Thirty-three years ago today, Carl Sagan convinced NASA to rotate the Voyager 1 probe and take one final photograph. The result, seen here in a recent reprocessing, is, to me, one of the most beautiful images ever captured. I know I wrote about it last Christmas, but it just springs to mind whenever there’s a …
What The Kids Are Reading
‘Tis the season for retrospectives. Since I don’t read or watch that much stuff the year it comes out, my annual lists are always about what I consumed during the previous year, regardless of when it was made. Last year I wrote about John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy. This year I have a little …
Science Open Thread: The Newest AI Chat Bot Is Interesting
I last wrote about AI text generation last year, when I got access to OpenAI’s GPT-3. It was impressive for what it was, especially given the era (time does funny things when we’re talking about generative AI advances). Well, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that OpenAI’s latest one is way more interesting than …
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While We’re At It, Another Social Media Open Thread: What Is Mastodon And How Does It Work?
Since Elon Musk’s (forced) acquisition of Twitter, people have been looking around for alternatives. The site hasn’t really changed yet–moderation activity remains the same, for example–but obviously there are changes coming. I don’t think we’re likely to see an experience much different from ~2018 Twitter, but regardless, it’s just sensible to wonder what else is …
AI Art Update, Samwise Edition
There have been some big changes on the AI-generated-images front lately. Most of them have been spurred by a model called Stable Diffusion, which has two novel features: its architecture, and the fact that the creators released it for free use at home. Architecture-wise, it’s a latent diffusion model, which (roughly speaking) combines the best …
Open Thread: A Smashing Success
The results are in, and NASA’s recent planetary defense proof-of-concept was a big success: NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to throw it off course. The mission succeeded beyond expectations, officials said. https://t.co/q8S33DdbW1 — NPR (@NPR) October 11, 2022 You may recall that the probe was crashed into one asteroid that …
Planetary Defense LIVE!
A planet-killer asteroid colliding with earth–we’ve all thought about it. Bruce Willis was in a movie about it. Some bumper stickers & commenters here regularly try to will it into happening. And now, at long last, we’re doing something to prepare for mitigating this existential risk. You may have heard of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection …