Lifeboat Foundation

The next update to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) could arrive this weekend, as the long-awaited v12.4.2 is scheduled to enter an internal testing phase tomorrow.

Tesla first released version 12 of FSD in March, and it was a significant release because it was the first version that relied on end-to-end neural nets, instead of over 300,000 lines of hand-written code. With the switch, CEO Elon Musk said that each revision should result in significant improvements, saying that v12.4 should see a 5 to 10 times improvement in miles per intervention.

However, v12.4 was only released to a limited number of testers earlier this month, more than four weeks after Musk initially said it would be available, and it received a luke-warm response, with a number of bugs and erratic driving behaviours reported. As a result, it has yet to go to a wide release.

Is this the beginning of the age of bionic humans?

Astronauts on board the International Space Station were instructed to shelter inside their respective spacecraft after reports indicated pieces of a broken-up satellite were headed their way.

Specifically, the remains of a derelict spacecraft called Resurs-P 1, a Russian commercial Earth observation satellite that launched in June 2013, were spotted by space junk monitor LeoLabs.

“Early indications are that a non-operational Russian spacecraft, Resurs P1 (SATNO 39186), released a number of fragments between 13:05 UTC 26 June and 00:51 UTC 27 June,” Leolabs tweeted late Wednesday evening.

With this measurement, the Large Hadron Collider again demonstrated its ability to provide very high-precision measurements and bring new insights into an old mystery.

The CMS collaboration revealed a groundbreaking measurement of the electroweak mixing angle, confirming Standard Model predictions and addressing previous discrepancies with the most precise collider-based measurement to date. This achievement highlights the potential for precision physics in hadron colliders and prepares for more advanced studies at the High-Luminosity LHC.

Electroweak Mixing Measurement

Specifically, the release says, carriers would simply have to provide unlocking services 60 days after activation. A welcome standard, but it may run afoul of today’s phone and wireless markets.

For instance, although the dreaded two-year contract is no longer forced on most consumers, many still opt for them to lock in the price and get other benefits. And perhaps more to the point, the phones themselves are often paid for in what amount to installment plans: You get a phone for “free” and then pay it off over the next few years.

The NPRM is the stage of FCC rulemaking where it has a draft rule but has not yet solicited public feedback. On July 18, the agency will publish the full document and open up commentary on the above issues. And you can be sure there will be some squawking from mobile providers!

But while medical research facilities are subject to privacy laws, private companies — that are amassing large caches of brain data — are not. Based on a study by The Neurorights Foundation, two-thirds of them are already sharing or selling the data with third parties. The vast majority of them also don’t disclose where the data is stored, how long they keep it, who has access to it, and what happens if there’s a security breach…

This is why Pauzauskie, Medical Director of The Neurorights Foundation, led the passage of a first-in-the-nation law in Colorado. It includes biological or brain data in the State Privacy Act, similar to fingerprints if the data is being used to identify people.

“This is a first step, but we still have a long way to go,” he says.

The universe is a massive place, with galaxies well beyond our own. However, some also hypothesize that there may be more than one universe. The multiverse theory essentially suggests that our universe is just one of many branching and infinite universes. These universes are believed to have appeared just after the Big Bang, and now, scientists may be closer than ever to proving this theory is correct.

The idea of a multiverse existing has gained a lot of following over the past several years—not only in entertainment avenues like the Marvel Cinematic Universe but also in the scientific community, especially since the 1980s when inflation—a period when the universe suddenly expanded—was invented. Inflation is the main explanation for why the universe is so smooth and flat. It also predicts the existence of several independent universes beyond our own.

But inflation isn’t the only route that scientists have looked at to prove the multiverse theory. Others have looked at alternatives called cyclic universes, which basically say the universe is on an unending cycle of ballooning and then compressing. It still focuses on that multiple universe prospect—though it focuses on them appearing at different times.

“Supergranules are a significant component of the heat transport mechanisms of the sun, but they present a serious challenge for scientists to understand,” said Dr. Shravan Hanasoge.

How does the Sun’s interior function and produce the energy needed to allow life to exist on the Earth? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as a team of international researchers led by New York University Abu Dhabi (NYU Abu Dhabi) investigated how the Sun delivers heat from its interior to the surface, also known as convection, through its supergranules, whose individual structures have diameters three times greater than the Earth. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the Sun’s convection processes while also challenging previous hypotheses about the Sun’s convection, as well.

For the study, the researchers conducted one of the most in-depth analyses of the Sun’s supergranuales using NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth, to examine approximately 23,000 supergranules across the Sun’s surface. The team used sound waves to examine the supergranules’ interiors, which previous studies have also done, as well. Through this, the team was able to measure upflows and downflows with incredible precision compared to past studies.

Continue reading “Revealing the Interior Structure of the Sun’s Supergranules” »

…a new neural network based on GPT-4 finds errors in its work and fixes them.

CriticGPT, a model based on GPT-4, writes critiques of ChatGPT responses to help human trainers spot mistakes during RLHF

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