If I remember correctly, the habitable-ish cloud layers have super-fast winds that circle the planet once every 4 days or so. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_super-rotation
Yeah, but communication is a two-way street. It might not matter to me that my words are unstructured, but it will to the person I'm writing to if they can't make head nor tail of what I'm saying, or worse, misunderstand it as being insulting when it isn't.
There is a whole industry built around [mis-]conception that people will take less offense on the content if it was presented differently. The predictable result is that it is actually rewriting content, not the presentation or tone. No amount of linkedinese corporate fluffery will wash off the core message that people are getting laid off unless you outright hide the message under ambiguity of double-speak like "slimming down operations", which can mean multiple things.
So essentially you have three choices:
1. Spend time writing (or have written by a copywriter) in corporate fluff dialect, where the actual message is still understandable by all parties. At the cost of appearing tone deaf.
2. Spend time reiterating with a bot that speaks some undefined sub-dialect of LLMinese where the reception of the message is unknown. At the cost of appearing even more tone deaf and insulting than a corporate cog.
3. Spend time restructuring message in genuine voice. At the cost of maybe being heard more harshly than intended.
I fail to see how option 2 can be perceived as anything but the worst, unless you assume that the target audience does not distinguish LLMinese from actual speech.
Totally agree. I don't understand why people are averse to working on their communication "soft" skills compared to other "hard" skills. People who find it hard to express themselves have my sympathy but at the same time I'm flabbergasted how they function in a team or in the workplace. Not to mention people for whom English is not the native language treating LLMs like the Star Trek universal communicator instead of helping with language acquisition.
And yeah, I know my tone is harsh and appears to lack empathy and I have only my writing skills to blame and a lack of time. That said I won't be the one to throw it in a LLM for "refinement" otherwise how would I improve? I'm not sure LLMs are to communication as are forklifts to lifting and moving stuff.
As a side note, the general advice regarding code review in my experience was not to take it personally and it's kinda funny to me for reasons I can't pin point how people (like me) have started giving unsolicited advice or criticism in regard to writing when in actuality both (code and writing) reflect personally on the human on the other side of the screen.
Anyway, I pretty much went off on my own tangent here with an apparent lack of empathy to boot but if we end up disregarding such fundamental human skills then what's to stop us from becoming dunces in a few generations? Sure, I'll add another abstraction layer even if it has a lot in common with reading tea leaves because it's not like I manually flip switches to input a program but I'll try my best to keep my individuality where it matters to me, specifically when it comes to expressing myself.
You are contradicting yourself: either presentation is not important so LLM use does not matter (as long as core message is still there), or it is important and and LLM can change how the message is received (by improving presentation or making it worse).
I don't see a contradiction. What they are saying is that no amount of non-ambiguous presentation can make poor content acceptable. They never said the presentation was meaningless.
Example: A friend has died and consolation is given. No amount of consolation makes the death a good thing for you, but there is still a difference in how that consolation is presented to you.
With regards to search engines, Google paid billions of dollars [0] to become the default on major browsers. I guess GP's implying that something similar might happen with LLMs.
Strangely enough, when I enter the "convergence point" book, my cursor gets an American flag, even though it wasn't American before. Has anyone else seen this?
Opinion: We need to move our astronomical observation equipment off of Earth and onto other bodies, especially radio astronomy, which, unlike telescopes that operate in other wavelengths, is still affected by Earth's emissions in LEO/near-Earth space. We should put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon [0] to benefit from the thousands of kilometers of lunar material separating Earth's emissions from telescopes.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the only solution.
However, it has serious disadvantages. It will exclude the poorer from astronomical research, except within the limits enabled by whatever cooperation the richer will be willing to do with them.
For the richer, that will make astronomical research much more expensive. When even USA, who claims to be the richest country, cuts a lot of the scientific funding, this makes likely a great reduction in the research targets that could be accomplished, even if a Lunar array of telescopes and radiotelescopes and communication relays for them were approved.
While professionals might still be able to do some work, the amateurs will be able less and less to enjoy the sight of the distant Universe.
There are already many years since I have become unable to see the sky that I enjoyed looking at when young, because it cannot be seen from the city where I live, due to light pollution (and high buildings). To see it again, I would have to go somewhere up in the mountains, far from a city or village, but I have not succeeded to do this recently. Even there now you can hardly look at the sky without seeing satellites, and it will only become much worse.
Nowadays there are many children who have never seen even once the sky that our ancestors were seeing every night, so many passages from old texts that mention the sky are unintelligible for them.
> It will exclude the poorer from astronomical research, except within the limits enabled by whatever cooperation the richer will be willing to do with them.
Isn't it the case that most astronomical research uses source data from large telescopes and sky surveys? An example is the Rubin Science Platform [0] which makes available images and metadata from the Rubin Observatory along with compute and APIs?
I get what you're saying, but poor people want cheap internet/phone connectivity. They can't afford telescopes anyways.
And starlink (and the like) have more uses beyond good remote connectivity. They're a big reason why Ukraine didn't lose to Russia. They're also a potential avenue for people in oppressed nations to talk to the rest of the world (eg: Iran has a death penalty for starlink usage to counter this point).
> Our telescopes actually need the (or at least an) atmosphere to function.
What about Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, JWST, etc? As of my understanding, the only reason we haven't built radio and and other long-wave telescopes in space is because of their impractical size preventing them from being deployed in orbit.
> There are some classes of observatories, which you cannot build in space but which are still affected by satellites to some degree.
This shows that wavelengths between ~10cm and ~10m are largely unaffected by the atmosphere, so you wouldn't gain much from putting receivers of those wavelengths in space. Spitzer and JWST (IR), and Chandra (x-ray) operate in bands that are generally blocked by the atmosphere, and Hubble gets better images than a similarly sized earth-based telescope because of the atmospheric distortion (stars don't "twinkle" when you're in space), however there are still earth-based visible light telescopes because you can more easily build a massive one on earth than in space
Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes, we detect optical light emitted by high energy particle Cascades in the atmosphere to observe cosmic gamma radiation.
The particles need the atmosphere to interact, Cherenkov light is only emitted in an optical medium and because it's optical light we measure we are affected by satellites. Not as strongly as optical telescopes though, because the air showers last for only tens of nanoseconds.
What? The atmosphere gets in the way. Ever heard of an (amateur/)astronomer talking about 'good seeing'? That's when the atmosphere is hindering you less than usual.
The limiting factor of passive optical telescopes on earth is the atmosphere.
IMO, everyone that launches/operates a constellation should pay for launch of large telescope every 5-10 years (assuming science organizations can fund/build them).
Sure, there have already been some launched and predictably they are only adequate to look at the bright stuff we already knew about from the big telescopes.
A small telescope is just a small telescope even when you put it in space.
> . We should put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon [0] to benefit from the thousands of kilometers of lunar material separating Earth's emissions from telescopes.
Do you really think a starlink style installation won't be put in orbit of the moon before such a telescope could be funded?
Those rules won't last long once (IF) there are significant numbers of people on the moon. The rules are easy to agree to today (50 years ago) because nobody could do anything otherwise anyway. Once the rules are getting in the way of a significant number of people they will change.
I make no predictions how they will change, but the current rules are obviously unworkable if significant numbers of people live in space. I also make no predictions on if we will ever get significant numbers of people living in space - there are a lot of hard/expensive problems that may not be solvable.
Starlinks are already spewing out into supposedly protected radio bands on Earth, good look getting these rules respected on the Moon when they aren't here.
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