Category: [Science & technology]

And RIP Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton, whose software helped land Apollo 11 on the Moon, dies at 90

The computer scientist behind groundbreaking research that helped land Nasa’s astronauts on the Moon, has died aged 90.
Margaret Hamilton was a trailblazer in her field, leading the team who developed the software for Nasa’s Apollo missions, which coined the term “software engineering”.
Hamilton’s former employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), confirmed her death, adding she died on 30 September.
“To say Hamilton was a pioneer – to say she was ahead of her time – would be a dramatic understatement,” MIT said in its statement, before acknowledging that she was a software engineer before it was mainstream.
Hamilton worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s and managed the Software Engineering Division.
It was in this division that she led a team of engineers writing and testing all onboard in-flight software for Nasa’s Apollo 11 project that guided US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land safely on the Moon.
“I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before. I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired,” she told the Guardian in 2019.

The photo of her standing next to the printout of the Apollo 11 code is a classic, of course; now there’s probably a mobile phone app that can do the exact same thing. I was saying yesterday about what changes Eva Marie Saint must’ve seen in her industry, but they must’ve been even more so in Margaret’s. Alas that she didn’t live to see the next landing, but at least she got to witness this year’s Artemis mission…

Warm out, isn’t it?

Sydney reaches 33C in potentially warmest start to spring since mid-1800s, while snow forecast in southern NSW

Summer heat is due to arrive early across much of eastern Australia with potentially record early September temperatures predicted for Brisbane and Sydney, while snow was expected in southern New South Wales.
Maximum temperatures in Sydney during the first days of Septemner were on track to match the city’s midsummer average of 26.4C, warmer than any other start to spring since the city’s Observatory Hill station opened in 1858. […]
The meteorologist Tom Saunders said a gusty north-westerly airstream blowing south from the northern interior would lift maximums this weekend by as much as 13C above the average.
The highest anomalies were set to affect the NSW coast.
“For Sydney, it’s likely to be the hottest day this early in spring on record and for the first five days of September we’re on track to average a top of 27 degrees that matches the midsummer average,” he told ABC News.
“Temperatures this spring will average as much as three degrees above the baseline from recent decades, potentially the hottest spring on record.” […]
Meanwhile, in southern NSW, live cameras appeared to show snow falling late on Saturday morning in Thredbo in the Snowy Mountains.
The Bureau of Meteorology had forecast snowfall to hit Thredbo top station by 4pm on Saturday, with a daytime low temperature of -1C.

Yeah, the last few days have been obnoxious with the start of spring hitting us with frankly summer temperatures. Actual summer looks like being complete bullshit if the predictions about this El Nino hold true, just like it was in the northern hemisphere in the last few months. Of course, this is an entirely natural process that isn’t being even remotely aggravated by human technology such as AI data centres and all that other shit we let happen. Nothing anthropogenic about any of it, OBVIOUSLY, and nothing to be concerned about.

Getting down with the kids?

Grok Not Only Generates Child Porn but Was Also Trained On It, New Lawsuit Claims

Oh, THIS is going to be fun to watch…

Musk-owned xAI’s Grok was trained on child sexual abuse material (CSAM), a new complaint filed earlier this week claims. The chatbot has taken significant heat over the last couple of months after Musk personally promoted Grok’s ability to nudify photos on his X account, leading to a renaissance of sorts for online perverts in which millions of nonconsensually created and distributed sexual deepfakes flooded the X timeline. A bulk of these nudification victims were children.
Numerous government probes, individual lawsuits, and at least three class actions quickly followed. Musk had to limit who could use the feature, aka put it behind a paywall and make even more money from it, but the so-called “spicy mode” feature is still available, though more restricted. The legal backlash also recently took an unusual turn when xAI itself sued two of its own users who took advantage of the tool to create CSAM. In that complaint, the company also claimed to have helped arrest at least 244 individuals who created or distributed CSAM content via Grok. […]
In the latest proposed class action, the plaintiff, who only goes by Jane Doe, is a previous victim of child pornography who is tracked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Child Exploitation Notification Program. She is claiming that CSAM of her as a child was used to train Grok, and as a result led to the creation of even more CSAM of her and other victims, this time AI-generated.
“xAI must be held responsible for knowingly training its models on images of the horrific abuse she suffered, and on the abuse images of every other survivor in this class,” Sarah London, the plaintiff’s counsel and a partner at Girard Sharp law firm, said in a press release.
The complaint claims that xAI intentionally designed Grok to respond to user prompts to create sexual content in an attempt to “entice more users of both X and Grok.” According to xAI policy, anything posted publicly on X and any output generated by Grok is considered training-eligible content, the lawsuit claims, which meant that every piece of CSAM posted by Grok was automatically fed back into the chatbot to refine it.

I don’t know the legal merits or otherwise of this case, but it doesn’t sound good for that Edolf character. Regarding whom…

…that’s the photo of him that Gizmodo chose to run with the article. Which is… unflattering inherently, but in this context it’s downright hideous. Shows what someone there thinks of him at least.

Or maybe he shouldn’t?

It’s probably a good thing for Sam Altman that he only has one kid, unlike Edolf and his… however many he has, cos all of the latter are going to grow up to despise their sperm donor, while Sam’s only going to have to worry about one. But OH that one child’s going to eventually hate him with the strength of a dozen kids. Honestly, just talking to that poor little bastard is probably the worst thing Sam could do to him, cos he wouldn’t be able to do without his software telling him what to say…

Is that so

Pioneer of ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism now says phrase unhelpful

The scientist who pioneered the “extreme male brain” theory of autism has said he regrets characterising the condition in this way because the phrase lends itself to misunderstandings.
Prof Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory that autistic people tend strongly towards systemising over empathising has been hugely influential in shaping the popular perception of autism over the past two decades. The underlying science had stood the test of time, he said, but he now views the “extreme male brain” label as unhelpful.
“Some of those terms were very easily misunderstood and so I do regret that,” he said. “It can lead to simplistic headlines like ‘autistic people lack empathy’, which is not true.
“Some of that language, like male brain and female brain, I just don’t think it’s useful today.”

I’m not sure it was useful then either, especially not when it came to female autistic people…

Con-CERN-ing!

CERN have shut down the Large Hadron Collider, and over on Threads people have been taking the news… normally:




I feel like the mild frontal headache is from the lobotomy… Personally I had no idea COVID-19 had the power to change time itself, that’s quite impressive… wonder how Ivermectin coped with that? Also, I’m slightly con-cern-ed (HAHAHA get it? Get it yet? Oh, fuck you) by the news that the next stage of the LHC begins in 2030. With the number of conspirachuds already panicking about the Great Reset and 2030 supposedly being the date that happens, rhey don’t need CERN giving them “evidence” like that…

Coulthart vs. AI

There was an interesting interview with John Coulthart a couple of weeks ago, where he says some things about AI I thought were worth preserving here:

We’re still waiting for all these developments to settle down so it’s foolish to try and prognosticate too much but it’s obvious that much of the argument in favour of AI art has been lost. The term “slop” became widespread at such a speed that it’s going to be difficult for the slop merchants to popularise their products in any other way, although I’m sure they’ll continue to make the attempt. I also think getting anyone to respect AI art will be very difficult. […]
On a more abstract level it’s been interesting seeing how quickly so much AI art has achieved a kind of mannerist sameness, a digital mulch that makes so much of the stuff look as though it’s extruded from the same pipe. “Slop” is very apt in this context. […] The slop machines don’t know about this because they don’t know what art is, and neither, it seems, do the engineers who program them. They’re asking people to accept the replacement of boundless human creativity with the world’s most expensive clip-art generator.

I think that last line is the real killer here, plus he’s equally dead on about that sort of sameness AI has attained. Which isn’t really surprising, though, cos AI was bound to feed off its own productions along with all the other stuff on the Internet it devours to make those productions in the first place… it’s not so much how quickly the term “slop” caught on so much as it is how quickly it became slop that is surprising.

Sun, I am disappoint

The Sun may not engulf Earth after all, scientists say

I think I actually have seen the theory before that the Earth actually won’t get swallowed up by the Sun, but it seems to be gaining traction:

Scientists say the Earth may not be engulfed by the expanding fireball of the dying Sun, which has long been assumed to be our planet’s ultimate fate.
This is not expected to happen for another five billion years, long after all life on Earth has been wiped out.
When the Sun burns through all of the hydrogen in its core, it will go through two immense expansion phases: first becoming a red giant, then, when its helium is spent, an “AGB” star. […]
As the Sun expands and its blistering surface approaches our planet, intense tidal waves will stir within the star.
When they dissipate, it will pull the Earth into its doomed embrace.
However, the growing Sun will also lose a lot of its mass due to stellar wind, which pushes our planet further away. […]
Advances made in modelling these tides over the last 15 years have enabled the study’s authors to show that “the dissipation is lower than previously expected”, an astrophysicist at the CEA Paris-Saclay centre in France .
To estimate how much mass the Sun could lose, the team focused, in particular, on a nearby star – called L2 Puppis – that is like the Sun’s “old cousin”, the study’s co-author Stephane Mathis said.
“A better understanding of tidal physics and the most advanced constraints we have on mass loss allow us to say that – in the current state of knowledge – Earth could move away from the Sun, contrary to what was predicted before,” Mr Mathis said.
According to the new modelling, Mars also escapes a death spiral into the Sun.
But the two planets closest to the Sun – Mercury and Venus – are not so lucky.
They will be inexorably swallowed by the expanding fireball.

Well, at least THEY’RE still fucked, but I’m sure a lot of people will be disappointed that the Earth might actually escape after all…