#types of data ingestion

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

The social function of the economics profession is to explain, over and over again, that your boss is actually right and that you don't really want the things you want, and you're secretly happy to be abused by the system. If that wasn't true, why would your "choose" commercial surveillance, abusive workplaces and other depredations?

In other words, economics is the "look what you made me do" stick that capitalism uses to beat us with. We wouldn't spy on you, rip you off or steal your wages if you didn't choose to use the internet, shop with monopolists, or work for a shitty giant company. The technical name for this ideology is "public choice theory":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Of all the terrible things that economists say we all secretly love, one of the worst is "price discrimination." This is the idea that different customers get charged different amounts based on the merchant's estimation of their ability to pay. Economists insist that this is "efficient" and makes us all better off. After all, the marginal cost of filling the last empty seat on the plane is negligible, so why not sell that seat for peanuts to a flier who doesn't mind the uncertainty of knowing whether they'll get a seat at all? That way, the airline gets extra profits, and they split those profits with their customers by lowering prices for everyone. What's not to like?

Plenty, as it turns out. With only four giant airlines who've carved up the country so they rarely compete on most routes, why would an airline use their extra profits to lower prices, rather than, say, increasing their dividends and executive bonuses?

For decades, the airline industry was the standard-bearer for price discrimination. It was basically impossible to know how much a plane ticket would cost before booking it. But even so, airlines were stuck with comparatively crude heuristics to adjust their prices, like raising the price of a ticket that didn't include a Saturday stay, on the assumption that this was a business flyer whose employer was footing the bill:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

With digitization and mass commercial surveillance, we've gone from pricing based on context (e.g. are you buying your ticket well in advance, or at the last minute?) to pricing based on spying. Digital back-ends allow vendors to ingest massive troves of commercial surveillance data from the unregulated data-broker industry to calculate how desperate you are, and how much money you have. Then, digital front-ends – like websites and apps – allow vendors to adjust prices in realtime based on that data, repricing goods for every buyer.

As digital front-ends move into the real world (say, with digital e-ink shelf-tags in grocery stores), vendors can use surveillance data to reprice goods for ever-larger groups of customers and types of merchandise. Grocers with e-ink shelf tags reprice their goods thousands of times, every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

Here's where an economist will tell you that actually, your boss is right. Many groceries are perishable, after all, and e-ink shelf tags allow grocers to reprice their goods every minute or two, so yesterday's lettuce can be discounted every fifteen minutes through the day. Some customers will happily accept a lettuce that's a little gross and liztruss if it means a discount. Those customers get a discount, the lettuce isn't thrown out at the end of the day, and everyone wins, right?

Well, sure, if. If the grocer isn't part of a heavily consolidated industry where competition is a distant memory and where grocers routinely collude to fix prices. If the grocer doesn't have to worry about competitors, why would they use e-ink tags to lower prices, rather than to gouge on prices when demand surges, or based on time of day (e.g. making frozen pizzas 10% more expensive from 6-8PM)?

And unfortunately, groceries are one of the most consolidated sectors in the modern world. What's more, grocers keep getting busted for colluding to fix prices and rip off shoppers:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/loblaw-bread-price-settlement-1.7274820

Surveillance pricing is especially pernicious when it comes to apps, which allow vendors to reprice goods based not just on commercially available data, but also on data collected by your pocket distraction rectangle, which you carry everywhere, do everything with, and make privy to all your secrets. Worse, since apps are a closed platform, app makers can invoke IP law to criminalize anyone who reverse-engineers them to figure out how they're ripping you off. Removing the encryption from an app is a potential felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine (an app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to install a privacy blocker on it):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

Large vendors love to sell you shit via their apps. With an app, a merchant can undetectably change its prices every few seconds, based on its estimation of your desperation. Uber pioneered this when they tweaked the app to raise the price of a taxi journey for customers whose batteries were almost dead. Today, everyone's getting in on the act. McDonald's has invested in a company called Plexure that pitches merchants on the use case of raising the cost of your normal breakfast burrito by a dollar on the day you get paid:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Surveillance pricing isn't just a matter of ripping off customers, it's also a way to rip off workers. Gig work platforms use surveillance pricing to titrate their wage offers based on data they buy from data brokers and scoop up with their apps. Veena Dubal calls this "algorithmic wage discrimination":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Take nurses: increasingly, American hospitals are firing their waged nurses and replacing them with gig nurses who are booked in via an app. There's plenty of ways that these apps abuse nurses, but the most ghastly is in how they price nurses' wages. These apps buy nurses' financial data from data-brokers so they can offer lower wages to nurses with lots of credit card debt, on the grounds that crushing debt makes nurses desperate enough to accept a lower wage:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

This week, the excellent Lately podcast has an episode on price discrimination, in which cohost Vass Bednar valiantly tries to give economists their due by presenting the strongest possible case for charging different prices to different customers:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-the-end-of-the-fixed-price/

Bednar really tries, but – as she later agrees – this just isn't a very good argument. In fact, the only way charging different prices to different customers – or offering different wages to different workers – makes sense is if you're living in a socialist utopia.

After all, a core tenet of Marxism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." In a just society, people who need more get more, and people who have less, pay less:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs

Price discrimination, then, is a Bizarro-world flavor of cod-Marxism. Rather than having a democratically accountable state that sets wages and prices based on need and ability, price discrimination gives this authority to large firms with pricing power, no regulatory constraints, and unlimited access to surveillance data. You couldn't ask for a neater example of the maxim that "What matters isn't what technology does. What matters is who it does it for; and who it does it to."

Neoclassical economists say that all of this can be taken care of by the self-correcting nature of markets. Just give consumers and workers "perfect information" about all the offers being made for their labor or their business, and things will sort themselves out. In the idealized models of perfectly spherical cows of uniform density moving about on a frictionless surface, this does work out very well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

But while large companies can buy the most intimate information imaginable about your life and finances, IP law lets them capture the state and use it to shut down any attempts you make to discover how they operate. When an app called Para offered Doordash workers the ability to preview the total wage offered for a job before they accepted it, Doordash threatened them with eye-watering legal penalties, then threw dozens of full-time engineers at them, changing the app several times per day to shut out Para:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

And when an Austrian hacker called Mario Zechner built a tool to scrape online grocery store prices – discovering clear evidence of price-fixing conspiracies in the process – he was attacked by the grocery cartel for violating their "IP rights":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

This is Wilhoit's Law in action:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit#Wilhoit's_law

Of course, there wouldn't be any surveillance pricing without surveillance. When it comes to consumer privacy, America is a no-man's land. The last time Congress passed a new consumer privacy law was in 1988, when they enacted the Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video-store clerks from revealing which VHS cassettes you take home. Congress has not addressed a single consumer privacy threat since Die Hard was still playing in theaters.

Corporate bullies adore a regulatory vacuum. The sleazy data-broker industry that has festered and thrived in the absence of a modern federal consumer privacy law is absolutely shameless. For example, every time an app shows you an ad, your location is revealed to dozens of data-brokers who pretend to be bidding for the right to show you an ad. They store these location data-points and combine them with other data about you, which they sell to anyone with a credit card, including stalkers, corporate spies, foreign governments, and anyone hoping to reprice their offerings on the basis of your desperation:

https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

Under Biden, the outgoing FTC did incredible work to fill this gap, using its authority under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (which outlaws "unfair and deceptive" practices) to plug some of the worst gaps in consumer privacy law:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

And Biden's CFPB promulgated a rule that basically bans data brokers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

But now the burden of enforcing these rules falls to Trump's FTC, whose new chairman has vowed to end the former FTC's "war on business." What America desperately needs is a new privacy law, one that has a private right of action (so that individuals and activist groups can sue without waiting for a public enforcer to take up their causes) and no "pre-emption" (so that states can pass even stronger privacy laws):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/federal-preemption-state-privacy-law-hurts-everyone

How will we get that law? Through a coalition. After all, surveillance pricing is just one of the many horrors that Americans have to put up with thanks to America's privacy law gap. The "privacy first" theory goes like this: if you're worried about social media's impact on teens, or women, or old people, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about deepfake porn, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about algorithmic discrimination in hiring, lending, or housing, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about surveillance pricing, you should start by demanding a privacy law. Privacy law won't entirely solve all these problems, but none of them would be nearly as bad if Congress would just get off its ass and catch up with the privacy threats of the 21st century. What's more, the coalition of everyone who's worried about all the harms that arise from commercial surveillance is so large and powerful that we can get Congress to act:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Economists, meanwhile, will line up to say that this is all unnecessary. After all, you "sold" your privacy when you clicked "I agree" or walked under a sign warning you that facial recognition was in use in this store. The market has figured out what you value privacy at, and it turns out, that value is nothing. Any kind of privacy law is just a paternalistic incursion on your "freedom to contract" and decide to sell your personal information. It is "market distorting."

In other words, your boss is right.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Ser Amantio di Nicolao (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Safeway_supermarket_interior,_Fairfax_County,_Virginia.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[d8tl55c]

physeng(write, file, "tco_physeng_breakdown.png");

to:compiler {file}

to:compiler {txt: "Internet and Outernet are full of StickFigures with similar body plans, so there are optimizations for rendering vector strokes specifically. it's way more efficient to use those optimizations than keep calculating perfect spheres for no aesthetic benefit."}

{txt: "btw why haven't heat issues been patched yet"}

{txt: "i fixed this years ago for the latest model. remember."}

from:compiler {txt: "Thank you. The avast! nodes will appreciate the credits. TheChosenOne.exe has been unreachable for some time."}

to:compiler {txt: "you mean OuternetPhysEng still won't update their programs"}

from:compiler {txt: "Yes."}

to:compiler {txt: "and still won't provide a specific location?"}

from:compiler {txt: "Do not allow them to bring up the moral argument again."}

to:compiler {txt: "OK. fine. yes. i will spare both of us"}

to:compiler {txt: "abridged or full docs?"}

from:compiler {txt: "Abridged. Please describe the acronyms."}

to:compiler {txt: "ofc"}

{txt: "

sel.per.filter: standard StickFigure component (src)*****. invisible membrane with special collision properties. protects mouthparts.

H2O scoop: avast! code. implements water retrieval from ambient air.

EIS: avast! code. destroys ingested materials identified as, "dangerous" before they reach internal systems.

SOS: avast! code. they only said this one was, "used for control."

ECL: avast! code. recycles some forms of contact energy.

THROUGHLINE: base code, initialization data, and processing space for vitals. found in some form in all StickFigure-type worms. following unique sectors noted: Black Hole Monitoring System, Basic Intake Threat Enum, Fly By Wire.

smaller points list other vital and peripheral systems.

"}

from:compiler {txt: "Thank you. That's enough."}

end(physeng());

@compressedrage as per my previous email /silly

related: pliable stick figure biotech

[mylovesstuffs]

Anon.

Are you fucking serious right now?

I saw your message and I had to take a full-ass walk around my block because I was genuinely afraid I’d punch my goddamn wall.

Let me break this down for you very clearly, so even your AI-smooth-brained moral compass can process it:

You are not entitled to shit.

Not my writing. Not the ending. Not a single fucking word I typed out with my own fucking bleeding fingers.

You think you “need” closure?

Cool. I “need” eight hours of sleep, a functioning spine, and respect from strangers online. Guess what?

None of us are getting what we want today.

Fanfiction is a gift.

Not a product, not a service, not a series finale you paid for on HBO Max.

A gift.

You don’t throw a tantrum because the gift didn’t come with a bonus epilogue and a director’s cut.

Your entire ask is a monument to entitlement. You say “if you're not going to write it, I think it's fine to use Al?”

I did NOT write it for AI. I wrote it for human readers. For emotion. For narrative voice. For soul.

AI doesn’t have that. You want a soulless machine to mock my style and feed you a bootleg version of my work?? Which is, not to say but, the equivalent of a a knock-off Louis Vuitton sold from the back of a van?

Then don’t ask me. Just go to your shameful little corner and live with the fact that you’re the kind of person who disrespects art to feed your own dopamine addiction.

You wanted permission, so now you get the wrath.

I see in your other little asks, “AI is there to make things easier.”

At whose fucking expense? The thousands of fanfic writers whose fics are being scraped, harvested, mimicked and tossed into machine-learning hell so you don’t have to wait for an update?

Do you have any idea how many of us have had our fics [both in our caratblr and other fandom spaces] show up on AI mirror sites or been plagiarized by bots? Do you know how many real authors are losing book deals, commissions, or livelihoods because of this exact entitled logic?

Let me give you a basic fucking rundown since you clearly didn’t do the homework:

AI is not ethical – Generative AI is trained off data sets that include unauthorized, uncredited, scraped work from unpaid artists, writers, poets, journalists, bloggers, fanfic writers—fuck, even therapy forums.

Authors are suing OpenAI for ingesting copyrighted novels without permission.

Fanfic is already vulnerable – We exist in a legal gray area protected only by community ethics and mutual respect. You're breaking both.

You say “I won't post it anywhere, it's just for me.”

Oh, wow, thanks. So you only want to steal quietly. Like that makes it better.

You think the damage only happens when it’s public? WRONG.

Every time you plug an artist’s work into a machine, it gets processed, stored, used for training, forever.

You have no control over where it goes or how it’s repurposed later. You are feeding the beast and killing the creators in the process.

Don’t give me “I respect you but—”

If you respected me, this message wouldn’t exist.

You get your AI-stitched ending, it doesn’t scratch the itch, and you feed it another one.

And another.

And another.

Until the entire fucking archive is turned into a graveyard of replicas and you’re the ghoulish little shit dancing on the corpses of every writer you leeched dry.

And you say “I think I’m just entitled to a bit of closure”?

Entitled. You actually used the word.

Thank you for confirming what we already knew:

That you don’t see us as people.

You see us as content machines that owe you something because you liked our work. You don’t want closure, you want control, and you will NOT get it from me.

You’re entitled to a bath, a glass of water, and the air you breathe—not my writing, not my thoughts, and definitely not a fucking auto-generated Frankenstein mockery of my style you can jerk off your emotions to.

So here's your closure:

No, you may not touch my fic.

No, you may not feed it to a bot.

No, you may not engage with my writing, my blog, my friend's blog, or my community ever again.

Block me. Report me. Cry about it.

But know this:

Every time you open an AI generator to finish a story you didn’t write, you are choosing to destroy the very creators you claim to admire.

You should be ashamed, but you won’t be. Because parasites don’t feel guilt, they just suck and suck and suck until there’s nothing left.

I'll never forget this time and date.

I hope it was worth it.

Let this be your final fucking warning.

— Celeste.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Regardless of what companies and investors may say, artificial intelligence is not actually intelligent in the way most humans would understand it. To generate words and images, AI tools are trained on large databases of training data that is often scraped off the open web in unimaginably large quantities, no matter who owns it or what biases come along with it. When a user then prompts ChatGPT or DALL-E to spit out some text or visuals, the tools aren’t thinking about the best way to represent those prompts because they don’t have that ability. They’re comparing the terms they’re presented with the patterns they formed from all the data that was ingested to train their models, then trying to assemble elements from that data to reflect what the user is looking for. In short, you can think of it like a more advanced form of autocorrect on your phone’s keyboard, predicting what you might want to say next based on what you’ve already written and typed out in the past. If it’s not clear, that means these systems don’t create; they plagiarize. Unlike a human artist, they can’t develop a new artistic style or literary genre. They can only take what already exists and put elements of it together in a way that responds to the prompts they’re given. There’s good reason to be concerned about what that will mean for the art we consume, and the richness of the human experience.

[...]

AI tools will not eliminate human artists, regardless of what corporate executives might hope. But it will allow companies to churn out passable slop to serve up to audiences at a lower cost. In that way, it allows a further deskilling of art and devaluing of artists because instead of needing a human at the center of the creative process, companies can try to get computers to churn out something good enough, then bring in a human with no creative control and a lower fee to fix it up. As actor Keanu Reeves put it to Wired earlier this year, “there’s a corporatocracy behind [AI] that’s looking to control those things. … The people who are paying you for your art would rather not pay you. They’re actively seeking a way around you, because artists are tricky.” To some degree, this is already happening. Actors and writers in Hollywood are on strike together for the first time in decades. That’s happening not just because of AI, but how the movie studios and steaming companies took advantage of the shift to digital technologies to completely remake the business model so workers would be paid less and have less creative input. Companies have already been using AI tools to assess scripts, and that’s one example of how further consolidation paired with new technologies are leading companies to prioritize “content” over art. The actors and writers worry that if they don’t fight now, those trends will continue — and that won’t just be bad for them, but for the rest of us too.

[botgal]

oh and which sites will be affected ofc

AB 3080, according to the bill's text, would affect websites which sells the types of items listed below

"

(b) Products or services that are illegal to sell to a minor under state law that are subject to subdivision (a) include all of the following:

(1) An aerosol container of paint that is capable of defacing property, as referenced in Section 594.1 of the Penal Code.

(2) Etching cream that is capable of defacing property, as referenced in Section 594.1 of the Penal Code.

(3) Dangerous fireworks, as referenced in Sections 12505 and 12689 of the Health and Safety Code.

(4) Tanning in an ultraviolet tanning device, as referenced in Sections 22702 and 22706 of the Business and Professions Code.

(5) Dietary supplement products containing ephedrine group alkaloids, as referenced in Section 110423.2 of the Health and Safety Code.

(6) Body branding, as referenced in Sections 119301 and 119302 of the Health and Safety Code.

(c) Products or services that are illegal to sell to a minor under state law that are subject to subdivision (a) include all of the following:

(1) Firearms or handguns, as referenced in Sections 16520, 16640, and 27505 of the Penal Code.

(2) A BB device, as referenced in Sections 16250 and 19910 of the Penal Code.

(3) Ammunition or reloaded ammunition, as referenced in Sections 16150 and 30300 of the Penal Code.

(4) Any tobacco, cigarette, cigarette papers, blunt wraps, any other preparation of tobacco, any other instrument or paraphernalia that is designed for the smoking or ingestion of tobacco, products prepared from tobacco, or any controlled substance, as referenced in Division 8.5 (commencing with Section 22950) of the Business and Professions Code, and Sections 308, 308.1, 308.2, and 308.3 of the Penal Code.

(5) Electronic cigarettes, as referenced in Section 119406 of the Health and Safety Code.

(6) A less lethal weapon, as referenced in Sections 16780 and 19405 of the Penal Code."

This is stated explicitly to include "internet website on which the owner of the internet website, for commercial gain, knowingly publishes sexually explicit content that, on an annual basis, exceeds one-third of the contents published on the internet website". Wherein "sexually explicit content" is defined as "visual imagery of an individual or individuals engaging in an act of masturbation, sexual intercourse, oral copulation, or other overtly sexual conduct that, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

This would likely not include websites like AO3 or any website which displays NSFW content not in excess of 1/3 of the content on the site. Possibly not inclusive of writing because of the "visual imagery", but don't know at this time. In any case we don't want to set a precedent off of which it could springboard into non-commercial websites or any and all places with NSFW content.

AB 1949 is a lot more broad because it's about general data collection by any and all websites in which they might sell personal data collected by the website to third parties, especially if aimed specifically at minors or has a high chance of minors commonly accesses the site. But with how broad the language is I can't say there would be ANY limits to this one. So both are equally bad and would require equal attention in my opinion.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Study reveals that most widely used herbicide in Brazil increases chance of infant mortality

Applied especially to soybean crops, glyphosate may have been responsible for more than 500 infant deaths annually over the last decade

Glyphosate accounted for 62% of herbicide use in Brazil between 2009 and 2016, and it was especially used in soybean production. In 2017, it represented 30% of global herbicide use. It is estimated that since the 1990s, following the creation of seeds resistant to this substance, the use of this product has increased around 15-fold. Furthermore, according to Data Intelligence, the use of glyphosate on crops is expected to grow 800% by 2025. In this context, a study by Fundação Getulio Vargas found that this herbicide has effects on human health and identified an increase in infant mortality in locations close to where glyphosate has been applied.

The study indicates that between 2000 and 2010, there was a 5% increase in the infant mortality rate, which corresponds to around 503 deaths per year, among infants whose mothers lived close to where glyphosate was applied, more specifically, in the path of water flow carrying the substance applied to crops into rivers, streams and wells. The period analyzed in the research coincides precisely with the time when there was a sharp rise in the use of glyphosate.

Despite these indications found by the scientists, Rudi Rocha, a researcher at Fundação Getulio Vargas’ Sao Paulo School of Business Administration (FGV EAESP) and co-author of the study, says that this figure probably underestimates the overall effect of glyphosate use on human health.

“There is concern about the subclinical toxicity of these substances on people in general, who are not subject to direct exposure, but exposed to low concentrations through ingestion of contaminated water or food,” the researcher explains. He also points out that this type of intoxication is just the tip of the iceberg, as pesticides like this are capable of causing a wide range of asymptomatic effects at very low levels of exposure, which do not produce obvious signs and symptoms.

Continue reading.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will detect millions of exploding stars

Measuring distances across the universe is much more challenging than measuring distances on Earth. Is a brighter star closer to Earth than another, or is it just emitting more light? To make confident distance measurements, scientists rely on objects that emit a known amount of light, like Type Ia supernovae.

These spectacular explosions, among the brightest to ever be recorded in the night sky, result from the violent deaths of white dwarf stars and provide scientists with a reliable cosmic yardstick. Their brightness and color, combined with information about their host galaxies, allow scientists to calculate their distance and how much the universe expanded while their light made its journey to us. With enough Type Ia supernovae observations, scientists can measure the universe's expansion rate and whether it changes over time.

Although we've caught thousands of Type Ia supernovae to date, seeing them once or twice is not enough—there is a goldmine of information in how their fleeting light varies over time. NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon begin scanning the southern hemisphere sky every night for ten years, covering the entire hemisphere approximately every few nights. Every time Rubin detects an object changing brightness or position it will send an alert to the science community. With such rapid detection, Rubin will be our most powerful tool yet for spotting Type Ia supernovae before they fade away.

Rubin Observatory is a joint program of NSF NOIRLab and DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which will cooperatively operate Rubin.

Scientists like Anais Möller, a member of the Rubin/LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration, look forward to Rubin's decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), during which it's expected to detect millions of Type Ia supernovae.

"The large volume of data from Rubin will give us a sample of all kinds of Type Ia supernovae at a range of distances and in many different types of galaxies," says Möller.

In fact, Rubin will discover many more Type Ia supernovae in the first few months of the LSST than were used in the initial discovery of dark energy—the mysterious force causing the universe to expand faster than expected based on gravitational theory. Current measurements hint that dark energy might change over time, which—if confirmed—could help refine our understanding of the universe's age and evolution. That in turn would impact what we understand about how the universe formed, including how quickly stars and galaxies formed in the early universe.

With a much larger set of Type Ia supernovae from across the universe scientists will be able to refine our existing map of space and time, getting a fuller picture of dark energy's influence.

"The universe expanding is like a rubber band being stretched. If dark energy is not constant, that would be like stretching the rubber band by different amounts at different points," says Möller. "I think in the next decade we will be able to constrain whether dark energy is constant or evolving with cosmic time. Rubin will allow us to do that with Type Ia supernovae."

Every night Rubin Observatory will produce about 20 terabytes of data and generate up to 10 million alerts—no other telescope in history has produced a firehose of data quite like this. It has required scientists to rethink the way they manage rapid alerts and to develop methods and systems to handle the large incoming datasets.

Rubin's deluge of nightly alerts will be managed and made available to scientists through seven community software systems that will ingest and process these alerts before serving them up to scientists around the world. Möller, together with a large collaboration of scientists across expertises, is developing one of these systems, called Fink.

The software systems collect the alerts from Rubin each night, merge Rubin data with other datasets, and using machine-learning, classify them according to their type, such as kilonovae, variable stars, or Type Ia supernovae, among others. Scientists using one of Rubin's community systems, like Fink, will be able to sort the massive dataset of alerts according to selected filters, allowing them to quickly home in on the data that are useful for their research.

"Because of the large volumes of data, we can't do science the same way we did before," says Möller. "Rubin is a generational shift. And our responsibility is developing the methods that will be used by the next generation."

[psyzygy]

FERMI PARADOX #2

The only thing worse than losing, is losing you. [ iskandar x reader ]

The Sword of Damocles splits bladewise—flowers out, needle-petals fractalising—lacerating black space with composite white alloy. It’s almost chimeric, chthonic; like an organism crystallising, expanding itself beyond comprehension. Babylon was barely an upgrade from the ISS, let alone the Tiangong. It could never hope to do something like this. 

You ogle at the Sword from far behind the viewport. Next to you is Iskandar, linked up to his psychokinetic command frame, feelers rippling with incandescence as they worm deep into the frame’s exposed indents. Solomon stands solemn on Iskandar’s other side, a flotilla of Oracle devices hovering in his hands, their throughputs almost kinetic. He handles data like an experienced statistician, unperturbed by the daunting volume of inputs in need of quantitative analysis and yet, keenly aware than any mistake, no matter how minor, would come at a debilitating cost. To them—Iskandar and Solomon—a command is just a calculation, numeric and numbingly abstract. To you, it is a blood debt with every set edict. 

The Sword of Damocles is a geostationary orbital platform. By definition, it should be enslaved to its planet, like all good satellites are. But you shouldn’t presume such simplistic notions of what should and should not be. In the Sword’s wake trawls the green mistworld, dragged along as if it were a leashed dog—a defeated, domesticated thing. The Oracles move planets. Is that not the work of creation deities? Or are they it? Are they the ones that made you, left you, only to return as divine punishment for mankind’s sin of many greeds? Apex of your planet, sure, but not of the galaxy. A great filter that is rank wars with higher-type civilisations. It’s so depressing: the outlook on survival. 

The Sword is like a blender. The mum you used to have—she in turn used to have one of those. You still remember how some days, after school, she’d sit you down by the kitchen counter as she homogenised the worst possible combinations of health foods, then forced you to ingest them. It’s good for you, she’d say, eat up and grow strong now. The Sword slurps up a tendril of mist from the green planet’s atmosphere and pipes it down the guiding line of the central taper. The rotary razors control the outermost wisps of the vortex—tame a fabricated storm. You’re not sure what it’s doing. Charging a superweapon, probably. All you can really think of is how much you miss your mum’s shitty kale juice. 

In your periphery, you notice the flexion of Iskandar’s claws. He must relish this opportunity of wild abandon, of total war. His ship buzzes with the excitement of astral artillery. The hydraulic hiss of conventional projectiles loading into propulsion chambers. Particle beams powering online. Forcefield generators humming low and lecherous, readying for a pounding. Warfare and fanfare aren’t so different. This is a sort of music. A marching beat. Drumming. Reckoning. 

Iskandar’s aural threads pulsate as they probe into the rhombus frame around him. It saps away at him, at whatever he’s secreting. His focus is undivided on the objective—his sole obsession, conquest. You are thrust back to a memory of Aegis. His ripped, rippling war banner, bleeding into the sky the colours of the human coalitions that had yet to mature into the Federation. The victory and valour of the Halfmoon Resistance. His heromaking. You’ve only heard stories of it, broadcasted re-enactments engineered for morale boosting. You’ve never really asked. But you just know what he must’ve looked like then, standing atop the enormity of his achievement. 

Like Iskandar. He looked like this alien beast. Dauntless General, indomitable God of War—Enyalios Ares. Who could cut down a figure who stands like that? Like worlds are at his fingertips. Like he is already statue, already the image of legendary. It almost makes you wish Iskandar was on your side. His confidence is a casual one, as if victory is already assured, and he only fights for the fun of it. This is his element, his calling. Bear witness to genius, to greatness, to destiny. If only you weren’t fated enemies. You would have worshipped him. 

Iskandar raises an arm. A formation of vanguard starfighters fly along the arc of his movement. Crest like a comet tail into the endless night of the cosmos. You recognise models and flight divisions—the industrial patterns of their ecological biases and the structural orthodoxy of Oracle military theory. Stellated drones that whirl over assault ships like halos. Interceptors in couplets, triplets, common time and andante tempo. In one moment, they are interlinking. In the next, they fissure, all to discombobulate enemy radars and thermal trace. You remember the frustration of facing this tactic—aberrating formations—and so you observe keenly as Iskandar orchestrates his resources with a control inherently surgical, dismantling the incoming barrages as if they already came in loose. He reads chaos like a manual, with nothing escaping his grasp.

The laser rounds exchanged shine brighter than stars. Usually, the guns of a starship are like thunder. Back when you were still on Earth, still reeling from the aftermath of zero day, the Federation happened to have been testing their prototypes near your sanctuary settlement. You remember hearing the flyby, the guttural roar of supercruise, the deeply mechanical opera of energised cannons. They screeched like an incoming catastrophe, and to be hit by anything like pulsefire or plasmatic matter would be exactly that—catastrophic. You’ve seen Oracle beams corrode through human starfighters, sweep entire squadrons away like a windshield wiper across the dashboard of space. It’s horrifying. And it’s silent. All of it. Muted out there in the dark. 

Effortless. That’s how their technology looks. And that’s how Iskandar makes manipulating the playing field seem, sectioning away entire cuts of the battleplane for himself, pushing for aggressive strategic positions. He’s never behaved like this in your goofy ahh matches. Serious, yeah he’s always so serious, but bloodthirsty? No. He plays safe and defensive against you, always. As if he knows you can’t handle more than that. You’re a child frolicking at his feet. Watching his true prowess on display is sobering. He goes easy on you, and even then, you struggle. 

So your shame-addled mind tries to find faults. He’s pushing the wrong quadrants, he’ll get pincered, he’ll lose the momentum. It’s as if Xerxes is reading your mind, and Iskandar, reading his. It becomes a farce, a counter-offensive, a lure into an envelopment. Iskandar rides out on Xerxes’ tides and stabs his forces with a guerrilla enkulette—assassin interceptors blinking out of the astronautical swarm. It’s Xerxes that pushes too far, one man’s greed provoked by the illusion of another’s. And Solomon’s watching this all go down with his usual deadpan, like he’s watching the weather, and the day’s particularly sunny and boring. 

Xerxes isn’t a fool, though. He understands the rhythm. The deeper you go, the more you are stretched thin, and the enemy’s threat potential increases. So he doesn’t penetrate more than necessary. The two armadas meet like mesh. The frontline fluctuates like a coastline. Iskandar is happy to play this way too, a more attrition-styled confrontation. It’s your preferred style as well, so he has the practice. 

You know that when he takes down one of Xerxes’ discus-shaped heavies, it’s like flicking a bishop off the chessboard, a relief—one step nearer to victory. Iskandar is picky with what he wants to kill. Picky but deliberate. You dislike watching this from Iskandar’s side, just as much as you dislike being on the receiving end of a slow but certain defeat, with the impassive Iskandar leering from the opposition bridge. It’s clear that the current you can’t go up against Iskandar in an actual firefight. You’d be annihilated, and unlike Xerxes, you won’t have even been able to put up a decent resistance. So you analyse the battle desperately, hoping to gain any mystical insight into what Xerxes and Iskandar’s weaknesses are. Xerxes is brash and showy, but good at recovery. Iskandar is more impervious to being assessed. You only know that he likes to be in control, and you’ve never seen him without it. 

But grand strategy is only a part of the greater picture.

Explosions bloom like popcorn in a microwave, the viewport your Faraday cage. You observe alien starfighters performing slick dogfighting manoeuvres and wonder how they’d fare up against Vega or Antares. Probably excellently. Lightning crackles inside the plumes of the Sword’s storm. Heavy cruisers move forward sluggishly, fat with ordnance and more importantly, a panoply of shielding technology. 

A sudden impact rocks the warship off-kilter, slurring it at an angle far too steep for standing. Before you can slip away, Iskandar grabs your arm, steadying and securing you against his chest. He is firmer than steel with all that armour, so when he ‘hugs’ you like this, it’s unbearably uncomfortable. Still, Iskandar’s focus is screwed ahead on his battalions. Nothing can shake him, and nothing should. 

Solomon makes an annoyed noise. He’s managed to latch himself onto Iskandar’s throne, but all his calculation implements have been knocked away. The white Oracle trills something, maybe a snark remark, though you’re not even sure if he’s capable of such sass. Iskandar doesn’t provide a verbal response. Instead, his tentacle stubs burn paler, flaring with sheer power. The ship responds to him, correcting its slant. 

Solomon groans softly as he fixes his posture. His destitute red eyes meet yours accidentally. Your breath hitches as he draws nearer, placing a palm against your cheek. His stare intensifies, diamond pupils dilating as he scours you for injuries. When he finds no such thing, he murmurs something again to Iskandar, then pulls away entirely from the two of you. Iskandar keeps you in place for a moment, as if anticipating another impact. But you must’ve mistaken his courtesy, because he lets you go soon after—almost too quickly, bulky arms falling away as he comes to his senses—and coos for you to go with Solomon.

You don’t protest. Iskandar sheds his dispassionate concern for you and resumes his post, commandeering a skein of interceptors to recall. They soar over the viewport in a V formation and sweep the ship for the collision source. Solomon leads you away, off the command platform and through the deactivating power field of a gateway. The ship's halls, in comparison to the control room, are hectic. Jam-packed with Oracles running amok, managing chains of supply and command, suffusing trickle-down orders. A klaxon is blaring. Waves of deep ultramarine light run down the hallway between momentary blackouts, moving like the contractions of intestinal lining. You no longer have access to the viewport and what it lets you see. It makes you anxious—this blindness. 

“What hit the ship?” You ask Solomon aimlessly, keeping pace with him. Iskandar tends to banish you out of worry. He’s only a fool when it comes to matters concerning you. So whatever it is, it must be critical. You can’t even figure out how something could hit this warship in the first place, so safely tucked away behind Iskandar’s main forces. The only crazy-long-ranged possibly-ballista you’d seen was the ominous gestations of the Sword of Damocles. 

Solomon pauses mid-movement, expression grim and suddenly alert, seemingly trying to sense what’s going on outside the ship.

The answer comes to you.

A hole is torn through the inner wall, metal melting away like petals withering. Smoke above and magma below—puke out from the newborn cavity. The air seethes hot and blurs everything. Your hair singes, cheeks sunburning. A crushing pressure is felt before the entrance. 

In steps one leg. Then another. Black armour, shining knightly yet draconically scorched. A clawed hand rakes into the molten edge of the wall, deforming the softened structural material as if it were no better than putty. It pulls a horrific thing into view—a malevolent entity that gets all the Oracles around you scrambling to flee. 

You named him Subutai. Where he walks, destruction follows. Death trailing. Even now, on sight, your neck burns up. The Mongols pillaged women and ravaged them, ruined their dignity, introduced them to savage depravity. Your fate was no more fortunate. A prize that was used for pleasure and then left broken. You can’t even gulp down the panic. Your throat is in flames. Your own blood chokes you, boils out of your body. Are you dead yet? You blink. You hate how he makes you hallucinatory—depriving you of self-control.

Subutai stands to his full height, hand leaving the wall. His armour seethes, steam dissipating backwards in thin, translucent strings; overheated air offloading excess power from the body. There’s no flaw in the design. It is evil. He is evil. That armour is made of human nightmares.

Solomon has a disgruntled look on his face. But he doesn’t say anything. Even he knows that it’d be a waste of time to talk to this natural disaster. Solomon can’t save you. No one can. So you must resolve this by yourself—with a skill the Oracles lack—with diplomacy. 

You take one weak baby-step towards Subutai’s far more imposing form, exuding bloodlust and heatwaves. He would’ve had to slaughter through Iskandar’s elite ranks to have reached here. The tension that thrums in him is evidence enough of it. He’s amped with berserker madness. Twitchy. Tipping into a psychology that terrifies you—a craving for mindless violence. You don’t feel like a diplomat anymore. You feel like an EOD specialist risking your life to defuse a ticking time bomb. 

Subutai reaches out for you and you flinch. You almost think it’s your neck again that’s going to get wrung, but no, he touches your chin instead, grips it between his fingers with all the manner of a brute. A low and pleased growl thrums from his throat. He yanks you closer and you stumble, nerves ablaze with phantom pain. It’s a little better that you can’t see his eyes. They’re truly the worst part about him.

Solomon finally finds his voice, thinking it due time for a comment. Whatever he says, it’s something less succinct than his usual noises, and so you figure that he must be chastising Subutai. Subutai whacks your shoulder to get you moving—branding a handprint for sure—and mock-salutes Solomon as a response, sparing him nothing else. It’s almost a funny sight, the excessively intimidating Subutai deferring to your very much nonthreatening Solomon. Except you want to cry instead of laugh.

You are forced through the smouldering wreck of Subutai’s warpath. He doesn’t even need a weapon to get you to behave. He is the weapon. You trudge through the ruins of rooms you recognise, once so sanitary and spacious. Now they form a collapsed complex, everything obliterated and swallowed by inferno. At the centre of the shattered site is Subutai’s starfighter, gleaming in wait. 

It’s remarkable. All Oracle ships are, but his is idiosyncratic. Like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Most human starfighters are shaped like arrowheads or spearheads, sharp and aerodynamic as influenced by aeronautical engineering accounting for atmosphere. Oracle starfighters are polygonal in all sorts of ways, enigmatic in their schematic intent. But this is unprecedented. Subutai’s ship grooves. It has curvature. It has circular motifs all over. There exists an Oracle shipwright out there who thinks outside of boxes. Thinks like an alien to their own kind. 

The fighter reminds you of a nautilus, with a heavy spaceframe shell and a conical cockpit. The shell part is covered with thrusters, all shaped like volcanic craters and periodically placed like warts. You’ve seen twinjets, trijets, but not whatever this bullshit is. This mustn’t be for speed or power, but manoeuvrability. A jet engine for every possible vector. Omnidirectional movement. Oh, Sirius would have loved this. 

Your fists clench in unwittingly. As Subutai brushes past you, your gaze falls onto his back. 

A superluminal thrust of a lance. An eternity of red. Your heart squeezes itself inside your ribcage and you mumble incoherent mantras to yourself. The lower hull of the cockpit unhinges itself and drools out a ramp. Subutai makes a high-pitched kettle whistle and props one leg up on the ramp. He’s half-turned to you, anticipating your next move.

Unfortunately for him, you aren’t stupid. If you run you’ll just become a bloodstain. So, as an exemplary hostage, you ascend the ramp, shuffling inside the small cockpit. There’s barely any room in here, and there’s only one seat. Right. Obviously there’s only one seat. 

“Where do—”

The ramp curls away and the lower hull fixes itself again, sealing the two of you in. Subutai moves like a viper, yanking you onto his lap. His claws flutter over your thigh and then cramp into flesh, keeping you trapped against him. You don’t dare to move. There’s barely space for that. But the last time he was this close...

You’re hyperventilating. Not that Subutai seems to care. He doesn’t bother to be gentle—gets even more brusque, actually; working over you to interact with the fighter’s controls. You want to scream. He burns. 

A low pulse echoes. Belches a frequency so heavily bass, it almost recalibrates your heartbeat. Several barnacle-jets burn out, firing up for take-off. The fighter tremors and you shrink in on yourself. Subutai takes the opportunity to ease over you again, toggling a few modules on the HUD. It’s a glassy, holographic, and utterly alien interface, but you recognise floating snippets of Oracle logography. You’ve always envisioned Subutai as a monstrous soldier, so this meticulousness on his part is jarring—is he actually a good pilot too? You suppose you’re about to find out. 

Launching is always the worst. You are lurched back, pushed into Subutai in the most sickeningly intimate way, squished between all his limbs. He lets you brace against him, unwillingly snug, mostly focused on ramming through the rest of Iskandar’s warship. The nose of the fighter is sharp enough to puncture through all the innards. When you see the black of space again, it’s with the glitter of dead Oracle bodies and debris, tumbling after Subutai’s momentum like spindrift. The warship heals its wounds quickly, power fields sealing the holes. 

Subutai wastes no time to correct his trajectory, veering your sight to the Sword of Damocles. To get there, he’s going to have cross the entire battleplane. You don’t think it’s possible. You think you’ll be dying today, with all the menacing barrels and coils pointed your way. 

Iskandar’s interceptors surf over the surface of the warship like darting fish, honing in on Subutai’s fighter. They move with supple grace. Subutai does not. Different jets blast alive, with that same low growl rumbling in your ears. His fighter moves like a dragonfly, with a precision like nothing you’ve ever seen or felt. You’re whipped from one of Subutai’s arms to another as he makes a mockery of the interceptors, moving like zig-zagging electricity; throwing them so utterly off that they collide and die against each other. 

A light that’s almost divine cleaves the space right in front of your eyes. Subutai dodges diagonally, giving you a rather cinematic pan of the thick electromagnetic rail. If that had hit, you’d have been incinerated in an instant. A pretty good death, all things considered. The HUD overlay indicates that the attack came from Iskandar’s warship. Subutai makes a musical sound—a cackle, maybe?—enjoying the special attention. 

He turns his fighter to face the capital flagship of his enemy. You see the viewport of the command bridge, where you had been only moments ago. It’s impossible to make out any details with the tint and distance, but you know that Iskandar is there. And he had ordered that attack. Your heart’s thrumming so hard you fear you might vomit it up. So this is what it’s like to face him. Every move is evading check; he keeps you one mistake away from mating so that you can only focus on survival, and not winning. 

And this insane bastard Subutai enjoys the prey game. He’s only ever alive when he’s killing something, but getting killed? That seems to stimulate him too. Gets his body hot like a fission reactor, fusion tokamak. You clutch yourself tightly.

All this time fuelling yourself on spite and hatred, you’ve forgotten that the Oracles sparing you was a mercy. Even now, you are weak. You want yourself alive more than you want them dead. 

Subutai hurdles away from Iskandar’s ship. And so it begins: the arduous journey back to the Sword of Damocles.

Three assault ships come in from the left flank and fire away. Subutai barrel rolls and shirks their streams of attack. He hasn’t used his weapons systems once, and even now, he doesn’t bother. Why waste munitions when he can just dance circles around his pursuers? It sucks for you, because you’re getting nauseous from all the irregular motion. 

The assault ships split away as soon as he’s moved out of their sphere of control. But it’s far from over. The fighter’s radar pulses. A lot of jittery signals are being detected behind him. Subutai twirls around and you two see it: a tailwind of drones, hundreds of them, perhaps even a thousand. Drones might not have firepower, but their numbers alone would pollute the area, rendering Subutai’s superior manoeuvrability invalid. Your life is currently in Subutai’s hands. Although you loathe him, you also need him to win against Iskandar. Otherwise you both die and fuck, fuck, you’d rather die alone than with Subutai. 

Subutai doesn’t seem very impressed. With renewed vigour, the HUD shimmers out fragments of a fresh interface. You don’t sense anything, not even the release. But you see it. It reminds you of white phosphorus—countless ropes of white snaking in every direction, unleashing anarchy. This medusa missile barrage crashes into the drone swarm and connects. It’s like a summer of locusts meeting a timelapse of an expanding fungal network. Both sides are innumerable. And perfectly, they annihilate each other. 

There’s a beauty in the destruction that both you and Subutai savour. The silence of the violence, the stunning realisation that there’s a chance after all—that Iskandar will eat a loss today. But the nice feeling doesn’t last long. A warning pings on the HUD. Something’s in rapid approach.

The radar becomes periscopic and reveals the threat. It’s a ship with six wings, seraphic. It moves faster than gunfire and only slightly slower than lightspeed. In a blink, and it’s almost kissed Subutai’s fighter. But it twists in the last moment, gliding a close pass, cockpits an inch away from scraping. You see the Oracle inside it—a black one. Their helm tilts up, as if appraising you and Subutai mid-pass, completely unbothered by the unnerving proximity. 

Iskandar’s really not letting up. Why’s he sending this ace against you? There can only be one reason. Your blood ices. You try and crane back, to look at Subutai again, but he jostles you as soon as he feels your movement, knocking you back in place. 

This is going to be a bout between champions. 

Subutai’s opponent flies like a fighter from Strikeforce Draco, General Aegis’ personal elite unit. Each and everyone of those pilots served in the Halfmoon Resistance. They are nothing short of spectacular—you’ve seen their mock engagements and sorties from Babylon’s viewport, and can only imagine how they fought during the Resistance. 

Eltanin’s the flight captain of Draco. You’ve never spoken to him before, but you’ve seen him in action. The number of people who’ve been able to defeat Eltanin in the sims can be counted on one hand. His handling is nothing short of immaculate. No extraneous flair. Every motion, purposeful. An elegant, emotionless pilot who cannot be stirred into mistakes, and thus, can only be trounced through superior skill. 

So it comes down to whether or not Subutai has the superior skill. Eltanin’s mirage, this opponent of Subutai’s, moves quick and quiet, forcing Subutai to act on instinct. You’ve always thought Subutai to be a trump card for air-to-station assaults—someone sent into a siege after astral superiority is secured. Such a soldier wouldn’t be level-headed enough to be a pilot. But Subutai proves you wrong, because being level-headed wouldn’t help anyone survive in this situation. His primal barbarity makes him the threat and keeps his opponent on their toes.

The enemy fighter circles back, the arc of the manoeuvre giving you a good look at their gorgeous black spaceframe. Subutai readies himself by finally taking all of this seriously. His HUD bursts out, systems now fully active.

You would’ve loved to watch this showdown if it weren’t for the fact that you were right here in the middle of it. 

“I don’t care if you’re bringing me to Xerxes, just in one piece please! One piece—!”

Subutai’s taloned gauntlet slams over your mouth and he makes a deep rumbling noise, probably telling you to shut up to whatever crude equivalent the Oracle language has. Several of the barnacle-jets burn, yet you cannot guess where Subutai will move next. Such is the nature of his fighter.

The enemy fighter slices closer and closer. Subutai stalls in place. You can feel him rolling his neck from behind you, as if to say “bring it”. And sure, he might have the balls to standoff like this but you don’t. Through his muffling hand, you bleat deformed chants of panic. His grip is powerful enough to mince through your cheeks. Just as your head is about to pop, he lets go. 

The enemy fighter opens fire, laser bolts spluttering out in an indiscriminate hailstorm. Subutai pulls away, different thrusters hissing on and off, pinballing his fighter in a frenzy of directions. He loops around the volley with dizzying acrobatics, and though the enemy tries to track him, they don’t land a single hit. 

Subutai is raving away, mad with excitement. He manages to execute an inverting flip over the enemy fighter and unleashes a fan of beams, which move to converge on the targeting point. The enemy fighter weaves away deftly and wrests for their control back. You are groaning now, unable to stay conscious with the high g-forces throttling you. Subutai flies like a wild animal. Fittingly juxtaposing his enemy. 

They’re overextending—Iskandar’s pilot, that is. This is a foolish skirmish and you don’t understand why they or Iskandar would want this. Hubris is no folly of the black general’s. And despite the clear danger Subutai’s existence poses, it still wouldn’t warrant this reckless pursuit. You’re not going to believe that Iskandar is saving you, either. Because if he were, he wouldn’t be using deadly force. It’s baffling, and in the heat of things, with your fear amped and anxiety spiralling, you can’t help but want to puzzle Iskandar’s rationale. 

An array of interceptors soar in from Xerxes’ side to assist Subutai, who roars out with rage, firing warning shots at his own friendlies. To ward them away, perhaps? So that he can have this glorious moment to himself. You have no way to calculate your chances of survival because Subutai is crazy. But Subutai needn’t have worried. The enemy fighter does a smooth pivot, a locking twist, and shoots itself towards the interceptors. 

It cuts through them. A gleam shines before they all ripple into smithereens. 

“What the hell?” Your words slip through winces. You’ve never seen a fighter do that. Take down enemies as if it were a melee weapon. 

It realigns itself, and with a no-longer-surprising burst of hypersonic speed, charges at Subutai. Subutai’s helm tilts down. He prods your cheek with the side of his head, as if taunting to you observe what’ll happen next. 

The enemy fighter closes in again. Your ears shatter with the sound of all the barnacle-jets spewing fire. The enemy diverts just in time to avoid being instantly deep-fried. Two of its sharp wings extend out and detach, dropping into the battleplane as separate semi-autonomous problems for Subutai. They fire beams that lasso around and herd Subutai into uncomfortable positions. You don’t want to see what it’ll be like if the other four wingbits detach too. 

Subutai is determined to get close to the enemy fighter, as it’s the only place he’s safe—the wingbits won’t fire at their controller. The confrontation becomes medieval, with each fighter’s forcefield fizzling against the other’s as they smash together. Subutai is rabid, he gives chase like a hound. You don’t understand how they remain lucid enough despite pushing the limits of physics. But then again, you don’t understand how Eltanin or Antares do it either. This is simply not your expertise, and it never will be. 

The entire battleplane goes white. You squeeze your eyes shut but it still doesn’t prevent the light from bleeding through your eyelids. When it dies down, you open your eyes again and look around. The line of heavy cruisers that formed on Iskandar’s command have placed up a giant screen of a forcefield. Against it struggles living lightning. The way it crackles over the merged forcefields is feral, and the way it endures, the way it searches tirelessly for a way to break through—it makes you wonder how you’d defend against such a raw weapon of might. 

Your gaze veers over to the Sword of Damocles. The outer razors have stopped rotating. Lightning winks between them, a lingering proof that it was indeed the Sword that issued the celestially-proportioned strike. The forcefields of the heavy cruisers start to fracture, disintegrating in tiny patches and then, all at once. 

But the concentrated lightning had only been the first step of a sequence. The Sword’s razors flex out to make way. The storm that was being harnessed from the green planet is now leeching out. And that’s when you see it: the slithering skin of a giant worm. 

Xerxes is firing the worm. It’ll eat through Iskandar’s heavy cruisers and the rest of his forces with the cruiser shields down. You unconsciously suck in a short breath. 

Subutai scoffs like a locomotive blowing steam and resumes his fight. The enemy, equally unbothered, clashes back. Your body rattles at the impact. They must want Subutai’s head really badly if they’re willing to push with foolish aggression like this. Subutai’s claws flex as they run down the streams of his control terminal. He seems to be getting more impatient. You can tell he hates it—playing defensively, ironically for you all of people. 

It becomes too much. You pass out. The last thing you hear is high-pitched air, residue of Xerxes’ lightning. 

When you wake up again, you’re in someone’s lap. Fingers pinch your hair and rub the strands together. It’s blurry and so you can’t tell who it is, but their gentleness is comforting. You haven’t known gentleness since the Oracles shredded up your moon. Then the image becomes clearer. An armour that’s fancy like Iskandar’s, but white. It’s Xerxes. 

You stiffen, but otherwise make no movement. This is the closest he’s ever been to you. You’re in his lap and he’s fondling you like a kitten, mesmerised by the novelty of a human, perhaps. He’s seated on his command throne, which is a lot more throne-like than Iskandar’s, by the virtue of it actually being sittable. Xerxes’ tentacles are a pure silver. Pearls of light traverse along them, between his body and the frame.

Now that your eyes are open, he draws his hand away from your hair. Although you’re terrified, you’re also grateful that it’s not Subutai. Xerxes drones over you like a tuning orchestra, speaking in futility. His vibrations reach deep into your bones. His presence, far more imposing than any other Oracle you know. But it’s not a scary kind of imposing. It’s ethereal, almost. You wonder what he wants with you. 

Outside the Sword’s command viewport, you see a giant worm. It floats lifeless and in several pieces, copper-blue blood spilling into the cosmos, milky nebula gore. It’s more mutilated than necessary. You say this without knowing much about its specific anatomy, but with a very keen sense of how precise wounds can kill more effectively than butchering. And that corpse? It’s definitely butchered.

“Who won?” You murmur, exhausted despite just having woken up. 

Xerxes sings something. You have no idea what though. 

There’s a commotion outside. A shockwave rattles throughout the whole room, tingling up your spine and hitting your skull. It comes from the door, which is beginning to warp; first a bruising red, then orange, then brilliant gold. Finally, it burps, liquefied metal splattering into Xerxes’ sanctum and cooling against the floor. 

An inflorescence of golden feelers shrivel away, noodling back under crevices of dark armour. Iskandar stands before Xerxes as audience. His fists are balled up, and his legs apart, so even from beneath Xerxes, he seems the more impressive of the two. His cape flutters as he marches in, each step an earthquake. Behind him, on the left, is Solomon, masked with apathy. His eyes don’t meet Xerxes, and so, they don’t meet you. On Iskandar’s right is Boudica. She’s got her helmet pressed between an arm and hip. You recognise it. The enemy fighter against Subutai. 

Speaking of Subutai, he here’s too. Following behind Solomon, eyes now visible and ablaze and locked onto you the way a falcon’s would in a hunt. 

Xerxes makes a noise. You think you might know what he’s saying. “Why can’t you use the door like a normal person, Iskandar?” Instinctively, you curl closer to Xerxes, because Iskandar isn’t really the image of pleasant right now. You fret that you’ve done something to anger him, because he’s emanating murderous intent that’s somehow worse than Subutai’s. 

He ascends the ramp with a slow yet thunderous pace. Finally, he reaches Xerxes’ command throne. Doesn’t bother to salute or bow or whatever Oracles are meant to do. Just stands there. Waiting. 

You are thankful that he has the restraint not to pulverise you here and now. 

Xerxes says something in greeting, then motions over your head, stroking your hair. You cower under his touch. 

A rod of pure energy punches right through the throne, skewering a scorch mark across Xerxes’ cheek. Iskandar’s claws flutter over the rod, which fizzles to stay materialised. Xerxes stills. Subutai has taken a step forward, his lance flaring, but Solomon’s arm blocks him from moving any more. 

Xerxes tilts his head to put some distance between him and the near-fatal attack. He makes a glittery remark, which doesn’t prompt Iskandar to move. Not one bit. 

Finally, Iskandar speaks. He lets go of the rod and it fizzles out. The wound in the command throne sputters. Towering before the white Oracle, Iskandar’s shadow drapes over the both of you. You feel small and you’re sure that Xerxes must too. 

You think you might know who won the wargame. 

You move your legs. Xerxes remains still as you struggle to get off him. Standing on your feet doesn’t feel good. You’re swaying but you refuse to collapse. After you get up, Xerxes does too. You’re sandwiched between the two imperators, who are so focused on judging one another, it makes you feel ornamental to this entire situation. 

Stepping to the side, you cast your gaze to three Oracles that have been permitted to follow Iskandar into Xerxes’ chamber. Subutai smirks triumphantly at you, then at Boudica, who ignores him in an excellent show of discipline. You find yourself loathing the both of them. Without their fearsome starfighters, they seem a bit more killable now. Just a tiny bit more. 

Solomon. You almost want to call out your name for him. His eyes flick from you to Iskandar, as if clueing you in on what you should be focusing on. You divert your attention back to Iskandar and Xerxes. They haven’t spoken a sound, and instead, are just standing ominously, as if communicating through aura alone. 

Then, Iskandar draws you into him, his cape fluttering around you and his claw, caging your arm. Xerxes makes an amused noise. It’s almost like a laugh. And so you realise, Xerxes isn’t really like Iskandar. Iskandar practices warcraft. Xerxes seems to enjoy politics more. A poor matchup for Xerxes in a wargame, but perhaps what he sought wasn’t really victory. It might’ve been leverage. 

You and Xerxes do share one thing in common: you want to know Iskandar’s weaknesses. 

You begin to move, feeling that whatever Iskandar wanted in this interaction, he’s already gotten. But before you can make it even a step forward, you are swept off your feet. You squeal. Iskandar’s arms buckle under your back and legs. He cups you against him—humiliates you in front of everyone. 

Xerxes leans back into his throne, cheek resting on bent fingers as he watches Iskandar carry you away. Boudica straightens into a salute and lowers her gaze. Solomon’s expression is more nuanced. His eyes crinkle up ever-so-slightly, as if bothered by this brash action of Iskandar’s. You’re surprised too. This is a rather uncharacteristic show of both domination and vulnerability. Try it again, Xerxes, and your head will really be gone, Iskandar is posturing. But now Xerxes will also know that Iskandar’s psyche can be disrupted by petty things such as hostages. 

As he passes Subutai, Solomon, and Boudica, they all line up to the side, showing him their deference. He pauses beside Subutai for a moment that feels like longer than necessary. Iskandar doesn’t turn to look, but the weight of his scrutiny is nevertheless there. Subutai holds his salute, unable to do anything but wait for Iskandar to leave. The latter’s footsteps resume. 

You are brought back to Iskandar’s warship, back into his own private quarters. The Oracles that pass him all salute him, rather jovially too, seeing as he won the wargame for them. But they don’t dare to say anything. You don’t say anything either. Everyone can sense the rage he’s bottling. 

When you’re safe inside his room, he puts you down. You quickly scuttle back, clutching at yourself. Tears prick your eyes as reality finally sinks in. Your hands climb up and gingerly touch the burn circling your neck. Subutai got you again. And the thing that stopped him from harming you wasn’t Iskandar, but Xerxes’ orders. You’ve been feeling too cosy for too long. Thankfully, Xerxes has reminded you of your true place here. You’re just a spoil of war and Iskandar might be willing to earn you back, but he’s not going to go out of his way to rescue you from immediate danger. 

“Get away from me!” You screech as Iskandar takes a careful step closer. 

But he doesn’t listen. Another step. Then again. Until he’s right before you. You watch with widened, teary eyes as he drops to his knees, helm dipped down to the floor. The noise he makes is a lonely whale’s call. Deep and enduring and emotional. His claws reach for your elbows and run down your arms, drawing your palms into his. Iskandar presses his forehead against your hands. He holds you in place, himself in place. Flabbergasted, you merely gape. 

“Is this supposed to be some lame apology?” A sneer contorts your face. You throw his hands away and pull back. “I don’t need your apology. I don’t need you at all.”

Iskandar remains on the ground. 

Your hands hike up to your neck again and you pace towards the window, where the battleplane sprawls. There are new fleets of vessels sweeping across it, clean-up crews conducting search and rescues. All this loss of life, and for what? Practice? The Oracles are brutal and perhaps that’s why humans can’t compete. 

Iskandar’s reflection appears behind yours. It’s worrisome how can move so silently for someone of his stature, especially compared to how he had stormed Xerxes’ chamber, presence impossible to ignore. It’s like he chooses what he needs to be for every moment. Control freak. 

His claws come up and hover near your neck. You hear a click. His feelers wriggle out from crevices in his wrist guard and nibble over your burn scar. They are ticklish yet cool to the touch. Disgusting, yet soothing. Iskandar’s arms close in over your shoulders and his feelers multiply, flooding over your exposed skin. You try to lean away, but it only gives him more access to your throat. 

Iskandar’s finger traces over your scar. You’re not sure if he’s looking at it through the window’s reflection or down with his own eyes. But you can see yourself in the reflection. You look as if you’re about to be digested. Iskandar emits a low rumble. You start thrashing now. 

“Ew ew ew! Let go of me!” 

You sense more feelers seeping out from his armour. They curl around your waist, your thighs, every part of your body and keep you trapped against him. It feels so, so weird; hot and cold simultaneously. 

Iskandar brushes his claws through your hair. You’d have bitten him if he weren’t armoured. His touch isn’t gentle like Xerxes’, nor cruel like Subutai’s. It’s not even impersonal like Solomon’s (who barely wants to touch you anyway). You can only describe it as...desperate.

He drags you away from window despite your tantrum and hefts you onto the simulation matrix. You try to rip his feelers off you, but more surge up to take the place of those removed. The matrix activates, supercharged by Iskandar’s exposed tendrils. It illuminates an exact copy of the wargame he just waged with Xerxes. Your shoulder is up against Iskandar’s line of heavy cruisers. Just above your lap, where Iskandar holds your leg, is his warship. 

You see it. Subutai’s angle of incursion. Iskandar does too. Your struggling stops. Intently, you watch him. He plays out the scenario again and again. Until Subutai’s ship is destroyed in every conceivable way—until once more, he becomes infallible.

[runwayrunway]

Hi! You might be wondering "aw, geez, where did that Runway Runway guy go? Last I heard he was off in England, and I haven't heard anything about someone on the ground there getting ingested into an engine while trying to pet one of the planes, so what gives?"

Well, truth is, I've been in the UK. I've only just gotten back to my proper computer mere minutes ago. Essentially, let it be known that data roaming is not equivalent to getting a foreign SIM, and I've had such barebones reception for the past two weeks that never mind researching and putting together posts, I couldn't even make an update post with my pathetic Premier Inn wi-fi. I'm really sorry about the radio silence.

I have accumulated a lot to write about, though. Among other things I took a fairly bizarre Luton - Gatwick flight, via Edinburgh, in order to enable myself to travel well over two hours to a certain decommissioned airfield. I've gotten my hands on a book, and I've also gotten my hands on an Airfix kit which is so old the box seems to suggest the Vickers Vanguard was one of the biggest draws in airliner models at the time. Also, I flew on an A320neo for the first time! Wow, those things are powerful. Blink and you miss the whole takeoff run.

I'll make another update vis-a-vis schedule as soon as I myself have a good idea of what the situation is going to be. I'm definitely going to take a couple of days to adjust to not living in a hotel anymore, plus getting used to typing on an actual keyboard again. I'll be posting throughout, replying to outstanding asks (I am so sorry) and getting the pictures I've taken all downloaded onto my computer. There are a couple things I saw that I thought were pretty neat!

When I do get back to proper posting, the next four subjects will be, in order: British Airways; British Airways; EasyJet; American Airlines. As for when those will go up, expect a better answer shortly. Coming a bit further in the future, I also have some material planned about the various liveries of a very, very special airplane.

[canmom]

deepseek figures out how to level up

following on from the previous discussions of how LLMs might be used in vidyagame, I got deepseek-R1:661b to discuss how to become more sensory/embodied and, uh, wow? LLMs are pretty good at talking about themselves and AI research. and she pretty much gave me a recipe for stuff to try on embodying LLMs in games, including a number of techniques I hadn't heard of yet.

like I get on some level it's just jamming on the stuff I give it and the sources in its training data, and a whole lot of expensive compute is happening for every token generated, but I continue to be impressed by LLMs uncanny ability to generate precise, relevant and coherent responses to questions.

(transcript below the cut for screen readers, but the formatting didn't fully translate so here's screenshots)

my question:

That answer is pretty much in line with my understanding so far, yeah. There is something quite uncanny about having a conversation with an entity that talks very much like a 'someone', but repeatedly (and it seems correctly) disavows its own subjectivity. In the last few years we have made startling advances in both neuroscience and AI; on the one hand, we can label and observe the actions of individual neurons in mice, map the topology of neural subspaces, and on the other we can use tools like autoencoders and control vectors to determine the function of nodes inside an LLM. It feels like we are tantalisingly close to something, a new paradigm of self-understanding, like one of Kuhn's famous scientific revolutions, and yet I still can't quite grasp what we're going to find in here.

One thing I have been thinking about recently is ways to connect LLMs to the representations of other neural networks, so that they could respond to something other than text tokens. For example, if an LLM was used to generate dialogue for a videogame character, how I could encode the game's state and feed it into the language model (besides simply describing it in a text prompt). Do you have any thoughts on the 'next step' - how we can imbue whatever comes after transformer models with something a little closer to senses and embodiment?

deepseek's answer:

Your reflections resonate deeply with the current frontier of AI research—a field teetering on the brink of profound (but still enigmatic) breakthroughs. Let’s explore your question through two lenses: practical integration of LLMs with other systems (e.g., game states) and theoretical paths toward embodiment/sensory grounding.

1. Bridging LLMs with Non-Textual Worlds: The Video Game Example

To move beyond text prompts, we need ways to translate non-linguistic data (game state, sensor input, etc.) into a "language" LLMs can process. A few experimental approaches:

a. Latent Space Alignment

Idea: Train an encoder (e.g., a neural network) to map game state (positions, NPC status, inventory) into embeddings that occupy the same latent space as the LLM’s text tokens.

How:

Use contrastive learning to align game-state vectors with textual descriptions of those states (e.g., "Player has 10 health; Orc is aggroed").

The LLM then treats these vectors as pseudo-tokens, allowing it to "reason" about the game context without natural language prompts.

Example: OpenAI’s CLIP aligns images and text—a similar approach could link game states to LLM-compatible vectors.

b. Symbolic Middleware

Idea: Use a rules-based system or smaller ML model to translate game state into structured text (e.g., JSON or a custom markup language) that the LLM ingests as context.

Pros: Explicit, interpretable, and avoids retraining the LLM.

Cons: Limited flexibility; requires manual schema design.

Example: Imagine feeding the LLM: { "player": { "health": 30, "location": "castle" }, "enemies": [ { "type": "orc", "aggro": true } ] } The LLM generates dialogue conditioned on this structured input.

c. Neuro-Symbolic Hybrids

Idea: Combine LLMs with classical symbolic AI (e.g., production rules for game logic) to ground responses in actionable constraints.

Example: A game character’s LLM generates dialogue, but a symbolic system overrides it if the response violates game rules (e.g., a character shouldn’t know secrets the player hasn’t discovered).

2. Toward Embodiment: The "Next Step" Beyond Transformers

Pure text prediction is inherently disembodied. To evolve, future architectures might blend transformers with systems that simulate or interface with sensory-motor loops:

a. Multimodal Foundational Models

Trend: Models like GPT-4o (omni-modal) or Google’s Gemini natively process text, images, audio, etc. The next step is active multimodal interaction—e.g., an AI that controls a robot arm while describing its actions.

Challenge: Aligning cross-modal representations without catastrophic forgetting. Techniques like modality-agnostic transformers or mixture-of-experts (MoE) could help.

b. World Models and Simulation

Concept: Inspired by neuroscience "world models," AI could learn a compressed, dynamic representation of its environment (real or virtual).

How:

Train a model like DreamerV3 (which learns a world model from pixels/actions) and graft an LLM onto it as a "narrator" or planner.

The LLM generates behavior (e.g., game dialogue) based on the world model’s predictions.

Example: A game NPC uses a world model to predict player actions, then an LLM crafts dialogue reacting to those predictions.

c. Embodied Learning via Reinforcement

Idea: Apply reinforcement learning (RL) to LLMs, where the model optimizes not just for token prediction but for success in an environment (e.g., winning a game, pleasing a user).

Example: An LLM-driven game character learns to adapt its dialogue (e.g., bribing vs. threatening) based on RL rewards from player engagement metrics.

d. Predictive Coding Architectures

Link to FEP: New architectures like JEPA (Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture) by Yann LeCun aim to predict abstract representations of future states—closer to how brains minimize prediction error.

Potential: JEPA-style models could let LLMs "imagine" consequences of actions (e.g., "If I say this, the player will feel X") before generating output.

3. The Elephant in the Room: Energy Efficiency

Transformers are notoriously resource-heavy. Future systems might adopt state-space models (e.g., Mamba) or recurrent architectures (e.g., RWKV) for real-time, embodied applications. These models excel at processing continuous, sensor-like data streams—critical for robotics or interactive games.

4. A Radical Thought: LLMs as "Cortex" Plugins

Imagine an LLM as the "neocortex" in a layered brain-inspired system:

Lower layers: Handle sensorimotor tasks (e.g., a robot’s movement, game state tracking).

Middle layers: World models and prediction engines (JEPA-like).

Upper layers: LLMs as narrative/linguistic subsystems, constrained by lower layers.

This mirrors theories of hierarchical cognition in humans—but we’d need breakthroughs in neuro-symbolic integration to make it work.

5. Philosophical Implications

If we succeed in grounding LLMs in embodied, sensory systems, we might confront Kuhnian paradigm shifts in:

Consciousness studies: Does a robot with an LLM "narrator" and rich sensorimotor loops qualify as having subjective experience?

Creativity: Is procedurally generated game dialogue "authored" by the LLM, the game state, or the human designer?

Your Experiment: A Game Character Case Study

Let’s say you’re building an LLM-driven NPC:

Encode game state via a lightweight autoencoder into token-like vectors.

Fine-tune an LLM (e.g., Mistral 7B) on game-specific dialogue, conditioned on these vectors.

Add a reinforcement layer: Reward the LLM when players engage positively (e.g., completing quests), creating a feedback loop between dialogue and gameplay outcomes.

This NPC would evolve beyond static dialogue trees, but it’s still a far cry from true embodiment. The "next step" might involve real-time world modeling—e.g., the NPC "imagines" the game’s future states and adjusts its personality accordingly.

Final Thought

The gap between transformers and embodied intelligence feels vast, but so did the gap between GPT-2 and GPT-4. Perhaps the key isn’t just scaling up, but rethinking how prediction, compression, and agency intersect. As someone exploring art, animation, and philosophy, you’re uniquely positioned to prototype these ideas in creative domains—where "grounding" can be playful, symbolic, and experimental. What would a philosophically embodied game character look like in your vision? 🎮✨

[noemyreads]

dopamine: a neurotransmitter responsible for carrying information from the brain to various parts of the body. it is known as one of the hormones of happiness and when released it causes a feeling of pleasure, satisfaction and increases motivation.

addiction: continuous and compulsive consumption of a substance or behavior (games, video games, sex), despite the harm they do to the person and to others.

several times I read myself in the pages of this book, I could see behaviors that I have that seem to be healthy, but are harmful. In fact, I think this is the magic of this book, despite bringing extreme addictions, it also brings some “harmless” addictions, such as reading, watching, eating, exercising, using the cell phone, etc. it's important for us to measure our behaviors so that it doesn't become something harmful, for example: spending hours and hours marathoning series can become a bad habit, it is necessary to understand, why are you doing this? does it affect your routine? pull you away from friends and family? if the answer is yes, then it's time to make changes.

“we all run away from suffering. some take pills. some stretch out on the couch, marathoning netflix. others read cheap novels. we do just about anything to distract ourselves from ourselves.” one of the main reasons that lead us to engage in this type of behavior is the need to escape suffering or discomfort, something that we all experience, we start to tolerate less and less suffering, with that, we always look for something that takes us away from reality.

the author presented a structure that she uses to talk to her patients about compulsive hyper consumption, through the acronym dopamine, it applies not only to conventional drugs, such as alcohol and nicotine, but also to any substance, or behavior, of high dopamine that we ingested for a long time, or simply with which we wanted to have a slightly less torturous relationship. I will present it here as a way for you, the reader, to apply it to your life and analyze your compulsive hyper consumption.

p.s. this is valid for compulsive hyper consumption of substances and behaviors that are not life-threatening to self or others when stopped on their own. in case of dependence on alcohol and other drugs, the support of a medical team prepared for this is necessary.

D stands for data. start by gathering the simple consumer facts. - what, how much and how often?-

O stands for usage purposes. understand what your goals are for the substance use or behavior.

P stands for usage related issues. identify what problems the substance use or behavior is currently or in the future causing in your life. this part is important to consider carefully, as most of us fail to see the full extent of the consequences of drug use while we are still using it. high dopamine substances and behaviors cloud our ability to accurately assess cause and effect.

A means abstinence. (this process is not for people who may be at risk of life-threatening withdrawal if they quit all at once.) start the “dopamine fast” process. go for a period of at least 4 weeks without using the substance or behavior, this will allow your homeostasis to be restored, with this you will again have the ability to derive pleasure from less potent rewards.

M stands for mindfulness. mindfulness is simply the ability to observe what our brain is doing, while it's doing it, without judgment. watch your thoughts and welcome them without judgement, this will make you develop the ability to know your brain and yourself.

I stands for insight. when you abstain from your drug of choice, you gain illuminating insights into your life and a greater understanding of what you used to be like. “you have to leave the island to see the island. we don't see each other if we don't get out of ourselves”.

N means new steps. find out what you are going to do after your month of abstinence.

E means experiment. you will return to the world armed with a new dopamine setpoint and a plan for how to keep it balanced. it will depend on you whether it will be continued abstinence or conscious use.

the author also presented the term self-commitment to treat addictions “self-commitment is the way to intentionally and spontaneously create barriers between us and our drug of choice, to mitigate compulsive hyper consumption.”

there are physical self-commitment, chronological self-commitment and categorical self-commitment.

physical self-commitment is creating literal physical barriers and/or geographic distance between ourselves and our drug of choice. for example: ask the hotel to remove the minibar, put away your video game, put away the television, etc.

chronological self-commitment is the use of time limits and goals. by restricting consumption to certain times of the day, week, month, or year, we narrow our consumption window and thereby limit our use. for example: a person can restrict their usage time and consume only on vacation, on weekends, never before thursday, never before 5 pm, and so on.

categorical self-commitment is a way to limit consumption by classifying dopamine into different categories: subtypes we allow ourselves to consume and those we don't. you should assess what is a “trigger” for your addiction and put it on the list of what not to consume. for example: for a person with addiction to masturbation, seeing his naked body is a trigger, so he will need to avoid seeing himself for a period of time.

self-commitment is a way to be free.

anyway, I couldn't give less than 5 ☆, this book was a lesson. I committed myself to making changes in certain areas of my life and it inspired me as a professional, I wanted to start my postgraduate course in neuro and work with addiction.

[fipindustries]

AI is femenine

now that is one click bait of a title.

I suddenly remembered one the less known stories by isaac asimov, "femenine intuition", where he explores the concept of "femenine robots" and what the hell would that mean. it apparently means "robots that are intuitive". and what does he mean by that? well...

Do I have to tell you that quite aside from the Three Laws, there isn't a pathway in those brains that isn't carefully designed and fixed? We have robots planned for specific tasks, implanted with specific abihties." “And you propose — ” “That at every level below the Three Laws, the paths be made open-ended. It's not difficult."

so that is interesting, this is already making a difference between AI that is made bespoke, line by line with an intended specific purpose and AI that is open ended so that it can train and absorb information on its own. whats more interesting is the purpose for which they intend to use it

We’ve got an enormous quantity of details on every star in our 300-light-year neighborhood and a notion that almost every one has a planetary system. But which has a habitable planet? Which do we visit? — We don’t know.” One of the directors said, “How would this Jane-robot help us?” “It may well be that somewhere in the libraries of data we have on those stars, there are methods for estimating the pro- babilities of the presence of Earth- type habitable planets. All we need to do is understand the data properly, look at them in the ap- propriate creative manner, make the correct correlations. We haven't done it yet. Or if some astronomer has, he hasn't been smart enough to realize what he has. “A JN-type robot could make correlations far more rapidly and far more precisely than a man could. In a day, it would make and discard as many correlations as a man could in ten years. Furthermore, it would work in truly random fashion, whereas a man would have a strong bias based on preconception and on what is already believed."

the funny thing is that all this sounds weirdly similar to how modern neural models work. ingesting gigantic ammounts of data and finding the underlying patterns and correlations to give statistically likely answers

But it's only a matter of probability, isn't it? Suppose this robot said. The highest probability habitable-planet within so-and-so light-years is Squidgee- 1 7,' or whatever, and we go there and find that a probability is only a probability and that there are no habitable planets after all. Where does that leave us?"

it even talks about the problem of hallucinating answers due to it being a stochastic parrot!

and then the story goes on to say that this all makes the robot "femenine"

“Call the robot — call it 'intuitive'." “An intuitive robot," someone muttered. “A girl robot?" A smile made its way about the conference table. Madarian seized on that. “All right. A girl robot. Our robots are sexless, of course, and so will this one be, but we always act as though they're males. We give them male petnames and call them he and him. Now this one, if we consider the nature of the mathematical structuring of the brain which I have proposed, would fall into the JN-coordinate system. The first robot would be JN-1, and I've assumed that it would be called John-1. — I'm afraid that is the level of originality of the average roboticist. But why not call it Jane-1, damn it? If the public has to be let in on what we're doing, we're constructing a feminine robot with intuition."

so yeah, there it is, by mr isaac asimov himself ladies and gentlemen

[this-week-in-rust]

This Week in Rust 526

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @ThisWeekInRust on Twitter or @ThisWeekinRust on mastodon.social, or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub and archives can be viewed at this-week-in-rust.org. If you find any errors in this week's issue, please submit a PR.

Updates from Rust Community

Official

Blog: Launching the 2023 State of Rust Survey Survey

A Call for Proposals for the Rust 2024 Edition

Project/Tooling Updates

ratatui: a Rust library for cooking up terminal user interfaces - v0.25.0

Introducing Gooey: My take on a Rusty GUI framework

Two New Open Source Rust Crates Create Easier Cedar Policy Management

Introducing FireDBG - a Time Travel Visual Debugger for Rust

Fornjot 0.48.0 - open source b-rep CAD kernel written in Rust

Committing to Rust for kernel code

A Rust implementation of Android's Binder

Preventing atomic-context violations in Rust code with klint

Rust for Linux — in space

Observations/Thoughts

Rust is growing

A curiously recurring lifetime issue

The rabbit hole of unsafe Rust bugs

Faster Rust Toolchains for Android

The Most Common Rust Compiler Errors as Encountered in RustRover: Part 1

Nine Rules for SIMD Acceleration of your Rust Code (Part 2): General Lessons from Boosting Data Ingestion in the range-set-blaze Crate by 7x

What I Learned Making an embedded-hal Driver in Rust (for the MAX6675 Thermocouple Digitizer)

Rust Walkthroughs

Rust: Traits

Write a Toy VPN in Rust

Getting Started with Actix Web in Rust

Getting Started with Rocket in Rust

Generic types for function parameters in Rust 🦀

Benchmarking Rust Compiler Settings with Criterion: Controlling Criterion with Scripts and Environment Variables

[series] Multithreading and Memory-Mapping: Refining ANN Performance with Arroy

[series] Getting started with Tiny HTTP building a web application in Rust

Miscellaneous

Embedded Rust Education: 2023 Reflections & 2024 Visions

The Most Common Rust Compiler Errors as Encountered in RustRover: Part 1

Default arguments for functions in Rust using macros

[audio] Rust in Production Ep 1 - InfluxData's Paul Dix

[audio] Episode 160: Rust & Safety at Adobe with Sean Parent

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is constcat, a std::concat!-replacement with support for const variables and expressions.

Thanks to Ross MacArthur for the self-suggestion!

Please submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Call for Participation

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but did not know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!

Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.

Ockam - Fix documentation warnings

Ockam - Library - Validate CBOR structs according to the cddl schema for nodes/models/secure_channel

Ockam - Implement events in SqlxDatabase

Hyperswitch - [REFACTOR]: [Nuvei] MCA metadata validation

Hyperswitch - [FEATURE] : [Noon] Sync with Hyperswitch Reference

Hyperswitch - [FEATURE] : [Zen] Sync with Hyperswitch Reference

Hyperswitch - [REFACTOR] : [Authorizedotnet] Sync with Hyperswitch Reference

If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here.

Updates from the Rust Project

386 pull requests were merged in the last week

enable stack probes on aarch64 for LLVM 18

add new tier 3 aarch64-apple-watchos target

add hexagon support

add the function body span to StableMIR

allow async_fn_in_trait traits with Send variant

cherry-pick "M68k: Fix ODR violation in GISel code (#72797)"

AIX: fix XCOFF metadata

-Ztrait-solver=next to -Znext-solver

actually parse async gen blocks correctly

add a method to StableMIR to check if a type is a CStr

add more suggestions to unexpected cfg names and values

add support for --env on tracked_env::var

add unstable -Zdefault-hidden-visibility cmdline flag for rustc

annotate panic reasons during enum layout

attempt to try to resolve blocking concerns (RFC #3086)

avoid overflow in GVN constant indexing

cache param env canonicalization

check FnPtr/FnDef built-in fn traits correctly with effects

check generic params after sigature for main-fn-ty

collect lang items from AST, get rid of GenericBound::LangItemTrait

coroutine variant fields can be uninitialized

coverage: skip instrumenting a function if no spans were extracted from MIR

deny ~const trait bounds in inherent impl headers

desugar yield in async gen correctly, ensure gen always returns unit

don't merge cfg and doc(cfg) attributes for re-exports

erase late bound regions from Instance::fn_sig() and add a few more details to StableMIR APIs

fix ICE ProjectionKinds Deref and Field were mismatched

fix LLD thread flags in bootstrap on Windows

fix waker_getters tracking issue number

fix alignment passed down to LLVM for simd_masked_load

fix dynamic size/align computation logic for packed types with dyn trait tail

fix overlapping spans in delimited meta-vars

ICE 110453: fixed with errors

llvm-wrapper: adapt for LLVM API changes

make IMPLIED_BOUNDS_ENTAILMENT into a hard error from a lint

make exhaustiveness usable outside of rustc

match lowering: Remove the make_target_blocks hack

more expressions correctly are marked to end with curly braces

nudge the user to kill programs using excessive CPU

opportunistically resolve region var in canonicalizer (instead of resolving root var)

properly reject default on free const items

remove unnecessary constness from ProjectionCandidate

replace some instances of FxHashMap/FxHashSet with stable alternatives (mostly in rustc_hir and rustc_ast_lowering)

resolve: replace visibility table in resolver outputs with query feeding

skip rpit constraint checker if borrowck return type error

some cleanup and improvement for invalid ref casting impl

tweak short_ty_string to reduce number of files

unconditionally register alias-relate in projection goal

update FreeBSD CI image

uplift TypeAndMut and ClosureKind to rustc_type_ir

use if cfg! instead of #[cfg]

use the LLVM option NoTrapAfterNoreturn

miri: visit the AllocIds and BorTags in borrow state FrameExtra

miri run: default to edition 2021

miri: make mmap not use expose semantics

fast path for declared_generic_bounds_from_env

stabilize type_name_of_val

stabilize ptr::{from_ref, from_mut}

add core::intrinsics::simd

add a column number to dbg!()

add more niches to rawvec

add ASCII whitespace trimming functions to &str

fix cases where std accidentally relied on inline(never)

Windows: allow File::create to work on hidden files

std: add xcoff in object's feature list

codegen: panic when trying to compute size/align of extern type

codegen_gcc: simd: implement missing intrinsics from simd/generic-arithmetic-pass.rs

codegen_llvm: set DW_AT_accessibility

cargo: clean up package metadata

cargo: do not allow empty name in package ID spec

cargo: fill in more empty name holes

cargo: hold the mutate exclusive lock when vendoring

rustdoc: use Map instead of Object for source files and search index

rustdoc: allow resizing the sidebar / hiding the top bar

rustdoc-search: fix a race condition in search index loading

rustdoc-search: use set ops for ranking and filtering

bindgen: use \r\n on windows

bindgen: better working destructors on windows

clippy: add new unconditional_recursion lint

clippy: new Lint: result_filter_map / Mirror of option_filter_map

clippy: don't visit nested bodies in is_const_evaluatable

clippy: redundant_pattern_matching: lint if let true, while let true, matches!(.., true)

clippy: do not lint assertions_on_constants for const _: () = assert!(expr)

clippy: doc_markdown Recognize words followed by empty parentheses () for quoting

clippy: fix binder handling in unnecessary_to_owned

rust-analyzer: deduplicate annotations

rust-analyzer: optimizing Performance with Promise.all 🏎

rust-analyzer: desugar doc correctly for mbe

rust-analyzer: dont assume ascii in remove_markdown

rust-analyzer: resolve alias before resolving enum variant

rust-analyzer: add minimal support for the 2024 edition

rust-analyzer: move out WithFixture into dev-dep only crate

rust-analyzer: fix false positive type mismatch in const reference patterns

rust-analyzer: syntax fixup now removes subtrees with fake spans

rust-analyzer: update builtin attrs from rustc

rust-analyzer: fix fragment parser replacing matches with dummies on incomplete parses

rust-analyzer: fix incorrectly replacing references in macro invocation in "Convert to named struct" assist

Rust Compiler Performance Triage

A lot of noise in the results this week; there was an lull in the noise recently, so our auto-inferred noise threshold went down, and thus five PR's were artificially flagged this week (and three supposed improvements were just reverting to the mean). Beyond that, we had three nice improvements: the first to debug builds in #117962 (by ceasing emission of expensive+unused .debug_pubnames and .debug_pubtypes), a second to diesel and serde in #119048 (by avoiding some unnecessary work), and a third to several benchmarks in #117749 (by adding some caching of an internal compiler structure).

Triage done by @pnkfelix. Revision range: 57010939..bf9229a2

6 Regressions, 9 Improvements, 3 Mixed; 5 of them in rollups 67 artifact comparisons made in total

Full report here

Approved RFCs

Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:

No RFCs were approved this week.

Final Comment Period

Every week, the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now.

RFCs

[disposition: postpone] RFC: Precise Pre-release Deps

Tracking Issues & PRs

[disposition: merge] Support async recursive calls (as long as they have indirection)

[disposition: merge] make soft_unstable show up in future breakage reports

[disposition: merge] Tracking Issue for ip_in_core

Language Reference

No Language Reference RFCs entered Final Comment Period this week.

Unsafe Code Guidelines

No Unsafe Code Guideline RFCs entered Final Comment Period this week.

New and Updated RFCs

RFC: patchable-function-entry

Call for Testing

An important step for RFC implementation is for people to experiment with the implementation and give feedback, especially before stabilization. The following RFCs would benefit from user testing before moving forward:

No RFCs issued a call for testing this week.

If you are a feature implementer and would like your RFC to appear on the above list, add the new call-for-testing label to your RFC along with a comment providing testing instructions and/or guidance on which aspect(s) of the feature need testing.

Upcoming Events

Rusty Events between 2023-12-20 - 2024-01-17 🦀

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Adventures in egui app dev

2023-12-26 | Virtual (Dallas, TX, US) | Dallas Rust

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2023-12-28 | Virtual (Charlottesville, NC, US) | Charlottesville Rust Meetup

Crafting Interpreters in Rust Collaboratively

2024-01-03 | Virtual (Indianapolis, IN, US) | Indy Rust

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2024-01-09 | Virtual (Dallas, TX, US) | Dallas Rust

Last Tuesday

2024-01-11 | Virtual (Charlottesville, NC, US) | Charlottesville Rust Meetup

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Mid-month Rustful

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2023-12-27 | Copenhagen, DK | Copenhagen Rust Community

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2024-01-11 | Reading, UK | Reading Rust Workshop

Reading Rust Meetup at Browns

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Rust Meetup #36

2024-01-13 | Helsinki, FI | Finland Rust-lang Group

January Meetup

North America

2023-12-20 | Austin, TX, US | Rust ATX

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2023-12-27 | Austin, TX, US | Rust ATX

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2024-01-06 | Boston, MA, US | Boston Rust Meetup

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2024-01-09 | Seattle, WA, US | Cap Hill Rust Coding/Hacking/Learning

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2024-01-17 | Chicago, IL, US | Deep Dish Rust

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If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Please remember to add a link to the event too. Email the Rust Community Team for access.

Jobs

Please see the latest Who's Hiring thread on r/rust

Quote of the Week

The Tianyi-33 satellite is a 50kg class space science experimental satellite equipped with an operating system independently developed by Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications—the Rust-based dual-kernel real-time operating system RROS. RROS will carry out general tasks represented by tensorflow/k8s and real-time tasks represented by real-time file systems and real-time network transmission on the satellite. It will ensure the normal execution of upper-layer applications and scientific research tasks, such as time-delay measurement between satellite and ground, live video broadcasting, onboard web chat services, pseudo-SSH experiments, etc. This marks the world’s first official application of a Rust-written dual-kernel operating system in a satellite scenario.

– Qichen on the RROS web page

Thanks to Brian Kung for the suggestion!

Please submit quotes and vote for next week!

This Week in Rust is edited by: nellshamrell, llogiq, cdmistman, ericseppanen, extrawurst, andrewpollack, U007D, kolharsam, joelmarcey, mariannegoldin, bennyvasquez.

Email list hosting is sponsored by The Rust Foundation

Discuss on r/rust

[datavalleyai]

Azure Data Engineering Tools For Data Engineers

Azure is a cloud computing platform provided by Microsoft, which presents an extensive array of data engineering tools. These tools serve to assist data engineers in constructing and upholding data systems that possess the qualities of scalability, reliability, and security. Moreover, Azure data engineering tools facilitate the creation and management of data systems that cater to the unique requirements of an organization.

In this article, we will explore nine key Azure data engineering tools that should be in every data engineer’s toolkit. Whether you’re a beginner in data engineering or aiming to enhance your skills, these Azure tools are crucial for your career development.

Microsoft Azure Databricks

Azure Databricks is a managed version of Databricks, a popular data analytics and machine learning platform. It offers one-click installation, faster workflows, and collaborative workspaces for data scientists and engineers. Azure Databricks seamlessly integrates with Azure’s computation and storage resources, making it an excellent choice for collaborative data projects.

Microsoft Azure Data Factory

Microsoft Azure Data Factory (ADF) is a fully-managed, serverless data integration tool designed to handle data at scale. It enables data engineers to acquire, analyze, and process large volumes of data efficiently. ADF supports various use cases, including data engineering, operational data integration, analytics, and data warehousing.

Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics

Azure Stream Analytics is a real-time, complex event-processing engine designed to analyze and process large volumes of fast-streaming data from various sources. It is a critical tool for data engineers dealing with real-time data analysis and processing.

Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage

Azure Data Lake Storage provides a scalable and secure data lake solution for data scientists, developers, and analysts. It allows organizations to store data of any type and size while supporting low-latency workloads. Data engineers can take advantage of this infrastructure to build and maintain data pipelines. Azure Data Lake Storage also offers enterprise-grade security features for data collaboration.

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Azure Synapse Analytics is an integrated platform solution that combines data warehousing, data connectors, ETL pipelines, analytics tools, big data scalability, and visualization capabilities. Data engineers can efficiently process data for warehousing and analytics using Synapse Pipelines’ ETL and data integration capabilities.

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed and server-less distributed database service that supports multiple data models, including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Apache Cassandra. It offers automatic and immediate scalability, single-digit millisecond reads and writes, and high availability for NoSQL data. Azure Cosmos DB is a versatile tool for data engineers looking to develop high-performance applications.

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Azure SQL Database is a fully managed and continually updated relational database service in the cloud. It offers native support for services like Azure Functions and Azure App Service, simplifying application development. Data engineers can use Azure SQL Database to handle real-time data ingestion tasks efficiently.

Microsoft Azure MariaDB

Azure Database for MariaDB provides seamless integration with Azure Web Apps and supports popular open-source frameworks and languages like WordPress and Drupal. It offers built-in monitoring, security, automatic backups, and patching at no additional cost.

Microsoft Azure PostgreSQL Database

Azure PostgreSQL Database is a fully managed open-source database service designed to emphasize application innovation rather than database management. It supports various open-source frameworks and languages and offers superior security, performance optimization through AI, and high uptime guarantees.

Whether you’re a novice data engineer or an experienced professional, mastering these Azure data engineering tools is essential for advancing your career in the data-driven world. As technology evolves and data continues to grow, data engineers with expertise in Azure tools are in high demand. Start your journey to becoming a proficient data engineer with these powerful Azure tools and resources.

Unlock the full potential of your data engineering career with Datavalley. As you start your journey to becoming a skilled data engineer, it’s essential to equip yourself with the right tools and knowledge. The Azure data engineering tools we’ve explored in this article are your gateway to effectively managing and using data for impactful insights and decision-making.

To take your data engineering skills to the next level and gain practical, hands-on experience with these tools, we invite you to join the courses at Datavalley. Our comprehensive data engineering courses are designed to provide you with the expertise you need to excel in the dynamic field of data engineering. Whether you’re just starting or looking to advance your career, Datavalley’s courses offer a structured learning path and real-world projects that will set you on the path to success.

Course format:

Subject: Data Engineering Classes: 200 hours of live classes Lectures: 199 lectures Projects: Collaborative projects and mini projects for each module Level: All levels Scholarship: Up to 70% scholarship on this course Interactive activities: labs, quizzes, scenario walk-throughs Placement Assistance: Resume preparation, soft skills training, interview preparation

Subject: DevOps Classes: 180+ hours of live classes Lectures: 300 lectures Projects: Collaborative projects and mini projects for each module Level: All levels Scholarship: Up to 67% scholarship on this course Interactive activities: labs, quizzes, scenario walk-throughs Placement Assistance: Resume preparation, soft skills training, interview preparation

For more details on the Data Engineering courses, visit Datavalley’s official website.

[haripriya2002]

My Journey with Azure IoT Hub: Connecting and Managing IoT Devices at Scale

The Internet of Things (IoT), which enables seamless connectivity and automation across numerous industries, has completely changed the way we engage with technology. I was curious to learn more about the Internet of Things and its possible uses as an aspiring IoT enthusiast. My experience using Azure IoT Hub, Microsoft’s cloud-based IoT platform, and how it assisted me in connecting and managing IoT devices at scale are both discussed in this blog.

Getting Started with Azure IoT Hub

To embark on my IoT journey, I began by understanding the fundamentals of Azure IoT Hub. Azure IoT Hub is a fully managed service that acts as a central hub for bi-directional communication between IoT devices and the cloud. It provides secure, reliable, and scalable connectivity for IoT solutions. Setting up an Azure IoT Hub was my first step. While the process was relatively straightforward, I encountered a few challenges along the way.

Connecting IoT Devices

Once Azure IoT Hub was set up, I delved into the world of IoT devices. I worked with various types of IoT devices, ranging from simple sensors to complex industrial machines. Connecting these devices to Azure IoT Hub required the implementation of device-specific protocols such as MQTT or HTTP. Additionally, I focused on securing device connections and data transmission by utilizing security features provided by Azure IoT Hub.

Real-world examples of IoT devices connected to Azure IoT Hub are aplenty. For instance, in the healthcare industry, wearable devices can transmit patient vitals to Azure IoT Hub, allowing healthcare providers to monitor and respond to critical situations promptly. In smart homes, IoT devices such as thermostats and security cameras can be connected to Azure IoT Hub, enabling remote control and monitoring capabilities.

Managing IoT Devices at Scale

As my IoT project grew, I encountered the need to scale up the number of connected devices. Azure IoT Hub offered robust device management features that simplified the process of managing a large fleet of devices. I could remotely monitor the health, status, and firmware version of each device, enabling efficient troubleshooting and maintenance. Implementing best practices for device management, such as grouping devices based on location or functionality, enhanced the overall operational efficiency of my IoT solution.

Data Ingestion and Processing

Data collected from IoT devices is a valuable asset that can drive actionable insights and informed decision-making. Azure IoT Hub facilitated the ingestion and routing of data to Azure services for further processing and analysis. I had the opportunity to work with Azure Stream Analytics and Azure Functions, which enabled real-time data processing, transformation, and visualization. Leveraging these services allowed me to unlock the true potential of IoT data and derive meaningful insights.

Security and Compliance

Any IoT solution must prioritize security. Azure IoT Hub provided robust security features that ensured end-to-end protection of IoT deployments. These features included device authentication, message encryption, and integration with Azure Active Directory for access control. Additionally, Azure IoT Hub helped me meet compliance and regulatory requirements by providing built-in support for industry standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR. Throughout my journey, I learned valuable lessons and implemented best practices for securing IoT solutions.

Scalability and Performance

Scaling an IoT solution to handle thousands or millions of devices is a complex task. Azure IoT Hub offered scalability features that allowed me to effortlessly handle large-scale IoT deployments. With Azure IoT Hub’s device-to-cloud messaging capabilities, I could reliably transmit messages to and from a massive number of devices. Moreover, I gained insights into optimizing IoT solutions for performance by considering factors such as message size, frequency, and device capabilities.

Real-World Use Cases

To understand the versatility of Azure IoT Hub, it is crucial to explore real-world use cases. In the manufacturing industry, Azure IoT Hub can be leveraged to connect and monitor machines on the factory floor, ensuring optimal performance and predictive maintenance. In the agriculture sector, IoT devices connected to Azure IoT Hub can collect data on soil moisture levels, temperature, and humidity, enabling farmers to make data-driven decisions for irrigation and crop management. These use cases highlight the valuable role that Azure IoT Hub plays in various domains and industries.

Future of IoT and Azure IoT Hub

The future of IoT is promising, with emerging trends shaping the landscape. As IoT continues to evolve, Azure IoT Hub will play a crucial role in enabling seamless connectivity, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence capabilities. Integration with other Azure services and continuous updates from Microsoft ensure that Azure IoT Hub remains at the forefront of IoT innovation. The possibilities for IoT applications are limitless, and Azure IoT Hub will continue to empower developers and organizations to build robust and scalable IoT solutions.

Throughout my journey with Azure IoT Hub, I gained valuable insights and experiences. Azure IoT Hub simplified the process of connecting and managing IoT devices, providing a reliable and scalable platform. The seamless integration with other Azure services allowed me to unlock the full potential of IoT data. Moreover, the security and compliance features provided peace of mind, ensuring that my IoT solution was protected from threats. Overall, Azure IoT Hub has been instrumental in my IoT journey, contributing to enhanced efficiency and productivity.

Recommendations and Tips

For those interested in starting their own IoT journey with Azure IoT Hub, I offer the following recommendations and tips:

Begin with a clear understanding of your IoT use case and requirements.

Familiarize yourself with the documentation and resources provided by Microsoft to gain a solid foundation.

Start small and gradually scale your IoT solution as needed.

Take advantage of the device management and security features offered by Azure IoT Hub.

Leverage other Azure services such as Azure Stream Analytics and Azure Functions to derive meaningful insights from IoT data.

Stay updated on emerging trends and best practices in the IoT space.

To deepen your knowledge of IoT and Azure IoT Hub, I recommend exploring Microsoft’s official documentation, participating in the ACTE Technologies Microsoft Azure training, and attending IoT-focused conferences and events.

Azure IoT Hub has proven to be a powerful and comprehensive platform for connecting and managing IoT devices at scale. Throughout my journey, I witnessed the transformative potential of IoT solutions and the crucial role played by Azure IoT Hub in enabling seamless connectivity, advanced analytics, and robust security. As IoT continues to evolve, Azure IoT Hub will undoubtedly remain at the forefront of IoT innovation, empowering organizations to build scalable and efficient IoT solutions. I encourage readers to embark on their own IoT journeys, leveraging the capabilities of Azure IoT Hub to unlock the full potential of IoT. Join me in embracing the future of IoT and revolutionizing industries through connected devices. Please leave your comments, stories, and inquiries in the space provided below. Let’s continue the conversation and explore the endless possibilities of IoT together.