Boulder Future Salon

According to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, more US adults agree with the statement, "Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track." For self-identified Democrats, between March of 2024 and September of 2025, the percent that agree went from 12% to 28%. For self-identified Republicans, the percent that agree went from 28% to 31%. For self-identified independents, the percent that agree went from 18% to 25%. Overall, for all US adults, the percent that agree went from 20% to 30%. (PBS said 19, NPR said 20. The Marist survey results document said 6% strongly agree + 13% agree, which, if I am capable of doing arithmetic, is 19%.) The poll was conducted September 22nd through September 26th, 2025, which is after the high-profile assassination of Charlie Kirk.

ImageTextEdit lets you "edit text in images with AI magic." Now whenever you see people with signs (protesters, for example), you won't be able to trust that the signs actually say what they look like they say. Not that you could trust images before, but thanks to this you can trust them even less. ;)

"Orbiting the Hénon Attractor." This is from 2022 but I just encountered it today. It is a system of equations that generates fractal images, but these, unlike looking like a Mandelbrot or Julia set or somesuch, remind me of the rings of Saturn or the cloud formations of Jupiter or Saturn.

xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, is making an alternative to Wikipedia called Grokipedia.

An aircraft that can reduce fuel burn by over 60% by using "laminar-flow aerodynamics" (as well as other technologies like "precision all-carbon-fiber composites") has been produced, or so it is claimed, by an aerospace startup company, Otto Aerospace, which announced its first fleet customer will be Flexjet, although deliveries won't begin until 2030.

"Tilly Norwood is an AI-generated actor whose creator claims she may soon be represented by talent agents." Alrighty then. I watched the AI-generated comedy sketch, AI Commissioner ... uh, comedy? It was a sketch. Is Hollywood getting disrupted? What do you say?

"Tilly Norwood is an AI-generated actor whose creator claims she may soon be represented by talent agents." Alrighty then. I watched the AI-generated comedy sketch, "AI Commissioner"... uh, comedy? It was a sketch. Is Hollywood about to get massively disrupted? What do you say?

"A study involving more than nine million pregnancies reported that children whose mothers had gestational diabetes during pregnancy had a higher chance of developing attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism than did children whose mothers didn't have the condition." "The study, presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in Vienna, is under review at a peer-reviewed journal. It is not the first to link gestational diabetes to neurodevelopmental disorders in children, but it is one of the largest. Researchers pooled results from 48 studies across 20 countries, finding that children born to people with gestational diabetes had lower IQ scores, a 36% higher risk of ADHD and a 56% higher risk of autism spectrum disorders. Estimates suggest the prevalence of autism in the general population is one in 127 people and 3-10% of children and teenagers have ADHD." "The latest results mirror those of another meta-analysis, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal in June, which included 56 million mother-child pairs and found that all types of diabetes in pregnancy, including type 1, type 2 and gestational diabetes, increase the risk of the baby developing ADHD and autism. But none of these studies has been able to show that diabetes during pregnancy causes these conditions." Note: Not acetaminophen (paracetamol).

Setsum is an order agnostic, additive, subtractive checksum. (An algorithmic curiosity for you.) At first that sounded impossible, but it's actually simple when you look under the hood. It takes a traditional cryptographic hash function, breaks the output into fixed-size integers (32-bit integers, for example), and then adds or subtracts those integers modulo a prime number. (They give an example here with 29 used as the prime number, but the largest prime number that fits in a 32-bit integer is 4,294,967,291.) Order doesn't matter, you can remove items, and you can combine setsums, but "setsum can tell you if states diverged, but not where. To narrow things down, you can split your data into smaller chunks and compare those. Build this into a hierarchical structure and you're basically back to something like a Merkle tree." "You can remove items that never existed. This might or might not be a problem depending on your use case. Given that you're only maintaining 256 bits of state, it's a reasonable tradeoff." "There's no history tracking. You can't tell when or how states diverged, just that they did."

A variant of the infamous Petya/NotPetya ransomeware virus has been discovered that is capable of bypassing UEFI Secure Boot on outdated systems. Petya in 2016 encrypted the hard drives of Windows (NTFS) computers and demanded Bitcoin payment. In 2017, a variant was made that targeted a Ukrainian tax filing program. It infected Ukrainian banks, electricity companies, and all kinds of Ukrainian companies before it escaped to the rest of the world. It pretended to demand payment but actually just wiped the hard disks; there was no way to pay and actually get the data back. It is thought to have been created by the Russian GRU specifically to cyberattack Ukraine. It was named NotPetya to distinguish it from the original Petya. The new variant is being called HybridPetya. It exploits a vulnerability in old versions of UEFI Secure Boot. UEFI stands for "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface" and the "Secure Boot" portion of the specification specifies a procedure for digitally signing the operating system (or more specifically, the OS boot loader), and not allowing the computer to boot up if the digital signature check fails.

Unbeknownst to me, there's been an effort underway to make a version of C++ called "Safe C++". "The goal of this proposal is to advance a superset of C++ with a rigorously safe subset. Begin a new project, or take an existing one, and start writing safe code in C++. Code in the safe context exhibits the same strong safety guarantees as code written in Rust." However, the C++ Safety and Security working group voted to prioritize "Profiles", whatever that is, over Safe C++. So it looks like "Safe C++" is never going to happen.

"An advanced version of Gemini 2.5 Deep Think has achieved gold-medal level performance at the 2025 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals." "This milestone builds directly on Gemini 2.5 Deep Think's gold-medal win at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) just two months ago." "The ICPC is globally recognized as the oldest, largest and most prestigious algorithmic programming competition at college level. This is a step up from high school level olympiads such as the IMO. Every year, participants from nearly 3000 universities and over 103 countries compete in solving real-world coding problems." "This year's world finals took place in Baku, Azerbaijan on September 4, and brought together the top teams from earlier phases of the competition. Over a five-hour period, each team tackled a set of complex algorithmic problems. Final rankings hinged on two unforgiving principles: only perfect solutions earned points, and every minute counted. From the 139 competing teams, only the top four teams won gold medals." "An advanced version of Gemini 2.5 Deep Think competed live in a remote online environment following ICPC rules, under the guidance of the competition organizers. It started 10 minutes after the human contestants and correctly solved 10 out of 12 problems, achieving gold-medal level performance under the same five-hour time constraint." "Gemini solved eight problems within just 45 minutes and two more problems within three hours, using a wide variety of advanced data structures and algorithms to generate its solutions. By solving 10 problems in a combined total time of 677 minutes, Gemini 2.5 Deep Think would be ranked in 2nd place overall, if compared with the university teams in the competition." "In an unprecedented moment, our model successfully and efficiently solved Problem C within the first half hour -- which no university teams in the contest solved."

SGS-1 is a generative AI model for CAD. "Today we are announcing SGS-1, a foundation model that can generate fully manufacturable and parametric 3D geometry." "Given an image or a 3D mesh, SGS-1 can generate CAD B-Rep parts in STEP format. Unlike all other existing generative models, SGS-1 outputs are accurate and can be edited easily in traditional CAD software." "SGS-1 can be used for real-world engineering tasks. In the below example, SGS-1 is used to design a bracket for a roller assembly from partial context and a text description." They go on to describe comparisons with the world's largest state-of-the-art "multimodal" models, such as GPT-5. These models "demonstrate a clear lack of spatial understanding, producing outputs that are unusable or too simple to actually be useful." "SGS-1 accurately represents the geometry and can be plugged into an assembly context, while the output from the large reasoning model is missing core spatial features." "With SGS-1, you can create new parametric geometry within your current assembly context. In this example, SGS-1 takes in a partial CAD assembly and a text description/image of a bracket, and produces a 3D design for a bracket that is feasible for the context." "First, render the partial assembly and come up with a text description of the parts you want to add..."

OSINT tracking of military vessels. "The US military is deploying significant airpower in the Caribbean one week after carrying out an airstrike on what it said was a boat operated by a Venezuelan drug cartel." "MQ-9 Reaper drones have been stationed in Puerto Rico, according to open-source imagery. The Pentagon is also planning to send F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters to the island, US officials said. Numerous C-17 Globemaster III cargo aircraft, as well as KC-135 Stratotanker and KC-46 Pegasus aerial refuelers, have also been flying to bases in the region." In case you're wondering, "the MQ-9B is a medium-to high-altitude, long-endurance hunterkiller remotely piloted aircraft, primarily tasked with eliminating time-critical and high-value targets in permissive environments", "the F-35 Lightning II is a multirole, stealthy, penetrating, all-weather fighter/attack family of tactical aircraft developed under the multinational Joint Strike Fighter program", "the KC-135 is an aerial tanker capable of simultaneous cargo and AE missions and has been the mainstay of the USAF tanker fleet for more than 60 years", and "the KC-46A is a heavily modified Boeing 767-200ER multirole passenger/cargo-tanker equipped with flying boom and probe/drogue refueling capability using the Wing Air Refueling Pod system." All of this is readily available from the explanatory pop-ups on the site. "The MQ-9s have been spotted at Rafael Hernández International Airport in Puerto Rico. That airfield is home to Coast Guard Air Station Borinquen, but the Coast Guard does not operate MQ-9s. "At least one Reaper was photographed on Sept. 4, and armed with what appeared to be Hellfire air-to-surface missiles, by the news agency Reuters."

"StemRad Radiation shield receives top marks in US Special Operations Command evaluation." Alright, if I ever need personal radiation protection, I know where to buy it. Although I have a funny feeling that if I ever realize I need personal radiation protection, it'll already be too late.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking before the UN, says the world needs global rules for use of AI in weapons. He doesn't elaborate on what these rules should be or how they should be enforced, but instead goes on to say it is cheaper to stop Russia now than to allow the AI weapons arms race to continue and have to protect every school, every piece of critical infrastructure, every port, and every ship from AI weapons.