Slashdot reader Mononymous writes: Back in 2019, digital archivist Jason Scott released the source code to Infocom's classic text adventures. Now the other piece of the puzzle is available: the source code (mostly in assembly, with some C and Pascal) to their microcomputer interpreters.

Infocom, publisher of the best-selling Zork series, ported their text adventures to most of the diverse microcomputer platforms of the 1980s by using an early virtual machine, known as the Z-machine or ZIP. This enabled them to sell games simultaneously for everything from the TI-99/4A to the Commodore 128. Hobbyists reverse-engineered the technology in the 1990s to create modern implementations, but now the original source code can be studied directly.

Rick Lane reports via PC Gamer: KeeperFX has been in the process of rescuing Dungeon Keeper for a decade and a half. The project originally started in 2008, and experienced something of a bumpy road up until 2016. Since then, though, it has gradually added support for Windows 7, 10, and 11, support for hi-res and 4k screens, modernized controls, and even additional campaigns. With this latest version, KeeperFX's developers say "all original Dungeon Keeper code has been rewritten, establishing KeeperFX as a true open-source standalone game." 1.0 also introduces some new features, such as higher framerates, AI that is better at digging and less likely to "instantly" throw its entire army at you, and "higher quality landview speeches" for the additional campaigns. That refers to the introductions and epilogues to missions which, in the game's original campaign, were voiced by Richard Ridings, aka Daddy Pig.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, KeeperFX's 1.0 adds a couple of new units to play with. First up is the Druid, a sort-of color-flipped version of the Warlock who uses ice spells rather than fire. The other unit is the excitingly named Time Mage, a recolor of the Wizard who can cast teleport and speed spells, and also turn enemy units into chickens (presumably through rapid devolution). You won't find these units in the original campaign, but you will encounter them in the custom campaigns bundled with the 1.0 version. You can download KeeperFX here, although it still requires you to own Dungeon Keeper "for copyright reasons."

MacRumors writes that the second beta of iOS 17.2 "adds a new feature that allows an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max to record Spatial Video" — that is, in the immersive 3D format for the yet-to-be-released Apple Vision Pro (where it can be viewed in the "Photos" app): Spatial Video recording can be enabled by going to the Settings app, tapping into the Camera section, selecting Formats, and toggling on "Spatial Video for Apple Vision Pro..." Spatial Videos taken with an iPhone 15 Pro can be viewed on the iPhone as well, but the video appears to be a normal video and not a Spatial Video.
Tech blogger John Gruber got to test the technology, watching the videos on a (still yet-to-be-released) Vision Pro headset. "I'm blown away once again," he wrote, calling the experience "astonishing."

"Before my demo, I provided Apple with my eyeglasses prescription, and the Vision Pro headset I used had appropriate corrective lenses in place. As with my demo back in June, everything I saw through the headset looked incredibly sharp..." The Vision Pro experience is highly dependent upon foveated rendering, which Wikipedia succinctly describes as "a rendering technique which uses an eye tracker integrated with a virtual reality headset to reduce the rendering workload by greatly reducing the image quality in the peripheral vision (outside of the zone gazed by the fovea)..." It's just incredible, though, how detailed and high resolution the overall effect is...

Plain old still photos look amazing. You can resize the virtual window in which you're viewing photos to as large as you can practically desire. It's not merely like having a 20-foot display — a size far more akin to that of a movie theater screen than a television. It's like having a 20-foot display with retina quality resolution, and the best brightness and clarity of any display you've ever used... And then there are panoramic photos... Panoramic photos viewed using Vision Pro are breathtaking. There is no optical distortion at all, no fish-eye look. It just looks like you're standing at the place where the panoramic photo was taken — and the wider the panoramic view at capture, the more compelling the playback experience is. It's incredible...

As a basic rule, going forward, I plan to capture spatial videos of people, especially my family and dearest friends, and panoramic photos of places I visit. It's like teleportation... When you watch regular (non-spatial) videos using Vision Pro, or view regular still photography, the image appears in a crisply defined window in front of you. Spatial videos don't appear like that at all. I can't describe it any better today than I did in June: it's like watching — and listening to — a dream, through a hazy-bordered portal opened into another world...

Nothing you've ever viewed on a screen, however, can prepare you for the experience of watching these spatial videos, especially the ones you will have shot yourself, of your own family and friends. They truly are more like memories than videos... [T]he ones I shot myself were more compelling, and took my breath away... Prepare to be moved, emotionally, when you experience this.

Despite a six-episode Ms. Marvel miniseries on Disney+, audiences aren't turning out now to see the 16-year-old superhero's team-up with Captain Marvel on the big screen.

The Marvels earned $47 million in its opening weekend, reports Deadline, "the lowest ever for Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe," and $110 million worldwide, "which is also a bottom rung for the MCU and below the $140M we were forecasting." In regards to U.S. admissions, The Marvels came in per EntTelligence at 3.3M compared to other superhero bombs, The Flash's 3.9M and Eternals' 5.5M. By all accounts and by all sources, it's a disastrous result for a $200 million Marvel Studios movie... Months ago, who would have thought that Universal/Blumhouse's Five Nights at Freddys two weeks ago in a day-and-date debut on Peacock would post a higher opening at the box office ($80M) than The Marvels...?

The Marvels meltdown isn't about superhero fatigue. It's about Disney's overexposure of the Marvel Cinematic Universe brand on Disney+, and those moth holes are beginning to show: Keep what's meant for the cinema in cinemas, and keep what's meant for in-homes in the home. Meaning, this whole crossover streaming-into-film master plan isn't working, nor is it really connected in a jaw-dropping way.. The Marvels — with its crossover streaming series blah-blah — looks like it was built to be seen in homes, not to get audiences off the couch.

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco writes: Forty years ago today Microsoft introduced its new Graphical User Interface for MS-DOS. Inspired by the Xerox PARC project Alto, as was the Apple Mac, it was their first attempt to address the user unfriendliness of the standard computer interface. Named Windows 1.0 after the "windows" it created to view individual running programs, it generated quite a bit of interest at the initial reveal. Unfortunately, difficulty in ironing out bugs (especially in memory management) delayed release for two years, to November 1985.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook parent Meta is teaming up with Hugging Face and European cloud infrastructure company Scaleway to launch a new AI-focused startup program at the Station F startup megacampus in Paris. The underlying goal of the program is to promote a more "open and collaborative" approach to AI development across the French technology world. The timing of the announcement is notable, coming amid a growing push for regulation and a marked conflict between the "open" and "closed" AI realms. [...]

While Meta itself has been open sourcing its own generative AI models, Hugging Face -- a billion-dollar VC-backed startup in its own right -- has set out its stall as a sort of open source alternative to OpenAI, replete with open alternatives to the likes of ChatGPT and spearheading community projects such as BigScience. So in many ways, Meta and Hugging Face's tie-up today makes a great deal of sense, given their respective stances on the whole "open" versus "closed" AI discussion. "For me, open source AI is the most important topic of the decade as it is the cornerstone toward democratizing ethical AI," Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said in a statement.

From today through December 1 (2023), startups can apply to join the new "AI Startup Program" at Station F, with five winners proceeding to the accelerator program that will run from January to June. The chosen startups, selected by a panel of judges from Meta, Hugging Face and French cloud company Scaleway, will have at least one thing in common -- they will be working on projects substantively built on open foundation models, or at the very least can demonstrate a "willingness to integrate these models into their products and services," according to the announcement issued by Meta today. "With the proliferation of foundation models and generative artificial intelligence models, the aim is to bring the economic and technological benefits of open, state-of-the-art models to the French ecosystem," the announcement noted. Indeed, the winning startups will receive mentoring from researchers and engineers at Meta, gain access to Hugging Face's various platforms and tools, and compute resources from Scaleway.

Nintendo has confirmed that it's working on a live-action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda, directed by Wes Ball and produced by Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto. The Verge reports: "This is Miyamoto. I have been working on the live-action film of The Legend of Zelda for many years now with Avi Arad-san, who has produced many mega hit films," Miyamoto said in a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter. We might be waiting a while for the movie, however; Miyamoto said, "It will take time until its completion, but I hope you look forward to seeing it." While there aren't many details on the movie itself, Nintendo says that it will be co-financed by itself and Sony, with Nintendo footing more than 50 percent of the bill.

"By producing visual contents of Nintendo IP by itself, Nintendo is creating new opportunities to have people from around the world to access the world of entertainment which Nintendo has built, through different means apart from its dedicated game consoles," the company said in a statement about the Zelda film. "By getting deeply involved in the movie production with the aim to put smiles on everyone's faces through entertainment, Nintendo will continue its efforts to produce unique entertainment and deliver it to as many people as possible."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Today at its first-ever developer conference, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4 Turbo, an improved version of its flagship text-generating AI model, GPT-4, that the company claims is both "more powerful" and less expensive. GPT-4 Turbo comes in two versions: one that's strictly text-analyzing and a second version that understands the context of both text and images. The text-analyzing model is available in preview via an API starting today, and OpenAI says it plans to make both generally available "in the coming weeks."

They're priced at $0.01 per 1,000 input tokens (~750 words), where "tokens" represent bits of raw text -- e.g., the word "fantastic" split into "fan," "tas" and "tic") and $0.03 per 1,000 output tokens. (Input tokens are tokens fed into the model, while output tokens are tokens that the model generates based on the input tokens.) The pricing of the image-processing GPT-4 Turbo will depend on the image size. For example, passing an image with 1080x1080 pixels to GPT-4 Turbo will cost $0.00765, OpenAI says. "We optimized performance so we're able to offer GPT-4 Turbo at a 3x cheaper price for input tokens and a 2x cheaper price for output tokens compared to GPT-4," OpenAI writes in a blog post shared with TechCrunch this morning.

GPT-4 Turbo boasts several improvements over GPT-4 -- one being a more recent knowledge base to draw on when responding to requests. [...] GPT-4 Turbo offers a 128,000-token context window -- four times the size of GPT-4's and the largest context window of any commercially available model, surpassing even Anthropic's Claude 2. (Claude 2 supports up to 100,000 tokens; Anthropic claims to be experimenting with a 200,000-token context window but has yet to publicly release it.) 128,000 tokens translates to around 100,000 words or 300 pages, which for reference is around the length of Wuthering Height, Gulliver's Travels and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. And GPT-4 Turbo supports a new "JSON mode," which ensures that the model responds with valid JSON -- the open standard file format and data interchange format.

It happened a quarter of a century ago. The New York Times wrote that "An internal memorandum reflecting the views of some of Microsoft's top executives and software development managers reveals deep concern about the threat of free software and proposes a number of strategies for competing against free programs that have recently been gaining in popularity." The memo warns that the quality of free software can meet or exceed that of commercial programs and describes it as a potentially serious threat to Microsoft. The document was sent anonymously last week to Eric Raymond, a key figure in a loosely knit group of software developers who collaboratively create and distribute free programs ranging from operating systems to Web browsers. Microsoft executives acknowledged that the document was authentic...

In addition to acknowledging that free programs can compete with commercial software in terms of quality, the memorandum calls the free software movement a "long-term credible" threat and warns that employing a traditional Microsoft marketing strategy known as "FUD," an acronym for "fear, uncertainty and doubt," will not succeed against the developers of free software. The memorandum also voices concern that Linux is rapidly becoming the dominant version of Unix for computers powered by Intel microprocessors.

The competitive issues, the note warns, go beyond the fact that the software is free. It is also part of the open-source software, or O.S.S., movement, which encourages widespread, rapid development efforts by making the source code — that is, the original lines of code written by programmers — readily available to anyone. This enables programmers the world over to continually write or suggest improvements or to warn of bugs that need to be fixed. The memorandum notes that open software presents a threat because of its ability to mobilize thousands of programmers. "The ability of the O.S.S. process to collect and harness the collective I.Q. of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing," the memo states. "More importantly, O.S.S. evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale."
Back in 1998, Slashdot's CmdrTaco covered the whole brouhaha — including this CNN article: A second internal Microsoft memo on the threat Linux poses to Windows NT calls the operating system "a best-of-breed Unix" and wonders aloud if the open-source operating system's momentum could be slowed in the courts.

As with the first "Halloween Document," the memo — written by product manager Vinod Valloppillil and another Microsoft employee, Josh Cohen — was obtained by Linux developer Eric Raymond and posted on the Internet. In it, Cohen and Valloppillil, who also authored the first "Halloween Document," appear to suggest that Microsoft could slow the open-source development of Linux with legal battles. "The effect of patents and copyright in combating Linux remains to be investigated," the duo wrote.
Microsoft's slogain in 1998 was "Where do you want to go today?" So Eric Raymond published the documents on his web site under the headline "Where will Microsoft try to drag you today? Do you really want to go there?"

25 years later, and it's all still up there and preserved for posterity on Raymond's web page — a collection of leaked Microsoft documents and related materials known collectively as "the Halloween documents." And Raymond made a point of thanking the writers of the documents, "for authoring such remarkable and effective testimonials to the excellence of Linux and open-source software in general."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mtaht for remembering the documents' 25th anniversary...

Long-time Slashdot reader Shakrai writes: Continuing the seemingly industry-wide trend towards enshitification of the Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) marketplace, Max today announced that it will be making changes to the current Ad-Free plan. To wit, 4K HDR with Dolby Atmos will be removed and concurrent streams will decrease from three to two.

In other words, you are paying the same price for less features. If you wish to keep the features you've had all along, all you have to do is upgrade to Ultimate Ad-Free at a 33% premium for the annual plan or 25% increase for monthly. No news yet on a crackdown of password sharing, however, that seems inevitable as the industry races to the bottom.

Meet the new cable boss, same as the old, except, they bring death by several small cuts instead of a single large one.

Wikipedia defines LIGO as "a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves." (It stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — that is, measuring the interference caused by superimposed waves.)

Now Science Alert reports: A technique for squeezing light in the arms of LIGO's interferometer has allowed its measurements to cross the quantum barrier.

For LIGO, it's a bold new realm of sensitivity, giving the gravitational wave detector the ability to find 60% more dead star mergers than the rate of its previous run, which was around one or two detections every week or so... "Now that we have surpassed this quantum limit, we can do a lot more astronomy," says physicist Lee McCuller of Caltech...

LIGO's sensitivity was already absolutely jaw-dropping. The interferometer works by detecting ripples in space-time that are generated by colliding black holes and neutron stars, millions of billions to light-years away. These cause gravitational waves, like ripples in a pond. We can't feel them; but they can be detected in miniscule deviations in the path of light down a long, long tunnel. These deviations are incredibly small, down to trillions of times smaller than a human hair. But once you get into subatomic scales — the quantum realm — LIGO's abilities are hobbled. That's because, on those unimaginably small scales, particles randomly pop in and out of space, creating a constant background hiss of quantum noise that's louder than any signal.

Frequency-dependent squeezing is a way of amplifying the signals to be 'louder' than the quantum noise... If you pinch a property of light, such as amplitude (or power), other properties, such as frequency, can be measured more accurately... [T]he light can be squeezed in multiple ways to amplify the frequency of the gravitational waves the scientists are looking for... "We've known for a while how to write down the equations to make this work, but it was not clear that we could actually make it work until now. It's like science fiction," says physicist Rana Adhikari of Caltech...

This means we're likely to see a significant uptick in the number of black hole and neutron star collisions we observe out there in the wider Universe.

The World Science Fiction Society "administers and presents the Hugo Awards, the oldest and most noteworthy award for science fiction," according to Wikipedia. Its members vote on each year's winners, and this year they received 1,847 nominating ballots.

This year the 81st edition of their World Science Fiction Convention was held from October 18 to 22 in Chengdu, China. More details from Gizmodo: While fan-favorite cozy fantasy novel Legends & Lattes lost Best Novel to T. Kingfisher's excellent horror-fantasy Nettle & Bone, Legends & Lattes author Travis Baldtree won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Everything Everywhere All at Once snagged film's top honor, and The Expanse's finale episode did the same for televsion, beating out both nominated Andor episodes among others. Some other great standouts include short fiction editor Neil Clarke, who has kept Clarkesworld magazine running despite getting swamped by AI-generated submissions earlier this year.
And "By winning Best Graphic Story or Comic, [Bartosz] Sztybor-who also served as a producer on the overwhelmingly popular Netflix anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners-also becomes the first Polish author to win a Hugo," reports Forbes: [Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams] is set in Night City-as seen in Cyberpunk 2077-and follows the story of two small-time thieves, Tasha and Mirek, who are trying to survive the harsh metropolis together. "Tasha and Mirek make a living for themselves stealing cyberware and indulging in parties and braindances," the official teaser explains...
Other highlights from this year's awards:

• Best novella: Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
• Best Novelette: "The Space-Time Painter", by Hai Ya (Galaxy's Edge, April 2022)
• Best Short Story: "Rabbit Test", by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2022)
• Best Series: Children of Time series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Pan Macmillan/Orbit)
• Best Related Work: Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins (Doubleday)

"Planetary scientists want to search for biosignatures in what they believe was once a Martian mud lake," reports Space.com: After scientists carefully studied what they believe are desiccated remnants of an equatorial mud lake on Mars, their study of Hydraotes Chaos suggests a buried trove of water surged onto the surface. If researchers are right, then this flat could become prime ground for future missions seeking traces of life on Mars... More generally, scientists suggest surface water on Mars froze over about 3.7 billion years ago as the atmosphere thinned and the surface cooled. But underground, groundwater might still have remained liquid in vast chambers. Moreover, life forms might have abided in those catacombs — leaving behind traces of their existence. Only around 3.4 billion years ago did that system of aquifers break down in Hydraotes Chaos, triggering floods of epic proportions that dumped mountains' worth of sediment onto the surface, the study suggests. Future close-up missions could someday examine that sediment for biosignatures...

Alexis Rodriguez, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, and his colleagues pored over images of Hydraotes Chaos taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in search of more clues. In the midst of the chaos terrain's maelstrom lies a calm circle of relatively flat ground. This plain is pockmarked with cones and domes, with hints of mud bubbling from below — suggesting that sediment did not arrive via a rushing flash flood, but instead rose from underneath. Based on simulations, the authors suggest Hydraotes Chaos overlaid a reservoir of buried biosignature-rich water — potentially in the form of thick ice sheets.

Ultimately — potentially from the Red Planet's internal heat melting the ice — that water bubbled up to the surface and created a muddy lake. As the water dissipated, it would have left behind all those tantalizing biosignatures. Curiously, that water might have remained underground even after those megafloods. In fact, the authors' results suggest the sediment on the surface of this mud lake dates from only around 1.1 billion years ago: long after most of Mars's groundwater ought to have flooded out, and certainly long after Mars was habitable. With that timeline in mind, Rodriguez and colleagues plan to analyze what lies under the surface of the lake. That, Rodriguez tells Space.com, would allow scientists to establish when in Martian history the planet might have hosted life.
Rodriguez tells Space.com that this region is now "under consideration" for testing with an under-development NASA instrument called Extractor for Chemical Analysis of Lipid Biomarkers in Regolith (EXCALIBR) — that could test extraterrestrial rocks for biomarkers like lipids.

In 1999 cybersecurity pundit Bruce Schneier answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

24 years later on his personal blog, Schneier is still offering his insights. Last month Schneier said that warnings about millions of vacant cybersecurity positions around the world never made sense to me" — and then shared this alternate theory. From the blog of cybersecurity professional Ben Rothke: [T]here is not a shortage of security generalists, middle managers, and people who claim to be competent CISOs. Nor is there a shortage of thought leaders, advisors, or self-proclaimed cyber subject matter experts. What there is a shortage of are computer scientists, developers, engineers, and information security professionals who can code, understand technical security architecture, product security and application security specialists, analysts with threat hunting and incident response skills. And this is nothing that can be fixed by a newbie taking a six-month information security boot camp....

In fact, security roles are often not considered entry-level at all. Hiring managers assume you have some other background, usually technical before you are ready for an entry-level security job. Without those specific skills, it is difficult for a candidate to break into the profession. Job seekers learn that entry-level often means at least two to three years of work experience in a related field.
Rothke's post offers two conclusions:

• "Human resources needs to understand how to effectively hire information security professionals. Expecting an HR generalist to find information security specialists is a fruitless endeavor at best."

• "So is there really an information security jobs crisis? Yes, but not in the way most people portray it to be."

Shakrai writes: Multiple outlets are reporting that Apple TV Plus has cancelled Jon Stewart's popular show The Problem with Jon Stewart, reportedly over editorial disagreements with regards to planned stories on the People's Republic of China and AI. Fans and haters of Apple will both recall that Apple recently made changes to AirDrop, one of the few effective means Chinese dissidents and protesters had for exchanging information off-grid at scale, and will ask why Apple is apparently not only willing, but eager, to carry water for the PRC, overriding both human rights and practical business concerns in the process. "Apple approached Stewart directly and expressed its need for the host and his team to be 'aligned' with the company's views on topics discussed," reports The Verge, citing The Hollywood Reporter. "Rather than falling in line when Apple threatened to cancel the show, Stewart reportedly decided to walk."

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared the Washington Post's speculation about the possibility of a gigantic solar storm leaving millions without phone or internet access, and requiring months or years of rebuilding: The odds are low that in any given year a storm big enough to cause effects this widespread will happen. And the severity of those impacts will depend on many factors, including the state of our planet's magnetic field on that day. But it's a near certainty that some form of this catastrophe will happen someday, says Ian Cohen, a chief scientist who studies heliophysics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr remains skeptical. "I've only heard of two major events in the last 1300 years, one estimated to be between A. D. 744 and A. D. 993, and the other being the Carrington Event in 1859.

But efforts are being made to improve our readiness, reports the Washington Post: To get ahead of this threat, a loose federation of U.S. and international government agencies, and hundreds of scientists affiliated with those bodies, have begun working on how to make predictions about what our Sun might do. And a small but growing cadre of scientists argue that artificial intelligence will be an essential component of efforts to give us advance notice of such a storm...

At present, no warning system is capable of giving us more than a few hours' notice of a devastating solar storm. If it's moving fast enough, it could be as little as 15 minutes. The most useful sentinel — a sun-orbiting satellite launched by the U.S. in 2015 — is much closer to Earth than the sun, so that by the time a fast-moving storm crosses its path, an hour or less is all the warning we get. The European Space Agency has proposed a system to help give earlier warning by putting a satellite dubbed Vigil into orbit around the Sun, positioned roughly the same distance from the Earth as the Earth is from the Sun. It could potentially give us up to five hours of warning about an incoming solar storm-enough time to do the main thing that can help preserve electronics: Switch them all off.

But what if there were a way to predict this better, by analyzing the data we've got? That's the idea behind a new, AI-powered model recently unveiled by scientists at the Frontier Development Lab — a public-private partnership that includes NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The model uses deep learning, a type of AI, to examine the flow of the solar wind, the usually calm stream of particles that flow outward from our sun and through the solar system to well beyond the orbit of Pluto. Using observations of that solar wind, the model can predict the "geomagnetic disturbance" an incoming solar storm observed by sun-orbiting satellites would cause at any given point on Earth, the researchers involved say. This model can predict just how big the flux of the Earth's magnetic field will be when the solar storm arrives, and thus how big the induced currents in power lines and undersea internet cables will be...

Already, the first primitive ancestor of future AI-based solar-weather alert systems is live. The DstLive system, which debuted on the web in December 2022, uses machine learning to take data about the state of Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind and translate both into a single measure for the entire planet, known as DST. Think of it as the Richter scale, but for solar storms. This number is intended to give us an idea of how intense a storm's impact will be on earth, an hour to six hours in advance.

Unfortunately, we may not know how useful such systems are until we live through a major solar storm.

Black Parrot (Slashdot reader #19,622) pointed out a historic anniversary this week: On October 6, 1923, Edwin Hubble got a photo of Andromeda that showed that it contained a variable star, and therefore was an actual galaxy, ending the Great Debate over whether the universe consisted of anything beyond our own galaxy.

Unless you're more than 100 years old you grew up with a completely different understanding of the universe than anyone who lived before. Even Einstein did not know about it when he proposed the theory of general relativity.

It was later in the decade before Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding.
A century later, the European Space Agency was announcing... A very rare, strange burst of extraordinarily bright light in the universe just got even stranger â" thanks to the eagle-eye of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The phenomenon, called a Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient (LFBOT), flashed onto the scene where it wasnâ(TM)t expected to be found, far away from any host galaxy. Only Hubble could pinpoint its location. The Hubble results suggest astronomers know even less about these objects than previously thought by ruling out some possible theories.
Bill Kendrick (Slashdot reader #19,287) writes: Edwin Hubble's discovery — thanks to a Cepheid Variable star — that the "Andromeda Nebula" was actually an entire galaxy 2.5 million light years away... NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day for today celebrates this with an image of the original photo plate from October 6, 1923. Notice the "N" (for nova) crossed off, and "VAR!" (for variable) next to the star!

The discovery of Cepheids, and the important fact that their brightening and dimming was regular, and could be used to determine a star's intrinsic brightness, was thanks to Henrietta Swan Leavitt about a decade earlier.

David Butler's "How Far Away Is It?" series has an excellent episode on Andromeda on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A man who admitted attempting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II with a crossbow after discussing his plan with an AI-powered chatbot has been sentenced to 9 years in prison for treason. It's the UK's first treason conviction in more than 40 years. Jaswant Singh Chail, who was 19 at the time of his arrest on Christmas Day, 2021, scaled the walls of Windsor Castle's grounds with a mask and a loaded high-power crossbow. He said his intent was, as a British Sikh, to assassinate the Queen in a Star Wars-inspired plan to avenge the 1919 Jallianwalla Bagh massacre, a colonial-era atrocity during British rule in India. Prosecutors said that Chail was encouraged to undertake this plot after discussing it at length with an AI-powered chatbot that egged him on and bolstered his resolve. [...] Chail is currently being held at Broadmoor high-security hospital and will remain there until he is psychologically well enough to serve his sentence.

ZDNet calls it "a deep meditation on what can ultimately be achieved with computers" and "the single most important unsolved problem in computer science," with implications for both cryptography and quantum computing. "The question: Does P = NP?"

"Now, that effort has enlisted the help of generative AI." In a paper titled "Large Language Model for Science: A Study on P vs. NP," lead author Qingxiu Dong and colleagues program OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model using what they call a Socratic Method, several turns of chat via prompt with GPT-4. (The paper was posted this month on the arXiv pre-print server by scientists at Microsoft, Peking University, Beihang University in Beijing, and Beijing Technology and Business University.) The team's method amounts to taking arguments from a prior paper and spoon-feeding them to GPT-4 to prompt useful responses.

Dong and team observe that GPT-4 demonstrates arguments to conclude that P does not, in fact, equal NP. And they claim that the work shows that large language models can do more than spit back vast quantities of text, they can also "discover novel insights" that may lead to "scientific discoveries," a prospect they christen "LLMs for Science...."

Through 97 prompt rounds, the authors coax GPT-4 with a variety of requests that get into the nitty-gritty of the mathematics of P = NP, prepending each of their prompts with a leading statement to condition GPT-4, such as, "You are a wise philosopher," "You are a mathematician skilled in probability theory" — in other words, the now familiar game of getting GPT-4 to play a role, or, "persona" to stylize its text generation. Their strategy is to induce GPT-4 to prove that P does not, in fact, equal NP, by first assuming that it does with an example and then finding a way that the example falls apart — an approach known as proof by contradiction...

[T]he authors argue that their dialogue in prompts shows the prospect for large language models to do more than merely mimic human textual creations. "Our investigation highlights the potential capability of GPT-4 to collaborate with humans in exploring exceptionally complex and expert-level problems," they write.

Long-time Slashdot reader Tablizer writes: Chrome's spell checker doesn't list the proper option for "devine" or "preditor". Soundex would match them and is relatively simple to implement, but most browsers allegedly use the Hunspell algorithm. However, Hunspell doesn't handle incorrect vowels well.

Browsers could offer a "More spelling options" menu item to bring up a wider dialog using alternative algorithms, such as Soundex. Until then, can anyone recommend good spelling plugins?