I worked on IceCube. Was at the South Pole for a little over a month. Wild once in a lifetime experience. And if I am being honest I was terribly bored after the first 2 weeks. Its very flat and white and cold and not much to do. I was asked to go back the next year and I said no.
Field work even in beautiful places can get stifling. When you don't have access to friends, family, routine, various freedoms... It can be a bit much.
I romanticized that kind of work, but I think my limit is roughly what you said at around 2 weeks. The novelty wears off. Especially because I miss my kids a lot after a few days.
Actually, another big one: I love cooking. When you eat what you're given and don't have a choice, even if the food is pretty good it's kind of... I don't know... I really just want to go home and make something that is distinctly 'my food', something I would only have at home.
Even so, I absolutely love field work. The stuff I do is nowhere near as crazy as the Antarctic. I'm typically on the semi-remote islands of the British Columbia coast. My wife goes to the Arctic; her experience is probably more like yours. Lots of time isolated on icebreakers. Occasionally visiting remote navy or military bases, though. Some indigenous communities. Not as middle-of-nowhere as the Antarctic! The longest she has done is 7 weeks, with ~4 days off of the ship.
Clear skies happen regularly enough. You can see refractive phenomena frequently (sun dogs, moon halos and the like). Same for night, plenty of clear skies and auroras during the winter when it’s dark enough to see them.
We hire two people to stay over the winter and operate the detector each year. No icecube affiliation or physics background required, although a technical background helps.
I spent a bit over a year at South Pole for IceCube. There's an old joke in the Antarctic: the first time is for the adventure, the second time is for the money, and the third time is because you don't fit in anywhere else anymore.
I had a professor who talked about working there. In his words, “Thank God for whiskey!”
While there is some romantic imagery (penguins!) down there, and the disconnect from the rest of the world might be appealing, for large parts of the year you’re just stuck inside.
I had a similar experience with this that actually concerned me. I can’t remember the quote I was googling, but it was verbatim a quote that someone said. The AI interpreted it as my quote and furthermore interpreted it as me intending harm to someone else. Now I’m worried I’m flagged in a system and waiting for the police to show at my door next time google hands over data to the government.
A bunch of these patterns are things that real human designers have been using for a while (with the exception of emojis everywhere). This is like how some people assume an em dash automatically means AI generated text.
If an agent under a company’s control commits a crime, the company has committed that crime. If we hold companies directly responsible for the actions of their agents, we may end up seeing companies being more secure with their testing and model development.
Best case scenario they’ll try to monetize the site. Worse case it’s a malware distribution play (can eventually change legit repo link to malicious repo)
So this is a landing page made by someone who doesn’t maintain the actual tool? This strikes me as a potential scam—build some domain rep off someone else’s tool then capitalize somehow
Doomers think I'm a ridiculous optimist, people who think "doomer" is a slur think I'm a ridiculous pessimist.
For comparison, if you take the general form of the Carter (et al) Doomsday argument, there'd be a 33% or so chance of global thermonuclear war in the same period even without AI:
How "hopeful" that is, is up to you. I mean, unless AI's sufficiently advanced technology (AKA magic) turns out to be able to solve entropy as well as aging, we're all doomed eventually, it's just when, and 10% chance over 40 years isn't a risk I worry about in itself.
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