while we're complaining about this platform that desperately needs (but will never find) competition, it's fucked up that we can't access Watch History and Watch Later playlists via the api.
Eye sensitivity isn't the issue. Sirius isn't barely visible at the detection threshold, it's the brightest star in our sky. If a 25x luminosity boost over the Sun only gets you to the edge of naked-eye visibility at that distance, where do the additional orders of magnitude come from to make it one of the most prominent objects in the night sky? Show me the math.
Your steel bar example isn't analogous. You had an intuition, discovered a physical constraint (speed of sound), and the math checked out. The constraint explained the phenomenon. What would it look like if the "established" model of the world were actually wrong?
Here, the math doesn't check out. That's my point.
I'm not saying "it seems like stars should be invisible but they're not", Im showing that inverse square law - which we can verify at human scales - predicts invisibility at stellar distances, and the proposed compensation (25x more luminosity) is insufficient by orders of magnitude.
Sirius is "billions of times dimmer" than the sun to our eyes IF you mean the Sun as seen from Earth versus Sirius as seen from Earth. But that's not the comparison. The comparison is:
Sun moved to 544,000 AU (Sirius's distance): 296 billion times dimmer than Sun at 1 AU
Sirius at 544,000 AU: 25x brighter than that
25x doesn't bridge a 296-billion-fold gap, plus the eye's dynamic range is irrelevant; we're comparing what brightness should reach the eye versus what compensation the model claims.
If your claim is "the eye can see across many orders of magnitude, so even though the Sun would be invisible at stellar distances, Sirius being slightly brighter makes it visible," then do the actual calculation. Show that 25x more luminosity produces enough photons to cross the detection threshold. Because the math I'm showing says it doesn't.
You're assuming the model works and looking for why my intuition is wrong. I'm showing the model's numbers are internally inconsistent. Those aren't the same thing.
>I've found that when I have a thought that seems to contradict the "established" model of the world, I tend to just be missing some critical factor.
Does it bother you that to make relativity work, they had to invent dark matter and dark energy - 96% of the universe's mass-energy - as fudge factors? At what point does "missing a critical factor" become "the model requires constant patching to match observations"?
You're comparing the Sun's illuminance at Earth (10^5 lux at 1 AU) to all starlight combined (10^-4 lux), then trying to work backward to what a single star should provide. That's not how this works.
The question isn't "what's the ratio between sunlight and all starlight." The question is: what happens when you move the Sun to stellar distances using inverse square law?
That's the Sun at Sirius's distance. Multiply by 25 for Sirius's actual luminosity: ~7.5×10^-6 lux.
Your own Wikipedia source says the faintest stars visible to naked eye are around 10^-5 to 10^-4 lux. So we're borderline at best, and that's with the 25× boost.
But moreover, you said "the difference between all starlight and just Sirius would be around 10^2." There are ~5,000-9,000 stars visible to the naked eye. If Sirius provides 1/100th of all visible starlight, and there are thousands of other stars, the math doesn't work. You can't have one star be 1% of the total while thousands of others make up the rest - unless most stars are providing almost nothing, which contradicts the "slightly brighter" compensation model.
Address the core issue: inverse square law predicts invisibility. The 25× luminosity factor is insufficient compensation. Citing aggregate starlight illuminance doesn't resolve this.
slightly off-topic thought experiment that's been on my mind lately:
to us, the sun appears to be the size of, let's say, a quarter held at arm's length. this is at 93M miles (1AU, or ~8 light minutes) distance. if we moved the sun 100 miles away from earth, it would take up the entire sky. now in the other direction, if we doubled the distance, to 2AU, it would appear to us as half its normal size and 1/4 as bright (irradiance follows inverse square law). at 3AU the sun would be 1/9 as bright and 3x smaller than a quarter. at 100AU, we're talking about brightness of 1/100^2 (one ten-thousandth) the sun's apparent brightness. with me so far?
Sirius A: the brightest star we can see; 25x more luminous than the sun; 2x the size of the sun; 8.6 light YEARS distance (544,000AU) from earth.
if we moved the sun to the same distance as Sirius A, it would appear 296 BILLION times dimmer and 544,000 times smaller. yet Sirius A is easily visible - the brightest star in our sky - despite being only 25x more luminous and 2x larger.
do you see the discrepancy? 25x more luminous doesn't compensate for a 296-billion-fold brightness loss. The numbers we are given don't make sense, not even close. (and this is without considering diffusion, which would make the discrepancy even worse.) i'm not proposing an explanation or a modification to the model, i just think the data don't make sense.
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No man. This is the whole problem. Don't sell yourself short like that.
What is a writing "voice"? It's more than just patterns and methods of phrasing. ChatGPT would say "rhythm and diction and tone" and word choice. But that's just the paint. A voice is the expression of your conscious experience trying to convey an idea in a way that reflects your experience. If it were just those semi-concrete elements, we would have unlimited Dickens; the concept could translate to music, we could have unlimited Mozart. Instead—and I hope you agree—we have crude approximations of all these things.
Writing, even technical writing, is an art. Art comes from experience. Silicon can not experience. And experiencers (ie, people with consciousness) can detect soullessness. To think otherwise is to be tricked; listen to anything on suno, for example. It's amazing at first, and then you see through the trick. You start to hear it the way most people now perceive generated images as too "shiny". Have you ever generated an image and felt a feeling other than "neat"?
>I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work
not just in a spreadsheet, any kind of deterministic work at all.
find me a reliable way around this. i don't think there is one. mcp/functions are a band aid and not consistent enough when precision is important.
after almost three years of using LLMs, i have not found a single case where i didn't have to review its output, which takes as long or longer than doing it by hand.
ML/AI is not my domain, so my knowledge is not deep nor technical. this is just my experience. do we need a new architecture to solve these problems?