Links for 2022-09-01
“Growing evidence supports what physicists have long suspected: In some way or other, space-time itself seems to fall apart at a black hole, implying that space-time is not the root level of reality, but an emergent structure from something deeper.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-most-famous-paradox-in-physics-nears-its-end-20201029
“We have created the first example of an engineering material that can simultaneously sense, think and act upon mechanical stress without requiring additional circuits to process such signals,” Harne said. “The soft polymer material acts like a brain that can receive digital strings of information that are then processed, resulting in new sequences of digital information that can control reactions.” https://www.psu.edu/news/engineering/story/researchers-engineer-novel-material-capable-thinking/
“Red mercury is purportedly a substance of uncertain composition used in the creation of nuclear weapons, as well as other weapons systems. Because of the great secrecy surrounding the development and manufacturing of nuclear weapons, there is no proof that red mercury exists. However, all samples of alleged "red mercury" analyzed in the public literature have proven to be well-known, common red substances of no interest to weapons makers.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury
These identical twins married identical twins. Now they have sons. [Washington Post] https://archive.ph/VJuXW
An experimental new attack can steal data from air-gapped computers using a phone’s gyroscope https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/24/gairoscope-air-gap-attack/
“Today we’re introducing Outpainting, a new feature which helps users extend their creativity by continuing an image beyond its original borders — adding visual elements in the same style, or taking a story in new directions — simply by using a natural language description.” https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-introducing-outpainting/
Faithful Reasoning Using Large Language Models: “We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on multi-step logical deduction and scientific question-answering, showing that it outperforms baselines on final answer accuracy, and generates humanly interpretable reasoning traces whose validity can be checked by the user.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.14271