nature, e.g. bills, documents, etc. I would like a local-first AI solution that allows me to say things like: "show me all tax documents for August 2023" or "show my home title". Ideally it is Mac software that can access iCloud too, since that where I store it all. I would prefer to not do any tagging. I would like to optimize on recall over precision, so False Positives in the search results are ok. What are modern approaches to do this, without hacking one up on my own?