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flaburgan 18 hours ago [-]
While I find it great that Claude is now helping people to progress on topics they may have not have time or knowledge for before, I found it a bit sad that this is done alone in a bedroom. NASA and ESA do have this kind of program, where they publish data and encourage people to help.
There is exactly this for exoplanet searching:
If you are logged in with an account they will even recognise you and add your name to the paper!
So instead of playing alone, join the common effort, this is how science will progress efficiently!
NiloCK 11 hours ago [-]
> NASA and ESA do have this kind of program, where they publish data and encourage people to help.
He helped to sift through published data, found something, then shared it.
I really struggle to find any fault here. He wasn't logged into a portal that hasn't yet been announced? What?
Is it your view that publishing on "the internet" rather than a NASA portal is playing alone and distinct from the common effort?
11 hours ago [-]
knlje 15 hours ago [-]
This is a quote from the Reddit post:
"TESS comes back to this part of the sky in November. I submitted an observing proposal asking it to record this star every 2 minutes while it's there. It was approved. Program #100. "
flaburgan 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, which means after doing this research alone instead of collaborating, he went to go see NASA with his findings and they agreed there was something interesting so they will look at it.
My point is not that his discovery is small, my point is he could have done it directly in collaboration with NASA, they encourage that.
DonsDiscountGas 12 hours ago [-]
Spending some time working alone and some time working with others is generally how collaboration works. It seems like he is working with NASA. You're being very nitpicky.
6 hours ago [-]
TeMPOraL 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe he is not that gregarious? Not every hobby needs to be social activity.
ryandrake 11 hours ago [-]
Yea, I've been having a blast with a RTL-SDR and Claude, telling the LLM to analyze interesting looking signals and try to figure out what they are, and (sometimes) finally successfully decoding them. I'm picking up a bunch of knowledge from the process too, to the point where I'm learning how to do some of the analysis myself.
It's such a low-stakes hobby, and I don't need to care about collaboration or "efficient progress." The local HAM radio group is a bunch of elderly guys who just talk about Trump and their sore backs, not my cup of tea. For some things, you can have plenty of fun alone in your computer room.
danlitt 14 hours ago [-]
Of course not. The point is that you will not do the research as well without the social activity. If you hate social activity, fine, but if you don't, then you should do it.
lo_zamoyski 12 hours ago [-]
That really depends. Some research benefits more from solitary study and work. Saturating everything with "collaboration" is not always the best way. It an be an impediment.
(Of course, when we use technology and read books, there is a remote participation in the social as these are cultural and thus social products, but that's not what is meant here.)
13 hours ago [-]
reaperducer 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe he is not that gregarious? Not every hobby needs to be social activity.
He posted it on Reddit. That's pretty much the definition of both gregariousness and social activity.
TeMPOraL 5 hours ago [-]
Posting on Reddit is sharing on his own terms. GP invites voluntarily relinquishing control over your own hobby work.
HelloMcFly 12 hours ago [-]
I understand that is your point, I don't understand why it matters to you when the collaboration happened? This clearly became a side project for them, one of passion that also seemed to be about exploring their own AI capabilities. Not every collaboration needs to or should start from the ground floor. What would have been the benefit of them collaborating earlier (setting aside it may have diminished their own drive/interest in the project)? The discovery gets recognition earlier? To what end?
lo_zamoyski 12 hours ago [-]
Who cares? You seem to be putting the cart before the horse. Collaboration is something you do if there is a reason and a benefit for doing so, not something you do for it's own sake.
And look, he found something interesting working alone. Now he can share it with NASA.
It's nice to be able to freely explore topics.
segmondy 11 hours ago [-]
some of us like to go for solo walks all alone.
RobRivera 4 hours ago [-]
Prickly
maaaaattttt 15 hours ago [-]
Would be cool to re-launch a kind of SETI@Home where locally running models (and OAI/anthropic accounts) could participate with their agents (acting as sub-agents) to do research during the night. I think there is something already about renting local GPU time out, but for profit.
Lots of security issues etc with this. But conceptually it would be nice to be able to contribute to space research that way.
arcanemachiner 13 hours ago [-]
I said this in another thread recently, but I feel like large-scale generation of open-access synthetic data could be a good way to donate unused capacity.
justinclift 14 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you've found your next project to spin up... :)
AdrianB1 13 hours ago [-]
In the late '90 I participated to SETI@home, donating free CPU cycles over nigh on some servers that were running 24x7 and were not utilized at night. Power saving was not a thing, so all that electricity was wasted, I found a use for it.
These days energy is expensive. It may be better to shut down home computers and let organizations use optimized hardware for such type of processing.
binlog 11 hours ago [-]
> Last month I was going through data from NASA's TESS telescope
Literally the first line of the post.
general_reveal 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
soltanov 2 days ago [-]
Call me when peer review confirms it; until then, it is noise fitting noise.
(Reason: Clean cut through the hype directly to scientific validation.)
snowwrestler 13 hours ago [-]
Agree on the need for verification, but that is not what peer review does. It would take an independent investigation.
soltanov 2 days ago [-]
I don't understand the downvotes on this topic. Almost everybody is in grey :)
timcobb 14 hours ago [-]
It's low effort and not interesting
wartywhoa23 1 days ago [-]
The color of truth on HN.
justsomehnguy 1 days ago [-]
That's the usual state of things. I even vouched for a green comment because it was in a spirit yet for some it was not.
handoflixue 1 days ago [-]
It's hacker news, not academia news.
Dismissing something for lacking formal academic review is counter to the ethos of the site, and the link itself mentions that verification is coming in a month and there's at least a loose consensus of actual people that this might be valid.
If they'd said "excited to see if this replicates in November!" I would have at least believed that they'd read the link and/or had some interest in the topic.
I don't see any value in "this topic doesn't interest me", though
colijobles 2 days ago [-]
Brilliant application. Imagine the progress we could make with models post trained on scientific process and a good agentic process.
I've been fascinated by how the Dutch and British East India companies operated.
Curious to take a look at this dataset.
londons_explore 19 hours ago [-]
Why wasn't this found before?
Surely 'take all observations of the sky and for every visible star do a frequency analysis' is step 1 when looking for planets?
PowerElectronix 18 hours ago [-]
Two economists pass by a $100 bill walking down the street. After a while, one asks the other if it was a $100 bill what they just walked by before.
The other answers: "Of course not, someone would haved picked it up already if it were"
Some times low hanging fruit is so low hanging that people don't bother to look for it as it's "obvious" someone else would had picked it already.
MisterMunchkin 7 hours ago [-]
Two economists are sitting on a park bench.
“I’ll pay you $100 if you eat that dog shit” says one
The other economist, being a rational actor, naturally eats the dog shit. He is given the $100.
But then he sees another dog shit. “Well, I’ll pay you $100 to eat that one!”
A second shit is consumed, producing $200 of GDP. The economists are overjoyed at their productivity and earnings.
malfist 13 hours ago [-]
Visual sky survey telescopes can produce hundreds of terabytes of data per night they operate. Radio telescope can produce tens of petabytes per night. The SKA-Low telescope could theoretically produce 9 exabytes per night.
To put that in perspective, the total daily internet traffic ranges between 25-35 exabytes per day. If you fraction that to the ten hours a telescope would operate SKA-Low could double the amount of data transmitted globally on the web while it's recording
The short answer is that there are a lot of stars and even more data.
When I last did astrophysics research half a decade ago (as an undergrad) the workflow for doing research boiled down to writing pipelines to clean the data and then have scripts to find interesting candidates and analyse them automatically. It was necessary to filter stuff to reduce false positives, so it's possible this candidate was just missed by such scripts.
It's also possible this star is in some PhD student's dataset and they just haven't published yet. Astrophysics papers in this vein usually focus on techniques for classification and data science so you'd expect to have at least dozens if not hundreds to thousands of interesting stellar objects before you have something worth publishing unless it was some truly novel technique. A paper just saying "we found an exoplanet" isn't particularly interesting these days, as it turns out there are a lot of them.
(I haven't looked at the data and I'm sure my skills have atrophied by now anyway, sadly.)
More power to the guy who did this (astrophysics is probably the most hobbyist-friendly science since a lot of the data is public and the only lab equipment you need is a laptop) but I suspect "ordinary" folks are far more impressed by this than astrophysics folks. A decade or two ago exoplanets were still thought to be very rare but we've since figured out they are quite common and have moved on to cataloguing them.
ZiiS 14 hours ago [-]
Doing a septillion (1e24) frequency analysis takes a measurable amount of time.
gilrain 13 hours ago [-]
Maybe skilled work within other fields is more difficult than we imagine based on our ignorance?
AlecSchueler 12 hours ago [-]
Maybe they're asking the question in the hope of learning where their ignorance lies.
nkrisc 7 hours ago [-]
I think then a better worded question would be simply: why isn’t this done for every star observed?
gilrain 11 hours ago [-]
Humility is a valuable tool, but it must advertise itself: nobody will believe it of a haughty tone, nor should they.
ForHackernews 14 hours ago [-]
One of the reddit comments from someone in the field says this signal is right at the edge of a noise threshold for existing models in use by academics.
I suppose you have to set a cutoff somewhere.
ContinuityLab 2 days ago [-]
Cool discovery, but I'd be real curious about the false-positive rate when letting coding agents loose on raw astronomical telemetry. Hallucinations in data reduction are no joke.
pizza234 2 days ago [-]
From the discussion:
> even got NASA to point a telescope at it for confirmation
efilife 22 hours ago [-]
You are reproducing the AI summary of the thread. I can't find this claim anywhere
efilife 20 hours ago [-]
It's there guys, I just missed it!
> TESS comes back to this part of the sky in November. I submitted an observing proposal asking it to record this star every 2 minutes while it's there.
> It was approved. Program #100.
colijobles 2 days ago [-]
with a proper stats harness the false positive rate can be brought well down to acceptable levels
phoronixrly 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
binary132 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
roosterIllusi0n 1 days ago [-]
If you can set the criteria for testing that a human would also use, then any llm can do the job.
What is uncool is how people are using cloud based AI and their universities are not providing self hosted models that keep data within the university. Cloud AI is useless due to it being no different than publishing everything you do publicly.
__alias 2 days ago [-]
Laughed at the reddit comment
> "We got vibe astronomy before GTA6"
lenkite 1 days ago [-]
Can Claude Code find aliens too ? Maybe Anthropic needs to make a Claude Extraterrestrial Search Product.
bookofjoe 13 hours ago [-]
Rename AI/LLM etc. "infraterrestials?" Or "superterrestrials"
iAMkenough 1 days ago [-]
/goal prove alien life exists, at whatever cost
CompoundEyes 14 hours ago [-]
It would be ironic if we spent so many resources prompting and scouring the solar system for intelligence that it extinguishes ours. Those humans and their dopamine hit fueled curiosity O_o
literalAardvark 19 hours ago [-]
Thought for 3.5, billion years
Life seeded out of the way, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy around a small unregarded yellow sun.
Life has launched an interstellar probe that will be in range of your sensors soon.
Would you like to write a fun research paper on the subject?
GeoAtreides 15 hours ago [-]
>at whatever cost
see, this is how you end up being disassembled atom by atom to be used in an von neumann probe
TeMPOraL 14 hours ago [-]
You end up getting all of us disassembled and turned into von Neumann probes.
Got a major Star Control II / Ur-Quan Masters vibes here.
bookofjoe 13 hours ago [-]
"... we are stardust..."
karim79 1 days ago [-]
We'll probably have vibe intergalactic travel before Elder Scrolls 6 releases.
xyzsparetimexyz 1 days ago [-]
No we won't
King-Aaron 1 days ago [-]
yes we will
1 days ago [-]
giancarlostoro 1 days ago [-]
We got adobe suite in Rust vibe coded before GTA6 as well.
Friend sent me this one, kinda glad people are learning what I learned with Claude 4.6… you can build anything at this point.
richrichardsson 15 hours ago [-]
The question is though, "Can you build anything that actually works?"
I only looked at PhotoCraft and it has some huge issues.
dkpk 23 hours ago [-]
I’m sure we’ll find Planet Nine soon.
rob74 18 hours ago [-]
HN Headline: "My LLM told me it had found Planet Nine. Then I realized it had just found Pluto."
flyinglizard 18 hours ago [-]
It’s written as if this was Claude congratulating itself.
djmips 18 hours ago [-]
We'll send Claude to settle there
chris_money202 8 hours ago [-]
That is the planet Claude is from
amelius 12 hours ago [-]
This made me wonder, if we ever send out a Voyager 3, would we send a copy of our AI engraved on the Golden Record with it? Or maybe send an entire GPU?
ghm2180 11 hours ago [-]
Karpathy mentioned sometime in 2024/25 in a tweey that we should send LLM weights engraved on the next one.
Dunno the intelligence of the idea. It would give aliens the wrong impression because such an LLM would have very basic data about our race(e.g. a curated set of wikipedia)
fsniper 18 hours ago [-]
Oh no more old.reddit? I can't read this without an app? Absolutely no.. This is bonkers.
I never used old reddit when it was new. I sometimes end up on it from HN links. What is the difference, besides the UI?
To be clear: this is a genuine question and not an attempt to bait a flamewar. I honestly have no idea what the matter is. I have deliberately tried to avoid all social media other than HN for a very long time.
k310 2 days ago [-]
Planet Claude?
Asking for a friend.
car 2 days ago [-]
Claire maybe?
milleramp 18 hours ago [-]
Na, the air is pink there, we would have seen the spectral signature.
OzzyB 1 days ago [-]
Claudina
HackerThemAll 2 days ago [-]
Hope not.
hmyn 20 hours ago [-]
just this line "I chose what questions to ask, what tests mattered, and what counted as pass/fail."
Kuyawa 13 hours ago [-]
All AI needs is data. Take every image of every inch of the sky for the past 100 years and feed it to SOTA LLMs and see what they produce
This is just the start, imagine ten years from now, or ten times the capacity
Fripplebubby 12 hours ago [-]
Did you read the post? This really isn't how this person went about this project at all.
higeorge13 2 days ago [-]
This is incredible use of AI tools. Big kudos!
simon_void 13 hours ago [-]
regarding naming the planet, I'd vote for "Adrian".
wartywhoa23 2 days ago [-]
Found a planet and saved a granny. Wake me up when this planet is acknowledged by any astonomer community with more say than r/ClaudeAI.
thiht 2 days ago [-]
Like NASA?
elzbardico 1 days ago [-]
Plot twist: The discovery is valid. But we figure out the author was not a innocent PM, but a team of astronomers working for Anthropic, And Anthropic's marketing department come up with the idea of crediting it to a PM. :-D
schiffern 1 days ago [-]
Sounds about right.
"Vibe-turfing"?
globular-toast 12 hours ago [-]
My favourite thing is Claude used the word "shite" in its comment summary.
amirkhanian 2 days ago [-]
Not an astronomer, but I'm a non-programmer who spent two months building a fairly big web app with Claude, so the false-positive question is the one I'd ask too.
What saved me wasn't asking Claude whether it was right (it almost always says yes). It was checks that don't depend on its own report: run it on data where you already know the answer, and give a fresh session only the result and ask it to break it.
For a planet hunt I guess that means hiding a few fake planets in real data to see if it finds them, and running the same pipeline on shuffled data to see how many "planets" it finds in pure noise.
_fuchs 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
frmrtntn 1 days ago [-]
It's interesting that a few months ago your sentiment would have been upvoted. I've noticed recently that things seem to be flipping around. Sadly, I think it's inevitable that people will accept a form of communication that consists of people trading slop. Even worse, the author lies about using AI for the writeup in the comments.
tcdent 1 days ago [-]
Commenting about AI tone in an article is the new commenting about the contrast between the font color and the background being too narrow. Nobody wants to hear it over and over and over again on every thread.
operatingthetan 1 days ago [-]
Every article isn't AI written. If it is AI written, it is worth calling it out to save others time.
popularonion 1 days ago [-]
Well, I appreciate the advance warning, so I want to hear it.
dualvariable 24 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, I get mentally exhausted reading AI slop over and over again.
My brain can't help itself in looking for AI tells and gauging if writing sounds like AI or not.
Then once it latches onto the idea that the writing is probably AI, then it feels like half my brain is just reading the text looking for the AI smells.
Calling it "AI smells" like "code smells" might actually be what is going on in my brain, and I start code reviewing it at that level rather than reading it for what it does.
I really would prefer people not just post slop. I don't care if you use it to clean up your own writing, but don't just let it rip.
lynndotpy 1 days ago [-]
I want to hear about it, and I am tired of seeing slop text over and over and over again on every thread.
It's not AI tone, that's not a thing, it's just low quality text.
exe34 20 hours ago [-]
I do. If somebody says it's written by AI, it saves me clicking on it and wasting my time.
LoganDark 1 days ago [-]
You're right that nobody wants to hear it, but I think that's because nobody wants to find out over and over and over that every thread is AI generated. Not because when something is AI generated, they wouldn't like a heads up so they can find something else.
For example, I've had people thanking me for pointing out LLMish later in an article when it's not as obvious at the beginning. It saves the time of thinking the article is manually written when it'll later turn out to be AI instead.
Note that I don't necessarily have anything against AI in particular, but rather the chronic lack of information density typical of LLM-generated articles. Some articles that were LLM-assisted are still information-dense enough to keep me satisfied.
wpm 21 hours ago [-]
Perhaps if they don't want to hear it they should stop upvoting the slop lazy crap articles to the front page in the first place.
King-Aaron 1 days ago [-]
There's probably a lot of bot activity going on behind that shift in sentiment I'd imagine.
SR2Z 1 days ago [-]
As someone who hates reading AI-written stuff (stylistically, I'm sure that someone could build an LLM that writes well) I have begrudingly accepted that it's here to stay.
However, I think that AI-slop is genuinely harder to read and less information-dense than stuff written by a person, and I catch myself abandoning articles and other written content early on when they smell too much like AI. It's simply less worth it to read them because I'll have to spend some precious time figuring out wtf the text is actually trying to say.
It seems like the flow is "User A writes bullet points and has a model convert them to prose to send to User B. User B then uses a model to convert the text back to bullet points."
I would in every case prefer the bullet points or raw transcript of the AI session to just the final output.
subscribed 1 days ago [-]
It is harder to read, and it's especially egregious in the human-facing documentation or code comments.
It takes considerable effort, rules, examples, hooks and prompt to keep the popular $model reasonably concise, and yet STILL from time to time it starts vomiting absolute garbage.
At the moment the best recalibration is "shaming" it and showing both the negative (the vomit) and positive (slop replaced with human sentences). Good for a moment (up to 200k context).
handoflixue 1 days ago [-]
My good sir, I regret to inform you that the informality of the English language has been in decline for quite some time. Possibly since that vulgar bard Shakespeare abandoned all pretense of a shared language and raised a generation that thinks words like "fashionable"[sic!!] are real words.
However, it is notable that the rules of this particular venue request one be charitable to your fellow forum goers, and thus the admonition that their preferred communication is "slop" is generally considered unwelcome.
Would that you had only been able to word your own communication is in proper vocabulary and grammar; alas, I must conclude that even as you reject modernity, you have embraced the "slop" of the past.
But to address your last sentence: OP explicitly admits to using AI in the Reddit comments, and apologizes for it. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wzw8zd/i_think_i.... If you are going to repeat this libel, at least have the decency to provide some sort of citation
paimapi 1 days ago [-]
is this supposed to be an example of bad writing because unnecessary bombast is definitely a sign of it
good writing is not just replacing random words with entries from thesaurus.com, it's writing for your reader. that's one thing LLM-generated text is very bad at - frequently violates the show-don't-tell rule, it lacks any interiority by it's very nature, etc
if you don't practice writing yourself, you don't develop the muscle of knowing what your reader's expectations are and you will forever remain a mediocre writer
NetMageSCW 1 days ago [-]
How do you know who the intended readers of that comment were?
paimapi 24 hours ago [-]
I assume myself and others like me since it is being posted on a forum where each and every comment has not only an audience but a points-based rating system
Regardless of authorial intent, everything posted here is for the wider HN audience
handoflixue 19 hours ago [-]
I will concede I had assumed a more educated audience, which could pick out reference to a particular linguistic style, rather than confusing it for a wild joy ride through thesaurus.com
Conversely, if you yourself write solely for points, then you might as well be a machine - for all reasonable virtues of truth, community, and free expression will find themselves at odds with such petty incentives. I am happy to lose a karma or two to speak my own mind, rather than playing puppet for your upvote.
paimapi 11 hours ago [-]
you're not really writing in a 'linguistic' style, you're just doing the Claude thing of using unnecessarily long words and forcing your reader to do extra cognitive processing because you want the substance of your writing to sound more sophisticated than it actually is
LOL. I mean, yeah, I want it to sound more sophisticated than it actually is! That's the point. It's funny. You're supposed to be in on the joke.
But that IS a style! It's a deliberate attempt to invoke something specific: in this case, the contrast between a supposed sophisticated vocabulary, and the concepts actually being quite simple.
I don't really think of it as "extra cognitive processing", though - the whole idea is that the audience should recognize the joke, as indeed you did!
paimapi 6 hours ago [-]
thus my original question - was this an example of bad writing?
the easy answer to this would've been yes or "unquestionably" if you wanted to keep up the Victorian writing style
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1 days ago [-]
It reads as an example of English writing that was once considered "proper". The point I see is that it shows how this complaint about AI writing is history rhyming with itself again.
SR2Z 1 days ago [-]
There is a difference between objections to style and objections to clarity and conciseness. My complaint with AI isn't that it's not formal enough, it's that there's so much bullshit and so little content in AI-generated blocks of text.
7 hours ago [-]
handoflixue 20 hours ago [-]
"Slop" is generally meant as a derogatory label against anything in the AI vernacular - it is not an objection to clarity, it is a repudiation of the idea of using AI for writing at all.
It's the same tired game we play, as a society, any time a new writing style enters the mainstream. That game goes back to at least Shakespeare's era, where our illustrious bard was called out for his tendency to make up words ("fashionable" being, I believe, an actual example of this?)
xyzsparetimexyz 1 days ago [-]
'Hide one year. The other two predict its dip.'
I DESPISE this kind of slop prose
cedws 23 hours ago [-]
Just reading that makes me angry. I’m so sick of reading shit like that.
efilife 22 hours ago [-]
You know what's funny? Here's what the author says about that
> small note: I wrote this while being way too excited about the whole thing, so yeah, some parts probably sound a bit AI-ish haha, sorry about that
I'm sorry. But what that means makes perfect sense to me; he can combine any two of his data points to predict the third.
emil-lp 20 hours ago [-]
Three comments that made sense. The fourth didn't.
efilife 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
thatguy0900 1 days ago [-]
I truly cannot stand the dramatic way ai writes posts like this. It talks with the gravitas of someone announcing a world shaking event every time. It annoys me to no end.
dylan604 11 hours ago [-]
Too bad LLMs did not learn imposter syndrome
VCFundedGenYer 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
supersparrow 1 days ago [-]
Why? We have been allowing technology to progress us for decades. Why stop now?
black6 1 days ago [-]
We're coming back around to an era of the Citizen Scientist.
125adT 15 hours ago [-]
Anthropic scientist poses as Redditor to do some viral marketing.
adamzenith 15 hours ago [-]
Do you have a source, and also so what? This could have just as easily been codex or any other harness.
- NASA (with the TESS mission): https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/nora-dot-eisner/planet-h...
- ESA (with the CHEOPS mission): https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/bmerin/planet-hunters-ch... (Very new! Will be announced next week!)
If you are logged in with an account they will even recognise you and add your name to the paper!
So instead of playing alone, join the common effort, this is how science will progress efficiently!
He helped to sift through published data, found something, then shared it.
I really struggle to find any fault here. He wasn't logged into a portal that hasn't yet been announced? What?
Is it your view that publishing on "the internet" rather than a NASA portal is playing alone and distinct from the common effort?
"TESS comes back to this part of the sky in November. I submitted an observing proposal asking it to record this star every 2 minutes while it's there. It was approved. Program #100. "
It's such a low-stakes hobby, and I don't need to care about collaboration or "efficient progress." The local HAM radio group is a bunch of elderly guys who just talk about Trump and their sore backs, not my cup of tea. For some things, you can have plenty of fun alone in your computer room.
(Of course, when we use technology and read books, there is a remote participation in the social as these are cultural and thus social products, but that's not what is meant here.)
He posted it on Reddit. That's pretty much the definition of both gregariousness and social activity.
And look, he found something interesting working alone. Now he can share it with NASA.
It's nice to be able to freely explore topics.
These days energy is expensive. It may be better to shut down home computers and let organizations use optimized hardware for such type of processing.
Literally the first line of the post.
Dismissing something for lacking formal academic review is counter to the ethos of the site, and the link itself mentions that verification is coming in a month and there's at least a loose consensus of actual people that this might be valid.
If they'd said "excited to see if this replicates in November!" I would have at least believed that they'd read the link and/or had some interest in the topic.
I don't see any value in "this topic doesn't interest me", though
I've been tinkering with the latter for the last couple of months. Yesterday my system made some progress on instabilities on a particular superconductive system: https://colinocallaghan.com/autonomous-ai-research/Spatial-P...
I've been fascinated by how the Dutch and British East India companies operated.
Curious to take a look at this dataset.
Surely 'take all observations of the sky and for every visible star do a frequency analysis' is step 1 when looking for planets?
The other answers: "Of course not, someone would haved picked it up already if it were"
Some times low hanging fruit is so low hanging that people don't bother to look for it as it's "obvious" someone else would had picked it already.
“I’ll pay you $100 if you eat that dog shit” says one
The other economist, being a rational actor, naturally eats the dog shit. He is given the $100.
But then he sees another dog shit. “Well, I’ll pay you $100 to eat that one!”
A second shit is consumed, producing $200 of GDP. The economists are overjoyed at their productivity and earnings.
To put that in perspective, the total daily internet traffic ranges between 25-35 exabytes per day. If you fraction that to the ten hours a telescope would operate SKA-Low could double the amount of data transmitted globally on the web while it's recording
When I last did astrophysics research half a decade ago (as an undergrad) the workflow for doing research boiled down to writing pipelines to clean the data and then have scripts to find interesting candidates and analyse them automatically. It was necessary to filter stuff to reduce false positives, so it's possible this candidate was just missed by such scripts.
It's also possible this star is in some PhD student's dataset and they just haven't published yet. Astrophysics papers in this vein usually focus on techniques for classification and data science so you'd expect to have at least dozens if not hundreds to thousands of interesting stellar objects before you have something worth publishing unless it was some truly novel technique. A paper just saying "we found an exoplanet" isn't particularly interesting these days, as it turns out there are a lot of them.
(I haven't looked at the data and I'm sure my skills have atrophied by now anyway, sadly.)
More power to the guy who did this (astrophysics is probably the most hobbyist-friendly science since a lot of the data is public and the only lab equipment you need is a laptop) but I suspect "ordinary" folks are far more impressed by this than astrophysics folks. A decade or two ago exoplanets were still thought to be very rare but we've since figured out they are quite common and have moved on to cataloguing them.
I suppose you have to set a cutoff somewhere.
> even got NASA to point a telescope at it for confirmation
> TESS comes back to this part of the sky in November. I submitted an observing proposal asking it to record this star every 2 minutes while it's there.
> It was approved. Program #100.
What is uncool is how people are using cloud based AI and their universities are not providing self hosted models that keep data within the university. Cloud AI is useless due to it being no different than publishing everything you do publicly.
> "We got vibe astronomy before GTA6"
Life seeded out of the way, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy around a small unregarded yellow sun.
Life has launched an interstellar probe that will be in range of your sensors soon.
Would you like to write a fun research paper on the subject?
see, this is how you end up being disassembled atom by atom to be used in an von neumann probe
Got a major Star Control II / Ur-Quan Masters vibes here.
https://getartcraft.com/apps
Friend sent me this one, kinda glad people are learning what I learned with Claude 4.6… you can build anything at this point.
I only looked at PhotoCraft and it has some huge issues.
Dunno the intelligence of the idea. It would give aliens the wrong impression because such an LLM would have very basic data about our race(e.g. a curated set of wikipedia)
https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
To be clear: this is a genuine question and not an attempt to bait a flamewar. I honestly have no idea what the matter is. I have deliberately tried to avoid all social media other than HN for a very long time.
Asking for a friend.
This is just the start, imagine ten years from now, or ten times the capacity
"Vibe-turfing"?
What saved me wasn't asking Claude whether it was right (it almost always says yes). It was checks that don't depend on its own report: run it on data where you already know the answer, and give a fresh session only the result and ask it to break it.
For a planet hunt I guess that means hiding a few fake planets in real data to see if it finds them, and running the same pipeline on shuffled data to see how many "planets" it finds in pure noise.
My brain can't help itself in looking for AI tells and gauging if writing sounds like AI or not.
Then once it latches onto the idea that the writing is probably AI, then it feels like half my brain is just reading the text looking for the AI smells.
Calling it "AI smells" like "code smells" might actually be what is going on in my brain, and I start code reviewing it at that level rather than reading it for what it does.
I really would prefer people not just post slop. I don't care if you use it to clean up your own writing, but don't just let it rip.
It's not AI tone, that's not a thing, it's just low quality text.
For example, I've had people thanking me for pointing out LLMish later in an article when it's not as obvious at the beginning. It saves the time of thinking the article is manually written when it'll later turn out to be AI instead.
Note that I don't necessarily have anything against AI in particular, but rather the chronic lack of information density typical of LLM-generated articles. Some articles that were LLM-assisted are still information-dense enough to keep me satisfied.
However, I think that AI-slop is genuinely harder to read and less information-dense than stuff written by a person, and I catch myself abandoning articles and other written content early on when they smell too much like AI. It's simply less worth it to read them because I'll have to spend some precious time figuring out wtf the text is actually trying to say.
It seems like the flow is "User A writes bullet points and has a model convert them to prose to send to User B. User B then uses a model to convert the text back to bullet points."
I would in every case prefer the bullet points or raw transcript of the AI session to just the final output.
It takes considerable effort, rules, examples, hooks and prompt to keep the popular $model reasonably concise, and yet STILL from time to time it starts vomiting absolute garbage.
At the moment the best recalibration is "shaming" it and showing both the negative (the vomit) and positive (slop replaced with human sentences). Good for a moment (up to 200k context).
However, it is notable that the rules of this particular venue request one be charitable to your fellow forum goers, and thus the admonition that their preferred communication is "slop" is generally considered unwelcome.
Would that you had only been able to word your own communication is in proper vocabulary and grammar; alas, I must conclude that even as you reject modernity, you have embraced the "slop" of the past.
But to address your last sentence: OP explicitly admits to using AI in the Reddit comments, and apologizes for it. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wzw8zd/i_think_i.... If you are going to repeat this libel, at least have the decency to provide some sort of citation
good writing is not just replacing random words with entries from thesaurus.com, it's writing for your reader. that's one thing LLM-generated text is very bad at - frequently violates the show-don't-tell rule, it lacks any interiority by it's very nature, etc
if you don't practice writing yourself, you don't develop the muscle of knowing what your reader's expectations are and you will forever remain a mediocre writer
Regardless of authorial intent, everything posted here is for the wider HN audience
Conversely, if you yourself write solely for points, then you might as well be a machine - for all reasonable virtues of truth, community, and free expression will find themselves at odds with such petty incentives. I am happy to lose a karma or two to speak my own mind, rather than playing puppet for your upvote.
there is an ironically long and obscure word describing this kind of writing:https://sites.utexas.edu/legalwriting/2015/07/27/tips-for-co...
But that IS a style! It's a deliberate attempt to invoke something specific: in this case, the contrast between a supposed sophisticated vocabulary, and the concepts actually being quite simple.
I don't really think of it as "extra cognitive processing", though - the whole idea is that the audience should recognize the joke, as indeed you did!
the easy answer to this would've been yes or "unquestionably" if you wanted to keep up the Victorian writing style
It's the same tired game we play, as a society, any time a new writing style enters the mainstream. That game goes back to at least Shakespeare's era, where our illustrious bard was called out for his tendency to make up words ("fashionable" being, I believe, an actual example of this?)
I DESPISE this kind of slop prose
> small note: I wrote this while being way too excited about the whole thing, so yeah, some parts probably sound a bit AI-ish haha, sorry about that
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wzw8zd/comment/p...