I think I found a planet nobody knew existed. I used Claude Code to find it
reddit.com
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I've been tinkering with the latter for the last couple of months. Yesterday my system made some progress on instabilities on a particular superconductive system: https://colinocallaghan.com/autonomous-ai-research/Spatial-P...
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> even got NASA to point a telescope at it for confirmation
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What is uncool is how people are using cloud based AI and their universities are not providing self hosted models that keep data within the university. Cloud AI is useless due to it being no different than publishing everything you do publicly.
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> "We got vibe astronomy before GTA6"
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Friend sent me this one, kinda glad people are learning what I learned with Claude 4.6… you can build anything at this point.
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Life seeded out of the way, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy around a small unregarded yellow sun.
Life has launched an interstellar probe that will be in range of your sensors soon.
Would you like to write a fun research paper on the subject?
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Surely 'take all observations of the sky and for every visible star do a frequency analysis' is step 1 when looking for planets?
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The other answers: "Of course not, someone would haved picked it up already if it were"
Some times low hanging fruit is so low hanging that people don't bother to look for it as it's "obvious" someone else would had picked it already.
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“I’ll pay you $100 if you eat that dog shit” says one
The other economist, being a rational actor, naturally eats the dog shit. He is given the $100.
But then he sees another dog shit. “Well, I’ll pay you $100 to eat that one!”
A second shit is consumed, producing $200 of GDP. The economists are overjoyed at their productivity and earnings.
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Or you can see it as a very basic representation of money flowing in the opposite way of services and goods in the economy, you can even measure the speed of money with the amount of shit they make each other eat in an afternoon.
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I suppose you have to set a cutoff somewhere.
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To put that in perspective, the total daily internet traffic ranges between 25-35 exabytes per day. If you fraction that to the ten hours a telescope would operate SKA-Low could double the amount of data transmitted globally on the web while it's recording
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When I last did astrophysics research half a decade ago (as an undergrad) the workflow for doing research boiled down to writing pipelines to clean the data and then have scripts to find interesting candidates and analyse them automatically. It was necessary to filter stuff to reduce false positives, so it's possible this candidate was just missed by such scripts.
It's also possible this star is in some PhD student's dataset and they just haven't published yet. Astrophysics papers in this vein usually focus on techniques for classification and data science so you'd expect to have at least dozens if not hundreds to thousands of interesting stellar objects before you have something worth publishing unless it was some truly novel technique. A paper just saying "we found an exoplanet" isn't particularly interesting these days, as it turns out there are a lot of them.
(I haven't looked at the data and I'm sure my skills have atrophied by now anyway, sadly.)
More power to the guy who did this (astrophysics is probably the most hobbyist-friendly science since a lot of the data is public and the only lab equipment you need is a laptop) but I suspect "ordinary" folks are far more impressed by this than astrophysics folks. A decade or two ago exoplanets were still thought to be very rare but we've since figured out they are quite common and have moved on to cataloguing them.
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Asking for a friend.
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https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
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To be clear: this is a genuine question and not an attempt to bait a flamewar. I honestly have no idea what the matter is. I have deliberately tried to avoid all social media other than HN for a very long time.
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This is just the start, imagine ten years from now, or ten times the capacity
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What saved me wasn't asking Claude whether it was right (it almost always says yes). It was checks that don't depend on its own report: run it on data where you already know the answer, and give a fresh session only the result and ask it to break it.
For a planet hunt I guess that means hiding a few fake planets in real data to see if it finds them, and running the same pipeline on shuffled data to see how many "planets" it finds in pure noise.
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For example, I've had people thanking me for pointing out LLMish later in an article when it's not as obvious at the beginning. It saves the time of thinking the article is manually written when it'll later turn out to be AI instead.
Note that I don't necessarily have anything against AI in particular, but rather the chronic lack of information density typical of LLM-generated articles. Some articles that were LLM-assisted are still information-dense enough to keep me satisfied.
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It's not AI tone, that's not a thing, it's just low quality text.
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My brain can't help itself in looking for AI tells and gauging if writing sounds like AI or not.
Then once it latches onto the idea that the writing is probably AI, then it feels like half my brain is just reading the text looking for the AI smells.
Calling it "AI smells" like "code smells" might actually be what is going on in my brain, and I start code reviewing it at that level rather than reading it for what it does.
I really would prefer people not just post slop. I don't care if you use it to clean up your own writing, but don't just let it rip.
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However, it is notable that the rules of this particular venue request one be charitable to your fellow forum goers, and thus the admonition that their preferred communication is "slop" is generally considered unwelcome.
Would that you had only been able to word your own communication is in proper vocabulary and grammar; alas, I must conclude that even as you reject modernity, you have embraced the "slop" of the past.
But to address your last sentence: OP explicitly admits to using AI in the Reddit comments, and apologizes for it. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wzw8zd/i_think_i.... If you are going to repeat this libel, at least have the decency to provide some sort of citation
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good writing is not just replacing random words with entries from thesaurus.com, it's writing for your reader. that's one thing LLM-generated text is very bad at - frequently violates the show-don't-tell rule, it lacks any interiority by it's very nature, etc
if you don't practice writing yourself, you don't develop the muscle of knowing what your reader's expectations are and you will forever remain a mediocre writer
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It's the same tired game we play, as a society, any time a new writing style enters the mainstream. That game goes back to at least Shakespeare's era, where our illustrious bard was called out for his tendency to make up words ("fashionable" being, I believe, an actual example of this?)
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Regardless of authorial intent, everything posted here is for the wider HN audience
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Conversely, if you yourself write solely for points, then you might as well be a machine - for all reasonable virtues of truth, community, and free expression will find themselves at odds with such petty incentives. I am happy to lose a karma or two to speak my own mind, rather than playing puppet for your upvote.
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there is an ironically long and obscure word describing this kind of writing:https://sites.utexas.edu/legalwriting/2015/07/27/tips-for-co...
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But that IS a style! It's a deliberate attempt to invoke something specific: in this case, the contrast between a supposed sophisticated vocabulary, and the concepts actually being quite simple.
I don't really think of it as "extra cognitive processing", though - the whole idea is that the audience should recognize the joke, as indeed you did!
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However, I think that AI-slop is genuinely harder to read and less information-dense than stuff written by a person, and I catch myself abandoning articles and other written content early on when they smell too much like AI. It's simply less worth it to read them because I'll have to spend some precious time figuring out wtf the text is actually trying to say.
It seems like the flow is "User A writes bullet points and has a model convert them to prose to send to User B. User B then uses a model to convert the text back to bullet points."
I would in every case prefer the bullet points or raw transcript of the AI session to just the final output.
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It takes considerable effort, rules, examples, hooks and prompt to keep the popular $model reasonably concise, and yet STILL from time to time it starts vomiting absolute garbage.
At the moment the best recalibration is "shaming" it and showing both the negative (the vomit) and positive (slop replaced with human sentences). Good for a moment (up to 200k context).
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I DESPISE this kind of slop prose
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> small note: I wrote this while being way too excited about the whole thing, so yeah, some parts probably sound a bit AI-ish haha, sorry about that
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wzw8zd/comment/p...
flaburgan[21 comments hidden]
- NASA (with the TESS mission): https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/nora-dot-eisner/planet-h...
- ESA (with the CHEOPS mission): https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/bmerin/planet-hunters-ch... (Very new! Will be announced next week!)
If you are logged in with an account they will even recognise you and add your name to the paper!
So instead of playing alone, join the common effort, this is how science will progress efficiently!
maaaaattttt[4 comments hidden]
justinclift[hidden]
AdrianB1[hidden]
These days energy is expensive. It may be better to shut down home computers and let organizations use optimized hardware for such type of processing.
arcanemachiner[hidden]
knlje[14 comments hidden]
"TESS comes back to this part of the sky in November. I submitted an observing proposal asking it to record this star every 2 minutes while it's there. It was approved. Program #100. "
flaburgan[13 comments hidden]
TeMPOraL[6 comments hidden]
danlitt[2 comments hidden]
lo_zamoyski[hidden]
(Of course, when we use technology and read books, there is a remote participation in the social as these are cultural and thus social products, but that's not what is meant here.)
ryandrake[hidden]
It's such a low-stakes hobby, and I don't need to care about collaboration or "efficient progress." The local HAM radio group is a bunch of elderly guys who just talk about Trump and their sore backs, not my cup of tea. For some things, you can have plenty of fun alone in your computer room.
reaperducer[2 comments hidden]
He posted it on Reddit. That's pretty much the definition of both gregariousness and social activity.
TeMPOraL[hidden]
DonsDiscountGas[hidden]
HelloMcFly[hidden]
lo_zamoyski[hidden]
And look, he found something interesting working alone. Now he can share it with NASA.
It's nice to be able to freely explore topics.
segmondy[2 comments hidden]
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RobRivera[hidden]
binlog[hidden]
Literally the first line of the post.
NiloCK[hidden]
He helped to sift through published data, found something, then shared it.
I really struggle to find any fault here. He wasn't logged into a portal that hasn't yet been announced? What?
Is it your view that publishing on "the internet" rather than a NASA portal is playing alone and distinct from the common effort?