alt Hacker News> Shrinking that into a 500 kg seed — or even Freitas’ original 100-ton seed — is not an engineering detail. It may be the entire problem.
How many AI tells can you count there?
But honestly (see what I did there?) the AI slop is reasonably cleaned up in this piece.
However, the essence of the argument has two deep flaws. One is that the time to complete an interstellar voyage is extremely long and you need some exergy, yada, yada, yada. We could start with sending self-replicating probes to the asteroid belt. There is zero chance that we'll attempt to send self-replicating probes to a different star system before we send them inside our own solar system. And the second error is this:
> Bootstrapping this loop [...] is a chicken-and-egg problem that no study I am aware of has worked through at the level of actual process flowsheets.
The fact that the current technology is not adequate, and nobody even attempted to solve such a problem is a weak argument. Three hundred years ago nobody had "worked through the process flowsheets" of making an injection molding machine, or a 3D printer, or a power drill, yet they are all available now.
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300 years ago people also believed alchemy was a serious field of study
It’s a bit silly to be so sensitive to “AI tells” in phrasing. If you go look for them in original human writing, you are guaranteed to find them—just like the AI training did! That’s how they became “tells” in the first place.
I find this line of reason to be incredibly irritating. So anything written above the level of "see Spot run" now must be AI slop? The author's piece is written well and reads easily. As a long-time user of nonrestrictive elements in sentences, I bristle at the idea that only AI is capable of writing sentences containing brief asides -- the things between the em dashes -- now.
The subheadings are all full of AI tells.
> The closure problem, honestly accounted
> A thermodynamic framing
All of those read like AI, especially considering that the subsections aren't consistent. Some are numbers, some are not, some are framings some are problem juxtapositions.
EM dashes everywhere, AI tells in subheadings, "It's not X it's Y" all over the text of the body. This is clearly AI writen.
Notice also the article has two by lines. At the top it's "by Paul Gilster" at the top of the text it's "by Peter Marinko"
Also note that the "metallugrist" they're interviewing that they claim "his current work explores the thermodynamics of technological civilizations" at Uppsala University, but the university's page for him says he's only involved in Animal Research Ethics Committee