Well, that was a terrifying read.

Suni and Butch talk about thrusters going out as they approach the space station.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/the-harrowing-story-of-what-flying-starliner-was-like-when-its-thrusters-failed/

Oh, *now* I understand why billionaires need to get much, much, much richer.

I mean, if you can’t afford to pay a million dollars to *every single voter* in Wisconsin, you might not get your way in a judicial election there, and all of human civilisation will be plunged into dire existential risk.

The April Issue of Clarkesworld features original stories by Samantha Murray, Sheryl Singerling, Gordon Li, Zhang Ran, Carolyn Zhao, Thomas Ha, and Rich Larson.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/issue_223
Subscribe at:
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/

The only Ghibli I want to see on my feed is actual Ghibli.

This post by photographer Jingna Zhang resonates with me.

#AI art is devoid of humanity, intention, and backstory. It’s a shallow remix of human works, designed to be consumed and discarded, grinding human creation down into a sandy paste, to be re-extruded into grotesque displays. It’s the opposite of what makes art so valuable.

#aiArt #art #plagiarism #artist

(alt text continues)

Gemini 2.5 Pro:

“Let n=2^a 5^b k, where gcd(k,10)=1. If a>0 or b>0, the decimal expansion of 1/n will have a non-repeating part. However, the digits within the repeating block sequence itself are determined solely by k.”

1/11=0.0909…
1/22=0.04545…
1/55=0.01818…

all have k=11.

Edited to add: After feeding it numerous counterexamples and corrections, I managed to get the current session to admit it was wrong (just as my usage quota ran out) ... but if it can be trained on number theory textbooks and still write nonsense like this, I doubt the model itself will be swayed by my feedback.

Asimov's SF and Analog have put the top few stories in each category in their 2024 annual readers’ poll free to read online on their web sites.

My novella “Death and the Gorgon” from Asimov’s and my novelette “Vouch For Me” from Analog are among them.

Links:

https://www.asimovs.com/about-asimovs/readers-award-finalists/

https://www.analogsf.com/about-analog/analytical-laboratory-finalists/

If you like some of these stories, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to the magazines. It’s a tough time for all SF magazines, and they’re the place where new writers get their start.

Curious to see what ads Netflix shows me now that they know I was born in 1900.

The AI bots that desperately need OSS for code training, are now slowly killing OSS by overloading every site.

The curl website is now at 77TB/month, or 8GB every five minutes.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries/

I'm looking for a job. I have 30 years of experience doing complex systems programming in many languages, most recently Typescript, Haskell, and Python. I learn quickly. I can do advanced mathematics.

In 2024 I helped a company migrate 15,000 customers from another company into their own systems.

In 2023 I helped develop a differential privacy database product written in Haskell.

Before that I helped develop a laboratory information management system that tracked up to 40,000 Covid-19 tests per day.

I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, but I have years of success working remotely, and I am also willing to consider relocation.

Please check out my CV.

https://plover.com/~mjd/cv/Mark%20Jason%20Dominus.pdf

#FediHire #FediJobs

“… by focusing on tasks that are relatively easy for humans, yet hard, or impossible, for AI, we shine a spotlight on capability gaps that do not spontaneously emerge from "scaling up".”

https://arcprize.org/blog/announcing-arc-agi-2-and-arc-prize-2025

»advanced nanovaccines for cancer immunotherapy« by nanasaheb thorat, a book published by springer, contains the phrase »As an AI language model« on page 25.

this raises a couple of significant questions: is this book still trustworthy, if it was written using an AI that we know produces text containing »alternative facts«. what is the actual harm such a book can cause? what are the quality assurance measures at springer actually worth?

btw. this book costs $100+.

TIL “Nabokov's 1974 novel Look at the Harlequins!, about a man who cannot distinguish left from right, was heavily influenced by his reading of [Martin Gardner’s] The Ambidextrous Universe.”

And “The Ambidextrous Universe” has a reference to “Pale Fire”!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambidextrous_Universe#Vladimir_Nabokov

Well, since it’s my binary 1000000th birthday today 🎉👴, it’s time let you know about the book I’ve been writing 📖

Titled “111 Places in Space That You Must Not Miss”, it’s a tour guide to some fascinating locations in the Solar System, Milky Way, & beyond. Each “chapter” comes with a full page image & a description of what you’d see & learn if you could travel there 🚀🧑‍🚀

Published by Emons Verlag, it’s out in July in the UK, September in the US 👇

https://www.accartbooks.com/uk/book/111-places-in-space-that-you-must-not-miss/

#SpaceScience

I… did not expect a rational number with 108 digits in its reduced denominator to occur as the answer to the fairly natural question “what is the area of the Pythagoras tree fractal?”. https://penteract.github.io/pythagTree.html 😲

1. For the past thirty years I've had the best job in the world.


I've had the opportunity to follow my curiosity; explore the workings of nature and society; mentor students and junior colleagues in the same process; and teach generations of students about it all.

Curiosity-driven research isn't just fun; it led us to develop tools that thousands of scientists use to find meaningful patterns in massive datasets (e.g. www.mapequation.org). 





Separately, I've had the opportunity to be part of the largest collective intellectual effort in human history.

In 2020, the scientific community came together—remotely, by necessity—in response to the COVID pandemic, to understand how this disease spreads and what that it does to people, to find of returning life to a semblance of normal amidst a pandemic, to develop a vaccine in record time.

And I've been able to teach 1000s of students. I've written a popular textbook about evolution; developed a class and book about critical thinking that is used around the world; and most recently launched a humanities course about LLMs that will be taught at scores of schools in the fall.

But right now my job doesn't feel like the best job in the world. 

Targeted attacks on university funding have put every US institution into a severe crisis. As of now, there is no way we will be able to continue doing the biomedical research, the conservation science, etc. that we always have.

It's been an exciting couple weeks for the exploration of planets around other stars.

A new report reveals that Barnard's star (closest single star to the Sun) has a whole system of planets.

People have been seeking planets there since the '60s. Now we've found them--four rocky worlds, 1/4 the mass of Earth, in tight orbits around their tiny red star.

https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2510/ #space #science #nature

This makes me feel very, very old, though maybe in a good way: I lived long enough to see the universe change from “Hmm, maybe heading for a Big Crunch” to “More likely everything receding into the distance behind cosmic horizons” to “WTF, honestly, who knows now?”

https://www.science.org/content/article/mystery-force-behind-universe-s-accelerating-expansion-may-not-be-so-constant-after-all

The market for burner phones in the carparks of airports worldwide must be skyrocketing.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-french-scientist-detained

INTERIOR. OVAL OFFICE. January 2033.

Camera tracks across the floor, then ascends to show the surface of the Resolute Desk, where two robotic autopens are fighting, signing various documents then crossing out each other’s signature, while emitting noises like angry steam irons.