Not only is Google "borrowing" content from others to show directly in the search results, more often than not it's completely wrong. Either because they have failed to parse the data correctly, or because it's from some shady web page (happens when googling stuff related to vaccines for instance).
Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
51–60 of 68 posts
Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
#52My son likes to ask our Google Home the distance to different planets. The numbers, though generally technically correct (sun has worked in the past), are misleading as some are minimum, some average distance and some maximum. For example "distance to mars" says 54.6 million km, which is the theoretical minimum. "distance to venus" says 261 million km which is maximum. I believe it was Jupiter that previously gave an…
By the "[maximum] distance to different planets" do you really mean literally that, or do you mean the maximum distances to their orbits?
What's the difference?
Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
#53Have a glimpse at the kind of errors we will be facing with the machine-learning AI in the near future.
How do we debug them and how do we know there is an error to correct in the first place?
Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
#54The only thing I feel is pure schadenfreude. AI still has very, very long ways to go.
Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
#55Distance Earth-Sun = 1 AU 1e6 AU = 15.81 light years. Somebody did not pick up the 'e6' part...
Pretty much. The sidebar references Wikipedia's List of brightest stars [1]. That table has the distance from Earth to the Sun in lightyears. So maybe a parsing problem with 0.000015813. On the January 21st this was changed from 0.000 015 813, so it may have been parsing that wrong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brightest_stars#Main_t...
Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
By the "[maximum] distance to different planets" do you really mean literally that, or do you mean the maximum distances to their orbits?
Wouldn’t those be the same? The periods of each planet’s orbit aren’t factors/multiples of one another, so eventually any two will be at opposite points in their orbit.
The maximum distance between two ellipses is not the same as the maximum distance between all pairs of points on them right? Like just imagine measuring the maximum distance from a circular orbit to itself. One measure would give zero (zero separation between the orbits) and the other would give twice the radius (individual points can be 2R away from each other).
If I'm doing this correctly I think the max distance between two points would come out to max_x max_y ||x - y|| whereas the max distance to the orbit would come out to max_x min_y ||x - y||.
Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I in the UK and I can't believe people still fall for the "sun" hoax. I don't know anyone who's ever seen it.
Lived in Seattle. We had a nice day of summer once.
Wait, what about the whole sum... ohhhhh, right, clouds. Clouds. Always clouds.
No summer ever.
Clouds always.
Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
#58the AIs are coming to kill us any day now
okay, but only for at least as a grave mistake as google's.
wait. when people die for no reason whatsoever, that counts, right?
Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
#59Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
#60Google's systems do not, "think."
Having interacted with a lot of computers over the years (including Google's for the last several of my employment), the machines at Google come as close to thinking as I've ever encountered. Two or three times a day they come up with answers that I cannot begin to comprehend how they arrived at. Sometimes they are brilliant, sometimes they are dumb, and sometimes they are merely mad.
They give every coworker I've ever had a run for their money on catching my fuckups.