6 ms·
Brightest flash ever disturbed Earth's atmosphere last year
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Oarch 3y agoThis error right at the start initially made me suspicious that the article was generated: "in a way that has never before detected before"
- HankB99 3y agoAt first I was suspicious at first. Did you notice any other clues? I noticed that too and just attributed it to sloppy editing, but you might be closer to the truth.
- raattgift 3y agoIn this case an early version of the AFP newswire article appears to be at fault; it's just that the claim of "proofread" (in "Editor's notes", top left above headline on phys.org) is perhaps somewhat exaggerated. One can see the same "never before detected before" error on numerous other aggregators: <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22never+before+detected+before%22&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22never+before+detected+before%22...>.
- HankB99 3y agoI wonder if that argues more to AI vs. Human "editing." It seems to me that an AI would be less likely to catch that when it's composing a story from sources in the Internet.
- doctoboggan 3y agoHonestly, if you are using one of the most recent LLMs, you do not get errors like that. In many ways typos or editing mistakes (like I suspect this is) are signs that a human wrote it, not an LLM.
- 15457345234 3y agoThey make errors like that if you tell them to make errors like that. "Ensure your response contains at least 5 grammatical and 3 typographic errors"
- dkarras 3y agothat is the type of error humans make frequently but LLMs make rarely
- hef19898 3y agoSo, the fair assumption would be to assume all content with too good to be true writing and grammar is AI written?
- garblegarble 3y agoNo, because many writers have editors whose role is to prevent mistakes like these from going to print
- hef19898 3y agoSo, if bad grammar -> human. If good grammar -> could be both?
- briansbum 3y agoMentioned elsewhere, bad grammar could be a human telling an AI to be plausibly bad.
- garblegarble 3y agoI don't think there's any sure way to tell, and trying to do so in the past has massively disadvantaged people who have English as a second language & get accused of plagiarism via LLM (can't find source with a quick google, but there was an ESL student accused of plagiarism by an 'ai text detection' model). I think we just have to embrace the fact that any text could be wholly/partially LLM generated. An LLM could be asked to introduce errors (or a human could edit the output, either to purposefully introduce errors, or naturally introduce errors as part of their process). We should focus on: 1. Developing our skills to verify people's claims (which has always been important) 2. Trying to understand the motivations/agenda behind the text (which I reckon is even more important still) The above two steps insulate you from a wide range of propaganda/trickery, and are the sorts of things we should have been focusing on in schools for decades already.
- georgemcbay 3y agoI make errors like that all the time when I write a sentence out, realize it reads awkwardly and then edit it incompletely, eg start with: "In a way that has never before been detected" (Sound it out in my head, sounds awkward... Decide it would read better as "in a way that has never been detected before" but edit it non-linearly to reduce the amount of cursor movement) First change: "In a way that has never before been detected [add: before]" Second change: "In a way that has never before [remove: been] detected before" Oops, I meant to highlight the first 'before' and hit delete but I mistakenly highlighted 'been', probably because my lazy brain was satisfied with seeing 'be' while searching for before. Hopefully I catch that on the 2nd edit, but if I'm in a rush maybe I don't.
- brabel 3y agoSomething that happened 2 billion light-years away is so enormously powerful that it can visibly affect Earth's atmosphere. Space never ceases to amaze me. Trying to imagine that is basically impossible, we think a volcano is a big thing :D... the sort of explosion we're talking about would make the whole Earth look like a grain of sand.
- asicsp 3y agoNot quite billions of light-years, but here's another example: >Modern astronomers now consider its distance from Earth to be about 7,200 light-years or 2,200 parsecs. >SN 1006 lies well beyond 1 kiloparsec, and it did not appear to have significant effects on Earth. However, a signal of its outburst can be found in nitrate deposits in Antarctic ice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1006 (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37783654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37783654)
- somenameforme 3y agoOne of the hypothesis for the Late Ordovician mass extinction event, which killed off about 85% of all marine species at the time, is an unfortunate burst of gamma rays, about 10 seconds long, from regions of space at least thousands of light years away. [1] One star goes boom and blanks out life on a planet thousands of light years away. The brutality of our universe cannot be overstated. It's one of the many reasons life being multiplanetary is so important. There's no reason this, a giant asteroid, supervolcano, or any other of the million possible ways the universe can think up to kill us all off won't happen. In fact it will happen, sooner or later - and we're overdue. Of course the odds of it happening tomorrow are near zero, but that will be just as true the day before it happens. And the number of things that can wipe out two wildly different planets simultaneously is a small subset of all things that can wipe out 1. And the same is true as we expand on outward to new star systems, eventually even new galaxies, and perhaps further yet beyond that. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Ordovician_mass_extinction#Gamma-ray_burst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Ordovician_mass_extinctio...
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
- yellow_lead 3y agoI wonder if this was responsible for any bitflips
- lowq 3y agoFor some reason I dkubt it
- garblegarble 3y agoWhat I've not found anywhere is whether this resulted in a detectable increase in background gamma radiation at ground level for the few minute period of this event - and the radiological maps I found don't provide historical data going back more than a month. Does anybody have any more info on this?
- guenthert 3y ago> But one with the brightness of the BOAT is estimated to come around once every 10,000 years. How is this estimated, given that they're looking for those only the last sixty years or so (afaiu, this event didn't leave an observable trace afterwards)?
- denton-scratch 3y ago"Is estimated" is pretty weak. Estimated by whom? Since the estimate is "with the brightness of BOAT", they must have made this estimate since BOAT. It follows that the estimate must be based on a single event. I don't like the writing in phys.org.
- jraph 3y agoIt is the passive tense invisibility cloak. A fantastic tool. A related cousin of the "under the carpet" magic broom.
- _Microft 3y agoSuch a prediction requires a model of the underlying processes or at least distribution of values from observations. The distribution of values in a dataset might suggest that the process producing these values does so in a manner consistent with e.g. a gaussian distribution with a given expectation value and standard variation. Now if a particular value is observed, this model can be used to estimate the probability of that value occuring. If it is also known how often these events happen per year then it's possible to say how many years of observation would be needed to observe such a value with probability of e.g. 50%, 95%, or whatever threshold you choose.
- quickthrower2 3y agoWant to know more about that cosmic explosion. If it does this 2bn ly away, what would it be like for anyone within say a million ly?
- bonzini 3y ago> The worst-case scenario would be if such a powerful blast came from much closer to home—say, within our own Milky Way galaxy. That could "completely erase" Earth's ozone layer, he said. The diameter of the Milky Way is 100,000 light years. 1 million is 100 times less powerful but it definitely wouldn't be fun.
- Aardwolf 3y agoSo could you say that when we see such a gamma ray burst in a distant galaxy (which apparently occurs daily from our point of view), that's witnessing all life in that galaxy being wiped out? This is pretty horrifying :/
- legutierr 3y agoWould such a burst travel through the body of a planet? If not, perhaps only half of the galaxy’s life would be wiped out.
- hobs 3y agoAbsolutely, as if it was basically not there.
- lawlessone 3y agoSurely the Earth would be too thick for that?
- itishappy 3y agoWe're dealing with incomprehensible amounts of energy. GRBs are powered by the violent deaths of massive stars. Orbiting planets are inconsequential. Have a fun paper! Stars Bisected by Relativistic Blades https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15347 https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15347
- bookofjoe 3y agopreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38326318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38326318