self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4hr ago
I'd chalk it down to post-COVID hypersensitivity. It's not like those years have faded from popular memory or discourse, and another scary-sounding viral outbreak can be reasonably expected to get many people going.
I'm not worrying about it. Less because I've done the kind of review that @Throwaway05 might have done (I know very little about HV beyond the high mortality rate and proven H2H and zoonotic transmission), and more because I'm tired boss.
Living through one global pandemic and then the overzealous measures around it was enough for me. Even if there's a new outbreak, until it gets much, much worse than Covid ever did, I'll still have to come into work. Perks of being an essential worker.
If we've got neo-Ebola-plus-plus, then I might seriously consider taking a career break and sitting indoors. Like, >2% CFRs for my reference class is my standard for "oh dear", and if it crosses 10%, I'm handing in my badge and going to the Winchester to wait for it blow over.
Otherwise, I'll start caring when we're talking >10k people infected, in multiple countries, in the span of a month or two. Caring isn't the same as doing anything in particular, that's just my personal threshold for sitting up and taking proper notice.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4hr ago
or live among rodents
Bay Area LessWrongians most affected.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6hr ago
Excuse you? My taste in women is cosmopolitan, even if I have a particular weakness for thick thighs. Breasts? As long as they're bigger than mine, the primary consideration is whether they let me touch 'em.
For your viewing pleasure:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Y5KVtU810
doomed to eternity
Eternity? Yay!
in hell
Oh. Not too bad. That's where my friends are going to be. I'll ask to be cremated with an air conditioner.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
I will hasten to point out that that was a joke, or at least 99% a joke. It might slightly amuse me to go attend a Mormon sermon if I'm very bored, but I'm not looking to be converted. I don't particularly want to be converted either. I wouldn't go there to pick a fight, I'd sit there quietly, be honest about my opinions if asked, and maybe learn something. I've been to Protestant sermons before, because my school used to be run by missionaries (technically, the religious indoctrination was half-arsed and quarter-hearted). Mormons though? It would be interesting to see what they're doing in there firsthand.
I think it's a significantly more inoffensive/benign alternative to kookier religions like Scientology, because I wouldn't even consider intentionally showing up to one of those gigs. Mormons seem like decent people, despite my strong reservations about the factual merit of their beliefs.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
I'm genuinely sorry to hear that, and I'm not being sarcastic. For what it's worth I believe I try to be extra polite when talking to you in particular, even if I'm willing to acknowledge that I can be slightly tetchy when ticked off. Can I really change that? I don't know. I have tried, I hope you believe me when I say that.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Either RKVs are dangerous enough that you should expand out in space as quickly as possible to defend yourself against them because people will fire them off indiscriminately, or they aren't actually all that dangerous and so there's no rush to expand. We both seem to agree that firing off RKVs isn't actually all that great of a strategy, so it doesn't make sense to try to be grabby specifically to survive RKVs.
That is a very false dichotomy. RKVs are existentially threatening to a planet-bound civilization in a way they simply aren't to a K1+ one, both because the latter has its own countermeasures and deterrence, and because dispersing across enough volume makes comprehensive eradication prohibitively expensive.
RKVs are also not made equal, any more than a Stinger and an ICBM are interchangeable because they're both missiles. You can go from planet-killer to whatever the limit of your launch infrastructure allows. You can modulate speed, switch from a single projectile to a macron gun, have the projectile intentionally disintegrate, switch to MIRV mode at terminal phase, etc etc. You're also not limited to RKVs or Nicoll-Dyson beams. Ultrarelativistic electron beams are perfectly nasty in their own right.
So yes, they're dangerous enough that you'd want to grow, and a sufficiently advanced civilization can also harden itself. Both can be true.
RKV defense
I don't dispute that more advanced civilizations can substantially harden themselves. That's half my argument. I do dispute that a dust shield is anything close to insurmountable, because, as I mentioned, a macron gun is literally relativistic dust. Seriously. The defenses that make a "durable" interstellar craft viable apply right back: laser sweeps, sacrificial forward drones, extended Whipple shields, etc. Disintegrating an incoming RKV is also not a guaranteed solution; it depends on how far out you intercept and how massive and fast the projectile is. It's worse than trying to blow up an asteroid with a nuke, because the debris cone can do nearly as much damage as the intact projectile.
Uhhh, here's what I in fact said
I know about black holes as propulsion mechanisms and as power plants. My point was that you don't need to make one yourself; you can just co-opt one if it's close enough. If.
Sure, and this might have already happened and we just don't happen to know it!
The whole content of GAH is that it predicts visible, persistent signatures. "It already happened invisibly" collapses straight back into the masking argument and inherits the same thermodynamic problem, so let me deal with both at once.
you likely also have the technical means to trivially prevent planets you've detected with biosignatures from noticing via selective emissions or laser masking
I have grave reservations about this being feasible at scale, and you're getting an awful lot for free here. A Dyson swarm has to dump waste heat somewhere. To mask it, you'd need either to redirect that heat away from every potentially-observing system in real time (which fails on light-cone delay alone, since you can't react to observers you don't yet know exist), or to eat leakage that scales with swarm size. At galactic scale that gets prohibitive fast. Selective emission masking also presupposes tracking every civilization in your light-cone with biosignatures, in advance, which is strictly harder than detecting them in the first place.
Project Hephaistos is actually informative here, and you're the one who mentioned it as a technosignature candidate in the first place. The fact that we can flag mid-IR excess candidates around individual M-dwarfs at galactic distances, and that the follow-up work suggests background Hot DOGs explain the contamination rather than masking failures, all of which tells you the detection floor is low. Hiding swarm-scale waste heat isn't a free lunch you can hand-wave. That is a ridiculous amount of engineering effort, for not very good reason. We don't hide the ISS from uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, even though we are actively trying not to contact them.
VNRs are considerably more complex and far-fetched than solar-sails, and, just like separatist expeditions into space, an inherently dangerous technology that a smart civilization would think twice before launching.
GAH only needs one civilization, anywhere, in the entire history of the observable universe, to launch them. If 99.9% of species are too cautious or too sensible or too risk-averse, the remaining 0.1% fills the lightcone. That was my "all it takes is one defector" point earlier, and it applies equally hard here. You're implicitly demanding universal restraint without admitting that you are, and "every species coordinates on the same restraint forever" is the part of your argument that I or anyone else familiar with Hanson would strenuously object to.
"Grabby aliens" is only one path out of thousands for a society to take, and the fact that we have not observed it being taken is not particularly strong evidence that it hasn't happened, let alone that the other thousands of options have not been pursued.
Pointing out that it's "one path out of thousands" is sloppy reasoning. There are an unbounded number of paths from my bed to the living room. I could climb out the window. I could head out the front door, catch a flight to Singapore, then another to Djibouti, come back in a bus and grab lunch on the way. But what would I actually do? Walk there. It's 10 seconds away.
The strength of GAH is that the absence of the signatures it predicts genuinely is strong evidence, because the assumption set is minimal. All you need is: STL interstellar travel is possible, and at least some civilizations will use available resources over geological timescales. That's it. Non-trivial amounts of time have passed since metallicity was sufficient for life to form. So either nobody is out there, or every single civilization in the lightcone independently converged on some elaborate restraint or hiding strategy.
The speed of light allows for cross-temporal sampling. We know what's happened in our galaxy in the last few tens of thousands of years, and we can see billions of years back. That's a lot of data.
The alternatives all require multiple, often jointly held assumptions about alien psychology, technology, or coordination. Aestivation needs everyone to also forgo currently available resources while they wait. Dark Forest needs a workable hiding strategy plus universal adoption. Fodor's intraterrestrials need every civilization to virtualize and also forgo probes. Masking needs a thermodynamic miracle plus universal adoption plus advance detection of every observer. The fewer joint assumptions, the better the explanation, and "no one is here yet" is just the cheapest fit.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
If you're talking about the Motte vs 4chan and Reddit? Yes. Vinge's work is great scifi, but not a good model for cosmology or technological forecasting. He says so himself, it's just an interesting plot conceit.
You just made a big long argument that RKVs are so cheap that you could sterilize the entire universe but also that RKVs aren't cheap enough to destroy every possible outpost made by a civilization that made something as obvious as a Dyson sphere.
Sterilizing planets is cheap. Particularly if you focus on potentially habitable planets, preferably before they show signs of intelligent life.
A K1+ civilization is a little more resistant to bleach. They can pack their bags and move to lower-rent neighborhoods like the local Oort, and which makes total eradication a real pain.
You are no longer aiming for a single planet in a system, assuming your terminal guidance allows for that. Now you've got to kill every asteroid, every orbital, every stealthed facility running cold, probably every rogue planet in the vicinity. Good fucking luck if they're multi-system. And if they've got VNRs, AGI/ASI? Sorry. You'll need to really up the budget or send your own berserkers.
To illustrate. Let's assume a civilization 200 ly away picks up Hitler's broadcast and decides they don't like the mustache. They fire an RKV at 99.9% of c. It'll get to Earth, at the earliest, somewhere past 2340. The solar system will look very different by them, assuming we haven't exterminated ourselves.
Now, setting aside the fact that this does actually explain the Fermi paradox (a prior civilization targeted every planet that was then capable of supporting life) you completely failed to address the downsides of spamming RKVs in universe where there may be civilizations that can produce RKVs: they are 1. likely noticeable because of the heat signature produced by relativistic speeds, even against interstellar particles, and 2. very easy to intercept with other RKVs or lightspeed weapons, and 3. not likely to be reliable against targets at long ranges because any minute error (including errors introduced by unexpected gravitational forces during the intervening travel time) will cause it to miss.
I am extremely confused by accusations that I haven't addressed the downsides of indiscriminate RKV spam, particularly if you're targeting systems with budding civilizations or near-peers. Given the speed of light is a rather hard limit, there's every chance they've grown up in the span of time between detection and terminal effect. That gap could be anywhere from decades to millennia, depending on fast the RKVs are.
Hang on a moment. You are quite possibly the first person who has told me that it's "very easy" to intercept RKVs. Citations please. As I've mentioned elsewhere, a sufficiently fast RKV will appear barely any time after the light that came off it. There's scope for (minor) evasive maneuvers, better versions of MIRVs, just going fuck it and exploding early to turn into a macron gun.
In particular, point 3 assumes zero terminal guidance, which is... a bold demand to make. It's hard to steer relativistic projectiles, of course, but not impossible.
And then there are Nicoll-Dyson beams. If you can build one, GG to whoever tries to block them. You can reach across a whole galaxy with ease.
Also, if someone was sterilizing every potential life bearing planet in the Milky Way, I think we wouldn't be having this conversation. At the bare minimum, we haven't been hit.
Why would you collect resources when the universe will do it for you? Stars won't be very energy rich near the heat death of the universe, but Sagittarius A* isn't going anywhere, and will likely continue to grow until after the stars burn out (remember, black holes can grow from cosmic background radiation), until the expansion of the universe places all objects and radiation beyond its gravitational reach forever. You could park yourself in orbit and run calculations off of a black hole (which emits tremendous amounts of radiation as it consumes matter, and tiny amounts as Hawking radiation) for an
Uh... What about all the photons that stars are busy wasting right now? At the bare minimum, you should harvest that. Maybe make kugelblitzes with a Nicoll-Dyson beam, if you're more inclined towards civilian applications. Dyson swarms can be dual use.
The main objection to this plan is that the Hawking radiation output on a supermassive black hole is too negligible to power anything, but I am not sure this holds true if we are orbiting near the event horizon with our Dyson swarm, due to time dilation. (Also you get fried with gamma radiation when the black hole collapses, but whatever, surely you've finished your big math problem or whatever by then.)
You forget that you can extract rotational energy from existing black holes with remarkable efficiency (compared to most power sources). It's easy. You just have to drop mass in the right way. Plenty of papers on black hole farming out there. You don't even need to make one yourself, you can happily appropriate the closest one if you can get to it.
You don't have to wait till they shrink and emit significant Hawking radiation. If you do, you're waiting a very, very long time. The Aestivation hypothesis fails because you don't see any of the infrastructure work you need before that wait makes sense.
Fodor explicitly discusses this, which tells me you've dismissed his take as "braindead" without bothering to read it (which you can do here).
I have read it. I found a Medium post. I still think it has severe hypoxic brain damage.
I would argue that you actually have to accept that most species will pursue ~limitless resources that they don't need, which is a harder pill to swallow. If we assume as a default that most species have no access to contraceptives, this makes sense. But if something like the human experience is the default, we can expect most species to grow slowly if at all by the time they need to colonize other worlds because they will be able to control their own reproduction, and they will not maximize the pursuit of energy resources simply for its own sake (we certainly do not do this on Earth). They will have zero reason to construct anything like Dyson sphere, as they will have no need for the energy. Furthermore, colonizing other star systems without cracking the lightspeed barrier is a very dangerous idea, for obvious reasons: your first concern shouldn't be aliens, but members of your own species developing their own culture in a technologically advanced parallel socio-political environment. No sane species would permit this by default without some sort of constraints. We should expect most species to, at least while their star is still burning, to centralize their civilization around their star system, which will have enough resources for practically limitless numbers of their society without anything besides modest engineering (such as space habitats), and actively inhibit attempts to leave by would-be splinter societies.
Oh god. I'm genuinely disappointed, and I don't say this for the sake of insulting you. You really, really underestimate how important selection pressure or exponential growth is. Consider humanity. All it takes is a single person with a dream, like Elon Musk, to move forward timelines by decades. VNRs are trivial to the kinds of civilizations we're discussing. Nominal population doesn't matter, especially when we consider robotics or AGI.
Your argument must be true for every civilization.For its entire history till the present. One defector, in one galaxy a million ly away? They'd have eaten the whole thing and sent probes and VNRs our way.
Even a very, very low rate of growth can take over galaxies in what is the barest fraction of the time that has passed since the universe formed, even counting since the earliest plausible eras for life to form - when metallicity was sufficient. We have billions of years to work with.
You demand that every civilization convergently decides to become a hermit. They is really not a good argument.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
If I've moved to Utah, it's been more damp than I expected. These are export-grade Mormons, perhaps they've been through stricter QC than is the norm. Or God is putting an uncommon degree of effort into the sales pitch. I deserve it. I've seen some shit.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
What even is going on around Iran? Haven't seen anything crop up in my feed for the past 2-3 weeks, which I'm taking as a sign that things have died down even though there's no official end to the hostilities. Is it just a double blockade now, with both sides playing chicken?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
The Dark Forest is a terrible explanation. Others have written on the matter before, and I'd advise you look that up first. If not, I will address that in detail. In fact, I've written it up
The Dark Forest theory just doesn't make sense on its own terms.
A civilization with access to exponential self-replicating probes is very hard to eradicate. The offense and defense equations change drastically when the latter have massive advantages in mass as well as the ability to disperse.
Further, it doesn't take imaging technology much better than ours to spot biosignatures from the other side of the galaxy. An inferometric telescope maybe an AU across in terms of effective lens size would work just fine. With better modeling, you could simply predict which planets are likely to be habitable, and then RKV the fuck out of them a few hundred million years before they develop multicellular life.
You can launch from distant outposts, outside the galactic plane even, a delay of decades or centuries means nothing on those time scales. No need to make your own system the obvious target. But in return, any civilization close to a Type 2 in terms of energy budget has the ability to sterilize the galaxy and barely notice the expense. They're also likely so dispersed and decentralized with off world outposts and robotic manufacturing and infrastructure that simply blowing up their home planet or razing it with a Nicoll-Dyson beam would only be a mild inconvenience. And there's no way to hide when you have one of those, that we know of.
If there were highly advanced and malevolent civilizations lurking out there, barring truly out there technologies and an implausible ability to cover their tracks in terms of emissions and signatures from before they knew how to start hiding or even the ability to do so, then there is simply no sense in trying to hide.
You should aim to get as big as possible, as fast as possible, if your Von Neumanns arrive at a system that's actually home to a hiding super-civilization, well they'd have found you first, but that's a problem tens of thousands of light years away. If they RKV you, so fucking what, you've got outposts past the Oort and can amass teratons of fuck-you in return. Your best bet is signaling that you're too big to fuck with, and the only way to get there is to grow.
Thankfully it seems that we're alone in the galaxy or even the cluster, unless there's very good reason why civs would have access to energy sources even more abundant than nuclear fusion and also coincidentally ignore all the lovely stars left free to waste theirs.
You can't hide. You can run. You can make them regret it. If you spot techno signatures across the galaxy, better be sure they won't be capable of sending RKVs back, but that's an acceptable cost, and in the meantime you need to rush for all the empty real estate.
Aestivation makes sense if you've already collected all the resources you can, tidied them up for longterm storage, and can sit tight till the universe cools down and you can exploit the Landauer limit in peace. If you see the stars still burning, that ain't working. You'd expect widespread star-lifting or intentional gravitational engineering. Aestivation without collecting resources? That's like putting $5 in the bank when you're a child and then hoping that works as your retirement fund. You need a job, or you should have a job.
Fodor's take is braindead. Yeah, sure, we can digitize and live in VR. Doesn't stop space probes and VNRs from being sent out. That is the default expectation.
Grabby Aliens is enormously parsimonious and makes minimal claims about motivations. All you need to accept is that STL interstellar colonization is possible, and that most species would want more resources, especially if they're easy to acquire. The beautiful thing is that you can turn the knobs and make things way more expensive or slow, and that doesn't change the bigger picture. There's been plenty of time to start the grab, and there's no evidence that even one civilization in the entire visible cosmos has started the process. All it takes is one.
Thanks for taking the time to explain! I can't productively engage with the specifics, but I appreciate the effort nonetheless.
We do not view coffee as a biohazard. I myself love drinking mock coffee made from barley and chicory and popping some caffeine pills, twice as potent as real coffee 😉 Tiramisu and coffee ice cream are superlative. We believe that upon our baptism, we have covenanted with God to abstain from coffee and tea as a sacrifice, similar to the Jewish abstention to shellfish which is not rooted in health grounds. I don't think it's a coincidence that tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco are all "rituals" served by hosts to guests in hospitality, transcending cultural barriers. There are obvious benefits to not partaking in substances like alcohol, but by refusing them and making ourselves stick out like sore thumbs in the crowd, it's a way of subliminally attracting publicity to our gospel.
Hmm. I understand the mindset, but it doesn't really appeal to me. Or at least I like tea and coffee too much to sacrifice it for anyone, even God. If he didn't want me to drink the stuff, he shouldn't have made extracted insecticide so delicious and compatible with my neurotransmitter receptors. Then again, he does have a tendency to make plants you're not supposed to eat, and then putting them right next to you with not so much as a chainlink fence for protection. It's in character.
I do believe that your current explanation is idiosyncratic, in the sense that the typical Mormon wouldn't see caffeine pills as an acceptable way of dodging their nominal religious obligations. I respect you for that, of course. Very Jewish coded, and I like Jews. Anyone who bases their theology around arguing with God and sometimes winning that argument (Rabbi Eliezer?) has my vote.
Out of curiosity, what would happen if someone were to get baptized, and then very conspicuously continue drinking coffee? Polite tutting? The Bishop grabbing you by the collar and throwing you out? A Dyson hand dryer (as opposed to the swarm) being used to un-baptize you? I don't know! It's an academic question, I like drugs in general, for personal consumption and as a peddler for pay. I don't know any Mormon doctors, but I wouldn't want to be one on a night shift.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
"We can say confidently there's no aliens because we looked for one extremely difficult to build megastructure of questionable plausibility, found multiple potential matches and we're pretty sure one of them is explained by a natural occurrence" is just a bad argument. I would bet every single one of these SETI findings is due to some natural occurrence, but that doesn't make the argument good!
The real argument, at least the one I have implicitly and explicitly made, is that we need a good explanation for why there's such an abundance of untapped negentropy in the wider universe, which would be extremely unlikely if there was a civilization out there with even a minor (in geological terms) headstart on us.
As any good Bayesian will tell you, an absence of evidence constitutes evidence of absence. It's not "proof" of absence (that nonsense is for Popperians), but the more you should reasonably expect to see something and then not see it, the more questions that raises.
You should know very well that even STL interstellar colonization is well within the reach of civilizations not that much more energetically or technologically advanced than us. We don't see it. Every single candidate we look at closer turns out to be a bust. I've shared a few examples, but that's not an exhaustive overview, there are other discussions I didn't link to. The point is that "almost certainly not aliens" is clearly true for technosignature claims. If there are any examples where we haven't conclusively proven otherwise so far, it's exceedingly likely that there's a boring explanation. Not aliens.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I should really ask my patients to follow me on Twitter. F4F life.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
No it's not, you can e.g. decelerate from nearly .5C over the course of about 20 years with a magnetic sail.
That is a better argument than most. I will concede that even JWST probably couldn't detect the thermal signatures, assuming the craft coasted in after doing the bulk of the braking by 10 AU away.
This is an odd objection to me given that the "aliens" in the conventional narrative supposedly act exactly as humans do towards, say, apes (trying to observe them discreetly but slipping up in embarrassing ways, occasionally knocking them out with mysterious weapons and taking biopsy samples or tagging them, doing hybridization experiments, etc.) and if anything that seems suspiciously anthropomorphic. It seems to me we should expect aliens to behave weirdly, if they were truly from a distant world in some way.
You should posit motivations that constrain expectations better than just "they might behave weirdly". We're still requiring a model of alien psychology that has to reconcile some very questionable behavior, conditioning on the observations actually being of something alien.
Why are they here? If they are here, why do they act in a manner that's just at or below the threshold for robust detection by our ever-improving detection capabilities?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Ahem :
We present high-resolution e-MERLIN and EVN (e-VLBI) observations of a radio source associated with Dyson Sphere candidate G, identified as part of Project Hephaistos. The radio source, VLASS J233532.86−000424.9, is resolved into three compact components and shows the typical characteristics of a radio-loud active galactic nucleus (AGN). In particular, the European VLBI Network (EVN) observations show that it has a brightness temperature in excess of K. No radio emission is detected at the position of the M-dwarf star. This result confirms our earlier hypothesis, that at least some of the Dyson Sphere candidates of project Hephaistos are contaminated by obscured, background AGN, lying close to the line of sight of otherwise normal galactic stars. High-resolution radio observations of other Dyson Sphere candidates can be useful in distinguishing truly promising candidates from those contaminated by background sources.
And even before the SETI article:
However, a trawl of several million potentially-habitable Gaia-detected stars for mid-IR-excess signatures is fraught with danger, due to both noise from such a large sample and, more importantly, confusion with the emission from dusty background galaxies.
Need I remind you that we shouldn't be looking for "just" a single Dyson swarm candidate? A civilization with the technology to build even one should be in the process of a Grabby Alien takeover of the lightcone. You'd want to see a roughly spherical wave of expansion, perhaps including swarms-in-progress.
Do I think "we haven't spotted any candidates for technosignatures, so there aren't any" is a good argument when we have spotted candidates for technosignatures? No, not really.
When the technosignatures, scrutinized closely, overwhelmingly tend to turn out to be well explained by natural phenomena? Yeah. We ought to check, because it's cheap and possibly quite important if we detect something real, but expectations should be very, very low if you're modeling things sensibly.
Look dude. I'll say it again, that's just the way I talk. There is no malice behind it, at worst it's a textual tic or an expression of mild exasperation. If you find it that unbearable, well, that's a shame. Take care.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Absolutely. But it was using Spotify's own metrics to assess popularity, and ran the scripts to collate those figures. We're talking evidence-based, rigorous, scientific glazing. At that point, it's not sycophancy, it's acknowledgement of my clear superiority over other mortals when it comes to diversity in musical taste.
Am I forgetting how light works? Some schmucks somewhere could have invented a superintelligence and started doing whatever ten-thousand years ago and there'd only be a little 20kly diameter bubble around us where we'd notice even if they were blowing up the universe.
If there's a "little" 20kly diameter bubble out there, I promise you we'd see that pretty well. We'd know by now.
Notice what even a mere 20,000 years of existence as rapidly hegemonizing interstellar civilization can achieve. Of course, by the time we see them, it's probably been much longer. And there might be massive civilizations taking over whole clusters we wouldn't know about for another million years. They're far away, if they exist. Their visual absence even with potential billion year headstarts suggests they don't exist.
I mean I'm not going in for aliens being real until somebody plunks down some real evidence or Gleep Glorp comes down and shakes my hand, but this stuff isn't satisfying. You're way too sure no canoe could ever cross the great sea.
The hell? I never disputed that interstellar travel is possible. It's perfectly plausible, the problem is that the civilizations that could launch them are nowhere to be seen. I'm also just saying that it's expensive, it's not very easy to hide, and if you do go to all that bother, then you wouldn't be as incompetent as your friendly neighborhood UFOs of alleged alien origin. If you have a K2 in the Milky Way, we might see it now. That would be a very unusual star, though a distant or occluded one might escape our scopes. If they came from even further away, what have they been up to, signing up with galactic HOA and agreeing to leave all the stars unmolested?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Wow, an LLM told you you had unique and discerning taste? Incredible!
Heh. Claude isn't sycophantic enough to do that. I declared that I have unique and discerning taste.
DJ Claudify
I've been meaning to try this for ages, but kept being too lazy to bother. There's a website called Exportify that dumps your saved Spotify playlists into a csv. The setup is painless: approve access, no suspicious permissions, and you walk away with every track you've ever saved alongside metadata like timestamps and Spotify's own popularity scores.
I exported the lot. I don't really do dedicated playlists; my method is to encounter a song I like, save it on the spot, or, on rare occasions, find something decent on the recommended page. The result is a library in strict chronological order, where almost every track carries temporal and emotional baggage. Here's the song I was listening to during a breakup. That's the one that was playing when I first stepped off the plane in Scotland. Consistency and curation are for try-hards; if I don't like what's playing I queue something better, or jump down the list.
I fed the csv to Opus 4.7 and ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking and asked them to chart my mood and vibes over time. Both did remarkably well, well past reading tea leaves. Then I asked for recommendations, ideally things I hadn't heard before.
From Claude:
"176 tracks in your library have a Spotify popularity score of zero. 244 sit below 10. About a quarter of your library is essentially invisible to the algorithm. Names like Chikoi The Maid, Holy Fawn, Suave Punk, Caleb Bryant, Mokadelic show up there. Meanwhile your highest-popularity saves are exactly the global hits everyone agrees on (Blinding Lights, I Wanna Be Yours, Espresso, deja vu, Hey Ya, 505). That bimodal shape tells me you save the songs everyone agrees on and you save the songs almost no one knows, with a thinner middle than most people have."
Yeah Boi. I can out-hipster the hipsters, I listen to songs and genres you people have never even heard of. All while not predicating my personality around it, because I do listen to normal, human music. Sabrina Carpenter? You've heard of her.
Both delivered. Claude was a touch better, with something like a 50% hit rate by recommendation-to-save ratio. Better than any human I know. Better than Spotify's own recommendations, which is the part that surprised me. Spotify has spent over a decade and presumably a small country's GDP building a hybrid recommender that fuses collaborative filtering, raw audio analysis via convolutional nets, and NLP over reviews and metadata. They have every play, skip, save, and 30-second-bailout from half a billion users.
In other words, they try pretty hard.
And yet a model that has never heard a single waveform is beating them on my library, presumably because it's drawing on the entire written corpus of human music criticism: every RateYourMusic thread, every Pitchfork review, every breathless Reddit comment about a B-side. Collaborative filtering also has a pull toward the popular middle, which an LLM doesn't share, since it isn't trained on user-item interaction logs at all.
Easy chronology probably helps too. Spotify mostly sees a bag of vectors with timestamps; a language model can read your library as a story and notice when the vibe shifts.
You should try it. It helps to give honest, immediate feedback on what works and what doesn't. A sampler:
"Avril sounds like something they'd play in an aquarium that sprang a leak. It's definitely for someone, I'm not sure if that someone is me."
"Blink sounds like elevator music on ketamine. A maybe?"
"Loretta fucked my ear canal and got it pregnant. Instant add."
"Mona Lisa can stay in the museum."
"Vapour has a lot going on. Someone else can get it on, fucking hell, there are notes in there that are best appreciated by a cat."
"Catamaran sounds like it was recorded inside a toilet. From the adjacent stall. Miss."
"Mountains isn't bad, but it's for a very moody teen girl, or a middle aged woman going through a divorce/mid life crisis. Close but no cigar. Sigh. I'll add it anyway."
The whole experience was unreasonably pleasant, especially given that I'm not even sure Claude can ingest audio, or was meaningfully trained on music samples. The rest of you are getting mogged by a blind deaf entity that lives in a computer. I added something like 20 songs over the hour, which is a ridiculous number against my usual rate of about one a week.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Thanks! I'm comparing myself to the other trainees when it comes to test scores and I think I'm slightly ahead on net. Not by the margin where I can take my foot off the gas, but I think I have an honest shot. If not, I'll be mad about breaking a lifelong streak of never failing any exam (of actual importance), but that's not the end of the world.
Look dude. You're not telling me anything really new, I've already explained that the kind of big, impossible to miss, incontrovertible and dramatic evidence that would make me sit up straight and take this more seriously. If Oumuamua deployed radiators and then settled into a parking orbit, I wouldn't be making this argument.
Anything less than that moves the needle by negligible amounts. It's one more floppy disk at best, against the mountain that is the other evidence suggesting the wider evidence is empty, or that if the aliens do exist, they have to remarkably stupid/incompetent.
In short, I think this is a massive waste of time. Not the search for aliens, in general. They might be out there. We might spot a K2 in Andromeda or something. Maybe someone is laying the foundation on a new Dyson swarm, which will affect property prices and escalate the race for the light cone. I'll believe it when I see it. We should keep spending some money on observing the cosmos in detail. But if you're looking on Earth, with evidence this scanty, with a claim this enormous? I'm not moved, the lever isn't long enough.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Of course. But that's only like half the nominal weighting on the test. Maybe 2/3rds. I imagine there's enormous overlap there, but that's one area where the SPMM notes haven't failed me nearly as badly. It's harder to bungle copy-pasting NICE/BAP guidelines.
Not that I would really have the time either way.
I gave it a very fair shake and was mostly disappointed. The prose leans purple, the protagonist is... okay, but "quirky" in a manner I do not find charming. He's painfully earnest, and the feral child being resocialized deal overstays its welcome. It's been long enough that I've forgotten much of my criticism, but I'd describe it as a mid novel at best.
That's a shame, because To The Far Shore is up there in terms of novels I've read on RR. Post-post-apocalyptic Oregon Trail, with radiation magic and fallen civilizations rediscovering muskets and the ruins of hyper-advanced civilizations that came before? You bet I enjoyed it.
Both are by the same guy, which is annoying. It means Warby can write. He just can't write this.
Consider the starts. Mazelton begins media res, he arrives at TTFS ready to fire: paranoid Ma assassin with an almost pathological lack of empathy, an inventory of opinions about everyone in the room, instincts honed by a clan that treated "eat carrion if you must" as parenting advice.
Tian arrives with nothing. The opening arc is the author manually installing a soul, one trauma-recovery beat at a time, and the prose is straining for emotional registers the protagonist can't yet supply. That's where the purple comes from. Lavender adjectives are what you reach for when your POV character is still booting up.
Xianxia compounds it. The genre wants a genuinely virtuous MC so cultivation breakthroughs feel earned, which makes "sweet boy from the trash heap" the obvious play. It is also rather played-out in the genre, and once Tian commits, his available range is roughly Pure to Slightly Less Pure. The supporting cast keeps trying to drag him somewhere more interesting. They were losing, when I gave up on it.
More options
Context Copy link