181–187 of 187 posts
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So its essentially "the system needs to be cheap and light enough to beat bringing more panels"
I remember calculating the cost efficiency of adding a sun tracking mount to some panels. It turned out that the increased power would be about the same as adding an additional panel and one panel was cheaper than the mount. The mount also would only help half the year and the extra panel would help the whole year.
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With an atmospheric density 1/150th that of Earth, the engineering of a leaf blower might be tricky. Clearly the atmosphere can move dust, but you might hit speed of sound problems in your turbine. Someone should spend a couple years doing some PhD work on Martian dust blowing turbine designs, but not burn out completely so they can write a 1000 word, interesting blog post with some pretty pictures for me to consume.
Also, you would have to carefully weigh if using the blower would not consume more energy than you stand to gain by clearing the panels...
Relevant. https://xkcd.com/695/
I hate this particular strip (not xkcd of course (which is 60% of the time wonderful) but this specific one). It anthropomorphises the Rover and we have enough sad news from all over the place to also start to worry about that machine (not even an AI). The next one will be Voyager who is all alone in empty space or whatnot. It is enough that I speak to my computer already.
Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...
Given the success of the helicopter drone (Ingenuity) on Mars, I wonder if that's an option for cleaning solar panels - i.e. put a simple rotating brush/fan system on the drone, keep it in a port on the main lander, and every once in a while, launch it and have it land on the solar panels, where it does a roomba routine. Since drones already expand the abilities of a lander, i.e. exploring the immediate area and coll…
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This type of arrogant, aggressive ignorance is really the worst part of HN. How many successful space probes have you designed? How much weight would the solution add, and what trade-offs would that impose on other mission parameters? NASA is by no means perfect. But we can start by assuming they have basic competence and positive intent unless proven otherwise.
I'm not doubting their competence, they're the best of the best IMHO. But sometimes politics and economics overshadows the work.
That said, I also realized that a motorcycle helmet tear off plastic film and some rubber bands held stretched by fusible links would solve the problem just fine and at least double the life of the mission for negligible weight. It may not be glamorous or even guaranteed to be environmentally friendly, but it would work. Kind of like the old joke about NASA spending millions to design a space pen when the Soviets just used a pencil.
So I'm afraid that there's still no way I can accept that the engineering isn't feasible. It just sets off my code smell detector too much. Planned obsolescence is perhaps a bit too strong of an accusation though, so I'm sorry for saying that.
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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.
I believe I have provided evidence it is a form of AGI. It is a generic type of request for it to come up with an analogy and it did so for me. I think arguing over whether it's general AI is quite similar to arguing whether uber is a taxi company. People pay to ride in someone else's car which gets them from A to B. It came up with that analogy at my request. You can make chatgpt generic requests and it answers them…
"""GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) is a type of machine learning model developed by OpenAI that is used for natural language processing tasks, such as language translation, summarization, and question answering. GPT is trained on large amounts of text data and is able to generate human-like responses to prompts.
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to the ability of a machine or artificial intelligence system to perform any intellectual task that a human being can. AGI is often thought of as a hypothetical future technology that would be able to understand and learn any intellectual task that a human being can, rather than being narrowly specialized to perform specific tasks like current AI systems.
GPT is not equivalent to AGI, as it is a specific type of machine learning model that is designed to perform natural language processing tasks, rather than being able to perform any intellectual task that a human being can. However, some researchers believe that the development of AGI may require the use of machine learning models like GPT as a building block, as they can be used to train AI systems to understand and generate human-like language."""
It similarly told me it is also not a "form of AGI"