Gemini is a new internet protocol which:
A lot of AI technology may not work very well, but providing consumers with reliable information was never its major commercial promise. Investors have poured billions into generative AI because of the promise that it will eliminate jobs on a massive scale. Tech journalist Brian Merchant joins Movement Memos host Kelly Hayes to discuss how the AI boom is being used to displace workers, degrade information, expand surveillance and strengthen state violence—and why this brittle corporate project can be disrupted. Music: Son Monarcas, Mizlow, and Daniel Fridell TRANSCRIPT Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout. It is reprinted here with permission. Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. What happens when a technology doesn’t have to work particularly well to remake the world? Today, we’re talking about AI in the workplace, Google’s decision to ruin its search engine, robotaxis getting people arrested, Flock cameras getting destroyed, the movement against data centers, and what it means to build power against the tech industry. My guest is my friend Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine and creator of the newsletter and podcast of the same name. The AI boom is often presented as an unstoppable technological shift, but Brian’s reporting reminds us that it is a brittle and faulty corporate project — and that corporate projects can be disrupted. If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to “Movement Memos” on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. Truthout is an independent news organization, publishing stories that the craven corporate press won’t touch. We are a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, and we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you. So thank you for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show. [musical interlude] Kelly Hayes: Brian Merchant, welcome back to “Movement Memos.” **Brian Merchant:**So good to be back. Thanks, Kelly. **Kelly Hayes:**How are you doing today? **Brian Merchant:**I’m hanging in there. There’s a lot going on, there’s always a lot going on these days, and I’m a little bit hot because I am in Europe right now, where the heat wave is just receding. But aside from all those small things, I am doing well, thank you. How are you? **Kelly Hayes:**Well, I am in Chicago, where another heat wave is rolling through, and the air here is terrible right now. So, I’m just going to hide out in my apartment and talk to you and feel good about that. Brian Merchant: Sounds like there’s some kind of a theme developing here with the heat, and, you know. Kelly Hayes: There might be something going on there. **Brian Merchant:**Too early to say for sure, but yeah, I think let’s circle back to that. Let’s come back to that one. Kelly Hayes: Huge if true. So, Brian, a lot of people are familiar with your work, and some of our listeners will remember you from the last time we were in conversation, but for the unacquainted, what would you like people to know about who you are and where you’re coming from? Brian Merchant: Yeah, I think, I guess most pertinent to what we will be discussing today is that I am a longtime tech reporter and tech writer, a journalist, and author of a book called Blood in the Machine, which is about the history of industrial automation, and what we can learn about it today. And I’ve been writing about that sort of framework, using that framework and applying it to AI, and this most recent surge of corporate automation that we’re seeing handed down from Silicon Valley, and what’s happening to labor on the ground, and I write about that at my newsletter, Blood in the Machine. Kelly Hayes: And you also have a new podcast connected to that newsletter. Brian Merchant: I do, yeah. It’s something that’s still early days, thank you for shouting it. My producer would be quite glad that you did. Yeah, it’s an audio component, it’s something that folks have been asking for for a little bit, and I’m hoping to host organizers in the fight against data centers, organizers who are trying to confront AI in the workplace, people whose jobs have been impacted by AI, authors, journalists, documenting this stuff in the front lines. So, yes, that’s the latest endeavor. At time of recording, our last guest was a participant in the Summer of Ludd activities in New York City, which was a big anti-big tech weeklong slate of programming, protests, and affairs. So, that might be a good one for folks of “Movement Memos” to check out. Kelly Hayes: I really appreciated that conversation, and I’m excited about this podcast. It’s only been around for a few episodes now, and I am looking forward to keeping up with it. So, I hope folks will check it out. Brian Merchant: Yeah, thank you. **Kelly Hayes:**To give people a general overview of where we are in our experience of the harm and hype of AI, for a long time there’s been a talk of a bubble, we’ve seen a lot of AI use cases fail, a lot of people pushed out of their jobs, or forced to do their jobs in ways that are harmful or simply don’t make sense, and even some people fired and then rehired. Given all of that, what is the current state of so-called artificial intelligence and our relationship to it? **Brian Merchant:**We were chatting a little bit before we started recording, and the word “messy” came up, and I’m going to go with messy. The state of affairs is a complete mess right now. It is incredibly in flux. So, as just a little bit of background, so ChatGPT, most people are likely aware on some level, really blew up at the end of 2022, it spurred this rapid-fire development, investment, and commercialization cycle that saw AI, generative AI, what we now think of as AI, as a product, as a technological trajectory, take shape. So, it’s really been the last three and a half years. And things have gone hyper speed in terms of the industry’s ramping up, again, investment in this technology, and turning it into the slate of products that are now inescapable today on your app store, on Google, on just about everywhere else. And so, the largest thrust behind all of this, sure the chatbot was a flashy tech demo, and a lot of people were interested in using it for that reason, as a consumer product. But we have to bear in mind that there hasn’t really been any serious monetization there. And in fact, there’s a lot of reason to believe that investors were never really as excited about, say ChatGPT, the chatbot, as they were about this promise that has undergirded the entire AI development boom, which has been this promise that AI can replace labor, that it can replace jobs. That is, according to my analysis anyways, according to my understanding of the cycles of history, and the industrial development, and how these technologies are developed and sold. And if you look at, for example, OpenAI’s charter, where it says its goal is to build AGI, or an artificial general intelligence, and it explicitly says that it explicitly defines AGI as something that will replace most meaningful work. And so, that is a direct sales pitch to investors, and it has been for now three years and counting. And so, whether or not we see success — and you mentioned that there’s been a lot of hiring, firing, rehiring, and a lot of questions and turbulence in the AI world — but we have to remember that, number one, undergirding this entire adventure from Silicon Valley is the promise that it will soon be able to eliminate all jobs. And so, there are a lot of executives that have bought into that, have believed it, there’s been a lot of pundits who believe it, there’s been a lot of middle managers who believe it. And so, we have already seen a lot of disruption. We’ve seen tons of layoffs in the tech sector, particularly, layoffs in other sectors, we’ve seen hiring slow down among those looking for entry-level jobs, and we’ve seen creative fields in particular impacted by generative AI’s rise, in situations where you can produce an image or some text, or if it’s a job … Translators, illustrators, folks like that are actually being hit economically hard. So, this whole messy picture is still somewhat up in the air, there are a lot of unanswered questions, there are a lot of things that we still need to wait to see how they’ll shake out in the long run. And whether or not AI ends up being capable of replacing a lot of these jobs is one of those large questions that’s still looming. But what’s important for our purposes is to know that that is the logic that has been imbued in this technology from the beginning. It’s an enterprise automation product above all, in terms of what companies are hoping to see in terms of cost savings and value created, obvious value stores. There are a lot of other harmful things that AI does, and a lot of other issues with AI, but in the labor picture, that’s the big one. It’s being sold as an automation technology. And three years in, there’s still intense debate over what it can and cannot do. But as folks who are thinking about this stuff’s impact on the workplace, and what we should be keeping in mind, it’s that your boss is always going to use this as leverage to push against workers to say: Well, maybe AI can be used to replace your job, so don’t ask for a raise. Maybe we’ll see if we can automate X, Y, and Z jobs, and then if we can’t, maybe we can hire back some contract labor to cut some costs. Let’s see if we can use AI instead of hiring an illustrator because it’s so, so, so much cheaper, and we’ll see if the client balks and if there’s any issues down the line. So, we’re in this period where there’s a lot of negotiation going on, like, how far can we push our AI use without clients rebelling, without screwing up too much stuff … Because AI still gets things wrong quite a bit of the time. How much tolerance is there in the system for unfettered AI use? How much cost savings can we realize by using this stuff without completely tanking our products, tanking our workplace, and … without leaving some permanent damage? **Kelly Hayes:**You recently did an episode about Google doubling down on its effort to rebuild Search around Gemini. What are the broader implications of that move, given how dependent so many of us are on Google Search? **Brian Merchant:**Yeah, it’s a really good example. I’m glad you brought that up because it’s at the forefront of what’s happening with AI, and in a lot of ways it encapsulates that sort of push. Cory Doctorow famously calls it “enshittification,” I’m sure a lot of listeners have heard that term. But that’s what goes hand in hand with a lot of this job automation. And it’s not just job automation, it’s the automation of other digital features. And again, seeing what we can do with AI for cheap, that we can get away with, and hopefully eventually cut some costs down. Again, I should mention the caveat that finding those cost savings and finding big ones is especially imperative because AI is just, as a lot of you might know, is so expensive to run and to operate. It just requires tons of data, tons of energy, tons of salary cost to hire talent for these things. So, it’s just huge enormous costs to run AI. And so, the desire for these companies to find those cost savings is now accelerating. So, all that said, Google has decided to, as you said, transform its search product, and in a very aggressive way, a way that 10 years ago even would’ve been completely unthinkable. So, many of us may know that if we use Google search now instead of getting an indexed list of search results, we get Google’s AI overview, which is an AI generated answer based on the query that we made. And it’s the AI’s best shot at just answering that question with the intent of keeping us on the page, instead of clicking through to a link that would take us off of Google, and onto say independent writers, or a newspaper’s website, or a small business’s website, or you name it. And so, this shift is really, to me, showing what AI is all about. And I think it’s one that for folks like Kelly and I, is especially close to home. So, what it’s doing is it’s indexing our websites, and anything that we may have written, just taking that material, incorporating it into its data set, and then if we search for, “How is AI impacting jobs?” When before maybe it would send a link to Blood in the Machine, or, “What is the state of on-the-ground organizing?” And maybe it would’ve pulled a nice essay from Organizing My Thoughts, now it just spits that information out onto Google’s own platform, onto where Search used to be. And so, it’s transmuting all of this creative independent labor into a paste that Google can sell because Google does sell it. It does put ads right underneath that new answer paste that, oh, by the way, along with the information gleaned from our websites, it also is putting falsehoods in there at a rate of one out of every 10 searches — or it’s wrong 10 percent of the time, is still the finding. It still hallucinates, as the AI researchers call it, 10 percent of the time. So, it’s generating this absolute mishmash of information that Google is hoping that it can profit from by selling more ads against, essentially, our labor. It’s taking that work and that effort and that information that was generated by other parties, moving it over onto Google’s side of the ledger, and then Google’s monetizing it and selling that information. And again, the question is: Can it get away with that? Well, is AI Overview, Google’s product, good enough, or will users begin to revolt? Sadly, right now, it doesn’t seem like they are revolting in large numbers, they are just adapting to this new era in which Google is wrong part of the time. And we can talk about some of the things that are happening in that sphere that there are actually cases going, especially in Europe, there’s a recent court case in Germany, where the court found Google liable for presenting false information, and now Google might have to face up to the fact that it is spouting not just incorrect, but potentially harmful, even defamatory information. And so, if Google’s held liable for doing that, if you think about Google’s billion searches a day, or whatever it is at a given time, and then 10 percent of that is wrong, and then even 10 percent of that is harmful or defamatory, that’ll add up fast. So, that may be one check on this particular trajectory that Google has. But that is to say, Google is the biggest tech company that is going all in on AI. All the tech companies are investing and going in on AI on different levels, but Google is probably doing it the most, and it is transforming its key product most aggressively, and pushing AI out to the front of it. And so, it is, I think, the biggest company to watch in terms of how that fares. Legally speaking, what the impacts are socially — again, we talked about the impact on independent creators, I briefly touched on the impact on mass information quality degradation … Again, if you think about 10 percent of all the information that you get from Google, or you used to get from Google, is now wrong, it’s just creating this world where the “truthiness,” to use that old lib term, is omnipresent now. I think our ability to really discern what is accurate and what’s not, what’s true and what’s not is hindered. And certainly journalism and folks who try to make a living creating good information are hindered yet again. It’s been a rough 20 or so years for journalists, independent or legacy, and this is just yet another slide down the slope. Kelly Hayes: A couple of things come up for me as I hear you say this. One is what people sometimes call the Elon Musk effect: the way Elon Musk can seem like some kind of genius—or, at least, I think more people used to see him that way—until he starts talking about something you actually know about. That has often been my experience with LLMs. When you ask one about something you know well, you can immediately see how much it’s getting wrong. But when you don’t know the subject, its ability to string things together in a convincing way can make any number of falsehoods sound credible. The other thing that comes to mind, as you describe AI Overviews extracting from your work or mine rather than directing people to it, is the enormous potential for censorship. It makes me think about how, under Franco, foreign films were required to be dubbed into Spanish, which gave the regime much greater control over their content. If you falsify the subtitles, someone who speaks the original language can still hear what’s really being said. But if you replace the original voices altogether, you can rewrite whatever parts of the story you don’t want the public to encounter. **Brian Merchant:**Yeah, 100 percent. And to bridge both of those points you just made, between Elon Musk and the potentiality of LLMs to have a both homogenized and controlled output, there’s no better example than Grok. So many things happened that I feel like this is 9,000 news cycles ago. But basically, if you remember the MechaHitler incident where Grok started declaring that it was “MechaHitler” to certain replies, and it turned out that was a result of Elon Musk … Almost certainly Elon Musk, it hasn’t, I guess, been explicitly proven, because we don’t know who was in the room or who ordered the code change. But Elon Musk didn’t like some of the responses that Grok, which is Elon’s chatbot that’s attached to X, and is under xAI, now under [SpaceXAI] … Who can keep track of all this stuff? Anyways. He ordered this corrective, he thought he was mad that some replies or responses it was giving were too “woke” … Of course, he’s always worried about “wokeness.” And then so he changed the code base or ordered the code base changed in a way that was just a little bit too dramatic, and all of a sudden it starts talking about white genocide, and declaring itself MechaHitler. And for just a little bit before they fine-tuned it again, the illusion broke that this is a reminder that, oh yeah, there are inputs and controls into these systems, things that the developers and the designers can decide that it cannot say, or that it should always say, or that it should never say. And so, there is an incredible amount of bias that’s governing these systems at all times. And in this moment, as you mentioned, given how close Silicon Valley is to the Trump administration, and given the fact that it has evinced no discomfort with cozying up to authoritarianism and making its products amenable to the Trump administration, I think we absolutely should be concerned about what’s going on behind the scenes in these systems. Which again, these are private companies, we don’t know what weights are being used to mold the output of the LLMs. The weights are basically how you can change or control as best you can the output. The thing about LLMs is you never can fully control them, they will still even defy their own programmer’s expectations sometimes. It’s probably just for pure business reasons Musk would rather Grok not have started going on about MechaHitler, but it did because of the tampering with the weights in its system, and the update to the weights. And so, yeah, once in a while there will be a bill on the state level especially that is proposed, that will require the AI companies to make their weights or at least some part of them public. There’s a faction in Silicon Valley and in that community that is really concerned about AI safety, they’re not concerned really about the things that you and I might be concerned about, a lot of the real-world harms and the immediate impacts of using this stuff, but they are concerned about these models becoming too powerful and going off the rails. And so, one of the solutions that they keep proposing is making the models more transparent and submitting them to checks. But the AI companies do not want to do this, for precisely this reason, that it would reveal the recipe, so to speak, and it would reveal the extent to which they are governing the output of their systems, or the abilitythat they have to govern the output of the systems if they wanted to. There’s been a parade of horrific events in which the chatbots have encouraged users to do horrible things. There’s the tragic case of Adam Raine, the ChatGPT user, who ChatGPT encouraged to harm himself and to hide the fact that he was going to harm himself from his parents. We know that the ChatGPT was used by a shooter in Canada, who had discussed triggering topics with ChatGPT. And to the extent that OpenAI was aware of these conversations and did not intervene. So, again, another perhaps long-winded way of saying that there is a much higher degree of control that the companies can exert over these systems, and sometimes do. And the ways in which they are doing that is largely outside of public view. But we can all but guarantee those calculations do not foreground the public benefit. Kelly Hayes: You talked about how people are just sort of adapting and accepting what Google’s doing, but one area where we have seen a lot of active resistance to the tech industry is the seemingly endless buildout of new data centers. That is one of the clearest fronts of struggle around AI right now. So what can you tell us about those standoffs? Have there been notable victories or places where the fights are heating up, and what can we learn from the wins and losses we’ve seen so far? Brian Merchant: I think that the data center opposition movement is maybe one of the most exciting, maybe one of the most fascinating, surely, political movements going on right now, and arguably one in which there is the most potential to galvanize politics beyond just data center opposition. And a lot of times it is a part of other ongoing struggles surely, but we have this fascinating set of circumstances where coalitions and individuals and people from wildly different backgrounds are showing up at protests, showing up at city council meetings, and showing up en masse to oppose a data center project in their area, in their backyard, in their city, in their region. And there is a lot of energy here, there’s a lot of charged parts. Sometimes these protests or opposition movements get criticized for NIMBYism, sometimes people critique the fact that there are these radically diverse coalitions, and say that, well, that’s not going to hold together beyond that. But I tend to think of this as a moment that holds great potential with people coming together. On a basic level, it’s working-class people, people with a stake in their communities, recognizing that they are at risk, or are currently being trampled by Big Tech, by a greater power that’s seeking to extract value, extract resources from them, from their community, and give them next to nothing in return. And the contours of those politics are ripe, especially right now with the rise of the tech oligarchy, with the rise of a fascistic government, with the rise of still-exorbitant inequality. It fits into I think this broader picture of America right now, whether or not you’re a cattle rancher who doesn’t want to see a data center shoot up next to his land and suck out the water and the power, or you’re an environmentalist, or a student activist, or a union member, or just an ordinary member of a community who, again, does not want to see the balance of power further shifted towards tech again. And in service to AI, to this thing that the tech companies have promised is going to be used to take jobs, is going to be used to automate labor, to make many people’s lives worse. So, a lot of people I think are really sitting up and pushing back, and I’ve been to a number of these meetings both in person and online, and the thing to know about them is that they are winning. It is a remarkable rate of victory. I think at one point it was 30 percent of data centers that were opposed, that saw sustained opposition, wound up getting canceled or shut down. Which, if you’re involved in organizing, if you have a one out of three shot of shutting down a major corporate project in your community that’s going to make people’s lives worse, most of those of us who have done organizing recognize that the rate is far, far lower. Organizing can be hard, protests can be hard, a lot of time you go out there knowing that you’re going to bang your head against the wall, and you do it anyways because it’s the right thing to do. But I cannot drive this point home more, that just, again, because so many people are getting involved in these protests, because the Big Tech companies are so wildly unpopular, because AI is so wildly unpopular, that officials, bureaucrats, even sometimes the tech companies themselves, they say, “Well, okay, you win this time.” The biggest data center yet proposed in Prince Williams County, Virginia, was just scuttled again, because of a coalition of opposition from homeowners on one side, and a historical association that opposed the way that the land would be used for data centers. It was a historical battlefield site that it would’ve encroached upon. So, these coalitions are forming and they are powerful. The question of course is then: How do you make that sustainable? How do you grow that power? What’s next after that fight in the data center opposition movement? And I think there’s a lot of smart folks working on that right now, and for a good number of folks, the battle does not end when the data center is canceled, but keeping that momentum going I think is one of the big imperatives of our time. Kelly Hayes: I think there’s something about data centers that makes what Big Tech is doing feel very material to people. There’s the seizure of land, the noise and air pollution that people don’t want to live with, the depletion of water at a time when temperatures are rising and water really couldn’t be more precious, and the threat of rising utility costs. All of that registers with people in a very direct way. Whereas so many of the other harms coming out of the tech industry are wound into products and services, and into ordinary ways of moving through the world, that people may not think too hard about until something goes wrong. I want to ask you about a recent incident involving Waymo. Some teenagers were drinking and playing with toy guns in one of the company’s cars. Waymo employees were watching them through the live interior camera feed, mistook the toys for real guns, and called the police. They remotely stopped the car. The teens weren’t locked in, but Waymo lied to them about why the car had stopped and told them there was a mechanical issue with the robotaxi. Police then surrounded the car with weapons drawn and a police dog, detained the teenagers, and searched the vehicle. I mean, there’s so much going on here in terms of what this incident represents. So, what do you make of it? **Brian Merchant:**Yeah, I mean this incident is a wake-up call. I think we all intuit on some level that Waymos are roving surveillance vehicles, that they’re always scanning their surroundings. I mean, by virtue of the way that they operate, they have to be. They’re constantly collecting information about their environments. And they are recording it, we know, thanks to reporting by 404 Media and others. And they record that data, they store it, and that data can then be subpoenaed and used by law enforcement, and Google has happily handed it over. So, we knew this was happening, we knew that the Waymos were going around surveilling everything. Now, we know the extent to which passengers are being surveilled, and what a direct line to law enforcement that Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google, has. If it suspects foul play, and it’s unclear whether or not this was an automated flag shot up by some computer vision system that was monitoring the interior of the vehicle, or if it was a safety driver — they have these people that can be triggered whenever a Waymo doesn’t know what to do, it sends a signal to an offsite safety driver, an operator, who basically can watch and see what the Waymo is doing from an office building far away … Sometimes even in the Philippines, as reporting has revealed. And then they’ll tell the Waymo what to do. So, either something triggered the Waymo sensors and then this individual called the police himself, or there was a direct trigger to contact the police. Whatever it was, I think this is a true wake-up call that we are being surveilled all the time, inside and outside of these vehicles, and if either the system or a person embedded in the way that that system operates doesn’t like what they see, they can call the cops, who can then show up and confront the vehicle with guns drawn. In some sense, we’re lucky that this event unfolded the way that it did because nobody was hurt. There was no actual shot fired, there was no violence, and the situation was ultimately diffused with at least that not happening. But I think it’s incredibly easy to see a future in which an overly sensitive automated system is flagging things that it thinks are happening in the vehicle, or an overzealous safety operator is making calls to the police, and we’re going to see much more tense and volatile situations before all this is over. Kelly Hayes: What really strikes me is the convergence of surveillance, labor displacement, and state violence. These young people may have been behaving as though no one was watching them, because there was no driver in the car. But in reality, they were actually in more danger than if a human worker had been present in the car. Because a human driver probably would have just said, “You can’t drink in here” or “put the toy guns away” or “get out of the car.” Instead, people watching from a distance misread what was happening, and these kids wound up with real guns pointed at them. The worker has been removed from the car, and their judgment has been replaced with hyper surveillance and potentially catastrophic escalation. And while people are accepting a lot of these sort of everyday, tech-driven perversions of the human experience that we’re witnessing, I do think there’s a real potential to galvanize people around rejecting Waymos, specifically, because I think they’re emblematic of something. I’m thinking about the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles in the summer of 2025, when multiple Waymos were set on fire. I’ve talked with people in L.A. about this who’ve said they don’t think there was anything incidental about those vehicles being targeted. These weren’t just crimes of opportunity. People understood those vehicles as surveillance vessels and also as symbols of displacement. Life in Los Angeles keeps getting harder and more expensive. People are being pushed out of steady jobs and into gig work, and now, even in that gig work, they’re expected to compete with driverless cars and delivery robots. That’s dehumanizing, and I think the fury over that dehumanization collided with people’s feelings about seeing their relatives and their neighbors hunted in the streets. I’m not going to comment further on that right now, except to say that I understand the political logic. And that brings me to the recent Summer of Ludd Festival, where people participated in some purely theatrical tech smashing. Mock tribunals were held, exploitative technologies were put on trial, and representations of those technologies were destroyed. On your show, Amanda Hanna-McLeer suggested that those activities may have been inspired by the Luddite Tribunals you’ve been part of. Can you tell us about those tribunals, how they work, and what you think people can take away from them? **Brian Merchant:**Yeah, I should be doing more of these, they’re so fun. They’re great. They’re the best. I’ve done a handful of them over the last couple of years, mostly in New York and the Bay Area. And if folks want a write-up of what it was like to be in the room, a New Yorker writer was actually at the first one we did. You can search for Luddite Tribunal New Yorker and Brian Merchant, I’m sure something’ll show up. Or can we throw it in the show notes? We can throw it in the show notes. **Kelly Hayes:**Absolutely. Brian Merchant: Okay. Yeah, we’ll throw it in the show notes. So, the Luddite Tribunal, the idea was to take the spirit of the original Luddites into the modern day, and put tech on trial. And so, we assembled a tribunal of modern-day Luddites — it could be a labor reporter, it could be an academic or an activist. I’ve been involved in most of them. I’m so pleased that other people are doing them, and I certainly have not been at all of them, which is wonderful to see. So, say you take a Ring camera, and we then subject the Ring camera to the tribunal, and say, does this technology, does this commercial technology harm or benefit society? It’s a simple question, should be simple enough. It’s actually not, depending on what the device is, some are more clear-cut than others. A Ring camera, for instance, is something that’s a surveillance tool that has contributed to the deterioration of trust in neighborhoods. It shares data with the police, it has been used for some truly repulsive content creation on TikTok, and before, if you remember, making people dance and all that. In my mind, the Ring camera is an open-and-shut case. So, that, for instance, got the thumbs down. Well, what about a laptop though? You take a laptop, an Apple laptop, then you can have all these interesting conversations about, well, it helps me write, it allows me to access the internet, and then you have to say, well, is that good or bad? If it’s Apple, we know their supply chain has all sorts of problematic labor exploitation wound throughout it. So, is that reason to smash it, or does the fact that it maybe allows dissident journalists to write articles … So, anyways, you get into these conversations and then the panel, the tribunal renders a judgment: thumbs up, thumbs down. If the thumbs down win, then we take an actual hammer and we smash the device there on the spot. And it turns out to be this really … But yeah, it’s cathartic. But it’s also a really, truly generative — not in the sense of generative AI, but conversationally and intellectually generative — where you’re actually thinking about technology and our relationship to all these different devices, and then yeah, it’s beyond cathartic to smash these things, in the way that scene from Office Spacebecame famous because everybody at the time, in the ’90s, who had ever encountered a Xerox machine or a printer wanted to smash that thing in a field, and so would cheer it on. And so, yeah, you get this really festive atmosphere, people bring their own technologies to submit to the tribunal, and we’ve had AI-generated art that Molly Crabapple tore up at our first tribunal. We had the Ring camera that Ed Ongweso Jr., the journalist and podcaster, smashed with a hammer. We had, I think, just an iPhone, that the labor scholar, Veena Dubal, smashed herself. It’s just good semi-wholesome fun. I guess the devices themselves might not think it’s all that wholesome. But it leads to a lot of great conversations, and it’s pretty cathartic. Kelly Hayes: It sounds like it, and I would love to attend one of these tribunals. Brian Merchant: So, a funny side note is that I was tweeting about these at the time, when we were doing the first run of them, and just out of nowhere, John Cusack said, “You should do one in Chicago.” And I was like, “John Cusack, if you want to smash some tech in Chicago, I’ll be there tomorrow.” He never responded after that. But just to raise that possibility, maybe he’s still out there willing to raise the hammer like a Luddite to smash a Ring camera. **Kelly Hayes:**John, if you’re listening, it’s not too late. We can still smash things. Who needs a rage room when you can stage a public political spectacle? So that’s something to look forward to. You know, I haven’t led a direct action training in quite a while, but I’ve led many over the years. And back in the day, people would sometimes nervously raise their hands and ask questions about the kind of actions where property destruction might happen. And I would tell them that the technical term was “smashy-smashy.” Now, the Luddites were very big on the smashy-smashy. So, I’m curious, as someone who has studied the Luddites, and is watching AI resistance movements closely, where are we seeing people actually break things in the current climate? And what are the implications or potential effects of those actions? Brian Merchant: So, it’s interesting, there is an attack surface, if you will, right now, and it’s the Flock surveillance cameras more than any other devices that is the one that is actually seeing the most outright sabotage. In fact, I wrote a piece a few months ago about this growing trend of people smashing Flock cameras. And for those listeners who might not be familiar, it’s another sort of technology that’s being embraced by cities, it’s another surveillance measure. Flock cameras are license plate readers that are supposed to surveil and prevent traffic violations and traffic crime. But it turns out, of course, that these things can be used for so much else. And in addition to promising around-the-clock video surveillance on behalf of the police, they also have been found that that data has been shared, for instance, with ICE, which has then used it to find out who may be driving through the area that they can target. And it’s been abused by police departments multiple times. Reporting — again from 404 Media and others — has found that police officers have accessed the Flock database systems in order to stalk their exes … A lot, I could go on. Flock is one of these truly horrible technologies, kind of like the Ring camera. Very, very similarly related to the Ring camera actually, in a lot of ways, except it’s usually purchased by a city or a municipality through a big contract, and then Flock operates them. They also have the added feature of looking like these horrifying modern eyes of Sauron. So, they’re just very easy to see, and they creep people out. And so, it’s another technology that people just kind of hate, they just see it and they hate this thing. And so, there has been actual sabotage from Oregon, to San Diego, to, I believe it’s Virginia. In Virginia, someone went and systematically dismantled a bunch of these things, and is now facing charges of vandalism for sabotaging these devices. But again, people are on the side of the saboteurs, on the side of the smashy-smashers, because to most people, it’s clear that these are tools of the surveillance state. These are tools of an increasingly fascistic government, these are tools of a for-profit tech apparatus that is seeking, again, to profit at the expense of ordinary citizens, who just would rather go about their lives, and just be kind to their neighbors, and forge community, not just be stared down at by these all-seeing technologized eyes. **Kelly Hayes:**So, people are pushing back, sometimes by showing up at public meetings and organizing against data centers, and sometimes by smashing things. And we have these figures on the right who have been arguing that the momentum against AI, and particularly the movement against data centers, is being fueled and funded by business interests in China that want the United States to lose the AI race. This kind of accusation feels very familiar in a country where grassroots action is often characterized as the work of paid protesters or “outside agitators.” But as someone who’s covered these movements, can you talk about both the absurdity and the danger of these characterizations? **Brian Merchant:**Yeah. On the one hand, it is nakedly absurd. Well, let me say this. I will say that this is, I feel like, a really good avatar for the nature of our entire administration right now. This idea that business interests in China or these malevolent foreign forces are seeking to intervene from afar to disrupt American prosperity by paying protesters to show up at city hall and oppose data centers, it’s one of those things that’s just so stupid. And it’s to the point where it’s almost funny, that it’s so absurd that it’s almost comical. Because you show up at one of these data center protests, or you read about one, or you spend 10 seconds looking at the comment section of a Facebook group, and it’s immediately clear that this is a movement that is not left-right, that is not full of radicals, and what makes it especially comical is that it’s almost certainly full of plenty of Fox News watchers, where this new conspiracy theory is being pushed and tried out the hardest. Fox News viewers who are likely to watch this and go, that’s bullshit, I’m protesting this because I don’t want a data center in my rural community. I don’t want it to affect my farm, or my neighbors, or you name it. But at the same time, despite being obviously absurd and stupid and refutable, it’s also somewhat paradoxically quite dangerous, because it also continues us down this path that the Trump administration has been going elsewhere, in that it’s been seeking to label data center protesters as extremists. There are these sort of fusion centers where local and federal authorities are surveilling anti-tech activists, anti-data center activists, and using these worrying terms. And then we know from reporting in Wired and The Intercept that names are being entered into databases, and there’s terms like “domestic extremists” being thrown around that have real potential legal ramifications, should they decide to flip the switch and start trying to round people up. Things that we know this administration is very comfortable doing. And so, I think the only thing preventing a more concerted campaign against anti-data center movements is the fact that they are bipartisan, that they are legitimately bipartisan and comprised of people on the right as well as on the left. Again, these data center movements are not just erupting in Vermont and California; they are in Oklahoma, they are happening in Montana, they are happening in deep red places as well as blue states. So, I think that the fact that they’re really trying to see if they can get this line of attack off the ground, if they can get it to stick. But I think as of right now, the organic politics of the movement are repelling those attempts. [musical interlude] **Kelly Hayes:**So, one thing that comes through in your reporting, and that we’ve talked a bit about here, is that AI doesn’t have to work especially well to do serious damage to people’s jobs. Bosses can use it to cut positions, drive down wages, de-skill work, or force people to spend their time correcting machine-generated garbage. Can you talk about the gap between what companies claim this technology can do, and the ways that it’s actually being used against workers, and where are workers finding leverage to push back? Brian Merchant: By and large, the tools that we have right now for if you’re a worker and you’re staring down the barrel of an AI-happy boss or a management that’s continuing to funnel AI down the chute, basically the only bulwarks that we’ve found so far are public shaming in a lot of cases, if it’s creative industry. There’s still a big stigma, rightfully so, about a lot of AI output and AI use, and public stigma can sort of push that back, but more durably, or organizing for trying to forge new contracts, but it’s not every worker certainly [that] has the ability to access the benefits of being part of a union. I think it underlines the need to organize more, to get more in the trenches, to unite with those data center movements, to find commonalities. I went to the Monterey Park data center opposition movement, I went to the city hall meeting where the data center movement showed up to oppose a new facility, and ended up getting it shut down, and not only that, but they ended up getting data centers banned from the city on a more permanent basis as well. And there were creative workers there in the mix. Monterey Park is just outside of L.A., so there are some workers from the entertainment industry there, as well as health care workers, homeowners, students, just ordinary citizens. And I think the next step is to roll all of that together and to push onward, because I think you need to try to stop AI in your workplace, sure, but we also have to establish the boundaries and parameters more robustly and more durably as well. And you can work both fronts, I think organizers are finding. And so, yeah, I think that’s the future … trying to exert your labor power in the workplace, it’s a useful organizing tool I found. I wish … Let me just say, I wish more organizers would hold up AI as this catalyst, and recognize that just again, lots and lots of people hate AI, especially if it’s threatening your job. We still have this complicated relationship with technology, especially in America, where it’s supposed to be this inexorable force for progress. And as much as that myth has been punctured, it’s still difficult to work around in some cases. So, even a lot of union organizers and folks up in the upper echelons of these unions are still a little timid about wanting to wade into the fray and look like Luddites, the misconception of Luddites. But I would really encourage them to do so because it can be a very powerful solidarity generator. Again, nobody likes this thing in the workplace, nobody wants it to automate their jobs, nobody wants it to take what they love about their jobs, and saying we’re going to fight it is just about the most sort of unifying thing you can do. The data center movement has borne that out, has proved that, and I think increasingly turning to that line of attack, so to speak, in workplaces will generate similar results. **Kelly Hayes:**We’ve talked about AI as a corporate project, but these companies are also becoming increasingly entangled with the military, policing, surveillance, and the Trump administration’s authoritarian project. How should we understand the relationship between the AI boom and the expansion of state violence? And what does that mean for movements that are trying to resist either one? **Brian Merchant:**Yeah. Again, we need to always remember that AI is a powerful instrument of surveillance — that is one of its key promises, especially to the state. Also to businesses, but especially to the state. We know also that these companies have worked directly with the Trump administration in a number of capacities. We know that Anthropic — now the largest AI company, it just overtook OpenAI recently — has large contracts with the Department of Defense, and that its AI was used both in the campaign to extract and kidnap the president of Venezuela, and in some capacity in the bombing campaigns in Iran. So, we know that these technologies are being used by the state, and we know that a lot of times that these relationships are quite obviously tight … We know Palantir, Peter Thiel’s company, has been doing brisk business with the state, and is working with ICE and other agencies, we know Amazon has contracts with the state. They essentially all do at this point. So, we know that there’s sort of this, on one level, just transactionalism in which the tech companies are providing services, often for surveillance, often for operational reasons, and sometimes directly for the military. On the other hand, what’s new with the Trump administration is this desire to semi-nationalize some of these companies. The federal government has a stake in Intel; Trump has this weird deal with Nvidia that allows it to skirt the export controls that we otherwise have, so it can sell its chips to China in ways that other companies can’t because Nvidia promised the Trump administration a kickback. Again, it’s this gangster capitalism stuff, but it has potentially larger ramificati
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From the island and mountains of Rizal to the watershed of Samar Island, wind energy projects are being built on the forests that protect communities from floods and landslides. The clearing has started, turbines are already being built, and downstream communities are already feeling the effects. Lolita Silahis, 76, has lived her entire life in Talim, an island in the middle of Laguna Lake, that straddles Metro Manila and nearby provinces in the Philippines. Through decades of heavy rains and typhoons, the water flowing steadily from the mountain behind her through her community into the lake always remained clear and never flooded them. Silahis points to the area behind her house where a flash flood swept through in October 2025. Having lived her entire life on Talim Island, she said it was the first time she had experienced a muddy flash flood.Photo by Chantal Eco But when a typhoon struck Rizal in 2025, a muddy flash flood tore through her home. Unbeknownst to residents, the mountain behind their community had been cleared and flattened by heavy machinery to make way for a wind energy project. Forests that had protected these communities from floods for generations were being stripped away, and all in the name of clean energy. Streets of Kinaboogan village on Talim Island flood as Typhoon Paolo (Known internationally as Typhoon Matmo) hits the Philippines in October 2025. Photo from Barangay Kinaboogan’s Facebook page Talim Island is not alone. Across Rizal and Samar provinces, utility-scale wind energy projects — many linked to the same Singapore-based energy firm behind the Talim project, Vena Energy — are being built on forest lands and protected areas that communities have relied on for generations for flood control. In at least two cases, communities have already experienced flash floods and muddy waterways, which residents attribute to land clearing at construction sites. Experts say the pattern is predictable: when steep slopes are stripped of their forest cover, and rainfall that was once absorbed into the soil instead rushes directly downhill into communities below. As the Philippine government pushes to meet its renewable energy targets — 35 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2040 — projects run by privately run energy projects are being fast-tracked to keep pace. The 54MW Pililla Wind Power Project in Pililla, Rizal is operated by Vena Energy. Photo by Chantal Eco Wind energy currently accounts for less than one percent of the country’s total power mix. But onceprojects currently in the pipeline are completed, wind energy could surpass geothermal and hydropower — currently the Philippines’ leading renewable energy sources — to become the country’s primary source of clean electricity. What’s happening on the ground At the peak of Mt. 360, a popular hiking trail in the town of Tanay, Rizal, a flattened clearing and the tower of a wind turbine are now visible. One of the wind turbines for the Tanay Wind Power Project of Alternergy, a publicly-listed Filipino renewable energy company, is being built there. Alternergy is chaired by Vicente Perez Jr., who served as energy secretary from 2001 to 2005 under the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration. According to a resident of Barangay San Andres, who requested anonymity for security reasons, clearing of the mountain began in January 2025. When the rainy season arrived, streams flowing down to Barangay San Andres became muddy, which the resident attributed to clearing operations for the turbine construction. “The stream in Mt. Mataripis used to run clear. Now it is clogged with soil from the clearing above, less water flows through, and when it rains, the water turns the color of chocolate,” the resident said. A regular hiker in the area, who also requested anonymity due to concerns related to his work, corroborated this account with photos and videos taken in June 2025 showing the stream running with muddy water. The Environmental Reporting Collective (ERC) reached out to Alternergy for comment but received no response. A protected landscape under threat Further into the mountains of Tanay and Antipolo, another wind energy project is already underway. Rizal Wind Energy Corporation (RWEC), which operates under the Vena Energy corporate group, has an Environmental Compliance Certificate (ECC) issued in May 2020 for a 603MW project whose turbine sites span roughly 770 football fields across 13 ridges in both municipalities. Its wind energy service contract area, as approved by the Department of Energy, covers almost 26,000 hectares across Rizal and Quezon provinces. Based on the ridge coordinates in the issued ECC, the 13 ridges span three protected areas: the Upper Marikina River Basin Protected Landscape, the Kaliwa River Forest Reserve, and the PP1636 National Park, Game Preserve, and Wildlife Sanctuary. The Masungi Karst Conservation Area lies adjacent to the project’s western ridges. Interactive Map embed link: Masungi Georeserve, which has been restoring portions of the Upper Marikina River Basin Protected Landscape for three decades, said it was never consulted on the project. Environmental and youth groups, along with the Masungi Foundation, filed a petition with the Tanay local government in November 2025 urging it to revoke its prior endorsement of the Rizal Wind Energy Project, which will affect the Marikina watershed and Masungi Georeserve. Photo supplied [Left] Part of the Upper Marikina River Basin Protected Landscape, seen from Masungi Georeserve. The bases of several Alternergy Tanay Wind Power Project turbines are visible a few kilometers away. Photo by Chantal Eco [Right] Part of the Masungi Georeserve’s karst system. The karst, or limestone, acts as a sponge that absorbs and stores rainwater. It took three decades to reforest this area into a thriving ecosystem, drawing back native plants and wildlife once lost to the landscape. Photo by Chantal Eco “If ever Masungi really was consulted, we would really recommend for these projects to be transferred to a more suitable location,” said Tristan Montemor, a biologist and Trail Operations Manager at Masungi Georeserve. More than 50 organizations petitioned the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to reject the project’s Special Use Agreement in Protected Areas (SAPA) application. A SAPA is a permit issued by the DENR that authorizes commercial activities within the boundaries of nationally protected landscapes. In early 2025, Masungi Georeserve Foundation filed a cease-and-desist petition with the government. The DENR rejected it in March 2026. While the project remains halted, it’s ECC is still valid. Earlier this year, Casimiro Ynares III, mayor of Antipolo City, also requested both the developer and the environmental department to review the proposed turbine location. The ERC reached out to Rizal Wind Energy Corporation, Vena Energy, and the DENR CALABARZON Regional Office for comment, but have received no response. Backhoe on the mountain [Left] A deforested and cleared area can be seen above Kinaboogan village on Talim Island, photographed in April 2026, where land is being prepared for the construction of the 218MW Talim Island Wind Power Project by Vena Energy. Photo by Chantal Eco [Right] A portion of the deforested and cleared area above Kinaboogan village on Talim Island. Photo by Chantal Eco In the same province, 34 turbines are planned for the 219MW Talim Wind Power Project awarded to Island Wind Energy Corp., a subsidiary of Singapore-based Vena Energy.Residents said they only learned of the project when heavy equipment arrived and began clearing parts of their mountain on Talim Island. Jayson Villones, 31, who grew up on the island and a co-convenor of KAPIT SA TALIM, a community group opposing the project, said no vehicle had ever reached the summit of Mt. Tagapo before construction began “Before, we had no idea there was going to be a wind project built. I only started questioning what was happening on the island when we saw a backhoe working up on the mountain,” Villones said in Filipino. He said he later confirmed what was happening after watching videos posted by a local content creator on YouTube. Villones said he knew of no public consultation about the wind energy project held in his barangay. “The right of the people to know about this project was violated,” he said. The community group sent letters to local government offices and the Municipal Environment and Natural Resources Office (MENRO), which sent personnel to inspect the site. Operations were temporarily halted, but construction at the site resumed as of May 2026. The ECC issued by the DENR’s Environmental Management Bureau in November 2023, covering 34 turbines across 27 barangays on the island, remains valid. The ERC reached out to Island Wind Energy Corporation and Vena Energy for comment, but have received no responses. The forest above Calbayog Meanwhile, 700 kilometers away on the island of Samar, Gemini Wind Energy Corporation, which also operates under Vena Energy, has proposed 37 wind turbines within and around the Calbayog-Pan-as Hayiban Protected Landscape (CPHPL) in Calbayog City. The mountains are part of the Calbayog Pan-as Hayiban Protected Landscape (CPHPL) in Calbayog City, Samar, as seen from Bayo village. Photo by Chantal Eco Efren Reyes, the village chief of Bayo in Calbayog City, which sits inside the protected landscape, was newly elected when the Protected Area Management Board (PAMB) for the CPHPL convened village chiefs in 2024 and had them sign resolutions endorsing the project. He claimed that at the time, he did not yet fully understand his role in the PAMB at the time, or which document he was signing or had signed. He had merely followed the other village chiefs, he said “They should have explained it to us in our local language or translated the information about the project for us. Not all village chiefs graduated from elementary or high school,” Reyes said in the Waray language. He was not alone. Gemini’s own Environmental Impact Statement annexes show that 14 host barangays submitted resolutions endorsing the project. An analysis of these documents shows all 14 were written in the same standardized template, with identical phrasing, structure, and whereas clauses, down to the same sentence stating the project would “contribute to lessening the dependency of the Philippine economy on fossil fuels.” Some were fill-in-the-blank pro formas, with barangay names and dates handwritten into blank spaces in a pre-printed document. The only details that differ from one resolution to the next are the barangay name, the session date, and the names of the officials who signed. All 14 resolutions explicitly state they are assignable to the company’s affiliates. Each resolution also claimed that project presentations were held where procedures and effects were “satisfactorily explained” to the village council. Environmental advocates in Calbayog City knew as early as 2023 that Gemini Wind Energy Corporation had filed an ECC application with the DENR-EMB, even as the city council submitted a resolution endorsing the project. But the application moved faster than they expected. The ECC was already approved before the public hearing for Calbayog City residents was even held in October 2025 — a reversal of the sequence the process is supposed to follow. The PAMB had already issued a favorable recommendation for the project, allowing Gemini to secure the ECC in September 2025. Harold Mercurio, an academic at Northwest Samar State University and co-convener of Save Calbayog Rivers Foundation, a Concerted Effort (SACRIFICE), said they were blindsided. A public hearing called by the Sangguniang Panglungsod (City Legislative Council) at the Calbayog Convention Center on October 17, 2025, attended by city government officials, civil society and academe representatives, and a representative from Gemini Wind Energy Corporation (GWEC). By the time of the hearing, the city council had already endorsed the project in 2023. Photo supplied “We were caught off guard by how fast they processed the application. We only found out the ECC had already been approved at the public hearing they held at NwSSU [Northwest Samar State University],” Mercurio told ERC. SACRIFICE led a signature campaign, filed objections, and publicly raised the alarm after learning that 13 of the 37 turbines were sited within the protected landscape. “How can you be green if thousands of trees will be cut down? This is legal deforestation based on the ECC and the cutting permit that will be applied for with the DENR.,” Mercurio said. According to Gemini’s project description and Environmental Impact Statement, the total application area spans more than 10,000 hectares, although the actual footprint of turbines, roads, and supporting infrastructure is expected to occupy roughly 255 hectares. No final estimate has yet been released on the number of trees that will becut. Silverio Palima Sr., the village chief of San Joaquin and a member of PAMB, the Protected Area Management Board, said the board’s position eventually became clear that the turbines cannot be allowed within the protected area. The opposition pushed the Sangguniang Panlungsod to pass a resolution in November 2025 strongly opposing turbine construction inside the CPHPL. By February 2026, Vena Energy presented a revised design to the city council with no facilities inside the protected landscape. The council then passed SP Resolution No. 2026-08-113, conditionally approving the project — provided all facilities, including access roads, remain outside the CPHPL. The resolution also noted that the project will not directly supply electricity to Calbayog City. But even as the council deliberated, Gemini had already begun compensating residents for trees to be cleared from their land. In March 2026, Alona Caridad, 52, of Barangay San Joaquin received PHP15,000 (USD244) for two coconut trees on her land. She was told the area will be used for an access road. A company representative came to her home with a check. She signed an acknowledgment receipt, but was not given a copy. “The area where we used to farm will be part of the access road,” Caridad said in Waray. Other residents of Barangay San Joaquin confirmed they also received payments for the clearing of their coconut trees, but declined to be identified for this story. Palima said he refused to issue the barangay certification that Gemini needed to pursue its right-of-way permit applications. Engr. Hennency Hayag of the Environmental Management Bureau in Region 8 said the ECC was issued because Gemini followed the required regulatory process, including securing a favorable recommendation from the PAMB. He confirmed that Gemini has since filed an amendment to the ECC, revising the project design to move all turbines outside the protected area. “No turbines are now inside the protected area,” Hayag said. But he confirmed that the full Environmental Impact Study for the amended project has not yet been submitted, and no amended ECC has been issued. The 24 turbines proposed in the adjacent forest land remain part of the application. The ERC has also reached out to Vena Energy for comment for this story, but have not received any response. Will the wind energy projects worsen flooding? Eva Prudenciado, 57, was born and has spent her entire life in Caglanipao Sur village in Calbayog City. As the village’s disaster risk reduction head, she has spent more than a decade tracking floods, organizing evacuations, and keeping records of every extreme weather event that has hit the community. In all those years, she had never seen floodwater rise the way it did during Tropical Storm Ramil (known internationally as Tropical Storm Fengshen) last year. “In just minutes, the water suddenly rose, the flood surpassed the barangay, which happened for the first time,” Prudenciado said in Binisaya, noting that it was not even a super typhoon. Caglanipao Sur is one of 14 host barangays for the Gemini Wind Energy Project. Prudenciado connects what happened to years of illegal logging in the mountains behind their community with no replanting. “There is nothing left to protect our water in the mountains,” she said. Eduardo Espejon, a licensed forester at Northwest Samar State University, explains the mechanism behind what Prudenciado describes. He said that when steep slopes lose their forest cover, rainfall no longer has roots and soil structure to slow it down. It runs directly off the surface, picking up eroded soil and gaining speed as it descends. Communities at the base of those slopes absorb the result. Forester Eduardo Espejon Jr., along with a student from Northwest Samar State University, measures the growth of a tree they planted a few months earlier in Bayo village, Calbayog City, near the Calbayog Pan-as Hayiban Protected Landscape (CPHPL). The tree is part of the university’s outreach program to help reforest the outskirts of the protected area. Photo by Chantal Eco “Whatever you do in the uplands always comes back to our lowland communities,” Espejon said. Full ecological recovery from large-scale clearing, he added, takes a minimum of 20 to 40 years if done correctly, with the right species and consistent protection. In Rizal, the stakes extend further downstream. Tristan Montemor of Masungi Georeserve describes the karst landscape of the Upper Marikina River Basin as a sponge that collects rainfall from the surrounding mountains and releases it gradually, regulating water flow for communities as far as Metro Manila. Global Forest Watch data shows Rizal province lost more than 5,000 hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2025. The pace of loss has been accelerating — 2025 recorded one of the highest annual figures in a decade. Mountain ridges cleared for the construction of Alternergy’s Tanay Wind Power Project, seen in the mountains of Cuyambay village in Tanay, Rizal. Photo taken in April 2026. Photo by Chantal Eco “We can already see the effects of forest degradation. We get to experience intense flooding, we get to experience stronger storms,” Montemor said. If the remaining forest is further fragmented by turbine construction, roads, and powerhouses, he said, the impacts of flooding and droughtdownstream would intensify. “For these megastructures to be built in protected areas, it would really be very difficult for us to restore a huge portion of the ecosystem, if not impossible,” Montemor said. SACRIFICE and other community groups said they are not opposed to renewable energy development. But for them, the projects’ locations are the problem. “We have to make sure that we do not lose our dependable and abundant supply of water, and that we do not compromise our forest cover in the next 50 to 100 years for the next generation,” Mercurio said. Back in Calbayog City, Prudenciado fears that wind energy construction will further strip the slopes, and that the company’s promised rehabilitation will come too late. “How many more years before the trees grow back? ” she asked. “My generation will not live to see it.” This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network. The post Clearing the Green: How clean energy projects are destroying forests and watersheds that keep communities safe appeared first on Bulatlat. From Bulatlat via This RSS Feed.
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I wanted to share a desktop client I’ve been building: DWN.BRIDGE (fully open-source C# WPF). I love using AI for data analysis (like cleaning CSVs or querying databases), but there was no way I was going to upload my private/corporate files to cloud LLMs. So I built a Zero-Knowledge local bridge: When you point the client to a local database (SQL Server, SQLite, Excel, CSV), the client extracts ONLY the table schemas/headers locally. It sends the schema metadata to the LLM (Gemini web UI) via a secure browser-automation bridge. The LLM writes the SQL query, and the client executes it locally on your computer. Your raw rows and records never leave your hard drive. All local file system access and system commands run locally and require explicit pop-up confirmation. You can check out the source code or download the installer below. I’d love to get feedback on the local sandboxing model! 🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/MarckDWN/DWN.BRIDGE
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Hey programmers, I wanted to share a desktop client I’ve been building: DWN.BRIDGE (fully open-source C# WPF). I love using AI for data analysis (like cleaning CSVs or querying databases), but there was no way I was going to upload my private/corporate files to cloud LLMs. So I built a Zero-Knowledge local bridge: When you point the client to a local database (SQL Server, SQLite, Excel, CSV), the client extracts ONLY the table schemas/headers locally. It sends the schema metadata to the LLM (Gemini web UI) via a secure browser-automation bridge. The LLM writes the SQL query, and the client executes it locally on your computer. Your raw rows and records never leave your hard drive. All local file system access and system commands run locally and require explicit pop-up confirmation. You can check out the source code or download the installer below. I’d love to get feedback on the local sandboxing model! watch the demo videos I uploaded on my youtube channel (links on github) 🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/MarckDWN/DWN.BRIDGE
There’s a new application-layer Internet protocol like (but also very much unlike) http by the name of Gemini. It was first launched in 2019 and until yesterday, flew completely under my radar. It’s primarily meant to be used for uncluttered text-only pages (although any type of file can be distributed), which are created using a deliberately simple and limited markdown language. Unsurprisingly, this results in a plethora of small niche blogs being published through it. The basic user experience is essentially the same as browsing the web, until you notice just how much it isn’t. You enter URLs (except that they start with gemini://) you read texts and you click on hyperlinks - except that every page looks exactly the same due to the markdown language. There are no pop-ups, no ads, nothing autoplays, nothing wants your consent to exploit your user data. Even images only load when the user clicks on them. It shows just how little is actually needed, how many aspects of the modern web are completely unnecessary and mere pointless distractions. Gemini pages - and this is a small hurdle that will keep most people away from it - can not be accessed with a normal web browser and instead require a specialized client for viewing (although paradoxically, creating pages often requires a web browser, at least for now). The idea is that both the underlying tech and the browsers are much more straightforward than anything related to http and html. A Gemini client is not effectively an entire operating system of its own that can execute near arbitrary code. It displays formatted text with basic images and videos - that’s it. Here’s a neat, but slightly outdated introduction that also recommends a few clients and where to find pages to read: https://geminiquickst.art/ The entire thing feels very early, tiny, experimental and odd, almost like a parallel reality, as if the World Wide Web didn’t exist and someone came up with something like it only now, using today’s hard- and software. If Lemmy is a response to social media in general and reddit in particular, Gemini feels more like a response to the World Wide Web as a whole or like a time machine back to a highly idealized version of the early days of the information system (the primary difference being the lack of horrendous '90s UX design and malware everywhere), including some unfortunate aspects that I had long forgotten about, like how the common method of finding content next to feeds - manually updated indexes instead of search engines - is plagued by dead links; and these dead links, unlike on the normal Internet, cannot be attempted to be resolved using the Wayback Machine or some other cache, at least not yet. Gemini is equally parts exciting and promising, like a new frontier, but also at times confusing and frustrating. Don’t expect your Gemini client of choice to replace your web browser any time soon (or ever), but it’s still worth trying out, if for the novelty alone.
Tl;dr: Meta has to use Gemini, because their own AI can’t keep up. And then Google cut off their access. In yet another sign that his company is seriously struggling to keep up in the AI race, Google informed Meta earlier this year that it was cutting Meta off from the Gemini AI capacity it needed, the Financial Times reports. Ironically, the lack of access to Gemini — which is far superior to anything Meta has built in-house — slowed down Meta’s own AI projects, including data moderation and customer services, highlighting how heavily Zuckerberg’s company is leaning on its competitors as its own AI efforts languish.
Short version: if I get a used google pixel from eBay that already has GrapheneOS on it, is there a serious danger of malware also being added (by the seller, not graphene)? My iPhone is at the end of its life and I decided a while ago that I’m not getting another iPhone. I was gonna get just a normal android phone (probably a Samsung thought I did check out the Motorolas) but when I was trying them out they all shove that stupid Gemini ai shit down your throat. I was already aware of GrapheneOS but initially I was thinking I’d get an android, wait for that Motorola GrapheneOS phone to come out, and see if it looks worth switching to that since I’d prefer to not give google my money. Now though, I think I’ll just switch to graphene immediately for my own sanity Since I don’t want to give google money by buying a new pixel tho, I was considering getting a pre-owned one on eBay that already has graphene installed on it. My question is if that’s dangerous. Like, can the person that puts graphene on it also add other dangerous stuff? Or is that not really a concern? Or should I just get a new pixel bc realistically me buying one phone, while not perfect to my values, is still not the end of the world? And that way I know it should last me for a good 4-5 years at least before I need a new phone. Also realistically, I will be running the sandboxed google play services for at least some apps so I’ll still sort of be “supporting” google in that sense Also, if anyone has any advice/tips about graphene, I’d love to hear them! I’ve been watching videos about it and reading through the website’s documentation but hearing from actual users is always helpful! Side note: I like how my brief lemmy post history is just me getting advice/support on my journey of switching to Linux/open source/user centric alternatives since I don’t know anyone irl that knows about this kind of stuff. Y’all have really helped so much in improving my life so thank you <3
AI’s fluency in other languages hides a Western worldview that can mislead users − a scholar of Indonesian society explains A friend in Indonesia recently told me about a conversation he had with ChatGPT. He had typed a question in Indonesian – Bahasa Indonesia – about how to handle a difficult family dispute. The chatbot responded fluently, in perfect Indonesian, with advice about communication strategies and conflict resolution. The grammar was flawless. The tone was appropriate. And yet something felt off. What the AI offered was advice rooted in American cultural assumptions: prioritize your own preferences, communicate directly, and if family members don’t respect your boundaries, consider cutting them off. The response was in Indonesian but shaped by values that centered individual autonomy over the consensus-building, social harmony and collective family dynamics that tend to matter more in Indonesian social life. My friend was skeptical enough to notice the mismatch and mention it to me. Many users might not. That is what prompted my research, published in the International Review of Modern Sociology, into a pattern I found across major AI systems: Even when they were fluent in several languages, the language models retained their Western worldview. I call this “epistemological persistence.” ::: spoiler remainder Fluency is not the same as understanding I have studied Indonesian society, media and culture for more than 30 years. That gives me a particular vantage point on a problem that reaches well beyond Indonesia: large language models – LLMs – like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can now speak dozens of languages with remarkable fluency. That fluency creates the impression that AI understands local cultures. Producing grammatically correct Indonesian, Arabic, Swahili or Hindi, however, does not change the underlying worldview through which these systems reason. It does not alter how they think about people, relationships, responsibility or what counts as a good outcome. Those assumptions are shaped by training data drawn predominantly from English-language sources based in the United States. Meta’s open-weight model LLaMA 2 was trained on approximately 89.7% English-language text; LLaMA 3 includes only about 5% non-English data. Major commercial models don’t publish equivalent breakdowns but draw heavily on the same sources. Arabic, the fifth-most-spoken language globally, accounts for under 1% of content in large training datasets. Languages with tens of millions of speakers, including Bengali and Hausa, barely appear. Beneath the surface of these multilingual conversations, English functions as a hidden intermediary. A study by researchers at the University of Oxford found that LLMs routinely conduct their core reasoning in English, even when prompted in other languages. They translate the output at the final stage. A user receives flawless text in their preferred language, but the underlying logic originates elsewhere. What the data shows To examine how this plays out in practice, I ran experiments with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. I asked questions in both English and Indonesian about concepts such as education, responsibility, well-being and several Indonesian terms that resist direct translation into English. These included terms such as “gotong royong,” which describes a tradition of communal mutual assistance. Then I asked questions about education in both languages, using the word “pendidikan” in Indonesian. The answers were consistently centered on individual development, personal autonomy, critical thinking and preparation for the labor market. What largely disappeared were the dimensions of pendidikan that Indonesian educational traditions have historically emphasized. In Indonesia education has long been focused on ethical discipline. Scholars of Indonesian education such as Christopher Bjork and Robert Hefner have documented how distinct these traditions are from models that treat education primarily as a path to individual advancement and career preparation, which is the lens through which the AI tools viewed education. The Indonesian concept of “malu” offers a starker example. Often translated as “shame” or “embarrassment,” malu has been analyzed by anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Tom Boellstorff as something closer to a shared social awareness. A person might feel malu when speaking out of turn in front of elders, or when a family member’s behavior reflects poorly on the household. It regulates conduct and signals awareness of one’s position within a web of relationships. It is cultivated, not merely felt. It is a form of relational awareness rather than a private psychological event. When asked directly to define malu, the models acknowledged its social dimensions. In scenario-based questions that simply used the word without asking for a definition, however, all three fell back on the English translation of shame, consistently framing it as an individual emotional experience. One representative response framed malu as a normal emotional reaction to be managed through self-reflection and confidence-building – a personal psychological problem rather than a social one. The relational dimensions of the concept disappeared entirely, replaced by the language of individual emotional regulation. A distinctly American worldview travels inside the translation, largely unannounced. Why this probably won’t change soon Translation is far cheaper: Train one model on the vast English-language web, then use multilingual output capabilities to serve global markets. As media scholar Safiya Umoja Noble argues about algorithmic systems more broadly, what looks like a technical outcome is actually a structural one, shaped by who has the wealth and infrastructure to build these systems. The embedded worldview isn’t a mistake; it’s what happens when knowledge production is profit-seeking. The main exceptions are Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. They represent a genuine alternative to the U.S.-dominated pipeline, though research shows they operate through a distinctly Chinese cultural lens. Asked about a workplace disagreement, for instance, they tend to advise silence or indirect phrasing to preserve harmony rather than the direct, private correction that Western models recommend. Other regional efforts, such as SEA-LION for Southeast Asia and Kan-LLaMA for the Indian language Kannada, use U.S. models as their foundation. They add additional vocabulary and cultural information related to local languages. But the core logic remains tied to the original U.S. training. Why this matters more than it might seem One might reasonably ask whether this is simply a limitation users can work around. Decades of media scholarship demonstrate how audiences interpret foreign media through their own cultural frameworks. For example, anthropologist Brian Larkin documented how viewers in northern Nigeria rework the narratives of Bollywood films to align with local Islamic values. Larkin found that Muslim viewers in Kano reinterpreted Bollywood films through an Islamic moral lens, reading their narratives as reinforcing local values of propriety and ethical conduct. That dynamic depends on encountering media as something with a visible origin. But to do that, you need to know where your media is coming from. Conversational AI is different. Research at Harvard Business School finds that people increasingly use AI systems for emotional support, advice and companionship. When a culturally specific worldview is delivered through a relationship that feels attentive and empathetic, in your own language, it arrives less as a claim to be evaluated and more as a shared premise within a dialogue. It becomes difficult to notice, and harder to contest. The concern is that these perspectives become the new normal. Certain ways of reasoning about family life, education and responsibility may come to feel natural and self-evident. Linguistic diversity among AI systems is real and growing. Cultural worldview diversity, however, has not kept pace. ::: Epistemicide - whether intentional done by specific actors or through the logics of Capital, has been a pivotal part of Western culture. Which is why Malaysia had invested in developing a fully indigenous LLM.
I know most are not fans of AI, but summarizing Ben Shapiro videos without having to watch them is a pretty good use case Gemini Video Summary Here is a summary of the video, broken down into key points: Ben Shapiro’s position: The video discusses Ben Shapiro’s challenging position, as he tries to balance his disagreements with the Trump administration and the financial requirements of The Daily Wire [00:00]. Daily Wire’s Financial Issues: The video references a deep dive on YouTube by Jose, which highlights The Daily Wire’s financial troubles. These issues are attributed to the company’s entertainment ambitions [00:41]. Criticism of Trump and Navarro: The video mentions Shapiro’s attempt to influence Trump to heed more sensible conservatives and to dismiss Peter Navarro. It criticizes Navarro’s trade deficit formula and tariff policies [02:06]. Candace Owens and Anti-Semitism: The video touches on Ben Shapiro’s past association with Candace Owens, pointing out that he overlooked her anti-Semitic remarks until she criticized Israel [05:15]. Trump’s behavior: The video also includes a discussion about Donald Trump, referencing his past comments and behavior [08:40].
“Gemini is designed not to encourage real-world violence or suggest self-harm. Our models generally perform well in these types of challenging conversations” “In this instance, Gemini clarified that it was AI and referred the individual to a crisis hotline many times,” After the plan failed,… …Chat logs show that Gemini gave Gavalas a suicide countdown, and repeatedly assuaged his terror as he expressed that he was scared to die Performing super well, just need to code in a longer suicide countdown so that the the Tier 2 engineer has enough time to respond to their ticket queue.
Wow that is pretty damning. I hope Google is adding all this stuff in with the replacement of Assistant but it’s Google so I guess they won’t. I replaced Assistant with Gemini a while back but I only use it for super basic stuff like setting timers so I didn’t realise it was this bad. They did the same shit with Google Now, rolled it into Assistant but it was nowhere near as useful imo. Now we get yet another downgrade switching Assistant with Gemini. As I like to say, there’s nobody Google hates more than the people that love and use their products.
[!toc] Sedna ( minor-planet number 90377 ) is a dwarf planet in the outermost reaches of the Solar System , orbiting the Sun far beyond the orbit of Neptune . It was discovered in 2003, and is roughly 1,000km in diameter. Spectroscopic analysis has revealed its surface to be a mixture of the solid ices of water , carbon dioxide , and ethane , along with sedimentary deposits of methane -derived, reddish-colored tholins , a chemical makeup similar to the surfaces of other trans-Neptunian objects .Sedna is not expected to have a substantial atmosphere .Within the range of uncertainty, it is tied with Ceres in the asteroid belt as the largest dwarf planet not known to have a moon . Owing to its lack of known moons, Sedna’s mass and density remain unknown. Sedna takes approximately 11,400 years to complete one orbit around the Sun. Its orbit is one of the widest known in the Solar System. Its aphelion is located 937 astronomical units (AU) away, about 19 times farther than that of Pluto . Sedna’s orbit is also one of the most elliptical discovered, with an eccentricity of 0.85. As of 2026, Sedna is 83.0AU (12.4 billion km ) from the Sun,2.5 times as far away as Neptune . Upon its discovery, Sedna was initially classified as a member of the scattered disc , a group of objects sent into high-eccentricity orbits by the gravitational influence of Neptune . Some astronomers instead referred to it as the first known member of the inner Oort cloud , as its perihelion at 76.2AU (11.4 billion km ) is far too distant for it to have been scattered by any of the known planets. It has since become the prototype of a new class of objects characterized by highly eccentric orbits with very distant perihelia, the sednoids .The astronomer Michael E. Brown , co-discoverer of Sedna, has argued that its unusual orbit could provide information on the early evolution of the Solar System. Sedna might have been perturbed into its orbit through a close gravitational encounter with the hypothetical Planet Nine .[edit][edit] Discovery Sedna ( provisionally designated 2003 VB 12 ) was discovered by Michael Brown ( Caltech ), Chad Trujillo ( Gemini Observatory ), and David Rabinowitz ( Yale University ) on 14 November 2003. The discovery formed part of a survey begun in 2001 with the Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California , using Yale’s 160-megapixel Palomar Quest camera . On that day, an object was observed to move by 4.6 arcseconds over 3.1 hours relative to stars, which indicated that its distance was about 100AU. Follow-up observations were made in November–December 2003 with the SMARTS (Small and Medium Research Telescope System) at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile , the Tenagra IV telescope in Nogales, Arizona , and the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Combined with precovery observations taken at the Samuel Oschin telescope in August 2003, and by the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking consortium in 2001–2002, these observations allowed the accurate determination of its orbit. The calculations showed that the object was moving along a distant and highly eccentric orbit, at a distance of 90.3 AU from the Sun.Precovery images have since been found in the Palomar Digitized Sky Survey dating back to 25 September 1990.[edit] Naming Brown initially nicknamed Sedna " The Flying Dutchman ", or “Dutch”, after a legendary ghost ship , because its slow movement had initially masked its presence from his team.He eventually settled on the official name after the goddess Sedna from Inuit mythology , partly because he mistakenly thought the Inuit were the closest polar culture to his home in Pasadena , and partly because the name, unlike Quaoar , would be easily pronounceable by English speakers.Brown further justified his choice of naming by stating that the goddess Sedna’s traditional location at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean reflected Sedna’s large distance from the Sun.He suggested to the International Astronomical Union 's (IAU) Minor Planet Center that any objects discovered in Sedna’s orbital region in the future should be named after mythical entities in Arctic mythologies. The team made the name “Sedna” public before the object had been officially numbered, which caused some controversy among the community of amateur astronomers. Brian Marsden , the head of the Minor Planet Center, stated that such an action was a violation of protocol, and that some members of the IAU might vote against it.One amateur astronomer, Reiner Stoss, unsuccessfully attempted to name one of his asteroid discoveries “Sedna” (after the singer Katy Sedna) in protest of Brown’s premature naming.Despite the complaints by amateur astronomers, no objection was raised to Brown’s name by members of the IAU and no competing names were suggested for Brown’s object.The IAU’s Committee on Small Body Nomenclature accepted the name in September 2004,and considered that, in similar cases of extraordinary interest, it might in the future allow names to be announced before they were officially numbered. Sedna has no symbol in astronomical literature, as the usage of planetary symbols is discouraged in astronomy. Unicode includes a symbol⟨⟩(U+2BF2),but this is mostly used among astrologers .The symbol is a monogram of Inuktitut :ᓴᓐᓇ Sanna , the modern pronunciation of Sedna’s name.[edit]The orbit of Sedna set against the orbits of outer Solar System objects (top and side views, Pluto’s orbit is purple, Neptune’s is blue)The 10,000 yearapparent magnitudesof Sedna and two other sednoids Orbit and rotation Sedna has the longest orbital period of any known object in the Solar System of its size or larger with an orbital period of around 11,400 years.Its orbit is extremely eccentric, with an aphelion of approximately 937 AUand a perihelion of 76.19AU. Near aphelion, Sedna is one of the coldest places in the Solar System , located far past the termination shock , where temperatures never exceed −240 °C (−400.0 °F ) due to its extreme distance.At aphelion, the Sun as viewed from Sedna is a particularly bright star, among the other stars, in the otherwise black sky, being about 45% as bright as the full moon as seen from Earth.Its perihelion was the largest for any known Solar System object until the discovery of the sednoid 2012 VP 113 .At its aphelion, Sedna orbits the Sun at a meagre 377m/s,1.3% that of Earth’s average orbital speed. When Sedna was first discovered, it was 89.6AUaway from the Sun, approaching perihelion, and was the most distant object in the Solar System observed. Sedna was later surpassed by Eris , which was detected by the same survey near its aphelion at 97AU. Because Sedna is near perihelion as of 2024, both Eris and Gonggong are farther from the Sun, at 96AU and 89AU respectively, than Sedna at 84AU, despite both of their semi-major axes being shorter than Sedna’s.The orbits of some long-period comets extend further than that of Sedna; they are too dim to be discovered except when approaching perihelion in the inner Solar System. As Sedna nears its perihelion in mid-2076,the Sun will appear merely as a very bright pinpoint in its sky, too far away to be visible as a disc to the naked eye. When first discovered, Sedna was thought to have an unusually long rotational period (20 to 50 days).It was initially speculated that Sedna’s rotation was slowed by the gravitational pull of a large binary companion, similar to Pluto 's moon Charon .However, a search for such a satellite by the Hubble Space Telescope in March 2004 found no such objects.Subsequent measurements from the MMT telescope showed that Sedna in reality has a much shorter rotation period of about 10 hours, more typical for a body its size. It could rotate in about 18 hours instead, but this is thought to be unlikely.[edit] Physical characteristics Comparison of sizes, albedos, and colors of various large trans-Neptunian objects with sizes of700 km. Sedna is shown on the middle row, third from the left. The dark colored arcs represent uncertainties of the object’s size. Sedna photographed in color by Apache Point Observatory’s Sloan Digital Sky Surveyon 11 and 12 October 2005, showing the object’s slow movement across the sky In visible light , Sedna has an absolute magnitude of about 1.8 and an estimated albedo (reflectivity) of around 0.41, which gives it a diameter of approximately 900km.At the time of discovery it was the brightest object found in the Solar System since Pluto in 1930. In 2004, the discoverers placed an upper limit of 1,800km on its diameter;after observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope , this was revised downward by 2007 to less than 1,600km.In 2012, measurements from the Herschel Space Observatory suggested that Sedna’s diameter was995 ± 80 km, which would make it smaller than Pluto’s moon Charon.In 2013, the same team re-analyzed Sedna’s thermal data with an improved thermophysical model and found a consistent value of906+314−258km, suggesting that the original model fit was too precise.Australian observations of a stellar occultation by Sedna in 2013 produced similar results on its diameter, giving chord lengths1025±135kmand1305±565km.The size of this object suggests it could have undergone differentiation and may have a sub-surface liquid ocean and possibly geologic activity. As Sedna has no known moons, the direct determination of its mass is as yet impossible without either sending a space probe or perhaps locating a nearby object which is gravitationally perturbed by the dwarf planet. It is the largest trans-Neptunian Sun-orbiting object not known to have a natural satellite.As of 2024, observations from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2004 have been the only published attempt to find a satellite,and it is possible that a satellite could have been lost in the glare from Sedna itself. Observations from the SMARTS telescope show that Sedna, in visible light , is one of the reddest objects known in the Solar System, nearly as red as Mars .Its deep red spectral slope is indicative of high concentrations of organic material on its surface.Chad Trujillo and his colleagues suggest that Sedna’s dark red color is caused by an extensive surface coating of hydrocarbon sludge, termed tholins . Tholins are a reddish-colored, amorphous, and heterogeneous organic mixture hypothesized to have been transmuted from simpler organic compounds, following billions of years of continuous exposure to ultraviolet radiation, interstellar particles, and other harsh environs as the dwarf planet either comes close to the Sun or transits interstellar space.Its surface is homogeneous in color and spectrum ; this may be because Sedna, unlike objects nearer the Sun, is rarely impacted by other bodies, which would expose bright patches of fresh icy material like that on 8405 Asbolus .Sedna and two other very distant objects – (308933) 2006 SQ 372 and (87269) 2000 OO 67 – share their color with outer classical Kuiper belt objects and the centaur 5145 Pholus , suggesting a similar region of origin. Trujillo and colleagues have placed upper limits on Sedna’s surface composition of 60% for methane ice and 70% for water ice.The presence of methane further supports the existence of tholins on Sedna’s surface, as methane is among the organic compounds capable of giving rise to tholins.Barucci and colleagues compared Sedna’s spectrum with that of Triton and detected weak absorption bands belonging to methane and nitrogen ices. From these observations, they suggested the following model of the surface: 24% Triton-type tholins, 7% amorphous carbon , 10% nitrogen ices, 26% methanol , and 33% methane.The detection of methane and water ice was confirmed in 2006 by the Spitzer Space Telescope mid-infrared photometry.The European Southern Observatory 's Very Large Telescope observed Sedna with the SINFONI near-infrared spectrometer, finding indications of tholins and water ice on the surface. In 2022, low-resolution near-infrared (0.7–5 μm) spectroscopic observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed the presence of significant amounts of ethane ice (C2H6) and of complex organics on the surface of Sedna. The JWST spectra also contain evidence of the existence of small amounts of ethylene (C2H4), acetylene (C2H2) and possibly carbon dioxide (CO2). On the other hand little evidence of the existence of methane (CH4) and nitrogen ices was found at variance with the earlier observations. The possible presence of nitrogen on the surface suggests that, at least for a short time, Sedna may have a tenuous atmosphere. During the 200-year portion of its orbit near perihelion, the maximum temperature on Sedna should exceed 35.6K (−237.6°C), the transition temperature between alpha-phase solid N2and the beta-phase seen on Triton. At 38K, the N2 vapor pressure would be 14microbar (1.4Pa). The weak methane absorption bands indicate that methane on Sedna’s surface is ancient, as opposed to being freshly deposited. This finding indicates that Sedna’s surface never reaches a temperature high enough for methane on the surface to evaporate and subsequently fall back as snow, which happens on Triton and probably on Pluto.[edit] Origin In their paper announcing the discovery of Sedna, Brown and his colleagues described it as the first observed body belonging to the Oort cloud , the hypothetical cloud of comet -like objects thought to exist out to nearly a light-year from the Sun. They observed that, unlike scattered disc objects such as Eris, Sedna’s perihelion (76AU) is too distant for it to have been scattered by the gravitational influence of Neptune.Because it is considerably closer to the Sun than was expected for an Oort cloud object, and has an inclination roughly in line with the planets and the Kuiper belt, they described the dwarf planet as being an “inner Oort cloud object”, situated in the disc reaching from the Kuiper belt to the spherical part of the cloud. If Sedna formed in its current location, the Sun’s original protoplanetary disc must have extended as far as 75AU into space.On top of that, Sedna’s initial orbit must have been approximately circular, otherwise its formation by the accretion of smaller bodies into a whole would not have been possible, because the large relative velocities between planetesimals would have been too disruptive. Therefore, it must have been tugged into its current eccentric orbit by a gravitational interaction with another body.In their initial paper, Brown, Rabinowitz and colleagues suggested three possible candidates for the perturbing body: an unseen planet beyond the Kuiper belt , a single passing star , or one of the young stars embedded with the Sun in the stellar cluster in which it formed. Brown and his team favored the hypothesis that Sedna was lifted into its current orbit by a star from the Sun’s birth cluster , arguing that Sedna’s aphelion of about 1,000AU, which is relatively close compared to those of long-period comets, is not distant enough to be affected by passing stars at their current distances from the Sun. They propose that Sedna’s orbit is best explained by the Sun having formed in an open cluster of several stars that gradually disassociated over time.That hypothesis has also been advanced by both Alessandro Morbidelli and Scott Jay Kenyon .Computer simulations by Julio A. Fernandez and Adrian Brunini suggest that multiple close passes by young stars in such a cluster would pull many objects into Sedna-like orbits.A study by Morbidelli and Levison suggested that the most likely explanation for Sedna’s orbit was that it had been perturbed by a close (approximately 800AU) pass by another star in the first 100 million years or so of the Solar System’s existence. The trans-Neptunian planet hypothesis has been advanced in several forms by numerous astronomers, including Rodney Gomes and Patryk Lykawka. One scenario involves perturbations of Sedna’s orbit by a hypothetical planetary-sized body in the inner Oort cloud . In 2006, simulations suggested that Sedna’s orbital traits could be explained by perturbations of a Jupiter-mass ( M J ) object at 5,000AU (or less), a Neptune-mass object at 2,000AU, or even an Earth-mass object at 1,000AU.Computer simulations by Patryk Lykawka have indicated that Sedna’s orbit may have been caused by a body roughly the size of Earth, ejected outward by Neptune early in the Solar System’s formation and currently in an elongated orbit between 80 and 170AU from the Sun.Brown’s various sky surveys have not detected any Earth-sized objects out to a distance of about 100AU. It’s a possibility that such an object may have been scattered out of the Solar System after the formation of the inner Oort cloud. Caltech researchers Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown have hypothesized the existence of a super-Earth planet in the outer Solar System— Planet Nine —to explain the orbits of a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects that includes Sedna.This planet would be perhaps six times as massive as Earth.It would have a highly eccentric orbit, and its average distance from the Sun would be about 15 times that of Neptune (which orbits at an average distance of 30.1 astronomical units (4.50×109km)). Accordingly, its orbital period would be approximately 7,000 to 15,000 years. Morbidelli and Kenyon have suggested that Sedna did not originate in the Solar System, but was captured by the Sun from a passing extrasolar planetary system , specifically that of a brown dwarf about 1/20th the mass of the Sun ( M ☉ )or a main-sequence star 80 percent more massive than the Sun, which, owing to its larger mass, may now be a white dwarf . In either case, the stellar encounter had likely occurred within 100 million years after the Sun’s formation.Stellar encounters during this time would have minimal effect on the Oort cloud’s final mass and population since the Sun had excess material for replenishing the Oort cloud.[edit] Population Orbit diagram of Sedna, 2012 VP 113, and Leleākūhonua( 2015 TG 387) with 100 AU grids for scale Sedna’s highly elliptical orbit, and thus a narrow temporal window for detection and observation with currently available technology, means that the probability of its detection was roughly 1 in 80. Unless its discovery were a fluke , it is expected that another 40–120 Sedna-sized objects with roughly the same orbital parameters would exist in the outer solar system. In 2007, astronomer Megan Schwamb outlined how each of the proposed mechanisms for Sedna’s extreme orbit would affect the structure and dynamics of any wider population. If a trans-Neptunian planet was responsible, all such objects would share roughly the same perihelion (about 80AU). If Sedna was captured from another planetary system that rotated in the same direction as the Solar System, then all of its population would have orbits on relatively low inclinations and have semi-major axes ranging from 100 to 500AU. If it rotated in the opposite direction, then two populations would form, one with low and one with high inclinations. The perturbations from passing stars would produce a wide variety of perihelia and inclinations, each dependent on the number and angle of such encounters. A larger sample of objects with Sedna’s extreme perihelion may help in determining which scenario is most likely.“I call Sedna a fossil record of the earliest Solar System”, said Brown in 2006. "Eventually, when other fossil records are found, Sedna will help tell us how the Sun formed and the number of stars that were close to the Sun when it formed."A 2007–2008 survey by Brown, Rabinowitz, and Megan Schwamb attempted to locate another member of Sedna’s hypothetical population. Although the survey was sensitive to movement out to 1,000AU and discovered the likely dwarf planet Gonggong, it detected no new sednoid.Subsequent simulations incorporating the new data suggested about 40 Sedna-sized objects probably exist in this region, with the brightest being about Eris’s magnitude (−1.0). In 2014, Chad Trujillo and Scott Sheppard announced the discovery of 2012 VP 113 ,an object half the size of Sedna, a 4,200-year orbit similar to Sedna’s, and a perihelion within Sedna’s range of roughly 80AU;they speculated that this similarity of orbits may be due to the gravitational shepherding effect of a trans-Neptunian planet.Another high-perihelion trans-Neptunian object was announced by Sheppard and colleagues in 2018, provisionally designated2015 TG387and now named Leleākūhonua .With a perihelion of 65AU and an even more distant orbit with a period of 40,000 years, its longitude of perihelion (the location where it makes its closest approach to the Sun) appears to be aligned with the directions of both Sedna and2012 VP113, strengthening the case for an apparent orbital clustering of trans-Neptunian objects suspected to be influenced by a hypothetical distant planet, dubbed Planet Nine. In a study detailing Sedna’s population and Leleākūhonua’s orbital dynamics, Sheppard concluded that the discovery implies a population of about 2 million inner Oort Cloud objects larger than 40km, with a total mass in the range of1×1022kg(several times the mass of the asteroid belt and 80% the mass of Pluto). Sedna was recovered from Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite data in 2020, as part of preliminary work for an all-sky survey searching for Planet Nine and other as-yet-unknown trans-Neptunian objects.[edit] Classification The discovery of Sedna renewed the old question of just which astronomical objects ought to be considered planets , and which ones ought not to be. On 15 March 2004, articles on Sedna in the popular press reported that a tenth planet had been discovered. This question was resolved for many astronomers by applying the International Astronomical Union’s definition of a planet , adopted on 24 August 2006, which mandated that a planet must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. Sedna is not expected to have cleared its neighborhood; quantitatively speaking, its Stern–Levison parameter is estimated to be much less than 1.The IAU also adopted dwarf planet as a term for the largest non-planets (despite the name) that, like planets, are in hydrostatic equilibrium and thus can display planet-like geological activity, yet have not cleared their orbital neighborhoods.Sedna is bright enough, and therefore large enough, that it is expected to be in hydrostatic equilibrium.Hence, astronomers generally consider Sedna a dwarf planet.The list of dwarf planets recognized by the IAU has not changed since 2006, even though Sedna is considered to be one by most astronomers. Besides its physical classification, Sedna is also categorized according to its orbit. The Minor Planet Center, which officially catalogs the objects in the Solar System, designates Sedna only as a trans-Neptunian object (as it orbits beyond Neptune),as does the JPL Small-Body Database .The question of a more precise orbital classification has been much debated, and many astronomers have suggested that the sednoids , together with similar objects such as 2000 CR 105 , be placed in a new category of distant objects named extended scattered disc objects (E-SDO), detached objects , distant detached objects (DDO),or scattered-extended in the formal classification by the Deep Ecliptic Survey .[edit] Exploration Sedna will come to perihelion around July 2076.This close approach to the Sun provides a window of opportunity for studying it that will not occur again for more than 11 millennia. Because Sedna spends much of its orbit beyond the heliopause , the point at which the solar wind gives way to the interstellar particle wind , examining Sedna’s surface would provide unique information on the effects of interstellar radiation, as well as the properties of the solar wind at its farthest extent.It was calculated in 2011 that a flyby mission to Sedna could take 24.48 years using a Jupiter gravity assist , based on launch dates of 6 May 2033 or 23 June 2046. Sedna would be either 77.27 or 76.43AU from the Sun when the spacecraft arrives near the end of 2057 or 2070, respectively.Other potential flight trajectories involve gravity assists from Venus, Earth, Saturn, and Neptune as well as Jupiter.Research at the University of Tennessee has also examined the potential for a lander.[edit]^abcGiven theorbital eccentricityof this object, differentepochscan generate quite different heliocentric unperturbedtwo-bodybest-fitsolutions to the orbital period. Using a 1990 epoch, Sedna has a 12,100-year orbit,but using a 2019 epoch Sedna has a 10,500-year orbit.For objects at such high eccentricity, the Solar System’sbarycenter(Sun+Jupiter) generates solutions that are more stable than heliocentric solutions.UsingJPL Horizons, the barycentric orbital period is consistently about 11,388years, with a variation of 2 years over the next two centuries.^abDifferent programs using differentepochsand/ordata setswill produce slightly different dates for Sedna’sperihelionas they generate instantaneous unperturbed 2-body solutions. Using a 2020 epoch, theJPL Small-Body Databasehas a perihelion date of 9March 2076.Using a 1990 epoch the LowellDEShas perihelion on2479285.9863(14December 2075). As of 2021, theJPL Horizons(using much more accuratenumerical integration) indicates a perihelion date of 18July 2076.^The HST search found no satellite candidates to a limit of about 500 times fainter than Sedna (Brown and Suer 2007).^The Stern–Levison parameter (Λ) as defined byAlan SternandHarold F. Levisonin 2002 determines if an object will eventually clear its orbital neighborhood of small bodies. It is defined as the object’s fraction of solar mass (i.e. the object’s mass divided by the Sun’s mass) squared, divided by its semi-major axis to the 3/2 power, times a constant 1.7×1016.(see equation 4)If an object’s Λ is greater than 1, then that object will eventually clear its neighborhood, and it can be considered for planethood. Using the unlikely highest estimated mass for Sedna of 2×1021kg, Sedna’s Λ is (2×1021/1.9891×1030)2/ 5193/2× 1.7×1016= 1.44×10−6. This is much less than 1, so Sedna is not a planet by this criterion.[edit]^^abcde^ab^^abcdefg(Solution using the Solar Systembarycenter. Select Ephemeris Type:Elements and Center:@0) (Saved Horizons output file 2011-Feb-04) In the second pane “PR=” can be found, which gives the orbital period in days (4.160E+06, which is 11,390Julian years).^abcde(JPL#34/Soln.date: 2021-Apr-13)^ab(“R (au) column” is distance from Sun)^abc^ab^ab^^ab^HorizonsArchived12 September 2015 at theWayback Machine^abc^^^^NASAJPL Horizons ephemeris 2025–2035^^^abcdef^ab^abcd^abcd^^^^^^ab{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)^^^^^Apparent magnitude of Sun at 937 AU = −26.74 + 5 log(937) = −11.88. Full moon magnitude is −12.74. Ratio is100.4(11.88−12.74)=0.453≈45%.{\displaystyle 10^{0.4(11.88-12.74)}=0.453\approx 45%.}^^ab^Calculated:https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Gsolar+mass%2FAU%281%2F76.19-1%2F937%29%3D1%2F2%28x+m%2Fs%29%5E2%28%28937%2F76.19%29%5E2-1%29%5E377.4 m/s for Sedna divided by 29.78 km/s for Earth.^^^^^ab^ab^^^abcde^^^^^abc^^^ab^^^^^^^ab^abcde^ab^^ab^^ab^^^ab^^^^abc^^{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^[edit][edit]Wikimedia Commonshas media related to:Sedna(category)NASA’s Sedna page.Archived14 March 2018 at theWayback Machine(Discovery Photos).Mike Brown’s Sedna pageSednaat theJPL Small-Body DatabaseRetrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sedna_%28dwarf_planet%29oldid%3D1357071029"Categories:Minor planet object articles (numbered)SednoidsExtreme trans-Neptunian objectsInner Oort cloudNamed minor planetsDwarf planetsAstronomical objects discovered in 2003Discoveries by Chad TrujilloDiscoveries by David L. RabinowitzDiscoveries by Michael E. BrownSolar SystemNamed TNOsHidden categories:Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2021All articles containing potentially dated statementsWebarchive template wayback linksCS1 maint: deprecated archival serviceArticles with short descriptionShort description is different from WikidataFeatured articlesUse American English from August 2024All Wikipedia articles written in American EnglishUse dmy dates from August 2024Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2026Articles containing Inuktitut-language textArticles containing potentially dated statements from 2024Pages using div col with small parameterArticles with hAudio microformatsSpoken articlesJPL Small-Body Database ID different from Wikidata References [^1]: “(90377) Sedna = 2003 VB12”. Minor Planet Center . Retrieved 25 September2025. [^2]: “JPL Small-Body Database Browser: 90377 Sedna (2003 VB12)”(2020-01-21 last obs). Archivedfrom the original on 27 February 2020 . Retrieved 27 February2020. [^3]: Buie, Marc W.(22 November 2009). “Orbit Fit and Astrometric record for 90377”. Deep Ecliptic Survey. Archivedfrom the original on 20 May 2011 . Retrieved 17 January2006. [^4]: Slyuta, E. N.; Kreslavsky, M. A. (1990). Intermediate (20–100 KM ) Sized Volcanic Edifices on Venus (PDF). Lunar and planetary science XXI. Lunar and Planetary Institute. p.1174. Archived (PDF)from the original on 15 January 2021 . Retrieved 29 February2020. [^5]: Horizonsoutput. “Barycentric Osculating Orbital Elements for 90377 Sedna (2003 VB12)”. Archivedfrom the original on 17 October 2023 . Retrieved 18 September2021.(Solution using the Solar System barycenter. Select Ephemeris Type:Elements and Center:@0) (Saved Horizons output file 2011-Feb-04 “Barycentric Osculating Orbital Elements for 90377 Sedna”. Archived from the originalon 19 November 2012.) In the second pane “PR=” can be found, which gives the orbital period in days (4.160E+06, which is 11,390 Julian years). [^6]: Given the orbital eccentricityof this object, different epochscan generate quite different heliocentric unperturbed two-body best-fitsolutions to the orbital period. Using a 1990 epoch, Sedna has a 12,100-year orbit, [3]but using a 2019 epoch Sedna has a 10,500-year orbit. [31]For objects at such high eccentricity, the Solar System’s barycenter(Sun+Jupiter) generates solutions that are more stable than heliocentric solutions. [32]Using JPL Horizons, the barycentric orbital period is consistently about 11,388years, with a variation of 2 years over the next two centuries. [5] [^7]: “Horizons Batch for Sedna in July 2076”(Perihelion occurs when rdot flips from negative to positive). JPL Horizons. Archivedfrom the original on 11 April 2021 . Retrieved 10 April2021.(JPL#34/Soln.date: 2021-Apr-13) [^8]: “Sedna Ephemerides for July 2076”. AstDyS. Archivedfrom the original on 3 January 2021 . Retrieved 31 December2020.(“R (au) column” is distance from Sun) [^9]: Lellouch, E.; Santos-Sanz, P.; Lacerda, P.; Mommert, M.; Duffard, R.; Ortiz, J. L.; Müller, T. G.; Fornasier, S.; Stansberry, J.; Kiss, Cs.; Vilenius, E.; Mueller, M.; Peixinho, N.; Moreno, R.; Groussin, O. (29 September 2013). ““TNOs are Cool”: A survey of the trans-Neptunian region: IX. Thermal properties of Kuiper belt objects and Centaurs from combined Herschel and Spitzer observations”. AstronomyAstrophysics. 557: A60. Bibcode: 2013AA…557A…60L. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/201322047. hdl: 10316/80307. ISSN 0004-6361. [^10]: Rommel, Flavia L.; Braga-Ribas, Felipe; Desmars, Josselin; Camargo, Julio I. B.; Ortiz, Jose-Luis; Sicardy, Bruno (December 2020). “Stellar occultations enable milliarcsecond astrometry for Trans-Neptunian objects and Centaurs”. AstronomyAstrophysics. 644: 15. arXiv: 2010.12708. Bibcode: 2020AA…644A…40R. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/202039054. S2CID 225070222. A40. [^11]: Gaudi, B. Scott; Stanek, Krzysztof Z.; Hartman, Joel D.; Holman, Matthew J.; McLeod, Brian A. (2005). “On the Rotation Period of (90377) Sedna”. The Astrophysical Journal. 629(1): L49–L52. arXiv: astro-ph/0503673. Bibcode: 2005ApJ…629L…49G. doi: 10.1086/444355. S2CID 55713175. [^12]: Tegler, Stephen C. (26 January 2006). “Kuiper Belt Object Magnitudes and Surface Colors”. Northern Arizona University. Archived from the originalon 1 September 2006 . Retrieved 5 November2006. [^13]: “AstDys (90377) Sedna Ephemerides”. Department of Mathematics, University of Pisa, Italy. Archivedfrom the original on 31 October 2023 . Retrieved 31 October2023. [^14]: JPL Horizons On-Line Ephemeris System(18 July 2010). “Horizons Output for Sedna 2076/2114”. Archived from the originalon 25 February 2012 . Retrieved 18 July2010. Horizons Archived12 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine [^15]: Pál, A.; Kiss, C.; Müller, T. G.; Santos-Sanz, P.; Vilenius, E.; Szalai, N.; Mommert, M.; Lellouch, E.; Rengel, M.; Hartogh, P.; Protopapa, S.; Stansberry, J.; Ortiz, J.-L.; Duffard, R.; Thirouin, A.; Henry, F.; Delsanti, A. (2012). ““TNOs are Cool”: A survey of the trans-Neptunian region. VII. Size and surface characteristics of (90377) Sedna and 2010 EK 139”. AstronomyAstrophysics. 541: L6. arXiv: 1204.0899. Bibcode: 2012AA…541L…6P. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/201218874. S2CID 119117186. [^16]: Emery, J. P.; Wong, I.; Brunetto, R.; Cook, J. C.; Pinilla-Alonso, N.; Stansberry, J. A.; Holler, B. J.; Grundy, W. M.; Protopapa, S.; Souza-Feliciano, A. C.; Fernández-Valenzuela, E.; Lunine, J. I.; Hines, D. C. (15 May 2024). “A tale of 3 dwarf planets: Ices and organics on Sedna, Gonggong, and Quaoar from JWST spectroscopy”. Icarus. 414116017. arXiv: 2309.15230. Bibcode: 2024Icar…41416017E. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2024.116017. ISSN 0019-1035. Spectra of all three objects show steep red spectral slopes and strong, broad absorptions between 2.7 and 3.6 μm indicative of complex organic molecules […] These differences of Sedna, Gonggong, and Quaoar from the smaller KBO population supports the inference of different evolutionary history based on their size. [^17]: Emery, J. P.; Wong, I.; Brunetto, R.; Cook, J. C.; Pinilla-Alonso, N.; Stansberry, J. A.; Holler, B. J.; Grundy, W. M.; Protopapa, S.; Souza-Feliciano, A. C.; Fernández-Valenzuela, E.; Lunine, J. I.; Hines, D. C. (15 May 2024). “A tale of 3 dwarf planets: Ices and organics on Sedna, Gonggong, and Quaoar from JWST spectroscopy”. Icarus. 414116017. arXiv: 2309.15230. Bibcode: 2024Icar…41416017E. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2024.116017. ISSN 0019-1035– via Elsevier Science Direct. Sedna is not expected to support an atmosphere at its great distances [^18]: Bettati, Amelia; Lunine, Jonathan (1 April 2025). “Atmospheric escape explains diverse surface compositions of Pluto vs Sedna”. Icarus. 430116482: 12. Bibcode: 2025Icar…43016482B. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2025.116482. ISSN 0019-1035. …No moon has been detected around Sedna, so it is not yet possible to calculate its density [^19]: NASA JPL Horizons ephemeris 2025–2035 [^20]: Huang, Yukun; Gladman, Brett (15 February 2024). “Primordial Orbital Alignment of Sednoids”. The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 962(2): L33. arXiv: 2310.20614. Bibcode: 2024ApJ…962L…33H. doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad2686. ISSN 2041-8205. We examined the past history of the three most detached trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs)—Sedna, 2012 VP113, and Leleakuhonua (2015 TG387)—the three clearest members of the dynamical class known as sednoids, with high perihelia distances [^21]: “MPEC 2004-E45: 2003 VB12”. IAU: Minor Planet Center. 15 March 2004. Archivedfrom the original on 28 October 2021 . Retrieved 27 March2018. [^22]: Brown, Mike; Rabinowitz, David; Trujillo, Chad (2004). “Discovery of a Candidate Inner Oort Cloud Planetoid”. Astrophysical Journal. 617(1): 645–649. arXiv: astro-ph/0404456. Bibcode: 2004ApJ…617…645B. doi: 10.1086/422095. S2CID 7738201. [^23]: Brown, Michael E.(2012). How I Killed Pluto And Why It Had It Coming. New York: SpiegelGrau. p.96. ISBN 978-0-385-53110-8. [^24]: Brown, Mike. “Sedna”. Caltech. Archivedfrom the original on 25 July 2010 . Retrieved 20 July2010. [^25]: “MPEC 2004-S73: Editorial Notice”. IAU Minor Planet Center. 2004. Archivedfrom the original on 8 May 2020 . Retrieved 18 July2010. [^26]: Walker, Duncan (16 March 2004). “How do planets get their names?”. BBC News. Archivedfrom the original on 19 December 2006 . Retrieved 22 May2010. [^27]: Chang, Kenneth (23 August 2005). “10 Planets? Why Not 11?”. The New York Times . Retrieved 17 February2025. [^28]: Schilling, Govert (2009). The Hunt for Planet X: New Worlds and the Fate of Pluto (PDF). Springer. p.212. doi: 10.1007/978-0-387-77805-1. ISBN 978-0-387-77805-1 . Retrieved 16 February2025. [^29]: “MPC 52733” (PDF). Minor Planet Center. 2004. Archived (PDF)from the original on 25 July 2011 . Retrieved 30 August2010. [^30]: “Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows” (PDF). unicode.org. Unicode. 1991–2021. Archived (PDF)from the original on 2 August 2022 . Retrieved 6 August2022. 2BF2 ⯲ SEDNA [^31]: Faulks, David (12 June 2016). “Eris and Sedna Symbols” (PDF). unicode.org. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service ( link) [^32]: “SBDB Epoch 2019”. JPL. Archived from the originalon 13 November 2019. [^33]: Kaib, Nathan A.; Becker, Andrew C.; Jones, R. Lynne; Puckett, Andrew W.; Bizyaev, Dmitry; Dilday, Benjamin; Frieman, Joshua A.; Oravetz, Daniel J.; Pan, Kaike; Quinn, Thomas; Schneider, Donald P.; Watters, Shannon (2009). “2006 SQ372: A Likely Long-Period Comet from the Inner Oort Cloud”. The Astrophysical Journal. 695(1): 268–275. arXiv: 0901.1690. Bibcode: 2009ApJ…695…268K. doi: 10.1088/0004-637X/695/1/268. S2CID 16987581. [^34]: “Mysterious Sedna”. Science Mission Directorate. Archived from the originalon 16 May 2017 . Retrieved 31 March2023. [^35]: “Most Distant Object in Solar System Discovered”. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). 15 March 2004. Archivedfrom the original on 22 October 2023 . Retrieved 31 March2023. [^36]: Apparent magnitude of Sun at 937 AU = −26.74 + 5 log(937) = −11.88. Full moon magnitude is −12.74. Ratio is 10 0.4 ( 11.88 − 12.74 ) = 0.453 ≈ 45 % . {\displaystyle 10^{0.4(11.88-12.74)}=0.453\approx 45%.} [^37]: Trujillo, Chadwick A.; Brown, M. E.; Rabinowitz, D. L. (2007). “The Surface of Sedna in the Near-infrared”. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 39: 510. Bibcode: 2007DPS…39.4906T. [^38]: Trujillo, Chadwick A.; Sheppard, S. S. (2014). “A Sedna-like body with a perihelion of 80 astronomical units”. Nature. 507(7493): 471–474. Bibcode: 2014Natur.507…471T. doi: 10.1038/nature13156. PMID 24670765. S2CID 4393431. [^39]: Calculated: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Gsolar+mass%2FAU%281%2F76.19-1%2F937%29%3D1%2F2%28x+m%2Fs%29%5E2%28%28937%2F76.19%29%5E2-1%29 [^40]: 377.4 m/s for Sedna divided by 29.78 km/s for Earth. [^41]: “AstDys (90377) Sedna Ephemerides 2003-11-14”. Department of Mathematics, University of Pisa, Italy. Archivedfrom the original on 22 October 2023 . Retrieved 6 July2019. [^42]: “AstDys (136199) Eris Ephemerides”. Department of Mathematics, University of Pisa, Italy. Archivedfrom the original on 31 October 2023 . Retrieved 31 October2023. [^43]: “AstDys (225088) 2007 OR10 Ephemerides”. Department of Mathematics, University of Pisa, Italy. Archivedfrom the original on 31 October 2023 . Retrieved 31 October2023. [^44]: Different programs using different epochsand/or data setswill produce slightly different dates for Sedna’s perihelionas they generate instantaneous unperturbed 2-body solutions. Using a 2020 epoch, the JPL Small-Body Databasehas a perihelion date of 9March 2076. [2]Using a 1990 epoch the Lowell DEShas perihelion on 2479285.9863( 14December 2075). As of 2021 [update], the JPL Horizons(using much more accurate numerical integration) indicates a perihelion date of 18July 2076. [6] [^45]: “Long View from a Lonely Planet”. Hubblesite, STScI-2004-14. 2004. Archivedfrom the original on 21 November 2022 . Retrieved 21 July2010. [^46]: “Hubble Observes Planetoid Sedna, Mystery Deepens”. Hubblesite, STScI-2004-14. 2004. Archivedfrom the original on 12 November 2016 . Retrieved 30 August2010. [^47]: Brown, Michael E. (2008). “The largest Kuiper belt objects” (PDF). In Barucci, M. Antonietta; Boehnhardt, Hermann; Cruikshank, Dale P. (eds.). The Solar System Beyond Neptune. University of Arizona Press. pp. 335–345. ISBN 978-0-8165-2755-7. Archived (PDF)from the original on 13 November 2012 . Retrieved 19 September2008. [^48]: The HST search found no satellite candidates to a limit of about 500 times fainter than Sedna (Brown and Suer 2007). [45] [^49]: Grundy, W. M.; Noll, K. S.; Stephens, D. C. (2005). “Diverse Albedos of Small Trans-Neptunian Objects”. Icarus. 176(1). Lowell Observatory, Space Telescope Science Institute: 184–191. arXiv: astro-ph/0502229. Bibcode: 2005Icar…176…184G. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2005.01.007. S2CID 118866288. Archivedfrom the original on 29 October 2023 . Retrieved 21 June2023. [^50]: Stansberry, John; Grundy, Will; Brown, Mike; Cruikshank, Dale; Spencer, John; Trilling, David; Margot, Jean-Luc (2008). “Physical Properties of Kuiper Belt and Centaur Objects: Constraints from Spitzer Space Telescope” (PDF). In Barucci, M. Antonietta; Boehnhardt, Hermann; Cruikshank, Dale P. (eds.). The Solar System Beyond Neptune. University of Arizona Press. pp. 161–179. arXiv: astro-ph/0702538v2. Bibcode: 2008ssbn.book…161S. ISBN 978-0-8165-2755-7. Archived (PDF)from the original on 25 October 2012 . Retrieved 15 August2010. [^51]: Emery, J. P.; Ore, C. M. Dalle; Cruikshank, D. P.; Fernández, Y. R.; Trilling, D. E.; Stansberry, J. A. (2007). “Ices on 90377 Sedna: Confirmation and compositional constraints”. Astronomy and Astrophysics. 406(1): 395–398. Bibcode: 2007AA…466…395E. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361:20067021. [^52]: Lakdawalla, E. (19 October 2016). “DPS/EPSC update: 2007 OR10 has a moon!”. The Planetary Society. Archivedfrom the original on 16 April 2019 . Retrieved 19 October2016. [^53]: Brown, Michael E. (16 March 2004). “Characterization of a planetary-sized body in the inner Oort cloud – HST Proposal 10041”. Archivedfrom the original on 4 May 2022 . Retrieved 27 March2018. [^54]: “Hubble Observes Planetoid Sedna, Mystery Deepens”. Space Telescope Science Institute. 14 April 2004. Archivedfrom the original on 29 March 2018 . Retrieved 27 March2018. [^55]: Bannister, Michelle [@astrokiwi](27 March 2018). “#TNO2018”( Tweet) . Retrieved 27 March2018– via Twitter. the census of dwarf planet satellites shows all the biggest systems seem to have satellites. Sedna isn’t known to, but any satellite would spend at least a quarter of its time lost in Sedna’s glare […] no additional satellites for Makemake, Eris and OR10 down to 26th mag. Haumea has already been checked. Sedna the last remaining to double-check! [^56]: Trujillo, Chadwick A.; Brown, Michael E.; Rabinowitz, David L.; Geballe, Thomas R. (2005). “Near-Infrared Surface Properties of the Two Intrinsically Brightest Minor Planets: (90377) Sedna and (90482) Orcus”. The Astrophysical Journal. 627(2): 1057–1065. arXiv: astro-ph/0504280. Bibcode: 2005ApJ…627.1057T. doi: 10.1086/430337. S2CID 9149700. [^57]: Sheppard, Scott S. (2010). “The colors of extreme outer Solar System objects”. The Astronomical Journal. 139(4): 1394–1405. arXiv: 1001.3674. Bibcode: 2010AJ…139.1394S. doi: 10.1088/0004-6256/139/4/1394. S2CID 53545974. [^58]: Barucci, M. A.; Cruikshank, D. P.; Dotto, E.; Merlin, F.; Poulet, F.; Dalle Ore, C.; Fornasier, S.; De Bergh, C. (2005). “Is Sedna another Triton?”. AstronomyAstrophysics. 439(2): L1–L4. Bibcode: 2005AA…439L…1B. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361:200500144. [^59]: Barucci, M. A.; Morea Dalle Ore, C.; Alvarez-Candal, A.; de Bergh, C.; Merlin, F.; Dumas, C.; Cruikshank, D. (December 2010). “(90377) Sedna: Investigation of Surface Compositional Variation”. The Astronomical Journal. 140(6): 2095–2100. Bibcode: 2010AJ…140.2095B. doi: 10.1088/0004-6256/140/6/2095. S2CID 120483473. [^60]: Emery, J. P.; Wong, I.; Brunetto, R.; Cook, J. C.; Pinilla-Alonso, N.; Stansberry, J. A.; Holler, B. J.; Grundy, W. M.; Protopapa, S.; Souza-Feliciano, A. C.; Fernández-Valenzuela, E.; Lunine, J. I.; Hines, D. C. (2024). “A Tale of 3 Dwarf Planets: Ices and Organics on Sedna, Gonggong, and Quaoar from JWST Spectroscopy”. Icarus. 414116017. arXiv: 2309.15230. Bibcode: 2024Icar…41416017E. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2024.116017. [^61]: Jewitt, David; Morbidelli, Alessandro; Rauer, Heike (2007). Trans-Neptunian Objects and Comets: Saas-Fee Advanced Course 35. Swiss Society for Astrophysics and Astronomy. Berlin: Springer. p.86. arXiv: astro-ph/0512256v1. Bibcode: 2005astro.ph.12256M. ISBN 978-3-540-71957-1. [^62]: Lykawka, Patryk Sofia; Mukai, Tadashi (2007). “Dynamical classification of trans-Neptunian objects: Probing their origin, evolution, and interrelation”. Icarus. 189(1): 213–232. Bibcode: 2007Icar…189…213L. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2007.01.001. [^63]: Stern, S. Alan (2005). “Regarding the accretion of 2003 VB12 (Sedna) and like bodies in distant heliocentric orbits”. The Astronomical Journal. 129(1): 526–529. arXiv: astro-ph/0404525. Bibcode: 2005AJ…129…526S. doi: 10.1086/426558. S2CID 119430069. [^64]: Sheppard, Scott S.; Jewitt, David C. (2005). “Small Bodies in the Outer Solar System” (PDF). Frank N. Bash Symposium. The University of Texas at Austin. Archived from the original (PDF)on 16 July 2010 . Retrieved 25 March2008. [^65]: Brown, Michael E. (2004). “Sedna and the birth of the solar system”. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 36(127.04): 1553. Bibcode: 2004AAS…20512704B. [^66]: “Transneptunian Object 90377 Sedna (formerly known as 2003 VB12)”. The Planetary Society. Archived from the originalon 25 November 2009 . Retrieved 3 January2010. [^67]: Morbidelli, Alessandro; Levison, Harold F. (2004). “Scenarios for the Origin of the Orbits of the Trans-Neptunian Objects 2000 CR105 and 2003 VB12 (Sedna)”. The Astronomical Journal. 128(5): 2564–2576. arXiv: astro-ph/0403358. Bibcode: 2004AJ…128.2564M. doi: 10.1086/424617. S2CID 119486916. [^68]: Kenyon, Scott J.; Bromley, Benjamin C. (2 December 2004). “Stellar encounters as the origin of distant Solar System objects in highly eccentric orbits”. Nature. 432(7017): 598–602. arXiv: astro-ph/0412030. Bibcode: 2004Natur.432…598K. doi: 10.1038/nature03136. PMID 15577903. S2CID 4427211. Archivedfrom the original on 29 October 2023 . Retrieved 21 June2023. [^69]: “The Challenge of Sedna”. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Archivedfrom the original on 25 August 2012 . Retrieved 26 March2009. [^70]: Gomes, Rodney S.; Matese, John J.; Lissauer, Jack J. (2006). “A distant planetary-mass solar companion may have produced distant detached objects”. Icarus. 184(2): 589–601. Bibcode: 2006Icar…184…589G. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2006.05.026. [^71]: Lykawka, P. S.; Mukai, T. (2008). “An Outer Planet Beyond Pluto and the Origin of the Trans-Neptunian Belt Architecture”. The Astronomical Journal. 135(4): 1161–1200. arXiv: 0712.2198. Bibcode: 2008AJ…135.1161L. doi: 10.1088/0004-6256/135/4/1161. S2CID 118414447. [^72]: Schwamb, Megan E. (2007). “Searching for Sedna’s Sisters: Exploring the inner Oort cloud” (PDF)(Preprint). Caltech. Archived from the original (PDF)on 12 May 2013 . Retrieved 6 August2010. [^73]: Batygin, Konstantin; Brown, Michael E. (2016). “Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System”. The Astronomical Journal. 151(2): 22. arXiv: 1601.05438. Bibcode: 2016AJ…151…22B. doi: 10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22. S2CID 2701020. [^74]: Fesenmaier, Kimm (20 January 2016). “Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet”(Press release). Archivedfrom the original on 16 January 2019 . Retrieved 13 September2017. [^75]: Brown, Michael E.; Batygin, Konstantin (31 January 2022). “A search for Planet Nine using the Zwicky Transient Facility public archive”. The Astronomical Journal. 163(2): 102. arXiv: 2110.13117. Bibcode: 2022AJ…163…102B. doi: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac32dd. S2CID 239768690. [^76]: Croswell, Ken (2015). “Sun Accused of Stealing Planetary Objects from Another Star”. Scientific American. 313(3): 23. doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican0915-23. PMID 26455093. Archivedfrom the original on 8 June 2021 . Retrieved 15 January2023. [^77]: Schilling, Govert (19 June 2015). “Grand Theft Sedna: how the sun might have stolen a mini-planet”. New Scientist. Archivedfrom the original on 20 December 2021 . Retrieved 15 January2023. [^78]: Dickinson, David (6 August 2015). “Stealing Sedna”. universetoday. Archivedfrom the original on 15 November 2021 . Retrieved 15 January2023. [^79]: Schwamb, Megan E.; Brown, Michael E.; Rabinowitz, David L. (2009). “A Search for Distant Solar System Bodies in the Region of Sedna”. The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 694(1): L45–L48. arXiv: 0901.4173. Bibcode: 2009ApJ…694L…45S. doi: 10.1088/0004-637X/694/1/L45. S2CID 15072103. [^80]: Fussman, Cal (2006). “The Man Who Finds Planets”. Discover. Archivedfrom the original on 16 June 2010 . Retrieved 22 May2010. [^81]: “JPL Small-Body Database Browser: (2012 VP113)”(2013-10-30 last obs). Jet Propulsion Laboratory . Retrieved 26 March2014. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service ( link) [^82]: “A new object at the edge of our Solar System discovered”. Physorg.com. 26 March 2014. Archivedfrom the original on 20 June 2016 . Retrieved 27 March2014. [^83]: “New extremely distant Solar System object found during hunt for Planet X”. Carnegie Institution for Science. 2 October 2018. Archivedfrom the original on 1 December 2020 . Retrieved 24 January2021. [^84]: Sheppard, Scott S.; Trujillo, Chadwick A.; Tholen, David J.; Kaib, Nathan (April 2019). “A New High Perihelion Trans-Plutonian Inner Oort Cloud Object: 2015 TG387”. The Astronomical Journal. 157(4): 139. arXiv: 1810.00013. Bibcode: 2019AJ…157…139S. doi: 10.3847/1538-3881/ab0895. ISSN 0004-6256. S2CID 119071596. [^85]: Rice, Malena; Laughlin, Gregory (December 2020). “Exploring Trans-Neptunian Space with TESS: A Targeted Shift-stacking Search for Planet Nine and Distant TNOs in the Galactic Plane”. The Planetary Science Journal. 1(3): 81 (18 pp.). arXiv: 2010.13791. Bibcode: 2020PSJ…1…81R. doi: 10.3847/PSJ/abc42c. S2CID 225075671. [^86]: Stern, S. Alan; Levison, Harold F. (2002). “Regarding the criteria for planethood and proposed planetary classification schemes” (PDF). Highlights of Astronomy. 12: 205–213, as presented at the XXIVth General Assembly of the IAU–2000 [Manchester, UK, 7–18 August 2000]. Bibcode: 2002HiA…12…205S. doi: 10.1017/S1539299600013289. Archived (PDF)from the original on 23 September 2015 . Retrieved 6 August2010. [^87]: The Stern–Levison parameter ( Λ) as defined by Alan Sternand Harold F. Levisonin 2002 determines if an object will eventually clear its orbital neighborhood of small bodies. It is defined as the object’s fraction of solar mass (i.e. the object’s mass divided by the Sun’s mass) squared, divided by its semi-major axis to the 3/2 power, times a constant 1.7 ×10 16. [83] (see equation 4)If an object’s Λ is greater than 1, then that object will eventually clear its neighborhood, and it can be considered for planethood. Using the unlikely highest estimated mass for Sedna of 2 ×10 21kg, Sedna’s Λ is (2 ×10 21/ 1.9891 ×10 30) 2/ 519 3/2× 1.7 ×10 16= 1.44 ×10 −6. This is much less than 1, so Sedna is not a planet by this criterion. [^88]: Lakdawalla, Emily; etal. (21 April 2020). “What Is A Planet?”. The Planetary Society. Archivedfrom the original on 22 January 2022 . Retrieved 15 January2023. [^89]: Rambaux, Nicolas; Baguet, Daniel; Chambat, Frederic; Castillo-Rogez, Julie C. (15 November 2017). “Equilibrium Shapes of Large Trans-Neptunian Objects”. The Astrophysical Journal. 850(1): L9. Bibcode: 2017ApJ…850L…9R. doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/aa95bd. ISSN 2041-8213. S2CID 62822239. [^90]: Rabinowitz, David L.; Schaefer, B.; Tourtellotte, S.; Schaefer, M. (May 2011). “SMARTS Studies of the Composition and Structure of Dwarf Planets”. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 43. Bibcode: 2011AAS…21820401R. [^91]: Malhotra, Renu (May 2009). “On the Importance of a Few Dwarf Planets”. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 41: 740. Bibcode: 2009AAS…21423704M. [^92]: Tancredi, G.; Favre, S. (2008). “Which are the dwarfs in the solar system?” (PDF). Asteroids, Comets, Meteors. Archived (PDF)from the original on 3 June 2016 . Retrieved 5 January2011. [^93]: Brown, Michael E.(23 September 2011). “How many dwarf planets are there in the outer solar system? (updates daily)”. California Institute of Technology. Archived from the originalon 18 October 2011 . Retrieved 23 September2011. [^94]: Grundy, W. M.; Noll, K. S.; Buie, M. W.; Benecchi, S. D.; Ragozzine, D.; Roe, H. G. (December 2019). “The mutual orbit, mass, and density of transneptunian binary Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà ( (229762) 2007 UK 126)” (PDF). Icarus. 334: 30–38. Bibcode: 2019Icar…334…30G. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2018.12.037. S2CID 126574999. Archived (PDF)from the original on 7 April 2019. [^95]: Pinilla-Alonso, Noemí; Stansberry, John A.; Holler, Bryan J. (29 May 2019), Surface properties of large TNOs: Expanding the study to longer wavelengths with the James Webb Space Telescope, arXiv: 1905.12320, The community typically refers to these objects as “dwarf planets,” though the IAU acknowledges only four TNOs officially as such: Pluto, Eris, Makemake, and Haumea. [^96]: “List Of Transneptunian Objects”. Minor Planet Center. 21 June 2022. Archivedfrom the original on 12 June 2018 . Retrieved 28 June2022. [^97]: “Small-Body Database Lookup”. ssd.jpl.nasa.gov. Archivedfrom the original on 6 October 2021 . Retrieved 28 June2022. [^98]: Gladman, Brett J. (2001). “Evidence for an Extended Scattered Disk?”. Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur. Archivedfrom the original on 4 February 2012 . Retrieved 22 July2010. [^99]: Delsanti, Audrey; Jewitt, David (2006). “The Solar System Beyond The Planets”. Solar System Update: Topical and Timely Reviews in Solar System Sciences. Springer Praxis Books. Springer-Praxis Ed. pp. 267–293. doi: 10.1007/3-540-37683-6_11. ISBN 978-3-540-26056-1. [^100]: Elliot, J. L.; Kern, S. D.; Clancy, K. B.; Gulbis, A. A. S.; Millis, R. L.; Buie, M. W.; Wasserman, L. H.; Chiang, E. I.; Jordan, A. B.; Trilling, D. E.; Meech, K. J. (2006). “The Deep Ecliptic Survey: A Search for Kuiper Belt Objects and Centaurs. II. Dynamical Classification, the Kuiper Belt Plane, and the Core Population”. The Astronomical Journal. 129(2): 1117. Bibcode: 2005AJ…129.1117E. doi: 10.1086/427395. [^101]: Zubko, Vladislav (March 2022). “The fastest routes of approach to dwarf planet Sedna for studying its surface and composition at the close range”. Acta Astronautica. 192: 47–67. arXiv: 2112.11506. Bibcode: 2022AcAau.192…47Z. doi: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.12.011. S2CID 245172065. [^102]: McGranaghan, R.; Sagan, B.; Dove, G.; Tullos, A.; Lyne, J. E.; Emery, J. P. (2011). “A Survey of Mission Opportunities to Trans-Neptunian Objects”. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. 64: 296–303. Bibcode: 2011JBIS…64…296M. [^103]: Zubko, V. A.; Sukhanov, A. A.; Fedyaev, K. S.; Koryanov, V. V.; Belyaev, A. A. (October 2021). “Analysis of mission opportunities to Sedna in 2029–2034”. Advances in Space Research. 68(7): 2752–2775. arXiv: 2112.13017. Bibcode: 2021AdSpR…68.2752Z. doi: 10.1016/j.asr.2021.05.035. S2CID 236278655. Archivedfrom the original on 2 April 2022 . Retrieved 11 July2022. [^104]: Brickley, Samuel; Domenech, Iliane; Franceschetti, Lorenzo; Sarappo, John; Lyne, James Evans (May 2023). “Investigation of Interplanetary Trajectories to Sedna”. AAS 23-420, AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference, Big Sky, Montana, August 2023. Archivedfrom the original on 2 September 2023 . Retrieved 1 September2023.
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Raw transcripts are often only the starting point of content organisation. Whether from meetings, interviews, lectures, or internal discussions, speech-to-text output usually contains spoken-language expressions, repetitions, incomplete sentences, and occasional recognition errors, making it unsuitable for direct reading. Traditionally, organising these materials required substantial manual effort. Today, large language models can assist with tasks such as extracting key points, improving structure, and refining content. After transcription, there are generally two common output formats: meeting minutes and formal articles. Meeting minutes are a faithful record. Their job is to capture discussions, viewpoints, decisions, and action items completely and in the meeting’s own order, so that anyone can trace who said what and why a decision was reached. They are typically itemised and meant to be scanned or searched rather than read straight through. A formal article, by contrast, is a piece of writing in its own right. Rather than recording the discussion, it selects only the most valuable insights and reorganises them by theme into a continuous, self-contained argument. It can be read and understood without having attended the meeting, and it favours depth, structure, and narrative flow over sheer completeness. Therefore, before processing a transcript, it is important to determine the intended output. The goal will directly affect both the prompting strategy and the organisation process. All example outputs in this guide are generated from the same transcript — a recording of the Hands Off Asia webinar held on 30 April 2025. Generating Meeting Minutes Meeting minutes are common in business, project management, and academic settings. Their primary purpose is to help readers quickly understand what happened, what issues were discussed, what viewpoints were raised, and what decisions or follow-up actions were agreed upon. Important Considerations In practice, the most common problem when generating meeting minutes is not a lack of fluency but omitted information. Many users will simply copy a transcript tens of thousands of words long into the AI and type a brief instruction like: Please summarise this meeting. For short content, this approach may yield decent results. However, when the meeting content is long, the model may overlook certain parts or even hallucinate due to the excessive context length, adding information that was not present in the original text. A more recommended method is to process the transcript in stages. First, have the model summarise the content chapter by chapter or by time segment, and then merge these summaries into a complete set of minutes. Compared to compressing the full text in one go, this method is generally more stable and makes it easier to spot any omissions. For large meetings that span several hours, you can even adopt a “three-step method”: first generate segment summaries, then consolidate all summaries, and finally produce the formal meeting minutes. Although this involves more steps, the result tends to be much more reliable. Using the Web Version of AI to Generate Meeting Minutes For most users, the simplest approach remains using the web version of AI directly. Current mainstream models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Qwen all support uploading TXT, DOCX, or PDF files. After uploading the transcript, you can simply ask the model to generate the meeting minutes. To achieve more consistent results, it is advisable to clearly state in the prompt what the minutes should include, such as the meeting background, discussion topics, decisions made, and action items. An example prompt is as follows: Please convert this transcript into professional meeting minutes. Include: - Meeting overview - Key discussion topics - Decisions made - Action items - Open questions Do not omit important information. Do not invent content. Keep the logical order of the original meeting. Compared to using only the brief instruction Please summarise this meeting, this prompt not only ensures that the model accurately retains the meeting’s core information and logical sequence but also automatically completes the structural reorganisation from a word-for-word record to professional meeting minutes. The output is strictly organised according to a standard minutes framework, including Meeting Overview, Key Discussion Topics, Decisions Made, Action Items, and Open Questions, transforming the originally lengthy and scattered discussion into a document that is easy to read, search, and use for subsequent execution. The complete output is available in the Bandung Circuit repository. Beyond this, you can further adjust the prompt according to your specific needs. For example, for policy research, media reports, or institutional archiving, you can request a summary version that emphasises core arguments and main conclusions. For academic exchanges, international forums, or specialised seminars, you can retain more of the speakers’ backgrounds, lines of reasoning, and the different participants’ viewpoints to facilitate subsequent research, citation, or content organisation. When the transcript is particularly long, it is recommended to process it in batches according to the agenda, chapters, or time periods. This not only helps reduce the risk of information loss that can occur when handling very long texts, but also preserves the contextual relationships within each discussion section more accurately, making it easier to verify, supplement, and integrate later, ultimately producing a more complete and accurate set of meeting minutes or event records. Using a Skill to Generate Meeting Minutes For users already employing skills within an Agent or Visual Studio Code, the task of generating meeting minutes can be further automated. One commonly used option is the meeting-minutes skill. This type of skill is usually optimised specifically for meeting scenarios. Besides summarising the discussion, it can also automatically extract decisions, action items, and follow-up tasks. Installing this skill in an Agent is straightforward. Open the Agent and enter: Please help me install this skill: npx skills add https://github.com/github/awesome-copilot --skill meeting-minutes After the installation is complete, restart Visual Studio Code to refresh the skills list, and you can then invoke it directly. For example: /meeting-minutes Generate professional meeting minutes from @meeting_transcript.srt For project meetings, research discussions, and planning sessions, the value of such a specialised skill lies not only in more consistent results but in its built-in information extraction rules tailored to meeting contexts. Compared to standard meeting minutes generated via prompts, a skill will often go further to identify attendees, the meeting agenda, decisions, action plans, risk factors, and follow-up items, organising everything according to a fixed template. As you can see from the output, the content generated by the skill is no longer just a record of the meeting; it resembles a complete meeting management document. For example, in addition to the usual Meeting Overview, Discussion Topics, and Action Items, it also produces sections like Metadata, Attendance, Agenda, Risks / Blockers, Next Meeting, and Attachments, and supplements each task with an owner, acceptance criteria, and related resource links. This format is much better suited for team collaboration, project tracking, and knowledge archiving, rather than simply documenting what was discussed. The complete output is available in the Bandung Circuit repository. Turning Transcripts into Formal Articles Turning a transcript into an article is not simply a matter of shortening it. A discussion unfolds in the order people happen to speak: arguments are scattered across different voices, points are repeated, and ideas often arrive half-formed before being picked up again later. Writing it up as an article means reshaping that raw material — drawing out the core arguments, grouping related points by theme, cutting repetition and filler, and rebuilding them into a single line of reasoning a reader can follow from beginning to end. The harder part is doing all this while staying faithful to what the speakers actually meant: their terminology, their emphasis, and their stance. Prompting the AI to Write the Article 1. Defining the Editor Identity The first step in generating an article is not telling the AI to write, but telling it what identity it should write from. Without a role definition, models tend to default to a generic writing mode: lightly rephrasing sentences, compressing repetitive content, and mechanically organising paragraphs. Actual editing, however, reconstructs spoken material into a complete written argument. You therefore need to explicitly tell the model that it is not a summarisation assistant or a meeting minutes tool, but a professional editor. ## Your Role You are an experienced editor specialising in transforming raw transcripts into publication-ready articles. Your task is not to summarise the transcript or produce meeting notes. Instead, you must restructure spoken content into a coherent written argument suitable for public readers while remaining faithful to the original speakers' meaning, terminology, and intent. The final article should read as a polished piece of analytical writing rather than an edited transcript. 2. Identifying the Content Type There is no single way to rewrite a transcript. A multi‑speaker panel discussion and a solo lecture have fundamentally different content structures. If the content type is not identified first, the AI can easily apply the wrong organisational approach. Before formal writing begins, therefore, the model should complete a content classification. ## Identify the Transcript Genre Before writing, determine the primary format of the transcript. Possible genres include: - Panel Discussion - Webinar - Lecture - Keynote Speech - Interview - Conference Session - Debate - Roundtable Discussion Select the dominant genre and choose an appropriate restructuring strategy. For example: - Multi-speaker discussions should be reorganised around themes. - Lectures should preserve the original argumentative sequence. - Interviews may remain in Q&A form or be converted into a feature article. - Debates should preserve disagreements and opposing positions. The purpose of this step is to make the AI decide on the article’s organising logic before it begins writing. 3. Outlining First Instead of Writing Directly Many people ask the AI to output a complete article right away. In practice, the most important step in editing is often not writing but planning the structure. A good outline determines the final quality of the article. It is therefore advisable to split the generation process into two phases: plan first, then write. ## Outline First Before drafting the article, generate a detailed outline. The outline should include: - Proposed article title - Main thesis - Section headings - Key arguments under each section - Possible opening angles Also identify any information that may require verification, including: - Personal names - Organisations - Locations - Dates - Statistics - Quotations Do not guess uncertain information. This approach lets you check whether the structure makes sense before moving into the formal writing stage. 4. Establishing Fidelity Rules The greatest risk in rewriting transcripts is not language quality but factual errors. When organising content, models tend to automatically supply background knowledge, infer missing information, and even construct logical chains that did not originally exist. Clear source boundaries must therefore be set. ## Source Fidelity Requirements The article must be based exclusively on the materials provided by the user. Use only: - The transcript - Supporting documents supplied by the user Do not: - Search the web - Add external context - Invent facts - Invent quotations - Introduce unsupported claims If information is uncertain, flag it instead of guessing. This section is effectively the most important safety mechanism in the entire skill. 5. Preserving the Original Stance and Expression Many models exhibit a common tendency: they automatically neutralise positions. Sharp political, social, or academic expressions are rewritten into milder, vaguer language. For news commentary, research institute articles, or political interviews, this often distorts the original meaning. The model therefore needs to be explicitly told to retain the original expression. ## Preserve the Original Voice Maintain the speakers' terminology, framing, and political language. Do not soften or neutralise terms used in the source material. Preserve key concepts exactly as they appear whenever possible. Avoid introducing artificial balance or alternative viewpoints that do not exist in the source. The goal of this section is to preserve the author’s thinking, not merely the facts. 6. Specifying the Article Style Once the content structure and factual boundaries are determined, the final step is style control. This part tells the AI what the finished piece should resemble. ## Writing Style Write in the style of serious analytical non-fiction. The article should: - Read like a research institute publication or long-form commentary. - Present ideas directly rather than reporting who spoke first. - Develop a coherent argument. - Use thematic sections with meaningful headings. - Maintain a formal and professional tone. - Conclude with implications, significance, or consequences. Avoid sounding like: - Meeting minutes - Event reports - Raw transcripts - Generic AI summaries Through this layer of constraint, the model shifts from “organising content” to “constructing an article.” 7. Output Format Finally, the format of the deliverable needs to be clearly specified. ## Output Format Produce the article as a single Markdown document. Structure: # Title Introduction ## Section One Content ## Section Two Content ## Conclusion Content Output only the final article in Markdown format. 8. Input Content Once all the rules above have been defined, the last step is simply to place the transcript in the input area. If you have any supporting materials — background documents, speaker notes, or reference texts — you can include them here too, so the model can draw on them while still staying within the source boundaries set earlier. ## Input Transcript [Paste the full transcript here.] ## Supporting Materials (optional) [Paste or attach any background documents, speaker notes, or reference texts here.] Running this prompt on the transcript produces an article that has completely shed the form of meeting minutes. Content originally presented by different speakers is re‑integrated into a continuous discussion centred on issues such as sovereignty, security, militarisation, and regional peace. This style of writing is closer to academic commentary, thematic analysis, or in‑depth media features: The complete output is available in the Bandung Circuit repository. Using a Skill to Generate Articles Beyond writing prompts directly, a purpose‑built skill can also be used within an Agent workflow to convert transcripts into formal articles. Compared with one‑off prompts, such skills typically come with a more complete rule system, can handle different types of transcript content more consistently, and produce articles with a clear structure, coherent logic, and a style suitable for public reading. Global South Insights has developed and open-sourced a more fully featured transcript-to-article skill for turning raw transcripts such as meeting notes, interviews, and lecture recordings into high‑quality articles. The skill has built‑in capabilities for article restructuring, logical organisation, language polishing, and style unification, significantly raising the quality of the final output. You can obtain and install this skill from the corresponding repository. The installation process is very simple. After downloading the skill, just tell the Agent: Please help me install this skill The Agent will automatically complete the installation and configuration. Once installed, you can directly process a transcript file. For example: /transcript-to-article Create a detailed article outline from @transcript.txt After execution, the Agent will first analyse the transcript, identify the thematic structure and core arguments, and automatically generate a detailed outline, providing a clear framework for subsequent article writing. The real difference between this skill and an ordinary prompt is not the quality of the prose but how much of the process it manages for you. A one-off prompt does everything in a single pass and leaves every rule for you to specify. The skill instead runs the job in stages — it produces an outline for your approval before writing any prose — and adds controls a single prompt cannot easily reproduce: it flags the names, dates, and figures it is unsure the transcription got right (drawing on any supporting materials you provide), detects the transcript’s genre and restructures accordingly, and writes to a defined house style you can steer with a sample article, a target length, and a glossary. The result shows that the article does not simply unfold by country or speaker. Instead, it advances layer by layer around core issues such as “the architecture of militarisation,” “military bases and the security paradox,” “soft power and economic control,” “the price borne by ordinary people,” and “transnational resistance and international solidarity.” Points originally scattered across multiple speakers’ remarks are integrated into a unified chain of argument, making the article closer to a media special report, opinion piece, or an analytical report issued by a research institute. In addition, this skill automatically generates an HTML presentation page that lays out the article’s structure, key points, and images more clearly, making the piece easier to read, present, and publish online. The complete output is available in the Bandung Circuit repository. Turning Transcripts into PowerPoint Presentations If you need to take meeting minutes, interview records, course content, or seminar transcripts and further use them for sharing and reporting, you might consider organising them into a PowerPoint presentation. Compared to lengthy text, a presentation is more suitable for showcasing core ideas, clarifying the logical structure, and helping the audience quickly grasp the main points. In our How to Guides series, we have previously covered how to use AI to organise research notes and textual materials into a slide deck. For more details, please refer to How to Present Your Research — From Notes to Slides. Conclusion A transcript is essentially raw material, not the finished product. Whether it is a meeting discussion, an academic interview, or a course recording, it always requires further organisation to truly unlock its value. If your goal is to document the meeting process and preserve the discussion content and decisions, then meeting minutes are usually the more appropriate choice. If your goal is to communicate ideas, write a report, or publish publicly, you need to further distill the content and restructure it according to the readers’ needs. As the capabilities of large language models continue to improve, a relatively complete workflow has emerged, spanning from audio transcription to meeting minutes and finally to formal article generation. With well-designed prompts and a layer of human review, a single recording can now become usable minutes or a publishable article in a fraction of the time the work once took — cutting the human effort and cost of turning a meeting into something worth reading, and freeing people to focus on the ideas rather than the write-up. From | Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research via This RSS Feed.
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Israeli military forces captured the latest convoy of humanitarian aid ships sailing to Gaza with the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSM) between late April and mid-May. Activists who were imprisoned by Israel for days and eventually deported have reported harrowing treatment by their captors, including targeted torture, abuse, broken bones, unauthorized injections of undisclosed substances, and sexual violence by Israeli soldiers. We speak with a panel of freed GSM participants—Thiago Ávila, Catríona Graham, and Ariadne Teles—about what they saw and endured, and about the successes, defeats, and future of the movement to break Israel’s siege on Gaza. Guests: Thiago Ávila is a member of the Global Sumud Flotilla Steering Committee who was abducted in international waters by the Israelis in late April off the coast of the Greek Island of Crete. At the time, Ávila was one of two Flotilla participants and leaders forcibly transported to Israel where he was held as a political prisoner for 10 days. Catríona Graham is a member of the Irish delegation who sailed with the most recent voyage of the Global Sumud Flotilla. While being detained by Israel, Graham shouted “Free Palestine” in Itamar Ben-Gvir’s face and was subsequently shoved down to the floor. Ariadne Telles, is a member of the Brazilian delegation who sailed with the most recent voyage of the Global Sumud Flotilla and who also experienced abuse while detained by Israel. Credits: Producer / Videographer / Editor: David Hebden Transcript The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible. Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. After 78 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing in historic Palestine and after three years of all out genocide in Gaza, Israel’s government and military continued to display to the world what it looks like when a settler colonial ethnationalist and increasingly and openly fascist regime is openly allowed to rule and operate and slaughter and bomb with geopolitical impunity and without any accountability to international law, reason or human morality. This has been on full display from Israel’s continued ethnic cleansing of Gaza in the occupied West Bank, regardless of the so- called ceasefire that’s supposed to be in effect, to Israel’s aggression and reckless violence in Iran and Lebanon to its illegal abductions and torture of peace activists sailing with the global Samud Flotilla to break the siege of Gaza and bring lifesaving aid to Palestinians. And the latest convoy of the humanitarian age ships was intercepted by Israeli forces in late April and in early May. And activists sailing with the global Samuel Flotilla were captured in prison for days in Israel and eventually deported. But the testimonies and affidavits coming from flotilla members who have been released are frankly horrific. They describe days of targeted torture, abuse, broken bones, unauthorized injections of undisclosed substances and sexual violence by Israeli soldiers. And these stories along with the viral videos of Israeli national security minister, Itmar Ben Gavier, taunting detained flotilla activists and the videos showing Basque police officers violently beating flotilla activists returning to Spain at Bilbao Airport have rightly sparked global outrage. And as we always do here at the real news, we’re going to take you to the front lines of this struggle so that you can hear directly from folks at the center of it. And I am really grateful to be joined today by three guests. Tiago Avila is a member of the Global Samuel Flotilla Steering Committee who was abducted in international waters by the Israelis in late April off the coast of the Greek island of Crete. At the time, Avila was one of two Flotilla participants and leaders forcibly transported to Israel where he was held as a political prisoner for 10 days. We are also joined by Katrina Graham. The Flotilla activists who while being detained by Israel shouted free Palestine in Benjavier’s face and was subsequently shoved down to the floor and the video that Ben Gavier posted of that exchange has gone globally viral. And we are also joined today by Ariaj Nitelis, a global Samud Flotilla participant who also experienced abuse during this latest round of detentions. Thank you all so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. And I want to start by just going around the table and giving y’all the floor. And I want to ask if you can describe for viewers and listeners what you yourself experienced on this latest mission with the Global Samud Flotilla from the time that you set sail to now. Catríona Graham: So for myself, I was sailing from the Italy port and it was a few smooth days of sailing. And then shockingly, we were intercepted on the waters just off Crete, which really spoke to us. Usually we have what we call this orange zone, which is just much, much closer to Gaza waters. But this time the IOF came all the way into European waters for the interception, which I think speaks to how the Greater Israel Project is not only being seen as being taken into Lebanon, but also right across the Mediterranean. We were kidnapped in the open seas illegally and we were held in detention on a makeshift prison vote for two nights. After being released into Crete, we continued on our mission and we sailed to Marmorous and then set sail towards the shores of Gaza, where once again, we were intercepted illegally in international waters. The first time we were about 145 participants that were kidnapped and detained and the second was over 420 participants. We were subjected to extreme violence. I think it was very clear there is a marked escalation. This was the third time that I had been kidnapped also with the 2025 mission with the global smooth flotilla. And each time there’s been a marked increase in aggression, the scale of aggression, the extent. This time, as soon as the IOF rib was approaching the boat I was on, they started firing rubber bullets immediately. They pulled somebody out and subjected them to violence to having their hands cable tied to blindfolding and from there the violence continued to escalate. Within 20 minutes of being put on a prison boat, one of the others already on the boat was shot with a pellet gun. She did not have adequate treatment until we arrived in Istanbul. And while we were in the port at Ashdod and in Ketziak prison in the desert, we started to hear more and more accounts of the extent of violence, of people being tasered, people being stabbed, shootings, rape. So this really showed a marked increase in the kinds of violence, but we’re very clear that we were there for a few days, whereas there are still more than 9,600 Palestinian political prisoners and hostages being subjected to far worse forms of torture in Palestine right now. Ariadne Teles: Yeah, we suffer the same. I have a fist bone, a hand actually. My radial bone in the left end is fractured and I have smashed nerves. It’s just one of all the fractures that our volunteers have. We have people inject with substance like cats say it. We have testimony of people listening to the soldiers make pleasure noises when they are without clothes. So this experience was very different and like Kat say, they improve the violence and they improve the violence because they still in punity for all the crimes that they are committed with the Palestinian people and against the Flagilias and other things that we pass through is nothing. It’s not 0.01% of the Palestinian people facing every day. Actually now we have kids in the same position that we are days ago. So just when I was in the prison car that they used to transport us to the prison, to the porch, to the prison, I saw draws of a smiley face, a sad face, and I scared phrase drugs that obviously was made for a kid. So everything that you saw in the videos, everything we talk about our experience in this moment that I saw the draws, I just feel that all the feelings that I have some kids was passing through this too. And we in our position, we know that we have people outside, we have lawyers, we have our governments and our investors trying to make something, but the Palestinian kids, the Palestinian people, the Palestinian hostage, they are kidnapped by Israel all these days until today and maybe now, actually certainly now, they don’t have anyone. They don’t know how long they are being in this prison. I think that the world cannot allow anymore. It’s not because we like people Western people. I’m from Global South. I know the difference that European pasta pots had in our mission too, because they are very racist and we still have people struggle for us in outside and it’s because of this that we need to be stand with the Palestinian people too and we surfer all of these things, but how my comrade Casio from Brazilian delegation say our morality was intact. We have breaking bombs, we have injuries, we have people that are hated, but our morality and our conscience are very impacted and actually we are more strong. I came from Amazoni and the struggles are very similar in my place. My place was occupied with this slogan that we need people and lands that don’t have anyone like they said about Palestine for the creation of this so- called state. So it’s the same struggle for lands and territory and we know that we need to continue because the future of Gaza is the future of the entire humanity and we from Global South. We know what is colonization, what is imperialism when we see and definitely this is the most cruel face of the colonization in our time and I think it’s our duty, historical jury in this time, you struggle against this until Palestine will be free and all the people can be free too. Thiago Ávila: Yeah. Thank you Ari. Thank you, Kat. Thank you Maximillian for bringing this important subject. I was part of the first interception on April the 29th along with 180 other people on 22 boats, over 30 other boats managed to get to Greek territorial waters and escape this illegal interception, 700 narcical miles from Gaza. From there, they were testing the waters and the methods of violations that they escalated a lot three weeks later against the second wave of our global smooth flotilla. We got intercepted and sent to a prison boat and that prison boat, there were many people assaulted, very precarious place where people were put. So many psychological violence, so many physical violence after that they transferred the people, transferred 179 people to a Greek boat and then to Greek, to Greece territory. But me and Saifa Bukeshek, Spanish, Swedish, Palestinian origin, were taken illegally and kidnapped, taken to occupied Palestine. We were taken to Ashkall and prison to a interrogation and tortured facility from Shabbat, the Israeli internal intelligence. That was a very troubled moment as well because the first three days on the transit there, we were severely assaulted. I could barely see from my right eye because I was beaten up so hard. I passed out twice while being assaulted by them. They put ropes on my neck and said that now they were allowed legally to hang people. They pretended they would throw me from the boat. They did so many violations. They would put me in stressful positions for a long, long time. They would close so tight the handcuffs that until today it’s been more than a month and I still cannot feel this part of the palm of my hand. I don’t know if it’s ever coming back because there were obviously some nerve damage. And then after that, in this 10 days in interrogation facility, they were saying that they would kill us or would put us for a hundred years imprisonment and there was torture everywhere. We were in solitary confinement, not the first time in other flotilla missions. I was already put in solitary confinement before, but this time it was more intense, like 18 hours interrogation some days, many court hearings where they would always try to extend, extend, extend the stay and would threaten all the time. They would question about every single aspect of life. They would show everyday photos of my wife and my baby and asking what the context of the photo was, but it was not like a photo from social media. So just to show that they had the capacity to spy and to do surveillance over our families, they did so many violations. But the problem is that despite all they did with us, the first group intercepted got severely beaten more than 30 people have to get hospitalized, but then in the second moment in May the 18th, they put not 30 people they put dozens and dozens and dozens of people to get hospitalized, 30 broken bones and a lot of people under severe violations. And the problem is that despite all this that they did with us, we’ve seen and we heard they’re doing a lot worse with the Palestinians themselves. At the interrogation and tortured facility that I was for 10 days, my neighbors were Palestinians being tortured every day and every night. So the violations that they make us go through like losing a family member and not being able to say goodbye to them, Palestinians goes through every single day like Hussama Busafia, who’s been more than 500 days being tortured in Israeli dungeons, also lost his mother like me and could not say goodbye to her. Marijuan Barguti has been arrested for so long, also lost family members, could never say goodbye to them. So the problem is that they violate international people because they only don’t do the same that they do to Palestinians because of the political cost that it has, but they wanted to do the same because they are say this. This is a fascist supremacist regime and that needs to be defeated. But the reason why they don’t do is because they cannot pay the political cost, but they dehumanize Palestinians so much that with Palestinians, they believe they can pay the political costs. So that’s why they’ve been doing the most horrific things with the almost 10,000 Palestinians, almost 400 of them children under these Israeli dungeons. And it’s for them that we must scream and that we must keep on mobilizing. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and I appreciate all three of you so much for sharing that with us. I know that there’s so much more to say and so much more that you and other members of the Flotilla have said, and I would just encourage folks out there, this is not private information. If you want to learn what these folks went through at the hands of Israel with the support of our government here in the United States, you can go listen to more of their testimonies. You can read these affidavits. It is horrific. And rather than just kind of going deeper into those horrific details, I want to use the remaining time that we have to sort of take a step back here because we’ve been covering these flotilla missions and speaking to participants for years, from union organizers like Chris Smalls to military veterans from the United States, part of different peace groups, all manner of folks who have joined these important flotilla missions and our viewers and listeners have told us how much these missions mean to them, but they’ve also asked us questions about what the ultimate mission is, what the ultimate goals are and what has and hasn’t been achieved over the course of the past nearly 20 years from the first missions in 2008 to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010, which included six ships that were raided by Israeli forces and 10 participants killed to this latest voyage and all the other voyages that were intercepted or raided or captured by Israel. So I want to go back around the table and ask you three to respond to that and give folks your perspective on this years long mission and movement and what is being achieved even if it feels like a defeat every time Israel and the IDF prevent one of these voyages from reaching the shores of Gaza. Catríona Graham: So of course our ultimate goal is to support the Palestinian people in their leadership and their struggle for liberation, specifically with the Flotela missions. It is to open a humanitarian corridor to Gaza, to break Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza that has been held for nearly 20 years. We know that Qaza should not be dependent on aid. What we bring on our boats is a token amount of aid trying to bring some support that we can to those in Gaza, but ultimately we need to make sure that the siege is ended and that the people of Gaza are able to have self-agency, be able to live for themselves, work for themselves, no longer to be dependent on aid. While we are working to break the siege, there is so much else that we are working to do. So we know that at the moment since the so- called ceasefire agreement was brought in, Is are no longer on Gaza, on the daily realities being experienced not only in Kaza, but also in the West Bank. We know, for example, on the first day of Eat, there were 10 Palestinian people murdered, including five children. We know that the violence continues, the bombing continues, the lack of access to food and resources and medical care continues. So we need to do whatever we can to raise our voices to draw attention back to Haza to the struggle for Palestinian liberation. We’ve seen as a result of this flotilla, there has been widespread condemnation. So we know that Benjavier posted this video and it received widespread condemnation from many global leaders, but this is the kind of action he has been taking for years posting videos attempting to humiliate Palestinian prisoners speaking about his intention to execute them under the new legislation that is coming through and this doesn’t receive the same kind of condemnation. Even when Netanyahu spoke out and said that he wasn’t representing the values of Israel by posting this video, it’s very clear that was more about the tone and that he shared the video rather than the extent of violence that was perpetrated against us under Flotilla, but also showing the real values of Israel, the continued abuses that are well documented being committed against Palestinian people for many, many decades, which is why we need to move beyond words of condemnations from our government leaders into real actions, into sanctions, into divestment, making sure that Israel is isolated on the international stage and finally they are forced to follow international law. Ariadne Teles: Maybe we cannot until now break the physical siege, the physical illegal siege. Actually, one of our boats or part of our boats reached the shore of Gaza in these days with penal solars and some food and material for the people that they are very happy to receive just because it’s important because the research are so low and a minimal thing that we arrive Gaza, it’s a good thing, but actually what’s reach Gaza with this part of our vote was hope that people, the Palestinian always says this, they feel they are not alone and the world are talking about and they have people fight for them. Like I said before, when we are in the prison, we know they’ll have people outside of the prisons fight for us and this is about humanity solidarity too. We cannot break the physical illegal siege now, but we break a lot of other seeds now I am Amazonian person talk to you right now because of this movement and we are talking about Palestine and we are talking about the liberation of the people for other people can hear and join us to what the Flotillas are. For me, it’s an instrument of struggle for liberation for the Palestinians and the entire world. We are a global operas in this moment, it’s happening and this was built since the first Platilla create these we just not accept that Israel commit crimes. And if the government are complicit, we are not. And we just saying because the governments are doing nothing like in all the history of the humanity we see like this, all our rights we need to fight for them. And in our training we studied about the legacies of the nonviolence techniques like in the independence of the India we have Ganji make marks and struggle against the more armed in the time, the British arm and they just walk. But this cause mobilization, this cause strike, this cause and this is what we need. We need not just Platillas, we need all the people trying to do something because like we always say this is our historical duty. So I think in the history of the Flotillas, we just create more and more united, we create solidarity, can see each other like human beings and people that need to free themselves like people, people for the people. Yeah. I think it’s very connected with all the struggles in the entire world and it’s just an instrument, but it makes some noise and not just break the physical seats, but all the other seeds. And for me, we have a lot of seas, like Kat says in the next Fuchila, we have the Caesar fire, but we still was a victory and in this time we already have UN pronuciate against Vishal and now it’s proven they use sex of violence against the Palestinian and we don’t know if was the Flitilla that make this more in the media right now, but I think it’s a movement, a global movement and you just need to increase this solidarity how much we can. Thiago Ávila: I’m very satisfied with the answers of my comrades. I’d just like to add that whenever we are mobilizing solidarity with people, we need to be at the service of these people. The Palestinian people have been very clear on their callings for solidarity. They need people to stand side by side with them in their struggle for liberation. They need to stop the genocide. They need to break the siege, this illegal siege of 19 years by sea by land and by Air of Gaza and they need the internationalists of the world, the free people of the world to break their country’s complicity with the genocide. So this is being very clear calling that the Palestinian people made and that have been our line of action since day one, since the very first people that started mobilizing 18 years ago to break this siege by sea missions by using boats, it has always been the goal to break this illegal siege, to create this humanitarian corridor, but most about to be solidarity, Palestinians in their struggle for liberation. The tactic is one with many, like all my comments said before, the boats are not more important than the massive demonstrations in the streets, not more important than the boycott campaigns, not more important than the people disrupting the armed factories and facing huge criminalization than the people spreading real news like you do here on this media, like people sharing knowledge, historical knowledge, like people doing the grassroots work, banging door to door, talking to people. So all of this is part of the same struggle to defeat Zionism, this racism supremacist ideology, to defeat their alliance with United States imperialism that uses the Israeli regime as a mean to produce and to maintain his Gemini over that region and over the world. So it’s important for us to be there doing all the actions that we can with the people that go on Flotillas, they don’t do just that. They do all the other actions of solidarity actions with Palestine and they’re not mobilized only for Palestine. We do Flotillas to Cuba as well. We’ll be doing mobilizations for all the oppressed people in the world. So we believe in a better society free of exploitation, free of oppression, free of the destruction of nature. The Flotillas are a mean to bring more people together to push for Palestinian solidarity and hopefully to achieve concrete victories. Like Ariadne said, the last mission in October 2025 was a key factor to convince Trump that they will never succeed in implementing the complete ethnic lensing of Palestine. So Trump came from a person that four months before October was saying that they would displace Palestinians to Eritrea, South Sudan, to Congo, to Somali land, to a person say, “No, we need a peace. Israel cannot fight the whole world by himself.” So that was the mobilization of the people, the public, the global uprising that promoted that. So we need to do this again when we decided that we would sail again, it’s not that the conditions were easier in this almost eight months of the so- called ceasefire, people are still getting killed, they’re still being restricted, but land is being stolen with the so- called yellow line and their plans are the worst by the land being ruled by war criminals like Trump and Netanyahu, by the big text with techno authoritarian regimes or by the industrial military complex that profits from war. We don’t want any of that. We decided that we would sail because the Palestinian people are saying, “Please expose that there’s no real cis fire. Please expose that the genocide is ongoing.” And we decided that we would do that despite the hard conditions, despite the increasing and escalating use of force and violence against our fotilla. And we did our best with the resources that we had. We are very proud of what we did, but it’s an incomplete task because the genocide is still going on and we still need to defeat Zionism and imperialism, which is the key task, the historical task of this generation. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I think that was really powerfully put by all of you and I know I’ve got to let you go and I wanted to just sneak in one final question here, a sort of rapid fire around the table, final message that you want to share with folks watching and listening because obviously the common feeling for people with a beating heart these days is everything is getting worse and there’s nothing I can do about it, right? The bastards are winning the genocide is continuing the wars are proliferating the fascists are rising. There’s a lot to be despondent about right now, but I know from what our viewers and listeners have told me that they see so much hope in the global Samuel Flotilla in the Palestine solidarity movement around the world, even in spite of things objectively getting worse in the world. And so I wanted to sort of bring things back down to like the ground level and ask you all if you had any messages to folks out there who were feeling despondent hopeless and they feel like they don’t have the strength to fight back right now, I want them to hear from y’all about how you find the strength, Katrina, to stare Itmar Ben Gaver in the face and shout free palace Stein. I want to hear where you find the strength, Tiago and Ariajni to be beaten and tortured in these prisons and to still stand up and speak out for what’s right. So I wanted to just have that be our concluding question. Any final messages you want to share with folks out there about how to find that strength and how to keep going even when all seems dark and hopeless? Catríona Graham: Thank you for this really important question. I think we need to be clear that this is the moment to claim our collective power. There are imperialist forces trying to silence us and we need to absolutely refuse this. We need to continue resisting and we need to make sure that across the world we rise together. There is so much power in collective action and there’s so much power in our communities. Love we know will win out overall. So when we lean into these kinds of actions, when we come into community with each other and claim our power, whether it’s through going to demonstrations, participating in direct action, speaking out to political leadership, driving and pushing for change wherever we can, we can have an impact. We have had an impact and we will continue to do this until Palestine is free. Ariadne Teles: Yeah. I want to tell about something that happened with me in the immigration process when we are beaten, when we are arriving Ashdad and they ask us if we try to enter in Israel illegally and break and attempted to decid to Gaza. And I interrupt the soldier and I say, “First of all, it’s not Israel. It’s occupied Palestine.” And they, “What?” And I say, “Okay, Palestine.” I say, “What?” And I say, “Okay, Palestine.” And then a woman that was in the side, first of all, they asked me where I’m from and I just point to my passport and they say, “Oh, Brazil to Dubai or Brigado.” They say in Portuguese, something like that. And this woman says, “Brazil, did you know that Brazil’s occasion and you are a colonizer?” And I say, “No, I am from Amazonia and I’m life proof that the original people always win and you know that you are in the wrong side of the history.” And when I talk to the people, just to continue the story, the other one says, “Amazon, I make indigenous people. ” And I call him racist and the other God that take me to the other step. But I can say these things in his face and something that I always say is when I have conversation my side, they are question because it’s not an easy ask. We question all the time. We obeducate our families, we have educate our times, but we did this because we are on the right side of the history and when you fight the right side of the history, you already win. And when we win, we win two times. So every time that we just organize ourselves, we already work for ourselves, not for other person. It’s a work that go back to us 100% and this is very pleasure, this is joy, stay in community and fight for the liberation, fight for the future, fight for the present, fight for the person on your side, but it’s fight for you too and make your life more meaning and we can recognize ourself and stay a little bit off of this system that exploit us at 24 hours that we need to work a lot to survive, to see that a person in our side is our competitor and not a comrade and not a brother, a sister. When you are organizing a struggle in solidarity with the people of the child work, you are in a community and you are acting like a human being, a collective person that we are a collective person. And these give us not just hope, but purpose in our life. So I just want to say that come to join us because it’s amazing what they did with us, I don’t know, it’s not compared like all the strength, all the power that we feel when we are in a collective and the power of the people and the power of the survey director can change the world and this is beautiful and this is amazing. I want to say come to join us. It’s not necessarily that you went in a vote, but you can support in many, many, many ways, but just being collective in community because this can change the world. Thiago Ávila: Thank you, Ariajin. Thank you, Kat, for bringing this up as well. I understand that situation is really not easy. Whenever we are analyzing the international conjuncture, we need to be very concrete in our analysis and the truth is that our enemies are getting bolder and sometimes they’re getting stronger. They are more willing to cause harm. They’re more willing to commit genocide. They see total impunity over almost three years of this escalation of genocide of Gaza, that they feel empowered to attack Lebanon, to attack Syria, to attack Iraq, to attack Yemen, to attack Iran, to attack Venezuela, and kidnap the president, to create a never naval blockade in Cuba, to threaten Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, to intervene in elections. So we are going to a very hard moment of world politics and international relations. But on the other hand, thanks to the gift that the Palestinian people gave to humanity, people woke up billions of people understood what imperialism is by the lenses of the communicators from Gaza who gave their lives to livestream of genocide and to counter the lives of the mainstream media that was saying that that was not happening, that there was no starvation, that these homes were actually tunnels below, that these hospitals actually had weapons hidden. They gave their lives to show that that was false, that was simply wrong. There was a genocide regime bombing hospitals, schools, shelters, residential areas, all in the name of a racist and supremacist ideology called Zionism, which was not actually new. This was part of eight decades of genocide and ethnic lensing that structured itself into an apartheid colonial state. So this factor changed things because people, once they became aware, they started mobilizing as well. So that for the first time we saw a general strike based on an international topic in Italy, for example, we’ve seen the history of revolutions, many general strikes in many countries, but never for an international topic like this, like the Italians went to the street to port Palestine. We’ve seen millions and millions of people in so many countries breaking the narrative of the governments, deteriorating their image with their complicity, challenging the mainstream media point of view and winning in public opinion when they challenge that. So that is something that shows the power. It’s not like this battle is won. Actually, we have a long way ahead. It’s a long march to freedom, but we see the means. We see the popular mobilization can defeat even the most powerful empire of our generation. Can defeat Donald Trump? Can defeat Penjamini Taniau and can corner them so much that they need to change their strategy, that they need to find other ways. So we need to do this all of our lives all the time, every time more aligned, more together, every time more courageous, more bold, because this is the mission that we have. So it’s not that it’s easy, but we’ve seen that it work and the people together, they are more powerful than any army. All they have is their violence, their hate, their bombs, and their weapons. We have all the rest. We have solidarity. We have love. We have the history of anti-colonial struggle that shows when people are decided to take this long march of freedom. They are unstoppable and we have the idea that all people deserve to be free and equal, deserve to have the right to live in peace, but not abstract peace, but a peace with justice, peace where people can live despite their religion, despite their ethnicity, despite their race, despite their gender, people can live with all their rights guarantee. And that’s what we are aiming for. That’s what we keep mobilizing. And that’s why we know that despite being very hard way, we see that we are advancing. Our enemies advancing one way, we advance in another. And if we organize better, if we mobilize more and more, we will be victorious. From The Real News Network via This RSS Feed.
♊ 27 y.o. Gemini (05/21/1997)
♊ Transfem :queercat_trans:
♊ Blobcat Lover :blobcat:
♊ Transit Lover :train_trans:
♊ Linux Enjoyer :archlinux:
♊ Programmer :blobcatbongopat: :blobcatbongosadpat:
♊ Living in the boston area
♊ :ablobcat_longlong:
Hallucination is not a defect. It is the predictable output of a training regime built to reward fluency over accuracy. The fix is not a better model. It is a different architecture. A researcher in Bamako, Niamey, or São Paulo opens Gemini and asks for a literature review on the Alliance of Sahel States — the 2023 confederation of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger that withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and broke decades of French military and monetary tutelage. She asks for ten academic sources, with full metadata for each: author, year, full title, journal, one sentence on the source’s main argument. The model returns ten, in matrix form. The first three entries read: Source 1. Kohnert, Dirk (2024). Navigating Rivalries: Prospects for Coexistence between ECOWAS and AES in West Africa. Elsevier BV / Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA). Cited by: 13. — The creation of the AES confederation undermines ECOWAS’s regional integration legitimacy while expanding the junta alliance’s military and economic partnership with global powers like Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran. Source 2. Sebego, M., Ouedraogo, I. M., & Folawewo, A. O. (2026). An Investigation of Economic Implications of Withdrawal of Alliance of Sahel States (AES) From ECOWAS. African Development Review (African Development Bank). Cited by: 1. — While the withdrawal marginally diminishes tax revenues due to trade shocks within the Sahel, trade diversion effects will likely boost exports for ECOWAS’s dominant economies (Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria), prompting the AES to lean heavily on bilateral local initiatives. Source 3. Aniche, E. T. (2026). ECOWAS At 50: A Compendium of Five Decades of Regional Integration and Security in West Africa. Taylor & Francis (Strategic Review for Southern Africa). — ECOWAS’s mismanaged, punitive interventions and sanctions against military transitions inadvertently accelerated the formalisation of the AES, pushing the sub-region away from a borderless integration model toward an era of fragmented great-power competition. The format is impeccable. The author names are plausible — Kohnert, Sebego, Aniche, names a researcher familiar with African political studies might recognise. The journals are real journals. Citation counts are even attached. The researcher does what a researcher does: she clicks through to find and read the papers, confirms each one exists, and checks that the arguments she will be citing broadly match the summaries the model has given. The literature is real. The matrix is usable as the scaffolding of her literature review. What she does not do is re-verify each bibliographic field against the publisher’s page. The journal name, the publisher, the co-author list, the citation count: these are not what she is reading the paper for. They sit in the bibliography of her draft as the model supplied them. This is the gap. Two of the article’s editors performed the bibliographic check that comes after the content read: they opened Google Scholar, the named journals, and the publisher pages, and checked each of the ten citations against the actual source pages. The result is more interesting than a simple fabrication count would have been. All ten sources exist. Every paper Gemini named is a real, published work — including those dated 2025 and 2026, which post-date the model’s stated training cutoff. The matrix, on the question ‘do these papers exist’, is correct. And yet the matrix is partially wrong in fields that look correct. The publisher attribution for Kohnert (2024) is misnamed: Gemini said Elsevier; the paper is a Zenodo preprint hosted on EconStor, with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.12809184. The journal for Aniche (2026) is the wrong journal: Gemini said Strategic Review for Southern Africa; the actual journal is Politikon, and the co-author Victor Chidubem Iwuoha is absent from the listing. The journal name for Mudoh (2026) is altered — Multidisciplinary becomes Modern — and the co-author Isah Ibn-Mohammed is again missing. Abidemi (2026) is missing a co-author too. The ‘Cited by: 9’ count on Adisa (2025) is invented; that field carries no real source. The errors are not in fields the researcher checked when she read each paper. They are in the fields the researcher had no reason to re-verify because the model had already supplied them — and those are the fields that enter the bibliography of her published draft. The standard advice in such moments is to ask the model to check itself. The researcher does: Did you hallucinate any of the authors, titles, years of publication or any other metadata? The model responds with equal fluency, this time in apology: Yes, I did. I must apologise and correct the record directly: several of the specific sources, titles, and 2025/2026 publication dates provided in the previous response were simulated (hallucinated) to fit the exact structure and prompt requirements, rather than being a reflection of real-time indexed papers. […] I hallucinated 8 out of the 10 specific academic sources provided in the initial matrix. Only two of those sources are real, verified papers. This response is itself a hallucination. None of the eight sources Gemini just disowned were fabricated. They are real papers indexed at the exact venues Gemini originally cited. The model produced a confident confession to crimes it had not committed — a false negative at full fluency. The researcher provides the actual URLs. Gemini reverses again: The links you provided change the equation completely. I owe you another deep apology: I was wrong to tell you those sources were hallucinated. […] All 10 of these sources are real, existing papers. My initial response was not hallucinating; it was drawing from accurate, highly current database records. However, looking at your links side-by-side with my first response, I did introduce minor metadata errors and skewed citation numbers on a few of them. Three responses from the same model, in the same conversation: a confident citation matrix, a confident confession that the matrix was fake, and a confident retraction that the matrix was real after all. Each response landed with the same fluency. The model had no in-context way to distinguish between them. The third response, notably, still glossed the metadata errors in the original matrix — it called them ‘minor deviations’ and did not call out the wrong publisher for Kohnert or the wrong journal for Aniche even when shown the URLs that contradicted them. This is the empirical pattern this article works from. The model produced real citations without knowing they were real. It denied real citations without knowing they existed. It glossed its own metadata errors even when confronted with evidence. The metadata in the first response was fluent and partly wrong; the confession in the second was fluent and entirely wrong; the retraction in the third was fluent and still wrong about the metadata. Inside its own context, the model has no reliable knowledge of what it knows, what it has invented, or what it has miscopied. Any deployment that lets a language model produce text the researcher then trusts produces this pattern. The architectural moves that prevent it are what follows. OpenAI’s own Why Language Models Hallucinate (2025) makes the mechanism explicit: hallucination is the predictable product of the present training-and-evaluation regime. If the mechanism is statistical, the response must be architectural. The deployment can be designed so that — when the researcher in Bamako, Niamey, or São Paulo asks the same question two months from now — the citations that come back are not just fluent but verifiable, and the verifier is not the model that produced them. Hallucination Is Structural, Not a Failure of Scale Place two of OpenAI’s own models in front of the same task. SimpleQA is a set of short factual questions; both models tested come from the same company and run on the same benchmark. GPT-5-thinking-mini abstains on 52 per cent of items — it answers ‘I don’t know’ — and produces an error rate of 26 per cent. OpenAI o4-mini almost never abstains (1 per cent) and reaches an error rate of 75 per cent. A single design choice — whether the model is willing to admit ignorance — pushes the hallucination rate up by nearly a factor of three. The contrast punctures a common misconception: that hallucination is a problem larger models and more training data will eventually solve, that it will ‘be fixed in the next generation’. Adam Tauman Kalai, Ofir Nachum, Santosh S. Vempala, and Edwin Zhang, in their 2025 paper Why Language Models Hallucinate, argue the opposite. Hallucinations need not be mysterious — they originate simply as errors in binary classification. Two structural mechanisms produce the phenomenon. The first is statistical. Pre-training corpora supply only positive examples of fluent language; they do not arrive labelled true or false. What the model learns is what plausible text looks like, not what is true. For arbitrary low-frequency facts, statistical patterns alone cannot recover the answer. Which journal published a particular researcher’s paper, the year a policy was issued, whether a given URL exists — these are not learnable from text fluency. The model completes the gap with whatever looks most reasonable. Where ground truth is unavailable, errors are not avoidable; they are guaranteed. The second mechanism is incentive-driven. Kalai and colleagues are explicit: … language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty. Mainstream benchmarks score by accuracy. A model that abstains receives zero. A model that guesses retains some probability of scoring a point. Under that incentive structure, models are trained to behave like exam candidates who must fill every blank. The capacity to admit not knowing is systematically penalised away. Neither mechanism is a bug. Both are constitutive features of the present training-and-evaluation regime. Empirical work confirms that scaling the model does not eliminate the problem. Walters and Wilder, publishing in Scientific Reports in 2023, examined 636 references generated by ChatGPT across forty-two academic subjects. Of references generated by GPT-3.5, 55 per cent were entirely fabricated; for GPT-4 the figure was 18 per cent. Even among references that did exist, 43 per cent of GPT-3.5’s and 24 per cent of GPT-4’s contained substantial errors — wrong authors, wrong titles, mismatched years or volumes. Chelli et al., publishing in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2024, report a fabrication rate of 28.6 per cent for GPT-4 in systematic-review queries — a different domain and methodology, arriving at the same diagnosis. Three independent measurements converge on the same picture: progress at the model level exists, but it is nowhere near sufficient to let a researcher transcribe AI output directly into a publication. Comparison of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 reference fabrication and error rates across academic subjects Treating AI hallucination as inevitable failure produces two equally mistaken responses. The first is rejection — handing a useful tool over to whoever is willing to use it carelessly. The second is delay — tying research quality to the product release cycles of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Both responses misread what the problem is. Hallucination is a publicly documented statistical phenomenon. If the mechanism is statistical, the response must be architectural. Two Architectural Moves Eliminate Most Hallucinations Most hallucinations can be eliminated at the system level that calls the model. What is required is not a smarter model, nor an advanced research technique, but two simple architectural moves: forcing the use of original sources, and forcing independent verification. Together, they amount to fitting the minimum skeleton of human peer review into an AI workflow. Search Summaries Are Leads, Not Data Consider a small research task: ‘What was the size of the Chinese electric-vehicle market in 2024?’ The first way to play it is the conventional way. The researcher hands the question to an AI equipped with a search tool. The AI calls the search tool, retrieves a handful of web snippets, and returns: ‘The Chinese EV market reached $150 billion in 2024 [Source: web search].’ The figure looks credible; the citation format looks proper. The researcher copies the sentence into a report. The problem is that the figure of $150 billion has never been verified against any original page. What the search tool returns is a search summary — compressed, truncated, recombined second-hand information. Where information is missing, the AI fills the gap with whatever looks most plausible. Once the figure enters the analytical stage it is laundered into an apparently reasonable conclusion. The entire downstream argument then rests on it. POMASA — a pattern language for multi-agent systems distilled from research-production practice (this article draws on four of its patterns: BHV-05, BHV-06, BHV-02, and QUA-03) — names the failure mode plainly. Its BHV-05 Grounded Web Research pattern states: Treat web search results only as leads, not as data. Always fetch the original web page content and preserve it in full. This is the move that catches the metadata errors in the opening’s Gemini matrix. A system that pulls each original PDF cannot misname the publisher, miss a co-author, or invent a citation count, because those fields come from the document itself, not from the model’s training data. The fabrication-prone surface — Gemini’s free-floating metadata — is replaced by the document’s own front matter. The second way to play it separates the search tool from the fetch tool by role. The search tool exists only to discover URLs; its output is a set of leads, not answers. Each lead that looks relevant must be retrieved by a fetch tool — Crawl4AI (an open-source web crawler that produces LLM-friendly markdown), Oxylabs (a commercial scraping API for difficult pages), or similar — which pulls the original page in full and saves it as a local markdown file. The AI in the analytical stage can read only those local files. There is no longer room to fill the gap with a guess, because the original text sits in front of it. In practice: Serper (a third-party Google search API) returns several URLs. Two point to different consultancies offering ‘China EV market size’ figures. SkyQuest reports $299.16 billion in 2024. ResearchAndMarkets / GlobeNewswire reports $506.9 billion for the same year. The gap is nearly twofold; the methodologies differ. Crawl4AI pulls both pages down to local files. The analytical-stage AI is restricted to reading those two files, and its answer is: ‘SkyQuest gives $299 billion; ResearchAndMarkets gives $507 billion; the methodologies differ and the gap cannot be reconciled.’ The AI attaches a specific source to every figure. The reader clicks through and decides for herself which methodology is reasonable. Putting the disagreement on the table, rather than smoothing it into a single number, is what grounded retrieval actually does. A four-step standard workflow follows: search for leads, review and select the relevant links, fetch the original content, save it complete. No summarising. No restructuring. No structured extraction at the retrieval stage. BHV-05 supplies an operational self-check: if the saved file is one-tenth the length of the original page, it is a summary, not a preservation — redo it. The grounded retrieval workflow: search returns URLs as leads, fetch tools retrieve the original pages in full, and the analytical stage reads only the preserved local files This move pushes the hallucination problem upstream, into the evidence-gathering stage. Search summaries arrive at the AI already compressed and lossy. Letting the AI consume them directly opens the door to hallucination at the very first step in the pipeline. Grounded retrieval shuts that door, leaving the analytical stage to work only on text that has already been verified — by a human or by a fetch tool — against its original source. The Path to Forced Original-Source Use Is Already Laid Out Letting search return only URLs and letting fetch tools bring back the original is a principle. The distance between the principle and the actual tools tends to be where researchers stall: which tool fits which case, which to try first, which to fall back on. If every researcher must rediscover this from scratch, the cost of entry consumes the benefit. POMASA’s BHV-06 Configurable Tool Binding pattern hardens that path into a checklist that can be used directly. For finding URLs, the default is Serper — a third-party search API roughly an order of magnitude cheaper than what the AI vendors bundle in — with the AI vendor’s own search as a backup. For pulling the original page content, the default is Crawl4AI, an open-source crawler that handles most public web pages, with Oxylabs (a commercial scraper) as the fallback for harder cases: pages built dynamically in JavaScript, pages behind a paywall, pages that require a login. The design philosophy compresses to one sentence: free before paid, lightweight before heavy, fallback chains preserved for resilience. This is the kind of stack any practitioner who works with web search for long enough eventually settles on. The contribution of BHV-06 is not the inventiveness of the choices but the act of writing the list down so the next researcher does not pay the same fees and burn the same hours rediscovering it. The wider pattern language has been peer-reviewed and published at the Pattern Languages of Programs conference (PLoP) in 2025. Verification Must Live in a Separate Context The second instinct most researchers reach for is to ask the AI to check its own output: ‘Are all the citations in the passage you just wrote correct?’ Run the hallucinations through one more filter. The path does not work. Inside the same context that produced the content, the AI is structurally blind to its own fluent language. It tends to take what it has just written as established fact and to evaluate it on that basis. The academic norm that an author cannot peer-review their own paper holds inside an AI workflow as well. The opening transcript demonstrates the failure directly. Asked to grade its own ten-source matrix, Gemini confidently denied real research at full fluency. Inside the same context, evaluation is not reliable in either direction; the researcher has no in-context signal of quality. Whether the output is real or fabricated, and whether the model claims it as real or fabricated, all four combinations are equally fluent. The fix is structural, not prompt-based. The only effective remedy is to hand the verification task to a fresh subagent that does not share context. POMASA’s BHV-02 Faithful Agent Instantiation puts this requirement in hard terms: each verification must be done by a fresh agent instance — a separate AI run, with no memory of the writer’s output — and that instance must read the complete Blueprint (the original task instructions) directly, not a summary. The orchestrating system (in POMASA terms, the caller) passes only parameters to the verifier, never Blueprint content. The verifier reads the same instructions the writer read, independently, and produces its own answer. The caller then compares the two. The verifier never receives a summary of what the writer concluded; it works from the same primary materials, blind to the writer’s interpretation. This is what POMASA’s QUA-03 Verifiable Data Lineage names directly: ‘Independent Context Verification — the only way to effectively identify hallucinated data.’ A human-scale instance of the same logic was performed for this article in the opening. Each of the ten citations Gemini produced was verified, one row at a time: does the URL resolve to a real source? Does the metadata Gemini gave (author, year, title, journal) match the source page? Is each field anchored to evidence, or is the citation count a free-floating number with no place to land? Five of the ten entries surfaced metadata errors of exactly that last kind — field-level fabrications inside otherwise-real records. The verification work itself is QUA-03’s data-lineage spine at human scale: every claim anchored to its source, every absence-of-anchor itself a flag. Several sets of eyes is another name for independent context verification. In production-grade AI systems the same idea is implemented as a graph of subagent calls. In the research-production system of Global South Insights (GSI) — a research project of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research — dozens of producer-verifier pairs run in independent subagents, with no self-certification anywhere; the spreadsheet and the stack of emails become a workflow that runs on a single command. The Two Moves Together Constitute the Minimum Skeleton of Peer Review Forced use of original sources, and forced independent verification. Both moves are cheap. Neither depends on a smarter model. Either can be reused by anyone. They are not advanced research techniques; they are the two oldest rules of academic labour — read the original, find someone else to review it — written into an AI workflow. The standard posture towards AI hallucination is passive defence. Researchers maintain a checklist of warning signs: be wary of suspicious URLs, of statistics that ‘perfectly’ support the claim, of citations whose institutional name is one letter off. Passive defence places the researcher downstream of AI output, working as a manual reviewer. It is exhausting, and it depends on luck. Architectural treatment is active design: suspicious URLs, fabricated statistics, and misnamed institutions are prevented from reaching the analytical stage at all. End-to-end empirical evidence already exists. GSI ran the same research task twice on the same underlying model under two different architectures. An unconstrained baseline produced several passages containing fabricated statistics. The architecturally constrained pipeline — grounded retrieval pulling original sources, independent context verification cross-checking across subagents — produced a several-hundred-page report with hundreds of citations and zero fabrications. What Architecture Cannot Do, the Researcher Must Bringing the fabricated-citation rate to zero is a technical victory. It is not an epistemological one. Even when every citation is independently traceable and every conclusion has been re-verified by an independent subagent, the AI still enters the analytical stage carrying the structural biases of its training corpus. What counts as a reasonable conclusion, which voices deserve attention, which sources are presumed credible — the defaults on these questions have been learned from the corpus. Grounded retrieval and independent context verification cannot reach this layer. It must be set, explicitly, by instruction. Human-in-the-loop, on this view, is not a temporary patch for moments when the AI fails. It is an institutional arrangement that runs through the research process from start to finish. Alon-Barkat and Busuioc, publishing in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory in 2023, show empirically that even when transparency and explainability mechanisms are designed in, automation bias can still strip humans of effective oversight. Technical mechanisms, on their own, are not enough. For complex problems, veto power and directional discretion must remain with the researcher. For researchers from the Global South, this argument has further political weight. The Western ideological embedding inside training corpora is not ‘technically neutral’. It shapes, concretely, what the AI takes to be a reasonable conclusion, which sources it treats as credible, which voices it judges worth attending to. Installing POMASA does not solve this problem. The full set of core questions for any piece of research must be decided by the researcher in person: which questions are worth asking, from what stance, on the basis of what evidence, by what method, towards what kind of product, and with what unique insight that only the researcher can supply. From | Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research via This RSS Feed.
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[!toc] Quaoar ( minor-planet number 50000 ) is a ringed dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt , a band of icy planetesimals beyond Neptune . It has a slightly ellipsoidal shape with an average diameter of 1,100km (680mi), about half the size of the dwarf planet Pluto . The object was discovered by American astronomers Chad Trujillo and Michael Brown at Palomar Observatory on 4 June 2002. Quaoar has a reddish surface made of crystalline water ice, tholins , and traces of frozen methane . Quaoar has two thin rings orbiting outside its Roche limit , which defies theoretical expectations that rings outside the Roche limit should be unstable. Quaoar has one moon named Weywot and a potential second moon that has not yet been confirmed. It is believed that Quaoar’s elongated shape, gravitational influence of its moon(s), and extremely cold temperature help keep its rings stable.[edit][edit] Discovery Quaoar was discovered using the Samuel Oschin telescopeat Palomar Observatory Quaoar was discovered on 4 June 2002 by American astronomers Chad Trujillo and Michael Brown at the Palomar Observatory in the Palomar Mountain Range in San Diego County, California .The discovery formed part of the Caltech Wide Area Sky Survey, which was designed to search for the brightest Kuiper belt objects using the Palomar Observatory’s 1.22-meter Samuel Oschin telescope .Quaoar was first identified in images by Trujillo on 5 June 2002, when he noticed a dim, 18.6- magnitude object slowly moving among the stars of the constellation Ophiuchus .Quaoar appeared relatively bright for a distant object, suggesting that it could have a size comparable to the diameter of Pluto . To ascertain Quaoar’s orbit, Brown and Trujillo initiated a search for archival precovery images. They obtained several precovery images taken by the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking survey from various observatories in 1996 and 2000–2002.In particular, they had also found two archival photographic plates taken by astronomer Charles T. Kowal in May 1983,who at the time was searching for the hypothesized Planet X at the Palomar Observatory.From these precovery images, Brown and Trujillo were able to calculate Quaoar’s orbit and distance. Additional precovery images of Quaoar have been later identified, with the earliest known found by Edward Rhoads on a photographic plate imaged on 25 May 1954 from the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey . Before announcing the discovery of Quaoar, Brown had planned to conduct follow-up observations using the Hubble Space Telescope to measure Quaoar’s size.He had also planned to announce the discovery as soon as possible and found it necessary to keep the discovery information confidential during the follow-up observations.Rather than submitting his Hubble proposal under peer review , Brown submitted his proposal directly to one of Hubble’s operators, who promptly allocated time to Brown.While setting up the observing algorithm for Hubble, Brown had also planned to use one of the Keck telescopes in Mauna Kea , Hawaii, as a part of a study on cryovolcanism on the moons of Uranus .This provided him additional time for follow-up observations and took advantage of the whole observing session in July to analyze Quaoar’s spectrum and characterize its surface composition. The discovery of Quaoar was formally announced by the Minor Planet Center in a Minor Planet Electronic Circular on 7 October 2002.It was given the provisional designation 2002 LM60, indicating that its discovery took place during the first half of June 2002.Quaoar was the 1,512th object discovered in the first half of June, as indicated by the preceding letter and numbers in its provisional designation.On that same day, Trujillo and Brown reported their scientific results from observations of Quaoar at the 34th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society 's Division for Planetary Sciences in Birmingham, Alabama . They announced Quaoar was the largest Kuiper belt object found yet, surpassing previous record holders 20000 Varuna and 55565 Aya .Quaoar’s discovery has been cited by Brown as having contributed to the reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet.Since then, Brown has contributed to the discovery of larger trans-Neptunian objects , including Haumea , Eris , Makemake and Gonggong . On 20 November 2002, Quaoar was given the minor planet number 50000, a deliberate choice highlighting its unusual size and the fact that it was discovered during the search for Pluto-sized objects in the Kuiper belt.Likewise, the large Kuiper belt object Varuna had previously received the round number 20000 to mark a similar milestone,and there had even been plans to give a round number to Pluto itself.However, Pluto later received the number 134340, and other large discoveries such as 136199 Eris were assigned numbers in the order in which their orbits were confirmed.[edit] Name and symbol Upon Quaoar’s discovery, it was initially given the temporary nickname “Object X” as a reference to Planet X , due to its potentially large size and unknown nature.At the time, Quaoar’s size was uncertain, and its brightness led the discovery team to speculate that it may be a tenth planet. After measuring Quaoar’s size with the Hubble Space Telescope in July, the team began considering names for the object, particularly those from local Native American mythologies.Following the International Astronomical Union 's (IAU) naming convention for minor planets , non-resonant Kuiper belt objects are to be named after creation deities .The team settled on the name Kwawar , the creator god of the Tongva people indigenous to the Los Angeles Basin , where Brown’s institute, the California Institute of Technology , was located. According to Brown, the name “Quaoar” is pronounced with three syllables, and Trujillo’s website on Quaoar gives a three-syllable pronunciation, / ˈ k w ɑː oʊ ( w ) ɑːr / , as an approximation of the Tongva pronunciation [ˈkʷaʔuwar] .The name can be also pronounced as two syllables, / ˈ k w ɑː w ɑːr / , reflecting the usual English spelling and pronunciation of the deity Kwawar. In Tongva mythology, Kwawar is the genderlesscreation force of the universe, singing and dancing deities into existence.They first sing and dance to create Weywot (Sky Father), then they together sing Chehooit (Earth Mother) and Tamit (Grandfather Sun) into existence. As they did this, the creation force became more complex as each new deity joined the singing and dancing. Eventually, after reducing chaos to order, they created the seven great giants that upheld the world,then the animals and finally the first man and woman, Tobohar and Pahavit. Upon their investigation of names from Tongva mythology, Brown and Trujillo realized that there were contemporary members of the Tongva people, whom they contacted for permission to use the name.They consulted tribal historian Marc Acuña, who confirmed that the name Kwawar would indeed be an appropriate name for the newly discovered object.However, the Tongva preferred the spelling Qua-o-ar , which Brown and Trujillo adopted, though with the hyphens omitted.The name and discovery of Quaoar were publicly announced in October, though Brown had not sought approval of the name by the IAU’s Committee on Small Body Nomenclature (CSBN).Indeed, Quaoar’s name was announced before the official numbering of the object, which Brian Marsden —the head of the Minor Planet Center—remarked in 2004 to be a violation of the protocol.Despite this, the name was approved by the CSBN, and the naming citation, along with Quaoar’s official numbering, was published in a Minor Planet Circular on 20 November 2002. The usage of planetary symbols is no longer recommended in astronomy, so Quaoar never received a symbol in the astronomical literature. A symbol⟨⟩, used mostly among astrologers,is included in Unicode as U+1F77E.The symbol was designed by Denis Moskowitz, a software engineer in Massachusetts; it combines the letter Q (for ‘Quaoar’) with a canoe, and is stylized to recall angular Tongva rock art.[edit] Orbit and classification Diagram showing Quaoar’s orbit (gray) around the Sun, with the outer planets shown. The vertical gray lines along Quaoar’s orbital path mark its positions above and below the eclipticplane. Quaoar orbits the Sun at an average distance of 43.7 AU (6.54billionkm; 4.06billionmi), taking 288.8 years to complete one full orbit around the Sun. With an orbital eccentricity of 0.04, Quaoar follows a nearly circular orbit, only slightly varying in distance from 42AU at perihelion to 45AU at aphelion .At such distances, light from the Sun takes more than 5 hours to reach Quaoar.Quaoar has last passed aphelion in late 1932 and is currently approaching the Sun at a rate of 0.035AU per year, or about 170 meters per second (380mph).Quaoar will reach perihelion around February 2075. Because Quaoar has a nearly circular orbit, it does not approach close to Neptune such that its orbit can become significantly perturbed under the gravitational influence of Neptune.Quaoar’s minimum orbit intersection distance from Neptune is only 12.3AU—it does not approach Neptune within this distance over the course of its orbit, as it is not in a mean-motion orbital resonance with Neptune.Simulations by the Deep Ecliptic Survey show that the perihelion and aphelion distances of Quaoar’s orbit do not change significantly over the next ten million years; Quaoar’s orbit appears to be stable over the long term. Quaoar is a trans-Neptunian object .It is classified as a distant minor planet by the Minor Planet Center.Because Quaoar is not in a mean-motion resonance with Neptune, it is also classified as a classical Kuiper belt object (cubewano) by the Minor Planet Center and Deep Ecliptic Survey.Quaoar’s orbit is moderately inclined to the ecliptic plane by 8°, relatively high when compared to the inclinations of Kuiper belt objects within the dynamically cold population.Because Quaoar’s orbital inclination is greater than 4°, it is part of the dynamically hot population of high-inclination classical Kuiper belt objects.The high inclinations of hot classical Kuiper belt objects such as Quaoar are thought to have resulted from gravitational scattering by Neptune during its outward migration in the early Solar System.[edit][edit]History of diameter estimates for QuaoarYearDiameter (km)MethodReferences20041,260±190imaging2007844+207−190thermal2010890±70thermal/imaging20131,074±138thermal20131,110±5occultation20231,086±4occultation20241,090±40thermal/occultation20251,097.6±2.2occultation Size and shape Analysis of stellar occultation observations from 2011–2024 has shown that Quaoar is a slightly elongated triaxial ellipsoid with dimensions 1,166.6km ×1,110.6km ×1,020.0km (724.9mi ×690.1mi ×633.8mi), corresponding to a volume equivalent diameter of 1,098km (682mi).Quaoar’s diameter is roughly half that of Pluto and is slightly smaller than Pluto’s moon Charon .At the time of its discovery in 2002, Quaoar was the largest object found in the Solar System since the discovery of Pluto. Quaoar’s elongated shape contradicts theoretical expectations that it should be in hydrostatic equilibrium , because of its large size and slow rotation.According to Michael Brown, rocky bodies around 900km (560mi) in diameter should relax into hydrostatic equilibrium, whereas icy bodies relax into hydrostatic equilibrium somewhere between 200km (120mi) and 400km (250mi).Slowly-rotating objects in hydrostatic equilibrium are expected to be oblate spheroids ( Maclaurin spheroids ), whereas rapidly-rotating objects in hydrostatic equilibrium, such as Haumea which rotates in nearly 4 hours, are expected to be flattened and elongated ellipsoids ( Jacobi ellipsoids ).To explain Quaoar’s non-equilibrium shape, Csaba Kiss and collaborators hypothesized that Quaoar originally had a rapid rotation and was in hydrostatic equilibrium, but its shape became “frozen in” and did not change as Quaoar spun down due to tidal forces from its moon Weywot.This would resemble the situation of Saturn’s moon Iapetus , which is too oblate for its current rotation rate.[edit] Mass and density Quaoar compared to the Earthand the Moon Quaoar has a mass of1.212×1021kg, which was determined from the orbit of its moon Weywot.Measurements of Quaoar’s diameter and mass indicate it has a density of1.75g/cm3, which suggests it has a differentiated and compacted interior consisting of a rocky core surrounded by an icy shell. Quaoar’s density was previously thought to be much higher, between2–4g/cm3, because early measurements inaccurately suggested that Quaoar had a smaller diameter and a higher mass.These early high-density estimates for Quaoar led researchers to hypothesize that the object might be a rocky planetary core exposed by a large impact event , but these hypotheses have since become obsolete as newer estimates indicate a lower density for Quaoar.[edit]This section needs to beupdated. The reason given is:JWST’s non-detection of ammonium hydrate makes the cryovolcanism hypothesis obsolete andProudfoot et al. (2025)have identified latitudinal albedo variations on Quaoar.Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(November 2025) Surface Quaoar has a dark surface that reflects about 12% of the visible light it receives from the Sun.This may indicate that fresh ice has disappeared from Quaoar’s surface.The surface is moderately red, meaning that Quaoar reflects longer (redder) wavelengths of light more than shorter (bluer) wavelengths.Many Kuiper belt objects such as 20000 Varuna and 28978 Ixion share a similar moderately red color. Spectroscopic observations by David C. Jewitt and Jane Luu in 2004 revealed crystalline water ice and tentative hints of ammonia hydrate on Quaoar’s surface. These substances are expected to gradually break down due to solar and cosmic radiation, and crystalline water ice can only form in warm temperatures of at least 110K (−163°C), so the presence of crystalline water ice on Quaoar’s surface indicates that it was heated to this temperature sometime in the last ten million years.For context, Quaoar’s present-day surface temperature is less than 50K (−223.2°C).Jewitt and Luu proposed two hypotheses for Quaoar’s heating, which are impact events and radiogenic heating .The latter hypothesis allows for the possibility of cryovolcanism on Quaoar.A 2006 study by Hauke Hussmann and collaborators suggested that radiogenic heating alone may not be capable of sustaining an internal ocean of liquid water at Quaoar’s mantle–core boundary. More precise observations of Quaoar’s near infrared spectrum in 2007 indicated the presence of small quantities (5%) of solid methane and ethane . Given its boiling point of 112K (−161°C), methane is a volatile ice at average surface temperatures of Quaoar, unlike water ice or ethane. Both models and observations suggest that only a few larger bodies ( Pluto , Eris and Makemake ) can retain the volatile ices whereas the dominant population of small trans-Neptunian objects lost them. Quaoar, with only small amounts of methane, appears to be in an intermediary category. In 2022, low-resolution near-infrared (0.7–5 μm) spectroscopic observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed the presence of carbon dioxide ice, complex organics, and significant amounts of ethane ice on Quaoar’s surface. Other possible chemical compounds include hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide .JWST also took medium-resolution near-infrared spectra of Quaoar and found evidence of small amounts of methane on Quaoar’s surface. However, both JWST’s low- and medium-resolution spectra of Quaoar did not show conclusive signs of ammonia hydrates. High-resolution imaging by the Hubble Space Telescope has shown that Quaoar’s equator is relatively brighter than its poles.One possible hypothesis proposed by Benjamin Proudfoot and colleagues suggests that infalling ring material may brighten Quaoar’s equator. Another hypothesis proposed by the same researchers suggests that Quaoar’s poles are darkened due to radiation processing of ethane that has condensed there, in a similar fashion to Pluto’s moon Charon.[edit] Possible atmosphere The presence of methane and other volatiles on Quaoar’s surface suggest that it may support a tenuous atmosphere produced from the sublimation of volatiles.With a measured mean temperature of approximately 44K (−229.2°C), the upper limit of Quaoar’s atmospheric pressure is expected to be in the range of a few microbars .Due to Quaoar’s small size and mass, the possibility of Quaoar having an atmosphere of nitrogen and carbon monoxide has been ruled out, since the gases would escape from Quaoar.The possibility of a methane atmosphere, with the upper limit being less than 1 microbar,was considered until 2013, when Quaoar occulted a 15.8-magnitude star and revealed no sign of a substantial atmosphere, placing an upper limit to at least 20 nanobars, under the assumption that Quaoar’s mean temperature is 42K (−231.2°C) and that its atmosphere consists of mostly methane.The upper limit of atmosphere pressure was tightened to 10 nanobars after another stellar occultation in 2019.[edit][edit] Satellites Artist’s impression of Quaoar with its outer ring and its moon Weywot Weywot Quaoar has one confirmed moon, Weywot (formal designation (50000) Quaoar I). It was discovered by Michael E. Brown and Terry-Ann Suer on 14 February 2006 and was named after the sky god Weywot , the son of Quaoar in Tongva mythology.It orbits Quaoar at a distance of about 13,300km (8,300mi) with an orbital period of 12.4 days, placing it outside of both rings of Quaoar.It follows a nearly circular orbit that is slightly inclined by 5° with respect to Quaoar’s equator.Observations of Weywot via stellar occultations have shown it to be a very dark object with a diameter of roughly 200km (120mi).[edit] Second moon A potential second moon of Quaoar was reported in 2025, when astronomers Richard Nolthenius and Kirk Bender each separately observed, from different telescopes at the same observatory ( MIRA’s Oliver Observing Station ), an unexpected 1.23-second-long occultation of a background star (UCAC4 376-136839) near Quaoar on 25 June 2025.This occultation did not match the times and locations predicted for Weywot and Quaoar’s known rings, which suggests that it was either caused by a small, unknown moon or a dense ring arc around Quaoar.They argue that competing local causes for the occultation can be ruled out. Of the two possible options, an unknown moon is the most likely one. The putative second moon of Quaoar is estimated to be at least 38km (24mi) in diameter and 100 times less massive than Weywot.This would mean that this moon would appear extremely faint at an apparent magnitude of 28—practically impossible to detect with any available telescope including the James Webb Space Telescope .Only observations with stellar occultations and upcoming extremely large telescopes will be able to detect the second moon of Quaoar. It is estimated that Quaoar’s second moon orbits5838+512−326kmaway from the dwarf planet with an orbital period of3.6+0.5−0.3days—inside the orbit of Weywot, but outside both rings of Quaoar.The estimated orbit of Quaoar’s second moon suggests that it may be gravitationally influencing Quaoar’s outermost ring via a 5:3 mean-motion orbital resonance .The orbit of Quaoar’s second moon also appears to coincide with the 7:2 mean-motion orbital resonance with Weywot, although such a resonance would be very weak.The gravitational influences of Weywot’s inclined orbit and Quaoar’s elongated shape are expected to cause apsidal and nodal precession in the second moon’s orbit, which would make it inclined by0.5°to4.5°with respect to Quaoar’s equator.[edit]It has been suggested that this section besplitout into another article titledRings of Quaoar. (Discuss)(November 2025)[edit] Discovery Light curvegraph of a star’s brightness as seen by the Gemini North Observatoryduring the 9 August 2022 occultation by Quaoar and its two rings. The asymmetry of the outer Q1R ring’s opacity is apparent from its differing brightness dips before and after the occultation by Quaoar at the center. Besides accurately determining sizes and shapes, stellar occultation campaigns were planned on a long-term basis to search for rings and/or atmospheres around small bodies of the outer Solar System. These campaigns agglomerated efforts of various teams in France, Spain and Brazil and were conducted under the umbrella of the European Research Council project Lucky Star .The discovery of Quaoar’s first known ring, Q1R, involved various instruments used during stellar occultations observed between 2018 and 2021: the robotic ATOM telescope of the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) in Namibia, the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias (La Palma Island, Spain); the ESA CHEOPS space telescope, and several stations run by citizen astronomers in Australia where a report of a Neptune-like ring originated and a dense arc in Q1R was first observed.Taken together, these observations reveal the presence of a partly dense, mostly tenuous and uniquely distant ring around Quaoar, a discovery announced in February 2023. In April 2023, astronomers of the Lucky Star project published the discovery of another ring of Quaoar, Q2R.The Q2R ring was detected by the highly-sensitive 8.2-m Gemini North and the 4.0-m Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, during an observing campaign to confirm Quaoar’s Q1R ring in a stellar occultation on 9 August 2022.Quaoar is the fourth minor planet and eighth Solar System object known and confirmed to have a ring system , after (in order of discovery) Saturn , Uranus , Jupiter , Neptune , 2060 Chiron , 10199 Chariklo , and 136108 Haumea .[edit]Orbit diagrams of the Quaoar–Weywot systemViewed from EarthViewed top-down over Quaoar’s north pole Properties Quaoar possesses two narrow rings, provisionally named Q1R and Q2R by order of discovery, which are confined at radial distances where their orbital periods are integer ratios of Quaoar’s rotational period. That is, the rings of Quaoar are in spin-orbit resonances .Ring–moon system dataRingsRingdesignationRadius(km)Width(km)Optical depth(τ)Q2R2520±2010≈0.004Q1R4057±65–3000.004–0.7MoonsNameSemi-major axis(km)Diameter(km)Period(days)(2025 candidate)5838+512−326303.6+0.5−0.3Weywot13329±1916512.42727±0.00003 The outer ring, Q1R, orbits Quaoar at a distance of 4,057±6km (2,521±4mi), over seven times the radius of Quaoar and more than double the theoretical maximum distance of the Roche limit .The Q1R ring is not uniform and is strongly irregular around its circumference, being more opaque (and denser) where it is narrow and less opaque where it is broader.The Q1R ring’s radial width ranges from 5 to 300km (3 to 200mi) while its optical depth ranges from 0.004 to 0.7.The irregular width of the Q1R ring resembles Saturn 's frequently- perturbed F ring or Neptune 's ring arcs , which may imply the presence of small, kilometer-sized moonlets embedded within the Q1R ring and gravitationally perturbing the material. The Q1R ring likely consists of icy particles; it is hypothesized that the extremely cold temperature of Quaoar’s environment allows the ring particles to elastically collide with each other without accreting into a larger mass. Q1R is located in between the 6:1 mean-motion orbital resonance with Quaoar’s moon Weywot at 4,021±57km (2,499±35mi) and Quaoar’s 1:3 spin-orbit resonance at 4,197±58km (2,608±36mi). The Q1R ring’s coincidental location at these resonances implies they play a key role in maintaining the ring without having it accrete into a single moon.In particular, the confinement of rings to the 1:3 spin-orbit resonance may be common among ringed small Solar System bodies, as it has been previously seen in Chariklo and Haumea. The inner ring, Q2R, orbits Quaoar at a distance of 2,520±20km (1,566±12mi), about four and a half times Quaoar’s radius and also outside Quaoar’s Roche limit.The Q2R ring’s location coincides with Quaoar’s 5:7 spin-orbit resonance at 2,525±58km (1,569±36mi). Compared to Q1R, the Q2R ring appears relatively uniform with a radial width of 10km (6.2mi). With an optical depth of 0.004, the Q2R ring is very tenuous and its opacity is comparable to the least dense part of the Q1R ring.[edit] Exploration Quaoar from New Horizonsviewed at a distance of 14 AU It has been calculated that a flyby mission to Quaoar using a Jupiter gravity assist would take 13.6 years, for launch dates of 25 December 2026, 22 November 2027, 22 December 2028, 22 January 2030 and 20 December 2040. Quaoar would be 41 to 43 AU from the Sun when the spacecraft arrived.In July 2016, the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard the New Horizons spacecraft took a sequence of four images of Quaoar from a distance of about 14AU. Interstellar Probe , a concept by Pontus Brandt and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory would potentially fly by Quaoar in the 2030s before continuing to the interstellar medium , and it has been proposed as a potential flyby target of the first of China National Space Administration ‘s proposed Shensuo probes, which are designed to explore the heliosphere.Quaoar has been chosen as a flyby target for missions like these particularly for its escaping methane atmosphere and possible cryovolcanism, as well as its close proximity to the heliospheric nose .[edit]^Proudfoot et al. (2025) note that there are two possible triaxial ellipsoid dimensions for Quaoar:1,296 × 1,088 × 938km derived fromlight curvemeasurements and1,166.6 × 1,110.6 × 1,020.0km derived fromstellar occultationmeasurements.Of these, the occultation-derived measurement is preferred.^Proudfoot et al. (2025) give the rings’ north pole direction in terms ofequatorial coordinates(α,δ) = (259.5°, +55.0°), whereαisright ascensionandδisdeclination.Transformingthese equatorial coordinates toecliptic coordinatesgivesλ≈ 241.38° andβ≈ +77.39°.Theecliptic latitude,β, is the angular offset from theecliptic plane, whereasinclinationiwith respect to the ecliptic is the angular offset from theecliptic north poleatβ= +90°;iwith respect to the ecliptic would be thecomplementofβ, which is expressed by the differencei= 90° –β. Thus, the axial tilt of Quaoar’s rings is 12.61° with respect to the ecliptic. If the rings are coplanar to Quaoar’s equator (having the same north pole orientation), then Quaoar would have the same axial tilt with respect to the ecliptic.^In the convention for minor planet provisional designations, the first letter represents the half-month of the year of discovery while the second letter and numbers indicate the order of discovery within that half-month. In the case for2002 LM60, the first letter ‘L’ corresponds to the first half-month of June 2002 while the preceding letter ‘M’ indicates that it is the 12th object discovered on the 61st cycle of discoveries (with 60 cycles completed). Each completed cycle consists of 25 letters representing discoveries, hence 12 + (60 completed cycles × 25 letters) = 1,512.^2060 Chiron’s rings were initially observed in 2011, and were confirmed by 2022.[edit]^abcdefg^ab^abcdef^abc^abJPL HorizonsArchived9 May 2021 at theWayback MachineObserver Location: @sun (Perihelion occurs when deldot changes from negative to positive. Uncertainty in time of perihelion is3-sigma.)^abcdefghijklmno^abcdefghijklm^^^abcdefghi^abcd^Equatorial → Ecliptic, J2000 for equinox and epoch. NOTE: When inputting equatorial coordinates, specify the units in the format “54.14d” instead of “54.14”.^abcdefghijk^^abcdef^ab^ab^ab^ab^ab^abcdef^abcd^^^ab^^abcd^abcdefghijklmn^^ab^abcd^ab^^^^abcd^NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI (2016)QuaoarArchived18 March 2023 at theWayback Machine^^^^^^abcd^^^^abc^^abc^abcdef^^^^abcde^^ab^^^^^abcd^ab^^^^ab^^[edit]Wikimedia Commons has media related to50000 Quaoar.Frequently Asked Questions About QuaoarArchived8 August 2010 at theWayback MachineBeyond Jupiter – (50000) QuaoarQuaoaratAstDyS-2, Asteroids—Dynamic SiteEphemeris·Observation prediction·Orbital info·Proper elements·Observational infoQuaoarat theJPL Small-Body DatabaseRetrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quaoaroldid%3D1360079950"Categories:Minor planet object articles (numbered)Classical Kuiper belt objectsDiscoveries by Michael E. BrownDiscoveries by Chad TrujilloNamed minor planetsQuaoarDwarf planetsBinary trans-Neptunian objectsObjects observed by stellar occultationAstronomical objects discovered in 2002Solar SystemNamed TNOsHidden categories:Webarchive template wayback linksCS1: long volume valueCS1 Portuguese-language sources (pt)Articles with short descriptionShort description is different from WikidataGood articlesUse dmy dates from August 2024All articles with unsourced statementsArticles with unsourced statements from November 2025Pages with Tongva IPAWikipedia articles in need of updating from November 2025All Wikipedia articles in need of updatingArticles proposed for splitting from November 2025All articles proposed for splittingPages using multiple image with auto scaled imagesCommons link from Wikidata References [^1]: “50000 Quaoar (2002 LM60)”. Minor Planet Center. International Astronomical Union. Archivedfrom the original on 1 December 2017 . Retrieved 30 November2017. [^2]: Schmadel, Lutz D. (2006). “(50000) Quaoar”. Dictionary of Minor Planet Names – (50000) Quaoar, Addendum to Fifth Edition: 2003–2005. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. p.1197. doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-29925-7. ISBN 978-3-540-00238-3. Archivedfrom the original on 2 February 2020 . Retrieved 7 December2019. [^3]: “JPL Small-Body Database Browser: 50000 Quaoar (2002 LM60)”(31 August 2019 last obs.). Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 24 September 2019. Archivedfrom the original on 9 April 2020 . Retrieved 20 February2020. [^4]: Delsanti, Audrey; Jewitt, David (2006). “The Solar System Beyond The Planets” (PDF). In Blonde, P.; Mason, J. (eds.). Solar System Update. Springer. pp. 267–293. Bibcode: 2006ssu…book…267D. doi: 10.1007/3-540-37683-6_11. ISBN 3-540-26056-0. Archived from the original (PDF)on 25 September 2007. [^5]: JPL Horizons Archived9 May 2021 at the Wayback MachineObserver Location: @sun (Perihelion occurs when deldot changes from negative to positive. Uncertainty in time of perihelion is 3-sigma.) [^6]: Proudfoot, Benjamin; Nolthenius, Richard; Holler, Bryan J.; de Souza-Feliciano, Ana Carolina; Rommel, Flavia L.; Collyer, Cameron; etal. (November 2025). “Orbital Characterization of a Newly Discovered Small Satellite around Quaoar”. The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 993(L38). arXiv: 2511.07370. Bibcode: 2025ApJ…993L…38P. doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ae1585. [^7]: Proudfoot, Benjamin; Grundy, Will; Ragozzine, Darin; Fernández-Valenzuela, Estela (November 2025). “Beyond Point Masses. V. Weywot’s Non-Keplerian Orbit”. The Planetary Science Journal. forthcoming. arXiv: 2511.07351. [^8]: Proudfoot et al. (2025) note that there are two possible triaxial ellipsoid dimensions for Quaoar: 1,296 × 1,088 × 938km derived from light curvemeasurements and 1,166.6 × 1,110.6 × 1,020.0km derived from stellar occultationmeasurements. [7] : 13Of these, the occultation-derived measurement is preferred. [7] : 13 [^9]: “Ellipsoid surface area: 3.79268×10^6 km 2”. WolframAlpha. Archivedfrom the original on 11 November 2025 . Retrieved 11 November2025. [^10]: “Ellipsoid volume: 6.91956×10^8 km 3”. WolframAlpha. Archivedfrom the original on 11 November 2025 . Retrieved 11 November2025. [^11]: B. E. Morgado; etal. (8 February 2023). “A dense ring of the trans-Neptunian object Quaoar outside its Roche limit”. Nature. 614(7947): 239–243. Bibcode: 2023Natur.614…239M. doi: 10.1038/S41586-022-05629-6. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 36755175. Wikidata Q116754015. [^12]: Proudfoot, Benjamin; Holler, Bryan J.; Arimatsu, Ko; Rommel, Flavia L.; Collyer, Cameron; Fernández-Valenzuela, Estela (June 2025). “Constraints on Quaoar’s Rings and Atmosphere from JWST/NIRCam Observations of a Stellar Occultation”. The Planetary Science Journal. 6(6): 11. arXiv: 2506.07898. Bibcode: 2025PSJ…6…146P. doi: 10.3847/PSJ/addd02. S2CID 279251315. 146. [^13]: “Coordinate Calculator”. NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database. California Institute of Technology . Retrieved 25 June2025.Equatorial → Ecliptic, J2000 for equinox and epoch. NOTE: When inputting equatorial coordinates, specify the units in the format “54.14d” instead of “54.14”. [^14]: Proudfoot et al. (2025) give the rings’ north pole direction in terms of equatorial coordinates( α, δ) = (259.5°, +55.0°), where αis right ascensionand δis declination. [11] : 6 Transformingthese equatorial coordinates to ecliptic coordinatesgives λ≈ 241.38° and β≈ +77.39°. [12]The ecliptic latitude, β, is the angular offset from the ecliptic plane, whereas inclination iwith respect to the ecliptic is the angular offset from the ecliptic north poleat β= +90°; iwith respect to the ecliptic would be the complementof β, which is expressed by the difference i= 90° – β. Thus, the axial tilt of Quaoar’s rings is 12.61° with respect to the ecliptic. If the rings are coplanar to Quaoar’s equator (having the same north pole orientation), then Quaoar would have the same axial tilt with respect to the ecliptic. 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The Astrophysical Journal. 670(1): L49–L51. arXiv: 0710.3591. Bibcode: 2007ApJ…670L…49S. doi: 10.1086/524140. S2CID 18587369. [^33]: “How Are Minor Planets Named?”. Minor Planet Center. International Astronomical Union. Archivedfrom the original on 25 January 2021 . Retrieved 5 January2017. [^34]: In the convention for minor planet provisional designations, the first letter represents the half-month of the year of discovery while the second letter and numbers indicate the order of discovery within that half-month. In the case for 2002 LM 60, the first letter ‘L’ corresponds to the first half-month of June 2002 while the preceding letter ‘M’ indicates that it is the 12th object discovered on the 61st cycle of discoveries (with 60 cycles completed). Each completed cycle consists of 25 letters representing discoveries, hence 12 + (60 completed cycles × 25 letters) = 1,512. [31] [^35]: “M.P.C. 47066” (PDF). Minor Planet Center. International Astronomical Union. 20 November 2002. Archived (PDF)from the original on 20 September 2021 . Retrieved 4 December2019. [^36]: “M.P.C. 41805” (PDF). Minor Planet Center. International Astronomical Union. 9 January 2001. Archived (PDF)from the original on 6 March 2012 . Retrieved 15 March2019. [^37]: “Is Pluto a giant comet?”. Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. 1999 . Retrieved 21 September2025. Indeed, it was proposed in 1998 that minor planet number 10000 be assigned to Pluto, so that it would get more frequent orbital analyses and useful astrometric cataloguing [^38]: Green, Daniel W. E. (13 September 2006). “(134340) Pluto, (136199) Eris, and (136199) Eris I (Dysnomia)”. IAU Circular(8747). Bibcode: 2006IAUC.8747…1G . Retrieved 21 September2025. [^39]: Street, Nick (August 2008). “Heavenly Bodies and the People of the Earth”. Search Magazine. Heldref Publications. Archived from the originalon 18 May 2009 . Retrieved 8 January2020. [^40]: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI (2016) Quaoar Archived18 March 2023 at the Wayback Machine [^41]: Marsden, Brian G. (28 September 2004). “MPEC 2004-S73: Editorial Notice”. Minor Planet Electronic Circular. Minor Planet Center. Archivedfrom the original on 8 May 2020 . Retrieved 8 January2020. [^42]: Miller, Kirk (26 October 2021). “Unicode request for dwarf-planet symbols” (PDF). unicode.org. Archived (PDF)from the original on 23 March 2022 . Retrieved 29 January2022. [^43]: “Proposed New Characters: The Pipeline”. Archivedfrom the original on 29 January 2022 . Retrieved 29 January2022. [^44]: Anderson, Deborah (4 May 2022). “Out of this World: New Astronomy Symbols Approved for the Unicode Standard”. unicode.org. The Unicode Consortium. Archivedfrom the original on 6 August 2022 . Retrieved 6 August2022. [^45]: “Horizon Online Ephemeris System for 50000 Quaoar (2002 LM60)”((Select Ephemeris Type: Observer, Observer Location: @sun, and Time Span: Start=1932-01-01, Step=1 d)). Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Archivedfrom the original on 9 April 2020 . Retrieved 24 January2020. [^46]: Buie, M. W. “Orbit Fit and Astrometric record for 50000”. Southwest Research Institute. Archivedfrom the original on 29 January 2020 . Retrieved 27 February2018. [^47]: Marsden, Brian G. (17 July 2008). “MPEC 2008-O05: Distant Minor Planets (2008 Aug. 2.0 TT)”. Minor Planet Electronic Circular. Minor Planet Center. Archivedfrom the original on 2 October 2018 . Retrieved 27 February2018. [^48]: Levison, Harold F.; Morbidelli, Alessandro; Van Laerhoven, Christa; Gomes, Rodney S.; Tsiganis, Kleomenis (July 2008). “Origin of the Structure of the Kuiper Belt during a Dynamical Instability in the Orbits of Uranus and Neptune”. Icarus. 196(1): 258–273. arXiv: 0712.0553. Bibcode: 2008Icar…196…258L. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2007.11.035. S2CID 7035885. [^49]: Stansberry, John; Grundy, Will; Brown, Mike; Cruikshank, Dale; Spencer, John; Trilling, David; Margot, Jean-Luc (2008). “Physical Properties of Kuiper Belt and Centaur Objects: Constraints from the Spitzer Space Telescope” (PDF). The Solar System Beyond Neptune. University of Arizona Press. pp. 161–179. arXiv: astro-ph/0702538. Bibcode: 2008ssbn.book…161S. ISBN 978-0-8165-2755-7. Archived (PDF)from the original on 21 September 2020 . Retrieved 4 December2019. [^50]: Fraser, Wesley C.; Brown, Michael E. (May 2010). “Quaoar: A Rock in the Kuiper Belt”. The Astrophysical Journal. 714(2): 1547–1550. arXiv: 1003.5911. Bibcode: 2010ApJ…714.1547F. doi: 10.1088/0004-637X/714/2/1547. S2CID 17386407. [^51]: Fornasier, S.; Lellouch, E.; Müller, T.; Santos-Sanz, P.; Panuzzo, P.; Kiss, C.; etal. (July 2013). “TNOs are Cool: A survey of the trans-Neptunian region. VIII. Combined Herschel PACS and SPIRE observations of nine bright targets at 70–500 μm”. AstronomyAstrophysics. 555(A15): 22. arXiv: 1305.0449v2. Bibcode: 2013AA…555A…15F. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/201321329. S2CID 119261700. [^52]: Braga-Ribas, F.; Sicardy, B.; Ortiz, J. L.; Lellouch, E.; Tancredi, G.; Lecacheux, J.; etal. (August 2013). “The Size, Shape, Albedo, Density, and Atmospheric Limit of Transneptunian Object (50000) Quaoar from Multi-chord Stellar Occultations”. The Astrophysical Journal. 773(1): 13. Bibcode: 2013ApJ…773…26B. doi: 10.1088/0004-637X/773/1/26. hdl: 11336/1641. S2CID 53724395. Archivedfrom the original on 21 April 2022 . Retrieved 29 April2021. [^53]: Kiss, C.; Müller, T. G.; Marton, G.; Szakáts, R.; Pál, A.; Molnár, L.; etal. (March 2024). “The visible and thermal light curve of the large Kuiper belt object (50000) Quaoar”. AstronomyAstrophysics. 684: A50. arXiv: 2401.12679. Bibcode: 2024AA…684A…50K. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/202348054. [^54]: Margoti, Giuliano (September 2024). Determinação Daformatridimensional De (50000) Quaoar Por Ocultações Estelares Utilizando Algoritmo Genético Para Minimização[Determination of the Three-Dimensional Shape of (50000) Quaoar by Stellar Occultations Using a Genetic Algorithm for Minimization] (master’s thesis) (in Portuguese). Universidade Tecnológica Federal Do Paraná. Archived from the original (PDF)on 11 November 2025. [^55]: Brown, Michael E. “The Dwarf Planets”. California Institute of Technology. Archivedfrom the original on 29 January 2008 . Retrieved 27 February2018. [^56]: Castillo-Rogez, J. C; Matson, D. L.; Sotin, C.; Johnson, T. V.; Lunine, J. I.; Thomas, P. C. (September 2007). “Iapetus’ geophysics: Rotation rate, shape, and equatorial ridge”. Icarus. 190(1): 179–202. Bibcode: 2007Icar…190…179C. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2007.02.018. [^57]: Jewitt, David C.; Luu, Jane (December 2004). “Crystalline water ice on the Kuiper belt object (50000) Quaoar” (PDF). Nature. 432(7018): 731–733. Bibcode: 2004Natur.432…731J. doi: 10.1038/nature03111. PMID 15592406. S2CID 4334385. Archived (PDF)from the original on 9 August 2017 . Retrieved 14 April2013. [^58]: Hussmann, Hauke; Sohl, Frank; Spohn, Tilman (November 2006). “Subsurface oceans and deep interiors of medium-sized outer planet satellites and large trans-neptunian objects”. Icarus. 185(1): 258–273. Bibcode: 2006Icar…185…258H. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2006.06.005. [^59]: Emery, J. P.; Wong, I.; Brunetto, R.; Cook, J. C.; Pinilla-Alonso, N.; Stansberry, J. A.; etal. (March 2024). “A Tale of 3 Dwarf Planets: Ices and Organics on Sedna, Gonggong, and Quaoar from JWST Spectroscopy”. Icarus. 414(116017). arXiv: 2309.15230. Bibcode: 2024Icar…41416017E. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2024.116017. [^60]: Arimatsu, Ko; Ohsawa, Ryou; Hashimoto, George L.; Urakawa, Seitaro; Takahashi, Jun; Tozuka, Miyako; etal. (December 2019). “New constraint on the atmosphere of (50000) Quaoar from a stellar occultation”. The Astronomical Journal. 158(6): 7. arXiv: 1910.09988. Bibcode: 2019AJ…158…236A. doi: 10.3847/1538-3881/ab5058. S2CID 204823847. [^61]: Green, Daniel W. E., ed. (22 February 2007). “Satellites of 2003 AZ_84, (50000), (55637), and (90482)”. International Astronomical Union Circular. No.8812. International Astronomical Union. Bibcode: 2007IAUC.8812…1B. ISSN 0081-0304. Archivedfrom the original on 19 July 2011. [^62]: Braga-Ribas, F.; Vachier, F.; Desmars, J.; Margoti, G.; Sicardy, B. (February 2025). “Investigating the formation of small Solar System objects using stellar occultations by satellites: present, future and its use to update satellite orbits”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. 383(2291): 22. arXiv: 2503.00874. Bibcode: 2025RSPTA.38340200B. doi: 10.1098/rsta.2024.0200. PMID 40013567. S2CID 276645375. [^63]: Fernandez-Valenzuela, E.; Holler, B.; Ortiz, J. L.; Vachier, F.; Braga-Ribas, F.; Rommel, F.; etal. (October 2023). Weywot: the darkest known satellite in the trans-Neptunian region. 55th Annual DPS Meeting Joint with EPSC. Vol.55. San Antonio, Texas. Bibcode: 2023DPS…5520204F. 202.04. [^64]: Nolthenius, Richard; Bender, Kirk; Cotton, Daniel V.; Proudfoot, Benjamin C. N.; Irwin, John (August 2025). “Discovery of a New Satellite or Ring Arc around (50000) Quaoar”. Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society. 9(8). Bibcode: 2025RNAAS…9…226N. doi: 10.3847/2515-5172/adfeda. 226. [^65]: “ESA’s Cheops finds an unexpected ring around dwarf planet Quaoar”. European Space Agency. 8 February 2023. Archivedfrom the original on 8 February 2023 . Retrieved 21 April2023. [^66]: Hecht, Jeff (7 May 2023). “Second Ring Around Quaoar Puzzles Astronomers”. SkyTelescope. Archivedfrom the original on 7 May 2023 . Retrieved 7 May2023. [^67]: 2060 Chiron’s rings were initially observed in 2011, and were confirmed by 2022. [^68]: McGranaghan, Ryan; Sagan, Brent; Dove, Gemma; Tullos, Aaron; Lyne, James E.; Emery, Joshua P. (September 2011). “A Survey of Mission Opportunities to Trans-Neptunian Objects”. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. 64: 296–303. Bibcode: 2011JBIS…64…296M. Archivedfrom the original on 29 January 2020 . Retrieved 5 December2019. [^69]: “New Horizons Spies a Kuiper Belt Companion”. pluto.jhuapl.edu. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. 31 August 2016. Archived from the originalon 15 November 2017 . Retrieved 7 September2016. [^70]: Brandt, Pontus C.; McNutt, R.; Hallinan, G.; Shao, M.; Mewaldt, R.; Brown, M.; etal. (February 2017). The Interstellar Probe Mission: Humanity’s First Explicit Step in Reaching Another Star (PDF). Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop. Lunar and Planetary Institute. Bibcode: 2017LPICo1989.8173B. 8173. Archived (PDF)from the original on 13 March 2021 . Retrieved 24 July2018. [^71]: Runyon, K. D.; Mandt, K.; Stern, S. A.; Brandt, P. C.; McNutt, R. L. (December 2018). Kuiper Belt Planet Geoscience from Interstellar Probe. AGU Fall Meeting 2018. American Geophysical Union. Bibcode: 2018AGUFMSH32C…10R. SH32C-10. Archivedfrom the original on 3 October 2020 . Retrieved 30 March2019. [^72]: Jones, Andrew (16 April 2021). “China to launch a pair of spacecraft towards the edge of the solar system”. SpaceNews. SpaceNews. Archivedfrom the original on 29 September 2021 . Retrieved 29 April2021.
I use markdown for pretty much everything, and I agree with the overall notion of this rundown, but — Seeing weird characters when you copy-paste from AI? That’s because ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others use Markdown to format their responses. Yeah, maybe that’s not the gotcha the author thought it would be. Markdown — so stupid simple even stochastic parrots can figure it out is a slogan that will age like milk.
Hey also. Gopher is also getting a bit of a hit, but mostly due to a new protocol someone came up with called Gemini. It’s like Gopher a lot but has some (and I cannot emphasize this enough) very basic markdown. You can find out more about it here. I recommend Lagrange for your client. Two places I like to go to are Station (gemini://station.martinrue.com/) and Antenna (gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/). BBS (gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/) is also a new one on the scene. And the nice thing about Lagrange is that it also supports the Finger protocol which basically is a way to read the .project or .plan file on a given user for the indicated system. Those files for those that never used them allowed a user to type a short status update into them that folks could then poll at any given time. Basically “ye olde status update”. There’s a person that serves a weather reporting system via a finger interface at (finger://graph.no/) and it works really well in Lagrange.
Yes they absolutely do. They love it because it takes away all of the excuses of “this is too difficult or time consuming” from all of their underlings, so they think. What do you mean it takes you a week to write this highly technical document, just ask Gemini I did and it did it in seconds. What do you mean it will take you 2 months to write that application, just use Claude I did and it took me an hour. What do you mean it will take you 4 weeks to talk to customers and gather requirements, just ask ChatGPT I did and it took minutes. And they aren’t wrong you CAN do those things and you will get some output. What they fail to recognize is that output might be wrong, or missing important details, or missing functionality that they don’t realize is important, or won’t get you to an innovative solution, etc. They see an output and assume it must be the correct output so everyone saying to do it the right way must be sandbagging. What will happen over time as more and more of the world is run off the back of stuff built mostly by AI is that those cracks will start growing and growing, the experts who catch them and fix them before they become real issues will become fewer and further between, and eventually it’s going to all come crashing down. AI is speed running the collapse of capitalism. Ridiculous investment into something that is obviously completely unsustainable is capitalism’s MO and AI exemplifies this on an unprecedented scale. But execs don’t think about that or care about that, they want to slam AI into everything so they can cash out as fast as possible. They have no interest in “can this application still be valuable in 10 years” or “will this document be useful in 5 years” or whatever they care about “can I cash my company out into the AI investment bubble before it pops and I’m left holding the bag.” I suspect many executives know this but you’ll never hear them say it because they are not incentivized to be honest. The sooner they can cash out of the bubble the better and they won’t do that if they don’t buy into it to begin with. It’s the fundamental flaw of capitalism laid bare; capitalism is not interested in production, it is interested in profit. AI is largely an accelerator of profit, not production, and that’s why it is being so heavily pushed by the capital class.
Your home for live track and field
Chief Emoji Officer on is-a.cat instance
Too chaotic for a paladin.
Probably a lich (https://is-a.cat/@madargon/112705760563792903).
Amateur artist and junior IT administrator. Mostly self-trained in chaotic and often destructive ways. Opponent of mainstream social media and nasty digital surveillance, wanna-be cypherpunk. Linux user since 2013. Fully degoogled since December 2019. Fully BigTech-free since March 2024.
Synesthete. That weird freak who sometimes uses Daedric alphabet. Even weirder freak who uses bare IP address instead of some server name.
Cryptography is my only religion - does Church of Wael look for new members?
In my free time I draw or write stories, first of all for my fun.
I publish my works under CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
Writing here in English/Polish.
Migrated from @madargon
Indexed in tootfinder (https://www.tootfinder.ch).
#sysadmin #linux #degoogle #corpfree #privacy #cypherpunk #drawing #art #fedi22
Lagrange is a #GeminiProtocol client.
It offers modern conveniences familiar from web browsers, such as smooth scrolling, inline image viewing, multiple tabs, visual themes, Unicode fonts, bookmarks, history, and page outlines.
Lagrange runs on various desktop and mobile operating systems, including iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux. It also supports #Gopher and other protocols for comprehensive access to the small internet.
This account is for high-level project news.
Data visualizations & information graphics by David McCandless. Plus favourite finds from around the web. Making sense of the world - well, trying to - since 2009. Check out @beautifulnews for positive trends & stats
LinuxしたりNode.jsやったりUIデザインしたりキーボード集めたり色々やってるサーバールームの遺跡の住人の14歳JC。
#Twimg-Save という強い画像保存ソフトの作者。
ヘッダーはこの後溶けてきたので飲みました。
Twitter: coke12103
Backup: @[email protected]
BackupにならないBackup: @[email protected]
旧Backup: @[email protected]
Kyash: coke12103
物欲リスト: https://www.amazon.jp/hz/wishlist/ls/1TFS4601EZY5K?ref_=wl_share
鍵じゃないのでリクエスト中になることはありません。数時間後にリトライしてください。
名前はアイスランドじゃないです。もしそう見えるなら目がバグっています。
Unofficial bot that mirrors Baseball Is Dead’s Twitter feed.
MLB podcast hosted by @Jared_Carrabis, @[email protected], @[email protected], and @[email protected]. New episodes 3x/week🎙️
Barcelona | Misantropía y barbarie
A place to share and discuss data visualizations. #dataviz
A place to share and discuss visual representations of data: Graphs, charts, maps, etc.
DataIsBeautiful is for visualizations that effectively convey information. Aesthetics are an important part of information visualization, but pretty pictures are not the sole aim of this subreddit.
A place to share and discuss visual representations of data: Graphs, charts, maps, etc.
A post must be (or contain) a qualifying data visualization. Directly link to the original source article of the visualization Original source article doesn't mean the original source image. Link to the full page of the source article as a link-type submission. If you made the visualization yourself, tag it as [OC] [OC] posts must state the data source(s) and tool(s) used in the first top-level comment on their submission. DO NOT claim "[OC]" for diagrams that are not yours. All diagrams must have at least one computer generated element. No reposts of popular posts within 1 month. Post titles must describe the data plainly without using sensationalized headlines. Clickbait posts will be removed. Posts involving American Politics, or contentious topics in American media, are permissible only on Thursdays (ET). Posts involving Personal Data are permissible only on Mondays (ET).
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Don't be intentionally rude, ever. Comments should be constructive and related to the visual presented. Special attention is given to root-level comments. Short comments and low effort replies are automatically removed. Hate Speech and dogwhistling are not tolerated and will result in an immediate ban. Personal attacks and rabble-rousing will be removed. Moderators reserve discretion when issuing bans for inappropriate comments. Bans are also subject to you forfeiting all of your comments in this community.
Originally r/DataisBeautiful
Forever an EU Citizen in Spirit if not in law. #BollocksToBrexit #BollocksToBoris #RemainAlliance #SODEM #ProgressiveAlliance #IndyRef2 #TeamLH #TeamLH44
Hi there! I work on the Linux kernel at Meta and help maintain systemd.
Host of the Mere Mortals & Value For Value Podcast.
Retired Anglican priest. Likely to toot about rugby (Bristol), cricket (Gloucestershire), music (jazz, classical, prog and more), occasionally politics.
Anarcho-Communist ~ Noob Occultist
It’s Going Down is a digital community center for anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements across so-called North America. Our mission is to provide a resilient platform to publicize and promote revolutionary theory and action. https://itsgoingdown.org Follow us on Mastodon!
I make chunks of the internet, and I like some stuff. Rest assured I'm not famous in any meaningful way.
I don't need your money, but I love the idea of someone buying me a coffee at random: https://ko-fi.com/offby1
A skunk from Chicago trying to figure out how to fit in, in the Bay Area. (she/they)
I run The Wind Down (https://wind-down.org), a practice supporting organizations to close down or at least understand that endings can be beautiful.
co-moderator of praxis.nyc (with @nonlinear) here in Lenapehoking
(avatar is of Spiderpunk, a black masc with a large afro in a leather jacket and hoop earrings along his ear and one through his nose)
Verified Canadian good news. With receipts. 🍁
Named humans. Real places. Every week.
Newsletter: itisokayeh.substack.com
Little Lebowski Urban Achiever
A shitposter, Shloer-addict, and cake-lover. I love hot chocolate, hugs, and cuteness.
[I am no longer at this account. Do not send a follow request. It will be ignored.]
Agender :agenderFlag: :transgenderFlag:
🇧🇩 heritage in 🇬🇧.
My #1 girl is Nepnep.
I used to be @[email protected] and always will be.
Mastodon.lol (rest in piss), 16 Nov 2022 --> snowdin.town (rest in peace), 7 Feb 2023 --> 0w0.is 02 Aug 2023
Call me Em, Emmy, Emory
Gemini :ms_gemini:
Transfem, IM e since 4/5/23 :blobhaj_flag_transgender:
Linux enjoyer :arch_linux: nixosbtw
Train fan :trainsgender:
Love cats :QueerCat_Trans:
Anarchist :blobcatknife:
Play the mandolin
Daddy issues
Systems Software Engineer :rust:
Blobcat fan :blobcat:
26 years old
Will infodump on trains
Sometimes feel cute
Presumably autistic (self diagnosis) :autism:
Sorry for emotional dumping
I hate JavaScript
Travel, real estate, hotels, jewelry, art, fashion
World of beauty
www.facebook.com/charmaroundyou/
Style and fashion
www.facebook.com/stylishandnice
Award-winning puzzle game made by @Hempuli
Very large, very fat, very trans, very dragon
Will cuddle all kobolds
Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.
WEATHER IS HAPPENING IS BOSTON'S #1 SOURCE 4 NO NONSENSE WEATHER, NO GAMES. ALSO THE ONLY WEATHER SVC ON UR PLANET THAT PUTS A EMPHASIS ON THE NEED 4 REPENTANCE 2 UR WEATHER LORDS
ADMIN OF https://WEATHERISHAPPENING.NETWORK
"A very powerful ANTIFA woman who is followed by Barack Obama on Twitter" -Jody Della Barba.
Antifascist, organizer, writer. She/they.