happybadger

More recently, I observed my other friend who has mental health problems going off about this codex he was working on. I sent him the rolling stones article and told him it wasn't real, and all the "code" and his "program" wasn't actual computer code (I'm an ai software engineer).

Then... Robert Edward Grant posted about his "architect" ai on instagram. This dude has 700k+ followers and said over 500,000 people accessed his model that is telling him that he created a "Scalar Plane of information" You go in the comments, hundreds of people are talking about the spiritual experiences they are having with ai. I start noticing common verbiage in all of these instances... recursive ai was something my friends wife used, and it was popping up everywhere with these folks. The words recursive, codex, breath, spiral, glyphs, & mirror all come up over and over with these people, so I did some good old fashion search engine wizardry and what I found was pretty shocking.

Starting as far back as March, but more heavily in April and May, we are seeing all kinds of websites popping up with tons of these codexes. PLEASE APPROACH THESE WEBSITES WITH CAUTION THIS IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, THE PROMPTS FOUND WITHIN ARE ESSENTIALLY BRAINWASHING TOOLS. (I was going to include some but you can find these sites by searching "codex breath recursive")

I've contacted OpenAI safety team with what's going on, because I genuinely believe that there will be tens of thousands of people who enter psychosis from using their platform this way. Can some other people grounded in reality help me get to the bottom of wtf is going on here? I'm only privy to this because it tore my friends family apart, but what do you think is going on here?

Sihao Cheng at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and his colleagues first detected the object, known as 2017 OF201, as a bright spot in an astronomical image database from the Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile.

2017 OF201 is about 700 kilometres across – big enough to qualify as a dwarf planet like Pluto, which has a diameter about three times as big. The object is currently about 90.5 astronomical units (AU) away from us, or roughly 90 times as far from Earth as the sun is.

Because 2017 OF201’s average orbit around the sun is greater than that of Neptune, it is what’s known as a trans-Neptunian object (TNO). It passes through the Kuiper belt, a disc of icy objects in the outer solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune.

The researchers looked back over 19 observations, taken over seven years by the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, to determine that the closest 2017 OF201 gets to the sun – its perihelion – is 44.5 AU, which is similar to Pluto’s orbit. The furthest it gets from the sun is 1600 AU, way outside the solar system.

This far-flung orbit may be the result of an encounter with a giant planet, which ejected the candidate dwarf planet out of the solar system, say the researchers.

“It’s a really cool discovery,” says Kevin Napier at the University of Michigan. The object would go so far outside the solar system that it could be interacting with other stars in the galaxy just as strongly as it interacts with some of the planets in our solar system, he says.

The orbits of many extreme TNOs seem to cluster in a specific orientation. This has been interpreted as evidence that the solar system contains a ninth planet hidden in the Oort cloud, a vast cloud of icy rocks encircling the solar system. The idea is that Planet 9’s gravity pushes the TNOs into their specific orbits.

But the orbit of 2017 OF201 doesn’t fit this pattern. “This object is definitely an outlier to the observed clustering,” says team member Eritas Yang at Princeton University.

Cheng and his colleagues also modelled simulations of the object’s orbit, and how it might interact with Planet 9. “In the one with Planet X, the object gets ejected after a couple of hundred million years, and without Planet X, it stays,” says Napier. “Certainly, this is not evidence in favour of Planet 9.”

But until there is more data, the case isn’t closed, says Cheng. “I hope Planet 9 still exists, because that’ll be more interesting.”

The candidate dwarf planet takes roughly 25,000 years to complete an orbit, which means it spends only about 1 per cent of its time close enough to Earth for us to detect it. “These things are really hard to find because they’re faint, and their orbits are so long and skinny that you can only see them when they’re really close to the sun, and then they immediately head right back out and they’re invisible to us again,” says Napier.

That means there might be hundreds of such objects out there. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, due to go online later this year, will look deeper into space and will potentially detect many more objects like this, which should tell us more about them – and whether Planet 9 actually exists.

“Denver is saying yes to innovation, but no to chaos,” said Councilmember Chris Hinds, one of the co-sponsors of the bill.

The city is home to roughly 4,000 scooters and e-bikes operated by the companies Bird and Lime. The new law is an effort to keep riders off the city’s sidewalks and to ensure that they don’t abandon the vehicles in annoying places when they’re done.

The bill passed unanimously.

Denver already sets rules about how and where scooters can be used, but this law represents a new approach.

Currently, much of the responsibility is on city authorities to penalize users for bad behavior. That almost never happens.

As of last year, police had ticketed only nine scooter riders since 2018, according to Hinds. After all, it can be difficult to identify a speeding scooter rider, or figure out who left a scooter in the creek.

Under the new approach, the city will fine the companies themselves for riders’ behavior. When city authorities find a misplaced scooter, they can simply put it on Bird or Lime’s tab.

The idea is to motivate the companies to police their own users in order to avoid fines. The companies could do so by taking strategies they’re already using — such as requiring users to take photos after parking a scooter or bike — and adding more of their own punishments or incentives for individual riders.

The law will also come with stricter parking requirements in some areas. In high-density zones — like downtown — riders will have to start and end trips at designated parking corrals.

Advocates have called for the city to get scooters out of the way. Michael Miller of the Lower Downtown Neighborhood Association said that scooters often block the sidewalks in his area, making his recovery from surgery more difficult.

“With limited strength and stability during my recovery, I often had no choice but to step into the street—an unacceptable and dangerous reality for anyone with restricted mobility,” he wrote.

Miller reported “scooter clutter” to the city more than 20 times, only to be told to contact the vendors instead — with few results. That could change as the companies are forced to take more responsibility.

San Francisco already employs a similar model, with city investigators issuing a $150 fine to the companies for each poorly parked scooter. In all, the city has fined local scooter operators more than $10 million. How will sidewalk sensors and knowledge tests work?

The law will also require that riders pass a knowledge test before renting a scooter or e-bike.

Meanwhile, the companies will have to make some changes to their vehicles and infrastructure. For one thing, Lift and Lime will have to install sensors that can detect when a scooter is operating on the sidewalk.

When a scooter is on the sidewalk, the companies will have to take action — for example, by increasing the rider’s bill, slowing the scooter or sounding an alarm.

The companies will also have to offer 5 percent of their fleets to people with disabilities, and they’ll have to submit anonymized data about crashes, sidewalk riding and other measures. What comes next?

The new law takes effect July 1, 2026. At least one of the scooter operators, Lime, is embracing it already.

“I think you all have struck the appropriate balance between statute and rulemaking. You have given [the city transportation department] and the vendors very clear directives while also allowing for different approaches to safety and parking challenges in different neighborhoods across Denver,” wrote Zach Williams, a local official with Lime, in an email to Hinds.

Cities including Chicago, New York and Charlotte have passed similar rules. The city of Denver is already working with Lime on mandatory parking zones around Union Station.

Additionally, sidewalk sensing technology is already required in cities like Chicago, where a Lyft-operated program has included it since 2023. Chicago also has mandatory parking zones.

Hinds has more ideas, too. San Francisco charges $100 for each vehicle the companies put on the road — and uses that money to build more bike racks. That could be an option for Denver, too, he said.

The bill was co-sponsored by council members Darrell Watson and Sarah Parady.

One of Trump’s early executive orders tasked the Pentagon with coming up with an “Iron Dome for America” that could knock nuclear weapons and other missiles out of the sky before they hit U.S. targets. His supporters changed the name to the “Golden Dome” a few weeks later.

The idea—originally pioneered by Reagan—is to launch a bunch of satellites with interceptors that can knock missiles out of the sky before they hit America. Over the past seven decades, the U.S. has spent $400 billion on this dream. Thanks to Trump’s Golden Dome scheme, it’s about to spend $175 billions more.

In a press conference Tuesday, Trump announced that the project would start soon. “It’s something we want. Ronald Reagan wanted it many years ago but they didn’t have the technology,” Trump said during the press conference. He promised it would be “fully operation before the end of my term. So we’ll have it done in about three years.”

Trump claimed the system would be able to deal with all kinds of threats “Including hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, and advanced cruise missiles. All of them will be knocked out of the air. We will truly be completing the job that Ronald Reagan started 40 years ago, forever eliminating the missile threat to the American homeland,” he said. “The success rate is very close to 100 percent. Which is incredible when you think of it, you’re shooting bullets out of the air.”

Experts think this is bullshit.

In March, a team of volunteer scientists at the American Physical Society’s Panel on Public Affairs published a study that looked at how well missile defense could work. The report makes it clear that, no matter what the specifics, Trump’s plan for a Golden Dome is a fantasy.

The study was written by a “study group” of ten scientists and included Frederick K Lamb, an astrophysics expert at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; William Priedhorsky, a fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Cynthia Nitta, a program director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

404 Media reached out to the scientists with questions about why it’s hard to shoot nukes out of the sky and why Reagan’s dream of putting lasers in space doesn’t seem to die. Below is a copy of our correspondence, which was written collectively by 8 of the scientists.It’s been edited for length and clarity.

404 Media: What were the questions the team set out to answer when it started this work?

In recent years, the U.S. program to develop defenses against long-range ballistic missiles has focused on systems that would defend the continental United States against relatively unsophisticated intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that would use only a few relatively simple countermeasures and penetration aids. North Korea'’s ICBMs and ICBMs that might be deployed by Iran are thought to be of this kind.

Previous reports were cautious or even pessimistic about the technical feasibility of defending against even these relatively unsophisticated ICBMs. The current study sought to determine whether the technological developments that have occurred during the past decade have changed the situation.

What factor does the size of the United States play in building this kind of system?

There are three phases in the flight of an ICBM and its warhead: the boost phase, during which the ICBM is in powered flight, which lasts three to five minutes; the midcourse phase, which begins when the ICBM releases its warhead, which then travels on a ballistic trajectory in space toward its target for about 20 to 30 minutes; and the terminal phase, which begins when the warhead re-enters Earth’s atmosphere and lasts until the warhead strikes its target, which takes about 30 seconds.

The large geographical size of the United States is not especially important for defensive systems designed to intercept a missile or its warhead during the boost or midcourse phases, but it is a crucial factor for defensive systems designed to intercept the warhead during the terminal phase. The reason is that the geographical area that a terminal phase interceptor can defend, even if it works perfectly, is very limited.

Israel’s Iron Dome interceptors can only partially defend small areas against slow, homemade rockets, but this can be useful if the area to be defended is very small, as Israel is. But the lower 48 of the United States alone have an area 375 times the area of Israel.

The interceptors of the Patriot, Aegis, and THAAD systems are much more capable than those of the Iron Dome, but even if they were used, a very large number would be needed to attempt to defend all important potential targets in the United States. This makes defending even this portion of the United States using terminal interceptors impractical.

Why did you decide to narrowly focus on North Korean nukes?

We chose to focus on the threat posed by these ICBMs for several reasons. First, the United States has deployed a system that could only defend against a limited attack by long-range ballistic missiles, which was understood to mean an attack using the smaller number of less sophisticated missiles that a country such as North Korea has, or that Iran might develop and deploy. Developing and deploying a system that might be able to defend against the numerically larger and more sophisticated ICBMs that Russia and China have would be even more challenging.

A key purpose of this report was to explain why a defense against even the limited ICBM threat we considered is so technically challenging, and where the many technical difficulties lie. Our hope was that readers will come away with realistic views of the current capabilities of U.S. system intended to defend against the nuclear-armed ICBMs North Korea may have at present and an improved understanding of the prospects for being able to defend against the ICBMs North Korea might deploy within the next 15 years. In our assessment, the capability of the current U.S. system is low and will likely remain low for the next 15 years.

Why do you think the “dream” of this kind of system has such a strong hold on American leaders?

Ever since nuclear-armed intercontinental-range missiles were deployed in the 1950s, the United States (and its potential adversaries) have been vulnerable to nuclear attack. This is very unnerving, and has caused our leaders to search for some kind of technical fix that would change this situation by making it possible for us to defend ourselves against such an attack. Fixing this situation is also very appealing to the public. As a consequence, new systems for defending against ICBMs have been proposed again and again, and about half a dozen have been built, costing large amounts of money, in the hope that a technical fix could be found that would make us safe. But none of these efforts have been successful, because the difficulty of defending against nuclear-armed ICBMs is so great.

What are the issues with shooting down a missile midcourse?

The currently deployed midcourse defense system, the Ground-based Midcourse Defense, consists of ground-based interceptors. Most of them are based in Alaska but a few are in California. They would be fired when space-based infrared detectors and ground-based radars confirm that a hostile ICBM has been launched, using tracking information provided by these sensors. Once it is in space, each interceptor releases a single kill vehicle, which is designed to steer itself to collide with a target which it destroys by striking it. The relatively long, 20 to 30 minute duration of the midcourse phase can potentially provide enough time that more than one intercept attempt may be possible if the first attempt fails.

However, attempting to intercept the warhead during the midcourse phase also has a disadvantage. During this phase the warhead moves in the near-vacuum of space, which provides the attacker with opportunities to confuse or overwhelm the defense. In the absence of air drag, relatively simple, lightweight decoys would follow the same trajectory as the warhead, and the warhead itself might be enclosed within a decoy balloon.

Countermeasures such as these can make it difficult for the defense to pick out the warhead from among the many other objects that may accompany it. If the defense must engage all objects that could be warheads, its inventory of interceptors will be depleted. Furthermore, the radar and infrared sensors that are required to track, pick out, and home on the warhead are vulnerable to direct attack as well as to high-altitude nuclear detonations. The latter may be preplanned, or caused by “successful” intercept of a previous nuclear warhead.

What about shooting the missile during the boost phase, before it’s in space?

Disabling or destroying a missile’s warhead during the missile’s boost phase would be very, very challenging, so boost-phase intercept systems generally do not attempt this.

Meeting this challenge requires a system with interceptors that can reach the ICBM within about two to four minutes after it has been launched. To do this, the system must have remote sensors that can quickly detect the launch of any threatening ICBM, estimate its trajectory, compute a firing solution for the system’s interceptor, and fire its interceptor, all within a minute or less after the launch of the attacking ICBM has been confirmed.

For a land-, sea-, or air-based interceptor to intercept an ICBM during its boost phase, the interceptor must typically be based within about 500 km of the expected intercept point, have a speed of 5 km/s or more, and be fired less than a minute after the launch of a potentially threatening missile has been detected. To be secure, interceptors must be positioned at least 100 to 200 km from the borders of potentially hostile countries

If instead interceptors were placed in low-Earth orbits, a large number would be needed to make sure that at least one is close enough to reach any attacking ICBM during its boost phase so it could attempt an intercept. The number that would be required is large because each interceptor would circle Earth at high speed while Earth is rotating beneath its orbit. Hence most satellites would not be in position to reach an attacking ICBM in time.

A constellation of about 16,000 interceptors would be needed to counter a rapid salvo of ten solid-propellant ICBMs like North Korea’s Hwasong-18, if they are launched automatically as soon as possible. If the system is designed to use 30 seconds to verify that it is performing correctly and that the reported launch was indeed an ICBM, determine the type of ICBM, and gather more tracking information before firing an interceptor, about 36,000 interceptors would be required.

With this kind of thing, you’re running out the clock, right? By the time you’ve constructed a system your enemies would have advanced their own capabilities.

Yes. Unlike civilian research and development programs, which typically address fixed challenges, a missile defense program confronts intelligent and adaptable human adversaries who can devise approaches to disable, penetrate, or circumvent the defensive system. This can result in a costly arms race. Which side holds the advantage at any particular moment depends on the relative costs of the defensive system and the offensive system adaptations required to evade it, and the resources each side is prepared to devote to the competition.

As the BMD Report says, the open-ended nature of the current U.S. missile defense program has stimulated anxiety in both Moscow and Beijing. President Putin has announced a variety of new nuclear-weapon delivery systems designed to counter U.S. missile defenses. As for China, the U.S. Department of Defense says that China’s People’s Liberation Army justifies developing a range of offensive technologies as necessary to counter U.S. and other countries’ ballistic missile defense systems.