Arduinna

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/09/northrop-grummans-new-spacecraft-is-a-real-chonker/

Posted by Stephen Clark

What happens when you use a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to launch Northrop Grumman's Cygnus supply ship? A record-setting resupply mission to the International Space Station.

The first flight of Northrop's upgraded Cygnus spacecraft, called Cygnus XL, is on its way to the international research lab after launching Sunday evening from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This mission, known as NG-23, is set to arrive at the ISS early Wednesday with 10,827 pounds (4,911 kilograms) of cargo to sustain the lab and its seven-person crew.

By a sizable margin, this is the heaviest cargo load transported to the ISS by a commercial resupply mission. NASA astronaut Jonny Kim will use the space station's Canadian-built robotic arm to capture the cargo ship on Wednesday, then place it on an attachment port for crew members to open hatches and start unpacking the goodies inside.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/09/northrop-grummans-new-spacecraft-is-a-real-chonker/

nnozomi posting in

guardian_learning

部首
囗 part 3
困, sleepy/in trouble/to imprison; 围, to surround; 固, hard/solid ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=31

语法
接 vs 接到
https://www.chineseboost.com/grammar/jie1-jie1dao4-answer-receive/

词汇
愿望, desire; 志愿, to volunteer/to wish; 志愿者, a volunteer ( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-3-word-list/

Guardian:
你已经被包围了, you are already surrounded
我们接到匿名举报提供了详尽确凿的证据, we received an anonymous phone call with solid evidence
我就帮你实现愿望, I'll help you make your dream come true

Me:
今晚我干不下去了，太困了。
你怎么一直不接我的电话？

killabeez posting in

hlh_shortcuts

Belated but heartfelt thanks to

lferion for contributing paid account time to the community. Thank you, kind fairy godperson!

guardian_wishlist_mod posting in

guardian_wishlist

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https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/09/meet-the-latest-anti-vaccine-voices-on-rfk-jr-s-cdc-advisory-panel/

Posted by Beth Mole

Health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has appointed five more people to the federal advisory committee that sets national vaccination recommendations. Like the existing members, the new appointees have questionable qualifications for being on the panel, and many have expressed anti-vaccine views.

In June, Kennedy purged all 17 highly qualified and thoroughly vetted members of the committee, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on setting vaccine policy. Kennedy quickly repopulated ACIP with seven hand-picked allies, most of whom also have questionable qualifications and have expressed anti-vaccine or contrarian public health views. Two members, including the new chair, have also been paid to testify against the vaccine makers in cases claiming they caused harms, a clear conflict of interest.

Here are the new members:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/09/meet-the-latest-anti-vaccine-voices-on-rfk-jr-s-cdc-advisory-panel/

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/09/google-releases-vaultgemma-its-first-privacy-preserving-llm/

Posted by Ryan Whitwam

The companies seeking to build larger AI models have been increasingly stymied by a lack of high-quality training data. As tech firms scour the web for more data to feed their models, they could increasingly rely on potentially sensitive user data. A team at Google Research is exploring new techniques to make the resulting large language models (LLMs) less likely to "memorize" any of that content.

LLMs have non-deterministic outputs, meaning you can't exactly predict what they'll say. While the output varies even for identical inputs, models do sometimes regurgitate something from their training data—if trained with personal data, the output could be a violation of user privacy. In the event copyrighted data makes it into training data (either accidentally or on purpose), its appearance in outputs can cause a different kind of headache for devs. Differential privacy can prevent such memorization by introducing calibrated noise during the training phase.

Adding differential privacy to a model comes with drawbacks in terms of accuracy and compute requirements. No one has bothered to figure out the degree to which that alters the scaling laws of AI models until now. The team worked from the assumption that model performance would be primarily affected by the noise-batch ratio, which compares the volume of randomized noise to the size of the original training data.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/09/google-releases-vaultgemma-its-first-privacy-preserving-llm/

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/internet-archives-big-battle-with-music-publishers-ends-in-settlement/

Posted by Ashley Belanger

A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit where music publishers sued the Internet Archive over the Great 78 Project, an effort to preserve early music recordings that only exist on brittle shellac records.

No details of the settlement have so far been released, but a court filing on Monday confirmed that the Internet Archive and UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Sony Music Entertainment, and other record labels "have settled this matter." More details may come in the next 45 days, when parties must submit filings to officially dismiss the lawsuit, but it's unlikely the settlement amount will be publicly disclosed.

Days before the settlement was announced, record labels had indicated that everyone but the Internet Archive and its founder, Brewster Kahle, had agreed to sign a joint settlement, seemingly including the Great 78 Project's recording engineer George Blood, who was also a target of the litigation. But in the days since, IA has gotten on board, posting a blog confirming that "the parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter."