Featured Links - April 24, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Frenchman's Bay

• Sci fi author Lavie Tidhar: Using Midjourney to explore ethics of AI. "AI tools can explore the ethics of AI itself, says Lavie Tidhar.  His new dystopian film uses AI image-generation program Midjourney to tell the story of a well-meaning artificial intelligence trying to help the last surviving human." Do watch the video. It's quite good and very unsettling.
• Nearby Supernovas Pose An Extra Previously Unconsidered Threat To Life. "Having a star in our vicinity go supernova poses three threats to life, not two, and the worst one may be the one we haven’t been thinking about."
• Starship OFT Thoughts. An article about last week's Starship launch from someone who was there. He was overwhelmed by the launch but thinks that SpaceX is going to have major problems with the launch systems. 
• Users Claim the Latest Windows 10 Update Breaks Some Printers. "Microsoft’s most recent update was meant to fix Windows incorrectly labeling printers, but it appears to have introduced new problems." If you are using Windows and suddenly can't print, this may be the source of the problem.
• A New Kind of Symmetry Shakes Up Physics. "So-called “higher symmetries” are illuminating everything from particle decays to the behavior of complex quantum systems."
• The Bicycle Is Nothing. "Today the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise. Dutch people own more bicycles per capita than any other place in the world. The country has more than 20,000 miles of dedicated cycling paths. International policymakers make pilgrimages to the Netherlands to learn how to create good bike infrastructure. But none of that was inevitable. It wasn’t something that magically emerged from Dutch culture."
• Cracking the Chess Code: A Groundbreaking Study Reveals Hidden Patterns in Openings. "In a study analyzing millions of chess games, researchers identified ten distinct clusters of chess openings, developed a method to determine player skill and opening game difficulty, and found potential applications for their classification system in other strategy games."
• 2023 TV Update. A post from Tim Bray with much useful information about setting up and using a modern TV with a receiver and Google Chromecast (which is similar to my setup).