J W

I read it as dark energy exists, but it's weakening rather than staying at roughly constant density as the universe expands. End result is expansion is actually slowing, not accelerating.

Needs confirmation, of course.

Infographic about GW241011 and GW241110 GW241011's source contained black holes about 13 and 8 times the mass of our Sun. The spin of the bigger black hole is high and bear aligned with the orbit. GW241110's source contained black holes about 17 and 8 times the mass of our Sun. The spin of the larger black hole is high and near anti-aligned with the orbit. Credit: Shanika Galaudage/Northwestern University/Adler Planetarium

We are pleased to announce our discovery of #GW241011 and #GW241110

Both come from binary black holes where one black hole is much larger than the other. The larger black holes have large spin. Could these black holes have formed in a previous merger?

ligo.org/science-summ...

#O4IsHere 🔭🧪⚛️☄️

Score

And this isn't even #BananaBall

Can't imagine plays at the plate get any closer, and with higher stakes. #WorldSeries

Thank you, Matt.

I think I post too infrequently to have experienced this (for my own reasons), but it's certainly true that attacks can come out of left field.

That said, as a veteran of the Usenet days, I guess I expect it to a degree. I hope the problems can be resolved, regardless.

For my part, rereading Daniel's post, I probably overstated the severity of the issues found. Described as "high quality", but none at this point rises to RCE level, etc.

So perhaps looks promising in the hands of competent people, but not a miracle cure.

Is it? Because, if you found it (and I just posted the link), your own claim, it seems, needs correction.

I'm not quite sure why this hill is important for you to die on.

A new breed of analyzers (See how I cleverly did not mention AI in the title!) You know we have seen more than our fair share of slop reports sent to the curl project so it seems only fair that I also write something about th...

Ah, here we go. Yes, it's significantly more than 50, which was the initial count. daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/10...

I'm happy to be corrected -- the writeup I'd read by the maintainer, which, of course, I cannot find now, seemed quite different, and described the bugs as real, serious, and of greater number. But I was going from memory.

Some of these errors could cost those who rely on Curl (that's a lot of people, organizations, and governments) incalculable losses.

Cyber security might be a somewhat relevant comparison. An example I read recently was from the developers of the Curl application, who routinely throw advanced error checking at their code.

Despite this, new AI tools recently found ~200 previously unknown significant flaws in the Curl code.

For the uninitiated, that can be a very challenging combination, as when some folks, without the background to judge, present ChatGPT output as solving complex, currently unsolved physics problems.

And to me, that's the biggest challenge: if you're asking it to do something you're not equipped to evaluate with a learned eye, you are asking for trouble. That's especially true since LLMs, in my experience, uniformly produce output that is presented with utter confidence.

Moral of the story: it's been a great time saver, particularly when coding routines, etc. as with pretty much all LLM output, it's required a thorough sanity check.

I will say that the code produced has been very solid. It's also required review, every time. Gemini has a habit of inventing nonexistent libraries (this is Arduino code).

To be fair, the interfaces with the libraries are great and, frankly, the libraries SHOULD exist.

Getting back to part of the original point (and also testing a couple of things), I've found LLMs such as Gemini to be pretty good at e.g. coding. Is it regurgitating existing coding practices that it has learned? Sure. Is that really that different than when I do it? That, I'm not so sure about.

I hope you feel better soon!

Science marches on, and interestingly, one strain of science denial centers around the idea that black holes haven't been shown to exist. We're actually well past that point, with multiple lines of evidence stretching back decades.

This is a cool find.

Scientists capture an image of two black holes circling each other for the first time For the first time, astronomers have managed to capture a radio image showing two black holes orbiting each other. The observation confirmed the existence of black hole pairs.

In space news, astronomers have not just confirmed but photographed the existence of a black hole pair finding two in a locked 12 year orbit of each other www.utu.fi/en/news/pres...

That's true - and even then, the raw astronomical data is typically in the form of simple flux data vs spatial locations or data cubes, and later colors are assigned to them and recombined.

That's exactly right. More generally, very few astronomical images are true color, since most are taken in other wavelengths (from radio to x-ray, sometimes composite). Colors are usually chosen in image processing to highlight various aspects.

George Smoot (awarded Nobel Prize in 2006 for his role in detecting the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background, the imprint of structure starting to form in the Universe) RIP 🔭🧪

apc.u-paris.fr/fr/memory-ge...

Ask Ethan: Where are we located relative to the Big Bang? If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?

Where are we located relative to the Big Bang?

#AskEthan

The Big Bang didn't occur at a single location in space, but rather, everywhere at once.

If we assumed it was a big ka-boom, we'd be shockingly close to its origin point.
bigthink.com/starts-with-...
#space #astro #bigbang #notanexplosion

A black and white photo of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. She is sitting at her desk and looking up at the camera, which is in front of her and to her left. Payne-Gaposchkin is wearing a baggy, ribbed sweater and has a wristwatch on her right arm. A pair of glasses rests on the desk in front of her, next to open books and papers which are just visible at the bottom of the photogaph. Filing cabinets, drawers, and another desk are visible in the background. She has short, dark hair which is no longer than chin-length, pulled out of her face behind her left ear.

“There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas."

Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who decoded spectral lines to deduce the elemental composition of stars, was born #OTD in 1900. 🧪 🔭 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬

Image: Harvard Observatory

I missed everyone talking about the 100th anniversary of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s dissertation yesterday.

BUT, just four short months ago I wrote a whole thread about her and work, so idk maybe I was early?

I've seen some people propose rewriting OpenBSD in Rust (and maybe an effort is underway), but it would surely be a huge undertaking, especially for a volunteer labor of love.

Ah, so reading a bit more, it's not per se, though a ton of developer-years have been spent on auditing for corruption flaws+executable location randomization to try to mitigate remaining bugs, etc