Starlink satellites can likely have their life extended by quite a bit, like past constellation satellites did. But it doesn’t really matter as SpaceX is still upgrading capability like crazy. Starship will mean a factor of 10-100x Starlink capacity expansion.
Or… the default LLM Google uses for search has been quantized to s**. Ask a proper Thinking model, with browsing enabled, and odds of a correct answer are much higher. There’s been substantial improvement in AI in even the last year.
Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.
Why would a human know specs for a random phone off the top of their head? The human response is either "I don't know" or "let me look that up", not a hallucination.
I think that it feels a little wasteful to go to Google search to ask a question like this, only for the AI that's giving you an answer instead of page results to perform its own web search to get you the response.
Also, I asked a thinking model with browsing enabled and got this:
> The Google Pixel 10 is expected to support Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be), based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 / Tensor G5 chipset it will likely use, which includes an integrated Wi-Fi 7 modem. Specific finalized specs aren't confirmed until Google's official announcement.
(Model GLM-5-Turbo - two months old - using Kilo Code in the "Ask" profile; in its thinking token churn it reasoned that it should keep the response brief and direct. Perhaps not the best suite of model+harness for this task, but it's what I had to hand that's not quantized to shit, is a thinking model, and has a web search tool available to it.)
> Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.
We google something specifically because the humans within reach don't know. The goal of searching is, well, to search pages - we're trying to find a site when we use google search.
The goal when using an LLM is generally different; we want an answer, not a site.
LLMs can not point you to sites, only in a general direction. That is because complete URLs do not exist as single tokens in any of the large models. It can synthesize a plausible-looking url, and if you're lucky that URL might even exist. But that doesn't mean that there is any relation between between the text surrounding a hyperlink in LLM output and the text on the linked page.
AI agents can verify and summarize URLs, but a plain LLM can not.
I think we’re getting what we deserve by snarkily telling people to Google stuff instead of answering accurately. Google results have never ever been pure accuracy
The point of LMGTFY is to land people on either the official documentation or a curated site like Stack Overflow. Google used to be able to do that reliably.
With the power of LLMs you can Google a standard library function and get an inaccurate summarisation of a Reddit discussion where neither side knows what they're talking about
Stack Overflow and Reddit for years have told people to just Google it. And then the Google result is people saying to just Google it, instead of actually being helpful.
Then what is the need for tokens? They must have /some/ value, even if its bragging rights or something. Otherwise I can just get the same thrill from guessing if there will be a rainbow tomorrow and seeing if I am right.
Yes, geologic times, so like 100 million years or more, not relevant to human life timescales. But even Venus has substantial atmosphere still, including substantial amounts of hydrogen still (with enhanced deuterium concentration due to the atmospheric loss… which could actually be worth mining for nuclear power export).
Making a magnetic field on those timescales is easy, tho, compared to the other challenges. If you cool Venus down, you can place superconducting wires around the equator to generate a magnetic field. This is much easier than the terraforming you had to do.
Untrue. You can actually mine the Venusian surface for metals. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (the vast majority of the elements used by life) can be extracted from the atmosphere, as well as sulfur. So from an elemental standpoint, it actually could be self-sufficient. Not that you’d WANT to avoid trade with other planets, but it is possible.
It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
Yes, but! It's very hard. But you are a million percent right that the Venusian surface has lots of fantastic metals, largely tied up in basalt and volcanic ash. The bad news to my understanding is that they're kind of pulverized and evenly spread out and requires lots of refining/processing, and not necessarily so much in the way of veins/ore deposits ripe for harvesting (though I could be mistaken).
But back to how hard it is. There's mid-atmosphere winds that are effectively persistent hurricanes. It's hotter than a pizza oven, and the thick co2 air might as well be an ocean, because it has that much crushing force.
In my opinion, people should get excited about the thick atmosphere, because it's also the secret superpower that unlocks all the near term possibilities. Floating in the upper atmosphere is more like being a ship in an ocean, and if we ever got materials strong enough (graphite-carbon composites?) we could do some really cool passive dragnet + air balloon lift kinds of things to recover surface resources and lift them to a hypothetical settlement.
The one need-to-have resource that, as far as I know, there's none of on Venus whatsoever, is iodine. So even in the best case you'd have to import that. Oh, and water. You can get some out of the sulfuric acid rain but probably not as much as you want.
Granted, these are all assuming technology advances and big time scales, but trying to practice a golden rule here and be as charitable to the exercise as possible and not bean soup the discussion to death, which is a pet peeve of mine.
It'd be interesting to try to imagine a Venusian colonization that's like two separated levels: an atmospheric area where most people live and where you grow food, and then a subterranean (yes, yes, sub... aphroditean?) where you mine and so forth, and there are brief, fraught transitions between the two layers but no actual habitation of the surface or lower atmosphere.
> It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
We are facing an existential crisis in the form of climate warming on Earth that we are unable to address properly. The thing is, terraforming Earth is the easiest thing to do: we already live on it, it's already liveable. Mars, Venus or any other body in the solar system is magnitudes harder to transform on almost every aspect.
So unless humanity demonstrates it can tackle the easiest terraforming endeavour that be, anything else is firmly in the science fiction realm.
Geoengineering of Earth is remarkably easy. The reason it’s not already being done is political, not technical or even necessarily economic. For less than NASA’s budget, it’s possible to do things like stratospheric solar radiation management. See: Mount Pinatubo. Some places (Florida, etc) have already made laws prohibiting it.
As far as being science fiction… obviously? Terraforming Venus is a very long term project. It’s scientifically possible but hasn’t already been done. I guess I don’t understand what “science fiction” is supposed to mean. Like, Jules Verne writing about long distance underwater submarines? Trips to the Moon launched from Florida?
Exactly. I used to be a lifelong fan of anything space. But right now it is limited to people conducting actual science to get a better understanding of our universe. All the dick-swinging billionaires and geopolitical vanity projects of going to the Moon and Mars are utter follies. Every billion spent there, a waste of money that could be better spent. And I am not even talking about outer atmosphere ultra-rich people tourism in literal penis rockets. Utter pollution and waste. Let's wait to colonize other planets until after we get our own house in order.
I really doubt your veracity about this. It’s literally illegal for billionaires to geoengineer the Earth to stop global warming (at least in several states). Doubtless you would also object to that as well. In which case it’s not actually about solving Earth’s problems but about not liking those who are doing it.
Billionaires could trivially fund uncontroversial projects like planting trees or solar electrification, especially in the developing world, both of which would help stop global warming. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for Elon or Larry to start doing either of those things, or anything else that would actually help mitigate or reverse climate change.
Musk could spend 10 or even 100 billion on more down to Earth efforts without affecting his quality of life in the slightest. Instead he's promoting a self-serving idea, one that relies entirely on his own rocket-company infrastructure.
Putting data centers in space is also a dumb idea due to the difficulty of dissipating heat, solar radiation, maintenance challenges and more.
I don’t understand this. Elon thought of a way to virtually eliminate the land, heat, water, and energy impacts of datacenters, and because it makes his companies money instead of being non-profit, this is bad?
Maybe I do get it. It’s not about the actual impact. It’s entirely about performing. Profit (which is literally just a measure of whether the return on something is greater than the inputs) is somehow evil, but losing money on something (ie it costs more in inputs than its outputs) is good.
> Elon thought of a way to virtually eliminate the land, heat, water, and energy impacts of datacenters
He has yet to do any of this. He had an idea that plenty of others have had, and have mostly dismissed due to concerns with feasibility. Granted, orbital DCs could one day be feasible with enough investment; I will not pretend that it is impossible. But for him to pretend that it is a solution for today's problems is at best the folly of a wealthy idiot and at worst a cynical attempt to juice the value of SpaceX before its IPO.
> But I like the fact that he is trying rather than spending his money on mansions and yachts.
Don't worry, he's doing that, too. And I'd dispute that he's trying; I've seen the SpaceX S-1, and it's looking like he took a successful business and rolled some failures into it to move money around. Everything is just a vehicle to make him wealthier; I don't believe anything he says in regards to helping humanity with his ventures.
I wish I was as "dumb" as Musk is. Long before Musk, I fantasized that if I was a billionaire, I would blow it all on a mission to Mars. Musk is living the dream. I bought shares in his companies just to share in the dream a bit!
Yes, I don't care about these selfish sociopath billionaires, and certainly wouldn't want them to geoengineer Earth. Perhaps pay their due tax to society would be a better idea. Fixing Earth might include having a system where people don't get to be billionaires and soon trillionaires that dominate the planet.
Terraforming is so conceptual at this point that I wouldn't take a hard stance on either being easier or harder. You never know what a few generations of studies will teach us; and what misconceptions we hold dearly that our descendants will laugh at us for.
At this point we're so deep into the science fiction that it might be easier to just hop into a time machine and colonize Mars before its atmosphere boiled off.
From my experience there is a correlation between people who think science is nonsense while also believing in terraforming. I don’t think anybody can even remotely predict the outcomes of a terraforming project.
Terraforming is possible but colonizing worlds hostile to humans has always meant genetic engineering to me. We need to drop the Star Trek idea that we can explore space in the sacks of water we call bodies.
Let's take the idea further, and borrow cstross's belief that canned apes will never colonize or explore anything, and only digital uploads into mechanical bodies will be destined for space.
> You can actually mine the Venusian surface for metals
By "surface" do you mean the ground of Venus? The odds of a mining operation happening on the ground of Venus seems like science fiction at best, impossible at worst. Between the high winds, corrosive atmosphere, outlandish heat and extreme pressure any vehicle on the surface would be torn to shreds likely within a few hours (which has so far been the case for all landers that actually survived the landing) - and that's not even getting into the idea of getting things off the ground. Extraction from the atmosphere would likely be the only method unless something significant changes with the entire planet. Refining those materials would require a lot of machinery being in Venus's orbit that we'd have to get there, as well. Speaking of the conditions though...
> It is also possible to terraform Venus
Everything is hypothetical at best regarding this and would require a level of time and resources no government nor company would want to invest for an outstanding "maybe".
>>>It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
I would argue that it is very much opposite. Venus has already 80% mass of Earth. Mars on other hand have not much different gravity than that of Moon and Moon is much closer to Earth if you plan to make something suitable for older folks that look for lighter gravity.
It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
We’ve not terraformed anything, ever, but now we can compare the difficulty of terraforming of one planet versus another? “It’s possible”? So is turning lead into gold.
I said it was possible. “…fleeting quantities of gold nuclei”, and probably worth far, far less than it cost to make. Given that, I stand by my statement. :-)
It shows only the better part but doesn't show the bad part. Poles are divided about usefulness of this uprising, how it was (badly) executed and many believe it was deemed to fail.
The aftermath [1] was that ~220k Poles died and out of that 150-200k civilians, often with mass execution - later on a lot of warsaw population was sometimes bitter toward the uprising’s leadership.
To put it in context: within 2 months 200k people died, similar number like in Hiroshima but almost nobody wordwide know about warsaw uprising.
Someone has a chart somewhere that shows responses in that subreddit getting more and more anti-conciliatory over time. I think it’s online misanthropy (measured by Reddit responses) increasing over time rather than it being objectively never the correct choice.
It doesn't reduce heart attack and stroke. It reduces appetite, kind of, and gives you a sore stomach while making you shit yourself inside out. All this can, with care, help contribute to weight loss.
Weight loss can reduce heart attack and stroke, but GLP-1 does not.
You could also reduce heart attack and stroke risks by not eating crap and going for a walk every so often.
We see risk reduction for heart attack and stroke for people on GLP-1s even without weight loss, which belies the idea that the protection only comes from losing weight.
Edit:
In fact, from the study -
BMI went from 35.86 (Continued) to 34.57 (Discontinued) to 35.48 (Interrupted),
Heart failure percentage was 11.57% for continued use, 12.73% for discontinued, 11.92% for interrupted
NICM went 3.10% for continued, 3.36% for discontinued, 3.31% for interrupted
BMI was higher for the continuing users and they still had lower heart failure and NICM rates than the discontinued and interrupted groups. (Also a bunch of other things including stroke and heart attack but I didn't want to write all of these out)
Have you got a link to the study those figures are actually from? I'm not saying their wrong but I would like to read and understand them for myself before I change my mind.
> BMI went from 35.86 (Continued) to 34.57 (Discontinued) to 35.48 (Interrupted),
So, what, was 35.86 the BMI at the start, 34.57 the BMI when they stopped taking the drug, and 35.48 after some interval?
For someone of a fairly average height, say 1.86 metres (that's a little under how tall I am) a BMI of 35.86 would be 124kg which is ridiculously fat and 34.57 would be around 119.6kg so you're looking at a loss of around 4.5kg or so.
That's a good shit and a haircut, in the grand scheme of things. It's fairly normal for someone's weight to fluctuate by a kilo up or down (a range of 2kg over normal) and not utterly off the map for a range of four kilos on a day-to-day basis, especially in obese people. That's why you're not supposed to keep weighing yourself and obsessing over the weight.
Pretty much every adult fat person has attempted diet and exercise to resolve their weight issue.
Saying they should try this first at this point in the game is like having your support case escalated 5 times already and them saying "have you tried turning it off and on again"
As best as I can tell, people are very attached to having achieved their body weight through whatever means they have determined are valid and derive self value from it, and believe that GLP-1s are cheating to achieve a result they worked harder for.
What you need to understand is there are a lot of people where all they have is being skinny and appearing to be healthy. Without that, there's nothing left for them.
For a long time, there has been a moat that they can use as a justification for why they're better. They can say "well I work hard, I eat right, I put in effort!" The idea that others can achieve that without any of that means... well, they did it all for nothing. In their heads.
The dirty little secret? Many of them don't do any of that, it's just a delusion. Always has been. I'm skinny, you think I go to the gym? Fuck no! I should, but I don't. And I eat whatever I want.
But if a lot of people have to face the reality that their most redeeming quality is nothing of their doing, that would ruin them. Ruin them. They could just, like, get achievements or something but that's hard. Continuing the delusion is easy.
It does reduce your appetite, and for most people have very few side effects. If you get nausea you're titrating up too fast. Most people, because it slows gastric emptying, it doesn't make them shit themselves "inside and out". GLP1s are a decent option for treating ibs-d or bile acid issues and is better tolerated than your bile acid sequesterants.
> You could also reduce heart attack and stroke risks by not eating crap and going for a walk every so often.
This victim blaming advice has been given for decades and obesity rates have been climbing for decades. Only glp-1s have reduced that.
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