Daily Tech News 5 October 2023

• A new communications satellite has instantly become one of the brightest objects in the night sky and astronomers are peeved, though when are they not? (New York Times) (archive site)
  
  BlueWalker 3 is a test run for AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird satellite constellation, designed for direct orbit-to-ground smartphone service. To achieve this the satellites are much larger than Starlink's - 64 times larger as seen from Earth, and thus 64 times brighter.

  To find the specific impact of BlueWalker 3, the authors of the new study compiled observations of the satellite recorded by amateur and professional astronomers in Chile, the United States, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Morocco. This global campaign revealed that BlueWalker 3 reached a magnitude that made it as bright as Procyon and Achernar, two of the 10 most luminous stars in the sky, according to the study.

  The problem is not so much that it is bright, as that it moves relative to the stars and spoils your photos, like an inquisitive squirrel at a wedding.

  "I really like how they used many different telescopes from many different places in the world; it highlights how this is truly a global problem," said Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan who was not involved with the study but wrote an article in Nature that accompanied it. "One country, or one small company, launches a satellite and it can be seen everywhere in the world."

  That is how satellites work, yes.

  "We shouldn't have progress at any cost," Dr. Tregloan-Reed said. "It's like building a brand-new development over a historical site. You can't just do that. You have to protect these things."

  More like building a brand-new development in an uninhabited wasteland. There is literally nothing there.

  He also acknowledged that astronomers don't own the night sky but have a vested interest in preserving it. "What we'd like to do is share the night sky, just not with you" he said.

• Researchers say current AI watermarks are trivial to remove. (Engadget)
  
  Just use an AI watermark removing AI.
  
  
  
• Other researchers say they have created unremovable watermarks for AI models themselves. (Engadget)
  
  They distribute signature data throughout the model that can be used to confirm ownership, and which can't be removed without major changes to the model.

  "It doesn't matter how clever you are—unless the change you make to the neural network parameters is very large, you cannot come up with a method for removing the watermark."

  But since the signature data has no value to the model, it is safe to make major changes to the model to remove it.
  
  
  
• I'll give The Verge a pass today: Twitter has done something dumb again, and it is directly Elon Musk's fault. (The Verge)
  
  If you include a link in a Tweet, Twitter will look up the page to see if it has tags for summary text and header images and include them in the tweet.
  
  Or it did. Now the summary text is gone.
  
  Because it looks prettier that way. Useless, but pretty.
  
  
  
• Speed-ish: A British driver was kidnapped by his new electric car when it refused to slow down below 30 mph, or stop, or be turned off. (BBC)
  
  And it's not some idiot pressing the accelerator rather than the brake pedal; the police had to park a van in front of it to stop it getting away while they waited for a technician to show up and put it out of its misery.
  
  In case you were wondering, the car was an MG. So we should be glad that it was moving in the first place.
  
  
  
• SoftBank CEO Son (that's his name) says artificial general intelligence (real AI) will be here within 10 years. (Reuters)
  
  Bloody unlikely given that everyone has stopped working on it to chase after glorified autocorrect systems.
  
  
  
• Los Angeles is now using AI to predict who might become homeless. (NPR)
  
  "It must be broken. It just says 'Los Angeles'".

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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