Huat Zai

Songbo @The_King?

Following several high-profile UFO sightings, which are now being investigated by the Pentagon, researchers are analyzing the data — and are finding that the numbers simply aren't adding up. Director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office Sean Kirpatrick and notorious Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb have turned their sights to "highly maneuverable" Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), or UFOs, for a recent investigation. Their findings, published in a yet-to-be peer-reviewed study, are both eyebrow-raising and sobering. While the paper spends quite a bit of time speculating how and why an extraterrestrial intelligence, or perhaps merely its self-propagating probes, would end up in our backyard, its more important takeaways are its conclusions on the physics involved in the sightings. In short, Kirpatrick and Loeb looked at the friction that should've been created between a fast-moving UFO and the air and water surrounding it, like those famously depicted in the initial videos the Pentagon released that baffled the Navy airmen that spotted them. Taken at face value, "highly maneuverable" UFO sightings indeed appear to not abide by the laws of physics, as a "bright optical fireball" should be created by the ensuing friction. This fireball, in turn, should also leave a resulting radio signature detectable on radar — but none such signatures were ever spotted. Does that mean the UFOs are an alien vessel composed of some frictionless material unknown to humans? That's far less likely. According to Kirpatrick and Loeb, there's a lot more mundane explanation: the instruments used to observe the UFOs were simply inadequate. "The lack of all these signatures could imply inaccurate distance measurements (and hence derived velocity) for single site sensors," they write. "Typical UAP sightings are too far away to get a highly resolved image of the object and determination of the object's motion is limited by the lack of range data." Unfortunately, if that's the explanation coming from Loeb, whose theories are considered by some scientists as a little "out there" à la Fox Mulder in "The X-Files," it's especially unlikely we're looking at an extraterrestrial civilization coming to visit us. The Harvard astronomer has consistently raised eyebrows, made headlines, and generally incited controversy over his bold claims and equally bold endeavors, in his quest to reveal if aliens have ever come by for a visit or not. Infamously, Loeb has suggested that it's possible there could be up to four quintillion alien spacecraft in our solar system, and has insisted that a mysterious interstellar asteroid dubbed 'Oumuamua may have been an alien probe. So while Loeb generally believes that the truth is out there, it looks like that as far as some of these "highly maneuverable" sightings are concerned, he thinks we'll need more reliable and accurate measurements before making any definitive conclusions. "If some observed UAP are of extraterrestrial origin," Loeb and Kirpatrick write, "there are some practical limits on the interpretation of observed and measured data resulting from physics-based constraints." https://futurism.com/harvard-pentagon-ufos-sightings-defy-physics

RIP

Microsoft laid off an entire team dedicated to guiding AI innovation that leads to ethical, responsible and sustainable outcomes. The cutting of the ethics and society team, as reported by Platformer, is part of a recent spate of layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company. The elimination of the team comes as Microsoft invests billions more dollars into its partnership with OpenAI, the startup behind art- and text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, and revamps its Bing search engine and Edge web browser to be powered by a new, next-generation large language model that is “more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search.” The move calls into question Microsoft’s commitment to ensuring its product design and AI principles are closely intertwined at a time when the company is making its controversial AI tools available to the mainstream. Microsoft still maintains its Office of Responsible AI (ORA), which sets rules for responsible AI through governance and public policy work. But employees told Platformer that the ethics and society team was responsible for ensuring Microsoft’s responsible AI principles are actually reflected in the design of products that ship. The team had been recently working to identify risks posed by Microsoft’s integration of OpenAI’s technology across its suite of products. The ethics and society team wasn’t very large — only about seven people remained after a reorganization in October. Sources who spoke with Platformer said pressure from the chief technology officer Kevin Scott and CEO Satya Nadella was mounting to get the most recent OpenAI models, as well as next iterations, into customers hands as quickly as possible. Last year, the reorganization saw most of the ethics and society team transferred to other teams. On March 6, John Montgomery, corporate vice president of AI, told the remaining members that they’d be eliminated after all. Members of the team told Platformer they believed they were let go because Microsoft had become more focused on getting its AI products shipped before the competition, and was less concerned with long-term, socially responsible thinking. Teams like Microsoft’s ethics and society department often pull the reins on big tech organizations by pointing out potential societal consequences or legal ramifications. Microsoft perhaps didn’t want to hear “No,” anymore as it became hell bent on taking market share away from Google’s search engine. The company said every 1% of market share it could pry from Google would result in $2 billion in annual revenue. https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/13/microsoft-lays-off-an-ethical-ai-team-as-it-doubles-down-on-openai/?tpcc=tcplusfacebook

https://southpark.cc.com/episodes/9niic5/south-park-japanese-toilet-season-26-ep-3

Finally time for us to stop being buibuis and just be biantai?

I traveled to a few times to thailand for work a few years back, company threw us into lulu lulu industrial areas. Rural thai food and the stuff you find in tourist traps are very different.

*cough cough* woah @coffeenut, never realised that your taste so heavy, noted noted.

Army pay with your tax money, they don't (openly) take a cut, SQ pay with their profit, of course stingy lah

The last time I tasted good thai food, is in Thailand.

That's because army pays way more than SIA

@socrates469bc maybe you should rent out your monkeys.

It's ok, not everyone is as xenophobia as we are @classyNfabulous it's Korea lah, korea