| Blogsite | https://bobreflected.blogspot.com/ |
These results are particularly important for people who model artificial night sky brightness (skyglow), because up until now, most skyglow models assume that all of the light comes from streetlight-style lights.
This shows that there are a great number of light sources that shine sideways (signs, and windows), that are right now being largely ignored.
This is also important for efforts to reduce #LightPollution, because it means that while streetlights are important, fixing them is not going to come close to fixing the entire problem.
Illuminated advertisements and lights mounted on buildings are also important - and the lights from residential houses probably matter a lot more than people generally think!
(13/)
«The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.»
It's nice to see places where community can help course correct!
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-pauses-ai-generated-summaries-after-editor-backlash/
Did you know YOU will be able to work on NSFâDOE Rubin Observatory data in your free time as a volunteer scientist? đ«”
We've partnered with the Zooniverse, a platform where researchers build projects for volunteer scientists. Find out more at https://rubinobservatory.org/explore/citizen-science
đ·: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/DOE/NSF/AURA/B. Quint
"AI companies claim their tools couldn't exist without training on copyrighted material. It turns out, they could â it's just really hard. To prove it, AI researchers trained a new model that's less powerful but much more ethical. That's because the LLM's dataset uses only public domain and openly licensed material."
tl;dr: If you use public domain data (i.e. you don't steal from authors and creators) you can train a LLM just as good as what was cutting edge a couple of years ago. What makes it difficult is curating the data, but once the data has been curated once, in principle everyone can use it without having to go through the painful part.
So the whole "we have to violate copyright and steal intellectual property" is (as everybody already knew) total BS.
Nature presents us with 80 "octaves" of light, of which humans can see exactly 1.
Bringing the other 79 octaves into view has taken two centuries of effort, but it has transformed our ability to sense our place in the cosmic order.
My new essay in Aeon magazine:
https://aeon.co/essays/william-herschels-sensors-let-us-see-the-invisible-universe #space #science #nature #tech
Read this.
Seriously. Quit scrolling, shut the hell up, and read this.
Updating my satellite numbers for the talk I'm giving for the Nanaimo amateur astronomer club tonight.
There are now 7,540 Starlinks in orbit (240 more than last time I gave this talk 3 weeks ago). There are 11,577 total satellites (though I know this is missing a bunch because Space Force is getting slower and slower at cataloguing...)
Starlink is ~2/3 of all satellites.
SpaceX effectively controls orbit (as they have for quite a while now)
I am under a DDoS attack. Not my server, not my service. Me.
And like everything these days, it has to do with #AI.
This is going to be a thread because I'm annoyed and have much to say. It should be called something like "How I wasted a good part of the last 7 years having to react to a dubious technology instead of doing my job". Or perhaps "How a science disappeared". You can decide. /0
Christopher Kyba đšđŠđȘđș
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras
Rubin Observatory
Vee
j_bertolotti
Corey S Powell
Michael Lucas 
Prof. Sam Lawler
Brent Toderian
Aurelie Herbelot is moving