Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

I got an email about my Win32 programming tutorial (circa 1999) from a 12 year old girl whose hobby is making "programs in languages used way before i was born" ...

First of all yes, excellent, this is a good hobby.

Secondly, don't mind me, I'll just be over here crumbling to dust.

GrapheneOS is the first platform using ARM hardware memory tagging in production. This provides a form of memory safety for memory unsafe languages. It has a high random chance of catching most memory corruption and always catches certain major classes of memory corruption bugs.

Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations is currently ranked #10 on Amazon under the Computer Hacking category, which is pretty good considering I’ve been explicitly recommending people buy it from anywhere but Amazon

If our civilization collapses, extraterrestrial archeologists can look at this and be impressed. Three satellites following the Earth in an equilateral triangle, each 25 million kilometers from the other two. Each contains two gold cubes in free-fall. The satellites accelerate just enough so they don't get blown off course by the solar wind. The gold cubes feel nothing but gravity.

Lasers bounce between each cube and its partner in another satellite, measuring the distance between them to an accuracy of 20 picometers: less than the diameter of a helium atom! This lets the satellites detect gravitational waves - ripples in the curvature of spacetime - with very long wavelengths, and correspondingly low frequencies.

It should see so many binary white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way that these will be nothing but foreground noise. More excitingly, it should be able to see mergers of supermassive black holes as far as... the dawn of time, or whenever such black holes were first formed. (The farther you look, the older things you see.)

It may even be able to see the "gravitational background radiation", the thrumming vibrations in the fabric of spacetime left over from the Big Bang. This radiation was created before the hot gas in the Universe cooled down enough to become transparent to light. So it's older than the microwave background radiation, which is the oldest thing we see now.

It's called LISA - the Laser Interferometric Satellite Antenna. And we're in luck: ESA has just decided to launch it in 2034.

First lockdown, I was a newbie school tech working from home, so I dived into training courses. This was a fun assignment - I simulated exoplanet detection (transit photometry) in the living room, Tia helped. https://youtu.be/mSCGQoaNnNY

Serious New Warning as Google AI Targets Billions of Private Messages
L: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2024/01/27/new-details-free-ai-upgrade-for-google-and-samsung-android-users-leaks/
C: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39159527
posted on 2024.01.27 at 15:31:58 (c=0, p=8)

Now that y'all have seen the differing career impacts, media coverage of, and societal reactions to, Black women being accused of plagiarism (Claudine Gay) and white women being accused of plagiarism (Neri Oxman)...

you can understand why I say that widely used automated plagiarism detecting software that advertises a false positive rate of 1%🤦🏿‍♂️, is devastating for Black students.

Another flavor of: in a racist country, being falsely accused has devastating consequences

https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/Race-and-Wrongful-Convictions.aspx

@_thegeoff I'm mostly doing, not photograping.
All traditional materials - flax sails attached to mast with bamboo hoops, jib & staysails tied to with bamboo hanks. Mostly hemp rigging & ropes & I think there's a wire stay from bowsprit to tge top of the foremast to top of the main mast.
1st picture shows every sail. I've never used the flying jib myself. I have rigged all the others.

Every single argument people make about Apple needing to tax developers to be on iOS can be answered by saying.

Ok. But the Mac. And Windows.

You have to ignore 20+ years of computer history to justify Apple's arguments.

Spent the day with so many adorable young scientists!

PBS Kids Day was a treat. I love meeting curious kids & watching them marvel at #science. Children ask the best questions.

TIL tilde (~) as "home" in unix and web directories:

On Unix-like operating systems (including AIX, BSD, Linux and macOS), tilde normally indicates the current user's home directory. [...] This convention derives from the Lear-Siegler ADM-3A terminal in common use during the 1970s, which happened to have the tilde symbol and the word "Home" (for moving the cursor to the upper left) on the same key.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde#Directories_and_URLs

pic: the ADM-3A
picture of a ADM-3A terminal, w…

@docfleetwood Sure!

1. OpenAI claims AI detection doesn’t work:

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8313351-how-can-educators-respond-to-students-presenting-ai-generated-content-as-their-own

 
2. Ars Technica on risks of AI detection:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/why-ai-detectors-think-the-us-constitution-was-written-by-ai/
  
3. AI detection biased against non-native English speakers:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.02819.pdf



4. AI detectors can’t reliably detect AI-generated text:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.11156.pdf
 
5. TurnItIn reports limitations of their own tools:
https://www.turnitin.com/blog/ai-writing-detection-update-from-turnitins-chief-product-officer

6. Washington Post article on false positives:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/14/prove-false-positive-ai-detection-turnitin-gptzero/

Update: Trump ordered to pay $83 million in damages in defamation trial. https://nypost.com/2024/01/25/news/donald-trump-e-jean-carroll-defamation-trial-live-updates-testimony/

I am speaking at BAH tomorrow. Hope to see a few of you!

We really, really don’t want to have to make a printer, but wow.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/

50 years ago today. Happy birthday, you mad and wonderful idea.

But worth most praising are the people who built and operated this little space marvel, which lasted three whole Earth years instead of a few days on Mars, as initially planned.

A few from the initial team, whose posts/ interviews/ papers I've used in my posts are:

• Bob Balaram, Chief Engineer
• MiMi Aung, Project Manager
• Teddy Tzanetos, team leader
• Timothy Canham, Senior Software Engineer
• Håvard Fjær Grip, Ingenuity Chief Pilot

Kudos to all, and to #NASA for such a great achievement!

Rest well, you magnificent Martian flying machine.

"NASA’s history-making Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has ended its mission at the Red Planet after surpassing expectations and making dozens more flights than planned. [...] [I]magery of its Jan. 18 flight sent to Earth this week indicates one or more of its rotor blades sustained damage during landing and it is no longer capable of flight."

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/after-three-years-on-mars-nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-mission-ends

#Mars #Ingenuity #Helicopters #Technology #Engineering

Here's today's press release for JAXA's SLIM lunar landing!

TL;DR:

Pinpoint site identification was crazily successful.

We were lowering into position, detecting boulders like a champ.

THEN ONE OF THE ENGINES DROPPED OFF.

(I kid you not)

(we don't know why yet)

(maybe space pirates)

But we still soft-landed on 1 engine.

(TAKE THAT SPACE PIRATES!)

but on our head.

Strangely, might not be a big deal once the Sun moves round to the other side of the spacecraft.

https://global.jaxa.jp/press/2024/01/20240125-1_e.html

Mugger take your phone? Cash apps too easily let thieves drain accounts, DA says https://arstechnica.com/?p=1998662