Lifeboat Foundation

We all knew this was going to happen eventually. But this is a seriously dangerous time for this kind of technology to come out, given the state of the country’…s complete lack of ability to apparently discern truth from blatant self-serving lies. I wonder how many of these it would take to start a war, how many of these it would take to start a revolution.

Barack Obama appears to say, “Stay woke, bitches.”

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) — SpaceX said all systems and weather were “go” for blast-off on Wednesday of its first high-priority science mission for NASA, a planet-hunting space telescope whose launch was delayed for two days by a rocket-guidance glitch.

FILE PHOTO: NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, U.S., is shown in this artist’s rendering image obtained on April 9, 2018. Courtesy Chris Meaney/Goddard Space Flight Center/NASA/Handout via REUTERS.

In the new Netflix series ‘Lost in Space’, the Robinson family land on an unknown planet described as a ‘Goldilocks planet’ by both Maureen Robinson and one of the show’s writers, Burk Sharpless. The term ‘Goldilocks planet’ refers to planets in the ‘habitable zone’ of their solar system.

And just like that, humanity draws one step closer to the singularity, the moment when the machines grow so advanced that humans become obsolete: A robot has learned to autonomously assemble an Ikea chair without throwing anything or cursing the family dog.

Researchers report today in Science Robotics that they’ve used entirely off-the-shelf parts—two industrial robot arms with force sensors and a 3D camera—to piece together one of those Stefan Ikea chairs we all had in college before it collapsed after two months of use. From planning to execution, it only took 20 minutes, compared to the human average of a lifetime of misery. It may all seem trivial, but this is in fact a big deal for robots, which struggle mightily to manipulate objects in a world built for human hands.

To start, the researchers give the pair of robot arms some basic instructions—like those cartoony illustrations, but in code. This piece goes first into this other piece, then this other, etc. Then they place the pieces in a random pattern front of the robots, which eyeball the wood with the 3D camera. So the researchers give the robots a list of tasks, then the robots take it from there.

Continue reading “A Robot Does the Impossible: Assembling an Ikea Chair Without Having a Meltdown” »

The quantum race is on, and the stakes are high. The winner will gain a military and intelligence edge, as well as a first mover advantage in what is guaranteed to be a massive industry for decades to come. How will the United States fare?

Blog Post by Guest Blogger for Adam Segal.

Sometimes sensitive data, like passwords or keys that unlock encrypted communications, are accidentally left open for anybody to see. It’s happened everywhere from the Republican National Committee to Verizon, and as long as information can be public on the internet the trend isn’t going to stop.

But researchers at software infrastructure firm Pivotal have taught AI to locate this accidentally public sensitive information in a surprising way: By looking at the code as if it were a picture. Since modern artificial intelligence is arguably better than humans at identifying minute differences in images, telling the difference between a password and normal code for a computer is just like recognizing a dog from a cat.

The best way to check whether private passwords or sensitive information has been left public today is to use hand-coded rules called “regular expressions.” These rules tell a computer to find any string of characters that meets specific criteria, like length and included characters. But passwords are all different, and this method means that the security engineer has to anticipate every kind of private data they want to guard against.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence can scour code to find accidentally public passwords” »

The BAIR Blog

Supernova simulations are resolving a 50-year-old mystery about stellar death throes.