Is there an exhaustive list of all the systems and experiments that are still running on these probes? I'm really curious about what data it's collecting and sending back to us.
Thanks! Looks like it's just the magnetometer and a receiver instrument. Once the pool of instruments runs dry, I wonder how thinly they'll be able to slice the functionality of the remaining, non-experimental systems to prolong their lifetime as much as possible.
NASA pioneered a lot of what underpins modern design of critical computer systems. Voyager's systems are impressively robust. As far as I know, they can patch it by directly sending up new assembly instructions that are written into its memory, and doing a warm reboot to get it to start executing new instructions without powering down anything. They had the foresight to make their software highly editable, while also having multiple redundancy and emergency systems. Despite this, I wonder how much pressure the people writing this software feel. Even with all the simulators and months of rigorous testing, sending up something that can (in the worst case) break the probe has to be terrifying.
I second your recommendation. I watched it last night, and loved it. It was beautiful to see the level of competence and devotion of the tiny group running the spacecraft.
This is a confused and misguided project. It makes the mistake of failing to identify why the AI 'style' feels wrong. The author decided to replicate similar tools by breaking down AI writing into bite-sized issues, but it just doesn't work the same way as correcting grammatical errors. Because of this, the author had to really try to find what's so wrong about these patterns in isolation, so all of it comes off as annoying nitpicks. Let's take a look at a few.
> Overused Intensifier - Delete it. If the sentence still makes sense, the word was never needed. If it doesn't, rewrite the sentence to show why it matters.
You heard it here first. Adjectives? More like AIdjectives, a covert plan by AI companies to make our writing more sloppy. According to this recommendation, writing should never have any emphasis, it should only contain the most basic "X is Y" relations, like in some programming language. Sentences should contain the bare minimum amount of information required to parse them, everything else must be cut. In practice, this recommendation only filters a few of the most pervasive 'corporate PowerPoint'-style language, but even then, the suggestion that these words are never useful is wrong.
> Triple Construction - Break the pattern. Use two items or four. Or convert one item into its own sentence to give it more weight.
Humans may really like when things are structured into threes, but you must resist this AI temptation! Use two or four points, because you're not like them. The only reason cited for why this is wrong is that LLMs use this pattern often, so naturally the rest of us must cede good writing practices to them.
> "Almost" Hedge - Commit. "Almost always" → "usually." Or just say "always" and defend the claim. Readers notice when you won't take a stance.
As we all know, the world is discrete and easy to describe. That's why there simply isn't anything between things that happen "usually" (70%) and "always" (100%). Saying "almost always" (95%) is bad, because you should round your estimates and defend what is now an obviously wrong statement, for it makes you seem more brutal and confident.
> "Broader Implications" - State the implication explicitly, or cut the phrase. "This has broader implications" says nothing. What are the implications? Say them.
God forbid you organize an essay that's in any way non-linear, temporarily withholding some information for the sake of organization. Asking to can the phrase entirely says that even complex writing should be strung together in a rigid and sequential order.
That's the problem with the project, the way I see it. It was too heavily inspired by Grammarly and the likes, and in chasing it, the criticisms were adapted to fit the Grammarly model. The issue with that LLM 'style' is the punchy, continuous overuse of these patterns to the point where these phrases start seeming like meaningless sound combinations. There's nothing wrong with most of these patterns individually, what I hate is when text is filled with them to the brim, not when they show at all. If your writing is like the example paragraph, with most of the text highlighted, then it's a sign that your essay is more rhetoric than substance. But if you write an argument with three items in it and it's highlighted because "that's like AI" to make you delete it, then that's performative self-censorship, not improving your writing.
It would be OK, but the point I'm raising is that the Grammarly-like design encourages the user to resolve everything it highlights, to make the text look uniform and spotless.
I think this would come off a lot better if the recommendations weren't so absolute. I like the effect of a multicolored slab of highlights calling out every LLM cliche in a passage. Yes, the slop style is not just the sum of these individual patterns, but they're definitely significant contributors to the effect, and they're worth being aware of in your own writing regardless of their association with LLMs. You just can't treat it as a list of must-resolve errors (same as with any writing feedback, really).
> According to this recommendation, writing should never have any emphasis...
If you have measurable amplifications, use them. "This outcome was 40% more frequent". Otherwise keep subjective emotion out of documents, unless you're writing a novel.
> God forbid you organize an essay that's in any way non-linear...
Essays should be brutally logical and sequential. If the text is becoming cluttered with data, break it out into a table. I read a document for information, not for some movie-director suspenseful build-up and revelation.
There's a good rule where I work that any document that requires someone to make a decision must fit on two or fewer pages. Anything longer is TLDR. Tables and charts are prized for their information density, novelesque writing is not.
> Otherwise keep subjective emotion out of documents, unless you're writing a novel.
There's more types of writing between the extremes of research papers and novels. Data is useful and all, but asking it to be the sole driving component of ALL types of non-fictional writing is too much. Besides, this tool would criticize your novel just the same, because the intended use is to have it filter everything you write.
These treaties are ancient and mostly irrelevant, especially outside the topic of hard drugs. Unless you're doing harm to the other nations, no one will do anything.
This paper is all the way from 2012. Since its publication, many countries have pushed the limits to far greater lengths than what it talks about. Canada remains a signatory to all the old 60s-80s treaties about drugs, but can you guess what the consequences were when we legalized cannabis in spite of all of them? No one cares about these.
Because the parent accused you of acquiescence and you just replied with a list of examples to follow, I don't think you understood what they meant.
In the worst-case world, there is still more than enough wealth and work done to provide the bare minimum quality of life to everyone. The automation of most occupations would lower the bar of creating the simplest food supplies and homes even more. But, in that horrific world, the elite class would say "lol no" and use that wealth to live in paradise, away from everyone else, while the rest are left with almost nothing. The parent is saying that your immediate reaction is depressing, because instead of anger or even disapproval, your instinct is to put your head down and reason that you and all the future generations should just live like a monkey, forever.
To me it increasingly seems like there's no version of reality where doing anything will solve the problem, unless you're one of the special few people who can influence the world. The violence is a sign of that. Average people don't do things like these, but when they start feeling helpless, the most unstable people of that society that don't have anything to lose will start acting more erratically. If there's no pressure relief, these actions propagate and will become more common and normalized. This is driven by desperation, not strategically weighing the pros and cons and what impact it'll have on society or what have you.
We invented something called “democracy” to fix this, and then we allowed enough wealth to accumulate that the wealthy just bought it and nerfed it.
We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.
Don't forget we created our own 'papal indulgence' system where if someone hides their morally bad actions/choices behind articles of incorporation/LCCs then somehow everything that person does is morally excused away by society and almost said to be an act of nature as if those people HAD to make those choices (because shareholder accountability or the market demands or whatever).
Shareholder accountability > societal accountability.
Accountability falling on a made up corporation > accountability falling to the humans that made the choices.
You can only get away with this structure up to a certain level of morally bankrupt behavior. But there can be a point where people refuse to defer to it as being legitimate.
I think the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic was the beginning of the end of legitimacy for this 'indulgences' system where the government wiped away/waves away horrific immoral behavior just because it was done under the government's papal indulgences system. You can literally ruin millions of lives, push thousands to hundreds of thousands of young girls/boys into prostitution, cause death and community destruction, and the consequences are mostly waived away because the Sacklers were protected by their papal indulgences.
when government’s aren’t wealthy and investing heavily in the public private individuals are and that’s where inequality starts. the only way out of this is with enough taxation to level the playing field for the common man and to provide the government with the resources to lift the welfare of it’s citizens
Describing something does not equal condoning something. Whether GP is correct in assessment or no, they are describing a pattern they see, as an observer. I don't see a value judgment in their language unless I'm missing something.
Whether they are correct or not I'm not going to weigh in on, but I will make the claim that figuring out why something happens is the best way of preventing it from happening again.
This has been the historical cycle for as long as we have records of human history. Power begets power and greed. Eventually either everyone else reaches a breaking point and "eat the rich", or an external group takes advantage and eats everyone. Then we try again.
Agreed. Anyone who thinks democracy isn't punctuated by economically-redistributive violence hasn't been studying history.
Based in the simple fact that humans will not cede power/wealth willingly once they gain it.
Ergo, violence (either state or individual) to effect a new balance.
Which isn't to legitimize violence, but is to say that stripping away a population's ability to effect change by being violent, if enough of them choose, is more dystopian than some violence.
There are a LOT of stages between "resigning and doing nothing" and "deadly violence" that have some effect.
Demonstrations are a start, though they seem to be more useful for networking inside a group and forcing the press to pay attention to some matter. Decision makers can easily ignore them.
What's less easy to ignore are strikes, especially general strikes, as e.g. port workers in Italy threatened during the total blockade in the Gaza war.
Given what AI has always been about, since well before LLMs, go-slows and work-to-rules aren't going to help, they'll just speed up transitions to AI.
The disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades, I can see those working. Certainly seems to have an impact in the video game news I see.
Those only work as long as legislators have shame, or there is a significant faction that can use the provided legitimacy to redistribute power away from the elites towards the people. That's not the case at a national level in the US right now.
Can I just ask why people are so fixated on revealing Satoshi's identity? This article phrases it as some pure, innocent and almost academic pursuit, driven by curiosity and the mystique itself. But the amount of effort spent on trying to find Satoshi is immense. He must be the internet's most doxxed person by now. Is it just because of his wealth? Is someone trying to exact revenge on him? Or is he wanted by the authorities of some country? Why is finding him so important?
It's a silly topic to spend (waste) time on, but I can't help it, I just find it sort of fascinating.
It's a mystery where you have to try and put together different pieces of evidence, match things up, try and look for hidden connections - a certain type of human mind (mine, I guess) just finds that process rewarding.
I've gone down most of these rabbit holes and my 2c is it's one of these two people, not any of the most common candidates: Len Sassaman or Paul Le Roux.
Sassaman is dead and Le Roux is in federal prison in the US, which explains why the coins haven't moved
Le Roux was not in prison before 2020, it makes no sense to me that he was spending his time trafficking drugs when he was sitting on billions.
Of course at this point the only "sane" reasons for someone to not touch the wallet is that they are sitting on so much BTC anyway, they don't want to cause the price to drop, or the keys are lost (but the person is alive), or the person is dead.
If someone has access they can hire security for a few billion dollars and still have some change.
If we count "insane" reasons then of course there are quite a few more. Such as ideological motivations.
Your timeline is a bit off - he got arrested on 26 September 2012 (around the time Satoshi disappeared), and he became a DEA informant after his arrest which is why he didn't finally get sentenced for 8 years.
So at the time of his arrest (after which he was in federal custody and the DEA were monitoring all his use of electronic devices) Bitcoin had only been in existence for three and a half years.
The drug trafficking and Le Roux's various other criminal enterprises all started happened in the mid-late 2000s, before Bitcoin was worth anything
We'll never know but I honestly think it might be him, there's other evidence:
Commonwealth English speaker (grew up in Rhodesia/SA) - Sassaman was american and it would be odd for him to adopt British english as Satoshi
Known Windows user and there are supposedly similarities in the tech stack and code between early Bitcoin client versions and TrueCrypt which Le Roux is widely believed to have developed
Early Bitcoin client versions included poker game code for some reason - Le Roux is known to have been interested in this and at one point was considering opening an online casino
On the other hand, evidence against Le Roux and in favour of Sassaman:
The whitepaper has weird references that suggest the author was involved in cryptography academically in the Benelux countries. Le Roux did live in the Netherlands at one point but afaik wasn't involved in anything academic whereas Sassaman very much was
What I'm saying is that the overall amount of effort being spent on this isn't very proportional to sheer curiosity. Curious people may go out of their way to do something difficult, but years-long research campaigns with a single person in the crosshair feel like a step too far. Not even the perpetrators of famous unsolved crimes receive this much scrutiny. I don't doubt there's many people in the mix who are just curious about this, like you are, but I feel like people who spend months of their lives on this could be trying to get at something bigger. Maybe hurting him or trying to profit off of the knowledge somehow, or even just becoming famous for being the person who found Satoshi Nakamoto.
So am I. I presume I can read if after he passes away, if I am still around. Otherwise I am content to respect people's wishes for anonymity and privacy, as there are plenty of other interesting things to learn about.
There are some legitimate reasons. First one: a government-backed operation that can have even deeper conspiracies. The second most important one is Bitcoin's long-term stability. If people figure out who created it, they can also predict what kind of major crashes can happen, especially Satoshi's wallet with million+ bitcoins used one day.
The types of data that's collected for these two purposes have a significant overlap.
Sufficiently detailed telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance because even if the goal isn't to target you right now, they will still have the secondary option of going back and inspecting all that data you sent them if they ever are interested in you. Another secondary use of telemetry is selling it to someone else to squeeze out a bit more money. There's no downside to doing this, so any business that collects a lot of varied telemetry and likes making money might as well do it. And once the data is in the hands of adtech businesses, it becomes a whole lot more like tracking you personally than just collecting some data for development. In Google's case, you don't even need to hand it over to anyone else, everything stays in-house.
Where is that free choice that you see "in reality"? This post is about the opposite of that getting put in place. The actual reality is that almost every service provider is converging on supporting a few extremely restrictive options. From every private service you can think of, to key government services. They all are saying "to interact with us, you must use one of these two types of devices, with all the attestation and security measures intact". It's impossible for people to make their own design decisions or choose for themselves, because other options do not have the corporate/government blessing.
It's ridiculous that you look at all of us being forced into a government-protected duopoly, and then say "Don't you dare force your decisions on us!" to anyone suggesting that this should not be the default. Rules for us, but not them.
> They all are saying "to interact with us, you must use one of these two types of devices, with all the attestation and security measures intact"
Are you claiming that this is the only way of interacting with particular government services, with the other ways that existed before the app no longer being available? To make situation „dystopian“ this must be the case.
First it's new and optional, then it's mature but equal, then as adoption grows further, the old way of doing things gets deprioritized and neglected, then you're a 2nd tier citizen until they finally remove it altogether.
See: Essential businesses like grocery stores going cashless
Businesses are not government services and free to do whatever allowed by the law. For a country to be dystopian the government in your example must prohibit businesses to take cash.
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