Slashdot reader echo123 shared a new article from Wired titled "Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It's Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong." ("On its 10th anniversary, Signal's president wants to remind you that the world's most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It's free. It doesn't track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it's a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.") Ten years ago, WIRED published a news story about how two little-known, slightly ramshackle encryption apps called RedPhone and TextSecure were merging to form something called Signal. Since that July in 2014, Signal has transformed from a cypherpunk curiosity — created by an anarchist coder, run by a scrappy team working in a single room in San Francisco, spread word-of-mouth by hackers competing for paranoia points — into a full-blown, mainstream, encrypted communications phenomenon... Billions more use Signal's encryption protocols integrated into platforms like WhatsApp...

But Signal is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the Silicon Valley model. It's a nonprofit funded by donations. It has never taken investment, makes its product available for free, has no advertisements, and collects virtually no information on its users — while competing with tech giants and winning... Signal stands as a counterfactual: evidence that venture capitalism and surveillance capitalism — hell, capitalism, period — are not the only paths forward for the future of technology.

Over its past decade, no leader of Signal has embodied that iconoclasm as visibly as Meredith Whittaker. Signal's president since 2022 is one of the world's most prominent tech critics: When she worked at Google, she led walkouts to protest its discriminatory practices and spoke out against its military contracts. She cofounded the AI Now Institute to address ethical implications of artificial intelligence and has become a leading voice for the notion that AI and surveillance are inherently intertwined. Since she took on the presidency at the Signal Foundation, she has come to see her central task as working to find a long-term taproot of funding to keep Signal alive for decades to come — with zero compromises or corporate entanglements — so it can serve as a model for an entirely new kind of tech ecosystem...

Meredith Whittaker: "The Signal model is going to keep growing, and thriving and providing, if we're successful. We're already seeing Proton [a startup that offers end-to-end encrypted email, calendars, note-taking apps, and the like] becoming a nonprofit. It's the paradigm shift that's going to involve a lot of different forces pointing in a similar direction."
Key quotes from the interview:

• "Given that governments in the U.S. and elsewhere have not always been uncritical of encryption, a future where we have jurisdictional flexibility is something we're looking at."

• "It's not by accident that WhatsApp and Apple are spending billions of dollars defining themselves as private. Because privacy is incredibly valuable. And who's the gold standard for privacy? It's Signal."

• "We also see growth in response to things like what we call a Big Tech Fuckup, like when WhatsApp changed its terms of service. We saw a boost in desktop after Zoom announced that they were going to scan everyone's calls for AI. And we anticipate more of those."

• "AI is a product of the mass surveillance business model in its current form. It is not a separate technological phenomenon."

• "...alternative models have not received the capital they need, the support they need. And they've been swimming upstream against a business model that opposes their success. It's not for lack of ideas or possibilities. It's that we actually have to start taking seriously the shifts that are going to be required to do this thing — to build tech that rejects surveillance and centralized control — whose necessity is now obvious to everyone."

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger writes: Have you ever wondered if it's true you can instantly get malware? In this video, a person connects an XP instance directly to the internet with no firewall to see just how fast it gets compromised by malware, rootkits, malicious services and new user accounts. The answer — fast!
Malwarebytes eventually finds eight different viruses/Trojan horses -- and a DNS changer. (One IP address leads back to the Russian federation.) Itâ(TM)s fun to watch -- within just a few hours a new Windows user has even added themself. And for good measure, he also opens up Internet Explorer...

âoeWindows XP -- very insecure,â they conclude at the end of the video. âoeVery easy for random software from the internet to get more privileges than you, and it is very hard to solve that.

âoeAlso, just out of curiosity I tried this on Windows 7. And even with all of the same settings, nothing happened. I let it run for 10 hours. So it seems like this may be a problem in historical Windows.â

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Dan Goodin: On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised in 2022. In a public GitHub repository committed in December of that year, someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers published what's known as a platform key, the cryptographic key that forms the root-of-trust anchor between the hardware device and the firmware that runs on it. The repository was located at https://github.com/raywu-aaeon..., and it's not clear when it was taken down. The repository included the private portion of the platform key in encrypted form. The encrypted file, however, was protected by a four-character password, a decision that made it trivial for Binarly, and anyone else with even a passing curiosity, to crack the passcode and retrieve the corresponding plain text. The disclosure of the key went largely unnoticed until January 2023, when Binarly researchers found it while investigating a supply-chain incident. Now that the leak has come to light, security experts say it effectively torpedoes the security assurances offered by Secure Boot.

Binarly researchers said their scans of firmware images uncovered 215 devices that use the compromised key, which can be identified by the certificate serial number 55:fb:ef:87:81:23:00:84:47:17:0b:b3:cd:87:3a:f4. A table appearing at the end of this article lists each one. The researchers soon discovered that the compromise of the key was just the beginning of a much bigger supply-chain breakdown that raises serious doubts about the integrity of Secure Boot on more than 300 additional device models from virtually all major device manufacturers. As is the case with the platform key compromised in the 2022 GitHub leak, an additional 21 platform keys contain the strings "DO NOT SHIP" or "DO NOT TRUST." These keys were created by AMI, one of the three main providers of software developer kits that device makers use to customize their UEFI firmware so it will run on their specific hardware configurations. As the strings suggest, the keys were never intended to be used in production systems. Instead, AMI provided them to customers or prospective customers for testing. For reasons that aren't clear, the test keys made their way into devices from a nearly inexhaustive roster of makers. In addition to the five makers mentioned earlier, they include Aopen, Foremelife, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, and Supermicro.

Cryptographic key management best practices call for credentials such as production platform keys to be unique for every product line or, at a minimum, to be unique to a given device manufacturer. Best practices also dictate that keys should be rotated periodically. The test keys discovered by Binarly, by contrast, were shared for more than a decade among more than a dozen independent device makers. The result is that the keys can no longer be trusted because the private portion of them is an open industry secret. Binarly has named its discovery PKfail in recognition of the massive supply-chain snafu resulting from the industry-wide failure to properly manage platform keys. The report is available here. Proof-of-concept videos are here and here. Binarly has provided a scanning tool here. "It's a big problem," said Martin Smolar, a malware analyst specializing in rootkits who reviewed the Binarly research. "It's basically an unlimited Secure Boot bypass for these devices that use this platform key. So until device manufacturers or OEMs provide firmware updates, anyone can basically... execute any malware or untrusted code during system boot. Of course, privileged access is required, but that's not a problem in many cases."

Binarly founder and CEO Alex Matrosov added: "Imagine all the people in an apartment building have the same front door lock and key. If anyone loses the key, it could be a problem for the entire building. But what if things are even worse and other buildings have the same lock and the keys?"

Harry R. Lewis has been a Harvard CS professor — teaching both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — and the dean of Harvard college. Born in 1947, Lewis remembers flipping the 18 toggle switches on Harvard's PDP-4 back in 1966 — up ("click!") or down ("CLACK"). And he thinks there's a lesson for today from a time when "Computers were experienced as physical things."

[T]he machine had a personality because it had a body you could feel and listen to. You could tell whether it was running smoothly by the way it sounded...

Unlike the unreliable mechanical contraptions of yore, today's computers — uninteresting though they may be to look at if you can find them at all — mostly don't break down, so we have fewer reasons to remember their physicality. Does it matter that the line between humans and the machines we have created has so blurred? Of course it does. We have known for a long time that we would eventually lose the calculation game to our creations; it has happened. We are likely to lose Turing's "Imitation Game" too, in which a computer program, communicating with a human via typed text, tries to fool the user into confusing it with a human at another keyboard. (ChatGPT and its ilk are disturbingly convincing conversationalists already.)

Our challenge, in the presence of ubiquitous, invisible, superior intelligent agents, will be to make sure that we, and our heirs and successors, remember what makes us human... All computers can do is pretend to be human. They can be, in the language of the late philosopher Daniel Dennett '63, counterfeit humans... The first error is suggesting that computers can be digitally trained to be superior versions of human intellects. And the second is inferring that human judgment will not be needed once computers get smart enough...

[N]o AI system can be divorced from the judgments of the humans who created it... Only hubristic humans could think that their counterfeits might completely substitute for human companionship, wisdom, curiosity, and judgment.â
Even back in 1966, Lewis says he learned two lessons that "have stood the test of time. Be careful what you ask them for. And it can be hard to tell what they are doing."

One example? "In those pre-miniaturization days, the ordinary operation of the central processor generated so much radiation that you would put a transistor radio on the console and tune it in between AM stations. From the other side of the room, the tone of the static indicated whether the machine had crashed or not."

12 years on Mars — and NASA's Curiosity rover "has made its most unusual find to date," reports CNN — rocks made of pure sulfur.

"And it all began when the 1-ton rover happened to drive over a rock and crack it open, revealing yellowish-green crystals never spotted before on the red planet." "I think it's the strangest find of the whole mission and the most unexpected," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "I have to say, there's a lot of luck involved here. Not every rock has something interesting inside...." White stones had been visible in the distance, and the mission scientists wanted a closer look. The rover drivers at JPL, who send instructions to Curiosity, did a 90-degree turn to put the robotic explorer in the right position for its cameras to capture a mosaic of the surrounding landscape. On the morning of May 30, Vasavada and his team looked at Curiosity's mosaic and saw a crushed rock lying amid the rover's wheel tracks. A closer picture of the rock made clear the "mind-blowing" find, he said...

"No one had pure sulfur on their bingo card," Vasavada said...

Members of the team were stunned twice — once when they saw the "gorgeous texture and color inside" the rock and then when they used Curiosity's instruments to analyze the rock and received data indicating it was pure sulfur, Vasavada said.
Vasavada also was grateful for the original landing site where Curiosity began methodically exploring back in 2012.

"I'm glad we chose something that was 12 years' worth of science."

NASA reports in an article for Phys.Org: Scientists were stunned on May 30 when a rock that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover drove over cracked open to reveal something never seen before on the Red Planet: yellow sulfur crystals. Since October 2023, the rover has been exploring a region of Mars rich with sulfates, a kind of salt that contains sulfur and forms as water evaporates. But where past detections have been of sulfur-based minerals -- in other words, a mix of sulfur and other materials -- the rock Curiosity recently cracked open is made of elemental (pure) sulfur. It isn't clear what relationship, if any, the elemental sulfur has to other sulfur-based minerals in the area.

While people associate sulfur with the odor from rotten eggs (the result of hydrogen sulfide gas), elemental sulfur is odorless. It forms in only a narrow range of conditions that scientists haven't associated with the history of this location. And Curiosity found a lot of it -- an entire field of bright rocks that look similar to the one the rover crushed. "Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert," said Curiosity's project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "It shouldn't be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting."

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the so-called "godmother of AI," is working on a startup focused on developing technology capable of human-like visual data processing and advanced reasoning. According to the Financial Times (paywalled), the startup is called World Labs and is already worth $1 billion. Quartz reports: "Curiosity urges us to create machines to see just as intelligently as we can, if not better," Li said during a Ted talk in April. "And if we want to advance AI beyond its current capabilities, we want more than AI that can see and talk. We want AI that can do." Andreessen Horowitz and the AI fund Radical Ventures are funders of World Labs.

Li is renowned for her contributions to AI. She invented ImageNet, a dataset used for advancing computer vision that many see as a catalyst for the AI boom. She consults with policymakers as they work to set up guardrails for the technology, and was named one of 12 national AI research resource task force members by the U.S. White House in 2021.

The Roddenberry Foundation — named for Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry — "announced Tuesday that this year's biennial award would focus on artificial intelligence that benefits humanity," reports the Los Angeles Times: Lior Ipp, chief executive of the foundation, told The Times there's a growing recognition that AI is becoming more ubiquitous and will affect all aspects of our lives. "We are trying to ... catalyze folks to think about what AI looks like if it's used for good," Ipp said, "and what it means to use AI responsibly, ethically and toward solving some of the thorny global challenges that exist in the world...."

Ipp said the foundation shares the broad concern about AI and sees the award as a means to potentially contribute to creating those guardrails... Inspiration for the theme was also borne out of the applications the foundation received last time around. Ipp said the prize, which is "issue-agnostic" but focused on early-stage tech, produced compelling uses of AI and machine learning in agriculture, healthcare, biotech and education. "So," he said, "we sort of decided to double down this year on specifically AI and machine learning...."

Though the foundation isn't prioritizing a particular issue, the application states that it is looking for ideas that have the potential to push the needle on one or more of the United Nations' 17 sustainable development goals, which include eliminating poverty and hunger as well as boosting climate action and protecting life on land and underwater.
The Foundation's most recent winner was Sweden-based Elypta, according to the article, "which Ipp said is using liquid biopsies, such as a blood test, to detect cancer early."

"We believe that building a better future requires a spirit of curiosity, a willingness to push boundaries, and the courage to think big," said Rod Roddenberry, co-founder of the Roddenberry Foundation. "The Prize will provide a significant boost to AI pioneers leading these efforts." According to the Foundation's announcement, the Prize "embodies the Roddenberry philosophy's promise of a future in which technology and human ingenuity enable everyone — regardless of background — to thrive."

"By empowering entrepreneurs to dream bigger and innovate valiantly, the Roddenberry Prize seeks to catalyze the development of AI solutions that promote abundance and well-being for all."

Shubham Sharma reports via VentureBeat: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which previously made headlines with a ChatGPT competitor trained on 2 trillion English and Chinese tokens, has announced the release of DeepSeek Coder V2, an open-source mixture of experts (MoE) code language model. Built upon DeepSeek-V2, an MoE model that debuted last month, DeepSeek Coder V2 excels at both coding and math tasks. It supports more than 300 programming languages and outperforms state-of-the-art closed-source models, including GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3 Opus and Gemini 1.5 Pro. The company claims this is the first time an open model has achieved this feat, sitting way ahead of Llama 3-70B and other models in the category. It also notes that DeepSeek Coder V2 maintains comparable performance in terms of general reasoning and language capabilities.

Founded last year with a mission to "unravel the mystery of AGI with curiosity," DeepSeek has been a notable Chinese player in the AI race, joining the likes of Qwen, 01.AI and Baidu. In fact, within a year of its launch, the company has already open-sourced a bunch of models, including the DeepSeek Coder family. The original DeepSeek Coder, with up to 33 billion parameters, did decently on benchmarks with capabilities like project-level code completion and infilling, but only supported 86 programming languages and a context window of 16K. The new V2 offering builds on that work, expanding language support to 338 and context window to 128K -- enabling it to handle more complex and extensive coding tasks. When tested on MBPP+, HumanEval, and Aider benchmarks, designed to evaluate code generation, editing and problem-solving capabilities of LLMs, DeepSeek Coder V2 scored 76.2, 90.2, and 73.7, respectively -- sitting ahead of most closed and open-source models, including GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Codestral and Llama-3 70B. Similar performance was seen across benchmarks designed to assess the model's mathematical capabilities (MATH and GSM8K). The only model that managed to outperform DeepSeek's offering across multiple benchmarks was GPT-4o, which obtained marginally higher scores in HumanEval, LiveCode Bench, MATH and GSM8K. [...]

As of now, DeepSeek Coder V2 is being offered under a MIT license, which allows for both research and unrestricted commercial use. Users can download both 16B and 236B sizes in instruct and base avatars via Hugging Face. Alternatively, the company is also providing access to the models via API through its platform under a pay-as-you-go model. For those who want to test out the capabilities of the models first, the company is offering the option to interact. with Deepseek Coder V2 via chatbot.

The sun fired off a volley of radiation-riddled outbursts in May. When they slammed into Earth's magnetic bubble, the world was treated to iridescent displays of the northern and southern lights. But our planet wasn't the only one in the solar firing line. From a report: A few days after Earth's light show, another series of eruptions screamed out of the sun. This time, on May 20, Mars was blitzed by a beast of a storm. Observed from Mars, "this was the strongest solar energetic particle event we've seen to date," said Shannon Curry, the principal investigator of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter, or MAVEN, at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

When the barrage arrived, it set off an aurora that enveloped Mars from pole to pole in a shimmering glow. If they were standing on the Martian surface, "astronauts could see these auroras," Dr. Curry said. Based on scientific knowledge of atmospheric chemistry, she and other scientists say, observers on Mars would have seen a jade-green light show, although no color cameras picked it up on the surface. But it's very fortunate that no astronauts were there. Mars's thin atmosphere and the absence of a global magnetic shield meant that its surface, as registered by NASA's Curiosity rover, was showered by a radiation dose equivalent to 30 chest X-rays -- not a lethal dose, but certainly not pleasant to the human constitution.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: "This is truly game-changing news!" exclaims Minecraft Education's Laylah Bulman in a LinkedIn post targeting high school CS educators. "We're thrilled to announce that the AP Computer Science Principles with Minecraft and MakeCode Curriculum has officially been approved by The College Board! And we are offering free professional learning for our inaugural cohort this summer...!

"Minecraft's highly engaging environment makes complex coding concepts relatable and fun, fostering a deeper understanding and encouraging broader participation. Ready to empower your students? Don't miss this opportunity!"

Recent Edsurge articles (sponsored by Minecraft Education) touted how Minecraft has found its way into computer science and other curricula in New York City and Broward County (Florida), two of the nation's largest school districts... Microsoft-backed nonprofit Code.org has also pushed Minecraft-themed CS tutorials into the nation's classrooms via its wildly-popular annual Hour of Code events since 2015, a year after Microsoft paid $2.5B to buy Minecraft. ("The best way to introduce anyone to STEM or get their curiosity going on, it's Minecraft," declared Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the time). Minecraft-related learning initiatives have also received millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation.

Amazon staff went undercover on Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a third-party seller called "Big River," WSJ reports. The mission: to scoop up information on pricing, logistics and other business practices. From the report: For nearly a decade, workers in a warehouse in Seattle's Denny Triangle neighborhood have shipped boxes of shoes, beach chairs, Marvel T-shirts and other items to online retail customers across the U.S. The operation, called Big River Services International, sells around $1 million a year of goods through e-commerce marketplaces including eBay, Shopify, Walmart and Amazon under brand names such as Rapid Cascade and Svea Bliss. "We are entrepreneurs, thinkers, marketers and creators," Big River says on its website. "We have a passion for customers and aren't afraid to experiment."

What the website doesn't say is that Big River is an arm of Amazon that surreptitiously gathers intelligence on the tech giant's competitors. Born out of a 2015 plan code named "Project Curiosity," Big River uses its sales across multiple countries to obtain pricing data, logistics information and other details about rival e-commerce marketplaces, logistics operations and payments services, according to people familiar with Big River and corporate documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The team then shared that information with Amazon to incorporate into decisions about its own business.

[...] The story of Big River offers new insight into Amazon's elaborate efforts to stay ahead of rivals. Team members attended their rivals' seller conferences and met with competitors identifying themselves only as employees of Big River Services, instead of disclosing that they worked for Amazon. They were given non-Amazon email addresses to use externally -- in emails with people at Amazon, they used Amazon email addresses -- and took other extraordinary measures to keep the project secret. They disseminated their reports to Amazon executives using printed, numbered copies rather than email. Those who worked on the project weren't even supposed to discuss the relationship internally with most teams at Amazon.

O'Reilly's "Tech Trends" newsletter included an interesting item this month: Want your own Klein Bottle? Made by Cliff Stoll, author of the cybersecurity classic The Cuckoo's Egg, who will autograph your bottle for you (and may include other surprises).
First described in 1882 by the mathematician Felix Klein, a Klein bottle (like a Mobius strip) has a one-side surface. ("Need a zero-volume bottle...?" asks Stoll's web site. "Want the ultimate in non-orientability...? A mathematician's delight, handcrafted in glass.")

But how the legendary cyberbreach detective started the company is explained in this 2016 article from a U.C. Berkeley alumni magazine. Its headline? "How a Berkeley Eccentric Beat the Russians — and Then Made Useless, Wondrous Objects." The reward for his cloak-and-dagger wizardry? A certificate of appreciation from the CIA, which is stashed somewhere in his attic... Stoll published a best-selling book, The Cuckoo's Egg, about his investigation. PBS followed it with a NOVA episode entitled "The KGB, the Computer, and Me," a docudrama starring Stoll playing himself and stepping through the "fourth wall" to double as narrator. Stoll had stepped through another wall, as well, into the numinous realm of fame, as the burgeoning tech world went wild with adulation... He was more famous than he ever could have dreamed, and he hated it. "After a few months, you realize how thin fame is, and how shallow. I'm not a software jockey; I'm an astronomer. But all people cared about was my computing."

Stoll's disenchantment also arose from what he perceived as the false religion of the Internet... Stoll articulated his disenchantment in his next book, Silicon Snake Oil, published in 1995, which urged readers to get out from behind their computer screens and get a life. "I was asking what I thought were reasonable questions: Is the electronic classroom an improvement? Does a computer help a student learn? Yes, but what it teaches you is to go to the computer whenever you have a question, rather than relying on yourself. Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don't learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out." It was not a popular message in the rise of the dot-com era, as Stoll soon learned...

Being a Voice in the Wilderness doesn't pay well, however, and by this time Stoll had taken his own advice and gotten a life; namely, marrying and having two children. So he looked around for a way to make some money. That ushered in his third — and current — career as President and Chief Bottle Washer of the aforementioned Acme Klein Bottle company... At first, Stoll had a hard time finding someone to make Klein bottles. He tried a bong peddler on Telegraph Avenue, but the guy took Cliff's money and disappeared. "I realized that the trouble with bong makers is that they're also bong users."

Then in 1994, two friends of his, Tom Adams and George Chittenden, opened a shop in West Berkeley that made glassware for science labs. "They needed help with their computer program and wanted to pay me," Stoll recalls. "I said, 'Nah, let's make Klein bottles instead.' And that's how Acme Klein Bottles was born."
UPDATE: Turns out Stoll is also a long-time Slashdot reader, and shared comments this weekend on everything from watching the eclipse to his VIP parking pass for CIA headquarters and "this CIA guy's rubber-stamp collection."

"I am honored by the attention and kindness of fellow nerds and online friends," Stoll added Saturday. "When I first started on that chase in 1986, I had no idea wrhere it would lead me... To all my friends: May you burdens be light and your purpose high. Stay curious!"

"It was three years of my, life you know?" a 93-year-old William Shatner tells the Guardian when asked about playing Captain Kirk on the original Star Trek series from 1967 to 1969: It gladdens him to see how much joy the series has brought its many fans, but the richest rewards came in his introduction to science fiction, which activated and nurtured a lifelong curiosity about our species. He reminisces about meeting the great writers of the genre fondly yet frankly, honest enough to sort Ray Bradbury into "the category right below friend, I think". He devoured their novels and developed a fascination with the principle of defamiliarization, that concepts taken for granted can be understood anew when viewed through the vantage of a stranger in a strange land. "Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu," he says.
Even on a grander scale, "The universe charms him with its mysteries," writes the Guardian, calling it "the key to maintaining wonder through nearly a century of life. He likes the not-knowing."

You can see this at play when the TV starship captain became a real-life spacefarer in 2021: Liberated by weightlessness, he found himself utterly transformed by the rush of perspective one can only assume miles above the Earth. "It's very personal, what you see from up there, what you read into the stillness," he says. "I saw the blankness of space as death, but an astronaut will see something else entirely. And when I looked back at the Earth, I saw life."

The question of mortality hangs over Shatner, albeit not in a morbid way. He's entranced by the paradox of death, that the absolute unknowability of what happens will be inevitably supplanted by the certainty of finding out... For a man accustomed to boldly going where no man has gone before, it's all just the next phase of a single ongoing adventure.
In fact, Shatner told Jimmy Kimmel Friday that he was always disappointed by the way he'd performed Captain Kirk's death. "I think you die the way you live," Shatner says. "So Captain Kirk always had these grotesque things happening... but without fear. But with joy, and love, and an opportunity to see what's better." So when performing Kirk's death, he'd imagined him actually gazing upon death itself — and looking upon it with wonder. "I ad libbed the 'Oh my'." Shatner's regret? That it "sounded fearful. And I didn't want to be fearful."

"Would you like a do-over?" Kimmel asks. (Adding "I've got some debris...") And Shatner agrees, performing — one more time — the death of Captain Kirk.

The video also includes an appropriate clip from a newly-released documentary about Shatner's life. "Don't do it half-heartedly," Shatner says at one point. "Whatever it is you do — do it fully. Do it passionately. Do it with your whole being."

Quora "used to be a thriving community that worked to answer our most specific questions," writes Slate. "But users are fleeing," while the site hosts "a never-ending avalanche of meaningless, repetitive sludge, filled with bizarre, nonsensical, straight-up hateful, and A.I.-generated entries..."

The site has faced moderation issues, spam, trolls, and bots re-posting questions from Reddit (plus competition for ad revenue from sites like Facebook and Google which forced cuts in Quora's support and moderation teams). But automating its moderation "did not improve the situation...

"Now Quora is even offering A.I.-generated images to accompany users' answers, even though the spawned illustrations make little sense." To top it all off, after Quora began using A.I. to "generate machine answers on a number of selected question pages," the site made clear the possibility that human-crafted answers could be used for training A.I. This meant that the detailed writing Quorans provided mostly for free would be ingested into a custom large language model. Updated terms of service and privacy policies went into effect at the site last summer. As angel investor and Quoran David S. Rose paraphrased them: "You grant all other Quora users the unlimited right to reuse and adapt your answers," "You grant Quora the right to use your answers to train an LLM unless you specifically opt out," and "You completely give up your right to be any part of any class action suit brought against Quora," among others. (Quora's Help Center claims that "as of now, we do not use answers, posts, or comments added to Quora to train LLMs used for generating content on Quora. However, this may change in the future." The site offers an opt-out setting, although it admits that "opting out does not cover everything.")

This raised the issue of consent and ownership, as Quorans had to decide whether to consent to the new terms or take their work and flee. High-profile users, like fantasy author Mercedes R. Lackey, are removing their work from their profiles and writing notes explaining why. "The A.I. thing, the terms of service issue, has been a massive drain of top talent on Quora, just based on how many people have said, Downloaded my stuff and I'm out of there," Lackey told me. It's not that all Quorans want to leave, but it's hard for them to choose to remain on a website where they now have to constantly fight off errors, spam, trolls, and even account impersonators....

The tragedy of Quora is not just that it crushed the flourishing communities it once built up. It's that it took all of that goodwill, community, expertise, and curiosity and assumed that it could automate a system that equated it, apparently without much thought to how pale the comparison is. [Nelson McKeeby, an author who joined Quora in 2013] has a grim prediction for the future: "Eventually Quora will be robot questions, robot answers, and nothing else." I wonder how the site will answer the question of why Quora died, if anyone even bothers to ask.
The article notes that Andreessen Horowitz gave Quora "a much-needed $75 million investment — but only for the sake of developing its on-site generative-text chatbot, Poe."

This week on his podcast Bill Gates asked Sam Altman how his team is doing after his (temporary) ouster, Altman replies "a lot of people have remarked on the fact that the team has never felt more productive or more optimistic or better. So, I guess that's like a silver lining of all of this. In some sense, this was like a real moment of growing up for us, we are very motivated to become better, and sort of to become a company ready for the challenges in front of us."

The rest of their conversation was pre-ouster — but gave fascinating glimpses at the possible future of AI — including the prospect of very speedy improvements. Altman suggests it will be easier to understand how a creative work gets "encoded" in an AI than it would be in a human brain. "There has been some very good work on interpretability, and I think there will be more over time... The little bits we do understand have, as you'd expect, been very helpful in improving these things. We're all motivated to really understand them, scientific curiosity aside, but the scale of these is so vast...." BILL GATES: I'm pretty sure, within the next five years, we'll understand it. In terms of both training efficiency and accuracy, that understanding would let us do far better than we're able to do today.

SAM ALTMAN: A hundred percent. You see this in a lot of the history of technology where someone makes an empirical discovery. They have no idea what's going on, but it clearly works. Then, as the scientific understanding deepens, they can make it so much better.

BILL GATES: Yes, in physics, biology, it's sometimes just messing around, and it's like, whoa — how does this actually come together...? When you look at the next two years, what do you think some of the key milestones will be?

SAM ALTMAN: Multimodality will definitely be important.

BILL GATES: Which means speech in, speech out?

SAM ALTMAN: Speech in, speech out. Images. Eventually video. Clearly, people really want that.... [B]ut maybe the most important areas of progress will be around reasoning ability. Right now, GPT-4 can reason in only extremely limited ways. Also reliability. If you ask GPT-4 most questions 10,000 times, one of those 10,000 is probably pretty good, but it doesn't always know which one, and you'd like to get the best response of 10,000 each time, and so that increase in reliability will be important.

Customizability and personalization will also be very important. People want very different things out of GPT-4: different styles, different sets of assumptions. We'll make all that possible, and then also the ability to have it use your own data. The ability to know about you, your email, your calendar, how you like appointments booked, connected to other outside data sources, all of that. Those will be some of the most important areas of improvement.
Areas where Altman sees potential are healthcare, education, and especially computer programming. "If you make a programmer three times more effective, it's not just that they can do three times more stuff, it's that they can — at that higher level of abstraction, using more of their brainpower — they can now think of totally different things. It's like, going from punch cards to higher level languages didn't just let us program a little faster — it let us do these qualitatively new things. And we're really seeing that...

"I think it's worth always putting it in context of this technology that, at least for the next five or ten years, will be on a very steep improvement curve. These are the stupidest the models will ever be."

He predicts the fastest technology revolution "by far," worrying about "the speed with which society is going to have to adapt, and that the labor market will change." But soon he adds that "We started investing a little bit in robotics companies. On the physical hardware side, there's finally, for the first time that I've ever seen, really exciting new platforms being built there."

And at some point Altman tells Gates he's optimistic that AI could contribute to helping humans get along with each other.

What would happen if we built a concert venue in near-Earth orbit? A science policy journalist explores the question in the Washington Post: Forget U2 in the Las Vegas Sphere. Take me to a real concert in the round, where I can float 360 degrees around the stage, watching a guitarist shred from the perspective of a fly and inventing dance moves that Earth's gravity would forbid.

Before you dismiss this as a hallucination, consider that we're on the cusp of a new era of space travel. Engineer and space architect Ariel Ekblaw, founder of MIT's Space Exploration Initiative, says that within a decade, a trip off the planet could become as accessible as a first-class airline ticket — and that, in 15 or 20 years, we can expect space hotels in near-Earth orbit. She's betting on it, having founded a nonprofit to design spherical, modular habitats that can assemble themselves in space so as to be lightweight and compact at launch, much like the James Webb Space Telescope that NASA vaulted into deep space two years ago.

"The first era of space travel was about survival," she told me as I recently toured her lab. "We're transitioning now to build spaces that are friendlier and more welcoming so that people can thrive in space as opposed to just survive." There's no reason, Ekblaw said, that a concert hall can't be one of those structures.
The article ultimately calls this "an impulse for space travel I can get behind: curiosity about who we are and what more we can create when we reach beyond Earth. This is the realm of not just scientists and engineers but of all kinds of dreamers. It's a rendition of space exploration that can engage anyone to imagine what's possible."