#original: silicon valley

[itsagentromanoff]

Tony: [about Steve as he fumbles during a hearing broadcast] He looks like a child in a custody hearing.

Clint: But, like, you don't feel sorry for him. You just want him to go away and not have any parents at all.

#original: silicon valley #robert downey jr #jeremy renner #chris evans #tony stark #steve rogers #clint barton #sassy clint barton #sassy tony stark #the avengers #non avengers quotes #quoting the avengers

[sumaya432]

WE PROPEL THE WORLD’S BEST COMPANIES WITH DATA ENGINEERED TO DELIVER THE ABSOLUTE HIGHEST PERFORMING C-LEVEL AND BOARD LEADERSHIP FASTER THAN ANYONE ELSE. Recognized for securing Rocketship CEOs for Tech Giants and many of Silicon Valley’s original unicorns, Christian & Timbers is now re-engineering the next generation of executive search. Introducing Science Based Search For the first time the data transparency to know you will be selecting from the absolute best, highest performing Rocketship Leaders within days not months of initiating the search. TALENT MAPPING → TALENT PIPELINING Knowing the complete competitive candidate ecosystem at launch allows you the business intelligence and talent pipelining to always execute the optimum search strategy. PREDICTIVE LEADERSHIP - PROPRIETARY OUTREACH Our brand, command of language and multi-tiered outreach engines assures leadership trusted to deliver our client’s most critical high-performance business outcomes. UNCOMPROMISING LEADERSHIP HIRING MODEL Capturing the complete candidate universe, KPIs and an Uncompromising Leadership Hiring Model gives you the data transparency to always hire the absolute best. Winning the war for talent for over 40 years

Our experience, global reputation and deep relationships with the best leadership gives us access to the most sought-after Rocketship Talent around the world. The industry’s most advanced Talent Map Engineering adds to our expertise in every specialization.

We first specialized in Robotics, then semiconductor, becoming market leaders in every sector of technology. We are experts in each sector we focus today.

#Building the World’s Greatest Companies #WE PROPEL THE WORLD’S BEST COMPANIES WITH DATA ENGINEERED TO DELIVER THE ABSOLUTE HIGHEST PERFORMING C-LEVEL AND BOARD LEADERSHIP FASTER TH #Recognized for securing Rocketship CEOs for Tech Giants and many of Silicon Valley’s original unicorns #Christian & Timbers is now re-engineering the next generation of executive search. #Introducing Science Based Search

[nasa]

Moon Mountain Named After Melba Roy Mouton, NASA Mathematician

Award-winning NASA mathematician and computer programmer Melba Mouton is being honored with the naming of a mountain at the Moon’s South Pole. Mouton joined NASA in 1959, just a year after the space agency was established. She was the leader of a team that coded computer programs to calculate spacecraft trajectories and locations. Her contributions were instrumental to landing the first humans on the Moon.

She also led the group of "human computers," who tracked the Echo satellites. Roy and her team's computations helped produce the orbital element timetables by which millions could view the satellite from Earth as it passed overhead.

The towering lunar landmark now known as “Mons Mouton” stands at a height greater than 19,000 feet. The mountain was created over billions of years by lunar impacts. Huge craters lie around its base—some with cliff-like edges that descend into areas of permanent darkness. Mons Mouton is the future landing site of VIPER, our first robotic Moon rover. The rover will explore the Moon’s surface to help gain a better understanding of the origin of lunar water. Here are things to know:

Mons Mouton is a wide, relatively flat-topped mountain that stretches roughly 2,700 square miles

The mountain is the highest spot at the Moon’s South Pole and can be seen from Earth with a telescope

Our VIPER Moon rover will explore Mons Mouton over the course of its 100-day mission

VIPER will map potential resources which will help inform future landing sites under our Artemis program

The VIPER mission is managed by our Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. The approximately 1,000-pound rover will be delivered to the Moon by a commercial vendor as part of our Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, delivering science and technology payloads to and near the Moon.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

#NASA #Moon Rover #Space #Solar System #Artemis #Science #Mission #Moon #Black History Month #astronomy #Black Excellence #blackexcellence365

[datura-tea]

i read this whole thing! a few takeaways:

was developed for tv by the westworld show creators; the showrunners wrote for captain marvel, tomb raider, portlandia, the office, silicon valley, and baskets

one of the leads, lucy (ella purnell) from vault 33, is naive and "doe-eyed" and left the vault for a rescue mission

the other leads will be a brotherhood of steel squire (aaron moten) and a bounty hunter ghoul (walton goggins)

vault boy will be there - he even gets an origin story

it's set in los angeles

todd howard was an executive producer on the show

everything in the series is officially part of the lore. direct quote from the article: “We view what’s happening in the show as canon,” says Howard. “That’s what’s great, when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion.” He admits to being envious of some of the TV show’s interpretations and additions: “I sort of looked at it like, ‘Ah, why didn’t we do that?’”

most of the characters are "chasing an artifact that has the potential to radically change the power dynamic in this world"

the article's pretty cool and made me a little cautiously hopeful about the show... we'll see on april 2024 whether it'll be good though

#i bet the artifact is a geck lol #shh peri shhh #fallout show #there are bits that i'm still iffy about but. thinking positive here

[probablyasocialecologist]

Musk isn’t an evil mastermind with a grand plan for Twitter. He’s a guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time to ride a wave of growth in a nascent industry, and who the media turned into the figurehead of the ascendant Silicon Valley. They created the myth of Musk’s genius, and he’s prospered from it ever since. In the past couple of years his mask has slipped, and he’s revealed himself not as the builder of the future, but as a bumbling fool who thinks he knows far better than everyone else when the evidence continues to pile up that nothing could be further from the truth.

#elon musk #twitter #social media #silicon valley

[moonatikart-blog]

fucked up little violence mare my beloved.......

been wanting to draw this scoundrel for a while, finally got round to it!

ft. Atom Smasher (@captainhoers)

https://derpibooru.org/images/3269754

---

now excuse me as i shill for the ol' cap'n hoers and this ponie. check these out if you have the time:

https://askthesunjackers.tumblr.com/tagged/askthesunjackers/chrono - extremely good cyberpunk comic that effectively adapts the genre to the 21st century. "its about the world silicon valley is building today" as hoers puts it. it's not that long you can probably read it all in a couple hours.

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/141568/fallout-equestria-duck-and-cover - as far as i know the origin of atom. funny as hell piss take of the original FoE, telling a more entertaining story in a tenth of the length. i am biased because its aggressively manc and thats where ive lived pretty much my whole life

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/301900/fallout-equestria-make-love-not-war - standalone sequel to the above story. honestly just an exceptionally well written journey which took me places i'd never expect.

#mlp #mlp oc #atom smasher

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

In October, tens of millions of borrowers will be required to pay their monthly federal student loan bills for the first time since March 2020, the Department of Education clarified Monday.

The pandemic-related pause on both payments and interest accumulation has been set to end later this summer, though the exact date payments would be due was a little fuzzy.

The Biden administration had previously said that the pause would end either 60 days after June 30 or 60 days after the Supreme Court rules on the separate student loan forgiveness program – whichever comes first.

A law passed in early June to address the debt ceiling officially prevented the pandemic-related pause from being extended again. The repayment date has been extended a total of eight times under both the Biden and Trump administrations.

“Student loan interest will resume starting on September 1, 2023, and payments will be due starting in October. We will notify borrowers well before payments restart,” the Department of Education said in a statement sent to CNN Monday.

The update was first reported by Politico.

Borrowers typically receive their bill statements from their loan servicer a few weeks before they are due. Not every borrower’s bill is due at the same time of the month.

The Department of Education has said that it will be in direct communication with borrowers and ramp up its communication with student loan servicers before repayment resumes.

Student loan experts recommend that borrowers reach out to their student loan servicer with any questions about their loans as soon as possible, especially if they are interested in enrolling in an income-driven repayment plan. Those plans, which set payments based on income and family size, can lower monthly payments but require borrowers to submit some paperwork.

Federal student loan borrowers can check the Federal Student Aid website for updates on resuming payments.

SOME BORROWERS COULD BE AT RISK OF DEFAULT

Some borrowers may struggle to resume paying their monthly student loan bills.

More student loan borrowers are currently behind on other kinds of bills than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The report also said that about 1 in 5 student loan borrowers have risk factors that suggest they could struggle when scheduled payments resume, like being delinquent on student loan payments before the pandemic or having multiple student loan servicers.

When payments restart, many people might be confused about how much they owe, when to pay and how. Millions of borrowers will have a different servicer handling their student loans since the last time they made a payment.

Originally, the pause on federal student loan payments was put in place to help borrowers struggling financially due to the pandemic.

From a jobs perspective, the economy has largely recovered from the pandemic-related disruptions. In May, 3.7 million more people were working than in February 2020.

But there are some soft spots. Major layoffs have recently been announced at big companies like Disney and Amazon. Earlier this year, a regional banking crisis was set off by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the largest bank to fail since the 2008 financial crisis. And inflation remains high but is cooling after reaching a 40-year peak last year.

STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS STILL ON THE TABLE

Meanwhile, all eyes are on the Supreme Court as borrowers wait to see if the Biden administration will be allowed to move forward with its student loan forgiveness program. A decision is expected in late June or early July.

Under the proposal, individual borrowers who made less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021 and married couples or heads of households who made less than $250,000 a year could see up to $10,000 of their federal student loan debt forgiven.

If a qualifying borrower also received a federal Pell grant while enrolled in college, the individual is eligible for up to $20,000 of debt forgiveness.

But several lawsuits argue that the Biden administration is abusing its power and using the pandemic as a pretext for fulfilling the president’s campaign pledge to cancel student debt.

No debt has been canceled yet. But if the Supreme Court allows the program to take effect, it’s possible the government moves quickly to forgive the debts of 16 million borrowers who the administration already approved for relief.

If the Justices strike down Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, it could be possible for the administration to make some modifications to the policy and try again – though that process could take months.

#us politics #news #cnn politics #president joe biden #biden administration #student loan forgiveness #cancel student loans #federal student loans #student debt forgiveness #student loan debt #us supreme court #scotus #2023 #Department of Education #politico #Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

[special-grade-fujioshi]

In the mad scramble to make as much silicone valley capital disappear as possible I actually think it's really possible that one of the hundreds of new subscription tv services struggling to find any original idea to adapt into a show to compete in an oversaturated and hype driven market might actually just end up creating a show about a pansexual and an asexual that are roommates

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

New simulations shed light on origins of Saturn’s rings and icy moons

A new series of supercomputer simulations has offered an answer to the mystery of the origins of Saturn’s rings - one that involves a massive collision in the recent history of the 4.5 billion-year-old Solar System.  

According to new research involving NASA and Durham and Glasgow universities, Saturn’s rings could have evolved from the debris of two progenitor icy moons that collided and shattered only a few hundred million years ago.   

They would likely have been similar in size to two of Saturn’s current moons, Dione and Rhea.   

Debris that didn’t end up in the rings could also have contributed to the formation of some of Saturn’s present-day moons.  

Most contemporary high-quality measurements of Saturn have come from the Cassini spacecraft.   

It spent 13 years studying the planet and its systems after entering Saturn’s orbit in 2004.  

The Cassini craft captured precise data by passing by and even diving into the gap between Saturn’s rings and the planet itself.   

Cassini found that the rings are almost pure ice and have accumulated very little dust pollution since their formation, suggesting that they formed during the most recent few per cent of the life of the Solar System. 

Motivated by the remarkable youth of the rings, the research team turned to the COSMA machine hosted by Durham University as part of the UK’s DiRAC (Distributed Research Utilising Advanced Computing) facility.  

The team modeled what different collisions between precursor moons may have looked like.   

These hydrodynamical simulations were conducted using the SWIFT open-source software at a resolution more than 100 times higher than previous studies, giving scientists their best insights into the Saturn system’s history.  

Dr Vincent Eke, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics/Institute for Computational Cosmology, at Durham University, said: “We tested a hypothesis for the recent formation of Saturn’s rings and have found that an impact of icy moons is able to send enough material near to Saturn to form the rings that we see now.  

“This scenario naturally leads to ice-rich rings because when the progenitor moons smash into one another, the rock in the cores of the colliding bodies is dispersed less widely than the overlying ice.” 

Saturn’s rings today live close to the planet, within what is known as the Roche limit – the farthest orbit where a planet’s gravitational force is powerful enough to disintegrate larger bodies of rock or ice that get any closer.   

Material orbiting farther out could clump together to form moons.   

By simulating almost 200 different versions of the impact, the research team discovered that a wide range of collision scenarios could scatter the right amount of ice into Saturn’s Roche limit, where it could settle into rings as icy as those of Saturn today.   

Since other elements of the system have a mixed ice-and-rock composition, alternative explanations haven’t been able to explain why there would be almost no rock in Saturn’s rings.   

Dr Jacob Kegerreis, a Durham University graduate who is now a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, said: “There’s so much we still don’t know about the Saturn system, including its moons that host environments that might be suitable for life, so it’s exciting to use big simulations like these to explore in detail how they could have evolved.”   

Dr Luis Teodoro, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Physics & Astronomy, said: “The apparent geological youth of Saturn’s rings has been a puzzle since the Voyager probes sent back their first images of the planet. This collaboration has allowed us to examine the possible circumstances of their creation, with fascinating results.” 

#science #space #astronomy #physics #news #astrophysics #SATURN

[sumaya432]

Building the World’s Greatest Companies

WE PROPEL THE WORLD’S BEST COMPANIES WITH DATA ENGINEERED TO DELIVER THE ABSOLUTE HIGHEST PERFORMING C-LEVEL AND BOARD LEADERSHIP FASTER THAN ANYONE ELSE. Recognized for securing Rocketship CEOs for Tech Giants and many of Silicon Valley’s original unicorns, Christian & Timbers is now re-engineering the next generation of executive search. Introducing Science Based Search For the first time the data transparency to know you will be selecting from the absolute best, highest performing Rocketship Leaders within days not months of initiating the search. TALENT MAPPING → TALENT PIPELINING Knowing the complete competitive candidate ecosystem at launch allows you the business intelligence and talent pipelining to always execute the optimum search strategy. PREDICTIVE LEADERSHIP - PROPRIETARY OUTREACH Our brand, command of language and multi-tiered outreach engines assures leadership trusted to deliver our client’s most critical high-performance business outcomes. UNCOMPROMISING LEADERSHIP HIRING MODEL Capturing the complete candidate universe, KPIs and an Uncompromising Leadership Hiring Model gives you the data transparency to always hire the absolute best. Winning the war for talent for over 40 years

Our experience, global reputation and deep relationships with the best leadership gives us access to the most sought-after Rocketship Talent around the world. The industry’s most advanced Talent Map Engineering adds to our expertise in every specialization.

We first specialized in Robotics, then semiconductor, becoming market leaders in every sector of technology. We are experts in each sector we focus today.

#Building the World’s Greatest Companies #WE PROPEL THE WORLD’S BEST COMPANIES WITH DATA ENGINEERED TO DELIVER THE ABSOLUTE HIGHEST PERFORMING C-LEVEL AND BOARD LEADERSHIP FASTER TH #Recognized for securing Rocketship CEOs for Tech Giants and many of Silicon Valley’s original unicorns #Christian & Timbers is now re-engineering the next generation of executive search. #Introducing Science Based Search

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kashmir Hill’s “Your Face Belongs to Us”

This Friday (September 22), I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. That night, I'll be in person at LA's Book Soup for the launch of Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You." On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

Your Face Belongs To Us is Kashmir Hill's new tell-all history of Clearview AI, the creepy facial recognition company whose origins are mired in far-right politics, off-the-books police misconduct, sales to authoritarian states and sleazy one-percenter one-upmanship:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691288/your-face-belongs-to-us-by-kashmir-hill/

Hill is a fitting chronicler here. Clearview first rose to prominence – or, rather, notoriety – with the publication of her 2020 expose on the company, which had scraped more than a billion facial images from the web, and then started secretly marketing a search engine for faces to cops, spooks, private security firms, and, eventually, repressive governments:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

Hill's original blockbuster expose was followed by an in-depth magazine feature and then a string more articles, which revealed the company's origins in white nationalist movements, and the mercurial jourey of its founder, Hoan Ton-That:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/18/magazine/facial-recognition-clearview-ai.html

The story of Clearview's technology is an interesting one, a story about the machine learning gold-rush where modestly talented technologists who could lay hands on sufficient data could throw it together with off-the-shelf algorithms and do things that had previously been considered impossible. While Clearview has plenty of competitors today, as recently as a couple of years ago, it played like a magic trick.

That's where the more interesting story of Clearview's founding comes in. Hill is a meticulous researcher and had the benefit of a disaffected – and excommunicated – Clearview co-founder, who provided her with masses of internal communications. She also benefited from the court documents from the flurry of lawsuits that Clearview prompted.

What emerges from these primary sources – including multiple interviews with Ton-That – is a story about a move-fast-and-break-things company at the tail end of the forgiveness-not-permission era of technological development. Clearview's founders are violating laws and norms, they're short on cash, and they're racing across the river on the backs of alligators, hoping to reach the riches on the opposite bank without losing a leg.

A decade ago, they might have played as heroes. Today, they're just grifters – bullshitters faking it until they make it, lying to Hill (and getting caught out), and the rest of us. The founders themselves are erratic weirdos, and not the fun kind of weirdos, either. Ton-That – who emigrated to Silicon Valley from Australia as a teenager, seeking a techie's fortune – comes across as a bro-addled dimbulb who threw his lot in with white nationalists, MAGA Republicans, Rudy Guiliani bagmen, Peter Theil, and assorted other tech-adjascent goblins.

Meanwhile, biometrics generally – and facial recognition specifically – is a discipline with a long and sordid history, inextricably entwined with phrenology and eugenics, as Hill describes in a series of interstitial chapters that recount historical attempts to indentify the facial features that correspond with criminality and low intelligence.

These interstitials are woven into a-ha moments from Clearview's history, in which various investors, employees, hangers-on, competitors and customers speculate about how a facial-recognition system could eventually not just recognize criminals, but predict criminality. It's a potent reminder of the AI industry's many overlaps with "race-science" and other quack beliefs.

Hill also describes how Clearview and its competitors' recklessness and arrogance created the openings for shrewd civil libertarians to secure bipartisan support for biometric privacy laws, most notably Illinois' best-of-breed Biometric Information Privacy Act:

https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=3004&ChapterID=57

But by the end of the book, Hill makes the case that Ton-That and his competitors have gotten away with it. Facial recognition is now so easy to build that – she says – we're unlikely to abolish it, despite all the many horrifying ways that FR could fuck up our societies. It's a sobering conclusion, and while Hill holds out some hope for curbing the official use of FR, she seems resigned to a future in which – for example – creepy guys covertly snap photos of women on the street, use those pictures to figure out their names and addresses, and then stalk and harass them.

If she's right, this is Ton-That's true legacy, and the legacy of the funders who handed him millions to spend building this. Perhaps someone else would have stepped into that sweaty, reckless-grifter-shaped hole if Ton-That hadn't been there to fill it, but in our timeline, we can say that Ton-That was the bumbler who helped destroy something precious.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

#pluralistic #books #reviews #gift guide #clearview ai #facial recognition #biometrics #eugenics #crime #privacy #cop shit #hoan ton-that

[secretmellowblog]

One of the more devastating things about the rise of AI “art” to me, outside of the obvious theft and Silicon Valley corporate evil and threat to the livelihoods of so many people, is just…the realization that so many of the people who’ve interacted with my art or writing don’t see me as a human being.

Like? Ever since high school I’d do drawing requests for people. I always thought it was like playing a game with those people, or having a conversation, or connecting in some small way.

And it’s crushing to realize that might never have been true? That everyone who was “talking” to me could have replaced me with an algorithm that spat out content and it wouldn’t have made a difference. I look back on the hundreds of free requests I drew for people because I was a lonely teenager flattered they liked something about me or the way I drew, and suddenly realize that basically none of those people liked anything about me as a person or the way I saw the world— the only viewed me as a tool they could use.

Idk I think a lot about how after Kim Jung Gi died, someone fed his work into an algorithm and generated copies of it as if that was the same thing— when no! He’s more than an art style and type of brushstroke! He wasn’t a tool, he was a thinking feeling human being. But even a great artist like him isn’t really perceived as a person? He’s just a mash of data you can shove into an algorithm to automatically generate products for you to consume. And an art producing machine is “superior” to the original person because it doesn’t get sad or tired or sick and it doesn’t die, and the only downside is that it creates art entirely absent of purpose or meaning or care or intent.

I don’t know, it’s weird to spend so much time on social media and then suddenly be hit by the horrifying realization that there might not be anyone on the other end. And that hurts even when, like me, most of the stuff you post is just sorta cute and goofy and inane. When people talk to you, they’re not talking to you; and when you try to talk to them, it’s like you’ve been talking to no one. You’re a tool that generates content and the moment they can automate some shallow surface level aspects of what you create it genuinely doesn’t matter to them if you’re alive or dead.

And I know that’s not true for some people who follow or interact with me, and I’m genuinely thankful for that; but the massive callous indifference a very weird thing to have to come to terms with, idk ahsjdjd XD.

#ai Art #delete later