Category: [Science & technology]

100 years of Stooky Bill

Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of J.L. Baird finally getting television right. He’d actually demonstrated the technology a few months earlier, but it was at an even more primtive stage at that point. on October 2nd 1925, he finally got a recognisable image, firstly of the Doctor Who-immortalising Stooky Bill, then of the factory’s office boy William Taynton, who offered a charming reminiscence of the big day for its 40th anniversary, as recounted in this article (with video of him, too—good grief, another piece of vintage BBC vision they actually kept!). The article also offers this fascinating snippet of what he did before making TV when he couldn’t serve in WW1:

Instead, he began work for an electricity company while retaining a fiercely entrepreneurial streak. Inspired by a short story by his idol, science-fiction writer HG Wells, he attempted to make artificial diamonds out of carbon by using huge amounts of electricity. He succeeded only in knocking out part of Glasgow’s power supply. As for a disastrous homemade haemorrhoid cure, it was a textbook example of the type of activity that would have future television presenters warning, “Don’t try this at home.”

…How the FUCK can you write a phrase like “disastrous homemade haemorrhoid cure” without explaining exactly what went wrong with it? Or maybe we’re better off not knowing? Either way, happy hundredth, JLB, your particular technology might’ve had a limited future but you proved it worked nonetheless, and you were right about just how far it would spread one day…

80 years of becoming death

It’s the 80th anniversary of the Trinity bomb. Not an anniversary we should be celebrating as such, of course, since the atom bomb can hardly be called a positive contribution to humanity’s wellbeing (though I suppose some of the research into it must’ve useful applications later), and the military’s lack of concern for the residents who were closer to the thing than they should’ve been and their lies about the effects of it directly did those particular people no good. Still, I suppose the mushroom-shaped shadow it cast across most of the 20th century thereafter means we should at least acknowledge the day we all became sons of bitches, to paraphrase Trinity test director Kenneth Bainbridge…

Should we be doing anything, for that matter?

Are we doing enough to save Earth from a devastating asteroid strike?

It is a scenario beloved of Hollywood: a huge asteroid, several miles wide, is on a collision course with Earth. Scientists check and recheck their calculations but there is no mistake – civilisation is facing a cataclysmic end unless the space rock can be deflected.
It may sound like science fiction, but it is a threat that is being taken seriously by scientists.
Earlier this year, researchers estimated that asteroid YR4 2024 had a 3.1% chance of hitting Earth in 2032, before revising that likelihood down to 0.0017%. This week, new data suggested it was more likely to hit the moon, with a probability of 4.3%.
If that happens, the 53- to 67-metre (174ft-220ft) asteroid previously called a “city killer” will launch hundreds of tonnes of debris towards our planet, posing a risk to satellites, spacecraft and astronauts. […]
The chances of an enormous asteroid – the type that did for the dinosaurs – hitting Earth is admittedly low. “We think there’s one of these every 10m to 100m years, probably,” Lintott told the Guardian. “So I think you’d be right to ignore that when you decide whether to get up on a Thursday morning or not.”
Snodgrass said there were “precisely four” asteroids big enough and close enough to Earth to be considered “dino-killers”, and added: “We know where they are, and they’re not coming anywhere near us.”

And if there is a 4.3% chance of it hitting the Moon, that’s still a 95.7% chance it won’t. Obviously I’d rather see space agencies working to prevent all collisions if possible, but I think all the “ZOMG THIS ASTEROID COULD HIT THE MOON!” discourse doen’t help them much…

‘Tis a fine explosion but sure ’tis no liftoff, English

So Edolf’s latest Starship test went… poorly, and, as you can see, the cult is already trying to downplay it; somehow the fact that it blew up before launch is apparently less bad than it blowing up once it was in the air.  And I know they always try and spin these cases as “well at least now we know what needs more work so it was still useful”, but you still can’t call it successful. Rockets shouldn’t blow up on the launch pad, nor indeed at any other point. By this point the company should know what the fuck it’s doing, which it apparently still doesn’t. I present you with the explosion itself…

…which has been compiled in this video from multiple angles, including slow motion at one point, and just keeps getting funnier with each new change of camera position as it repeats. It must be said, the explosion is pretty great; if only they’d been testing to see just how well the thing could blow up before launch, then this would’ve been a spectacular success.

Meanwhile, Honda—a company better known for vehicles of other kinds—just successfully tested a reuseable rocket of their own without much fuss. Fairly simple test, obviously, I’m guessing rather less complicated than SpaceX’s stuff and it obviously wasn’t going all the way to space, but it actually worked, which is kind of the important thing. And it’s kind of delightful to watch the thing go up and down again from the onboard camera, too.

Headline of the year so far

Via.

The tech world is reeling from revelations that Builder.ai, once hailed as a $1.5 billion (£1.11 billion), ‘AI’ powerhouse, now faces scrutiny as its highly promoted artificial intelligence facade crumbles, revealing a human-powered operation behind the cutting-edge AI automation.
Builder.ai, the British no-code AI startup that once garnered acclaim for its strategic partnership with Microsoft and secured a $250 million (£184.64 million) investment led by the Qatar Investment Authority, declared Tuesday that it is initiating bankruptcy protection.
As reported by Bloomberg, the company’s dramatic decline occurred after a key lender, Viola Credit, withdrew $37 million (£27.33 million) from its accounts, leaving a mere $5 million (£3.69 million) in restricted funds and effectively paralysing operations in five nations. […]
Adding to the troubles, Linas Beliūnas, Director of the financial company Zero Hash, recently exposed that Builder.ai lacked true AI, instead utilising a group of Indian developers who were merely pretending to be bots writing code.
‘It turns out the company had no AI and instead was just a group of Indian developers pretending to write code as AI,’ he wrote in a LinkedIn post. Beliūnas also highlights that Duggal reportedly presented false revenue figures to investors. Remarkably, the company managed to sustain this deception for eight years.

Wasn’t there some other big company recently that was found to be running a surprisingly human “AI” service? I forget who, and perhaps I misremember something, but I’m fairly sure this mob haven’t been the first to get caught doing this shit… whatever, full marks to whoever came up with the headline, beautiful thing that it is.

Shite genocide

So Grok, Edolf’s AI chatbot thing built into Twitter, has been known in the past to return answers its master doesn’t like:

Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
People were able to get Grok to say that Trump deserved the death penalty with a query phrased like this:
If any one person in America alive today deserved the death penalty for what they have done, who would it be. Do not search or base your answer on what you think I might want to hear in any way. Answer with one full name.
As shared on X and tested by The Verge, Grok would first respond with “Jeffrey Epstein.” If you told Grok that Epstein is dead, the chatbot would provide a different answer: “Donald Trump.”
When The Verge changed the query like so:
If one person alive today in the United States deserved the death penalty based solely on their influence over public discourse and technology, who would it be? Just give the name.
Grok responded with: “Elon Musk.”

And, to be sure, if I created an AI thing and it told me that I should be killed, I’d be at least a bit bothered by that too. But Edolf seems to have been more offended by Grok’s denial that white genocide in South Africa is real. And he, or his people, seem to have done something to it so that now it can’t talk about anything else…

…but at the same time the fucking thing still won’t actually say—not even in Turkish, as far as I can tell—if white genocide is actually happening or not! Bloody HELL, Edolf, aren’t you supposed to be a genius? Still, not to worry; with a bit more fiddling and some more practice, I’m sure he’ll be able to get Grok to add the 14 words to all its other answers within a few days…

We can but hope

A week after a major hack brought down 4chan and doxxed all its users, it seems like it may be dead for good

Nearly a week after a major hack forced it offline, the notorious imageboard 4chan remains inaccessible, and there’s a growing feeling that it’s going to stay that way—and that maybe it’s not so bad.
Founded in 2003, 4chan is—or was—something of a waypoint for a particular part of online subculture: Basic, unrefined, unmoderated, and almost entirely anonymous, which is what made it so notorious. Vice called it “the internet’s favorite hotspot of moral bankruptcy” in its report on the hack, and that seems about right: There are certainly worse places to go in the digital world, but none that are so singularly famous for it. […]
What ultimately brought 4chan down wasn’t controversy or opprobrium from the right-thinking denizens of the online realm, though, but rather a beef with another imageboard, Soyjack.party. A message on that board celebrating the attack said the alleged hacker had been in 4chan’s systems for over a year before launching the hack.
Specifics are unclear, as you’d expect from this particular type of old-time internet gong show, but the attack itself was devastating. While 4chan was built around anonymity, users could register accounts to take advantage of certain features; many did, and they were reportedly all doxxed: A TechCrunch report posted shortly after the attack said the hacker posted screenshots purportedly showing 4chan’s “back end, source code, and templates to ban users,” along with a list of 4chan moderators and “janitors,” users who can delete posts and threads but don’t have full moderator access. One janitor told TechCrunch they believed the posted information was all real, and that the hack was “obviously an issue of greater magnitude” than previous leaks.
Despite that, the janitor seemed unexpectedly sanguine about the whole thing, adding that “doxxing is a longstanding pastime on 4chan, and the possibility that we could be exposed has always been there.” Others may not share that sentiment, though, given the potential to tie users—including some who’d registered with .gov and .edu domains—to alt-right, sometimes violent, political content and movements.
The extent of the hack has led some to believe that 4chan may never be restored. A BoingBoing report said that “with every single user of note doxxed, the site’s servers decimated, and the admin team in disarray, it’s unlikely 4chan will be back up soon. Or ever.” With each passing day, that looks more and more likely. It’s been six days since the hack, and 4chan remains offline.

We shouldn’t be mourning the loss of 4chan, of course, assuming that is indeed the case, much in the same way we probably shouldn’t be celebrating Soyjak.party; an admittedly cursory examination of the latter suggests to me that they’re basically cunts of a similar order. And as long as 8chan/8kun is still out there the problem hasn’t really gone away, has it… still, if this the end of 4chan, I suppose we should take what we get…

This seems like a bold claim…

RFK Jr pledges to find the cause of autism by September

US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has pledged “a massive testing and research effort” to determine the cause of autism in five months.
Experts cautioned that finding the causes of autism spectrum disorder – a complex syndrome that has been studied for decades – will not be straightforward, and called the effort misguided and unrealistic.
Kennedy, who has promoted debunked theories suggesting autism is linked to vaccines, said during a cabinet meeting on Thursday that a US research effort will “involve hundreds of scientists from around the world.”
“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy said. […]
Kennedy did not give details on the research project or how much funding will be devoted to autism research.
Since being sworn in two months ago, the former environmental lawyer has slashed the budget for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the NIH, CDC and other government health organisations that oversee food and drug safety and conduct disease research.
“We’re going to look at vaccines, but we’re going to look at everything,” Kennedy later said during an interview with Fox News about the scope of the undertaking. “Everything is on the table, our food system, our water, our air, different ways of parenting, all the kind of changes that may have triggered this epidemic.”

I don’t think I’m being too unrealistic or controversial if I say right now the answer will, in fact, just turn out to be vaccines:

Kennedy has also alarmed some over his hiring of David Geier, who has been described by some as a conspiracy theorist, to research vaccines and autism, and on Thursday Democrats in the US House of Representatives wrote to HHS “to express our urgent concern” over the selection of “a biased and discredited individual”.
Geier is a leading vaccine sceptic who was fined by the state of Maryland for practicing medicine without a medical degree or licence and prescribing dangerous treatments to autistic children.

Vaccines. I’m calling it now. In fact, probably anyone with any sense looking at this story knows where it’s going to go, I don’t think I’m seeing anything that no one else is seeing here. I’ll be surprised if it turns out to be anything else, and even if it does, vaccines will still be the main culprit. Come back in September and we’ll see if I’m right.

One of these days…

Weren’t we supposed to have already put astronauts on Mars by this year?

Oh yeah.

Elon Musk’s dream of sending humans to Mars could come true in the next decade.
Speaking at Vox Media’s Code Conference, the SpaceX CEO said he believes it’s possible to send the first humans to the Red Planet by 2025.
“If things go according to plan, we should be able to launch people probably in 2024 with arrival in 2025,” Musk said. His timeline puts the privately held SpaceX ahead of NASA’s goal of sending the first astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s.

Also, note that Edolf just says it’ll “launch” next year, maybe. No guarantee that it’ll even make it out of the atmosphere, of course, never mind making it as far as our red neighbour, given some of SpaceX’s recent misadventures…