swansont

I can see how you couldn’t measure time in that case, but is time dependent on that? Does time pass if there’s nothing around to experience it?

Stated without evidence, and contradicts observation Part of the issue with your previous posts was that you never adequately defined your terms. Precision is required, or the argument is susceptible to errors like the equivocation fallacy If you rewrote this mathematically, it would be a division-by-zero error; the ratio diverges. The implication of that is you can’t draw a valid conclusion. There are, of course, ways to have limits of such ratios converge, but it would be incumbent upon you to provide that rigor. The arguments presented are too sloppy.

Is there any credible discussion of time stopping in the heat death scenario?

As usual, though, this will come after damage has been done, even though some of the problems were easily foreseeable MEALworms are, by definition, too filling. The lembas bread of the larval insect world. You’d have to use snackworms.

I don’t understand the question. Who is “they” that’s writing code? Anthropic should be responsible for whatever its code does, and if someone uses AI to write code, that someone should be responsible for that code. Are you talking about writing code with AI and then blaming the AI for whatever bad happens as a result? Such lawsuits will better define who’s legally responsible for what, like how a manufacturer is liable for a defective product or certain obvious ways of using it unsafely, like with automobiles - there are legally required safety features, but the driver is at fault for accidents

Possibly related: a German court basically ruled that Google’s AI hallucinated results are statements by Google since they aren’t just information being passed along, so Google isn’t protected as normal search engine results are. “The court treated the AI overviews as Google's own content and rejected Google's argument that users were responsible for fact-checking the results themselves.” Also that allegedly being accurate 91% of the time isn’t good enough https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/ Since it ties responsibility for errors back to the creator of the AI, perhaps this is followed by similar rulings elsewhere and under other circumstances.

My equations are for conservation of momentum and energy; they already assume the actual device is as efficient as possible. The way to maximize efficiency is to have the rocket mass be small and the ejected mass be large. Such as a bomb set in between a payload and a really, really big rock. You drastically change the ratio - if you have a 1 kg payload and 9 kg rock, your efficiency is now 90%. But that also means a really large acceleration, and you have no more reaction mass (if you did, that has to be included with the payload mass so it’s not 90% efficient anymore), so no more thrust or maneuvering. Doesn’t work for the visitation scenario.

One of the issues with matter-antimatter is that it’s an energy storage medium, like a battery that needs charging, rather than tapping into already-stored energy. You need to create all the antimatter ahead of time, so that whole energy investment is up front. — Let’s look at a snapshot of a rocket that carries its own reaction mass. The ejected mass m is sent away at speed v, and the rest of the rocket has mass M and recoils at V. This is in the rest frame of the system as the mass is ejected. Conservation of momentum dictates mv = MV, so (mv)^2 = (MV)^2 Meaning the ratio of kinetic energy of each is KErocket/KEexhaust = m/M i.e. if, in some small time increment, you eject a kg of exhaust, your million kg of rocket (payload+fuel+superstructure, etc) gets one millionth of the energy of the exhaust. That’s a reason why rickets are multi-stage - you are shedding mass to improve the efficiency. But you can only do that if you don’t need that superstructure anymore, which is not the case if you want to, say, enter and leave some gravity well (or wells) after your trip. It only works as a one-off, like our trips to LEO, or to the moon, or probes/orbiters

Yes, but only as compared to a less-efficient method. There’s a minimum, i.e. you can’t be more than 100% efficient, but it can’t even be 100% efficient. No matter what you throw out of the back of a rocket, it has energy. You can’t transfer all the energy to the payload.

It also a matter where you are; you aren’t going to accelerate upward unless your thrust or lift exceeds the gravitational force. It’s why ion drives aren’t used until you get away from the planet. NASA’s best gives you about 100 milliNewtons of thrust https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dawn/technology/ion-propulsion/ (similar argument for using photons)

In the US you can advertise supplements that aren’t considered drugs, and have not undergone the tests that drugs do to show safety and efficacy, but you can’t promise a cure for anything. So they always use weasel phrases; people will say it worked for them (but not that it works in general), they will say clinically tested (but not that the tests showed anything), the ads will tout how many have tried it and people will give anecdotal remarks like “I’ve used it for ten years and I feel great”. Basically they can sell placebos as long as they don’t overstep. If they do overstep they pay a fine which might be a small fraction of their profits, so it’s not necessarily a deterrent

TIL that bananas will enrage honeybees, because they contain isoamyl acetate (aka isopentyl acetate) which is a main component of the bees’ alarm pheromone https://blythewoodbeecompany.com/blogs/news/put-down-that-banana-beekeeper

The energy to move from one place to another in a gravitational field is not affected by the method, A 1 kg object moving up 1 meter on earth requires 9.8 Joules because that’s the change in potential energy. You can devise methods that use different forces acting for different distances or times, but the minimum energy you need to supply is the same. The method affects how much energy is wasted on whatever it is you’re throwing out of the back of the rocket. That dictates the efficiency.

AFAICT the point of this thread is the issue of some kinds of AI potentially not being objective and the legal implications of that. There are certainly lots of examples of the failures of LLM objectivity, so is that really in question? (Lawyers are being chastised and even sanctioned for using AI to generate documents) I pointed out early on that machine learning and LLMs are not synonymous, and I think it’s a mistake to treat them as such; you need to make these distinctions to have a productive conversation. Is anyone claiming that deterministic or probabilistic simulations are AI? (and even without that your summary of events of the plane landing doesn’t jibe with the NTSB summary; the simulations were used well after the fact) As iNow suggested, the objectivity/fidelity/reliability has to be adequately demonstrated before they will be accepted. We have examples of things not accepted in court because they fall short.

Calculating the minimum energy it takes to launch a payload to orbit, or to interstellar space, doesn’t depend on the method of propulsion. Same for getting up to a certain speed. The detail of propulsion matters for how much energy is wasted, i.e. how much more you need than the minimum, and you can calculate that for different scenarios. None of that analysis is included in saying “slow boat” or “we’ll refuel along the way” The science is in the details.