Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 187 posts

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#171

Post by superjan »

simonswords82 wrote: post #19

Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...

I asked about that recently in another thread. Besides the argument that you can just make the panels bigger, the dust is also statically charged so it is sticky, and wiping it off is not easy. It is also amusing that we, as programmers, are inclined to suggest adding MOVING PARTS to a system that is not servicable, and that the same problem can be solved just by adding more of an already proven solution. It sounds like this one clever special mitigation that solves a minor problem, but instead brings the system down.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#173

Post by brnt »

wongarsu wrote: post #29
brnt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They add weight, but also may extend the mission, meaning for science for buck. NASA rovers outlast their no doubt conservatively estimated life expectancy consistently.

Well, you give a mission plan of one year, and design a rover to fit that plan. And because you don't want to fail, you engineer everything to have a tiny failure rate in the first year. That also makes the systems likely to work for many more years, but that's just a side effect. You have only explicitly designed and spent money on that first year. Taking funding from that first year to add a system that only become…

Sure, but you also learn from experience. If it turns out dust on panels is usually the limiting factor, and the rover otherwise stay in good shape well beyond expectations, a mitigation for the dust may be an effective solution in reliably operation lifetime and thus mission scope.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#174

Post by logicallee »

nradov wrote: post #149
logicallee wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(writing this comment myself by hand) In case you click through, what I want you to focus on in the transcript is that it came up with the two additional analogies at the end at my request, but I absolutely didn't suggest or introduce what they are specifically and I had no idea what it would come up with. You can't know this, but it's my experience. Understanding and coming up with analogies is a gold standard of ge…

The analogies are garbage, not even remotely relevant to the issue. I have tried ChatGPT for myself. It's a great technical achievement, and has some practical value in writing rough drafts on certain limited topics. But you haven't provided any evidence that it is a form of AGI in any meaningful sense.

Another example of how ChatGPT is general intelligence:

There is a chatgpt detector here: https://detectchatgpt.com/

I asked ChatGPT to write a story (my prompt was just "Write a story about a pumpkin"). ChatGPT wrote a nice story, well, slightly weird, and the chatgptdetector detected it with 99.96% confidence ("We estimate a 99.96% probability that this text was generated by ChatGPT or another GPT variant.") while a visual bar showing its confidence filled up all the way.

I next gave ChatGPT the instruction "Rewrite it so it is not detected as GPT output." (thanks to a tip on Reddit, where I saw this mentioned.)

Bear in mind that ChatGPT is a GPT variant. I am asking it to fool a test that by definition it cannot fool. It would be like asking you to figure out how you can go through a human detector and not be detected as human.

I fully expected the site to identify it despite ChatGPT's best attempt at self-obfuscation since by definition it is still outputing GPT output.

This time it passed the test. The bar dropped from a full 99.96% to just 15%.

It was the same story. ChatGPT just successfully passed the generic request to fool some detection algorithm it knows nothing about.

Do you have any idea how much intelligence that takes? To successfully fool a test, where you don't know how the test works, you don't know which test I'm talking about, you're just trying not to pass as what you really are, which in ChatGPT's case is a GPT variant?

That is the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen any computer do. It is by definition an impossible task - since in reality it is still ChatGPT. How can it fulfill the generic request to no longer be detectable?

I am blown away by the capabilities of this AGI.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#175

Post by CWuestefeld »

Clamchop wrote: post #131
CWuestefeld wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The messages were written by the very people that they are ostensibly sent to . It's sock-puppeting.

Why does this make the sentiment insincere? Is it inauthentic if you're saying it to yourself? And whoever wrote this didn't write it just for themselves (there are other involved people and there is public relations). More charitably than sock puppeting, it is storytelling through personification.

If NASA themselves want to use storytelling for PR purposes, fine. I don't think that has a proper home in scientific journalism.

Isn't that what we* have been criticizing journalists about - letting the objective story get co-opted to achieve someone's agenda?

*I don't know if that "we" specifically includes you. But certainly big chunk of society, especially in technical spheres, is within the "we".

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#177

Post by HWR_14 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #153
HWR_14 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Nitter stopped working sometime after Musk's takeover. Maybe just the specific mirror I used?

Nitter works sometimes depending on which host you hit and when. Nitter.net hasn't worked me all day, but there are others that do. Nitter.cz seems to be working right now. https://nitter.cz/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296#m

I had been hitting one host almost exclusively. That host probably went down and I didn't think to move to another. Thanks!

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#178

Post by andrewflnr »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #109
simonswords82 wrote: post #19

Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...

Cant just use a pad on the arm to rub away at them?

I'd go with a brush, actually.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#179

Post by mikewarot »

coffeeblack wrote: post #127
barbazoo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike the Twitter UX so much, it's not clear to me if the "thread" only contains 2 tweets or if I'm too dumb to navigate this shitshow of a UI. Constantly being bombarded with popups doesn't help the UX either.

New Twitter will soon get long-form Tweets to address that problem. Amazing how in 15 years they never managed to fix this UX issue, despite have ten times more people than they actually needed.

The fact that tweets were short was a feature, not a bug.

>Amazing how in 15 years they never managed to fix this UX issue, despite have ten times more people than they actually needed.

It's not been established at all that this is the case. If they manage to keep things running without running afoul of consent decrees, etc. for a few years, then you might have a point.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#180

Post by salawat »

saalweachter wrote: post #156
devsploit wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this sent me down a rabbit hole. Apparently "NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts" ( https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9321/nasa-retires-insight-mars-la... ). Ah well, nothing wrong with a little space theatre!

So the message was no message? How do we know the lander wasn't captured by Martians and locked in a faraday cage, in dire need of rescue?

We have other vehicles we could actually probably get cross checks from. Plus, that'd require some serious level of knowledge to fake a foreign species computational responses from little more than non-invasive scans of chips.

...Unless they are that good... and everything we've been sent is a cleverly constructed ruse.

It's clear, there is only one option. Who's up for an expedition?

Post reply on HN