gerikson

Except the people selling expensive PCs.

Good news everyone, there's 2 bonkers pieces about the stars and the galaxy on LW right now!

Here's a dude very worried about how comets impacting the sun could cause it to flare and scorch the earth. Nothing but circumstantial evidence, and GenAI researched to boot. Appeared in the EA forum as part of their "half-baked ideas" amnesty

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9gAksZ25wbvfS8FAT/a-new-global-risk-large-comet-s-impact-on-sun-could-cause

The only thing I'd note about this is that even if the comet strikes along the plane of eliptic (not an unreasonable assumption), the planet would still have to be exactly in the right place for this assumed plume of energy to do any damage. And if it hits the Sahara or the Pacific, NBD presumably.

(Edit turns out the above is just the abstract, the full piece is here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OHgc7Q4git6OfDNTE_TDf9fFNgrEEnCUfnPMIwbK3vg/edit?usp=sharing)

Then there's this person looking really far ahead into how to get energy from the universe

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YC4L5jxHnKmCDSF9W/some-astral-energy-extraction-methods

Tying galaxies together: Anchor big rope to galaxies as they get pulled apart by dark matter. Build up elastic potential energy which can be harvested. Issue: inefficient. [...] Not clear (to me) how you anchor rope to the galaxies.

Neutrino capture: Lots of neutrinos running around, especially if you use hawking radiation to capture mass energy of black holes. So you might want to make use of them. But neutrinos are very weakly interacting, so you need dense matter to absorb their energy/convert them to something else. Incredibly dense. To stop one neutrino with lead you need 1 lightyear of matter, with a white dwarf you need an astronomical unit, and for a neutron star (10^17 kg/m^3 density, 10km radium) you need 340 meters of matter. So neutrino capture is feasible,

(my emphasis)

Black Hole Bombs: Another interesting way of extracting energy from black holes are superradiant instabilities, i.e. making the black hole into a bomb. You use light to extract angular momentum from the blackhole, kinda like the Penrose process, and get energy out. With a bunch of mirrors, you can keep reflecting the light back in and repeat the process. This can produce huge amounts of energy quickly, on the order of gamma ray bursts for stellar mass black holes. Or if you want it to be quicker, you can get 1% of the blackholes mass energy out in 13 seconds. How to collect this is unclear.

(again, my emphasis)

Same author has a recent post titled "Don't Mock Yourself". Glad to see they've taken this advice to heart and outsourced the mocking.

"Why is LessWrong awesome and it's because we're prepared to take racism seriously isn't it"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HZrqTkTCgnFhEgxvQ/what-is-lesswrong-good-for

The focussing on Covid is weird seeing that AFAIK basically everyone who knew anything about pandemics were sounding the alarm at the same time that (some) rats and techbros were trying to corner the market in protective gear.

Shoulda used Grok

“I’d already been ChatGPT-ed into bed at least once. I didn’t want it to happen again.”

According to a 2024 YouGov poll, for instance, around half of Americans aged 18-34 reported having been, like Holly, in a situationship (a term it defines as “a romantic connection that exists in a gray area, neither strictly platonic nor officially a committed relationship”).

“Over the course of a week, I realised I was relying on it quite a lot,” she says. “And I was like, you know what, that’s fine – why not outsource my love life to ChatGPT?”

She describes being on the receiving end of the kinds of techniques that Jamil uses – being drilled with questions, “like you’re answering an HR questionnaire”, then off the back of those answers “having conversations where it feels as if the other person has a tap on my phone because everything they say is so perfectly suited to me”.

Credit where credit is due, I found this via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552565

Also per https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-data-centers-finances, author is Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman, founder of the hedge fund in question.

An investor runs the numbers of AI capex and is not impressed

(n.b. I have no idea who this guy is or his track record (or even if he's a dude) but I think the numbers check out and the parallells to railroads in the 19th century are interesting too)

Global Crossing Is Reborn…

Now, I think AI grows. I think the use-cases grow. I think the revenue grows. I think they eventually charge more for products that I didn’t even know could exist. However, $480 billion is a LOT of revenue for guys like me who don’t even pay a monthly fee today for the product. To put this into perspective, Netflix had $39 billion in revenue in 2024 on roughly 300 million subscribers, or less than 10% of the required revenue, yet having rather fully tapped out the TAM of users who will pay a subscription for a product like this. Microsoft Office 365 got to $ 95 billion in commercial and consumer spending in 2024, and then even Microsoft ran out of people to sell the product to. $480 billion is just an astronomical number.

Of course, corporations will adopt AI as they see productivity improvements. Governments have unlimited capital—they love overpaying for stuff. Maybe you can ultimately jam $480 billion of this stuff down their throats. The problem is that $480 billion in revenue isn’t for all of the world’s future AI needs, it’s the revenue simply needed to cover the 2025 capex spend. What if they spend twice as much in 2026?? What if you need almost $1 trillion in revenue to cover the 2026 vintage of spend?? At some point, you outrun even the government’s capacity to waste money (shocking!!)

An AI Addendum

As a result, my blog post seems to have elicited a liberating realization that they weren’t alone in questioning the math—they’ve just been too shy to share their findings with their peers in the industry. I’ve elicited a gnosis, if you will. As this unveiling cascaded, and they forwarded my writings to their friends, an industry simultaneously nodded along. Personal self-doubts disappeared, and high-placed individuals reached out to share their epiphanies. “None of this makes sense!!” “We’ll never earn a return on capital!!” “We’ve been wondering the same thing as you!!”

[...]

Remember, the industry is spending over $30 billion a month (approximately $400 billion for 2025) and only receiving a bit more than a billion a month back in revenue. The mismatch is astonishing, and this ignores that in 2026, hundreds of billions of additional datacenters will get built, all needing additional revenue to justify their existence. Adding the two years together, and using the math from my prior post, you’d need approximately $1 trillion in revenue to hit break even, and many trillions more to earn an acceptable return on this spend. Remember again, that revenue is currently running at around $15 to $20 billion today.

He wanted Nazi Germany with Milton Friedman, he'll get Argentina without a USA to bail it out.

Not really, Schmitt is the real villian

I found it really interesting and scary

https://archive.ph/ZdXIS

I read the disucssions and while I can sympathize with jwz's ridicule of barely covered raw git, I think he's asking for advice in the wrong place. There must be tons of solutions for running a small business with lots of part timers ,like a nightclub.

I think one important through-line is that both pencil-necked computer fondlers and muscle-bound roid ragers can and do hate women.

Surprisingly still up on lobsters and the comments aren't totally horrible.