masterspace

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

You're talking about the people who lowered a car from a rocket crane onto the surface of another planet, you can be thoughtfully critical, but their technical record has earned them a lot more than surface level dismissal.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

Setting that aside, exploring space is not the same thing as building a company town for the world's least mentally stable pregnancy fetishist oligarch in an unworldly cold desert where everyone is sure to die.

I would argue that the majority of sci-fi has predicted otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Yeah bud, there's also these little shelters called caves.

The author of the article literally guffaws at the prospect of respinning a planet's core when that's not remotely how you would approach that problem.

It would be like writing an article saying "Come on, you believe in vaccines? What, you think a scientist can cut open your individual cells and put antibodies in each one? You really think they have tweezers that small? Get real dum dum."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

The scale of what you just described is really goofy.

The word you're looking for is "big". As in, it embiggens the noblest spirit.

I don’t think it’s feasible to protect a mars-diameter disc of massive magnets from damage by either normal objects traveling through the area or from some human engineered attack.

It's also not possible to protect the ISS from either of those and yet it's operated fine for 30 years. You do not need every little bit of it to be perfect, you just need to deflect enough solar wind that it allows Mars atmosphere to build back up which is what provides the real protection.

If you’re imagining the capacity to create such an emplacement, don’t you imagine that such phenomenal effort and wealth of resources would be better spent solving some terrestrial problem?

Like I said, we waste more resources than that all the time. I'd rather we didn't build yachts and country clubs and private schools, yet we do. There's no reason to not get started building that array, especially if it will take a while.

There’s a real difference between e-waste, which is mostly byproducts of the petroleum refining process with electronic components smeared liberally on, many of which rely on petroleum byproducts themselves and electromagnets, which are, at the scale you’re discussing, massive chunks of metals refined, shaped and organized into configurations that will create magnetic fields when dc is present.

That is not what e-waste is. E-waste primarily consists of silicon chips and the metal wires connecting them. Even the circuit boards themselves are primarily fibre glass, not petroleum.

And no, we wouldn't be creating those using actual magnets, we'd be using electro magnets, which is just coils of wire connected to PV and logic chips.

I quite frankly flat out do not understand why people on the left are so against space exploration suddenly. You know that Elon Musk is not the only billionaire right? And you know virtually that all of them just sit on their wealth, and do nothing with it but wast on luxury lifestyles for themselves right? Yeah it would be better if billionaire's did not exist, but as long as they do, why are you upset about their money going to space exploration as opposed to just yachts and $20,000 a night hotel stays?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (5 children)

No, not really. If we're talking about colonizing a planet, building a bunch of magnets connected to solar panels is not going to be that big or expensive a part of it.

It's also the kind of relatively cheap thing that takes a long time that we may as well get started now. I mean we churn out that much bullshit e-waste constantly for no reason, if we were more focused / more billionaire's money went to that, you might actually be able to get it done.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (7 children)

The rub there is that it's 1-2 Tesla's over the whole cross sectional area of Mars (I believe).

It's not that hard to make a 2 Tesla magnet, but the most powerful electromagnet we've ever made is only 45 Tesla's and even that only produces a 2 Tesla strong field out to 2.8m. So you might be looking at a Mars diameter worth of small magnets.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (9 children)

Solar panels would be my guess, though you can always build a space based nuclear reactor if you can refuel it and get rid of its waste.

It would certainly need a lot more to figure out an actual feasible plan, but I don't think there's anything fundamentally impossible about doing it with today's technology, let alone the future's.

[–] [email protected] 126 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (31 children)

This is a pretty embarassing way to open this article:

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars's dead core? No? Well. It's fine. I'm sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let's discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

NASA legitimately has a plan for this, and no it's not crazy, and no it doesn't involve restarting the core of a planet:

https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html

You just put a giant magnet in space at Mars' L1 Lagrange point (the orbital point that is stable between Mars and the sun), and then it will block the solar wind that strips Mars' atmosphere.

Otherwise cosmic rays etc are blocked and interrupted by the atmosphere, not the magnetosphere.

The confident dismissiveness of the author's tone on a subject that they are (clearly) not an expert in, let alone took the time to google, says all you really need to know about how much you should listen to them.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 days ago

The work is reproduced in full when it’s downloaded to the server used to train the AI model, and the entirety of the reproduced work is used for training. Thus, they are using the entirety of the work.

That's objectively false. It's downloaded to the server, but it should never be redistributed to anyone else in full. As a developer for instance, it's illegal for me to copy code I find in a medium article and use it in our software. I'm perfectly allowed to read that Medium article, learn from it, and then right my own similar code.

And that makes it better somehow? Aereo got sued out of existence because their model threatened the retransmission fees that broadcast TV stations were being paid by cable TV subscribers. There wasn’t any devaluation of broadcasters’ previous performances, the entire harm they presented was in terms of lost revenue in the future. But hey, thanks for agreeing with me?

And Aero should not have lost that suit. That's an example of the US court system abjectly failing.

And again, LLM training so egregiously fails two out of the four factors for judging a fair use claim that it would fail the test entirely. The only difference is that OpenAI is failing it worse than other LLMs.

That's what we're debating, not a given.

It’s even more absurd to claim something that is transformative automatically qualifies for fair use.

Fair point, but it is objectively transformative.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Tell me you've never developed software without telling me you've never developed software.

A closed source binary that is copyrighted and illegal to use, is totally the same thing as a all the trained weights and underlying source code for a neural network published under the MIT license that anyone can learn from, copy, and use, however they want, right guys?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

You said open source. Open source is a type of licensure.

The entire point of licensure is legal pedantry.

No. Open source is a concept. That concept also has pedantic legal definitions, but the concept itself is not inherently pedantic.

And as far as your metaphor is concerned, pre-trained models are closer to pre-compiled binaries, which are expressly not considered Open Source according to the OSD.

No, they're not. Which is why I didn't use that metaphor.

A binary is explicitly a black box. There is nothing to learn from a binary, unless you explicitly decompile it back into source code.

In this case, literally all the source code is available. Any researcher can read through their model, learn from it, copy it, twist it, and build their own version of it wholesale. Not providing the training data, is more similar to saying that Yuzu or an emulator isn't open source because it doesn't provide copyrighted games. It is providing literally all of the parts of it that it can open source, and then letting the user feed it whatever training data they are allowed access to.

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