Even if you don't have a telescope or binoculars, you can still enjoy naked eye star gazing. The book that got me started and which I highly recommend: The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H. A. Rey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars:_A_New_Way_to_See_Th...

https://archive.org/details/stars00hare

These are also available in the excellent Stellarium software: https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium-skycultures/blob/ma...

I recognize H. A. Rey only as the author/illustrator of Curious George, had no idea he published anything else of note. Looks like my library has a copy. Thanks for sharing!

Yes, he is the same author. You will recognize his drawings in the Stars book.

Just to get your nostalgia juices flowing again, someone recreated the Defender sound engine in the browser.

https://www.zapspace.net/defender_sound/

Thank you, I always loved the Defender sounds

This is really cool. I love the spectrogram visualizer.

I don't care to start a debate about who first invented television when, but I remember hearing (conformed by wikipedia [1]) that Leon Theremin, inventor of the musical instrument named after him, demonstrated mechanical television at roughly the same time.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin

Funny you bring Leon Theremin up. I just showed a friend of mine The Thing[0] today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

Making AI companions is becoming a widespread little hobby project. Many have created them and shared instructions on how to do it. My preference would be to use local resources only (say, with ollama), they can even be made with voice recognition, TTS, and an avatar character.

While I have not interfaced my AI with all the services that Clawdbot does (WhatsApp, Slack, etc.) I don't think that is too much of a stretch from my very simple build.

I also would like local LLMs - but that's hardly the biggest issue with these projects?

You point it at your email, and you've opened a vector for prompt injection and data exfiltration - all as an integral part of the features you want (read my emails, send some emails).

Your local LLM won't protect you there.

You could probably write some limited tools (whitelist where mail could be sent) - but it goes against the grain of "magically wonderful ai secretary".

Security is not a convenience.

There is a video update from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. (I could only find this on Facebook) https://www.facebook.com/reel/1190509063198524

I'd be more concerned about just slop, whether AI or human created. And the fact that Youtube content is overwhelmingly slop - regardless of creator type - is not news at all.

There's good stuff too if you are a bit selective.

And yet, penny dreadful editions and pulp magazines that existed before pocket books... did they have the same effect? Or did they only produce pocket book writers?

yeah, the story felt fishy without mentioning those.

I know someone pursuing a degree in meteorology at well known university for the subject and I asked that person if they are being taught about these and other AI weather models, about how they work, how to evaluate them for effectiveness, etc.

The answer: AI is not even covered, at least at the undergrad level. This is just a sample of one, so are any other universities educating future meteorologists on this subject?

Are meteorologists even the right people to be training on how to produce and improve better modeling of weather?

For the dedicated fan, the complete collection of Peanuts strips is available in several volumes.

https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/the-complete-peanu...

I remember my grandmother saying that Peanuts characters look like children but spoke like adults and that was what she liked. Apparently, kids saying "good grief" was unheard of back in that time, as were kids generally being disappointed and sad.