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More details of the AI piloted fighter jet

More details of the AI piloted fighter jet

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“It’s a security risk not to have it. At this point, we have to have it [AI flight capabilities]”

Back in 2016, I wrote about how a lone grad student created a fighter pilot AI that was able to defeat a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel every engagement. Back in April 2024, I wrote about how a new project put AI into an real F16 called X-62A, or codenamed Vista. At the time, they didn’t reveal the results of those tests other than saying they ‘went well’.

Well, now we know what happened. First off, when the VISTA AI test aircraft flew against humans in a dogfight, it was able to do so with no safety rule violations logged. During simulation tests named AlphaDogfight, kicked off in 2020, AI agents developed by Heron Systems beat an experienced Air Force F-16 pilot in simulated dogfights 5-0. Essentially duplicating what the grad student was able to achieve in 2016 simulations.

In further live tests, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said, “We were up against a pilot who had two or three thousand hours of experience. He was very good. It was roughly an even fight. But against a less experienced pilot the AI … [and] the automation would have performed better,”

We also learned that in this most recent experiment with a real plane, the re-enforcement learning based AI pilot wasn’t trained to fly from point A to point B or do any kind of normal ‘civilian’ flying. Instead, it was meant to figure out a specific dogfighting problem:

“We did about 10 or a dozen different situations where … I was in the front seat and I had a button on my stick where basically I initiated the automation,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, the real pilot in the AI plane, said at an AI expo hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project.

“It was meant to do something much more sophisticated [than just fly the plane], but limited in that we had to reason over a highly dynamic situation. So, where is the adversary, what is the adversary doing, how do I put my airplane in position to solve for both safety and weapons effectiveness?”

This distinction of using AI to help solve getting the plane in position against an opponent leaves the critical decision to fire up to the human; while still solving one of the most critical problems of air combat – which is out-foxing your opponent to get a weapons lock on them.

At the end of the hourlong flight, Kendall climbed out of the cockpit grinning. He said he’d seen enough during his flight that he’d trust this still-learning AI with the ability to decide whether or not to launch weapons in war.

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Typing of the Classics

Typing of the Classics

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Entertrained has a novel way to teach you how to type. They let you type along to its catalog of public domain books which include: Dracula, Walden, and Leaves of Grass. Learn how to type while reading classics at the same time.

Just select your book and start typing. There’s neat little scoring/error run system that gives you an overall score and performance breakdown.

DnD classic videos

DnD classic videos

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This is the kind of entertainment that the internet had in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. Not political, full of vitriol, not overrun by bot comments, not divisions and raging against the latest -ism of the week. Just fun, intelligent slices of gold.

One of the first would be this sketch called Dungeons and Dragons (also known as Summoner Geeks or Attacking the Darkness). It was a simple audio comedy sketch parodying the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game experience, produced in 1996 by the Dead Alewives. It originally comes from an album of sketches titled Take Down the Grand Master.

This animated version came about in 2000, when Volition released a 3D animation test turned promotional video for the Summoner video game. They cast characters from both Summoner and Red Faction to play the different roles from the sketch. The video was included in the game, and can be found by viewing the credits. It was one of the earliest forms of Machinima – even before that was even a thing.

Then came The Gamers. In their skit they play four college DnD players that must guide their characters to defeat the evil of The Shadow. They navigate dangerous forests, ancient ruins, a missing player who’s at his girlfriend’s, and not get killed by the girl down the hall. They later went on to make JourneyQuest, Dorkness Rising, and a host of other videos – but I think this original is still the best.

Journey back to a time when the internet was still amazing.

Cleaning up trash

Cleaning up trash

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Walking around Portland, it doesn’t take long to find a mess. Litter bugs, homelessness, and open drug use are a regular thing. The downtown area is particularly bad; especially around the McDonalds on Burnside and 20th. It’s a daily thing to pass a few passed out bodies lay on the street/bushes or standing around open sidewalk campfire. Drug dealers are very active in the morning at 7am.

A few of us that go to daily mass sometimes pick up a garbage bag, grabbers, and do a walk around the church. It’s not uncommon to complete a 10 minute walk around the block to see there’s already more trash. Used needles, fast food trash, lighters and foil, food remnants, filthy clothes, bottles, cigarette butts, human feces, and people passed out in bushes. It’s all there. I wake people up sleeping to make sure they aren’t dead. I point them towards the many services freely available in the city just blocks away. I usually get a few 4 letter word responses.

As I walk around the building, I often would just say the rosary or pray. When things are bad, you can despair, let anger overwhelm you, or just do something out of love. I say this as someone keenly aware of how badly the city of Portland has failed. Portland policy has directly created this humanitarian disaster. Deaths are now more than double (at one point 4x) what they were before drug legalization. It is a sad fact that prison was literally doing a better job of saving lives than legalization and harm reduction.

As I walked around the building and picked up trash, it struck me that I wasn’t that different. I too leave little bits of trash around all day.

We drop a dirty little comment here. We leave a little lie there. We are discard contempt at a slow shop employee that annoys us. We dirty up someone’s reputation with gossip. We cut someone off in traffic. We bully someone at school/work. We ignore a friend or person who could use a little of our help. We focus only on ourselves. We carelessly drop little bits of un-love trash all day long. Others often have to deal with the fallout of that trash when their spouse comes home from work upset.

It was a moment for me to reflect that when I am humble and help clean up a mess – of either real trash or some situation I find myself in – this is the work of God. God comes to help clean up the hurt, damage, and trash we have made of our lives and our society. We are called to do that out in the world as well.

Where can I stop littering little acts of un-love? What trash can I clean up today in thanks for God helping me clean mine up?

FLY – the VR successor to Google Earth

FLY – the VR successor to Google Earth

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Google Earth VR was the first mainstream real-world immersive map exploration app for modern PC VR headsets, but the app never made it to the standalone VR headset era. The new app FLY still uses Google Earth’s 3D map tiles, but brings exploring Google Earth in VR to Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3, and Apple Vision Pro. It even includes the 3D geometry for certain cities.

The future of truck pulls is electric?

The future of truck pulls is electric?

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Instead of ear-splitting roar of an engine, this Tesla cybertruck quietly pulls as far as 2500-3500 diesel engines.

Honestly, it’s probably inevitable. I mean, trains use diesel-electric combo where the diesel engine powers the electric motors that do the actual pulling. If someone hooked a few train motors into a frame, slapped a auto/truck body on it and took it to a pull, it would likely out-pull anything out there…

https://twitter.com/niccruzpatane/status/1824815771559625156

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Making shoes with no stitches or glue

Making shoes with no stitches or glue

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Starting with the basic idea of using a hot glue gun to form and build up a model, why not make whole objects in this way? Why not shoes? If you attach that glue gun to a robotic arm and the glue into a light filament – voila: LightSpray.

LightSpray is a technique that use a robot arm to spray a recyclable filament around a mold to create a seamless one-piece upper that is directly attached to the midsole, eliminating the need for stitching or glue. The entire shoe is fully assembled in just 3 minutes. Supposedly coming Fall/Winter 2024.

The video is pretentious – thinking they invented something new – but it does get the idea across. Like Nike’s attempts at 3D printing, and 3D printed clothing, I think it’s definitely going to change things.

More Tetris firsts – probably the last

More Tetris firsts – probably the last

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Just a few months back, Blue Scuti got the first Tetris kill screen; now DogPlayingTetris just got the last remaining achievement of NES Tetris.

The NES Tetris community has long been aware that you could (theoretically) avoid the crash at level 255 and then cause the game to loop all the way back to level 0. Rebirth has been the game’s mythical true ending – thought thought to likely be impossible/extremely unlikely.

Just today, NES Tetris rebirth has finally been achieved by “DogPlayingTetris” or “Dog” or “Michael Kahnh” at 1:40:34