Stochastic Scribbles
Random musings in a variety of subjects, from science to religion.

Ingenuity no longer flying

The Ingenuity helicopter traveled to Mars with the Perseverance rover, being the first vehicle to fly around in the atmosphere of another planet. There was a little scare as contact with the helicopter was lost, but communications were soon restored. Unfortunately, damage was incurred on one of its rotors, so Ingenuity will no longer be flying. This makes me a little sad, but not disappointed. It was only supposed to be able to fly for three days, so it has far exceeded its expectations.

Large language models

Large language models such as ChatGPT and Bard have been all the rage lately. After trying them out for a while, however, I think the general hype around them may be a tad bit overdone. The feeling I get is that they are very good at stitching text seamlessly together, but they do not actually know anything.

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Thousands of naps each day

I am so envious of the penguins which get to nap thousands of times per day. On the flip side, they don’t get to have a good night’s sleep, so maybe I shouldn’t be so envious.

Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu is rather unpopular in Israel. Yet he is somehow the longest serving prime minister of Israel, even as he becomes yet more unpopular with the recent conflict between Hamas and Israel. It mystifies me how he has remained prime minister for so long, especially because Israel is not that much of an autocratic state. At least not yet.

All of history

Kurzgesagt has a great new video showing all of Earth history to scale. It’s a one hour video where every second shown is 1.5 million years passing for Earth. It really makes it visceral how short human history is relative to all of Earth history. I was also reminded how long multicellular life hadn’t existed on Earth; the eras before their emergence were not those that I paid much attention to.

This is now my favorite video for showing on idle screens.

More posts are in the archives.