Category: Technology

Are Aliens Studying Us?

For many years, conspiracies and beliefs have circulated the claim that aliens are here with us on earth and are watching our everyday lives. Today I will be discussing my thoughts on this.

Humans have the technology to do amazing things such as create space technology, but we have never seen life on any other planet besides our own. I would like to believe that aliens live somewhere in space, but we cannot find them because of the absolute vastness of space. We have seen UFOs and supernatural activity on camera, but every fuzzy sighting and highly pixelated image has been chalked up to civilian and military air activity. If aliens have been sighted, they clearly possess technology far beyond our own and have faster-than-light traveling methods. .

We have no evidence that there is definitely life in space, let alone life that could be infinitely stronger, faster and different from us and the kinds of life we know. We see aliens as weird and creepy, and they may feel the same way. Aliens, if anywhere, have to be somewhere where there is a lot of technology and power. They do have spaceships, so obviously there are living things that know we are here and have the power to come into the gravitational pull of the earth and also leave.

Even then, there could be even more advanced forms of life studying aliens in whatever place they are located. It’s dangerous as well; it’s as if we don’t know where they exist but they know exactly every move we make, what goes on in the world, and they are able to see us without us ever knowing. We rarely catch a glimpse of what we believe is a UFO. It could just be a cloud, a light from somewhere our eyes cannot reach, or maybe our imagination. But now it is getting to a point where sightings are constantly uploaded to the internet, concerning the public.

The fact that people think aliens are fake shows us how low our intelligence really is. We should never overlook the fact there could be other life out there that is hidden from human sight and that we may never discover. We are not advanced enough to discover aliens yet. We have made space devices and technology that can reach our own solar system’s planets, but we have no idea whether alternate universes truly exist or not, and if so, how to reach them. Maybe the aliens we speak of know not to come out of the UFO or give any appearances, and that is why we can only imagine what they look like or fabricate something representative of the concept.

Aliens are still so unknown in their ways and activities. Humans may see what we assume to be a UFO, but no one has completely accurate proof. In my opinion, there has to be life out there that we do not know anything about yet – aliens – and it is only a matter of time until we figure out how they really present as a ‘species.’

News Technology

AI is advancing. FAST

Source: The Daily Star

The picture above was not made by a human. It is not the result of a constructive thought process, but was actually made in seconds, generated by artificial intelligence (AI)

Over the past year, AI has been in the mainstream media because of its rapid, extreme advancement . AI used to be a much more complicated process, but now there are whole apps dedicated to making AI art, like the image pictured above. More recently, people on Tik Tok have used AI to make AI voice-generated impressions of presidential figures, but these have been used for a more comedic tone rather than for harm. This may sound scary to people who are not aware of the capacity of AI. So far it has been harmless, but only time will tell.

Conspiracy theorists have always been throwing out phrases such as “AI is taking over,” but now this seems like a possibility not limited to just conspirators. This new wave of AI generators is young–barely a year old–so there is no way to tell how far it will go in the future. The AI possibilities are endless, because it is supposed to mimic humans and our intelligence.

I talked to some people around McClatchy’s campus about their thoughts about AI. The first person I talked to was Nathen, who said “It’s… cool. It’s good.” Victor had a more pessimistic and humorous outlook on the topic, saying, “We about to end up like I, Robot,” in reference to a movie related to the topic. Anthony had an optimistic type of response: “AI is kinda useless right now, but maybe in the future it will be more significant”. Lastly, Justin simply said, “It’s cool.”

Overall, the students at CKM have diverse opinions on the recent advancements in AI tech, with some feeling optimistic, others scared, and still others unfazed.

Archive Opinion Technology

Why NFTs Won’t Work

By Tristan Olynick, Staff Writer

Over the past year, NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) have come into the view of the mainstream media and have come into controversy. The biggest reason why these internet keys have become controversial is because simply, they do not work. Many people believe that these may change the way we use the internet, yet NFTs are stupid technically and ideally.

A big problem is that NFTs are artificially inflated. This inflation comes from the practice that a lot of top tier NFT owners use called “wash trading”. This happens when the owner of an NFT will buy his own NFT with a different crypto wallet. These purchases are traceable through viewing a wallet’s history.

The purpose of wash trading is to artificially drive up the price of these images to an unreasonable number, causing people to think that it’s worth more than it really is. It also puts on the act to potential buyers that it is highly tradeable, causing higher chances for profit returns.

A lot of this wash trading is discovered by places such as “Chainanalysis” which “Connects cryptocurrency transactions to real-world activity.” According to Chainanalysis, there were 25 NFTs discovered under wash trading that made over 8.9 million dollars in ETH (Ethereum) which is an online currency.

A key argument you may have heard thrown around about NFTs changing the game may be in video games, which claim that you can buy an NFT and use it in one game, and then use it in another. A quote from American singer Mike Shinoda, “Imagine taking your favorite skin from Valorant, and using it [in] Fortnite. And not paying extra, because you won it. Then using it in CoD, Minecraft, even Twitter, IG.” This is practically impossible.

On January 9, 3D character artist Xavier Coelho-Kostolny created a thread on twitter explaining why Mike Shinoda’s vision is impractical. When reviewing the thread, one point jumps out clearly. It is irreconcilable to jump from one art style to another; specifically based on rendering technology.

Rendering technology is complicated, there is no same way of rendering things. Many games use vastly different “engines” that drive this rendering for objects, effects, backgrounds, and more in these games. While Valorant renders their game through one engine, Minecraft will render objects in not only a different, but different code. This creates a very important limitation that many seem to overlook.

Due to this change in code and rendering engines, each and every NFT would need to be converted to every single engine imaginable, including ones made by smaller companies which might not even support this conversion. To render an NFT in Valorant you have to give specific instructions and rules to draw this NFT to one’s monitor. Using that same NFT in another game such as Minecraft would break it entirely because they both use completely different sets of instructions to draw objects.

When you look at the server side of things, it gets even worse. If NFTs were to take full effect there would possibly be millions of them. All of them (to even be identified by the platform you are using such as Instagram) would have to be placed on a centralized hub where the platform can pull information from. The platform then needs to spend multiple CPU cycles to verify it is yours and cannot be duplicated, this would slow down server performance immensely rendering them almost useless.

To actually accomplish Shinoda’s dream, Xavier explains that it would cost an unfathomable amount of money with legal issues, conversion work, having to remodel it to fit with the games art style, and performance cost. It simply isn’t worth the work, and many believe it would completely kill the NFT market.

Opinion Technology

Java is a Bad Language

By Tristan Olynick, Staff Writer

As someone who has done extensive research into Java, and worked on back-end server plug-in development with it, I would like to state that Java is slow and finicky.

I’ve worked with programming languages such as Python and C++ before, creating multiple bots for platforms like Instagram and Twitter. To do this, I have had to interact with this god forsaken language (which also includes JavaScript or as I will refer to it for now on, JS) and it’s corresponding JSON files. Every time I’ve used it, something has gone wrong.

The only positive thing I am able to say about JS is that when you aren’t getting a constant flow of errors (approximately 3% of the time) it’s actually fun to write in. In addition to this, because Java is not a compiled or interpreted language, it’s completely platform-independent. This allows Java to run on phones, computers, servers, and more without any extra code or languages.

A massive negative point about JS is how abominably slow it is. According to Forbes, when accurately translated to Java, optimized C++ code runs 3x slower. Compared to C++, Java is a high level language; it doesn’t have access to lower level functionality like C++, making it way more inefficient. Along with bound checks on arrays, and higher memory usage, Java is generally considered to be an unproductive language.

If being slow wasn’t bad enough, even Java’s libraries are flawed. Log4J is an open-source, apache logging framework that many developers use to store logging information. On December 1, 2021 CloudFlare (a widely used cybersecurity plug-in/company) reported that an exploit in Log4J allowed remote code execution on other people’s computers. Essentially, if you exploited this bug, someone could anonymously run code on your computer or server (which is really bad). Remote Code Execution (RCE) attacks can lead to your system being accessed remotely, key logged, and even bricked.

My final problem with JavaScript is its readability. Because it is a single-threaded, asynchronous, language, it is hard to read and learn. When using someone else’s code, you want to be able to understand what you’re working with.

As a scripting language that is very slow with zero readability, I believe that Java is a bad language. Despite all of this, JS is used frequently, which is unfortunate because it makes it an important language to learn.