Detecting Machine-Generated Content: An Easier Task For Machine Or Human?

February 1, 2023 by Maya Posch 41 Comments

In today’s world we are surrounded by various sources of written information, information which we generally assume to have been written by other humans. Whether this is in the form of books, blogs, news articles, forum posts, feedback on a product page or the discussions on social media and in comment sections, the assumption is that the text we’re reading has been written by another person. However, over the years this assumption has become ever more likely to be false, most recently due to large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-2 and GPT-3 that can churn out plausible paragraphs on just about any topic when requested.

This raises the question of whether we are we about to reach a point where we can no longer be reasonably certain that an online comment, a news article, or even entire books and film scripts weren’t churned out by an algorithm, or perhaps even where an online chat with a new sizzling match turns out to be just you getting it on with an unfeeling collection of code that was trained and tweaked for maximum engagement with customers. (Editor’s note: no, we’re not playing that game here.)

As such machine-generated content and interactions begin to play an ever bigger role, it raises both the question of how you can detect such generated content, as well as whether it matters that the content was generated by an algorithm instead of by a human being.

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The Radioactive Source Missing In Australian Desert Has Been Found

February 1, 2023 by Lewin Day 66 Comments

Nuclear material is relatively safe when used, stored, and managed properly. This generally applies to a broad range of situations, from nuclear medicine to nuclear power generation. Some may argue it’s impossible to use nuclear weapons safely. In any case, stringent rules exist to manage nuclear material for good reason.

Sometimes, though, things go wrong, mistakes are made, and that nuclear material ends up going AWOL. That’s the situation that faced authorities in Australia, as they scoured over a thousand kilometers of desert highway for a tiny missing radioactive source with the potential to cause serious harm. Thankfully, authorities were able to track it down.

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Do You Need The Raspberry Pi Camera Module V3?

January 26, 2023 by Jenny List 22 Comments

This month came the announcement of some new camera modules from Raspberry Pi. All eyes were on version 3 of their standard camera module, but they also sneaked out a new version of their high quality camera with an M12 lens mount. The version 3 module is definitely worth a look, so I jumped on a train to Cambridge for the Raspberry Pi Store, and bought myself one for review.

There’s nothing new about a Pi camera module as they’ve been available for years in both official and third party forms, so to be noteworthy the new one has to offer something a bit special. It uses a 12 megapixel sensor, and is available both in autofocus and wide angle versions in both standard and NoIR variants. Wide angle and autofocus modules may be new in the official cameras, but these are both things which have been on the third-party market for years.

So if an autofocus camera module for your Pi isn’t that new, what can we bring to a review that isn’t simply exclaiming over the small things? Perhaps it’s better instead to view the new camera in the context of the state of the Pi camera ecosystem, and what better way to do that than to turn a Pi and some modules into a usable camera! Continue reading “Do You Need The Raspberry Pi Camera Module V3?” →

Open-Sourcing The Lisa, Mac’s Bigger Sister

January 25, 2023 by Maya Posch 23 Comments

Forty years ago, on January 19th of 1983, Apple released the Lisa, which was in many ways a revolutionary system. On January 19th of 2023, to celebrate the system’s 40th birthday, the Computer History Museum released the source code for Lisa OS version 3.1 under the Apple Academic License Agreement. Written in Pascal, the source includes over 1,300 source files, covering the OS itself, the Lisa Toolkit development system and a number of applications. The questions one might ask at this point include what the Apple Lisa even is, and why it was such an important system in computer history.

This especially in light of the terrible flop that the Lisa turned out to be, with only 10,000 units sold over two years. Part of this failure was definitely due to the introductory price, that was set at $9,995 (over $27,000 in 2021 dollars). Although it featured an OS with memory protection, despite the lack of an MMU on the Motorola 68k, among other advanced features that placed it well beyond other desktop computers of the time, it got quickly crushed in the market by Apple’s MacIntosh, even after successive Lisa successor releases that sought to address its shortcomings.

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NASA Lunar Probe Finds Out It’s Not Easy Being Green

January 23, 2023 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

If you’re a space fan, these are very exciting days. There’s so much happening overhead that sometimes it can be difficult to keep up with the latest news. Artemis I just got back from the Moon, the International Space Station crew are dealing with a busted Soyuz, SpaceX is making incredible progress with their Starship architecture, CubeSats are being flung all over the solar system, and it seems like every month a new company is unveiling their own commercially-developed launch vehicle.

So with everything going on, we wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t heard about NASA’s Lunar Flashlight mission. The briefcase-sized spacecraft was launched aboard a special “rideshare” flight of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket back on December 11th — tagging along with two other craft heading to our nearest celestial neighbor, the Japanese Hakuto-R lander, and a small rover developed by the United Arab Emirates. There was a time when a launch like that would have been big news, but being that it was only the second of seven launches that SpaceX performed in December alone, it didn’t make many headlines.

But recently, that’s started to change. There’s a growing buzz around Lunar Flashlight, though unfortunately, not for the reasons we’d usually hope. It seems the diminutive explorer has run into some trouble with its cutting-edge “green” propellant system, and unless the issue can be resolved soon, the promising mission could come to an end before it even had a chance to start.

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Punycodes Explained

January 18, 2023 by Matthew Carlson 18 Comments

When you’re restricted to ASCII, how can you represent more complex things like emojis or non-Latin characters? One answer is Punycode, which is a way to represent Unicode characters in ASCII. However, while you could technically encode the raw bits of Unicode into characters, like Base64, there’s a snag. The Domain Name System (DNS) generally requires that hostnames are case-insensitive, so whether you type in HACKADAY.com, HackADay.com, or just hackaday.com, it all goes to the same place.

[A. Costello] at the University of California, Berkley proposed the idea of Punycode in RFC 3492 in March 2003. It outlines a simple algorithm where all regular ASCII characters are pulled out and stuck on one side with a separator in between, in this case, a hyphen. Then the Unicode characters are encoded and stuck on the end of the string.

First, the numeric codepoint and position in the string are multiplied together. Then the number is encoded as a Base-36 (a-z and 0-9) variable-length integer. For example, a greeting and the Greek for thanks, “Hey, ευχαριστώ” becomes “Hey, -mxahn5algcq2″. Similarly, the beautiful city of München becomes mnchen-3ya. Continue reading “Punycodes Explained” →

AI-Controlled Twitch V-Tuber Has More Followers Than You

January 12, 2023 by Kristina Panos 45 Comments

Surely we have all at least heard of Twitch by now. For the as-yet uninitiated: imagine you had your own TV channel. What would you do on it? Although Twitch really got going as a place for gamers to stream the action, there are almost as many people jamming out on their guitars, or building guitars, or just talking about guitars. And that’s just the example that uses guitars — if you can think of it, someone is probably doing it live on Twitch, within the Terms of Service, of course.

Along with the legions of people showing their faces and singing their hearts out, you have people in partial disguise, and then you have v-tubers. That stands for virtual tubers, and it just means that the person is using an anime avatar to convey themselves.

Now that you’re all caught up, let’s digest the following item together: there’s a v-tuber on Twitch that’s controlled entirely by AI. Let me run that by you again: there’s a person called [Vedal] who operates a Twitch channel. Rather than stream themselves building Mad Max-style vehicles and fighting them in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or singing Joni Mitchell tunes, [Vedal] pulls the strings of an AI they created, which is represented by an animated character cleverly named Neuro-sama. Not only does Neuro-sama know how to play Minecraft and osu!, she speaks gamer and interacts regularly with chat in snarky, 21st century fashion. And that really is the key behind Twitch success — interacting with chat in a meaningful way.

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