knightly the Sneptaur

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • how much more for the product/service would you be willing to pay for a human operator on the other side or conversely, how cheap would the non-human supported product/service have to be for you to choose it over the more expensive human supported option?

    Better question, how much is a company willing to pay me to use an LLM instead of going to one of their competitors?

    Because if the answer is insultingly small then I’m not patronizing them.





  • Sort of. The speed of light in a vacuum is the speed of causality, nothing can go faster than the maximum speed at which one part of the universe can effect another.

    It is possible for fluids to move faster than the speed of sound in the fluid around it, such as the exhaust products of a supersonic jet engine, but in these cases not all of the fluid is operating like a wave. The core of the jet experiences a laminar flow where all of the fluid is moving in the same direction and at roughly the same speed, like a laser instead of a flashlight. At the boundaries of this laminar flow exists a turbulent region where the fluid interacts with the surrounding medium and is slowed to subsonic speeds.





  • It’s still a matter of timescale, as in “how far future are we talking?”. On a stellar scale, they’d need to get here in the next billion years or so before the expansion of the sun boils off everything above the lithosphere. On a geological scale, it’s only a couple hundred million years 'til everything that isn’t already buried or washed into the sea is getting squashed into a new pangea. On a climatological scale, corrosion and decay/overgrowth will render almost all artifacts unrecognizable within a couple of thousand years, though it’d be a few tens of thousands before our impact on the atmosphere is nulled. On a human timescale, the inverse-square law means that our radio signals are only detectable without astronomically-sized antennas within a shell of a few dozen light years or so.