Hackaday Links: February 12, 2023
So, possibly ideal now is not the greatest time to get into the high-altitude ballooning interest? At least in the US, which with the downing of one more — whatever? — around Alaska, appears to have taken a “Sidewinders 1st, menace identification later” approach to everything that floats by. The newest incident included an aircraft of mysterious style, explained as “the measurement of a little car” — there’s that models trouble again — that was functioning about Prudhoe Bay off the northern coastline of Alaska. The explanation that was given for this a single earning a Sidewinder was that it was working considerably decrease than the balloon from very last week, only about 40,000 toes, which is properly inside of the ceiling of professional aviation. It was also more than sea ice at the time of the shootdown, building the opportunity of bothering everyone in addition to a polar bear not likely. We’re not using any political situation on this total factor, but there surely are engineering and specialized areas of these shootdowns that are very exciting, as nicely as the aforementioned probable for liability if your HAB goes astray. No person ever seriously advantages from acquiring an worldwide incident on their resume, following all.
Relating to that first balloon — if the 2nd object is confirmed to be a balloon at all — we had been amazed to find that navy aviation fans recorded the radio site visitors going again and forth among the pilots to coordinate the takedown. It’s not a surprise that this would be thoroughly coordinated — just one does not fling a rocket with nine kilos of substantial-explosive all over willy-nilly, following all, especially with the sky full of welcoming tankers and surveillance plane — but that the radio targeted visitors all appears to be have been totally in the open up. We’d have envisioned the armed service to use some type of digital method at least, and just in a natural way assumed they’d encrypt anything. All the more so considering that a lot of legislation enforcement companies below in the states have switched above to electronic modulation like Job 25 with whole encryption. Seemingly not so with military services aviation however, at minimum in this case. The more you know.
We don’t hold close to a great deal on Reddit any longer — it is a rough neighborhood these times — but when we did, we ended up generally shocked by the creative imagination of the end users in coming up with their handles. And now it appears like some of these handles are “killing words” for the well-liked chatbot. It would seem that a pair of stability researchers who ended up on the lookout via ChatGPT’s token set observed a cluster of about 100 bizarre phrases, like “SolidGoldMagikarp,” “StreamerBot,” and ” TheNitromeFan,” with the major space seemingly significant. The peculiar tokens all seem to crack ChatGPT in some way, and they all look to be Reddit handles, some of whom are involved in a contest of kinds on r/counting to count to infinity. We had been going to riff a little on how quick it appears to be to split ChatGPT in techniques that seem to give you unanticipated glimpses into how it works, but following locating out about competitive counting, that seems like it would be burying the lede a bit.
Ok, we’ll bite. We have gotten a pair of strategies on a a little bit sketchy-sensation construct, world’s smallest 3D printer this 7 days, and it is most likely time to open up this up for discussion. We on the composing crew have essentially been hashing this out on our Discord channel, since nobody likes to slide for a scam. Some of us assumed it was a pretend, some not. From our level of check out, it doesn’t look considerably diverse from Sean Hodgins’ ornament-printing Xmas ornament from a couple yrs back again each are SLA printers with the carriage of an aged DVD travel serving as the Z-axis, and equally surface to be about the very same dimensions. Sean’s printer labored really perfectly, so we’re inclined to imagine that this a single does far too. But we’ll allow you be the choose.
And finally, due to the fact our timeline appears to be to be inching at any time nearer to the unavoidable crossover into The Terminator universe, you might want to verify out AndysMachines, a YouTube channel where Andy is, most likely unwisely, trying to build a film-accurate T800 endoskeleton. His latest establish focuses on the murderous cyborg’s arms, which like actual human palms are pretty advanced. There’s a great deal of machining goodness in these movies, and the conclude outcomes have been quite amazing so far. And anything appears to perform, also, or at minimum transfer — it’s not just a product. Andy’s putting a great deal of considered into the signifies of our destruction, so examine it out whilst you can. Then again, maybe we can just say “SolidGoldMagikarp” to it, or even ask it to depend to infinity.
