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:
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.
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.
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.
"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. "
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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
117 comments
- 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!
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.
"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. "
(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.)
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.
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.
Literally the first line of the post.
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?
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...
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
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 suppose you have to set a cutoff somewhere.
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
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)
> 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"
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.
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.
This is just the start, imagine ten years from now, or ten times the capacity