Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss

Tracking all radios

A cluster sweeps a band of territory 2000km wide so, circling the planet every 90 minutes or so, it can revisit many areas several times a day. Moreover, unlike spy satellites fitted with optical cameras, rf satellites can see through clouds. Their receivers are not sensitive enough to detect standard mobile phones. But they can pick up satellite phones, walkie-talkies and all manner of radar. And, while vessels can and do illicitly disable their ais, switching off their communications gear and the radar they use for navigation and collision-avoidance is another matter entirely. “Even pirates don’t turn those things off”. Horizon also plans to compile a library of unique radar-pulse “fingerprints” of the world’s vessels, for the tiny differences in componentry that exist even between examples of the same make and model of equipment mean that signals can often be linked to a specific device. It will thus be able to determine not merely that a vessel of some sort is in a certain place, but which vessel it is, and where else it has been.

6x aging differences

Some humans age faster than others. Variation in biological aging can be measured in midlife, but the implications of this variation are poorly understood. We tested associations between midlife biological aging and indicators of future frailty risk in the Dunedin cohort of 1037 infants born the same year and followed to age 45. Participants’ ‘Pace of Aging’ was quantified by tracking declining function in 19 biomarkers indexing the cardiovascular, metabolic, renal, immune, dental and pulmonary systems across ages 26, 32, 38 and 45 years. At age 45, participants with faster Pace of Aging had more cognitive difficulties, signs of advanced brain aging, diminished sensory–motor functions, older appearances and more pessimistic perceptions of aging. The slowest ager gained only 0.4 ‘biological years’ for each chronological year in age; in contrast, the fastest-aging participant gained nearly 2.5 biological years for every chronological year.

Noah Smith scifi recs

The Vorkosigan saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold

This might be the greatest scifi book series of all time. It’s a series of intrigues, space adventures, mysteries, and comedies, centered around a liberal family struggling to reform a conservative empire. Astute observers will recognize that Tyrion Lannister was probably slightly inspired by Miles Vorkosigan. I’m truly amazed that no one has talked about making this into a Netflix series yet. I have several friends who read the entire series multiple times in a row after I recommended it. My advice is to start with Barrayar, then move on to The Warrior’s Apprentice.

Schismatrix Plus, by Bruce Sterling

This book gets lumped in with cyberpunk, but it’s really not cyberpunk. Instead, it’s a wild, episodic journey around a future Solar System in the middle of a technological Singularity. The protagonist, whom I identify with pretty deeply, is just a guy who goes around finding 1 thing after another to get involved with — always looking to sidestep the onrushing future and find the next cool trip. The sheer breadth of far-out cool scifi ideas and cultures he encounters on his rambling journey makes this feel like multiple books in one. This setting also somehow reminds me of Austin, Texas back in the 80s and 90s — the sort of Wild West feeling combined with techno-optimism and plenty of weirdos. Kind of a Slacker in space. Which makes sense, because Bruce Sterling is from Texas.

Porting Linux to the M1

interesting, very detailed bringup report.

The Asahi Linux project officially kicked off at the beginning of the year, but at that time we were all waiting for 1 crucial piece: support from Apple for booting alternate kernels on Apple Silicon systems. While the feature had been documented and mostly implemented, there was 1 final missing piece of the puzzle: support for the kmutil configure-boot command, which is what lets you install a non-Apple kernel. This didn’t stop us from making progress, however, as the first step to porting an OS to an undocumented platform is documenting it!

10x H.264

We propose a neural talking-head video synthesis model and demonstrate its application to video conferencing. Our model learns to synthesize a talking-head video using a source image containing the target person’s appearance and a driving video that dictates the motion in the output. Our motion is encoded based on a novel keypoint representation, where the identity-specific and motion-related information is decomposed unsupervisedly. Extensive experimental validation shows that our model outperforms competing methods on benchmark datasets. Moreover, our compact keypoint representation enables a video conferencing system that achieves the same visual quality as the commercial H.264 standard while only using one-tenth of the bandwidth. Besides, we show our keypoint representation allows the user to rotate the head during synthesis, which is useful for simulating a face-to-face video conferencing experience. Our adaptive and 20 keypoint scheme obtains 10.37 and 6.5 reduction in bandwidth compared to the H.264 codec, respectively.

SpaceX telemetry

Neat: due to some nuclear weapons treaty, rocket communications are transmitted more or less in the clear, and a group of enthusiasts have decoded additional internal sensor readings & pictures from spacex, but also some chinese ones(?). Kind of surprising that there’s not more industrial espionage going on, or if there is, others don’t seem to suspiciously catch up with spacex.

Toward Confidential Clouds

Imagine a future in which end users have complete and verifiable control over how their data is used by any cloud service. If they want their organization’s documents to be indexed, a confidential indexing service could guarantee that no one outside their organization ever sees that data. A confidential videoconferencing service could guarantee end-to-end encryption without sacrificing the ability to record the session or provide transcripts, with the output sent to a confidential file-sharing service, never appearing unencrypted anywhere other than the organization’s devices or confidential VMs. A confidential email system could similarly protect privacy without compromising on functionality such as searching or authoring assistance. Ultimately, confidential computing will enable many innovative cloud services, while allowing users to retain full control over their data.

All futurism is Afrofuturism

The fact that Africa has some productive manufacturers and the fact it has managed to shift more people into factory work are both good signs. And though Asia’s growth boom is still going strong, it can’t last forever, and Africa’s day as the workshop of the world may come soon.

But economists, leaders, policymakers, businesspeople, and international organizations need to be focusing on this challenge more than they are. The fate of humanity in the 21st century and beyond hinges on whether African countries can figure out the riddle of industrialization.