Author name: Kris Guyer

tesla’s-berlin-factory-shuts-down-after-suspected-transformer-arson

Tesla’s Berlin factory shuts down after suspected transformer arson

Cars, Tesla / /

🔥 —

The Volcano Group, which set fires at the plant in 2021, claimed responsibility.

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A Tesla Inc. electric vehicle near the Tesla Inc. Gigafactory in Gruenheide, Germany, on Tuesday, March 5, 2024.

Enlarge / Tesla halted production at the factory near Berlin and sent workers home after a fire at a high-voltage pylon caused power failures throughout the region.

Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Tesla has had to suspend operations at its factory in Berlin, Germany, today. Early this morning there was a suspected arson attack on a nearby electrical transformer that led to the factory being evacuated, according to the German publication BZ. The fire has also left parts of Berlin without power, as well as towns in Brandenburg.

According to BZ, the transformer fire happened at 4: 50 am CET, with Tesla’s factory losing power an hour before the start of today’s shift. Other companies based at the industrial estate next to the Tesla factory have also had to suspend work.

The fire brigade and power company’s work to restore power was slowed by the discovery of a tent apparently occupied by climate activists protesting water pollution at Tesla’s factory, as well as a planned expansion of the site. A sign warning of unexploded ordnance resulted in the first responders calling in the bomb squad.

Power has since been restored to the surrounding communities but remains out at the industrial estate.

“If the first findings are confirmed, it is a perfidious attack on our electricity infrastructure, this will have consequences,” said Brandenburg’s minister of the interior, Michael Stübgen. “The rule of law will react to such an act of sabotage with all severity,” he said.

A left-wing organization called the Volcano Group has claimed responsibility for the fire. The same group committed a previous arson attack on the Tesla factory in May 2021, claiming that the automaker is “neither green, ecological nor social.”

It’s unwelcome news for the EV company, which saw its share price slide heavily on Monday after news that Tesla’s sales in China dropped 19 percent year on year in February.

Tesla’s Berlin factory shuts down after suspected transformer arson Read More »

daily-telescope:-a-new-webb-image-reveals-a-cosmos-full-of-galaxies

Daily Telescope: A new Webb image reveals a cosmos full of galaxies

daily telescope, Science, Space / /

Deep field —

See a galaxy as it was just 430 million years after the Big Bang.

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This image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument shows a portion of the GOODS-North field of galaxies.

Enlarge / This image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument shows a portion of the GOODS-North field of galaxies.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, et. al.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s March 5, and today’s image comes from the James Webb Space Telescope.

It’s a new deep-field image from the infrared space telescope, showcasing a portion of the “Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey” region of space that has previously been observed by other space telescopes, including Hubble and Chandra. Almost everything in this image that doesn’t have lines emanating from it is a galaxy.

Such deep field images are poetic in that they’re just showing a tiny fraction of a sky—the width of this image is significantly less than a single degree of the night sky—and yet they reveal a universe teeming with galaxies. We live in a cosmos that is almost incomprehensibly large.

If you click through to the Webb telescope site you will find an annotated image that highlights a galaxy in the far lower-right corner. It is galaxy GN-z11, seen at a time just 430 million years after the Big Bang.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, et. al.

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Daily Telescope: A new Webb image reveals a cosmos full of galaxies Read More »

nasa-cancels-a-multibillion-dollar-satellite-servicing-demo-mission

NASA cancels a multibillion-dollar satellite servicing demo mission

Maxar, NASA, osam-1, satellite servicing, Science, Space / /
Artist's illustration of the OSAM-1 spacecraft (bottom) linking up with the Landsat 7 satellite (top) in orbit.

Enlarge / Artist’s illustration of the OSAM-1 spacecraft (bottom) linking up with the Landsat 7 satellite (top) in orbit.

NASA

NASA has canceled an over-budget, behind-schedule mission to demonstrate robotic satellite servicing technology in orbit, pulling the plug on a project that has cost $1.5 billion and probably would have cost nearly $1 billion more to get to the launch pad.

The On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 mission, known as OSAM-1, would have grappled an aging Landsat satellite in orbit and attempted to refuel it, while also demonstrating how a robotic arm could construct an antenna in space. The spacecraft for the OSAM-1 mission is partially built, but NASA announced Friday that officials decided to cancel the project “following an in-depth, independent project review.”

The space agency cited “continued technical, cost, and schedule challenges” for the decision to cancel OSAM-1.

Mission creep

The mission’s cost has ballooned since NASA officially kicked off the project in 2016. The mission’s original scope called for just the refueling demonstration, but in 2020, officials tacked on the in-orbit assembly objective. This involved adding a complex piece of equipment called the Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER), essentially a 16-foot-long (5-meter) robotic arm to assemble seven structural elements into a single Ka-band communications antenna.

The addition of SPIDER meant the mission would launch with three robotic arms, including two appendages needed to grab onto the Landsat 7 satellite in orbit for the refueling demonstration. With this change in scope, the name of the mission changed from Restore-L to OSAM-1.

A report by NASA’s inspector general last year outlined the mission’s delays and cost overruns. Since 2016, the space agency has requested $808 million from Congress for Restore-L and OSAM-1. Lawmakers responded by giving NASA nearly $1.5 billion to fund the development of the mission, nearly double what NASA said it wanted.

Restore-L, and then OSAM-1, has always enjoyed support from Congress. The mission was managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Former Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) was a key backer of NASA missions run out of Goddard, including the James Webb Space Telescope. She was the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee when Congress started funding Restore-L in late 2015.

At one time, NASA projected the Restore-L mission would cost between $626 million and $753 million and could be ready for launch in the second half of 2020. That didn’t happen, and the mission continued facing delays and cost increases. The most recent public schedule for OSAM-1 showed a launch date in 2026.

In 2020, after reshaping the Restore-L mission to become OSAM-1, NASA formally laid out a budget for the renamed mission. At the time, NASA said it would cost $1.78 billion to design, build, launch, and operate. An independent review board NASA established last year to examine the OSAM-1 mission estimated the total project could cost as much as $2.35 billion, according to Jimi Russell, a NASA spokesperson.

The realities of the satellite servicing market have also changed since 2016. There are several companies working on commercial satellite servicing technologies, and the satellite industry has shifted away from refueling unprepared spacecraft, as OSAM-1 would have demonstrated with the Landsat 7 Earth-imaging satellite.

Instead, companies are focusing more on extending satellite life in other ways. Northrop Grumman has developed the Mission Extension Vehicle, which can latch onto a satellite and provide maneuvering capability without cutting into the customer spacecraft to refuel it. Other companies are looking at satellites that are designed, from the start, with refueling ports. The US military has a desire to place fuel depots and tankers in orbit to regularly service its satellites, giving them the ability to continually maneuver and burn propellant without worrying about running out of fuel.

NASA cancels a multibillion-dollar satellite servicing demo mission Read More »

this-rare-11th-century-islamic-astrolabe-is-one-of-the-oldest-yet-discovered

This rare 11th-century Islamic astrolabe is one of the oldest yet discovered

astrolabes, astronomy, history of science, Science / /

An instrument from Verona —

“A powerful record of scientific exchange between Arabs, Jews, & Christians over 100s of years.”

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Close up of the Verona astrolabe showing Hebrew inscribed (top left) above Arabic inscriptions

Enlarge / Close-up of the 11th-century Verona astrolabe showing Hebrew (top left) and Arabic inscriptions.

Federica Gigante

Cambridge University historian Federica Gigante is an expert on Islamic astrolabes. So naturally she was intrigued when the Fondazione Museo Miniscalchi-Erizzo in Verona, Italy, uploaded an image of just such an astrolabe to its website. The museum thought it might be a fake, but when Gigante visited to see the astrolabe firsthand, she realized it was not only an authentic 11th-century instrument—one of the oldest yet discovered—it had engravings in both Arabic and Hebrew.

“This isn’t just an incredibly rare object. It’s a powerful record of scientific exchange between Arabs, Jews, and Christians over hundreds of years,” Gigante said. “The Verona astrolabe underwent many modifications, additions, and adaptations as it changed hands. At least three separate users felt the need to add translations and corrections to this object, two using Hebrew and one using a Western language.” She described her findings in a new paper published in the journal Nuncius.

As previously reported, astrolabes are actually very ancient instruments—possibly dating as far back as the second century BCE—for determining the time and position of the stars in the sky by measuring a celestial body’s altitude above the horizon. Before the emergence of the sextant, astrolabes were mostly used for astronomical and astrological studies, although they also proved useful for navigation on land, as well as for tracking the seasons, tide tables, and time of day. The latter was especially useful for religious functions, such as tracking daily Islamic prayer times, the direction of Mecca, or the feast of Ramadan, among others.

Navigating at sea on a pitching deck was a bit more problematic unless the waters were calm. The development of a mariner’s astrolabe—a simple ring marked in degrees for measuring celestial altitudes—helped solve that problem. It was eventually replaced by the invention of the sextant in the 18th century, which was much more precise for seafaring navigation. Mariners’ astrolabes are among the most prized artifacts recovered from shipwrecks; only 108 are currently cataloged worldwide. In 2019, researchers determined that a mariner’s astrolabe recovered from the wreck of one of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s ships is now officially the oldest known such artifact. The so-called Sodré astrolabe was recovered from the wreck of the Esmeralda (part of da Gama’s armada) off the coast of Oman in 2014, along with around 2,800 other artifacts.

An astrolabe is typically composed of a disk (mater) engraved with graduations to mark hours and/or arc degrees. The mater holds one more engraved flat plate (tympans) to represent azimuth and altitude at specific latitudes. Above these pieces is a rotating framework called the rete that essentially serves as a star map, with one rotation being equivalent to one day. An alidade attached to the back could be rotated to help the user take the altitude of a sighted star. Engravings on the backs of the astrolabes varied but often depicted different kinds of scales.

  • The Verona astrolabe, front and back views.

    Federica Gigante

  • Close-up of the Verona astrolabe showing inscribed Hebrew, Arabic, and Western numerals.

    Federica Gigante

  • Dedication and signature: “For Isḥāq […], the work of Yūnus.”

    Federica Gigante

  • Federica Gigante examining the Verona astrolabe.

    Federica Candelato

The Verona astrolabe is meant for astronomical use, and while it has a mater, a rete, and two plates (one of which is a later replacement), it is missing the alidade. It’s also undated, according to Gigante, but she was able to estimate a likely date based on the instrument’s design, construction, and calligraphy. She concluded it was Andalusian, dating back to the 11th century when the region was a Muslim-ruled area of Spain.

For instance, one side of the original plate bears an Arabic inscription “for the latitude of Cordoba, 38° 30′,” and another Arabic inscription on the other side reads “for the latitude of Toledo, 40°.” The second plate (added at some later date) was for North African latitudes, so at some point, the astrolabe might have found its way to Morocco or Egypt. There are engraved lines from Muslim prayers, indicating it was probably originally used for daily prayers.

There is also a signature on the back in Arabic script: “for Isḥāq […]/the work of Yūnus.” Gigante believes this was added by a later owner. Since the two names translate to Isaac and Jonah, respectively, in English, it’s possible that a later owner was an Arab-speaking member of a Sephardi Jewish community. In addition to the Arabic script, Gigante noticed later Hebrew inscriptions translating the Arabic names for certain astrological signs, in keeping with the earliest surviving treatise in Hebrew on astrolabes, written by Abraham Ibn Ezra in Verona in 1146.

“These Hebrew additions and translations suggest that at a certain point the object left Spain or North Africa and circulated amongst the Jewish diaspora community in Italy, where Arabic was not understood, and Hebrew was used instead,” said Gigante. “This object is Islamic, Jewish, and European, they can’t be separated.”

Nuncius, 2024. DOI: 10.1163/18253911-bja10095  (About DOIs).

This rare 11th-century Islamic astrolabe is one of the oldest yet discovered Read More »

hackers-exploited-windows-0-day-for-6-months-after-microsoft-knew-of-it

Hackers exploited Windows 0-day for 6 months after Microsoft knew of it

Biz & IT, lazarus group, microsoft, Security / /
The word ZERO-DAY is hidden amidst a screen filled with ones and zeroes.

Hackers backed by the North Korean government gained a major win when Microsoft left a Windows zero-day unpatched for six months after learning it was under active exploitation.

Even after Microsoft patched the vulnerability last month, the company made no mention that the North Korean threat group Lazarus had been using the vulnerability since at least August to install a stealthy rootkit on vulnerable computers. The vulnerability provided an easy and stealthy means for malware that had already gained administrative system rights to interact with the Windows kernel. Lazarus used the vulnerability for just that. Even so, Microsoft has long said that such admin-to-kernel elevations don’t represent the crossing of a security boundary, a possible explanation for the time Microsoft took to fix the vulnerability.

A rootkit “holy grail”

“When it comes to Windows security, there is a thin line between admin and kernel,” Jan Vojtěšek, a researcher with security firm Avast, explained last week. “Microsoft’s security servicing criteria have long asserted that ‘[a]dministrator-to-kernel is not a security boundary,’ meaning that Microsoft reserves the right to patch admin-to-kernel vulnerabilities at its own discretion. As a result, the Windows security model does not guarantee that it will prevent an admin-level attacker from directly accessing the kernel.”

The Microsoft policy proved to be a boon to Lazarus in installing “FudModule,” a custom rootkit that Avast said was exceptionally stealthy and advanced. Rootkits are pieces of malware that have the ability to hide their files, processes, and other inner workings from the operating system itself and at the same time control the deepest levels of the operating system. To work, they must first gain administrative privileges—a major accomplishment for any malware infecting a modern OS. Then, they must clear yet another hurdle: directly interacting with the kernel, the innermost recess of an OS reserved for the most sensitive functions.

In years past, Lazarus and other threat groups have reached this last threshold mainly by exploiting third-party system drivers, which by definition already have kernel access. To work with supported versions of Windows, third-party drivers must first be digitally signed by Microsoft to certify that they are trustworthy and meet security requirements. In the event Lazarus or another threat actor has already cleared the admin hurdle and has identified a vulnerability in an approved driver, they can install it and exploit the vulnerability to gain access to the Windows kernel. This technique—known as BYOVD (bring your own vulnerable driver)—comes at a cost, however, because it provides ample opportunity for defenders to detect an attack in progress.

The vulnerability Lazarus exploited, tracked as CVE-2024-21338, offered considerably more stealth than BYOVD because it exploited appid.sys, a driver enabling the Windows AppLocker service, which comes preinstalled in the Microsoft OS. Avast said such vulnerabilities represent the “holy grail,” as compared to BYOVD.

In August, Avast researchers sent Microsoft a description of the zero-day, along with proof-of-concept code that demonstrated what it did when exploited. Microsoft didn’t patch the vulnerability until last month. Even then, the disclosure of the active exploitation of CVE-2024-21338 and details of the Lazarus rootkit came not from Microsoft in February but from Avast 15 days later. A day later, Microsoft updated its patch bulletin to note the exploitation.

Hackers exploited Windows 0-day for 6 months after Microsoft knew of it Read More »

european-crash-tester-says-carmakers-must-bring-back-physical-controls

European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

Cars, road safety / /

do that here, too —

In 2026, Euro NCAP points will be deducted if some controls aren’t physical.

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man pushing red triangle warning car button

Enlarge / A car’s hazard warning lights will need a physical control to get a five-star EuroNCAP score in 2026.

Some progress in the automotive industry is laudable. Cars are safer than ever and more efficient, too. But there are other changes we’d happily leave by the side of the road. That glossy “piano black” trim that’s been overused the last few years, for starters. And the industry’s overreliance on touchscreens for functions that used to be discrete controls. Well, the automotive safety organization European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) feels the same way about that last one, and it says the controls ought to change in 2026.

“The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes,” said Matthew Avery, Euro NCAP’s director of strategic development.

“New Euro NCAP tests due in 2026 will encourage manufacturers to use separate, physical controls for basic functions in an intuitive manner, limiting eyes-off-road time and therefore promoting safer driving,” he said.

Now, Euro NCAP is not insisting on everything being its own button or switch. But the organization wants to see physical controls for turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers, the horn, and any SOS features, like the European Union’s eCall feature.

Tesla is probably at greatest risk here, having recently ditched physical stalks that instead move the turn signal functions to haptic buttons on the steering wheel. (Ferrari also has its turn signals on the steering wheel, but Ferrari does not appear in Euro NCAP’s database so probably doesn’t care.)

Euro NCAP is not a government regulator, so it has no power to mandate carmakers use physical controls for those functions. But a five-star safety score from Euro NCAP is a strong selling point, similar to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s coveted Top Safety Pick program here in the US, and it’s likely this pressure will be effective. Perhaps someone should start bugging IIHS to do the same.

European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls Read More »

the-ai-wars-heat-up-with-claude-3,-claimed-to-have-“near-human”-abilities

The AI wars heat up with Claude 3, claimed to have “near-human” abilities

AI, Anthropic, Biz & IT, chatgpt, chatgtp, Claude, Claude 2, Claude 3, Haiku, large language models, machine learning, openai, Opus, Sonnet, text synthesis / /
The Anthropic Claude 3 logo.

Enlarge / The Anthropic Claude 3 logo.

On Monday, Anthropic released Claude 3, a family of three AI language models similar to those that power ChatGPT. Anthropic claims the models set new industry benchmarks across a range of cognitive tasks, even approaching “near-human” capability in some cases. It’s available now through Anthropic’s website, with the most powerful model being subscription-only. It’s also available via API for developers.

Claude 3’s three models represent increasing complexity and parameter count: Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus. Sonnet powers the Claude.ai chatbot now for free with an email sign-in. But as mentioned above, Opus is only available through Anthropic’s web chat interface if you pay $20 a month for “Claude Pro,” a subscription service offered through the Anthropic website. All three feature a 200,000-token context window. (The context window is the number of tokens—fragments of a word—that an AI language model can process at once.)

We covered the launch of Claude in March 2023 and Claude 2 in July that same year. Each time, Anthropic fell slightly behind OpenAI’s best models in capability while surpassing them in terms of context window length. With Claude 3, Anthropic has perhaps finally caught up with OpenAI’s released models in terms of performance, although there is no consensus among experts yet—and the presentation of AI benchmarks is notoriously prone to cherry-picking.

A Claude 3 benchmark chart provided by Anthropic.

Enlarge / A Claude 3 benchmark chart provided by Anthropic.

Claude 3 reportedly demonstrates advanced performance across various cognitive tasks, including reasoning, expert knowledge, mathematics, and language fluency. (Despite the lack of consensus over whether large language models “know” or “reason,” the AI research community commonly uses those terms.) The company claims that the Opus model, the most capable of the three, exhibits “near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks.”

That’s quite a heady claim and deserves to be parsed more carefully. It’s probably true that Opus is “near-human” on some specific benchmarks, but that doesn’t mean that Opus is a general intelligence like a human (consider that pocket calculators are superhuman at math). So, it’s a purposely eye-catching claim that can be watered down with qualifications.

According to Anthropic, Claude 3 Opus beats GPT-4 on 10 AI benchmarks, including MMLU (undergraduate level knowledge), GSM8K (grade school math), HumanEval (coding), and the colorfully named HellaSwag (common knowledge). Several of the wins are very narrow, such as 86.8 percent for Opus vs. 86.4 percent on a five-shot trial of MMLU, and some gaps are big, such as 84.9 percent on HumanEval over GPT-4’s 67.0 percent. But what that might mean, exactly, to you as a customer is difficult to say.

“As always, LLM benchmarks should be treated with a little bit of suspicion,” says AI researcher Simon Willison, who spoke with Ars about Claude 3. “How well a model performs on benchmarks doesn’t tell you much about how the model ‘feels’ to use. But this is still a huge deal—no other model has beaten GPT-4 on a range of widely used benchmarks like this.”

The AI wars heat up with Claude 3, claimed to have “near-human” abilities Read More »

read-the-roon

Read the Roon

Highlights / /

Roon, member of OpenAI’s technical staff, is one of the few candidates for a Worthy Opponent when discussing questions of AI capabilities development, AI existential risk and what we should do about it. Roon is alive. Roon is thinking. Roon clearly values good things over bad things. Roon is engaging with the actual questions, rather than denying or hiding from them, and unafraid to call all sorts of idiots idiots. As his profile once said, he believes spice must flow, we just do go ahead, and makes a mixture of arguments for that, some good, some bad and many absurd. Also, his account is fun as hell.

Thus, when he comes out as strongly as he seemed to do recently, attention is paid, and we got to have a relatively good discussion of key questions. While I attempt to contribute here, this post is largely aimed at preserving that discussion.

As you would expect, Roon’s statement last week that AGI was inevitable and nothing could stop it so you should essentially spend your final days with your loved ones and hope it all works out, led to some strong reactions.

Many pointed out that AGI has to be built, at very large cost, by highly talented hardworking humans, in ways that seem entirely plausible to prevent or redirect if we decided to prevent or redirect those developments.

Roon (from last week): Things are accelerating. Pretty much nothing needs to change course to achieve agi imo. Worrying about timelines is idle anxiety, outside your control. you should be anxious about stupid mortal things instead. Do your parents hate you? Does your wife love you?

Roon: It should be all the more clarifying coming from someone at OpenAI. I and half my colleagues and Sama could drop dead and AGI would still happen. If I don’t feel any control everyone else certainly shouldn’t.

Tetraspace: “give up about agi there’s nothing you can do” nah

Sounds like we should take action to get some control, then. This seems like the kind of thing we should want to be able to control.

Connor Leahy: I would like to thank roon for having the balls to say it how it is. Now we have to do something about it, instead of rolling over and feeling sorry for ourselves and giving up.

Simeon: This is BS. There are <200 irreplaceable folks at the forefront. OpenAI alone has a >1 year lead. Any single of those persons can single handedly affect the timelines and will have blood on their hands if we blow ourselves up bc we went too fast.

PauseAI: AGI is not inevitable. It requires hordes of engineers with million dollar paychecks. It requires a fully functional and unrestricted supply chain of the most complex hardware. It requires all of us to allow these companies to gamble with our future.

Tolga Bilge: Roon, who works at OpenAI, telling us all that OpenAI have basically no control over the speed of development of this technology their company is leading the creation of.

It’s time for governments to step in.

His reply is deleted now, but I broadly agree with his point here as it applies to OpenAI. This is a consequence of AI race dynamics. The financial upside of AGI is so great that AI companies will push ahead with it as fast as possible, with little regard to its huge risks.

OpenAI could do the right thing and pause further development, but another less responsible company would simply take their place and push on. Capital and other resources will move accordingly too. This is why we need government to help solve the coordination problem now. [continues as you would expect]

Saying no one has any control so why try to do anything to get control back seems like the opposite of what is needed here.

Roon’s reaction:

Roon: buncha ⏸️ emojis harassing me today. My post was about how it’s better to be anxious about things in your control and they’re like shame on you.

Also tweets don’t get deleted because they’re secret knowledge that needs to be protected. I wouldn’t tweet secrets in the first place. they get deleted when miscommunication risk is high, so screenshotting makes you de facto antisocial idiot.

Roon’s point on idle anxiety is indeed a good one. If you are not one of those trying to gain or assert some of that control, as most people on Earth are not and should not be, then of course I agree that idle anxiety is not useful. However Roon then did attempt to extend this to claim that all anxiety about AGI is idle, that no one has any control. That is where there is strong disagreement, and what is causing the reaction.

Roon: It’s okay to watch and wonder about the dance of the gods, the clash of titans, but it’s not good to fret about the outcome. political culture encourages us to think that generalized anxiety is equivalent to civic duty.

Scott Alexander: Counterargument: there is only one God, and He finds nothing in the world funnier than letting ordinary mortals gum up the carefully-crafted plans of false demiurges. Cf. Lord of the Rings.

Anton: conversely if you have a role to play in history, fate will punish you if you don’t see it through.

Alignment Perspectives: It may punish you even more for seeing it through if your desire to play a role is driven by arrogance or ego.

Anton: Yeah it be that way.

Connor Leahy (responding to Roon): The gods only have power because they trick people like this into doing their bidding. It’s so much easier to just submit instead of mastering divinity engineering and applying it yourself. It’s so scary to admit that we do have agency, if we take it. In other words: “cope.”

It took me a long time to understand what people like Nietzsche were yapping on about about people practically begging to have their agency be taken away from them.

It always struck me as authoritarian cope, justification for wannabe dictators to feel like they’re doing a favor to people they oppress (and yes, I do think there is a serious amount of that in many philosophers of this ilk.)

But there is also another, deeper, weirder, more psychoanalytic phenomena at play. I did not understand what it was or how it works or why it exists for a long time, but I think over the last couple of years of watching my fellow smart, goodhearted tech-nerds fall into these deranged submission/cuckold traps I’ve really started to understand.

e/acc is the most cartoonish example of this, an ideology that appropriates faux, surface level aesthetics of power while fundamentally being an ideology preaching submission to a higher force, a stronger man (or something even more psychoanalytically-flavored, if one where to ask ol’ Sigmund), rather than actually striving for power acquisition and wielding. And it is fully, hilariously, embarrassingly irreflexive about this.

San Francisco is a very strange place, with a very strange culture. If I had to characterize it in one way, it is a culture of extremes and where everything on the surface looks like the opposite of what it is (or maybe the “inversion”) . It’s California’s California, and California is the USA’s USA. The most powerful distillation of a certain strain of memetic outgrowth.

And on the surface, it is libertarian, Nietzschean even, a heroic founding mythos of lone iconoclasts striking out against all to find and wield legendary power. But if we take the psychoanalytic perspective, anyone (or anything) that insists too hard on being one thing is likely deep down the opposite of that, and knows it.

There is a strange undercurrent to SF that I have not seen people put good words to where it in fact hyper-optimizes for conformity and selling your soul, debasing and sacrificing everything that makes you human in pursuit of some god or higher power, whether spiritual, corporate or technological.

SF is where you go if you want to sell every last scrap of your mind, body and soul. You will be compensated, of course, the devil always pays his dues.

The innovative trick the devil has learned is that people tend to not like eternal, legible torment, so it is much better if you sell them an anxiety free, docile life. Free love, free sex, free drugs, freedom! You want freedom, don’t you? The freedom to not have to worry about what all the big boys are doing, don’t you worry your pretty little head about any of that…

I recall a story of how a group of AI researchers at a leading org (consider this rumor completely fictional and illustrative, but if you wanted to find its source it’s not that hard to find in Berkeley) became extremely depressed about AGI and alignment, thinking that they were doomed if their company kept building AGI like this.

So what did they do? Quit? Organize a protest? Petition the government?

They drove out, deep into the desert, and did a shit ton of acid…and when they were back, they all just didn’t feel quite so stressed out about this whole AGI doom thing anymore, and there was no need for them to have to have a stressful confrontation with their big, scary, CEO.

The SF bargain. Freedom, freedom at last…

This is a very good attempt to identify key elements of the elephant I grasp when I notice that being in San Francisco very much does not agree with me. I always have excellent conversations during visits because the city has abducted so many of the best people, I always get excited by them, but the place feels alien, as if I am being constantly attacked by paradox spirits, visiting a deeply hostile and alien culture that has inverted many of my most sacred values and wants to eat absolutely everything. Whereas here, in New York City, I feel very much at home.

Meanwhile, back in the thread:

Connor (continuing): I don’t like shitting on roon in particular. From everything I know, he’s a good guy, in another life we would have been good friends. I’m sorry for singling you out, buddy, I hope you don’t take it personally.

But he is doing a big public service here in doing the one thing spiritual shambling corpses like him can do at this advanced stage of spiritual erosion: Serve as a grim warning.

Roon responds quite well:

Roon: Connor, this is super well written and I honestly appreciate the scathing response. You mistake me somewhat: you, Connor, are obviously not powerless and you should do what you can to further your cause. Your students are not powerless either. I’m not asking you to give up and relent to the powers that be even a little. I’m not “e/acc” and am repelled by the idea of letting the strongest replicator win.

I think the majority of people have no insight into whether AGI is going to cause ruin or not, whether a gamma ray burst is fated to end mankind, or if electing the wrong candidate is going to doom earth to global warming. It’s not good for people to spend all their time worried about cosmic eventualities. Even for an alignment researcher the optimal mental state is to think on and play and interrogate these things rather than engage in neuroticism as the motivating force

It’s generally the lack of spirituality that leads people to constant existential worry rather than too much spirituality. I think it’s strange to hear you say in the same tweet thread that SF demands submission to some type of god but is also spiritually bankrupt and that I’m corpselike.

My spirituality is simple, and several thousand years old: find your duty and do it without fretting about the outcome.

I have found my personal duty and I fulfill it, and have been fulfilling it, long before the market rewarded me for doing so. I’m generally optimistic about AI technology. When I’ve been worried about deployment, I’ve reached out to leadership to try and exert influence. In each case I was wrong to worry.

When the OpenAI crisis happened I reminded people not to throw the baby out with the bath water: that AI alignment research is vital.

This is a very good response. He is pointing out that yes, some people such as Connor can influence what happens, and they in particular should try to model and influence events.

Roon is also saying that he himself is doing his best to influence events. Roon realizes that those at OpenAI matter and what they do matter.

Roon reached out to leadership on several occasions with safety concerns. When he says he was ‘wrong to worry’ I presume he means that the situation worked out and was handled, I am confident that expressing his concerns was the output of the best available decision algorithm, you want most such concerns you express to turn out fine.

Roon also worked, in the wake of events at OpenAI, to remind people of the importance of alignment work, that they should not toss it out based on those events. Which is a scary thing for him to report having to do, but expected, and it is good that he did so. I would feel better if I knew Ilya was back working at Superalignment.

And of course, Roon is constantly active on Twitter, saying things that impact the discourse, often for the better. He seems keenly aware that his actions matter, whether or not he could meaningfully slow down AGI. I actually think he perhaps could, if he put his mind to it.

The contrast here versus the original post is important. The good message is ‘do not waste time worrying too much over things you do not impact.’ The bad message is ‘no one can impact this.’

Then Connor goes deep and it gets weirder, also this long post has 450k views and is aimed largely at trying to get through to Roon in particular. But also there are many others in a similar spot, so some others should read this as well. Many of you however should skip it.

Connor: Thanks for your response Roon. You make a lot of good, well put points. It’s extremely difficult to discuss “high meta” concepts like spirituality, duty and memetics even in the best of circumstances, so I appreciate that we can have this conversation even through the psychic quagmire that is twitter replies.

I will be liberally mixing terminology and concepts from various mystic traditions to try to make my point, apologies to more careful practitioners of these paths.

For those unfamiliar with how to read mystic writing, take everything written as metaphors pointing to concepts rather than rationally enumerating and rigorously defining them. Whenever you see me talking about spirits/supernatural/gods/spells/etc, try replacing them in your head with society/memetics/software/virtual/coordination/speech/thought/emotions and see if that helps.

It is unavoidable that this kind of communication will be heavily underspecified and open to misinterpretation, I apologize. Our language and culture simply lacks robust means by which to communicate what I wish to say.

Nevertheless, an attempt:

I.

I think a core difference between the two of us that is leading to confusion is what we both mean when we talk about spirituality and what its purpose is.

You write:

>”It’s not good for people to spend all their time worried about cosmic eventualities. […] It’s generally the lack of spirituality that leads people to constant existential worry rather than too much spirituality. I think it’s strange to hear you say in the same tweet thread that SF demands submission to some type of god but is also spiritually bankrupt and that I’m corpselike”

This is an incredibly common sentiment I see in Seekers of all mystical paths, and it annoys the shit out of me (no offense lol).

I’ve always had this aversion to how much Buddhism (Not All™ Buddhism) focuses on freedom from suffering, and especially Western Buddhism is often just shy of hedonistic. (nevermind New Age and other forms of neo-spirituality, ugh) It all strikes me as so toxically selfish.

No! I don’t want to feel nice and avoid pain, I want the world to be good! I don’t want to feel good about the world, I want it to be good! These are not the same thing!!

My view does not accept “but people feel better if they do X” as a general purpose justification for X! There are many things that make people feel good that are very, very bad!

II.

Your spiritual journey should make you powerful, so you can save people that are in need, what else is the fucking point? (Daoism seems to have a bit more of this aesthetic, but they all died of drinking mercury so lol rip) You travel into the Underworld in order to find the strength you need to fight off the Evil that is threatening the Valley, not so you can chill! (Unless you’re a massive narcissist, which ~everyone is to varying degrees)

The mystic/heroic/shamanic path starts with departing from the daily world of the living, the Valley, into the Underworld, the Mountains. You quickly notice how much of your previous life was illusions of various kinds. You encounter all forms of curious and interesting and terrifying spirits, ghosts and deities. Some hinder you, some aid you, many are merely odd and wondrous background fixtures.

Most would-be Seekers quickly turn back after their first brush with the Underworld, returning to the safe comforting familiarity of the Valley. They are not destined for the Journey. But others prevail.

As the shaman progresses, he learns more and more to barter with, summon and consult with the spirits, learns of how he can live a more spiritually fulfilling and empowered life. He tends to become more and more like the Underworld, someone a step outside the world of the Valley, capable of spinning fantastical spells and tales that the people of the Valley regard with awe and a bit of fear.

And this is where most shamans get stuck, either returning to the Valley with their newfound tricks, or becoming lost and trapped in the Underworld forever, usually by being picked off by predatory Underworld inhabitants.

Few Seekers make it all the way, and find the true payoff, the true punchline to the shamanic journey: There are no spirits, there never were any spirits! It’s only you. (and “you” is also not really a thing, longer story)

“Spirit” is what we call things that are illegible and appear non mechanistic (unintelligible and un-influencable) in their functioning. But of course, everything is mechanistic, and once you understand the mechanistic processes well enough, the “spirits” disappear. There is nothing non-mechanistic left to explain. There never were any spirits. You exit the Underworld. (“Emergent agentic processes”, aka gods/egregores/etc, don’t disappear, they are real, but they are also fully mechanistic, there is no need for unknowable spirits to explain them)

The ultimate stage of the Journey is not epic feelsgoodman, or electric tingling erotic hedonistic occult mastery. It’s simple, predictable, mechanical, Calm. It is mechanical, it is in seeing reality for what it is, a mechanical process, a system that you can act in skilfully. Daoism has a good concept for this that is horrifically poorly translated as “non-action”, despite being precisely about acting so effectively it’s as if you were just naturally part of the Stream.

The Dao that can be told is not the true Dao, but the one thing I am sure about the true Dao is that it is mechanical.

III.

I think you were tricked and got stuck on your spiritual journey, lured in by promises of safety and lack of anxiety, rather than progressing to exiting the Underworld and entering the bodhisattva realm of mechanical equanimity. A common fate, I’m afraid. (This is probably an abuse of buddhist terminology, trying my best to express something subtle, alas)

Submission to a god is a way to avoid spiritual maturity, to outsource the responsibility for your own mind to another entity (emergent/memetic or not). It’s a powerful strategy, you will be rewarded (unless you picked a shit god to sell your soul to), and it is in fact a much better choice for 99% of people in most scenarios than the Journey.

The Underworld is terrifying and dangerous, most people just go crazy/get picked off by psycho fauna on their way to enlightenment and self mastery. I think you got picked off by psycho fauna, because the local noosphere of SF is a hotbed for exactly such predatory memetic species.

IV.

It is in my aesthetics to occasionally see someone with so much potential, so close to getting it, and hitting them with the verbal equivalent of a bamboo rod to hope they snap out of it. (It rarely works. The reasons it rarely works are mechanistic and I have figured out many of them and how to fix them, but that’s for a longer series of writing to discuss.)

Like, bro, by your own admission, your spirituality is “I was just following orders.” Yeah, I mean, that’s one way to not feel anxiety around responsibility. But…listen to yourself, man! Snap out of it!!!

Eventually, whether you come at it from Buddhism, Christianity, psychoanalysis, Western occultism/magick, shamanism, Nietzscheanism, rationality or any other mystic tradition, you learn one of the most powerful filters on people gaining power and agency is that in general, people care far, far more about avoiding pain than in doing good. And this is what the ambient psycho fauna has evolved to exploit.

You clearly have incredible writing skills and reflection, you aren’t normal. Wake up, look at yourself, man! Do you think most people have your level of reflective insight into their deepest spiritual motivations and conceptions of duty? You’re brilliantly smart, a gifted writer, and followed and listened to by literally hundreds of thousands of people.

I don’t just give compliments to people to make them feel good, I give people compliments to draw their attention to things they should not expect other people to have/be able to do.

If someone with your magickal powerlevel is unable to do anything but sell his soul, then god has truly forsaken humanity. (and despite how it may seem at times, he has not truly forsaken us quite yet)

V.

What makes you corpse-like is that you have abdicated your divine spark of agency to someone, or something, else, and that thing you have given it to is neither human nor benevolent, it is a malignant emergent psychic megafauna that stalks the bay area (and many other places). You are as much an extension of its body as a shambling corpse is of its creator’s necromantic will.

The fact that you are “optimistic” (feel your current bargain is good), that you were already like this before the market rewarded you for it (a target with a specific profile and set of vulnerabilities to exploit), that leadership can readily reassure you (the psychofauna that picked you off is adapted to your vulnerabilities. Note I don’t mean the people, I’m sure your managers are perfectly nice people, but they are also extensions of the emergent megafauna), and that we are having this conversation right now (I target people that are legibly picked off by certain megafauna I know how to hunt or want to practice hunting) are not independent coincidences.

VI.

You write:

>”It’s not good for people to spend all their time worried about cosmic eventualities. Even for an alignment researcher the optimal mental state is to think on and play and interrogate these things rather than engage in neuroticism as the motivating force”

Despite my objection about avoidance of pain vs doing of good, there is something deep here. The deep thing is that, yes, of course the default ways by which people will relate to the Evil threatening the Valley will be Unskillful (neuroticism, spiralling, depression, pledging to the conveniently nearby located “anti-that-thing-you-hate” culturewar psychofauna), and it is in fact often the case that it would be better for them to use No Means rather than Unskillful Means.

Not everyone is built for surviving the harrowing Journey and mastering Skilful Means, I understand this, and this is a fact I struggle with as well.

Obviously, we need as many Heroes as possible to take on the Journey in order to master the Skilful Means to protect the Valley from the ever more dangerous Threats. But the default outcome of some rando wandering into the Underworld is them fleeing in terror, being possessed by Demons/Psychofauna or worse.

How does a society handle this tradeoff? Do we just yeet everyone headfirst into the nearest Underworld portal and see what staggers back out later? (The SF Protocol™) Do we not let anyone into the Underworld for fear of what Demons they might bring back with them? (The Dark Ages Strategy™) Obviously, neither naive strategy works.

Historically, the strategy is to usually have a Guide, but unfortunately those tend to go crazy as well. Alas.

So is there a better way? Yes, which is to blaze a path through the Underworld, to build Infrastructure. This is what the Scientific Revolution did. It blazed a path and mass produced powerful new memetic/psychic weapons by which to fend off unfriendly Underworld dwellers. And what a glorious thing it was for this very reason. (If you ever hear me yapping on about “epistemology”, this is to a large degree what I’m talking about)

But now the Underworld has adapted, and we have blazed paths into deeper, darker corners of the Underworld, to the point our blades are beginning to dull against the thick hides of the newest Terrors we have unleashed on the Valley.

We need a new path, new weapons, new infrastructure. How do we do that? I’m glad you asked…I’m trying to figure that out myself. Maybe I will speak more about this publicly in the future if there is interest.

VII.

> “I have found my personal duty and I fulfill it, and have been fulfilling it, long before the market rewarded me for doing so.”

Ultimately, the simple fact is that this is a morality that can justify anything, depending on what “duty” you pick, and I don’t consider conceptions of “good” to be valid if they can be used to justify anything.

It is just a null statement, you are saying “I picked a thing I wanted and it is my duty to do that thing.” But where did that thing come from? Are you sure it is not the Great Deceiver/Replicator in disguise? Hint: If you somehow find yourself gleefully working on the most dangerous existential harm to humanity, you are probably working for The Great Deceiver/Replicator.

It is not a coincidence that the people that end up working on these kinds of most dangerous possible technologies tend to have ideologies that tend to end up boiling down to “I can do whatever I want.” Libertarianism, open source, “duty”…

I know, I was one of them.

Coda.

Is there a point I am trying to make? There are too many points I want to make, but our psychic infrastructure can barely host meta conversations at all, nevermind high-meta like this.

Then what should Roon do? What am I making a bid for? Ah, alas, if all I was asking for was for people to do some kind of simple, easy, atomic action that can be articulated in simple English language.

What I want is for people to be better, to care, to become powerful, to act. But that is neither atomic nor easy.

It is simple though.

Roon (QTing all that): He kinda cooked my ass.

Christian Keil: Honestly, kinda. That dude can write.

But it’s also just a “what if” exposition that explores why your worldview would be bad assuming that it’s wrong. But he never says why you’re wrong, just that you are.

As I read it, your point is “the main forces shaping the world operate above the level of individual human intention & action, and understanding this makes spirituality/duty more important.”

And his point is “if you are smart, think hard, and accept painful truths, you will realize the world is a machine that you can deliberately alter.”

That’s a near-miss, but still a miss, in my book.

Roon: Yes.

Connor Leahy: Finally, someone else points out where I missed!

I did indeed miss the heart of the beast, thank you for putting it this succinctly.

The short version is “You are right, I did not show that Roon is object level wrong”, and the longer version is;

“I didn’t attempt to take that shot, because I did not think I could pull it off in one tweet (and it would have been less interesting). So instead, I pointed to a meta process, and made a claim that iff roon improved his meta reasoning, he would converge to a different object level claim, but I did not actually rigorously defend an object level argument about AI (I have done this ad nauseam elsewhere). I took a shot at the defense mechanism, not the object claim.

Instead of pointing to a flaw in his object level reasoning (of which there are so many, I claim, that it would be intractable to address them all in a mere tweet), I tried to point to (one of) the meta-level generator of those mistakes.”

I like to think I got most of that, but how would I know if I was wrong?

Focusing on the one aspect of this: One must hold both concepts in one’s head at the same time.

  1. The main forces shaping the world operate above the level of individual human intention & action, and you must understand how they work and flow in order to be able to influence them in ways that make things better.

  2. If you are smart, think hard, and accept painful truths, you will realize the world is a machine that you can deliberately alter.

These are both ‘obviously’ true. You are in the shadow of the Elder Gods up against Cthulhu (well, technically Azathoth), the odds are against you and the situation is grim, and if we are to survive you are going to have to punch them out in the end, which means figuring out how to do that and you won’t be doing it alone.

Meanwhile, some more wise words:

Roon: it is impossible to wield agency well without having fun with it; and yet wielding any amount of real power requires a level of care that makes it hard to have fun. It works until it doesn’t.

Also see:

Roon: people will always think my vague tweets are about agi but they’re about love

And also from this week:

Roon: once you accept the capabilities vs alignment framing it’s all over and you become mind killed

What would be a better framing? The issue is that all alignment work is likely to also be capabilities work, and much of capabilities work can help with alignment.

One can and should still ask the question, does applying my agency to differentially advancing this particular thing make it more likely we will get good outcomes versus bad outcomes? That it will relatively rapidly grow our ability to control and understand what AI does versus getting AIs to be able to better do more things? What paths does this help us walk down?

Yes, collectively we absolutely have control over these questions. We can coordinate to choose a different path, and each individual can help steer towards better paths. If necessary, we can take strong collective action, including regulatory and legal action, to stop the future from wiping us out. Pointless anxiety or worry about such outcomes is indeed pointless, that should be minimized, only have the amount required to figure out and take the most useful actions.

What that implies about the best actions for a given person to take will vary widely. I am certainly not claiming to have all the answers here. I like to think Roon would agree that both of us, and many but far from all of you reading this, are in the group that can help improve the odds.

Read the Roon Read More »

blue-origin-is-getting-serious-about-developing-a-human-spacecraft

Blue Origin is getting serious about developing a human spacecraft

blue origin, Science, Space / /

A new era at Blue —

Company seeks: “Experience with human spaceflight or high-performance aircraft systems?”

–

Dave Limp, Blue Origin's new CEO, and founder Jeff Bezos observe the New Glenn rocket on its launch pad Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Enlarge / Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s new CEO, and founder Jeff Bezos observe the New Glenn rocket on its launch pad Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

The space company named Blue Origin is having a big year. New chief executive Dave Limp, who arrived in December, is working to instill a more productive culture at the firm owned by Jeff Bezos. In January, the company’s powerful BE-4 rocket engine performed very well on the debut launch of the Vulcan booster. And later this year, possibly as soon as August, Blue Origin’s own heavy-lift rocket, New Glenn, will take flight.

But wait, there’s more. The company has also been hard at work developing hardware that will fly on New Glenn, such as the Blue Ring transfer vehicle that will be used to ferry satellites into precise orbits. In addition, work continues on a private space station called Orbital Reef.

One of the key questions about that space station is how astronauts will get there. The only current means of US crew transportation to low-Earth orbit is via Blue Origin’s direct competitor, SpaceX, with its Dragon vehicle. This is likely unpalatable for Bezos.

Boeing is an official partner on Orbital Reef. It has a crewed spacecraft, Starliner, set to make its debut flight in April. But there are serious questions about Boeing’s long-term commitment to Starliner beyond its seven contracted missions with NASA, in addition to concerns that its price will be about 50 percent higher than Dragon if it ever flies private astronauts. Blue Origin has also had some discussions with India about using its new crew capsule.

All of these options have downsides, especially for a company that has a vision of “millions of people living and working in space.” It has long been understood that Blue Origin will eventually develop a crewed spacecraft vehicle. But when?

Now, apparently.

A bit of history

A dozen years ago, the company was performing preliminary studies of a “next-generation” spacecraft that would provide transportation to low-Earth orbit for up to seven astronauts. Blue Origin ultimately received about $25 million from NASA’s commercial crew program before dropping out—SpaceX and Boeing were the ultimate victors.

For a time, the crew project was on the back burner, but it has now become a major initiative within Blue Origin, with the company hiring staff to develop the vehicle.

The first public hint of this renewed interest came last June, when NASA announced that Blue Origin was one of seven companies to sign an unfunded Space Act Agreement to design advanced commercial space projects. Later, in a document explaining this selection process, NASA revealed that Blue Origin was working on a “commercial space transportation system.” This included a reusable spacecraft that would launch on the New Glenn rocket.

“The development plan for the reusable CTS (commercial space transportation system) has significant strengths for its low external dependence, approach to mature its technologies, and demonstrated technical competency,” NASA stated in its source selection document, signed by Phil McAlister, director of the agency’s commercial space division.

Staffing up for a crew vehicle

The best evidence that Blue Origin is serious about developing an orbital human spacecraft has come in recent job postings. For example, the company is seeking a leader for its “Space Vehicle Abort Thrusters Integrated Product Team” on LinkedIn. Among the preferred qualifications is “experience with human spaceflight or high-performance aircraft systems.”

Most human spacecraft have “abort thrusters” as part of their design. Built into the crew vehicle, they are designed to automatically fire when there is a problem with the rocket. These powerful thrusters pull the crew vehicle away from the rocket—which is often in the process of exploding—so that the astronauts can parachute safely back to Earth. All of the crewed vehicles currently in operation, SpaceX’s Dragon, Russia’s Soyuz, and China’s Shenzhou, have such escape systems. There is no practical reason for abort thrusters on a non-human spacecraft.

After years of secrecy, Blue Origin is revealing more about its intentions of late. This is likely due to the long-awaited debut of the New Glenn rocket, which will announce Blue Origin’s presence as a bona fide launch company and significant competitor to SpaceX. It’s therefore probable that the company will talk more about its crewed spaceflight ambitions later this year.

Blue Origin is getting serious about developing a human spacecraft Read More »

macbook-airs-get-an-m3-upgrade,-while-the-m1-model-is-finally-retired

MacBook Airs get an M3 upgrade, while the M1 model is finally retired

Apple, Apple M3, Mac, MacBook Air, Tech / /

bout time —

M2 Air is the new $999 base model, M1 Air goes away after more than 3 years.

–

Apple is refreshing the MacBook Air with M3 chips but leaving everything else about the 2022 redesign intact.

Enlarge / Apple is refreshing the MacBook Air with M3 chips but leaving everything else about the 2022 redesign intact.

Apple

Apple has quietly refreshed its MacBook Air lineup, bringing new chips (and in some cases, new prices) to its most popular laptops. New 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs include Apple’s latest-generation M3 chip, while the old M2 MacBook Air now replaces 2020’s M1 MacBook Air as Apple’s $999 entry-level laptop. The new 13- and 15-inch M3 systems start at $1,099 and $1,299; they can be ordered today and will be released on March 8.

The new Airs use the same design as the M2 versions. Compared to older M1 and late-Intel-era Airs, they have slightly larger displays with a prominent notch, a non-tapered but still thin-and-light chassis, larger trackpads, modestly refined keyboards, and a MagSafe port for charging.

All of the new Airs use the M3, with no options to upgrade to faster or more capable processors (frustratingly, this means the Air is still restricted to just a single external display). The $1,099 13-inch Air does use a slightly cut-down version of the chip with 8 GPU cores instead of 10, with the 10-core GPU available as a $100 upgrade; all 15-inch models use the fully enabled M3 with the 10-core GPU.

Aside from the M3 chip, the new laptops also support Wi-Fi 6E, and hardware-accelerated video decoding for the AV1 video codec. But other specs, including RAM and storage options, stay the same as before. Both laptops start with 8GB and 256GB or RAM and storage, respectively, and top out at 24GB and 2TB. Both Airs’ performance should generally be similar to the 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro that starts at $1,599, though the Pro has a cooling fan that may help it run heavy workloads a bit more quickly.

All versions of the M3 include four high-performance CPU cores and four high-efficiency CPU cores, the same as the M1 and M2, though Apple says that chip upgrades have made the M3 “up to 60 percent faster” than the M1. Performance upgrades compared to the M2 will be a bit milder.

The update gets the 13- and 15-inch Airs onto the same update schedule, though the timing is a bit awkward for the barely nine-month-old 15-inch M2 MacBook Air. That’s an even shorter life cycle than we saw with the M2 MacBook Pros that Apple replaced last November after just 11 months. But the 13-inch M2 MacBook Air originally came out in July of 2022 and was well overdue for an upgrade.

The only Macs without an M3 update are Apple’s desktops: the Mac mini, the Mac Studio, and the Mac Pro. Of these, the M2 Mac mini is the oldest, and Apple has already released the M3 and M3 Pro chips that would probably be used in a refresh. It’s possible that Apple is waiting to get the mini and the Studio models in sync with one another to prevent some of the awkward overlap that happened last year when the Mac mini got an M2 upgrade but the Studio still used M1 chips.

MacBook Airs get an M3 upgrade, while the M1 model is finally retired Read More »

i-worked-exclusively-in-vision-pro-for-a-week—here’s-how-it-went

I worked exclusively in Vision Pro for a week—here’s how it went

Apple, Features, Reviews, Tech, vision pro, visionOS / /

  • A close-up look at the Vision Pro from the front.

    Samuel Axon

  • There are two displays inside the Vision Pro, one for each eye. Each offers just under 4K resolution.

    Samuel Axon

  • This is the infamous battery pack. It’s about the size of an iPhone (but a little thicker), and it has a USB-C port for external power sources.

    Samuel Axon

  • There are two buttons for the Vision Pro, both on the top.

    Samuel Axon

  • You can see the front-facing cameras that handle passthrough video just above the downward-facing cameras that read your hand gestures here.

    Samuel Axon

  • Apple offers several variations of the light seal to fit different face shapes.

    Samuel Axon

You can get a lot of work done while wearing Apple’s Vision Pro and have fun doing it—but it’s not yet at the stage where most of us will want to fully embrace spatial computing as the new way of working.

I spent more than a week working almost exclusively in the Vision Pro. I carried on Slack conversations, dialed into Zoom video calls, edited Google Docs, wrote articles, and did everything else I do within my day-to-day responsibilities as an editor at Ars Technica.

Throughout the experience, I never stopped thinking about how cool it was, like I was a character in a cyberpunk novel. The Vision Pro opens some new ways of approaching day-to-day work that could appeal to folks with certain sensibilities, and it offers access to some amenities that someone who hasn’t already invested a lot into their home office setup might not already have.

At the same time, though, I never quite zeroed in on a specific application or use case that made me think my normal habit of working on a MacBook Pro with three external monitors would be replaced. If you don’t already have a setup like that—that is to say, if you’ve just been working on a laptop on its own—then the Vision Pro can add a lot of value.

I plan to explore more use cases in the future, like gaming, but this is the last major piece in a series of sub-reviews of the Vision Pro that I’ve done on various applications, like entertainment or as an on-the-go mobile device.

My goal has been to see if the Vision Pro’s myriad use cases add up to $3,500 of value for today’s computing enthusiast. Productivity is front and center in how Apple markets the device, so this is an important one. Let’s see how it holds up.

The basics

Outside the realm of entertainment, visionOS and its apps are mostly about flat windows floating in 3D space. There are very few apps that make use of the device’s 3D capabilities in new ways that are relevant to productivity.

There are two types of visionOS apps: spatial apps and “Compatible Apps.” The former are apps designed to take advantage of the Vision Pro’s spatial computing capabilities, whereas Compatible Apps are simply iPad apps that work just fine as flat windows within the visionOS environment.

Let's find out if the Vision Pro can be an adequate replacement for this, my usual work space.

Enlarge / Let’s find out if the Vision Pro can be an adequate replacement for this, my usual work space.

Samuel Axon

In either case, though, you’re usually just getting the ability to put windows around you. For example, I started out by sitting at my kitchen table and putting my writing app in front of me, Slack and my email app off to the side, and a browser window with a YouTube video playing on the other side. This felt a bit like using several large computer monitors, each with an app maximized. It’s cool, and the ability to shift between your real environment and fully immersive virtual ones can help with focus, especially if you do intensive creative work like writing.

If there’s one thing Apple has nailed better than any of its predecessors in the mixed reality space, it’s the interface. Wherever your eyes are looking, a UI element will glow to let you know it’s the item you’ll interact with if you click. Clicking is done by simply tapping two of your fingers together almost anywhere around your body; the headset has cameras all over, so you don’t have to hold your hands up or in front of you to do this. There are also simple pinching-and-moving gestures for scrolling or zooming.

I worked exclusively in Vision Pro for a week—here’s how it went Read More »

the-world’s-most-traveled-crew-transport-spacecraft-flies-again

The world’s most-traveled crew transport spacecraft flies again

commercial crew, Commercial space, crew dragon, Crew-8, falcon 9, human spaceflight, international space station, launch, NASA, Science, Space / /
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off with the Crew-8 mission, sending three NASA astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut on a six-month expedition on the International Space Station.

Enlarge / A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off with the Crew-8 mission, sending three NASA astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut on a six-month expedition on the International Space Station.

SpaceX’s oldest Crew Dragon spacecraft launched Sunday night on its fifth mission to the International Space Station, and engineers are crunching data to see if the fleet of Dragons can safely fly as many as 15 times.

It has been five years since SpaceX launched the first Crew Dragon spacecraft on an unpiloted test flight to the space station and nearly four years since SpaceX’s first astronaut mission took off in May 2020. Since then, SpaceX has put its clan of Dragons to use ferrying astronauts and cargo to and from low-Earth orbit.

Now, it’s already time to talk about extending the life of the Dragon spaceships. SpaceX and NASA, which shared the cost of developing the Crew Dragon, initially certified each capsule for five flights. Crew Dragon Endeavour, the first in the Dragon fleet to carry astronauts, is now flying for the fifth time.

This ship has spent 466 days in orbit, longer than any spacecraft designed to transport people to and from Earth. It will add roughly 180 days to its flight log with this mission.

Crew Dragon Endeavour lifted off from Florida aboard a Falcon 9 rocket at 10: 53 pm EST Sunday (03: 53 UTC Monday), following a three-day delay due to poor weather conditions across the Atlantic Ocean, where the capsule would ditch into the sea in the event of a rocket failure during the climb into orbit.

Commander Matthew Dominick, pilot Michael Barratt, mission specialist Jeanette Epps, and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin put on their SpaceX pressure suits and strapped into their seats inside Crew Dragon Endeavour Sunday evening at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX loaded liquid propellants into the rocket, while ground teams spent the final hour of the countdown evaluating a small crack discovered on Dragon’s side hatch seal. Managers ultimately cleared the spacecraft for launch after considering whether the crack could pose a safety threat during reentry at the end of the mission.

“We are confident that we understand the issue and can still fly the whole mission safely,” a member of SpaceX’s mission control team told the crew inside Dragon.

This mission, known as Crew-8, launched on a brand-new Falcon 9 booster, which returned to landing a few minutes after liftoff at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The Falcon 9’s upper stage released the Dragon spacecraft into orbit about 12 minutes after liftoff. The four-person crew will dock at the space station around 3 am EST (0800 UTC) Tuesday.

Crew-8 will replace the four-person Crew-7 team that has been at the space station since last August. Crew-7 will return to Earth in about one week on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft, which is flying in space for the third time.

The Crew-8 mission came home for a reentry and splashdown off the coast of Florida in late August of this year, wrapping up Crew Dragon Endeavour’s fifth trip to space. This is the current life limit for a Crew Dragon spacecraft, but don’t count out Endeavour just yet.

Fleet management

“Right now, we’re certified for five flights on Dragon, and we’re looking at extending that life out,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. “I think the goal would be for SpaceX to say 15 flights of Dragon. We may not get there in every single system.”

One by one, engineers at SpaceX and NASA are looking at Dragon’s structural skeleton, composite shells, rocket engines, valves, and other components to see how much life is left in them. Some parts of the spacecraft slowly fatigue from the stresses of each launch, reentry, and splashdown, along with the extreme temperature swings the capsule sees thousands of times in orbit. Each Draco thruster on the spacecraft is certified for a certain number of firings.

Some components are already approved for 15 flights, Stich said in a recent press conference. “Some, we’re still in the middle of working on,” he said. “Some of those components have to go through some re-qualification to make sure that they can make it out to 15 flights.”

Re-qualifying a component on a spacecraft typically involves putting hardware through extensive testing on the ground. Because SpaceX reuses hardware, engineers can remove a part from a flown Dragon spacecraft and put it through qualification testing. NASA will get the final say in certifying the Dragon spacecraft for additional flights because the agency is SpaceX’s primary customer for crew missions.

The Dragon fleet is flying more often than SpaceX or NASA originally anticipated. The main reason for this is that Boeing, NASA’s other commercial crew contractor, is running about four years behind SpaceX in getting to its first astronaut launch on the Starliner spacecraft.

When NASA selected SpaceX and Boeing for multibillion-dollar commercial crew contracts in 2014, the agency envisioned alternating between Crew Dragon and Starliner flights every six months to rotate four-person crews at the International Space Station. With Boeing’s delays, SpaceX has picked up the slack.

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