Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

> Shrinking that into a 500 kg seed — or even Freitas’ original 100-ton seed — is not an engineering detail. It may be the entire problem.

How many AI tells can you count there?

But honestly (see what I did there?) the AI slop is reasonably cleaned up in this piece.

However, the essence of the argument has two deep flaws. One is that the time to complete an interstellar voyage is extremely long and you need some exergy, yada, yada, yada. We could start with sending self-replicating probes to the asteroid belt. There is zero chance that we'll attempt to send self-replicating probes to a different star system before we send them inside our own solar system. And the second error is this:

> Bootstrapping this loop [...] is a chicken-and-egg problem that no study I am aware of has worked through at the level of actual process flowsheets.

The fact that the current technology is not adequate, and nobody even attempted to solve such a problem is a weak argument. Three hundred years ago nobody had "worked through the process flowsheets" of making an injection molding machine, or a 3D printer, or a power drill, yet they are all available now.

The subheadings are all full of AI tells.

> The closure problem, honestly accounted

> A thermodynamic framing

All of those read like AI, especially considering that the subsections aren't consistent. Some are numbers, some are not, some are framings some are problem juxtapositions.

EM dashes everywhere, AI tells in subheadings, "It's not X it's Y" all over the text of the body. This is clearly AI writen.

Notice also the article has two by lines. At the top it's "by Paul Gilster" at the top of the text it's "by Peter Marinko"

Also note that the "metallugrist" they're interviewing that they claim "his current work explores the thermodynamics of technological civilizations" at Uppsala University, but the university's page for him says he's only involved in Animal Research Ethics Committee

> Notice also the article has two by lines. At the top it's "by Paul Gilster" at the top of the text it's "by Peter Marinko".

It is Paul Gilster's blog. It looks like all articles there are by him, hence his byline at the top.

In this particular article he writes an introduction talking about self-replication, then says "Right now I want to introduce Peter Marinko, who today weighs in on self-replication and the problems therein", describes Marinko, and then the rest of the text is Marinko's, hence the second byline after Gilster's introduction.

Something similar happens in the next article on the site. Marinko write a length response to comments on the first article. Gilster decided that would be better as a separate article to further discussion: "When Peter wrote recently with his thoughts on reader reactions, I asked him for permission to run it as a regular post rather than a comment, because I think this is a lively question and would like to see us continue to explore it".

So that too is a post by Gilster, and so with his byline, but after an introduction it just run's Marinko's text, so has a second byline for that section.

He does the same thing on this article [1]. He wrote a review a paper, some commenter had interesting thoughts, and Gilster posted an article talking about that, introducing the commenter, and then the rest of the article was the commenter's text. So two bylines, one for the intro and one for the guest text.

It looks like the other articles on the site are just Gilster, and so only have one byline.

[1] https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2026/06/05/observations-on-t...

300 years ago people also believed alchemy was a serious field of study

That is true. What should we conclude from this statement?

That you shouldn’t assume just because in the past ideas have existed that became reality, that all current ideas are feasible or possible?

I didn’t assume that. The author makes the opposite assumption: that because nobody has ever proposed a path to technological feasibility, that thing will forever be technologically unfeasible. I simply find this argument to be very weak.

And today we call it transmutation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation

It’s a bit silly to be so sensitive to “AI tells” in phrasing. If you go look for them in original human writing, you are guaranteed to find them—just like the AI training did! That’s how they became “tells” in the first place.

But LLMs go through post-training that gives them a style distinctive from most human writing. It's certainly detectable.

This reads as heavily LLM generated/edited to me.

I find this line of reason to be incredibly irritating. So anything written above the level of "see Spot run" now must be AI slop? The author's piece is written well and reads easily. As a long-time user of nonrestrictive elements in sentences, I bristle at the idea that only AI is capable of writing sentences containing brief asides -- the things between the em dashes -- now.

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