"Shellworlds". With just two shells. As described in his books by Iain M. Banks.
Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
#32[deleted]
Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
#33I am such a sucker for technical Aspie writing. I've seen it mistaken for LLM output many times but this is not that.
You sure about that? It really comes off as LLM output to me, in its general structure and formatting, attention-grabbing opening sentences of paragraphs ("This ratio has a profound consequence:", "This distinction matters."x2), and the classic "it's not X, it's Y" stuff ("The collector is a hybrid optical-power megastructure, not a single dense slab of ordinary powersats.", "The shell does not interact with a small number of giant launchers. It interacts with a dense distributed network.")
Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
#34I am such a sucker for technical Aspie writing. I've seen it mistaken for LLM output many times but this is not that.
For what it’s worth, gptzero.me rates it as entirely AI generated, with 100% confidence. It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty strong signal.
Certain aspects of how it’s structured and written do also seem AI-generated—for instance, the simultaneously persuasive but explanatorily equivocal tone is pretty typical of current LLMs. Also, there are just some text formatting features that are pretty rare for humans to use—for instance, using the nice-looking Unicode 1/2 fraction glyph, which isn’t really in keeping with the otherwise unpolished maths formatting.
It’s a bit sad that AI writing is now so good as to seem almost authentic, if not for the giveaway of a few subtle stylistic quirks.
Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
#35> The mirror fleet does not increase the total power available to the project; Mercury still intercepts only a fixed amount of sunlight. I think I must be missing something important, because this doesn't make sense to me. If you put your mirrors in orbits where they don't block the dayside surface (sun-synchronous?), then they increase the total surface area receiving solar radiation.
Isn't the point of mirrors to concentrate heat for mining, not to get more total power?
Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
#36I am such a sucker for technical Aspie writing. I've seen it mistaken for LLM output many times but this is not that.
Nah, it's totally Claude. No human writes the bulleted list in https://github.com/RokoMijic/MercurialDyson/blob/4f6cb3c0b5b..., or "The thermal management problem that naively prohibits rapid disassembly is resolved by three key insights…". The whole thing reeks of Claude, but chapters 12 and 13 are probably the clearest slam-dunks.
If you want to compare styles, https://github.com/Smaug123/gospel/blob/764996d20e11674f9221... is similarly written almost entirely by Opus (4.5 rather than 4.6) with some strong LessWrong-o-sphere background prompting and the instruction to be terse. The styles are practically identical.
Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
#37I encourage Dyson sphere enthusiasts to listen to the interesting argument that Dyson spheres they may be deliberately designed as an "sounds neat but is impossible" filter joke, ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM .
(Thanks to the maintainers of yt-dlp and of whisper-cpp, and to OpenAI for training Whisper. It makes this kind of task actually bearable.)
There are no actual claims about Dyson spheres in the video? It's literally just "Dyson published a paper, I claim without evidence that Dyson intended it as a joke, people who believe it are gullible fools, therefore it's impossible, also I found someone else's blog post who doesn't know what they're talking about, also desiring the expansion of humanity is evil and eugenics"? Can you summarise an actual argument from the video?
Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
#38I am such a sucker for technical Aspie writing. I've seen it mistaken for LLM output many times but this is not that.
Nah, it's totally Claude. No human writes the bulleted list in https://github.com/RokoMijic/MercurialDyson/blob/4f6cb3c0b5b... , or "The thermal management problem that naively prohibits rapid disassembly is resolved by three key insights…". The whole thing reeks of Claude, but chapters 12 and 13 are probably the clearest slam-dunks. If you want to compare styles, https://github.com/Smaug123/gospel/blob/764996d20e116…
> DI containers mean the call site doesn't tell you what's called. Instead: pass values in, get values out.
That one is obviously LLM.
Before I left the comment, I reviewed some of this user's commit history to about a decade back, and they genuinely write like this. Though I think this is the first long-form content I've seen from them.
Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
#39From the Readme:
> Note: the written report is currently "vibe coded" physical and engineering analysis using various LLM-based AIs, with the author acting as a guide and sanity check and putting pieces together. The intention moving forward is to move calculations to code and simply report the results.
Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
#40I am such a sucker for technical Aspie writing. I've seen it mistaken for LLM output many times but this is not that.
It is though, even says so in the readme:
> Note: the written report is currently "vibe coded" physical and engineering analysis using various LLM-based AIs, with the author acting as a guide and sanity check and putting pieces together. The intention moving forward is to move calculations to code and simply report the results.