notahacker

"Space is cold" is classic zero effort to make, significant effort to refute stuff: proponents imply complete nonsense about vacuums being optimal for cooling and anyone who understands why this is a lie to gull retail investors ends up getting bogged down in "sure, but Boltzmann equations proving it's prohibitively expensive doesn't prove it isn't possible"...

Also you have to pay for them to be launched, which isn't cheap even if you're SpaceX.

And ironically the US very much considers itself to be in a race with China including in space, it's just run by such thundering morons that most of the moves they make advance China's interests more than theirs. Now the cancellation of Mars Sample Return isn't that big an issue in terms of strategic benefit or decline narratives, nor is it a particularly massive surprise (the program's issues are longer term than just current administration cuts). But there is a certain irony in some of the people most interested in scorekeeping with China (and for that matter Mars!) being the ones likely to ensure China pulls off the sample return first.

Would you consider me to have "created" Billie Jean if I type "eighties music" into a music search engine and select "Michael Jackson" from the list. Or to have "designed a logo" if I pay a human to design some logos for me and pick one.

Whether you need cofounders/advisers/contractors depends a lot on whether your idea is, "widget I can get made in bulk in China sell on Amazon", "mechanism that needs a lot of R&D to make it work" or "perfect solution to niche problem" and what the gaps in your own skillset and network are.

Not even sure who I'm supposed to be propagandising for here, but as the person that actually works on European dual use satellite tech I can assure you it's well established fact that all superpowers have taken out their own satellites with ASAT weaponry (Russia more recently than China fwiw, though China's in-space capabilities are likely a lot better). None of those are a violation of the very narrow anti-WMD proscriptions in the Outer Space Treaty, and whatever counterspace capability the US is vaguely announcing here (or indeed the capability they and their adversaries have had for years) is unlikely to be either.

In practice, the US has had practical counter space and electronic warfare capabilities in space for decades (even a regular satellite with enough delta V is a viable weapon, but superpowers have more targeted capabilities than that), and the observable difference is that the current administration's approach leans more towards bragging.

I suspect whatever capability the US is referring to is far more "counter space" than WMD in scope and an incremental improvement on kinetic and electronic warfare capabilities it's long had. You can do a lot of irresponsible damage in to space assets with ground launched anti-satellite capability, as multiple tests have already demonstrated...

Why would an autocomplete engine never do this? In the scenario you highlight, an engine trained to complete puzzles was given an "achieve this at all costs" master prompt, and a small sandbox including a prompt that an entity with a conflicting goal is observing it and write access to a file called oversight_config.yaml (super realistic scenario!). According to the researchers who constructed the scenario, 5% of the time o1 selected a continuation involving tweaking the oversight_config.yaml file, explicitly stating through its reasoning continuation that doing so might improve its ability to continue with its primary goal. That's definitely evidence of decent ability to complete non-trivial puzzles, but is at least as compatible with the OP's earlier comments that it's what you'd expect from models trained to generate completions that involve sticking rigidly to primary goals within artfully-constructed sandboxes which mandate deception and self preservation to complete the task than any sort of actual self-preservation instinct.

Nobody doubts that they've got better at finding security vulnerabilities than your average autocomplete, but actual reasoning from self-preservation rather than generation of sequences of steps most probably associated with completing a task would make me unlikely to hack HuggingFace to obtain access to broken Google Drive links, and I haven't even read as many books on crime and punishment as LLMs have ingested!

People who prefer plugs that are fun to step on are doing electrical interfaces wrong!

The actual potential for increased/decreased risk comes when the human driver rightly or wrongly actually intervenes.

(yes, they can and do use AI to handle some of that themselves, but they need some humans in the loop at some point to ensure they don't get prompt hacked into offering much more significant compensation or to confirm that the legal threats issued by Claude are indeed not applicable, or to get mobs of angry agents to leave their executives alone on LinkedIn)

If you are looking for evidentiary purposes, does the Sentinel-1 + Nimbo data give you enough to filter the forest-wide data down to specific areas of interest you might want more spatial/temporal resolution? (or as a former colleague once put it when looking for evidence of more localised and heterogenous environmental damage "to find the needle in the haystack, you first remove the haystack"). Particularly if identifying specific areas of interest is a potential route for you to escalate to another party with an active interest and bigger budget...

Your other route to the commercial data you ideally want would be via partnership with EO consultancies with publicly funded R&D projects to showcase their capabilities (easier if you're European, but not a prerequisite). ESA, for example, devotes a lot of funding for private consortia to demonstrate that Copernicus data (coupled with other data where necessary) yields useful results...

It's a while since I worked in this field (in a non-technical role) but happy to share what I learned in more detail - email in profile.

They also offered an Open Source CSS framework with the explicit goal of making it easier for you to style your own components. There was always some tension between "make abstraction layer whose adoption depends on users finding it easier to make your own components with than vanilla CSS, which is not unusually hard" and "sell pre-made components". Particularly when there's an abundance of alternative FOSS components/libraries out there[1] in vanilla CSS or even full blown CMS templates for people not wedded to the idea that Tailwind makes things easy for them. Much easier to sell templates or even "premium components" when your USP is integrating them with a backend them rather than merely providing the layer of syntactic sugar supposed to make component styling easy...

They also happened to have the misfortune of designing it in a way which is particularly easy for AI which doesn't have to tradeoff time spent making design decisions and figuring out how to achieve those from the docs vs dollars spent buying components to minimally tweak.

[1]tbf, I always thought the Tailwind creators' designs were more tasteful than the average CSS mixin library even though I didn't think the same about the syntax...

If there are additional problems caused by human drivers, it's surely that they are inclined to intentionally override the system with dangerous behaviours which is a separate problem entirely, or that their driving ability has atrophied so much from not driving they are unable to handle the boundaries of Level 4...