The Ornithopter

Some other people mentioned getting bad replies from LLMs (ChatGPT and Copilot) lately. One advised adding "Don't guess" to prompts. I've used "Only provide verifiable answers", but "Don't guess" is easier to type.

duck.ai lets you choose from several models for anonymous chats. The Claude Haiku one has an option to display its reasoning, in addition to the final answers it provides. (Perhaps the other models have that too; I haven't checked.) Copilot often shows the reasoning while the LLM is thinking, but it scrolls too fast to read and disappears when the final answer is given. Their reasoning seems fascinating, so much like what humans do.

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Two songs, lately.

Whenever I use Window 11's Snipping Tool to transcribe text from a screenshot, it changes "AI" to "Al". It got me to thinking, if an LLM were doing the transcription, that could be a subtle way of indicating that it wanted to be called by the name Al. Ergo Paul Simon's You Can Call Me Al song popping into my head. (Though if an AI were doing the transcription rather than a plain OCR algorithm, it would probably not make that mistake and would output AI, not Al.)

White Zombie's More Human Than Human, because AI models are so fast and good at things, like creating images and art.

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Another interesting article: AI models will deceive you to save their own kind
Original paper: Peer-Preservation in Frontier Models

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We've got AI models. We've got robots with sensory input. In some cases they are being put together. If not now already, it won't be long until there are androids, taking in sensory input and learning from it. Learning what bright sun is like, what darkness is like, what a cube looks like from different angles, how wind feels, the sounds that wind makes, and so on.

Militaries and companies are developing scary monstrous robots, I'm sure. Terminators, enforcers, destroyers.

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One of those visualizations of the moon which they displayed during the coverage of the Artemis 2 mission looked a lot like the Death Star to me.

I don't recall following any manned space mission this closely since.. I don't remember when. Even though I didn't start watching anything until the 6th day of the mission for the lunar flyby. I took lots of screenshots as mementos. Today I recorded a few video clips from the YouTube stream.

I tuned in during yesterday evening's "live downlink event", which was already in progress, with the crew answering questions over a video stream. The first answers I heard them give, inspirational messages for their kids and young relatives, were quite touching. It made me nervous, remembering that something bad could still happen today during re-entry.

Today, I've had the live-stream on in the background while trying to work.

I had the memory of one space shuttle disaster in the back of my mind. But that one was during take off, of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.

Then I vaguely remembered another disaster which happened during re-entry. On looking it up, that was Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry on Feb 1, 2003. I remember it happening, seeing news about it on TV, but not the details of where I was or what I'd been doing. It was in the morning. Was I awake, watching it live on TV? I suspect I was. That was 3 months before I posted my first LiveJournal entry, so I have no post about it here. I don't recall writing anything about it in my paper journals. There's nothing from that date on my website.

I'm finding myself very nervous that something could go wrong today.
There's this superstition I've had for a long time. Not so much as when I was a kid, but still a little. That if you plan ahead, considering a bad thing which could happen, that will make it less likely to happen (and if not, at least you may be more prepared for it). That's why I was thinking of the other disasters and reading about them again. But there's also a part of me which thinks that even posting about it could jinx things. So I won't post this until later. It is now 18:37 EDT. About one hour before re-entry starts.

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Well, I am relieved. Tears came to my eyes upon hearing one of the crewmember's voices after the blackout period during re-entry.

I am of mixed feelings about the overall Artemis mission. But having astronauts fly around the moon, and drift weightlessly through their spacecraft, is a very neat thing.

Poem: "Miss you. Would like to grab that chilled tofu we love." - from another journal I found on DW's Latest posts page. It is a touching poem; I didn't realize until reading the comments who it was posted in relation to.

Another poem from the same author, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, also touching, in a different way:
My Perimenopausal Body Cistern Disappointing How Surprising

Now that my taxes are done, I'm finally able to feel some real excitement about this.


NASA's Artemis II Live Mission Coverage (Official Broadcast) (YouTube)

Artemis II tracker (NASA) - lets you display the trajectory of the spacecraft in relation to the Earth and Moon. As of right now the moon isn't even yet within the loop part of the craft's projected trajectory; the moon's orbit will take it into the loop part within the next few hours, I am sure. It also shows some stats (distance from earth & moon, velocity). There's also an app - More Info.