astra1701

aspiring aerospace eng ⇔ astronomer | computing | classics | SBSP dreamer |
Fata viam invenient: per aspera ad Lunam et ultra, per astra humanitus accensa

[Nick Dobos @NickADobos]

OpenAI was hacked via the exact library mentioned in the xkcd comic hahahaha

The prophecy is fulfilled

[vik @vikhyatk]

anyway my favorite side channel: detecting player positions by listening to their gpu coil whine over the microphone

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

Huge amounts of time and money was invested into preparing critical systems to make sure it was a non event. You are simply unaware of the number of disasters engineers constantly save you from

[Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy @MIRA_OBS]

We've got a new science paper up on arXiv: https://t.co/UXScsZ57ti The paper describes our World-leading polarimeter, and the science you can do with it!

[Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou]

I want to thank @25YearsAgoLive for his efforts today. I grew up in the shadow of 9/11 so I’ve spent my entire life obsessed with the history of that day. Yet his live posting still managed to reveal an entirely new perspective on 9/11 to me.

It was about 9 PM here in Australia last night when he posted his first “live” tweet mentioning the first plane crash. I turned on notifications so that I would get each post as they came in. One thing that really stood out to me was just how fast things moved. Within 7 minutes of that post you see the entire north of the building just completely engulfed in inferno. You hear people desperately calling first responders trapped in this raging inferno. Only 7 minutes had passed since the first impact. I actually felt my heart racing, thumping in my chest.

I couldn’t leave my phone screen, I found myself refreshing his page every 30 seconds like it was actually happening live.

Then all of a sudden you see the second plane impact. Just 17 minutes after the first plane. For all my prior reading, I never realised the attacks happened that fast. Because of the way people talked about the gap in time when people still naively thought that the first plane impact had been an accident, I had always wrongly assumed that the second plane impact took place like an hour later.

Experiencing the horror of that day minute by minute really just gave me a completely new perspective on the events. You can understand the panic, the terror, the fog of war. You can easily understand how and why people feared multiple waves of attack, dozens of hijacked aircraft, dozens of explosions, biological weapons.

I really felt that I was watching it live. I couldn’t do anything for 90 minutes but refresh his page. I felt so much anxiety and tension, it sounds stupid but I found myself pacing back and forth in my room.

@25YearsAgoLive just delivered a masterpiece of public history. Like an actual, legitimate masterpiece.

[Patriotic Wonka Action Figure @athaidad]

This might genuinely be the most powerful piece of internet performance art we'll see. Since I was a young child in 2001, I expected to follow this account today as a touching memorial. But watching this happen "live" filled me with emotions I didn't expect to have.

[Katherine Boyle @KTmBoyle]

This might be the first major anniversary of 9/11 where watching the footage really feels like an older world. It was a different world. And those of us who came of age in it have an obligation to never forget what happened that day and after.

To those with no memory of 9/11, I recommend visiting the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. There were so many witnesses to this horrific crime and so many details we never discuss. Too many victims had to make the unthinkable choice about their last moments.

The last time I visited, I stopped on this testimony from a man who witnessed the moment a woman jumped to her death:

"She had a business suit on, her hair all askew. This woman stood there for what seemed like minutes and then she held down her skirt and jumped off the ledge. I thought, how human, how modest, to hold down her skirt before she jumped. I couldn't look anymore."

The other thing you see at the Memorial is just how many heroes were minted that day. How many men ran into the towers knowing they were running towards their deaths. So many people died in service of their fellow Americans that day, and their courage inspired the many men and women of my generation who decided to enlist and serve the country after watching the towers fall.

The legacy of 9/11 is the heroism of our fellow Americans. The courage of so many to lay down their lives for their neighbors. May they rest in peace and may we never forget.

[tyson brody @tysonbrody]

I think you can connect the decline on overall literacy and the return of 'orality' to the fact so many people presume every news story is explicitly moralistic and not just 'here is an interesting thing happening in the world today that you may not know about'

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

It’s really problematic that so many people are determined to take a story that provided new interesting information about the world, treat it like an op-ed, attribute a dumb thesis to the op-ed, and then get angry about it.

[Sci-Fi Archives @SciFiArchives]

Peter Elson’s cover for Isaac Asimov’s Oceans of Venus. I love how wonderfully strange this era of sci-fi art was. A submarine-like spacecraft exploring Venus somehow feels completely natural.

[Cynthia Dunlop @c_a_dunlop]

(Some) writers appreciate LLM writing assistance but readers hate it. Survey says… https://t.co/pKY40S7rgf

If readers suspect AI, they not only stop reading, but also downvote/avoid the author.

[HUBBLE @HUBBLE_space]

🆕 Hubble has spotted a decagon at Saturn’s south pole! 🪐

For more than 40 years, astronomers have been watching the hexagonal jet pattern 🌬️ on Saturn’s north pole. Now, they have discovered another pattern, on the planet’s south pole. 1/2

[Jon Edwards @edwards345]

Not a good day. I woke up to a phone call from Joe Kenahan telling me that “the rocket is gone.” We had no idea what happened for a few weeks. We had a war room set up in HT01 where we had high speed plots and video frame stills taped to the wall in chronological order, zoomed in to the order of milliseconds. We used accelerometer data to triangulate the origin of the failure, similar to what we did for the CRS-7 investigation. To our surprise it pointed to a similar location near the lox tank COPVs. It took weeks of testing to replicate the failure and when we did, it was a strange mix of feeling overjoyed that we figured it out and extremely sad that we didn’t prevent the failure in the first place.

That said, shooting COPVs from a mile away with a long-range .50-caliber rifle was pretty cool. Thankfully we were able to close that branch of the fault tree 😂

[Scott Manley @DJSnM]

Thinking about the @longnow light installation at Burning Man showing rotation of the earth, and how the 'Rabbit' on runways is the same idea.
So how fast is the rabbit moving? it's about 800 meters and triggers every half second so that's about 1.6 km/sec or mach 5

[Eric Berger @SciGuySpace]

After the Artemis I mission in 2022, there were more than 100 char loss sites observed across the dish-shaped heat shield at the base of Orion, some of which were more than an inch deep. On the Artemis II heat shield? Just nine.

https://t.co/aQ4GCpccA6

[Tory Bruno @torybruno]

@DJSnM Hmmm

[Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope @NASARoman]

Success! Roman’s planned mid-course correction burn went as expected, ensuring that we are on track for our orbit around the second Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth.

https://t.co/9Pun3svIu8

[Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope @NASARoman]

Be part of the bigger picture! 🌌

With more than a million individual pixels per pointing of Roman’s Wide Field Imager, there’s a spot for everyone in Roman’s first images, set to be released in the next few months.

Grab your certificate and pixel number now: https://t.co/JAHI6BFnJc

[CyberWizard @CyberWiz_YT]

I love these little things that NASA does. My name went around the moon and now I claim a pixel of the cosmos.