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After Pause, NASA’s Voyager 1 Communicating With Mission Team | NASA
It’s been a long time since September 1977 and it’s still going, just… On Oct. 24, NASA reconnected with the Voyager 1 spacecraft after a brief pause in communications. The spacecraft recently turned off one of its two radio transmitters, and the team is now working to determine what caused the issue. https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/10/28/after-pause-nasas-voyager-1-communicating-with-mission-team/
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“A surprising device is capturing the vibe of a single street corner in San Francisco” | …it’s not surveillance if it’s art
This is a few weeks old now, but still fun; it thoroughly epitomises the issue of “intent” being a major aspect of threat / that software and services are not inherently evil just because they have a particular metaphorical “shape” https://www.npr.org/2024/10/04/nx-s1-5135714/an-old-phone-in-a-plastic-box-captures-the-cultural-vibes-of-a-san-francisco-neighborhood …and it got spotted:
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As many people have pointed out, there are literally movies about this scenario
…to name just the big ones. AI ‘Will Enhance’ Nuclear Command and Control, Says Stratcom Boss
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The ITU is not a fit body to govern the internet, and neither is the UN
This short thread by Dominique Lazanski shows why governments (and their preferred fora such as the ITU) must be kept away from internet policy decisions and technical standards. For all of its faults the IETF at least takes the neutral stance that all governments are potentially hostile to the public good, and that political horse…
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New coffee grinder on order
Coffee is an essential of life and taken very seriously at Chez Muffett, although I don’t regularly throw enormous amounts of money at anything else other than actual beans; instead my goal is to wring as much value out of what I can afford to get on a budget. But my beloved Baratza Virtuoso is…
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If Donald Trump’s team OPSEC is so weak that they are open to people claiming to be him on random burner phones, AI voice synthesis presents an existential danger
The ramifications of this tweet are terrifying:
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China Adds 160 Gigawatts in First 3 Quarters of 2024 | CleanTechnica
China apparently weaning itself off of oil — can’t think why. For comparison the UK total demand averaged over a year comes out to something like 38GW https://cleantechnica.com/2024/10/26/china-adds-160-gigawatts-in-first-3-quarters-of-2024/ Via Matt Green
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WaPoMeltDown: if you wield the tagline “democracy dies in darkness” you had better live by it
Wow, go check out the hashtag search: https://x.com/search?q=%23WaPoMeltDown&src=recent_search_click
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From 2022: a 25-minute video on the history of GPS, end to end encryption, and our avoidance of hard science cost/benefit analyses of “saving a child’s life”
Just a little thing I knocked together a couple of years ago and which still stands up reasonably today:
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Graham Smith @cyberleagle “celebrates” the first birthday of the Online Safety Act with a 6 Year retrospective timeline of blog posts correctly predicting the extant clusterf*ck
If you are not following Graham already you should find some way to do so; in the meantime go read this thread:
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“…what’s so ‘magical’ about a perfect geometric form, with wings made of mirrors, flying in the dark silence outside of the world, singing a song made of light?”
For science optimists this is a lovely little thread on Bluesky which deserves reading on a Friday morning: https://bsky.app/profile/dryad.technology/post/3l7cikbvmrs2q
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Regulators around the world are racing to regulate Big AI; meanwhile @Raspberry_PI have released a £65 Neural Network AI Accelerator
I’ve said it, and various things like it, before: trickle-down economics may not work, but trickle-down technology absolutely DOES work because ideas are hard to kill, and Moore’s Law is still a background drumbeat to our lives. Actus-Reus-based “AI Regulation” – of the tech rather than the intent – is not just shooting at the…