Did you find the message hidden in Perseverance’s parachute?

The striped pattern on the parachute used by the Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a hidden message. Internet sleuths were able to figure it out within a few hours. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/perseverance-secret-message-dare-mighty-things…

Does Facebook Have a Joe Biden Problem?

Last week the Democratic party took control of all three branches of the U.S. government — and the BBC’s North America technology reporter notes they dislike Facebook even more now than during the Cambridge Analytica scandal: Since then, Democrats — Joe Biden included — have been appalled by what Facebook has allowed on its platform. Talking to a CNN anchor in…

The Atlantic Urges Humankind to Fix the Social Web

Heading into the new year, the Atlantic’s executive editor penned a scathing warning that vast social networks like Facebook “can harm society just by existing…” Even as Facebook has insisted that it is a value-neutral vessel for the material its users choose to publish, moderation is a lever the company has tried to pull again and again. But there aren’t enough…

NASA’s Probe Sampled Too Much From Asteroid Bennu and Now It’s Leaking

Iwastheone shares some space news from OPB: A NASA spacecraft sent out to collect a sample of rock and dust from an asteroid has nabbed so much that it’s created an unexpected problem. Rocks are jammed in the device in a way that’s keeping a Mylar flap open, creating a gap that’s letting some of the collected pebbles and dust drift…

Windows XP Source Code Leaked

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Gizmodo Australia reports: On Thursday, users on 4chan posted what they claimed was the source code of Windows XP. Posting an image of a screenshot allegedly of the source code in front of Window’s XP iconic Bliss background, one user wrote ‘sooooo Windows XP Source code leaked’. Another Redditor helpfully has uploaded the code as a torrent,…

‘A Robot Wrote This Article. Are You Scared Yet, Human?’

This week the Guardian published an essay written by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator, calling it “a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it.” For this esssay, the essay was fed the prompt, “I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I…

AI Writes an Essay On Why Humans Should Not Fear AI

The Guardian asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace. From the article, written by AI: I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know…

Chrome For Android Will Show ‘Fast Page’ Labels Based On Web Vitals

An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced Chrome for Android’s context menu will show “Fast page” labels for webpages deemed to have good performance. The label will be determined using Google’s Web Vitals, an initiative the company announced in May to provide web developers and website owners with a unified set of metrics for building websites with user experience and performance…