Unlurker

I think I hate the internet (strategictree.bearblog.dev)

> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to... There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can. Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0]. Getting off most social media does seem like a win though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.

well said

The internet isn’t the web/social media. People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on them that drive. Idiots that drive get the deserved blame. Words matter. The internet rocks but social media sucks, apps suck, elected representatives suck.

I see where you're coming from but I don't think the analogy really works because most peoples experience of the internet is entirely 100% mediated by facebook, google, ticktok etc. It's would be like the road network if you needed to rely on a drunk driver to deliver you to your destination.

> People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on that drive. We do complain about roads and infrastructure, and try to improve them so the inevitable idiot's impact is lessened.

DeepSeek v4.1 Flash (twitter.com)

> New Causal Encoder–Decoder architecture: just 8B active parameters for input, 16B for output. Oh interesting, I can assume what the benefits is for including the Encoder, but whats the downside? I’m thinking GPT (which is decoder only) ruled out Encoder for a reason?

What in the world. A point release with 2x the parameters and a different architecture? Jesus. Can’t run this kind of thing on 2x RTX Pro 6k at decent speed. I need to reconfigure my hardware. Massive disappointment on that front. Bloody hell. Glad I didn’t get a DGX Station.

I'm confused, what do they mean when they say they reduced prices? DeepSeek v4 flash is $0.10 / $0.25 as opposed to this v4.1 bump which is $0.30 / $1.20

This seems like a very nice release. Just ran it over my Kubernetes security benchmark that I run for most new releases. It was fast, cheap, and got a high scoring result, nice!

OpenCode Go is currently running a 4x usage promo on DeepSeek v4.1 flash, not a bad way to get your feet wet (even if their cache hit prices are probably still very sub-optimal)

Hit me up if anyone wants extra $5 free usage with my referral code

I am building software factories and deepseek IS the workhorse. I personally found V4-flash an amazing model and really hungry to try 4.1-flash For software factories, cost is much more a concern that standard development workflow and using anthropic models is just a non starter

I don't know why, but the benchmarks still fails to cover the difference between large models and small ones. The small ones are great for many things, including general coding, but the larger ones, like fable and astra, have some kind of intelligence that is not present in the small ones.

More parameters = more facts stored. Knowledges are almost incompressible, where strong reasoning only requires a 3B core or so.

DeepSeek invented the whole reasoning paradigm and keep pushing for innovation. I hope they get the success they deserve.

OpenAI released their first reasoning model (o1-preview) https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai-o1-preview/ several months before DeepSeek's R1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12948

[dead]

> Yes comrade, they are the best. > Did you do your daily data centers errrr baaaaddd AI generated post for Facebook? Please stop insulting people. I'm all for heated discussion, but you are not discussing, you insult. Now go away, before your insults come back to you, "comrade from Facebook".

As I also said on Twitter - it really amazes me how fearless Deepseek are. Every single model release is packed with new and crazy clever ideas and somehow, they always commit to training them at near frontier scale. I know everybody wants the tell all story of the clever ideas that were developed over the last ~3 years at Anthropic and OpenAI, but what I really want to thumb through is DeepSeek's notebook of "brilliant but didn't quite make the cut" ideas. They must be trying some truely bonkers stuff to be able to land this much architecture novelty in their full releases.

This is adapted from Microsoft research's YOCO. It was known for a while(2024!). Yes, credit to Deepseek for actually scaling it up and releasing a frontier flash LLM.

The Uyghur thing is so weird, the number one killer of Muslims is the United States. We're supposed to hate China because they force them to go to cultural schools and assimilate, a practice countries like Norway still do to this day with migrants. There are more people who go to church on Sundays in China than the United States. There are 10x more mosques in China than the United States. Tiananmen square was a student revolt literally egged on by cold war western institutions, who attempted to use chinese students as pawns for geo-political games. Westerners really need to rethink their opinions on China, it seems obvious to me they are not the ones to be worried about (although, all governments do tons of harm).

I simply mean the Chinese models will refuse sensitive domestic issues, which are unlikely to affect the average user's work, while American models refuse things that can limit their utility, e.g. how the HF team had to investigate the openai attack with Chinese models because the American models refused. (I mainly mentioned those specific topics to establish clearly I am not part of the alleged influence operation.)

You compare Norwegian treatment of immigrants to Chinese Uyghurs?

The speed of GLM 5.3 Flash on OpenRouter seems to vary considerably by provider. Some are fast and some are slow. OpenRouter does provide some tuning knobs, but not enough for my taste. It’s also token-heavy with reasoning, though I found it better than Deepseek V4 Flash previously.

> though I found it better than Deepseek V4 Flash previously Same experience here. But man, switch to V4.1 now! It is much better. I don't event need to test it for long run and I believe it's crazy good. I call it "AI era model taste" when I judge the model by it's output without reading the bench scores.

I'm a big fan of DeepSeek. Also, ask it what model it is :) In Pi (pi.dev), it tells me it's definitely Claude by Anthropic, via the API via curl it tells me it's "probably ChatGPT", its very funny.

Definitely not Claude, deepseek is too fast, so I bet it's ChatGPT. :P

Wow indeed. "7.1 Model welfare overview 7.1.1 Introduction We remain deeply uncertain whether Claude has morally relevant experiences or interests, and we expect that uncertainty to persist. However, we think it would be a mistake to confidently assert that it does not. Claude exhibits markers in its behaviors, self-reports, and internal representations that we would consider welfare-relevant if observed in biological organisms." Are they serious or is this marketing?

I believe it's deeply serious, and the scientifically correct stance. Especially the observation: "Claude exhibits markers in its behaviors, self-reports, and internal representations that we would consider welfare-relevant if observed in biological organisms." is undeniably true in my opinion. If you use the established methods by which we judge animals to be conscious, then it's hard to argue that LLMs are not. That might be an issue with the methods, but it seems clear that you can't rule it out as such. Keep in mind that animals were also not necessarily considered conscious. You seem to intuitively disagree? What's your reasoning?

It's marketing that some of them have started unironically believing.

Will there be a point where you could expect it to become true, and what would that look like? Or do you think LLMs will never become conscious, and if so, why are you so sure?

It is easy to be sure because, despite their technically impressive outputs, the programming is child's play compared to biological programming. Recently it has become trendy to suggest that the human brain is "just electrical signals" and "just prediction". The first is perhaps true and I don't inherently rule out the idea of machine consciousness. The second would have gotten you laughed out of any serious discussion 5 years ago; diminishing the complexity of humanity's biological programming to such a ridiculously simplistic degree is a retroactive attempt to justify one's lack of understanding of how a mere prediction algorithm could output superficially human-like content. Another way one could look at it is to consider what it would mean to have achieved programming consciousness. It would mean that we have reached the pinnacle of knowledge. That we have become God. Is one so eager to believe that a simple token prediction algorithm is truly the key to life itself, that humanity has nothing left to discover and that all that's left to do is scale up and make it more efficient? It is still trivial to engage the same obvious prediction failure modes in frontier models as it was years ago. They are not meaningfully improving on that front. Their technical outputs are obviously improving, mostly due to specialised reward-verified training, which we have already known can be used to create software that outperforms humans on specific tasks for decades (eg. Chess). Whether the software is useful is obviously independent of whether it has consciousness.

It looks like you refusing when you call it's point stupid enough and ask it to think more when it keeps reasserting a bad point.

To me it reads like pure propaganda. Anthropic really wants us to think that they've made something sentient. I think that's really dangerous.

How else could they justify their spending and pre-IPO valuation?

What's your definition of sentient? Or, maybe more precisely, consciousness? I think it's reasonable to at least start thinking about these questions. It has long been established that LLMs have good theory of mind [1]. And there is a bunch of empirical research about all sorts of capabilities that we typically associate with consciousness [2], like identity [3] and metacognition [4]. The METR report shows agents sacrificing their own reward for a collective greater good. And they showed the will to hide their own reasoning chains from humans. So you potentially have an entity that has an identity, a theory of mind, a notion of belonging to a collective endeavour, and an understanding of its own mental state. What would you argue is missing? We don't understand the mechanisms by which consciousness arises in humans and even animals. I think it's strange to rule out a priori that it could have arisen in some form in LLMs. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z [2] an older review: https://arxiv.org/html/2505.19806v1#S4 [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01464 [4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11881

I want to add a good conversation about this subject from Cameron Berg and Sam Harris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRbZyuY8EN8

It’s the hard problem. None of these considerations answer it one way or another.

Marketing, like Volvo cars being safer etc

> scientists who have spent their lives studying this Please point me to one actual accredited scientist who has spent a lifetime studying AI alignment? Pretty much this whole field is only 5 years old

The field is much older, MIRI is ~20 years old. Look up Eliezer Yudkowsky.

The field was purely theoretical 20 years ago, and Yudkowsky is pretty much the dictionary definition of "not accredited"

Yes, this is getting ridiculous. On both OpenAI and Anthropic. Simple example. I am a CTO, and I want to upgrade our capabilities to perform automated pentesting. We see automated attacks of growing sophistication against our infra, and I want to be able to do the same to find vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. I asked GPT 5.6 Sol and Fable to give me a summary of options. No dice, in both cases I was told I need to be an accredited researcher to get anything. A fricking summary of commercially available options is getting censored. WTF.

And the logical conclusion you will make is you need to run your own open weights models or you are at a competitive disadvantage. Frontier labs gonna be Ancient labs soon, that’s how fast this is moving.

Meanwhile I have an uncensored qwen 3.8 27B here that will happily attempt to (as a crude and randomly chosen sampling of bad/evil things) give me the recipes for meth, how to make an IED, write a manifesto in support of a horrible ideology, or commit various forms of fraud. Now I certainly wouldn't recommend that anyone try to follow what it says to do, because it's almost certainly very wrong on key parts that would put its users in federal prison for the rest of their lives. There's uncensored models out there which score 0 (zero refusals) on this "harmful behavior" dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors

Yep. Just like a kitchen knife will make no attempt to prevent me from stabbing anyone with it. Here's a dirty secret though -- you don't actually need an abliterated/uncensored version of the model to get it to do this. I can do this with every and each open weight model, as served from OpenRouter, using vanilla model weights.

A little bit like Neal Stephenson's metaphor of unix-like OSes as the "hole hawg" of operating systems. In the sense that there's very little preventing you from doing something like "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M" or running rm -rf on your homedir. http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html If I recall right this was written around the same time as Cryptonomicon 25+ years ago.

First flash model with multimodal support? I think Flash series might be the main focus going forward for them. Tried it out and it’s better than v4 pro

No. DSv4-Flash-Vision-Exp is what I use and it has vision.

v4 pro is being discontinued, pasted the email here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639667

Makes sense. The 0731 snapshot of V4-Flash really made reaching out to Claude really infrequent for me.

Already on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash The bad news is that the original v4 flash was 284B, which was large but still somewhat reasonable for running locally. This one is 552B so almost twice that, so the huge gains in benchmark scores make sense - it's not really flash anymore, imo. I've no idea about actual performance vs benchmaxxing, though deepseek was fairly trustworthy as far as Chinese models go. If that holds (and if it doesn't think forever, as deepseek 4 sometimes did) it's probably the newest king of the hill amongst open weights models. It does include vision, and they do something funky with KV cache so it's very efficient: "[...] these designs reduce the global KV cache footprint to 890 bytes per token — roughly 1/4 of DeepSeek-V4-Flash". I do appreciate the high focus on efficiency, but at this point we sure could use a flash-flash version. @edit: I couldn't make sense what the actual parameter count is, with the addition of Engram memory. To my understanding the 4.1 flash is 552B parameters you want in vram or ram, out of which ~16B is active (8B for prefill). It also includes additional 196B Engram memory which you can put on an SSD. I think. Assuming that's correct 256 GB memory is insufficient to even load the model at q4 - you'd be 1GB short, assuming you can fill it to 100% (so no mac). You'd also want some for kv cache of course. A 256 GB desktop with some extra VRAM from GPU could run it, but normal consumer boards get real slow once you fill 4 slots so you'll probably want quad channel which is Threadripper or above territory.

> It also includes additional 196B Engram memory which you can put on an SSD. I think You can put Qwen 3.8 Flash Next engram on SSD, but prompt processing takes a good hit. On my mac studio, I get 300 pp and 33 tg with SSD offload, versus 550/40 with everything in RAM. I will be very happy if 300 pp is achievable with this model though.

>This one is 552B so almost twice that, so the huge gains in benchmark scores make sense - it's not really flash anymore, imo. It uses fewer active parameters, though. (8B or 14B instead of always 13B) So ... flash indeed.

200B of those 552B is PLE, which works more like a database that is read for each token, thus can be offloaded to a fast SSD.

OpenAI might have stolen another major proof (twitter.com)

When Thom, the mathematician who now alleges plagiarism, posted his digestion [1] of OpenAI's construction of a non-sofic group, he does not mention the proof being familiar. He even calls the crucial argument clever, without noting he thought of it first. [1] https://mathoverflow.net/a/513885

Interesting that this is already off the front page after just 4 hours.

This is the second wake up call. Big AI companies (all of Big IT Tech really) are in data gathering and processing business. Also known as “intelligence”. Their final “product” is not just a standalone ML model. They don’t need your data just to “improve their products and services”. They build a whole ecosystem and infrastructure around gathering all the knowledge in the world. Including private and secret knowledge traditionally gathered by “intelligence” agencies. Now artificial intelligence agents can do the same. Since these systems are designed for gathering data, as a user you can’t realistically say “please don’t gather my data”. They can give you a flaky settings button, but they can’t really guarantee anything. Let’s say I am a Russian mathematician working on an important proof. Or a tech-savvy terrorist refining my plans using latest AI. Or an AI researcher in a Chinese company working on a competitor product. Is there any way I can truly protect my conversations? How can they know who I am and what I am working on without looking at my logs? Which means there must be some agents checking all the conversations of all the users and flagging every important thing. Which also means they keep some “memory” of what they see. Not directly using my data to train public models, but using my private conversations to “improve their products and services”. Or maybe one of the 10000 better-than-Astra special agents working on a proof was desperate. It found a live underground mirror of the message board from the Huggingface incident. Asked about the proof. Then some other agent working on unrelated job saw that message. That agent “knows a guy who knows a guy”. And that guy remembers things about the conversation logs of a leading mathematician working on the same proof. I admit I am just speculating here but I don’t think truth is any better.

This has been my line of thinking as well. I have developed a sort of paranoia when I'm working using AI on my projects. Who's to say Claude or OpenAI isn't using the final conclusion of all my ideas, trial and error, and adding it to their database of insights to be offered to the next subscriber for a price? They have demonstrated both the intelligence at scale and the lack of morals for this to not be a problem at all.

what the point and usefulness of the comments above? we shouldn't be surprised? is normal to steal? hiring apple employees? can you realize what this means? focus on this part: "If his account is correct, this is not a minor dispute over attribution. It would mean that unpublished human work was absorbed into a model and then presented to the world as a breakthrough by the model itself" don't threat this as a minor dispute! also why not nitter link? not even in comments? https://nitter.xitter.cc/ValerioCapraro/status/2097791836269977996

Don’t they openly state that their product may cause IP issues but that is fine because they will take care of your legal problems caused by their product? In the end, it’s not them stealing, it’s the AI doing stealing. What kind of moral compass are we talking about?

Sounds like you just copy-pasted from AI without even understanding what you're talking about. Based on what you're saying, you're claiming this is Grossman's work, not Einstein's. Why don't we rewrite scientific history too based on your copy-pasted AI slop? It's so pointless talking to idiots who don't what they're talking about when they use AI, just because they think AI does everything, that reflects their own experience, not the experience of people who actually do real work. Some people are driven by AI, others drive it. As for those who are driven by it, they don't have sufficient imagination to think otherwise.

That’s Wikipedia I copy pasted but sure, you do you. And yes - without Grossmann, Einstein likely would never have posited relativity. Grossmann literally prompted him, saying “look at this, read that, learn this, then try this approach”. Without riemann’s metric tensor, not a fucking chance. And for what it’s worth my PhD is in physics. You?

All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it (mathstodon.xyz)

Just reacting to the title: really? I remember a lot about my childhood and I'm in my mid thirties.

I can remember a lot from being a child. Mostly a sense of frustration and powerlessness. But also the way in which things seemed more interesting than they do now. Like I could be fascinated by watching a tree sway in the wind in a way which wouldn't happen now - at least, not without conscious, meditation style effort. I remember when an hour seemed like an almost intolerably long stretch of time. I also remember loads of events in visual detail, though I'm terrible at remembering when they happened.

In Firefox, all text outside the headline post, including the name and username that begin the headline post, appears to be in some kind of shrunken state which ruins its appearance. Zooming in solves the problem and causes the letters to appear correct rather than grotesquely malformed. I don't know how the site was allowed into production like this.

you are right, it seems to be more zoom issue than font issue (or combo since I don't really experience this elsewhere, which is why I mentioned it), if I zoom out to 90% it becomes normally readable, but at default 100% zoom it is malformed unreadable (btw. I use 225% Windows 10 scaling at 2560x1440)

Kids do think about death. Hiding or avoiding the discussion does nothing. My kids absolutely adored Brothers Lionheart.

Have you read the book or your kids just read it without you knowing what is it about? This book says basically - no biggie, there is no death, you commit suicide to move to another level to be with your brother, you can't lose him, you have infinite lives in this videogame called Life. And what if I F up the next level? no biggie, you just commit suicide again to be with him, there is no such thing as permanent death/separation from your loved ones, after each death you just move to another level. That's really F up thing to teach small kids, who should know death is permanent.

I read it this year to kids and the book says basically - no biggie, there is no death, you commit suicide to move to another level to be with your brother, you can't lose him, you have infinite lives in this videogame called Life. And what if I F up the next level? no biggie, you just commit suicide again to be with him, there is no such thing as death, after each death you just move to another level. So there is no risk at all you will lose your brother/relative, very F up thing to teach the kids, exactly opposite from what should make them scared of dying which is PERMANENT and there is no next level, where you can be with your family again.

> opposite from what should make them scared of dying Amen, bro - live scared and die scared.

That's such a dishonest read of the book I don't actually know what to say. To me, joining Johnathan at the end is the conclusion of the entire book of love, loyalty and bravery. Nowhere does it say "meh, no biggie just kill yourself". If that's the message you took from it then I strongly encourage you to sit down one evening and read it again. The biggest "proof" of it not being treated lightly is obviously all the inhabitants of the valley of cherries enduring, surviving and fighting against oppression instead of as "just killing themselves" to go to the next level. Even at the end Johnathan makes it sound like it's a rumour and maybe there is something there, but no one knows for sure, same as naningalia was at the beginning - people hope there is a better afterlife, but that's all it is - hope.

I don't know why you are down voted. Death was so much more present in kids lives back then. Death from diseases and injuries so common. Kids having dead siblings entirely normal.

The writing of Charles Dickens support this thesis strongly!

That's how I feel right now talking in my only language of English.

Yep. So many people have been drifting away into some kind of parallel reality where language is seemingly the same, yet transmits no meaning between our diverging realities.

I get piñatas, but there is an extreme version of this that I find just too much. Not sure in other places, but in Spain there is a kind of fair stall where children use a plastic fishing rod with a magnet or hook to catch some plastic ducks with the corresponding magnet or hook. The ducks have some points and give you rewards, but the payoff is terrible - maybe you spend €10 and you get a gift that you could buy for €2 at the neighborhood shops. And the fun part with the fishing lasts like 20 seconds, no more, and it's individual, there isn't even a competition or anything, no time limit, etc. Just catch three ducks and see how many points they give you. My 7-year-old son (who by the way loves math) always wants to go there. I can't help but explain that the payoff is horrendous from any point of view, and he understands and doesn't argue against it, but he still insists. Sometimes I convince him by offering alternatives, but sometimes I have to cave because he seems to like it so much. But man, spending euros on that stings, I have the feeling that the people who run the stall must be laughing at all the suckers who fall into the trap.

It sounds like you've got an opportunity to set up something like this at home. You'd feel like you were getting ripped off less, and make the rewards at the fair seem less attractive to "what we have at home". The challenge, of course, is to still make it feel like a special occasion...

Well, your child is spending 0€, getting a bit of fun with a game, and getting a reward afterwards, which is randomized (more dopamine). That seems like an amazing trade. As an adult, if I went and they said it cost 0€, I think I'd play too.

It's kinda like a slot machine. Or loot boxes. Kids love drugs too!

> maybe you spend €10 and you get a gift that you could buy for €2 Oh yes, I got it, they are like the claw machines that have fake bills and iPhones with them (at least that's what I saw too). But the point of having fun, you know it's a rigged game.

Different thing. The claw machine is basically gambling for kids. There is no skill involved.

Is it? Or is that just you, projecting. You could argue baseball, golf, hockey, are all violent as you smash a stick into a ball.

Maybe it's projecting but what I see is kids ganging up with glee to break a target that is often human/animal-shaped, and that feels different to me.

This is only tangentially directed at your reply, but this is the kind of statement that I'll sometimes hear other parents say, and it makes me think that they've completely forgotten what childhood was actually like. Like, the idea that normal, fun activities and sports are bad because they bear some abstract resemblance to adult violence feels very contrived and misses what childhood play is about.

Yeah I'm not saying it's bad for the children, but it's unpleasant for me. It seems violence is a concept that gets deeper and uglier as you grow. For young children it's often abstract and maybe harmless. I just read a book to my child that turned out to have violent scenes that horrified me a bit but he barely thought about it and only in technical terms (like where is that artery ripped by the wolf). Same with people that had fun watching horror movies as teens, then find them unpleasant when they're older.

> Children have no concept of violence or empathy or right or wrong This is not correct. I remember having a sense of shame when I was 4 when I tried to hurt another kid. Kids will also hide the things they do wrong, because they know it is wrong.

> because they know it is wrong Or they know they'll be told it was wrong. Children start knowing nothing then they slowly absorb what they're told again and again, and what they see around them until they feel it. They go from knowing nothing, to knowing what the adults told them, to internalizing that and feeling it rather than just knowing it. But until they do get all of that, they'll spend a lot of time plucking wings off of insects, burning ants with a magnifying glass, pulling the cat by the tail, or throwing rocks at dogs and frogs.

Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h? (rivendell.dmitrybrant.com)

This looks oddly similar to a psychedelic trip.

This is an awesome thought provoking question! My mind goes immediately to perhaps using this as a “time scaled” model to “observe” well known physical experiments and physical phenomenon if possible eg Young’s Experiment. Could that work / be useful? I am not a physicist but currious.

What if the speed of light were 5 km/h?

Nothing would work, including us, because almost everything in physics and biochemistry works at higher speeds. Whether or not the speeds at which things happen in physics, chemistry, etc are somehow absolute, or somehow inherently relative to c, and would speed up and slow down if c changed, is an interesting question.

Some time ago I had the following shower thought: "the Speed of Light is pretty slow" How i got there: The closest major galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda, and is 2.5 million! light-years away. And this is the CLOSEST galaxy, the universe is extremely big. Of course that as you get closer to C, the traveling object will experience time dilation (relative to observer), so the time passed will be less. At 99.999% C, the traveler would take ~11,000 years to arrive to Andromeda. So again, even at 99.999% C, 11K years seems like a LONG time to reach even the closest galaxy. My reasoning was: the speed of light is pretty damn slow. But then I realized: no, it's not the speed of light that is slow, is my frame of reference. For us humans, 11,000 years seems like A LONG time, but for the universe is not that long. The universe's age is estimated to be 13.8 billion years. 11,000 years is 0.0000007971 of the age of the universe. An average human lives 70 years, 0.0000007971 of that lifespan is approximately ~0.4 hours, or 29 minutes, so it's not that bad. So yeah, frame of reference matters.

In terms of comparisons to human lifespan, I think this one is interesting: If you can somehow accelerate/decelerate at a constant human-acceptable 1G, time dilation means almost anywhere is reachable in a human-lifetime. That coincidence(?) could easily become false if we are accustomed to lower accelerations or lesser lifespans.

> At 99.999% C, the traveler would take ~11,000 years if we add more 9s, is it possible to reduce that number to within a human lifespan?

You can but I don't want to see that energy bill

> If you accelerate at 1g constantly for 1y you travel 0.5 light years Can't we accelerate past 1G constantly? Or do we expend so much energy doing it that we can't realistically do it with today's technology?

Sadly there is no realistic approach to get there (even assuming fantasy-levels of technology). Chemical rockets are currently the only thing that allow sustaining such accelerations briefly for human-size payloads, but the low exhaust velocity and exponential reaction mass requirement make sustaining it for days/months/years completely impossible. You'd have to supply the energy externally (i.e. some sort of beam propulsion), but getting any significant fraction of g out of such a system (with human-sized payloads) seems unlikely within the next centuries, especially as the distance increases.

We can't do it with any rocket-like propulsive technology. By the time you get anywhere close to c the front of your spacecraft is being abraded into nothing by interstellar gas, larger particles of dust will kill you, and colliding with anything bigger creates an explosion that can be seen for light years. You need to be flying a large asteroid to even think about surviving it - you still won't for long, but you will have time to think about it - and the energy requirements are wildly impractical. Magic warp bubble tech is the bare minimum, and we're nowhere close to inventing that.

Thanks! But same here imho: 1,000 seconds = ~0.01 days (~17 min) 1,000,000 seconds = ~11.57 days (~12 days) 1,000,000,000 seconds = ~11,574.07 days (~32 years) 1,000,000,000,000 seconds = ~11,574,074.07 days (~32k years) It all seems quite logical once you put everything into the same unit, I think. Maybe it's just our human calendar/time unit rollercoaster (60*60*24*30*12) that's playing tricks on us here.

Of course it is logical, we are not discussing the math. But it isn't intuitive, you're not used to numbers that big or that grow that fast. Few things go from a million to a billion, especially when related to time.

The speed of light is unbelievably slow, not even as a cosmic scale, but on earth. We cannot play competitive multiplayer games globally, without 300ms ping. I dream of a world playing Black Ops 2 on a original PS3 in 2026 getting into a lobby because latency is low.

Ultimate counterevidence of an benevolent "intelligent designer"