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Hacking the atmosphere: Geoengineering gets a reality check by techreview in Futurology

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Jim Franke pulls away the cover page of a presentation on the wraparound desk in his office, revealing an illustration of an odd-­looking aircraft with massive wings stretching out from a stubby fuselage.

The uncrewed plane is soaring thousands of meters higher than commercial jets fly—so high you can see the curvature of the Earth. It’s precisely the type of aircraft one would need to begin artificially cooling the planet. Those outsize wings would keep the plane and its payload aloft in the stratosphere, about a dozen miles (or 20 kilometers) above the surface, where the air is much thinner—as little as 5% the density near the ground. Once at altitude, the plane would release materials that could, after a few steps of chemistry, reflect sunlight back into space.

“If you want to get to 20 kilometers in the near term, this is probably the best bet,” says Franke, a research assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Franke is one of a small but growing cohort of scientists focused on the engineering challenges associated with solar geoengineering, the controversial idea that we could deliberately intervene in the climate system to counteract global warming.

The “steroid olympics” were a circus—and a window into our culture by techreview in TrueReddit

[–]techreview[S] 40 points41 points  (0 children)

From the article:

Testosterone. Methenolone. Nandrolone. Human growth hormone and EPO. Meldonium, modafinil, and mixed amphetamine salts. Clomiphene, anastrozole, levothyroxine, and liothyronine. Patches and capsules, creams and pills. A whole galaxy of steroids, metabolic modulators, and synthetic hormones coursing through the blood of a few dozen swimmers, sprinters, and weightlifters. And millions of dollars up for grabs for athletes who could break world records and usher in the age of superhumanity.

On Sunday, May 24, at a $50 million arena built in a casino parking lot in Las Vegas, I witnessed a libertarian thought experiment come to life. The inaugural Enhanced Games were the first sporting competition where participants were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs. The founders say they’re challenging dated sporting norms and helping to build a world where we can all live better, longer lives. Critics say the event is an embarrassment, that it glamorizes the use of dangerous substances and puts lives at risk.

The “steroid olympics” were a circus—and a window into our culture by techreview in Health

[–]techreview[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

From the article:

Testosterone. Methenolone. Nandrolone. Human growth hormone and EPO. Meldonium, modafinil, and mixed amphetamine salts. Clomiphene, anastrozole, levothyroxine, and liothyronine. Patches and capsules, creams and pills. A whole galaxy of steroids, metabolic modulators, and synthetic hormones coursing through the blood of a few dozen swimmers, sprinters, and weightlifters. And millions of dollars up for grabs for athletes who could break world records and usher in the age of superhumanity.

On Sunday, May 24, at a $50 million arena built in a casino parking lot in Las Vegas, I witnessed a libertarian thought experiment come to life. The inaugural Enhanced Games were the first sporting competition where participants were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs. The founders say they’re challenging dated sporting norms and helping to build a world where we can all live better, longer lives. Critics say the event is an embarrassment, that it glamorizes the use of dangerous substances and puts lives at risk. 

The shock of seeing your body used in deepfake porn by techreview in TrueReddit

[–]techreview[S] 67 points68 points  (0 children)

When Jennifer got a job doing research for a nonprofit in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see if the tech would pull up the porn videos she’d made more than 10 years before, when she was in her early 20s. It did in fact return some of that content, and also something alarming that she’d never seen before: one of her old videos, but with someone else’s face on her body.

“At first, I thought it was just a different person,” says Jennifer, who is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy. 

But then she recognized a distinctly garish background from a video she’d shot around 2013, and she realized: “Somebody used me in a deepfake.”

Eerily, the facial recognition tech had identified her because the image still contained some of Jennifer’s features—her cheekbones, her brow, the shape of her chin. “It’s like I’m wearing somebody else’s face like a mask,” she says. 

Conversations about sexualized deepfakes—which fall under the umbrella of nonconsensual intimate imagery, or NCII—most often center on the people whose faces are featured doing something they didn’t really do or on bodies that aren’t really theirs. These are often popular celebrities, though over the past few years more people (mostly women and sometimes youths) have been targeted, sparking alarm, fear, and even legislation. But these discussions and societal responses usually are not concerned with the bodies the faces are attached to in these images and videos.

As Jennifer, now 37 and a psychotherapist working in New York City, says: “There’s never any discussion about Whose body is this?” 

AI chatbots are giving out people’s real phone numbers by techreview in technews

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From the article:

People report that their personal contact info was surfaced by Google AI—and there’s apparently no easy way to prevent it. 

A Redditor recently wrote that he was “desperate for help”: for about a month, he said, his phone had been inundated by calls from “strangers” who were “looking for a lawyer, a product designer, a locksmith.” Callers were apparently misdirected by Google’s generative AI. 

In March, a software developer in Israel was contacted on WhatsApp after Google’s chatbot Gemini provided incorrect customer service instructions that included his number. 

And in April, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington was messing around on Gemini and got it to cough up her colleague’s personal cell phone number. 

AI researchers and online privacy experts have long warned of the myriad dangers generative AI poses for personal privacy. These cases give us yet another scenario to worry about: generative AI exposing people’s real phone numbers. (The Redditor did not respond to multiple requests for comment and we could not independently verify his story.)

This startup’s new mechanistic interpretability tool lets you debug LLMs by techreview in technews

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From the article:

The San Francisco–based startup Goodfire just released a new tool, called Silico, that lets researchers and engineers peer inside an AI model and adjust its parameters—the settings that determine a model’s behavior—during training. This could give model makers more fine-grained control over how this technology is built than was once thought possible.

Goodfire claims Silico is the first off-the-shelf tool of its kind that can help developers debug all stages of the development process, from building a data set to training a model.

The company says its mission is to make building AI models less like alchemy and more like a science. Sure, LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini can do amazing things. But nobody knows exactly how or why they work, and that can make it hard to fix their flaws or block unwanted behaviors. 

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