Huat Zai

The US has shot down another unidentified flying object in the fourth military operation of its kind this month. President Joe Biden ordered it to be downed near Lake Huron, close to the Canadian border, on Sunday afternoon. The object could have interfered with commercial air traffic as it was traveling at 20,000ft (6,100m), a Pentagon statement said. It was first detected above military sites in Montana on Saturday, it added. The object, which was not deemed a military threat, has been described by defence officials as unmanned and octagonal in shape. It was downed by a missile fired from an F-16 fighter jet at 14:42 local time (19:42 GMT). The incident raised further questions about the spate of high-altitude objects that have been shot down over North America this month. A suspected Chinese spy balloon was downed off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February after hovering for days over the continental US. Officials said it originated in China and had been used to monitor sensitive sites. China denied the object was used for spying and said it was a weather monitoring device that had been blown astray. The incident - and the angry exchanges in its aftermath - ratcheted up tensions between Washington and Beijing. On Sunday, a defence official said the US had communicated with Beijing about the first object after receiving no response for several days. It was not immediately clear what was discussed. Since that first incident, American fighter jets have shot down three further high-altitude objects in as many days. President Biden ordered an object to be shot down over Alaska on Friday, and on Saturday a similar object was shot down over the Yukon in north-western Canada. Officials have not publicly identified the origin or purpose of these objects. Both the US and Canada are still working to recover the remnants, but the search in Alaska has been hampered by Arctic conditions. "These objects did not closely resemble, and were much smaller than, the [4 February] balloon and we will not definitively characterise them until we can recover the debris," a White House National Security spokesperson said. Unidentified flying objects - timeline 4 February: US military shoots down suspected surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina. It had drifted for days over the US, and officials said it came from China and had been monitoring sensitive sites 10 February: US downs another object off northern Alaska which officials said lacked any system of propulsion or control 11 February: An American fighter jet shoots down a "high-altitude airborne object" over Canada's Yukon territory, about 100 miles (160 km) from the US border. It was described as cylindrical and smaller than the first balloon 12 February: US jets shoot down a fourth high-altitude object near Lake Huron "out of an abundance of caution" Later on Sunday, the US Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said he had not ruled any explanation out - including extraterrestrial life. "I'll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven't ruled out anything," Gen Glen VanHerck told reporters after being asked about the possibility of aliens. One senior official told ABC News that the three most recent objects to be shot down were likely weather balloons and not surveillance devices. But this was contradicted by the top Democrat in Congress, who earlier told the broadcaster that intelligence officials believed the objects were in fact surveillance balloons. "They believe they were [balloons], yes," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, adding that they were "much smaller" than the first one shot down off the South Carolina coast. "The bottom line is, until a few months ago, we didn't know of these balloons," he said. Democrat Debbie Dingell, one of several Michigan members of Congress who applauded the military for downing the object over the state on Sunday, joined growing calls for the White House and defence officials to provide more information. "We need the facts about where they are originating from, what their purpose is, and why their frequency is increasing," she said. Democratic Senator Jon Tester, who represents Montana, told the BBC's US partner CBS: "What's gone on the last two weeks or so... has been nothing short of craziness. And the military needs to have a plan to not only determine what's out there, but determine the dangers." Republicans have repeatedly criticised the Biden administration for its handling of the first suspected spy balloon, saying it should have been shot down far sooner. Meanwhile, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the UK would conduct a security review following the recent incidents in the US and Canada. "This development is another sign of how the global threat picture is changing for the worse," he said.

DC heroes are all a little over-powered, Marvel heroes are all a little broken. Broken people have more interesting background stories.

The Flash is DC, GR is Marvel

It's how he likes his coffee

for me is

She went to the 'sifu' and is still running around bumping into all kinds of spirits, I think that kinda speaks for itself...

Wait, there's an actual SHTF in sg?..

Nice toy, yours?

@kokleong @Standing Birdy @socrates469bc let's form a chatgpt startup and pitch to Temasick

Taiwan democracy is truly interesting, they already have a streamer as an MP, and now this XD

Generative AI exploded into the mainstream last year. Led by the Elon Musk cofounded OpenAI — the creator of both DALL-E 2, a text-to-image generator, and ChatGPT, an impressive text-generating system — the industry has absolutely exploded, as these generative tools and others, notably the image-generating systems Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, have dazzled investment firms and the broader public alike. "Generative AI is well on the way to becoming not just faster and cheaper, but better in some cases than what humans create by hand," reads a blog post by top investment firm Sequoia Capital, published September 2022. "If we allow ourselves to dream multiple decades out, then it's easy to imagine a future where Generative AI is deeply embedded in how we work, create and play." But despite the hefty amount of investment cash — an estimated $1.37 billion across 78 deals in 2022 alone, according to The New York Times — that VCs are throwing at generative AI companies, not everyone in the field is convinced that these generative machines are really the Earth-shifting force that both creators and investors believe them to be. "The current climate in AI has so many parallels to 2021 web3 it's making me uncomfortable," François Chollet, an influential deep learning researcher at Google and the creator of the deep learning system Keras, wrote in a blistering Twitter threat. "Narratives based on zero data are accepted as self-evident." In other words, Chollet is arguing that in eerily similar fashion to the blockchain bubble, hype — as opposed to firm data and proven results — is in the industry driving seat. And considering the current state of affairs over in Web3land, if Chollet's right? A failure for VC-predicted returns to materialize could spell some grim consequences for the broader AI industry. "Everyone is expecting as a sure thing 'civilization-altering' impact (and 100x returns on investment) in the next 2-3 years," he continued. "Personally I think there's a bull case and bear case. The bull case is way way more conservative than what the median person on my TL considers as completely self-evident." The bull case, he believes, is that "generative AI becomes a widespread [user experience] paradigm for interacting with most tech products." But Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — AI that operated at the level of a human or above — remains a "pipe dream." So, startups based on OpenAI tech might not be rendering us humans obsolete quite yet, but they could well find a long-term role within specific niches. The bear case, meanwhile, would be a scenario in which large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 would find "limited commercial success in SEO, marketing, and copywriting niches" and ultimately prove to be a "complete bubble." (He does offer that image generation would be far more successful LLMs, but would peak "as an XB/y industry" around 2024.) That all said, Chollet believes the most likely case is somewhere in between. But even so, even Chollet's best case prediction is still way out of alignment with VC enthusiasm, where acolytes are writing checks sized to match their optimism for the tech — OpenAI, for example, is in talks to close an investment deal that would bring the company's value to nearly $30 billion. "It's the new 'mobile' kind of paradigm shift that we've been all waiting for," Niko Bonatsos, an investor at the venture capital firm General Catalyst, told the NYT. "Maybe bigger, too." To investors' credit, the algorithms are cool. Text-to-image-generators are genuinely impressive, and open up broad new creative frontiers for people without Photoshop chops. GPT systems, at the very least, are lots of fun to play around with. That said, they also have a lot of problems. ChatGPT, for example, isn't always right about the very confident statements it provides, and experts fear that the tech may make it very simple to easily and efficiently generate misinformation. And though industry CEOs are open about the fact that these programs are still in relative infancy, the very real potential for destruction and blurred creative lines that they present is tough to ignore, even when backdropped against a bright — if still mostly imagined — future. And to Chollet's point, it takes more than a product being cool and fun, or even very useful for niche things, to really be a "paradigm shift." VCs may well be taking a much bigger risk than they think they are, both fueling and feeding off of a hype cycle of half-baked products, rather than making measured calls about a situationally promising, though still quite limited, burgeoning market. "The fact that investment is being driven by pure hype, by data-free narratives rather than actual revenue data or first-principles analysis," Chollet's thread concluded. "The circularity of it all — hype drives investment which drives hype which drives investment... narratives backed by nothing somehow end up enshrined as self-evident, common wisdom simply because they get repeated enough times by enough people." "Everyone starts believing the same canon (especially those who bill themselves as contrarians)," he said. https://futurism.com/deep-learning-expert-gpt-startups-rude-awakening

Not sure if like the balls or the armpits