Comet To Make First, And Likely Only, Appearance in Recorded History

The new year has just begun, but the cosmos are already set to make history in 2023. From a report: A comet discovered less than a year ago has traveled billions of miles from its believed origins at the edge of our solar system and will be visible in just a few weeks during what will likely be its only recorded appearance. The comet, C/2022 E3 (ZTF), was first seen in March 2022 as it made its way through Jupiter’s orbit. According to NASA, it’s a long-period comet believed to come from the Oort Cloud, the most distant region of Earth’s solar system that’s “like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris” that can get even bigger than mountains. The inner edge of this region is thought to be between 2,000 and 5,000 astronomical units (AUs) from the sun — between 186 billion and 465 billion miles.

This means that C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has made a rare, once-in-a-lifetime journey to be close to Earth. “Most known long-period comets have been seen only once in recorded history because their orbital periods are so, well, long,” NASA says. “Countless more unknown long-period comets have never been seen by human eyes. Some have orbits so long that the last time they passed through the inner solar system, our species did not yet exist.”

Now, the recently discovered E3 comet, which has been seen with a bright greenish coma and “short broad” dust tail, is set to make its closest approach to the sun on January 12. It will make its closest approach to Earth on February 2. Astrophotographer Dan Bartlett managed to capture an image of the comet in December from his backyard in California. He was able to see “intricate tail structure” in the comet’s plasma tail, he said, and “conditions are improving.”

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Fossil Fuel Power Fell Up To 68% as Blackouts Hit US South

Power plants that burn coal and natural gas to produce electricity had significant drops in generation as a winter storm hit the US Southeast, forcing blackouts that left hundreds of thousands in the dark. From a report: Duke Energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority cut power to homes and businesses during the holiday season as an extreme winter storm pummeled the region. Duke instituted rotating outages Dec. 24 that interrupted service to about 500,000 customers, while TVA for the first time in its history had rotating blackouts Dec. 23 and Dec. 24. The disruption was the latest instance of a major failure to generate electricity in the US following a storm or natural disaster, a trend that’s brought attention to the state of the nation’s energy infrastructure and its dependence on fossil fuels to keep the lights on even as the Biden administration advocates for a transition to renewable energy.

The failure of coal and gas highlights how even the power sources that have long served as the backbone of the US electrical grid can still falter, especially as the South sees its population increase and relies more on electric heat. TVA saw power generation from coal plants drop about 68% from more than 4 gigawatts early Dec. 23 to a low of about 1.5 gigawatts on Dec. 24, according to federal data. While gas generation increased Dec. 23, on Dec. 24 it fell roughly 25% from about 11.5 gigawatts to less than 9 gigawatts as the utility ordered outages for almost six hours. High winds damaged several of the protective structures at the Cumberland Fossil Plant, the biggest TVA coal plant, as well as multiple gas-fired combustion turbines used during peak power periods, a TVA representative said in an email.

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Nintendo’s Upcoming California Theme Park Has Augmented Reality ‘Mario Kart’ Races

“Starting next year, Nintendo fans can step through a life-size warp pipe and enter the Mushroom Kingdom,” reports Bloomberg, “for the first time on American soil.”

Bloomberg shares its reaction after “an early preview tour of the land as it finalizes construction,” noting that it has “a chirping soundtrack of cheerful instrumentals and distant coin clinks.”

Super Nintendo World, an interactive replica of Nintendo’s dynamic lands and characters, will bring its colorful chaos to Universal Studios Hollywood when it opens on Feb. 17, 2023. The expansion provides an opportunity to race alongside Mario and Luigi before meeting them face to face, and it will bring video game-inspired dining, retail and merchandise to the California theme park inside an immersive, bowllike structure lined with spinning coins and turtle shells….

Whether Koopa Troopas in motion or a fake desert set against the actual skies, there’s always something to look at — and somewhere intriguing to head first. Its marquee attraction, Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge, puts riders in augmented reality-enabled helmets to experience the Mario Kart racing game firsthand while the challenge plays out virtually in front of them….

Super Nintendo World was released at Universal Studios Japan in March 2021, but its arrival stateside marks Universal Studio Hollywood’s largest opening since its Wizarding World of Harry Potter expansion in 2016, and it’s the first of Nintendo’s notable footprints on domestic soil. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, starring Chris Pratt, hits theaters in April, and a third iteration of Super Nintendo World will open with Epic Universe, the all-new theme park arriving at Universal Orlando Resort in 2025.

In each iteration, the main draw is the Mario Kart experience. Here, riders in four-passenger vehicles will join Team Mario to compete across multiple courses for the Golden Cup — a familiar process to anyone who’s played Nintendo’s racing challenge back home.

The article reminds readers that “all attendees can punch blocks (with more force than one may anticipate) and re-create other moments in the Mushroom Kingdom.”
But they ultimately describe the experience as a kind of “overwhelming immersion, transporting people to a location they’ve previously seen, but never before in real life.”

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‘Metropolis’, Sherlock Holmes Finally Enter the Public Domain 95 Years Later

Guess what’s finally entering America’s public domain today? Appropriately enough, it’s Marcel Proust’s 1927 novel Remembrance of Things Past.

Also entering the public domain today are thousands of other books, plus the music and lyrics of hundreds of songs, and even several silent movies.

Fritz Lang’s sci-fi classic Metropolis enters the public domain today — and so does the Laurel & Hardy comedy Battle of the Century (which culminates with one of Hollywod’s first pie fights), according to Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain:
This is actually the second time that Metropolis has gone into the US public domain. The first was in 1955, when its initial 28-year term expired and the rights holders did not renew the copyright. Then in 1996 a new law restored the copyrights in qualifying foreign works. Metropolis, along with thousands of other works, was pulled out of the public domain, and now reenters it after the expiration of the 95-year term, with the once missing scenes available for anyone to reuse.
They also note that some material is in the public domain from the beginning, including government works like the images from the James Webb telescope.

But for other works, today is a big and important day, writes the Associated Press:
Alongside the short-story collection “The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes,” books such as Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse,” Ernest Hemingway’s “Men Without Women,” William Faulkner’s “Mosquitoes” and Agatha Christie’s “The Big Four” — an Hercule Poirot mystery — will become public domain as the calendar turns to 2023. Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost.

The works from 1927 were originally supposed to be copyrighted for 75 years, but the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act delayed opening them up for an additional 20 years. While many prominent works on the list used those extra two decades to earn their copyright holders good money, a Duke University expert says the copyright protections also applied to “all of the works whose commercial viability had long subsided.”

“For the vast majority — probably 99% — of works from 1927, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason,” Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, wrote in a blog post heralding “Public Domain Day 2023.” That long U.S. copyright period meant many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn’t be used by others. On the Duke list are such “lost” films like Victor Fleming’s “The Way of All Flesh” and Tod Browning’s “London After Midnight….”

Also entering the public domain today:

– Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop
– A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six (illustrations by E. H. Shepard)
– Franklin W. Dixon’s The Tower Treasure — the first Hardy Boys book
– Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf (German version)
– The song “My Blue Heaven”
– Songs by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong
– Alfred Hitchcock’s early silent movie The Lodger

The UK-based newspaper the Observer adds:
For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy…. The term was gradually lengthened in small increments by Congress until 1976, when it was extended by 19 years to 75 years and then in 1998 by the Sonny Bono Act. So, as the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig puts it, “in the 20 years after the Sonny Bono Act, while 1 million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term”….

[T]he end result is that American citizens have had to wait two decades to be free to adapt and reuse works to which we Europeans have had easy access….

The issue highlighted by Public Domain Day is not that intellectual property is evil but that aspects of it — especially copyright — have been monopolised and weaponised by corporate interests and that legislators have been supine in the face of their lobbying. Authors and inventors need protection against being ripped off. It’s obviously important that clever people are rewarded for their creativity and the patent system does that quite well. But if a patent only lasts for 20 years, why on earth should copyright last for life plus 70 years for a novel?

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Melbourne’s Anti-Graffiti QR Codes Vandalized to Point to ‘Alternative’ Site

The Australian city of Melbourne recently posted QR codes its citizens could use to report grafitti, reports Australia’s public broadcaster ABC.

Unfortunately, someone overlaid “a number” of those QR codes with “alternative” QR codes leading to a pro-graffiti documentary:

The City of Melbourne is investigating how many of the QR codes have been affected and is assessing whether an alternative will be needed in future…. The lord mayor said the City of Melbourne had initiated discussions with Victoria Police and would draw on CCTV footage to see “how we can catch those culprits”. […]

The Lord Mayor did not believe the compromised QR codes had resulted in more graffiti in the city. “I think this is more of a PR effort by the vandals,” she said.

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What Will Technology Do in 2023?

Looking back at 2022’s technology, the lead technology writer for the New York Times criticized Meta’s $1,500 VR headset and the iPhone’s “mostly unnoticeable improvements.”

But then he also predicted which new tech could affect you in 2023. Some highlights:

– It’s very likely that next year you could have a chatbot that acts as a research assistant. Imagine that you are writing a research paper and want to add some historical facts about World War II. You could share a 100-page document with the bot and ask it to sum up the highlights related to a certain aspect of the war. The bot will then read the document and generate a summary for you….

That doesn’t mean that we’ll see a flood of stand-alone A.I. apps in 2023. It may be more the case that many tools we already use for work will begin building automatic language generation into their apps. Rowan Curran, a technology analyst at the research firm Forrester, said apps like Microsoft Word and Google Sheets could soon embed A.I. tools to streamline people’s work flows.

– In 2023, the V.R. drumbeat will go on. Apple, which has publicly said it will never use the word “metaverse,” is widely expected to release its first headset. Though the company has yet to share details about the product, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, has laid out clues, expressing his excitement about using augmented reality to take advantage of digital data in the physical world. “You’ll wonder how you lived your life without augmented reality, just like today you wonder: How did people like me grow up without the internet?” Mr. Cook said in September to students in Naples.

He added, however, that the technology was not something that would become profound overnight. Wireless headsets remain bulky and used indoors, which means that the first iteration of Apple’s headgear will, similar to many others that preceded it, most likely be used for games. In other words, there will continue to be lots of chatter about the metaverse and virtual (augmented, mixed, whatever-you-want-to-call-dorky-looking) goggles in 2023, but it most likely still won’t be the year that these headsets become widely popular, said Carolina Milanesi, a consumer tech analyst for the research firm Creative Strategies. “From a consumer perspective, it’s still very uncertain what you’re spending your thousand bucks on when you’re buying a headset,” she said. “Do I have to do a meeting with V.R.? With or without legs, it’s not a necessity.”

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AI-Powered Software Delivery Company Predicts ‘The End of Programming’

Matt Welsh is the CEO and co-founder of Fixie.ai, an AI-powered software delivery company founded by a team from Google and Apple. “I believe the conventional idea of ‘writing a program’ is headed for extinction,” he opines in January’s Communications of the ACM, “and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed.”

His essay is titled “The End of programming,” and predicts a future will “Programming will be obsolete.”
In situations where one needs a “simple” program (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be generated by an AI rather than coded by hand…. with humans relegated to, at best, a supervisory role…. I am not just talking about things like Github’s CoPilot replacing programmers. I am talking about replacing the entire concept of writing programs with training models. In the future, CS students are not going to need to learn such mundane skills as how to add a node to a binary tree or code in C++. That kind of education will be antiquated, like teaching engineering students how to use a slide rule.

The engineers of the future will, in a few keystrokes, fire up an instance of a four-quintillion-parameter model that already encodes the full extent of human knowledge (and then some), ready to be given any task required of the machine. The bulk of the intellectual work of getting the machine to do what one wants will be about coming up with the right examples, the right training data, and the right ways to evaluate the training process. Suitably powerful models capable of generalizing via few-shot learning will require only a few good examples of the task to be performed. Massive, human-curated datasets will no longer be necessary in most cases, and most people “training” an AI model will not be running gradient descent loops in PyTorch, or anything like it. They will be teaching by example, and the machine will do the rest.

In this new computer science — if we even call it computer science at all — the machines will be so powerful and already know how to do so many things that the field will look like less of an engineering endeavor and more of an an educational one; that is, how to best educate the machine, not unlike the science of how to best educate children in school. Unlike (human) children, though, these AI systems will be flying our airplanes, running our power grids, and possibly even governing entire countries. I would argue that the vast majority of Classical CS becomes irrelevant when our focus turns to teaching intelligent machines rather than directly programming them. Programming, in the conventional sense, will in fact be dead….

We are rapidly moving toward a world where the fundamental building blocks of computation are temperamental, mysterious, adaptive agents…. This shift in the underlying definition of computing presents a huge opportunity, and plenty of huge risks. Yet I think it is time to accept that this is a very likely future, and evolve our thinking accordingly, rather than just sit here waiting for the meteor to hit.

“I think the debate right now is primarily around the extent to which these AI models are going to revolutionize the field,” Welsh says in a video interview. “It’s more a question of degree rather than whether it’s going to happen….

“I think we’re going to change from a world in which people are primarily writing programs by hand to a world in which we’re teaching AI models how to do things that we want them to do… It starts to feel more like a field that focus on AI education and maybe even AI psychiatry. In order to solve these problems, you can’t just assume that people are going to be writing the code by hand.”

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The Shameful Open Secret Behind Southwest’s Failure? Software Shortcomings

Computer programmer Zeynep Tufekci now writes about the impact of technology on society. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tufekci writes on “the shameful open secret” that earlier this week led Southwest airlines to suddenly cancel 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours. “The recent meltdown was avoidable, but it would have cost them.”

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes that the piece “takes a crack at explaining ‘technical debt’ to the masses.” Tufekci writes:

Computers become increasingly capable and powerful by the year and new hardware is often the most visible cue for technological progress. However, even with the shiniest hardware, the software that plays a critical role inside many systems is too often antiquated, and in some cases decades old. This failing appears to be a key factor in why Southwest Airlines couldn’t return to business as usual the way other airlines did after last week’s major winter storm. More than 15,000 of its flights were canceled starting on Dec. 22, including more than 2,300 canceled this past Thursday — almost a week after the storm had passed.

It’s been an open secret within Southwest for some time, and a shameful one, that the company desperately needed to modernize its scheduling systems. Software shortcomings had contributed to previous, smaller-scale meltdowns, and Southwest unions had repeatedly warned about it. Without more government regulation and oversight, and greater accountability, we may see more fiascos like this one, which most likely stranded hundreds of thousands of Southwest passengers — perhaps more than a million — over Christmas week.

And not just for a single company, as the problem is widespread across many industries.

“The reason we made it through Y2K intact is that we didn’t ignore the problem,” the piece argues. But in comparison, it points out, Southwest had already experienced another cancellation crisis in October of 2021 (while the president of the pilots’ union “pointed out that the antiquated crew-scheduling technology was leading to cascading disruptions.”) “In March, in its open letter to the company, the union even placed updating the creaking scheduling technology above its demands for increased pay.”

Speaking about this week’s outage, a Southwest spokesman concedes that “We had available crews and aircraft, but our technology struggled to align our resources due to the magnitude and scale of the disruptions.”

But Tufekci concludes that “Ultimately, the problem is that we haven’t built a regulatory environment where companies have incentives to address technical debt, rather than passing the burden on to customers, employees or the next management…. For airlines, it might mean holding them responsible for the problems their miserly approach causes to the flying public.”

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‘Switch Pro’ Reportedly Cancelled As Nintendo Shifts Focus To Next-Gen Console

An anonymous reader shares a report: Rumours of a Nintendo Switch Pro console have been swirling in the video game industry and the gaming community for years. However, it seems that Nintendo is ready to move on from the portable console. According to Digital Foundry’s John Linneman, many developers acknowledged that a “mid-generation Switch update” was initially planned, but Nintendo opted to focus instead on building a new console. Nintendo has yet to officially announce its next video game system, and Linneman said he does not expect it will be released until 2023. “So I think at one point internally from what I can understand from talking to different developers, is that there was some sort of mid-generation Switch update planned at one point and that seems to be no longer happening,” said Linneman in the Digital Foundry podcast.

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‘Lifetime Value’ Is Silicon Valley’s Next Buzzword

So long, “total addressable market.” Farewell, “flywheel effect.” Silicon Valley has a new buzzword. As the cost of signing up new customers rises, “lifetime value” is set to become must-use jargon for technology executives, investors and analysts in 2023. Reuters reports: Companies like Uber, DoorDash and Spotify want shareholders to know they can squeeze more revenue out of users than it costs to recruit them. As with previously popular jargon, though, the idea can quickly get garbled. The concept of lifetime value is not new, but a common definition remains elusive. The venture capitalist Bill Gurley defines it as “the net present value of the profit stream of a customer.” Hollywood uses it to estimate the cumulative income from streaming movie titles, after deducting the cost of making the film.

It’s catching on in the tech world. Uber boss Dara Khosrowshahi and his team invoked (PDF) the term seven times during the ride-hailing firm’s investor day. At a similar event in June executives from music streaming service Spotify mentioned (PDF) it 14 times, with another 47 references to the abbreviation LTV. Earnings transcripts for 4,800 U.S.-listed companies analyzed by Bedrock AI show executives and analysts mentioned “lifetime value” over 500 times between October and mid-December, up from just 47 times in three months to March 2019.

The problem is that everyone seems to have a different definition of lifetime value. Food delivery firm DoorDash looks at it as a metric to measure “customer retention, order frequency, and gross profit per order” over a fixed payback period. Uber and its Southeast Asian peer Grab treat it as the ability to bring in one customer and then cross-sell different services at a lower cost. The $49 billion e-commerce firm Shopify defines lifetime value as the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend with the business over the course of an “average business relationship.” But lifetime value isn’t a silver bullet, as Gurley noted a decade ago. As capital becomes more scarce, generating free cash flow remains the most important target. As with previous buzzwords, investors may find that references to lifetime value do more to confound than clarify.

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