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Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury

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Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury

#41

I 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.

Ah, I do see that was added to the readme about 12 hours after my original comment. It does seem more heavily curated than any one-shot output would be.

Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury

#44

I am such a sucker for technical Aspie writing. I've seen it mistaken for LLM output many times but this is not that.

Actually, it is LLM output and I have updated the readme to show that. But I didn't just ask an LLM to one-shot this. It was a process of iteratively throwing ideas at it, doing calculations, and getting other LLMs to critique. Probably ~100-200 calls to top of the line consumer reasoning models went into this so far.

Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have plenty of long-form content on my blog at transhumanaxiology Less Wrong profile roko and X/rokomijic

Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury

#46
Author here: just noting that this is a first-draft and still evolving.

Also, it is LLM output and I have updated the readme to show that. But I didn't just ask an LLM to one-shot this. It was a process of iteratively throwing ideas at it, doing calculations, and getting other LLMs to critique. Probably ~100-200 calls to top of the line consumer reasoning models went into this so far.

Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury

#47

This reads like an LLM plagiarizing this video from Kurzgesagt: https://youtu.be/pP44EPBMb8A?si=fSwWPOCnCsC1QEny

That video is describing the generic concept of building a Dyson sphere from Mercury but lacks a proper account of waste heat removal and energy. It also lacks a specific timeline.

Re: Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury

#50

> 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?

Not in orbit.
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