Weekly round up #02
Games and emulation
Unciv: FOSS Civ V clone
Unciv is an open source, mod-friendly Android and Desktop remake of Civ V, made with LibGDX.
Just discovered this neat project. Check out the website and GitHub repo.
Anbernic RG35XXSP
I ordered one of these recently. It's of course modeled on the design of the Game Boy Advance SP, and handles emulation of systems up to N64 / PS1 / PSP. This device is widely considered the best of its kind among the emulation hobby community.
Anbernic offers them in seven different colorways:
Artificial Intelligence
Executive Order for AI Testing
The executive order was previously expected, then cancelled and presumed dead, then abruptly approved and signed with one minor change (90-day review period shortened to 30 days).
The raw text is here on whitehouse.gov, and Zvi's in-depth analysis is a good starting point for breaking it down in greater detail.
Essentially, the order implicitly establishes a "voluntary" prior restraint regime in which federal agencies will be given early confidential access to new frontier models for one month prior to release for benchmarking, cybersecurity review, etc.
Zvi's summary:
The Executive Order starts out talking about innovation, in its title and purpose, because a lot of pro-innovation people care deeply about vibes.
Section 2 sets a rapid timeline for implementing stronger cyber defenses. That part seems clearly good and I don’t expect any serious objections.
Section 4 has the attorney general go after AI-enabled cybercrime, and Section 5 is the disclaimers, Section 1 is vibes. Sure.
Section 3, the big one, is called ‘Secure Frontier Model Development.’
It calls for various agency heads to, within 2 months, coordinate on:
1. A classified benchmarking process for cyber capabilities to determine what is a ‘covered frontier model.’
2. A voluntary framework to let labs get benchmarked, and give the government early confidential and secure model access for ‘up to 30 days’ before release to ‘other trusted partners.’
3. Definitely not in any way create a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance or permitting requirement, oh no sir, absolutely not.
News and geopolitics
Blue Origin rocket explosion
Catastrophic explosion of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket leaves the launch site severely damaged:
Multiple sources have confirmed that there is significant damage to Blue Origin’s launch site in Florida, LC-36A. The company invested years and at least hundreds of millions of dollars in this facility. The scale of the massive lightning towers is difficult to comprehend unless one has climbed one of them.
The company does not have another launch site for New Glenn. It has begun preliminary work on a nearby pad, LC-36B, and has plans to develop another site at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. But these projects are just getting started.
Rebuilding the company’s pad, or finishing a new one, will likely take at least a year, even with a major effort by Blue Origin, and drawing upon Jeff Bezos’ nearly infinite resources. One source familiar with pad rebuilds estimated that 15 months was a “best case” scenario.
This is likely to have downstream consequences for various space programs.
SpaceX plans largest IPO in history
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket maker and artificial intelligence company, set a price for its initial public offering on Wednesday of $135 a share, which would value it at $1.77 trillion and crown it the largest I.P.O. ever.
(via NYT)
Miscellanea
Pirahã anthropology
I stumbled across (and greatly enjoyed) this entry from the 2023 ACX book review contest. It's a summary/review of Daniel Everett's memoir Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.
Everett figures out very quickly why no outsider speaks Pirahã – even the basic building blocks of the language are a nightmare. Phonemes are the fundamental sounds of a language that differentiate one word from another. Most variants of English give you in the neighborhood of 20 vowels and 20 consonants to work with. Pirahã has very, very few phonemes: Three vowels and eight consonants. All the different words sound the same. Once he’s gotten used to that, he noticed that his interview partners keep varying the pronunciation apparently at random. The same words sound all different.
Pirahã, as it turns out, is an intensely tonal language. So intensely tonal, in fact, that stuff like consonants and vowels seem more like an afterthought and all the meaning you need can be conveyed just via pitch – in the book, Everett at one point uses musical notation. Pirahã speech can be hummed, whistled, yelled, sung. Outsiders aren’t exactly fans. “It sounds like they are crying all the time,” says one official of Brazil’s Indian Protection Service. The river traders just call them “little animals”.
