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"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.cnet.com/science/space/october-skies-will-put-on-a-show-heres-when-to-look-up/

As autumn paints the leaves, the universe is putting on its own seasonal spectacular. October features an action-packed lineup of meteor showers and celestial showcases.

Every planet in the solar system is easily seen at some point this month, with Mercury being the most difficult. That's not unusual, thanks to its proximity to the sun. Here's a quick rundown on the best times to view each planet in October. 

Mercury: Mercury is in elongation (the furthest it can get from the sun) on Oct. 12, making that day and the two or so days before and after the best possible time to view Mercury.

Venus: Venus spends most of the month being right next to the sun, making it virtually impossible to see. However, by the end of the month, it begins to separate from the sun, making it visible just after sunset. The best view is on Oct. 31, and the view is only set to get better going into November.

Mars: Mars will be visible in the night sky every night in October. It rises from the eastern horizon right around 2 a.m. and stays there until the sun comes up.

Jupiter: Jupiter and Mars are going to be pretty close together all month, so most of the same rules apply, except that Jupiter rises about two hours later than Mars on most nights in October.

Saturn: Saturn is living its best life in October. It's visible almost right at sunset ET and stays visible in the night sky until sunrise.

Neptune: Neptune is also visible every day in October and follows a very similar path to Saturn. It rises in the east, streaks across the sky, and sets in the west right around sunrise. They're actually pretty close together in the night sky every night during the month, so if you can find Saturn, Neptune isn't far off, but you'll definitely need magnification to see it.

Uranus: Uranus is visible the entire month and follows a very similar path through the sky as Saturn and Neptune, but its trek happens later at night. It rises on the eastern horizon about 2 hours after Saturn and follows it across the sky, but never really catches up, ending up in the high western sky when sunrise comes.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-harness-randomness-to-crack-a-55-year-old-conjecture-20260928/

The late Ronald Graham wore two hats. He was a renowned mathematician, at one time president of the American Mathematical Society. He was also a serious juggler, and president of the International Jugglers' Association. "He loved tricks," said Fan Chung, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego, who was married to Graham. "You know, spinning a ball, spinning a coat hanger, spinning several balls together, throwing pens against the wall."

Sometimes Graham wore both hats at once. "It's interesting, in fact, that many mathematicians and computer scientists have an interest in juggling," he said in a 1980 television interview. "I think it's the search for patterns and structure that is responsible for this."

He would go on to write numerous papers, some with Chung, on the mathematics of juggling. But back in 1971, decades before he made that connection explicit, he posed a question that some mathematicians now say might have been inspired by juggling, too.

Start with a random set of different integers, not including zero. Can you always rearrange them so that if you add up the first two numbers, then the first three, then the first four, and so on, every "partial sum" turns out different? In the language of juggling, this would mean that if each ball stays in the air for a different amount of time, you can always find an order to throw them in such that two balls won't come crashing down on the same beat — which would ruin the act.

If the numbers are all positive, then the answer to Graham's question is obviously yes: The sums will always grow larger as you add more numbers. Similarly, if there are both positive and negative numbers in the mix, the answer is also known to be yes. But what if the numbers live in a finite world — like numbers wrapped around a clock, which repeat after a certain count?

That's what Graham wanted to know. He conjectured that the answer should still be yes. It often happens, he figured, that even when dealing with rigid constraints, you can still find enough flexibility to construct special patterns or structures — just as it's usually possible to find a valid sudoku board or Latin square (another kind of puzzle) despite their many rules. "It fits nicely in all these questions about designs and about very symmetric structures," said Noga Alon, a mathematician at Princeton University. But for decades, no one could prove Graham's intuition to be true.

That changed recently, when several young mathematicians picked up the balls. In a proof that spanned four papers and various fields of mathematics, they finally resolved Graham's rearrangement conjecture. The final paper, by Lisa Sauermann of the University of Bonn and Huy Tuan Pham of the University of Chicago, appeared in February 2026, officially closing the problem.

Across the papers, one theme prevailed: the power of randomness to draw out patterns. As Alon put it, "It's the power of collaboration, the power of the young generation, the power of probabilistic methods" that solved the problem.

Alp Müyesser, a mathematician at the University of Oxford, often finds himself drawn to problems whose solutions need two ingredients: a random process, and something extra as well. After solving one such problem in 2022 while he was still a graduate student, he encountered Graham's conjecture and realized that his just-finished proof could help there, too.

Alp Müyesser enjoys thinking about problems that require him to combine randomness with something else.

The conjecture is set in the world of clock arithmetic. You start by placing the whole numbers on a number line, then you wrap the line around the face of a clock so that the numbers repeat after some prime number, p. Say p is 7, for instance. In this setting, 0, 7, 14, and all other multiples of 7 are equivalent — meaning that you can add two positive numbers (like 3 and 4) and get zero.

Graham asked the following: If you pick any set of nonzero numbers off this number line (for any p), can you always rearrange them so that the partial sums you get are all different?

The challenge depends on how big your set is compared to p. The more numbers you pick, the more sums there are to manage. But if you choose fewer numbers, there will be fewer ways to rearrange them. These different cases inspire different approaches.

Müyesser, along with his former adviser, Alexey Pokrovskiy of University College London, tackled the case where your set includes almost every possible number up to p. With sets this large, it can be extremely hard to construct a valid ordering. But it turned out that starting with a random ordering can bring you most of the way there.

It's embarrassing for humanity that we don't know this. This situation just had to be rectified.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/09/29/fresh-css-constructs-move-web-design-beyond-ticky-tacky-little-boxes/5299614

The World Wide Web's decades-long tyranny of box design is finally coming to an end. A new set of CSS features – including the shape() function, and the border-shape and corner-shape properties –  offers web designers and their AI agents a broader palette for laying out content in a more fluid manner.

When the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published its first standard for web page layout in 1996, web sites emulated the grid-defined layouts of academic papers, newspapers, and magazines. 

At the time, graphics drivers, and browser rendering engines were all in a relatively primitive state. Developers were also trying to grapple with a new medium and generally found that flowing text within a defined space was much easier when the geometric coordinates of that space were kept as simple as possible.  

But now print is basically dead, webdevs are savvier (and if not, AI is happy to help), and Lord knows GPUs are more powerful. So there's no reason today why a web page has to be square, daddy-o.  

In Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 proto-Sci-Fi classic Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the protagonist who lives in flat two-dimensional space is abruptly exposed to the dizzying world of three dimensions, much to his astonishment.

Web developers may experience similar emotions when they first use these new CSS constructs.

In their original forms, HTML and CSS could draw only horizontal or vertical lines or borders on a Web page. Fancier layouts required proprietary plug-ins, such as Java Applets, Macromedia/Adobe Flash, or some tedious JavaScript hacks.

SVG first broke the boxiness of the web, giving the developers the ability to put curves, squiggly lines, logos or any other wild-ass shape desired by using a series of numerical coordinates to describe the shape (it's tedious work, though image-to-SVG converters help). SVG was limited to a canvas placed on a Web page, however. CSS ruled the layout of the page itself.

hubie writes:

Surprising Findings from Historical Data: the famous flood of 1342 was not an isolated event, but a series of events – providing insights for climate research and risk assessment:

It went down in history as the "St. Mary Magdalene's Flood" – a massive flood disaster that engulfed large parts of Europe in 1342. Now, in a painstaking, years-long effort, historical sources have been analyzed and combined with modern hydrological knowledge to obtain a reliable picture of this natural disaster.

This revealed some surprises: The great flood of 1342 was not an isolated event, but a particularly devastating part of a series of 16 flood events lasting almost two years. A lesson can be learned for the future: Flood protection must not only consider individual extreme events. It must also be anticipated that several major floods will occur in quick succession.

[...] The economy of the entire continent was affected: trade routes were disrupted, and vital infrastructure was destroyed—for example, the Stone Bridge in Prague, which spanned the Vltava River before the construction of the now-famous Charles Bridge.

"Historical data show that it wasn't just a single flood event, but a whole series of events," says Günter Blöschl, hydrologist, team leader at TU Wien. Where historical records are incomplete, modern floods with similar conditions were selected to draw analogies. In this way, a comprehensive picture of flood history in space and time emerged step by step. "We can reconstruct month by month when which regions of Europe were affected," says Andrea Kiss. "This clearly shows that a series of flood events stretches like a string of pearls through the years 1341 to 1343. Not all equally devastating, not all in the same place, but all clearly connected".

1342 was the year with the highest number of extreme flood events in the last 700 years, and 1343 is a close third. This cluster was no coincidence: The team found several possible factors that could have contributed to this extraordinary series of floods. Around 1340 and 1341, an unusually high number of volcanic eruptions occurred, including the Hekla eruption in Iceland. Sulfur-containing aerosols in the atmosphere can lead to cooling and alter large-scale circulation patterns.

At the same time, Arctic sea ice had already declined significantly since the mid-1330s, while solar activity in the 1330s-1340s was still relatively low. "The interplay of these factors could have contributed to intense low-pressure systems, prolonged rainfall, and thus the unusual series of floods." says A. Kiss. "This is extremely interesting for us today: We can draw important lessons about the interplay of climate and precipitation from events that occurred almost seven centuries ago," says G. Blöschl.

Furthermore, the St. Mary Magdalene's Flood confirms a finding that the TU Vienna team had already reached in another context: Flood events are not statistically independent of one another. They don't simply occur randomly like lottery wins; they can be statistically and causally linked. This means that even in modern risk planning, it must be considered that flood disasters cannot be viewed in isolation, but can always occur in rapid succession.

Journal Reference: Kiss, A., Viglione, A., Barriendos, M. et al. Cascading continental-scale floods across Europe in 1342–1343. Nature 656, 638–645 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10888-8

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.zdnet.com/innovation/workera-study-ai-skills-upskilling-2026/

AI is no longer emerging in the workplace. It's in the office, and it's shaping how businesses, employees, and their respective interests operate, and it's doing so rapidly. 

A new study from Workera found that 80% of companies feel they are more likely to be on track for an AI-enabled future in 2026, up from 67% last year. However, some may be missing the boat on what's most important — their people. 

Findings from Workera's 2026 State of Skills Intelligence Report, published Sept. 23, suggest business leaders and working professionals need to find more common ground on how to upskill for an AI world, and Kian Katanforoosh, founder and CEO of Workera, said organizations need to take the lead.

“I would advise any leader right now to think about giving [their] people time to upskill. Don’t think that they will just figure it out without you actually carving out time. With time also comes the psychological safety; give them the psychological safety to experiment [with AI],” Katanforoosh told ZDNET in an exclusive interview.

This year's research surveyed 1,000 salaried professionals working for organizations with 5,000 or more employees in the US. The survey was conducted in July 2026 using the market research tool Pollfish. Year-over-year measurements were obtained by comparing July 2026 results with those from a similar survey conducted with Pollfish in March 2025. 

AI skills are imperative, and both companies and employees know it. Workera's survey found that more than two-thirds of employees (67.8%) now use AI tools beyond ChatGPT at least a couple of days a week, up from 39.9% last year. That’s nearly a 30% year-over-year increase in AI tool use. 

But that rise in day-to-day use is underscored by a few less-gleaming realities. 

Nearly 60% of employees said no time is allocated during work hours for upskilling (56.4%), and almost 43% mentioned a lack of relevant learning materials (42.5%) as the biggest obstacles to improving AI skills. Additionally, employees reported spending minimal time each week on skill development. Over 80% of employees spend just five hours or less per week on training (84.3%). 

Katanforoosh said AI upskilling can be cumbersome, with many employees feeling "overwhelmed" with so many ways to learn and little time built into workdays to do it. On top of this issue, the last 12 months have rapidly changed the learning landscape. 

"Last year was more about adoption and access, and now we’re past that, and so it’s about outcomes and actions, which creates additional stress," Katanforoosh said.

hubie writes:

As AI agents begin to operate in populations rather than one at a time, new research suggests that the number of them changes what they collectively decide:

New research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that when artificial intelligence (AI) agents interact in groups, their number is not merely a technical detail. It is a decisive factor in what the group settles on: populations built from the same AI model, doing the same task, can reach opposite outcomes for no other reason than that one group is bigger.

Human beings behave differently depending on how many of us are in the room. A family is not a small village. A village is not London. London is not a nation state. As scale grows, new rules, norms and pathologies can appear that were nowhere to be found at the scale below. The authors argue the same is true of AI.

The study, from City St George's, University of London, the IT University of Copenhagen and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, arrives at a time when AI agents are now being deployed working together rather than working alone. Multi-agent systems are already used in finance, energy, defence and social media, and researchers have begun modelling populations of millions, even billions, of interacting agents — what some now call AI societies.

Yet the industry's AI alignment — it doing what humans intended it to do — and safety effort remains overwhelmingly focused on the single model. Benchmarks, red-teaming exercises — adversarial testing designed to expose a model's weaknesses — and safety evaluations almost always describe one agent responding on its own, and where groups are examined at all, they are examined at one fixed size.

"Physicists have a motto for this: more is different," said Andrea Baronchelli, Professor of Complexity Science at City St George's and senior author of the study.

To find out what changes with scale, the team used the "naming game", a classic framework for studying how conventions emerge, in which randomly paired agents each pick a word from a shared pool and are rewarded when they happen to pick the same one. Agents see only their own recent interactions, never the wider population, and are never told they are in a group. Over many pairings, a population can converge spontaneously on a shared convention — the bottom-up way norms form in human cultures.

[...] Interaction, they found, can pull a group away from what its members individually want in three ways. It can amplify an existing leaning until the group converges on it almost every time. It can induce a preference out of nothing, with populations of individually neutral agents reliably favouring one word over an equally viable alternative. And it can reverse a preference outright, so that a population settles on the word its own members disfavoured.

[...] Group size then determines how strongly these preferences bite, in ways that cannot be extrapolated. Larger populations became more predictable across every model and word pair tested, converging on one word until the outcome was effectively certain. But the size at which that tipping point arrived varied enormously: for some combinations as few as two agents, for others around ten thousand. Scale could also change the kind of distortion. For the pair {straight, gay}, Llama agents individually preferred straight — but populations reversed toward gay, and only once the group reached six agents or more. Below that, the effect was simply invisible.

The team also developed an analytical theory, borrowed from statistical physics, that predicts the behaviour of infinitely large populations and explains why the randomness of small groups gives way to near-certainty above a critical size.

"Bias was our test case, because it is measurable and it matters," Dr Ariel Flint, first author of the study, added. "But there is no reason to think collusion, deception or cooperation are immune to size effects. Current testing practice may be missing risks that appear only at particular population sizes — not because anyone was careless, but because nobody thought to vary the number."

The authors say that the implications of the study for the alignment of AI systems are direct. A model can be aligned when tested on its own and still produce outcomes nobody chose once it is deployed alongside copies of itself — and no amount of single-agent evaluation will reveal it.

"AI alignment is still largely being done as though each model lived alone in the world," said Professor Baronchelli.

Journal Reference: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2531697123

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Whitehall unit will examine critical contracts after Capita pensions fiasco strengthens case for bringing work in-house:

The UK government is setting up a new unit it promises will "bring forward the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation."

Government outsourcing has long attracted criticism over value for money and service quality, with technology-heavy business processes among the contracts coming under scrutiny.

The government said the new unit, based within the Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet, would "coordinate departmental insourcing activity, unblock barriers to delivery and identify cross-government opportunities to maximize value for money and restore direct operational accountability."

The unit will consider bringing critical service contracts back in-house and work alongside the recently announced Public Interest Test, which applies to most central government service contracts worth at least £1 million. The test requires departments to consider factors beyond short-term price, including service quality and public value. The unit is also expected to help reduce spending on consultants and professional services by building capability within the Civil Service.

One early candidate is the Cabinet Office's building management work, including cleaning and security, which the government says it will consider bringing in-house when existing contracts end in 2028.

The case for insourcing has gained urgency in Whitehall following the disastrous start to Capita's contract to administer the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS).

The UK outsourcing company won the seven-year, £239 million contract in November 2023 and took over from MyCSP in December 2025. The previous arrangement with MyCSP began in 2012 and had cost £238 million since 2016. Capita's takeover produced a glitchy website and left some former civil servants struggling to access their pensions, as The Reg exclusively revealed. .

In July, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Minister for the Cabinet Office, said the Capita CSPS contract "could be a prime candidate for insourcing in the future."

However, he also admitted that option would have to wait. "If I were to terminate the contract straightaway, that would clearly cause severe disruption to the payroll. I cannot replace a complex pension operation overnight," Thomas-Symonds said.

Even if the government eventually brings the pension administration back in-house, it is unlikely to be an early candidate. Capita's initial seven-year term runs until December 2032, and the contract includes an option for a further three years.

Original Submission

Source BBC Television News: (17:18 BST 30 Sep 2026)

The Prime Minister has stated that the UK now believe that Iran was behind to the attempted attack on RAF Fairford.

The Iranian Ambassador has strongly denied any connection with the incident.

See previous reporting: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=26/09/28/1259254 https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=26/09/27/115249

hubie writes:

Study finds PETM was marked by a widespread browning of Earth's landscapes and trees are at the root of these drastic changes:

If you want to know how rapidly pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will impact future forest ecosystems, you have to look into the distant past. The researchers behind a new study published in Science have done just that, reconstructing the forest canopy of 56 million years ago, during a massive and abrupt emission of carbon into the atmosphere during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). For the first time, the authors of the study used fossilized leaf cells to reconstruct the tree canopy of the PETM, Earth's most recent period of comparable global warming, with chilling implications for our near future.

"We are putting CO₂ into the atmosphere faster than any known natural process," says lead author and paleobotanist Dr. Regan Dunn, Assistant Deputy Director and Associate Curator of the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research at La Brea Tar Pits and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. "The Earth has never experienced a carbon release at the pace we're creating today. The PETM gives us our best window into how Earth's climate and ecosystems respond to a massive carbon injection before humans began reshaping the planet."

The authors found that the PETM was marked by a widespread browning of Earth's landscapes. Against a backdrop of elevated atmospheric CO₂, global warming, and reduced rainfall triggered by volcanically driven carbon release, plant species migrated northwards, and canopy cover declined, accelerating erosion and disrupting the terrestrial water cycle. The human-caused climate change happening now is pumping CO2 at an order of magnitude faster than the ancient parallel. Trees are at the root of these drastic changes.

"There are significant tree mortality events everywhere on Earth right now," says Dunn. "Forests are in decline because of warming temperatures, drought stress, pathogen and insect infestations, and wildfires—when you start losing the trees, our canaries in the coal mine, you're in trouble. It's almost universally true in all of Earth's five major extinction events."

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aec4776

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/trump-ai-super-intelligence-internet-response/

If artificial intelligence isn’t called AI, does that make the technology more acceptable?

Speaking to world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said he wanted future US government documents to use the term “super intelligence” or “SI” instead of “artificial intelligence” because it’s “more accurate.”

"The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake," the president said at the UN. "It is not fake. It's actually amazing.”

And to honor the rebrand, Trump said, “Welcome to the new world of super intelligence — SI.”

As of yet, there doesn’t appear to be an official government order forcing a change from AI to SI. A White House representative referred CNET to the president’s UN comments.

The president was still using the term AI as of Saturday, when he proposed an AI Force as a follow-up to the Space Force, the space service branch established in 2019.

Then, on Monday, Trump posted a poll to Truth Social and X, asking people to vote for a new term to replace AI: “superior intelligence,” “extreme intelligence,” or “supreme intelligence.” In that instance, “superior intelligence” took the lead before the poll closed. (The president blamed low votes for “supreme intelligence” on the public’s views of the Supreme Court.)

Another poll, posted less than an hour later, asked people to decide between “super intelligence” or “superior intelligence.” In that case, “super” won by a razor-thin margin.

This is hardly the first name change under the Trump administration. A January 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in official documents. Just last month, Trump ordered Lake Ontario to be designated Lake America. There’s also an ongoing battle over adding the president’s name to the Kennedy Center in Washington.

Get ready for more semantic chaos. The term AI is already a well-established part of the lexicon. An even stickier problem is that Trump’s proposed nomenclature hijacks a term that already has a distinct meaning in the tech world. Superintelligence, as a single word, is used to refer to a hypothetical AI model that can outthink and outperform humans.

Social media commenters quickly found the supersnarky side of the global AI race. “China is already developing Super Duper Intelligence,” wrote Clay Jones on Bluesky.

Some played off the letters SI already being used for Sports Illustrated. “Really not looking forward to the swimsuit issue now,” said one Bluesky commenter.

Another assumed the president would add his brand to the new term. “I thought he would put ‘Trump’ into it somewhere. You know, like … Super Trump Intelligence…'STI.'"

Another X user picked an obvious retort. “‘Lack of intelligence’ is what this administration has.”

One post references the famed scene in the 2011 movie Mean Girls, where Lacey Chabert’s character, Gretchen Wieners, attempts to establish “fetch” as a new slang term.

And some memes and posts pointed out that SI spells sí, meaning “yes” in Spanish.

One referenced the famed scene from the 1996 film Independence Day, in which a fictional president, played by Bill Pullman, encourages the nation to fight against an alien attack.

Legendary Fox Trot cartoonist Bill Amend pointed out that changing AI to SI might have a domino effect on other businesses using the term. “OpenAI lawyers currently scrambling to lock down OpenSI trademarks and web domains…” Amend wrote on Bluesky.

And others pointed out that a name change does nothing to address any of the controversial issues about the technology, with one person writing, “Hey guys, good news! Artificial intelligence isn’t going to take away your job and destroy the planet. Super intelligence is going to take away your job and destroy the planet. OK, ciao.”

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A new Finnish study links habitual coffee consumption to healthier body composition and metabolic markers, while revealing distinct associations with sex hormones in men and women:

The study, conducted at the University of Oulu, analysed data from 2,264 participants aged 46 in the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966. Researchers examined how habitual coffee consumption was associated with circulating metabolites, cardiometabolic risk markers and sex hormones.

Despite having a similar body mass index (BMI), individuals with higher coffee consumption had lower total and visceral fat and greater skeletal muscle mass than those who consumed less coffee.

In both men and women, higher coffee consumption was correlated with lower circulating levels of branched-chain amino acids, biomarkers that have previously been linked to insulin resistance and an increased risk of type 2 diabetes when chronically elevated.

The strongest sex-specific associations were observed in men. Higher coffee consumption was linked to a more favourable glucose–insulin profile, higher concentrations of total and bioavailable testosterone, and increased levels of sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG). At the same time, free testosterone and the free androgen index were modestly lower. In women, hormonal associations were more limited and were primarily characterised by higher SHBG and lower measures of free androgens.

"Coffee is consumed by millions of people every day, yet we still know surprisingly little about how it relates to our metabolism and hormones. What stood out in our findings was a distinct hormonal signature that didn't disappear even after we took into account BMI and lifestyle factors, with several of these associations differing between men and women," says Luca Verroest, lead author of the study and Doctoral Researcher at the University of Oulu.

The results suggest that hormonal pathways may partly explain the relationship between coffee consumption and metabolic health. However, as this was an observational study, the findings demonstrate associations rather than cause-and-effect relationships.

Journal Reference: Verroest, L., Jokelainen, J., Choudhary, S. et al. Associations of habitual coffee intake with testosterone and cardiometabolic markers: the Northern Finland birth cohort 1966 study. Eur J Nutr 65, 215 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00394-026-04038-z

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

Our possessions have come alive, transforming ownership from a finished transaction into a permanent, demanding relationship. Modern devices—from smartwatches to TVs—exist in a state of permanent incompletion, constantly requiring updates, configurations, and subscriptions. This turns everyday screen time into unpaid tech-support labor and maintenance rather than leisure.

While features like Apple's Screen Time frame tech exhaustion as a personal failure of self-control, the author argues that your burnout is a completely rational response to a needy ecosystem. In contrast, a simple twelve-dollar Casio F-91W watch offers true luxury. Because it has remained functionally "finished" since 1989, it collects no data, requires no updates, and asks for absolutely nothing.

Worth the attention if you've got the time: https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

"Beijing's intended strategy is to dominate the high ground of the twenty-first century":

In a forthcoming memoir, former US politician and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson offers a blistering assessment of China, saying the United States must do all it can to retain its leadership in space exploration.

"Beijing's intended strategy is to dominate the high ground of the twenty-first century," writes Nelson in Space Odyssey, a book to be published by Harper Horizon in January 2027.

A former Congressman and Senator from Florida, Nelson served as a mission specialist on a space shuttle flight in 1986 and later as NASA administrator from May 2021 to January 2025 under President Biden. The book largely focuses on his space policy work in Congress and his tenure as NASA's leader.

[...] Nelson has long been wary of China as a threat to the United States, noting his concerns about technology theft from the West. Unlike his predecessor under a Democratic president—former astronaut Charlie Bolden, who served as NASA leader under President Obama—Nelson supported the Wolf Amendment, which strictly limits cooperation between NASA and China's space program.

The reason, Nelson says, is that China's space program is militarized and highly secretive.

"China is not a partner to be trusted," he writes. "Partnership requires trust, and trust is founded on transparency. With China, despite repeated efforts to build verifiable, rules-based cooperation and set commonsense guard rails for engagement, there has never been much of either."

The flashpoint of the near future is the Moon, where both NASA and China are in a contest to not just land humans but also establish a long-term settlement. As for how this competition is going, Nelson writes, "America is not the obvious favorite."

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

First LLM to pass test did it in a parking lot at snail's pace, at considerable expense, but it still counts for something:

If you've ever wondered whether a generative AI model can drive a car, wonder no more: It can be done, at great expense and very slowly, so long as it can maintain an internet connection.

A trio of computer scientists has been putting various commercial AI models through road tests, to see how well they can drive a Toyota Corolla around a set of cones in a parking lot.

Their attempts to date, part of a project called DrivingBench, recorded sorry performances from GPT-5.6 Sol, Grok 4.6, and Claude Fable 5.1, none of which managed to complete the course.

Now comes word that OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra has succeeded where other commercial AI models have failed. On its second attempt, OpenAI's flagship model steered a car all of 134.7 meters to complete the course in 5 minutes, 22 seconds.

"GPT-6 Astra was the only model to fully complete the course (on attempt 2, in about 5 minutes)," the DrivingBench report says. "Claude Fable 5.1's third attempt got around halfway through the course, as did Astra's first attempt. All other attempts didn't make it past the first corner. Generally, the failure there was one of perception: reading which side of the first diagonal cone line the lane is on."

To complete that trip at an average speed of 0.94 miles per hour, researchers Tobias Gessler, Aditya Ramabadran, and Simon Mahns spent $7.74 to burn 6.6 million tokens on inferencing operations. 

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

XV Excalibur hailed as first US or UK underwater drone to let one off in tests:

A British uncrewed submarine has test-fired a torpedo for the first time, demonstrating the ability of undersea drones to attack targets as well as perform reconnaissance and surveillance roles.

The XV Excalibur, a 12 meter (40 ft) experimental uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV), was unveiled last year as the Royal Navy's first large submarine drone as part of Project CETUS.

According to the Prime Minister's Office, the test firing was part of the AUKUS program, a trilateral security partnership between Australia, the UK and America. It involved the Excalibur launching a heavyweight torpedo "jointly developed by the US and Australia," which implies it was the Mk 48 torpedo currently carried by all US Navy submarines.

Also according to Downing Street, this was the first time either the US or UK has launched a torpedo from an underwater drone, rather than a crewed submarine.

The Register understands that  Excalibur navigated autonomously to its launch position and carried out a pre-programmed launch sequence, but was not responsible for detecting or tracking the target, as target data was provided through external systems.

As noted by defense site Navy Lookout, the Excalibur has no torpedo tubes, and its payload bay in the midships section of the hull is too small to accommodate a large torpedo, so it is possible the weapon was carried via some sort of cradle attached to the underside of the sub.

[...] While Excalibur is currently an experimental vehicle, it is expected to inform requirements for future UUVs that the Royal Navy wants to help patrol the North Atlantic and protect against expected Russian sabotage of undersea cables and other infrastructure in the event of hostilities breaking out.

The Excalibur tests come as UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham is expected to confirm the UK and US are working together in an AI and Autonomy partnership. This - so we are told - will help Britain protect critical national infrastructure, from sea lanes to air space, providing the means to detect threats and deter adversaries using the latest AI technology developed on both sides of the Atlantic.

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