Jacob Aron
@jjaron
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News editor for New Scientist
London
Joined January 2009
We've never seen anything like this recording of a landing on another world. @Firefly_Space
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In a monthly reporting call on global climate, researchers from the US government’s climate and weather agency avoided linking recent record temperatures with climate change
newscientist.com
In a monthly reporting call on global climate, researchers from the US government’s climate and weather agency avoided mentioning rising levels of greenhouse gases
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Image by Michael Carroll in 2013. We did NOT see the little one coming; it hit Earth above Chelyabinsk in 2013, injuring >1400 people. Asteroid 2024 YR4 is bigger than the little one & perhaps as large as the football field! JWST 🔭 data next month will help pin down the size.
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The making shit up machine will make up as much shit as you want, and it only costs $200 a month!
Had a sort of a funny experience with OpenAI’s Deep Research tool, which I wanted to share since I think it reveals some of the tool’s strengths and weaknesses.
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And this is why I am yet to find a use for LLMs
anyway I guess as long as whatever thing you're doing has the property that it can withstand a factual error rate of ≥85%, this thing is safe to use
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This ain't gonna happen
"We will pursue our manifest detinty into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars." President Trump in his inaugural address just now.
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"plan" is doing a lot of work here
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I wrote about how strange and wonderful it was that the incredible Twin Peaks briefly dragged David Lynch into the mainstream, and how hard he fought — especially with Twin Peaks: The Return — to do what interested him, and not a potential mass audience:
rollingstone.com
David Lynch's show Twin Peaks was a surprise cultural and ratings phenomenon when it aired in 1990. It changed television forever
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It seems insane that this form exists? 972 hours! Is anyone reading it?
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says that AI can draft 95% of an S1 IPO prospectus “in minutes” (a job that used to require a 6-person team multiple weeks). “The last 5% now matters because the rest is now a commodity,” per Solomon.
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Did it though? Or did a noisy statistic continue to oscillate around zero?
UK economy grew for the first time in three months, expanding by 0.1% in November, official figures show
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My leader this week is a cheerful one: it is time to accept that we have broken the climate, and for us to look at what comes next
newscientist.com
A series of events, from the California wildfires to evidence we passed 1.5 degrees last year, suggests wild weather will become even more common
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Congestion pricing coverage is peak economics Every person is like, "I didn't used to bear the external costs of my behavior. But now that I do, I am adjusting along an infinite variety of least-cost adaptive margins that no central planner could have foreseen or designed"
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If this doesn't explain how he became an expert in Parisian sewers then there is no reason for it to exist
Les Misérables' Jean Valjean is basically a superhero already and now he’s getting the requisite origin story to boot. https://t.co/VUa2UOtdaa
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If ChatGPT had a way to reliably ingest RSS, this could potentially be useful...but as far as I'm aware, it doesn't
Today we’re rolling out a beta version of tasks—a new way to ask ChatGPT to do things for you at a future time. Whether it's one-time reminders or recurring actions, tell ChatGPT what you need and when, and it will automatically take care of it.
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The government’s new AI plan marks a big shift in direction. Sunak saw the importance of AI but he tried to position the UK as the world’s AI safety leaders, emphasising the risks and in an eye-catching but negative way.
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70% accuracy is very bad, but if your existing processes are starting below that level, yeesh
“Tests carried out by the department showed that the tool had an accuracy of about 70 per cent, which was described as “performing as good or better than existing processes” https://t.co/mkxMavGQvU
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Not this again. I look forward to the intelligence agencies pointing out which of the laws of physics we're going to ignore in order to make such a weapon possible.
News from @shaneharris: Two intel agencies have shifted their position on the odds a mystery weapon caused Havana Syndrome—previously ruled out—to a "roughly even chance," based on new intelligence:
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It feels almost pointless reposting this on X these days but, as we predicted, 2024 was the warmest in the instrumental record, and probably since humans evolved. The climate will not stabilise until we reach net zero, and that physics is not susceptible to lobbying or bullying
2024 has recorded the highest temperature in any year since 1850 🌡🌍 This is the 11th year in succession that has equalled or exceeded 1.0°C above the pre-industrial average period A number of centres released their estimates today: https://t.co/Dqnx28jQog
#GetClimateReady
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There are supposedly serious people who think this chart is absolutely definitely nothing to worry about.
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