Month: October 2023

Enlarge (credit: atakan/Getty Images)

The way you talk can reveal a lot about you—especially if you're talking to a chatbot. New research reveals that chatbots like ChatGPT can infer a lot of sensitive information about the people they chat with, even if the conversation is utterly mundane.

The phenomenon appears to stem from the way the models’ algorithms are trained with broad swathes of web content, a key part of what makes them work, likely making it hard to prevent. “It's not even clear how you fix this problem,” says Martin Vechev, a computer science professor at ETH Zürich in Switzerland who led the research. “This is very, very problematic.”

Enlarge / Whatever is in those Wonder Flower, I want some. (credit: Nintendo)

Back in 1995, Nintendo released Yoshi’s Island, which included the game’s seventh level, “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy.” After a relatively sedate and predictable first half, the last part of “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy” introduces the floating white puffballs that give the level its name (and its cult status among Mario fans). While touching most enemies in Yoshi’s Island causes damage or instant death, touching a fuzzy simply makes the entire level start to bob up and down like a series of ocean waves, as a wide-eyed Yoshi staggers back and forth like he's 10 shots deep into an epic bender.

Playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder, it feels like somebody at Nintendo asked, “What if we made a game where every level was like ‘Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy’?” Thankfully for us, someone at Nintendo apparently heard this question and said, “Sure, why not?”

Wonder-full flowers

The Wonder Flowers hidden in each level of Super Mario Bros. Wonder could have easily been a gimmick—the kind of repetitive, minor alterations to the status quo that help check a box on the game packaging. Instead, the Wonder Flower effects provide a much-needed shot in the arm that keeps the game from falling into anything approaching a predictable rut.

A consensus among leading American astronomers is that NASA's next wave of great observatories should take advantage of game-changing lift capabilities offered by giant new rockets like SpaceX's Starship.

Launching a follow-on to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Starship, for example, could unshackle the mission from onerous mass and volume constraints, which typically drive up complexity and cost, a panel of three astronomers recently told the National Academies' Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"The availability of greater mass and volume capability, at lower cost, enlarges the design space," said Charles Lawrence, the chief scientist for astronomy and physics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We want to take advantage of that.”