Lifeboat Foundation

“You’d be crazy not to, given their track record.”

Amazon is working toward the launch of two prototype satellites for its SpaceX Starlink-rivaling internet service, Project Kuiper. The delivery giant plans to launch these first two satellites at some point next year, and earlier this year, it penned what it calls “the largest commercial procurement of launch vehicles in history.”

Amazon signed that agreement, totaling 83 Kuiper launches, with United Launch Alliance (ULA), European firm Arianespace, and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

Continue reading “Amazon may have to turn to SpaceX for help launching its Starlink rival service” »

There is a mix of excitement and fear and lots of memes.

After much back and forth and a lawsuit, four days ago, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of the social media platform Twitter. Musk had put the deal on hold after his initial offer earlier this year. Later he backed out, citing a high number of fake or spam accounts on the platform, a point that then-CEO Aggarwal had publicly denied.

Musk was then taken to court by Twitter’s lawyers. The court had given the two parties time till the month’s end to work out a deal.

Continue reading “Here are some of the best internet reactions to Elon Musk buying Twitter” »

When in 2015, Eileen Brown looked at the ETER9 Project (crazy for many, visionary for few) and wrote an interesting article for ZDNET with the title “New social network ETER9 brings AI to your interactions”, it ensured a worldwide projection of something the world was not expecting.

Someone, in a lost world (outside the United States), was risking, with everything he had in his possession (very little or less than nothing), a vision worthy of the American dream. At that time, Facebook was already beginning to annoy the cleaner minds that were looking for a difference and a more innovative world.

Today, after that test bench, we see that Facebook (Meta or whatever) is nothing but an illusion, or, I dare say, a big disappointment. No, no, no! I am not now bad-mouthing Facebook just because I have a project in hand that is seen as a potential competitor.

I was even a big fan of the “original” Facebook; but then I realized, it took me a few years, that Mark Zuckerberg is nothing more than a simple kid, now a man, who against everything and everyone, gave in to whims. Of him, initially, and now, perforce, of what his big investors, deluded by himself, of what his “metaverse” would be.

Continue reading “Meta what?” »

An artificial intelligence system from Google’s sibling company DeepMind stumbled on a new way to solve a foundational math problem at the heart of modern computing, a new study finds. A modification of the company’s game engine AlphaZero (famously used to defeat chess grandmasters and legends in the game of Go) outperformed an algorithm that had not been improved on for more than 50 years, researchers say.

The new research focused on multiplying grids of numbers known as matrices. Matrix multiplication is an operation key to many computational tasks, such as processing images, recognizing speech commands, training neural networks, running simulations to predict the weather, and compressing data for sharing on the Internet.

AI image generators, which create fantastical sights at the intersection of dreams and reality, bubble up on every corner of the web. Their entertainment value is demonstrated by an ever-expanding treasure trove of whimsical and random images serving as indirect portals to the brains of human designers. A simple text prompt yields a nearly instantaneous image, satisfying our primitive brains, which are hardwired for instant gratification.

Although seemingly nascent, the field of AI-generated art can be traced back as far as the 1960s with early attempts using symbolic rule-based approaches to make technical images. While the progression of models that untangle and parse words has gained increasing sophistication, the explosion of generative art has sparked debate around copyright, disinformation, and biases, all mired in hype and controversy.

Continue reading “How AI image generators could help robots” »

It’s going to get even worse, says the CEO in the earnings call.

Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of building the future of the internet is costing Meta billions of dollars every quarter. In the quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, Reality Labs, Meta’s division tasked with building the metaverse, reported a loss of $3.67 billion in the period between July through September, up from $2.8 billion in the previous quarter, Engadget.

IStock/COM & O

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse dream is costing billions — and Meta plans to spend more next year” »

TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX started taking pre-orders Oct. 25 for a flat panel antenna that enables land vehicles to use its Starlink broadband service while in motion.

The company aims to make deliveries starting in December for an upgraded Starlink for RVs service, which currently only comes with a standard $599 Starlink dish designed for stationary use.

The flat panel antenna will cost subscribers $2,500 and is better suited for moving vehicles because its wide area of view can connect to more satellites, according to SpaceX. The company has warned customers that using any other Starlink dish on the go will void their limited warranty.

The newly-designed dish allows users to have a permanent high-performance Starlink installation on their vehicles.

SpaceX announced it is now accepting orders for its new “flat high-performance” Starlink dish for moving vehicles.

In a Tuesday tweet, the private space firm explained that the new offering allows customers to “enjoy high-speed, low-latency internet while on the move!”

The world wide web is not enough, because scientists have managed to transmit data at a staggering 1.84 petabits per second — nearly twice the amount of global internet traffic in the same interval.

That blows the previous record for data transmission using a single light source and optical chip of one petabit per second out the water. And to put that ridiculous amount into perspective, a petabit is equal to one million gigabits. A single gigabit, or 1,000 megabits, is about the fastest download speed money can buy for most households.

To achieve the astonishing feat, researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Chalmers University of Technology used a custom optical chip that can make use of a single infrared light by splitting it into hundreds of different frequencies that are evenly spaced apart. Collectively, they’re known as a frequency comb. Each frequency on the comb can discretely hold data by modulating the wave properties of light, allowing scientists to transmit far more bits than conventional methods.