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12 votes
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Jet Propulsion Laboratory-led team use Iceland as a stand-in for Venus to test radar technologies that will help uncover the planet's ground truth
6 votes -
In Spain, dozens of girls are reporting AI-generated nude photos of them being circulated at school: ‘My heart skipped a beat’
68 votes -
I just had a weird experience, one possible interpretation of which is that my iphone just read my mind
So I just finished Mission Impossible, latest movie, in the theater. I tend to avoid Mr. Cruise because of him personally, but darn it if he's not a decent actor and usually has a top notch crew....
So I just finished Mission Impossible, latest movie, in the theater. I tend to avoid Mr. Cruise because of him personally, but darn it if he's not a decent actor and usually has a top notch crew. Also, Simon Pegg filters some of the evil. I give it a B+. What's relevant to my tale is that the movie features an evil, possibly sentient, very pervasive AI that is very accurate in its predictions.
After the movie ended, I brought forth my iphone to look at while the credits rolled to a post-credits scene that never came. I glanced at a newsletter, which had "Pickleball" in the subject line. Now, I happen to think that pickleball is a sign of the apocalypse, and that the 1000 years of satan's rule will look a lot like Wall-E (who is obviously Christ). I was mulling posting a quip about that, and thought further that the quippiest way to do that was to talk about life on the ship in Wall-E. So I tapped the search bar and started typing "what is the name of the ship . . ." and, this where it gets freaky, before I could continue to tap out "in Wall-E" Siri suggested the fandom page for Wall-E.
Bzzz-wut? I checked my histories, I have not mentioned Wall-E or pickleball anywhere, to my recollection, I have never even mentioned it to anyone (I have probably complained abut pickleball in a general sense). As far as I know, the concept has only ever lived in my mind.
Now, I don't, as I sit here in this moment, believe that Siri can detect my thoughts. But it is a downright Fortean confluence of seemingly unconnected mental activity and external reality. I found (in my very short search) only one other mention, at hipinions.com of pickleball being related to Wall-e. If it is not merely coincidence, and not AI reading my mind, it is very peculiar and particularly well timed and specific predictive association by the AI, and one which I am certainly not entirely comfortable with, perhaps the first time I have ever had such a hmmm moment with technology.
It might be interesting what happens next, now that I have entered this datum into the AI's processing materials. Watch this space for further developments.
P.S. the ship in Wall-E is named "Axiom."
8 votes -
UK's Online Safety Bill: Crackdown on harmful social media content agreed
27 votes -
A publisher published a book on educational technology generated by AI. Authors of a cited source found plagiarism
10 votes -
How to regulate AI? Bioethicist David Magnus on medicine’s critical moment
4 votes -
‘We put in air conditionin’, stayed year-round, and ruined America’
13 votes -
The rise of surge pricing: ‘It will eventually be everywhere’
33 votes -
Tesla reinvents carmaking with quiet breakthrough
25 votes -
Plan for £100m UK underwater living research facility move forward
12 votes -
How a single flight plan with unexpected waypoint data caused a meltdown of the UK's air traffic control system
24 votes -
Robots are pouring drinks in Vegas. As AI grows, the city's workers brace for change
19 votes -
Swedish schools minister Lotta Edholm moves students off digital devices and on to books and handwriting, with teachers and experts debating the pros and cons
20 votes -
Could a language learning model talk to whales? Or a human who speaks a language besides English?
The New Yorker has a provocative article asking the question "Can We Talk To Whales?" It boils down to utilizing language learning models to process a dataset of sperm whale clicks, their codas,...
The New Yorker has a provocative article asking the question "Can We Talk To Whales?" It boils down to utilizing language learning models to process a dataset of sperm whale clicks, their codas, and crossing one's fingers to see if "ClickGPT" can produce actual sperm whale language.
Which makes me wonder if a language learning model been given a library of Chinese sounds and ideograms, without context, then communicated in workable Chinese?
Using a language learning model to learn to speak to whales is an interesting idea, but I'm thinking any LLM assigned the task will wind up chunking out a word salad or something akin to Prisencolinensinainciusol. I'd like to learn more.
24 votes -
Texas paid bitcoin miner more than $31 million to cut energy usage during heat wave
41 votes -
Tech billionaires launch California ‘utopia’ website
55 votes -
A portrait of Tenochtitlan
31 votes -
Blockchains are entering their “broadband era”
7 votes -
NarxCare score may influence who can get or prescribe pain medication
16 votes -
Should AI be permitted in college classrooms? Four scholars weigh in.
13 votes -
The endless battle to banish the world’s most notorious stalker website Kiwi Farms
22 votes -
As a young industrial designer, Patricia Moore undertook a radical experiment in aging. Her discoveries reshaped the built world.
26 votes -
France’s browser-based website blocking proposal will set a disastrous precedent for the open internet
49 votes -
Machines can't always take the heat: How heat waves threaten everything from cars to computers
15 votes -
The wallet event: Crypto startup company tells bankruptcy judge it has lost the password to a 38.9 million dollar physical crypto wallet
17 votes -
Ørsted shares fall 25% after it reveals troubles in US business – £7bn wiped off value of world's largest offshore wind company over possible £1.8bn write-down
8 votes -
Finnish citizens traveling with Finnair between Helsinki Airport and the UK will be able to trial Digital Travel Credentials, using them to leave and enter Finland
8 votes -
Why Silicon Valley is here. One radio engineer had a plan. And it worked.
3 votes -
Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot US fatality
35 votes -
The indigenous groups fighting against the quest for 'white gold' in South America
11 votes -
A cargo ship equipped with rigid sails, each the height of a ten-story building, has departed on its inaugural journey
62 votes -
My secret to dating in San Francisco is a spreadsheet
24 votes -
How a brain implant and AI gave a woman with paralysis her voice back
15 votes -
The world's largest floating wind farm is now officially open in Norway – and helping to power North Sea oil operations
19 votes -
Permanent US injunction and $650,000 civil penalty imposed on Experian Consumer Services for allegedly sending commercial emails
15 votes -
Carbon removal should be a public good
30 votes -
Lunar Codex: Digitised works of 30,000 artists to be archived on moon
15 votes -
Cyberattack shutters major NSF-funded telescopes for more than two weeks
18 votes -
Much of the innovation in natural language processing comes from the US, resulting in an English language bias – Finland decided to change the game with a collective approach
12 votes -
Advice on setting up home ethernet (with unused cable already in the walls)
I live in a townhouse (built in 2002, if it matters for context) it has ethernet cables in the walls, that have apparently never been hooked up (yay futureproofing) they’re cat 5e cables (I...
I live in a townhouse (built in 2002, if it matters for context)
it has ethernet cables in the walls, that have apparently never been hooked up (yay futureproofing)
they’re cat 5e cables (I checked on the cable sleeve, because I wanted to make sure it would support gigabit ethernet and not just 100mbit)
behind each wall plate, the ethernet cable is just coiled there, not terminated in a connector and not connected to anything (along with coax cable and telephone wires which are hooked up to the wall plate, but which I’m not currently using at all)
the cables run to a wiring box in one of the bedroom closets. here they are also just hanging around, unterminated and unconnected to anything.
I have a rough idea of how to DIY this, but I've never done it before - the extent of my networking knowledge is layer 2 and above. so I'm looking for any protips of the sort that you figure out after doing it several times but that aren't obvious the first time you do it.
right now, my shopping list is:
- a patch panel (I’m eyeing this one) which will terminate the cables in the wiring box
- a punch down tool (maybe like this one) for…umm…punching the wires, it seems like?
- a gigabit switch (I have a spare 8 port one that I’ll use, there's only 6 runs of cable total) to go in the wiring box
- a wall plate (like this) for each of the 6 endpoints
I really only care about 2 of the 6 - the motivation behind this project is that my modem & router are downstairs, my home office is upstairs, and currently I run powerline ethernet between them. powerline ethernet isn't great, but it sucks especially hard when something like a portable AC unit is running on the same circuit, and that's currently making the internet speeds in my home office suffer. but the 6 cable ends in the wiring box are unlabeled, and so it seems easier to just wire them all up rather than play guessing games to figure out which of them are the 2 I care about.
the main thing I'm unsure about is the termination of the cables with the punch-down tool. I've crimped ethernet cables, years ago, and hated it, due to having clumsy hands and large, ungainly fingers. this doesn't seem quite as bad, but I'm still cautious about having to do all this in the fairly cramped closet space, and with limited ability for "do-overs" due to the finite amount of cable installed in the walls. I'm thinking I may buy a cheap ethernet cable and sacrifice it for some test runs of the punch-down tool.
26 votes -
Advice for upgrades
Hello fellow creatives (not me though, I'm asking on behalf of my wife), would you be able to pass on some knowledge and sage advice? Right now my wife is running an Etsy shop and personal site...
Hello fellow creatives (not me though, I'm asking on behalf of my wife), would you be able to pass on some knowledge and sage advice?
Right now my wife is running an Etsy shop and personal site selling mostly Heat Transfer Vinyl based tees, teddies, bags, etc. She's making all of this using a Cricut Explore 3 as it was very hobbyist, along with a half decent heat press with electromagnetic pressure.
It's time to grow up a bit. We're going to be building a 5m X 5m building for her to work out of rather than a small office space in the house (she has a lot of stock) and with this, maybe it's time to upgrade the equipment.
She's not been fond of sublimation, although we have an A3 Epson for that. She's not keen on polyester. So the question is: does she upgrade from using a small Epson EcoTank and Cricut to something like a Roland BN20 or BN20D or simply go for a larger format cutter since she buys it buy the roll anyway? DTG seems very expensive and DTF is so new that you need to printer daily to stop the heads dying. I think she likes Vinyl and she also likes a little print and cut, but not so much of the latter as the combo she has is pretty shite.
Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions? I'm trying to look at a budget of sub £10k for hardware. Happy to second hand if it's recommended.
6 votes -
Chromium is showing immense promise as a cheap, plentiful alternative to metals used in smartphone screens and solar cells
11 votes -
Using artificial intelligence to ban books only makes the problem worse
20 votes -
The superconductor sensation has fizzled - and that's fine
40 votes -
How wave power could be the future of energy
7 votes -
Bank of England outage hits key payments systems processing billions
10 votes -
A totaled Tesla was sold for parts in the US but came back online in Ukraine — here’s what happened
15 votes -
Superconductor megathread
Hey everyone, As a few of you may know, there was a paper released a few days ago claiming that an Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor (RTAPS) was created. You can see the original...
Hey everyone,
As a few of you may know, there was a paper released a few days ago claiming that an Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor (RTAPS) was created. You can see the original paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008
To bring things into perspective if this holds true we would likely dispense with energy and transportation concerns. It would be akin to the discovery of fire, penicillin or the transistor. A groundbreaking change. See here for a more detailed, bullish list of things it can help with: https://nitter.net/Andercot/status/1685088625187495936
There are many communities that are discussing this. The best summary I was able to find is here: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-temperature-and-ambient-pressure-superconductor.1106083/page-17
There is still a very much active debate there (and elsewhere online) of people on the viability of the original people. Many are pessimistic that the evidence is scant and that the original publication does not hold its water. An interesting summary of the sentiment of a part of the community can be found through the (faux) betting market of Manifold here: https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-temp-ambient-pre
On the link above they are also diligently tracking any replication attempts. Currently we are at the stage were theoretical simulations have validated the possibility of the purported materials to be superconductors (https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892).
Finally, a nice replication attempt that tried to make the creation process better and demonstrated some of the effects required to prove superconductivity (scroll up): https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685804254718459904
This is very exciting, because even if some properties are valid, it gives a mjor boost to the whole field.
143 votes -
The writers’ strike over AI is bigger than Hollywood
65 votes