Flink Labs

This is the shot you can’t get from the press site. This camera was sitting a few football fields from the SLS rocket at Pad 39B for days before launch, baking in the Florida sun, surviving rain, humidity, and whatever else the Cape threw at it. No photographer behind the viewfinder. Just a camera, a sound trigger, and a bet. The way pad remotes work: you set your camera up days in advance, dial in your composition, lock everything down, and walk away. You don’t touch it again until after the launch. The shutter fires on sound activation with a @MiopsTrigger smart+ trigger. With SLS, the four RS-25 engines ignite six seconds before the solid rocket boosters, so the camera is already firing before the vehicle even leaves the pad. You get home, pull the card, and find out if you nailed it or if a bird landed on your lens two days ago and left your a present and you got 400 photos of soemthing crappy. There’s no formula for protecting your gear this close. Some photographers build wooden boxes with doors that pop open. Some use plastic bags and tape. Some do plastic or metal barn door rigs on hinges. I tend to leave mine open just in plastic rain covers because boxes limit my composition and setup time, but that means your cameras are more exposed to the elements and whatever energy and debris comes off the pad. You’re basically gambling a camera body every time you set one. That’s what I love about this genre. There’s no playbook. You make it up as you go. Every time is an adventure. 📸 credit: me for @SuperclusterHQ - Artemis II pad remote | ~1,000 ft from Pad 39B | Kennedy Space Center

@blind_via Mate it was intentional and for good reason. Have a think about why they might have done it. Give you a hint...heaps of kids watching something in 1986

We have LIFT OFF! Fire the camera guy though, they took the camera away from the rocket during booster separation to show us the crowd 😭 I'm dyin, I wanted to see the sep

@JackWhitlock 1986 Reasons!!!

The official Artemis II livestream is absolutely terrible. Why cut away from the rocket during SRB separation?

if you enjoyed today’s artemis launch i have a whole show for you about moon and mars launches

@IsaacKing314 As someone who has Challenger PTSD it was VERY VERY much appreciated they panned away.

Narrating "standing by for SRB separation", cutting the feed to pan across random spectators looking upwards, then cutting back after SRB separation just finished should be a capital crime.

@SpaceKoala Good reason they didn't show it. That was the moment all Gen X held their breath with immense PTSD from challenger and it is best not to have the kids watching go through it.

Poor NASA feed manager spazzing out and forgetting we actually want to see things like booster separation.

@BridgetPhetasy Indeed!!!! Will forever remember getting up to have my parents tell me the shuttle had blown up.

Gen X breathes a collective sigh of relief.

NASA DIRECTOR JUST SAID "FOR ALL MANKIND - FULL SEND"

Liftoff. The Artemis II mission launched from @NASAKennedy at 6:35pm ET (2235 UTC), propelling four astronauts on a journey around the Moon. Artemis II will pave the way for future Moon landings, as well as the next giant leap — astronauts on Mars.

Took me way too long to realise that’s a shower and not a Dalek…

You don't truly understand the magnitude of the potential impact of powerful AI on the world unless you are aware, and have fully internalized, that senior leadership and most researchers at the frontier labs *actually believe* the following: 1. Existing AI is already significantly speeding up AI research. Very soon (this year), AI will very likely take over *ALL* aspects of AI research other than generation of novel research ideas. Soon (within the next 2 years), AI will very likely take over *ALL* aspects of AI research, period. This means hundreds of thousands of GPUs working 24/7 to discover novel ideas at the level of, or better than, the likes of Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, etc. The thread below presents a conservative timeline: AI researchers will "meaningfully contribute" to AI development in 1-3 years. 2. Many (but, as far as I can tell, not all) executives and researchers at the frontier labs believe that fully automated AI research will kick off recursive self-improvement (RSI), wherein the AI models will autonomously build better and better AI models, with human oversight (for safety reasons), but increasingly with no human input into the research or implementation of that research. From the thread below: "'[h]umans vs AI on intellectual work is likely to be like human runner vs a Porsche in a race', likely very soon" - but replace "intellectual work" generally with "AI research" specifically. RSI is a complicated and messy thing to consider, both because there will be compute and energy constrains and because there are unknowns (will there be diminishing returns from greater intelligence of the models? if so, when will these diminishing returns become meaningful? is there a ceiling to intelligence that we don't know about?). But suffice to say that, if RSI *is* achieved in a way that many leaders/researchers at the frontier labs believe is possible, *THE WORLD MAY BECOME COMPLETELY UNRECOGNIZABLE WITHIN JUST A FEW YEARS*. This is subject to various bottlenecks; as the thread below correctly notes, "[i]nstitutional, personal & regulatory bottlenecks will bind very hard", and much also depends on continuing progress in areas like robotics. 3. On ~the same timeline as full, end-to-end automation of *ALL* aspects of AI research (within the next 2 years), AI will also become capable of making significant novel scientific discoveries *IN OTHER FIELDS*. This is why Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis et al. believe that it is possible that all diseases will be curable within 10 years. (One account of how this might be possible is set forth in "Machines of Loving Grace".) The point is that an LLM that is capable of significant novel insights in the field of AI research should likewise be capable of significant novel insights in at least some (and perhaps all) other fields. The thread below notes: "AI for automating science [is] very early" - obviously true, but I think some changes may be right on the horizon. Overall, and again from the thread below: "'a million scientists in a data center' will think much more quickly than humans, on almost any intellectual task; this will happen in the next 2-10 years." This is ~the same timeline as that presented in "Machines of Loving Grace". Many will be tempted to dismiss all this as "just hype", "they are just trying to raise money again", etc. But no! - the above, in fact, presents the *actual beliefs* of senior leadership and many researchers at the frontier labs. Again, they genuinely think that AI research will be automated soon. Many of them genuinely believe that RSI is achievable in the not-too-distant future. And they genuinely see a real path towards AI significantly accelerating science, curing diseases, inventing new materials, helping to solve key global issues from poverty to climate change, etc., etc. Whether the frontier labs' beliefs are correct is, of course, a separate question. I personally have historically tended to take public statements by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google at face value and quite seriously. As a result, I was not surprised when LLMs won gold in the IMO, IOI and the ICPC competitions last year, or when Claude Code/Codex started taking off, or when Anthropic and OpenAI started releasing significantly better models every 1-2 months, or when some of the best coders became reliant on Claude Code/Codex in their daily work, or when LLMs became significantly helpful to scientists in fields like math and physics in the last few months. The trajectory has been ~the same as that publicly predicted by the frontier labs. We have been accelerating. And, as of right now, all signs are indicating that the acceleration shall continue and that full automation of AI research and, potentially, RSI are firmly on the horizon.

Coming soon. freedom.gov

@RileyRalmuto Freedom.gov

ok i guess some folks havent figured it out yet so here we go: its all marketing. for either a phone, app, hotline, whatever phone-related thing Trump is launching tomorrow. "text 45470" related? if you noticed, all of the blurred images and a few of the clear ones are people holding and looking at phones... JD Vance, Marco Rubio, President Trump, etc. etc. the video below, when played in reverse, says "Exciting announcement tomorrow" when i realized all of it was just marketing or at best an accidental post being spun into their marketing campaign for a phone-related product i completely stopped digging. nothing about that is fun or interesting. womp womp

It appears the White House Comms and Mystery is about the Launch of Freedom.gov This is a planned U.S. State Department portal designed to let people in Europe, China, and elsewhere access content blocked by their governments. Reports suggest it may include a built-in VPN to mask user location and bypass restrictions.

Good morning @AlboMP & @AngusTaylorMP I am willing to sell you the following dashboard at a fair market value instead of you paying Accenture $20M to deliver a much worse version in 6 months' time. ⛽️ checkpetrol.com.au

@jordanhknight_ Encouragement

Cryptic video posted within the last hour by the White House with the emoji “🤫” which when you play it in reverse says: “Exciting announcement tomorrow.”

@bitcloud Likewise. Just so deeply deeply wrong at a level so engrained in my DNA.

Something fundamentally switched in me when I read that case.

The Lucky Country 🇦🇺 Tough people, advanced economy, world-beating living standards, resource rich beyond measure. Chose to run out of fuel, voted net zero and opened the borders to masses who genuinely hate you. Australia, what the hell is happening to you.