abie Ars Scholae Palatinae
5y
764

malor said:
The SLS is just so dumb. It uses the most complex and expensive engines ever built, which justified their cost by being re-usable, straps four of them to a stick, and then throws them in the ocean.

What a pile of crap that design is.

Another contender for 'dumbest design' is ISRO's PSLV. This is a 4 stage rocket that has:
1) The first stage is a a large solid rocket booster
2) Up to six additional strap on (giggity) SRBs, albeit optional - ISRO considers these part of the first stage
2) The second stage is powered by a single 'Vikas' engine that uses hypergolic propellants (UDMH/N2O2)
3) The third stage is another SRB
4) The fourth stage is powered by two engines that use different hypergolic propellants from the second stage(MOH/MMN)

https://arstechnica.com/civis/attachments/pslv_c51_b-jpg.58966/

All very Kerbal. This Rube-Goldberg machine manages to send up to 3800 Kg to LEO, or about 17% the payload of a Falcon 9 without reuse. I get that the rocket is an evolution of previous designs, but why didn't someone at some point not take a step back and ask if maybe a clean sheet approach would be better? 5 separation events, 3 different SRB designs and two completely different liquid stages, sheesh.

The late-night liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites on Sunday set a new record for the most flights by a SpaceX launch vehicle, with a first-stage booster flying for a 16th time. SpaceX now aims to fly its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 20 times, double the company’s original goal.

The flight followed several months of inspections and refurbishment of SpaceX’s most-flown rocket, a process that included a “recertification” of the booster to prove, at least on paper, that it could fly as many as five more times after completing its 15th launch and landing last December. //

It was SpaceX’s 216th successful mission in a row for the Falcon rocket family, a record unmatched in the history of space launch vehicles.

The booster flown Sunday night, numbered B1058 in SpaceX’s inventory, debuted with the company’s first launch of astronauts in May 2020, sending NASA crew members Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken toward space on the Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission. That mission ended a nearly nine-year gap in US launches carrying astronauts into orbit.

SpaceX’s fleet-leading booster has now launched 801 spacecraft and payloads, plus two astronauts, in more than three years of service. //

SpaceX’s latest iteration of the Falcon 9 rocket design—called the Block 5—flew for the first time in 2018. At that time, SpaceX had the goal of launching each Falcon 9 Block 5 booster 10 times. With boosters still coming back in good shape after each flight, SpaceX extended the life to 15 launches and landings, according to a report last year by the trade magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology.

The magazine reported that SpaceX put booster components through vibration testing to four times the fatigue life of what they would experience over 15 flights, giving engineers confidence that the rockets will continue to fly successfully. //

SpaceX started the year with the goal of flying 100 missions in 2023, the most flights in a year by any launch provider. SpaceX flew 61 times in 2022. The Falcon 9 continues to be the workhorse for the launch industry as SpaceX tests its much larger Starship vehicle, which engineers designed to eventually be fully reusable with an even faster launch cadence.

But the main limitation of SpaceX’s blistering launch rate is not the availability of flight-ready rockets—it’s the turnaround of the company’s three Falcon 9 launch pads. SpaceX has flown out of Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as often as once every five days. The Falcon 9 launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California can be set up for another mission in fewer than 10 days.

If you feed America's most important legal document—the US Constitution—into a tool designed to detect text written by AI models like ChatGPT, it will tell you that the document was almost certainly written by AI. But unless James Madison was a time traveler, that can't be the case. Why do AI writing detection tools give false positives? We spoke to several experts—and the creator of AI writing detector GPTZero—to find out.

Among news stories of overzealous professors flunking an entire class due to the suspicion of AI writing tool use and kids falsely accused of using ChatGPT, generative AI has education in a tizzy. Some think it represents an existential crisis. Teachers relying on educational methods developed over the past century have been scrambling for ways to keep the status quo—the tradition of relying on the essay as a tool to gauge student mastery of a topic. //

As tempting as it is to rely on AI tools to detect AI-generated writing, evidence so far has shown that they are not reliable. Due to false positives, AI writing detectors such as GPTZero, ZeroGPT, and OpenAI's Text Classifier cannot be trusted to detect text composed by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. //

"I think they're mostly snake oil," said AI researcher Simon Willison of AI detector products. "Everyone desperately wants them to work—people in education especially—and it's easy to sell a product that everyone wants, especially when it's really hard to prove if it's effective or not."

Additionally, a recent study from Stanford University researchers showed that AI writing detection is biased against non-native English speakers, throwing out high false-positive rates for their human-written work and potentially penalizing them in the global discourse if AI detectors become widely used.

Ted Chiang wrote about: that ChatGPT is a “blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web.” But the paper includes the math that proves the claim.

What this means is that text from before last year—text that is known human-generated—will become increasingly valuable. //

Tatütata • July 5, 2023 8:47 AM

What this means is that text from before last year—text that is known human-generated—will become increasingly valuable.

A bit like steel smelted before 8 August 1945… //

Tatütata • July 5, 2023 8:54 AM

The tails of the original content distribution disappear. Within a few generations, text becomes garbage, as Gaussian distributions converge and may even become delta functions. We call this effect model collapse.

Academia just discovered GIGO and the telephone game. Alleluia!

Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide,

and low-orbit space with débris.

so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah.

Isn’t it already? I just made my daily contribution. //

Winter • July 5, 2023 9:04 AM

I see a very lucrative market appearing for (high school) students working part-time as “real” human text producers. //

NC • July 5, 2023 9:27 AM

Hah, normal people don’t get paid! If a big tech company decides they want highschooler’s essays, they’ll just have Pierson or a pierson-alike company make essay-writing a part of the homework program they distribute with their textbooks, and thousands of teachers will require hundreds of thousands of students to submit millions of hours of work for free. For which Pierson might make a few bucks. //

Winter • July 5, 2023 9:49 AM

@NC

Hah, normal people don’t get paid!

Damn, my scheme is already torpedoed by those pesky capitalists.

But the matter is not really solved yet:
Who Owns Student Work?
https://designobserver.com/feature/who-owns-student-work/12667/

I know local Universities claim copyright to student’s works by way of some overarching educational contract (this is EU). I am not sure whether that has ever been tested in court. But I have never heard of schools being allowed to sell student work without getting the student involved. //

The U.S.’ ongoing naval challenges give Red China an opportunity to accumulate more power throughout the Indo-Pacific.

If you’re using an oximeter at home and your oxygen saturation level is 92% or lower, call your healthcare provider. If it’s at 88% or lower, get to the nearest emergency room as soon as possible.

Using the power of the federal government to pressure Big Tech into censoring “disinformation” is a modern Pandora’s box. Sure, the Biden administration may decrease the influence of its critics—in an astonishing violation of the First Amendment—but it also enables bad actors to weaponize this very tool against the U.S. government itself, in an utterly embarrassing cautionary tale.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an astonishing report Monday, revealing that the FBI under President Joe Biden urged Meta, Instagram’s parent company, to remove the U.S. State Department’s official Russian-language Instagram account.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the FBI routinely forwarded lists from the Secret Service of Ukraine, or SBU, to Big Tech companies, warning that the social media accounts allegedly “spread Russian disinformation,” according to the report.

The SBU flagged the accounts for Big Tech and the FBI, and the FBI often would follow up to ensure that Big Tech took action against these social media accounts. The lists from Ukraine’s secret police often included U.S.-based accounts, and the House subcommittee faults the FBI for failing “to respect fundamental American civil liberties.”

A tremendous catch affected the scheme to combat “Russian disinformation,” however. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, had infiltrated Ukraine’s SBU. This may not come as a surprise, since both Russia and Ukraine established these agencies as replacements for the old Soviet secret police, known as the KGB.//

That list from Ukraine’s secret service included the Instagram account “usaporusski,” the verified Russian-language account of the U.S. State Department.

So, according to the SBU, the U.S. State Department has been “used in the interests of the aggressor country to distribute content that promotes war, inaccurately reflects events in Ukraine, justifies Russian war crimes in Ukraine in violation of international law,” and more.

Ultimately, it appears the State Department survived this round of social media purging, but other accounts may not have been so lucky.

The House subcommittee report notes that the FBI, on behalf of Ukraine’s secret service, also flagged multiple pro-Ukraine Facebook and Instagram posts from Americans. Some of these posts currently are unavailable, while posts from Russian government officials—to whom the pro-Ukraine posts had been responding—remain on the platforms.

If Thomas had done what a new AP report says Justice Sonia Sotomayor did, the Democrats would be parked in front of the Supreme Court now, demanding impeachment, with AOC on the bullhorn leading the charge. The report says that not only were institutions that had her speak prodded to buy her books, but that her Supreme Court staff was also used in the effort.

Join over a million freedom-loving Americans in shopping quality products, services, and exclusive discounts from values-aligned businesses.

As the U.S. permanently occupied base in Antarctica at McMurdo Sound expanded over the years, delivering fuel for heating, desalination of water, running diesel generators for electric power, and fueling aircraft and land vehicles accounted for fully half the total cargo delivered to Antarctica by the late 1950s. In August 1960, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was authorised to install a nuclear power plant at McMurdo to provide heat, water, and electricity. A contract was let to the Martin Company, which built a version of their portable modular nuclear reactor which was designated PM-3A. This reactor was delivered to Antarctica in December 1961 and went critical for the first time in March 1962. It began to supply power to the McMurdo station in July 1962. When fully operational, the reactor supplied 1.8 megawatts of electrical power and 14,000 gallons (53 cubic metres) of fresh water a day.

Unfortunately, the reactor proved unreliable in operation, with availability of only 72% due to frequent malfunctions and shutdowns. In 1972, it was decided to shut down the reactor and replace it with diesel generators. Over its ten year lifetime, the reactor suffered 438 malfunctions. Cleaning up the site and shipping radioactive material back to the U.S. took until 1979. This was, to date, the only nuclear reactor ever operated in Antarctica, although radioisotope thermal generators 1 have been used to power scientific instruments in remote locations.

Here is a history of “Nuclear Power at McMurdo Station, Antarctica”. The reactor used was developed as part of the U.S. Army Nuclear Power Program. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9S1P54n1FA

Between 1954 and 1977, the U.S. Army Nuclear Power Program developed a series of small, modular nuclear reactors intended to provide electrical power and heating to remote installations which would otherwise require continuous logistical support to supply fuel. One of the project’s first pilot installations was the PM-1 reactor installed at the U.S. Air Force’s Sundance Air Force Station radar base in Wyoming. Located on a mountain peak at 1800 metres above sea level, 150 km from the nearest railhead, the ability to run two years between refuelling was seen as a great advantage.

The PM-1 reactor was a pressurised water design, producing 1.25 megawatts of electrical power, plus space heating for the installation. The reactor, designed and built by the Martin Company, was shipped in 16 packages, each transportable by a C-130 cargo plane or by road or rail and assembled on site. The reactor was fuelled by uranium enriched to 93% U-235 and would run two years on a fuel load. The reactor and power plant was designed to operate with a staff of two: reactor operator and maintenance technician.

The reactor went critical on site on 1962-02-25 and the plant remained in operation until 1968. It served as a pilot plant for the similar PM-3A reactor installed at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, as described in the post here on 2023-02-24, “Nuclear Power for Antarctica”. https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/nuclear-power-for-antarctica/2796

Retro-computing fans can download the final updates released for '90s-era OSes.

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on Saturday, Yellen committed a grievous diplomatic error—she bowed repeatedly, at least three times, to Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng when she met him.

That’s a grave show of American weakness to the Chinese, particularly the repeated and deep nature of the bowing. If the Chinese didn’t already think they could step all over us, that’s the type of signal to them that they can, when Biden officials act that desperate to bend over for them. Lifeng even backed up a little to give her more room to kowtow to him, like she was a servant.

“Never, ever, ever,” Bradley Blakeman, a senior staffer in George W. Bush’s White House, told The Post. “An American official does not bow. It looks like she’s been summoned to the principal’s office, and that’s exactly the optics the Chinese love.”

“Bowing is not part of the accepted protocol,” agreed Jerome A. Cohen, an emeritus professor at NYU and expert in Chinese law and government. [….]

“The way to treat an adversary is, you don’t go hat in hand,” Blakeman said. “But with this administration, time and time again, we embarrass ourselves and show weakness. And it just shows the lack of effective leverage we have.”

Why is it so difficult to extract drinkable water from seawater? Doooh—stupid second law of thermodynamics!

In the 1960s, there seemed a sweet solution to all of the “shortages” that vex our demon-haunted, fear-first age of technological timidity. You build the nuclear power plants on the seacoast, using the effectively infinite heat sink of the deep ocean as the cold sink (avoiding the need for those scary cooling towers!). In addition to generating electricity too cheap to meter for the power grid, the thermal energy, which would otherwise go to waste, is used to desalinate sea water, which supplies abundant fresh water for human consumption, agriculture, and the adjacent Fission Falls Water Park. Part of the fresh water and electricity is input to the electrolysis plant, which generates hydrogen for mobile transportation applications. The brine-rich by-product of desalination which isn’t sold as artisanal Captain Neutron nuclear sea salt is disposed of by dilution in the deep ocean.

Any territory, however small and seemingly resource-poor, with a modest ocean coastline, could become an energy, agriculture, and transport superpower if only they could tunnel through the fear barrier. New Hampshire has 21 km of Atlantic coastline, which advocates of Porcxit 4 might bear in mind.

I am writing this on the Book 8088, an utterly bizarre $200-ish imported system that uses a processor from 1984, a custom motherboard design, and a bunch of cobbled-together parts to approximate the specs of the original IBM PC 5150 from 1981. It's running at a blazing-fast speed of 4.77 MHz, at least when it's not in TURBO MODE, and it has a generous helping of 640KB (yes, kilobytes) of system memory. (If you can't buy one now, keep an eye on the listing because it has blinked into and out of stock a few times over the last few weeks).

This is a weird computer, even by the standards of all the other weird computers I've gotten my hands on. Its keyboard is cramped, it comes with a stolen BIOS and stolen software, and everything is always just slow, slow, slow. Its speakers keep crackling unhappily at me for no readily apparent reason. Its tiny, low-resolution LCD screen is hopelessly dim.

Tech support is supplied by the AliExpress seller in China, with both sides relying on automated translation to bridge the language gap. And I do need a little tech support because the system isn't quite working as promised, and the hardware that is working mostly isn't configured optimally.

And yet! The Book 8088 remains an interesting technological achievement, a genuine IBM PC compatible that shares a lot in common with my first ancient, terrible personal computer. I'm not sure it's a good buy, even for retro-tech die-hards who eat and breathe this sort of thing. But that doesn't mean it hasn't been a ton of fun to explore. //

Intel's first x86 processor was the 8086, which was released in mid-1978. It was the company's first 16-bit processor at a time when most were still 8-bit, and it could execute assembly code written for Intel's earlier 8008, 8080, and 8085 chips. But this same relatively forward-looking design made it more expensive to use, so it didn't become the chip that would help the x86 architecture take over the computing world.

That honor went to 1979's 8088, a cut-down version of the 8086 that could execute the same code and remained a 16-bit chip internally but which used an 8-bit external data bus. Halving the speed at which the CPU could communicate with the rest of the system obviously hurt performance, but it also meant that manufacturers could continue using it with parts made for older, cheaper 8-bit computer designs.

One of those companies was IBM.

The original x86 PC was a project that was turned around inside of a year by a small team within IBM, and a decision to use an "open" architecture (not in the modern "open-source" sense but in the "modular, non-proprietary hardware with expansion slots that any other company can develop for" sense) was done partly out of expediency. It shipped with an 8088, a 5.25-inch drive for 360KB 5.25-inch floppy disks, no hard drive, and 16KB of RAM. The original press release quaintly calls them "characters of memory" and numbers them in bytes; the MacBook Air I'm editing this on has 17,179,869,184 characters of memory. //

The IBM PC's design is simple enough that retro-tech hobbyists have successfully created modern open-source versions of its hardware and BIOS. The most notable work comes from Sergey Kiselev, who maintains an open-source BIOS and some open-source designs for motherboards and ISA expansion cards; newer chips have made it possible to condense the IBM 5150, its various expansion cards, and even a couple of newer amenities into a board small enough to fit into the Book 8088's tiny, chunky frame. The Book 8088 benefits from all of this work, though; at a bare minimum, its creators are violating the GPL license by modifying Kiselev's BIOS and removing his name from it (we confirmed this by looking at the BIOS files sent by the seller).

"While my work is open source, and I don't mind people using it in their projects, I do care deeply about the principles of open source software development and licensing," Kiselev wrote to Ars. "And whoever manufacturers this machine bluntly violates copyright law and licensing."

The Book 8088 also ships with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.0, along with other software; at this point, all of this stuff is broadly classified as "abandonware" and is freely available from WinWorldPC and other sites without protest from Microsoft, but allowing old software to stay up for historical and archival purposes isn't the same as inviting people to sell it on new hardware.

http://go.redirectingat.com/?id=100098X1555750&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAbandonware&sref=rss

http://go.redirectingat.com/?id=100098X1555750&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwinworldpc.com%2Fhome&sref=rss

Updated: No need to wait for Prime Day to have this fantastic PC deal from Amazon

Security researchers are warning that tens of thousands of photovoltaic (PV) monitoring and diagnostic systems are reachable over the public web, making them potential targets for hackers.

These systems are used for remote performance monitoring, troubleshooting, system optimization, and other functions to allow remote management of renewable energy production units.

Cyble’s threat analysts scanned the web for internet-exposed PV utilities and found 134,634 products from various vendors, which include Solar-Log, Danfoss Solar Web Server, SolarView Contec, SMA Sunny Webbox, SMA Cluster Controller, SMA Power Reducer Box, Kaco New Energy & Web, Fronis Datamanager, Saj Solar Inverter, and ABB Solar Inverter Web GUI.

It is important to note that the exposed assets are not necessarily vulnerable or misconfigured in a way that allows attackers to interact with them. However, Cyble’s research shows that unauthenticated visitors can glean information, including settings, that could be used to mount an attack. //

Exploiting vulnerabilities in the PV systems that Cyble found exposed online has happened recently, with hackers scanning the web for vulnerable devices to add them to botnets.

For example, CVE-2022-29303, an unauthenticated remote command injection vulnerability impacting Contec’s SolarView system was used by a relatively new Mirai variant looking for fresh systems to grow its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) power.

On Twitter, Bonnie Glaser, Asia Director of the George Marshall Fund of the United States, wrote: “This message will not land well with Japan and South Korea. Does Wang Yi really think that national interests are less important than appearance?”

“The irony of … Wang Yi telling Japanese and Koreans ‘you can never become an American,’ is that Japanese and Koreans become Americans every day,” wrote Jeff M. Smith, director of the Asian Studies Center at U.S. think tank The Heritage Foundation.

“They’re part of the fabric of America. What they can’t become is Chinese. Tone deaf. Again,” Smith wrote.

Avik Roy
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“A man wrote me and said: ‘You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.’”—Ronald Reagan, 1989 https://reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-presentation-ceremony-presidential-medal-freedom-5
4:40 PM · Jul 4, 2023

Whether appealing to racial stereotypes or economic or security interests, it’s likely we’ve not seen the last of China’s efforts to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its Indo-Pacific allies.

The Biden administration is reportedly gearing up to challenge a federal court ruling that found government collusion with social media companies to censor speech likely violated the First Amendment. The Justice Department filed a notice of appeal on Wednesday in the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the administration disagrees with the judge’s decision but would not elaborate further on the scathing ruling against censorship aimed at conservatives.

On Tuesday, Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Donald Trump appointee, issued a 155-page injunction in response to the lawsuit by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri. The lawsuit alleged that the White House had coerced or “significantly encouraged” tech companies to suppress free speech during the COVID pandemic.

The ruling held that “the censorship alleged in this case almost exclusively targeted conservative speech” but emphasized that the issues raised by the case transcend “beyond party lines.” The Biden administration argued that it took “necessary and responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security.”

Judge Doughty wrote:

… evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’ //

Astonishingly, the administration attempted to absolve itself of responsibility with the claim that social media companies should determine what qualifies as misinformation and how they should combat it without consideration for its role in pressure campaigns. In an ironic argument, they claimed that the lawsuit was an attempt to “suppress the speech of federal government officials under the guise of protecting the speech rights of others.” //

Elon Musk revealed many government communications and requests for censorship in public releases known as the Twitter Files. The government’s backdoor requests for censorship of speech were uncovered after he purchased the Twitter platform in 2022. https://redstate.com/tags/twitter-files