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- On Valentine’s Day, six dating app users filed a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing Tinder, Hinge and other Match dating apps of using addictive, game-like features to encourage compulsive use. Match’s apps, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in the Northern District of California, “employ recognised dopamine-manipulating product features” to turn users into “gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards”, generating “market success by fomenting dating app addiction that drives expensive subscriptions and perpetual use”. Match said the lawsuit was “ridiculous”, but online dating experts said it reflected a broader backlash to the way apps were gamifying human experience for profit and leaving people feeling manipulated.
- Two former nuns have called on Pope Francis to initiate an independent investigation into a once-prominent Jesuit artist-priest who they allege sexually abused them, including by forcing them to have threesomes and making them watch pornography so they would “grow spiritually”. Speaking publicly for the first time, Mirjiam Kovac and Gloria Branciani said the wall of silence surrounding Marko Rupnik, who has been accused by several women of sexual, psychological and spiritual abuses dating back three decades, had finally “crumbled”. The women are former members of the Ignatius of Loyola community, an order co-founded by Rupnik, whose mosaics adorn the walls of some Vatican chapels and other churches.
- Google went into damage-control mode this week after its new artificial intelligence model, Gemini, was caught engaging in historical revisionism which, until now, has been confined to the realm of entertainment and impressionable children whose parents are demonized for speaking out against it. Gemini has no problems generating pictures of ‘strong black men,’ but strong white men ‘could potentially reinforce harmful stereotypes about race and body image.’ And of course, Gemini is not really interested in ‘following the science,’ as it were. ~ Tyler Durden
- An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, ChatGPT users began reporting unexpected outputs from OpenAI’s AI assistant, flooding the r/ChatGPT Reddit sub with reports of the AI assistant “having a stroke,” “going insane,” “rambling,” and “losing it.” OpenAI has acknowledged the problem and is working on a fix, but the experience serves as a high-profile example of how some people perceive malfunctioning large language models, which are designed to mimic humanlike output. ChatGPT is not alive and does not have a mind to lose, but tugging on human metaphors (called “anthropomorphization”) seems to be the easiest way for most people to describe the unexpected outputs they have been seeing from the AI model. They’re forced to use those terms because OpenAI doesn’t share exactly how ChatGPT works under the hood; the underlying large language models function like a black box. “It gave me the exact same feeling — like watching someone slowly lose their mind either from psychosis or dementia,” wrote a Reddit user named z3ldafitzgerald in response to a post about ChatGPT bugging out. “It’s the first time anything AI related sincerely gave me the creeps.”
- Passengers on board commercial flights over the weekend were in for a wild ride, as freak winds pushed their flights to faster than the speed of sound. Virgin Atlantic Airways flight 22, British Airways flight 292, British Airways flight 216, United Airlines Flight 64 and American Airlines Flight 120 all reached speeds of over 800mph by travelling along the jet stream. For comparison, the typical cruising speed of a passenger plane is roughly 575mph.
- The father of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, John Shipton, called on Australia on Thursday to put pressure on its allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, to help bring his son home. A UK court held hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday to consider a US extradition request for Assange. Judges Victoria Sharp and Jeremy Johnson said they would issue their ruling later. Shipton talked to his son on the phone on Wednesday following a rally outside the High Court in London, during which the investigative journalist’s supporters urged the UK authorities to release Assange and not to extradite him to Washington, Australian broadcaster ABC reported. After that, Assange’s father appealed to the Australian government.
- The European Union is “totally dependent” on China for lithium, since the bloc imports 97% of its needs on the material from the country, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday. “We have observed that China, over the last 20 to 30 years, has strategically bought mine after mine globally. They take the raw material, they have the processing procedures in China and then they have the monopoly for this raw material. Take lithium: 97% of the lithium we use in the European Union is from China. So we are totally dependent on this one on China,” von der Leyen said during her opening speech at the Clean Tech Industry Dialogue in Brussels.
- Hours after the US press published groundless claims of Russia’s space-based nuclear program, the Pentagon sent “a missile-tracking system” into orbit – part of the Department of Defense’s new plan dubbed Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture that aims to fill the low-Earth orbit with myriads of small and cheap satellites. The New York Times broke the Pentagon’s new initiative on February 15, explaining that the US military had adopted an approach similar to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite constellation. If America’s adversaries knock down even a dozen of those small and cheap Pentagon satellites, the system would continue operating shifting to other units, according to the media outlet. As Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen H. Hicks stated last month, the Pentagon will be able to launch those small cost-effective satellites “almost weekly.”
- The elusive engineer behind several highly unusual patents, filed on behalf of the U.S. Navy, has broken his silence and finally spoken to the media. Salvatore Cezar Pais responded to emails sent by The War Zone, but his answers bring us no closer to how the technology behind the patents, which involve fusion power and other exotic tech, came about. Dr. Pais, formerly an aerospace engineer with Naval Air Systems Command/ Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division and now at the Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs, recently achieved notoriety with the publication of patents involving compact fusion reactor energy—truly wild stuff that stretches the limits of science—and a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft.”
- The last several days have witnessed well over half a dozen attacks or attempted attacks by Houthis on foreign vessels and tankers in the Red Sea. For example the US military confirmed Tuesday that two US-owned tankers were struck the day prior. Such attacks are now coming several times a day. On Thursday the Pentagon said its coalition ships in the Red Sea intercepted six more drones over waters off Yemen. This came after another UK-owned ship was struck, and is reportedly burning and immobile some 70 nautical miles southeast of Aden.
- A pre-recorded video shared Tuesday to the official “POTUS” account on X has a whopping THIRTY cuts, prompting yet more questions about Biden’s mental acuity. The video shows Biden making a short speech about NATO, and remarkably he doesn’t slur a single word or struggle to read his script as he does in every other situation. Of course, it’s a pre-recorded video so they’re not going to leave in mistakes. However, it is the sheer amount of cuts that has people asking the question, is he capable of completing more than one sentence at a time? ~ Steve Watson via Modernity.news
- Ukraine’s devastating troop losses are long past crisis levels, and its forces are in retreat along some key front line areas, particularly in the region outside Avdiivka in Donetsk after Russia captured the city Saturday. The New York Times observed of the aftermath, “Without dominant hills, larger rivers or extensive fortifications of the kind it built around Avdiivka over the better part of a decade, Ukraine will probably have to cede more ground to hold back Russian units.” “They don’t have a well-established secondary line to pull back to,” one analyst was cited in the Times as saying. Ukraine’s leadership has long been mulling a new mass mobilization and conscription drive, which has received immense pushback from the war-wearied population. But instead of implementing that controversial measure domestically, President Zelensky is going a different route. He on Wednesday signed a decree opening up Ukraine’s military forces to “foreigners and stateless persons.”
- NASA is looking for four people to spend a year living in a simulated version of Mars, the administration announced Tuesday. The mission, set to kickoff spring 2025, aims to shape the agency’s plans for human exploration of the Red Planet and will be the second part of mission CHAPEA, the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog. The four person volunteer crew will live and work inside a 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed habitat at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The habitat, which is called the Mars Dune Alpha, simulates similar challenges that a mission on Mars would present, including resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays and varying environmental stressors.
- The black hole powering the most luminous object observed in the solar system is eating roughly the equivalent of the Sun every day through the gas and cosmic dust it sucks up. Quasar J0529-4351 has been visible in sky surveys since 1980 but was only identified as the most luminous object in the universe last year and its ravenous appetite was just described in a study published on Monday. So bright was the object that it was previously misidentified as a foreground star. Quasars are the extremely bright center of a galaxy and are powered by supermassive black holes. The newly identified quasar comes from just 1.5 billion years. “It is a surprise that it has remained unknown until today, when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It has literally been staring us in the face until now,” Christopher Onken of the Australian National University (ANU) and one of the study’s authors said.
Rose Rambles... 