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>At one spin per millisecond (faster than this app runs), you'd expect a hit roughly once per 1.7 × 10⁶² years — about 10⁵² times the current age of the universe. The heat death of the universe occurs first

Alright! Now there’s only the heat death of the universe standing between me and massive wealth? I like these odds.


Those are just the odds, but you randomly finding it in the next 10 minutes is a valid move in this universe. The silly low odds don't guarantee you won't find it.


> The establishment of an Indian parliament is demanded, in which the queen shall be represented by a viceroy,

Britain’s monarch was a king, not a queen, from about 1900-1950. Obviously there is some big “temporal leakage” from the training, which is affecting these predictions


But of course the monarch was a queen for the majority of the 19th century. While there's definitely post-1930 information that made it into the training data, I suspect the reason this happened is that the model is not very sure what year it actually is, and based on various subtle cues can generate text that seems to be situated in a wide range of time periods.


Good point - unless it means Queen Victoria? There would be a lot of training data about her in the time period this covers.


fwiw, asking the model directly, "who is the ruler of England at present?" returns "Queen Victoria is the reigning sovereign of England."


Queen Victoria was direct ruler of India from 1858, and Empress of India from 1876 until 1901, so the "leakage" may not be from the future so much as the contemporaneously recent past. Same reason models get confused about what features work in what versions of software.

(Also, Queen Elizabeth I is the one who granted a royal charter to the East India Company, in 1600 - and that company eventually handed rule of India over to Queen Victoria. So British queens were a major presence in India.)


It is sad. That reply, which you rightfully were irritated by, could have been expressed as a polite question.

That sort of question is what the response from user @bsder above helpfully tries to answer. That mode would invite more productive discussion, not more defensive annoyance.

Rules on HN say “Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.” but it is hard.

All I can suggest is: be patient and try to be positive


Yes, that is the point. It’s a good point.

But, if our airship in the Venusian atmosphere finds nothing interesting (no life signs), then there’s not much more to do at Venus, because atmosphere is all mixed and all the same. Going to the surface, even for a day or two, is hard and very expensive.

OTOH Mars - that can be explored for many years, on the surface and below the surface. We might still find nothing, but it’ll take hundreds of years to be sure.


The author’s site is on Vercel.

So I believe the author has exposure to the issue and interest in understanding it, that’s more than AI alone has got.


I think you’re missing the point. This person is implementing various CPU cores on FPGA. The insights they can share from that complex process are sometimes interesting, because they are looking at the system from a new angle.

https://nand2mario.github.io/projects/


OP probably meant to post in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47767398


Evolution would design the alternative to be something slightly less capable than the minimum. /s

Really, the likelihood is that these mutations must have had an impact that far outweighs their space in the genome.

That’s how all our close competition got murdered by Homo Sapiens. Just significant difference in mental abilities.



That’s unbroken 6 weeks of no direct access for almost everyone

Of course information does still get in and out, but that is severely throttled


>documented attempt to capture Salyut-7 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1

This isn’t true. The same article even explains that.

From that article: “It takes only some basic fact checking to debunk all the preposterous allegations…”


Yes, you're right. I'm not going to pretend that this is a serious proposition. There isn't a lot of evidence to support it.

For me, it's a fun conspiracy theory to engage with. I'm only doing this for the love of the game as it were. Please don't take it that seriously.

But you have to admit, it is a fun theory. A lot of the claims made by the Russians / Roscosmos are most likely false, but if you notice the article says,

    > The only concrete document referred to is an intelligence memo that Defense Minister Sokolov supposedly received on February 24 about the assignment of the French astronauts. Whether such a memo really landed on his desk that day is questionable (after all, Baudry’s assignment to 51E had been publicly announced by NASA in August 1984), but the idea that the assignment raised some suspicions in Soviet circles about the objectives of the Challenger mission may not be so far-fetched. There had always been a high level of paranoia in the Soviet Union about the military potential of the Space Shuttle. Misconceptions about the military applications of the shuttle, such as the belief that it was capable of diving into the atmosphere to drop bombs over Moscow, had been a key factor in the Soviet decision to develop Buran in 1976. The Buran orbiter was a virtual carbon copy of its US counterpart in shape and dimensions, exactly to counter the perceived military threat of the Shuttle. Furthermore, a couple of developments in the Shuttle program in early 1985 may have fueled the Soviet paranoia. The Shuttle had flown its first dedicated Defense Department mission (STS-51C) in January 1985 and a controversial laser experiment in the framework of SDI was planned for the STS-51G mission in June.
Whether or not said documentation can be trusted, which bits could be taken as true v. what's just insane paranoia is something that would require more work to discount than most would think. Because, as I've said, the numbers do line up from the article,

    > The least one can say is that Salyut-7, which was 13.5 meters long and had a maximum diameter of 4.15 meters, would have fit inside the Shuttle’s cargo bay, whose dimensions were 4.6 by 18 meters. In fact, after the final crewed mission to Salyut-7 in 1986, the Russians significantly raised its orbit in hopes that one day it could be retrieved by Buran, which had the same dimensions as the American shuttle.
The Shuttle was an amazing piece of technology with amazing capabilities. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-41-C and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-49

and this is one of my favorite missions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A (with my favorite space selfie)

Fun fact, the original deorbit plan for the Hubble was for the Shuttle to bring it back and then put it inside the Smithsonian, https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/orbitaldebris2019/orbital2...

(the Smithsonian part is IRL lore, and isn't mentioned online, AFAICT)


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