Philosophically, this looks like breaking the training data limit in the same way that humans do: by using an internally consistent view of the world to imagine new scenarios and integrate them into an updated worldview.
Readit Newsunchocked commented on Unsupervised Elicitation of Language Models arxiv.org/abs/2506.10139... · Posted by u/kordlessagain
Feels like 1999 all over again. This time, I think it really is different.
It is insane that the Paris agreement requires a centered 20-year running mean of global surface temperature to define global warming thresholds.
That bureaucratic sleight of hand builds roughly a decade of delay into the system. Sclerotic by design.
unchocked commented on NASA releases Hubble image taken in new pointing mode science.nasa.gov/missions... · Posted by u/isaacfrond
Missing from the article: Jared Isaacman offered to fix Hubble for free, and NASA turned him down.
unchocked commented on What Is Dimensional Analysis? cgad.ski/blog/what-is-dim... · Posted by u/cgadski
Best one-lesson favor I ever got was dimensional analysis in high school.
Do it, and most basic physics is trivial.
unchocked commented on Space travel via tether between asteroids blog.cerowrt.org/post/tou... · Posted by u/osivertsson
Hop David is the person on the internet who the author wants to talk to about whether their math on orbital tethers is correct.
unchocked commented on Red algae proteins grafted into tobacco double plant growth news.cornell.edu/stories/... · Posted by u/geox
Engineering an improved rubisco into the food supply (or the notional biological carbon capture stream) would significantly boost to the carrying capacity of our planet.
A group of scientists did actually come up with a "chemtrail" like plan to cool the planet... And it is horrific:
> To achieve a 2 °C result, the plan would inject 6.7 teragrams (6.7 billion kg/14.8 billion lb) of sulfur dioxide per year into each pole, calling for an eye-watering total of 13.4 teragrams (29.5 billion lb) of material annually.
https://newatlas.com/environment/sai-polar-refreezing/
The cost would be astronomical (but far more doable than other climate engineering methods) and the environmental cost of raining sulfuric acid over the arctic with an enormous fleet of planes would be unspeakable.
They clearly released the plan to illustrate how impractical climate engineering is, but I wonder if this is a seed for the wider chemtrail theory.
FWIW, the SO2 injection rate for climate engineering is about 1/10 of our current tropospheric injection rate from burning fossil fuels.
I bring it up to illustrate that we are already making consequential choices about the climate.
unchocked commented on The next 5 years will be the hottest yet grist.org/science/el-nino... · Posted by u/no_wizard
Meta-comment:
Why exactly are we talking about paths for 'Getting to a 1.5C warming', when we've already hit 1.2C warming, and are still emitting more carbon each year than we have at any other point in our history?
Given the lag between carbon emissions and warming, and given the lag for introducing net emission reductions, how exactly are we expected to not blow right on past that 1.5C budget? Are we all going to permanently turn the lights off next week?
There is no chance that we will remain below 1.5C. Because there is (rightly) moral value attached to staying below 1.5, that fact is (also) hard to accept.
The formalized narrative makes sense through a values-based lens, as does the conversation moving through stages of grief as geophysics makes itself felt.
In hard sci-if settings like The Expanse, would we expect that all of the electronics in space to be a few generations behind the state-of-the-art planetside to account for radiation hardening? Would the electronics be more likely to be installed inside of ships where presumably there is already radiation shielding for people (thinking sensor packages and hard points)?
No, just put them inside a radiation shield and pump heat out. Same protocol for the humans.