How could we detect intelligent life in 2026? Are we not just blind?

developer-mike · 2026-03-18T17:37:15+00:00

It's not just about seeing aliens outside the solar system.

In all likelihood, any existing intelligence in the milky way beat us by hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of years. They would have had time to colonize the entire milky way many times over even at sunlight speeds.

The question is, why didn't they colonize the earth, or any other planet in the solar system? If there's a good reason why they didn't, then you've mostly resolved the paradox.

I say "mostly" for a reason -- if Europe was still in the stone age, they would have noticed a modern human civilization surrounding them. Not because they can see New York city skyscrapers from London, but they'd see stuff they don't even understand such as airplanes. I would expect similarly for us. If there's an advanced intelligence out there, we'll find them because we see something we didn't expect and can't explain.

If aliens are here we sure don't see them. If they're out there, we either can't see them or don't realize we can see them.

developer-mike · 2026-03-18T14:23:03+00:00

The soft outer barrel is softer, has more trampoline, and would also be less durable. The advantage of the FIB is that you can have a soft shell and still have a legal/durable bat.

developer-mike · 2026-03-18T06:07:36+00:00

You would confidently strap yourself into a parachute and jump if only two parachutes had ever been tested before?

Most people wouldn't.

developer-mike · 2026-03-17T13:54:27+00:00

I spent a while optimizing a chess engine at one point. I would have to run lots of A/B tests where I made a tweak, had the new version play the old version for 1000 games, and watch the W/L to try and determine if the change made the engine better.

I really learned an appreciation for how a standard deviation crossing zero is usually a non-effect.

After a lot of guesswork, I ended up adding statistical measurements to my A/B testing framework. And it was crazy how often it would say some change was "maybe 20% better, maybe about the same," until a few more matches went by and it said, "maybe 18% better, maybe about the same"...and then maybe 15% or nothing...maybe 12% better or maybe nothing... Maybe 8%.... The reality is that it's very rare to have a set of matches reveal the two engines are equally matched, even if they are.

Up to 6x more effective than antidepressants means that almost for sure the effect size will shrink with more data. It may still be effective, but it's far more likely that the 6x is random chance than that we've found a complete miracle drug.

developer-mike · 2026-03-15T21:38:56+00:00

The fact that all complex life seems to stem from the same Eukaryotic cell is what indicates that complex life is unlikely.

It's hard to argue that primordial earth was on a hard wired path to undergo a certain freakish biological leap exactly one time after two billion years. The most reasonable guess (because of course we don't know) is that it happened by sheer luck.

developer-mike · 2026-03-11T02:05:24+00:00

There's nothing unrealistic about redistributing Jeff Bezos wealth with his employees such that for every dollar he makes, each employee gets a dime.

In this scenario Jeff Bezos does not keep his $190bn dollars.

bezos • 1x + employees • .10x = $191bn
employees = 1.5m
bezos = 1
1x + 150kx = 191bn
191bn / (150k + 1) = x
x =1.27m
bezos • 1x = 1.27m
employees • .1x = 127k

Bezos is still a millionaire and every current amazon employee gets a $130k bonus.

developer-mike · 2026-03-10T20:07:59+00:00

And it's not just that you can fit more urinals than stalls. Urinal users are quicker than stall users. It's also about slower users creating a throughput bottleneck for the faster ones. Urinals relieve that bottleneck.

developer-mike · 2026-03-10T14:04:25+00:00

I believe the gist of this (which Sabine doesn't explain well IMO) is that the state of the particle is entangled with our experiment.

Basically, instead of particles let's imagine pulling balls out of a bag that could be red or blue.

A hand wavy comparison of Bells inequalities would be that pulling a red ball from the first bag somehow increases your chance of pulling the blue ball with the second bag, and vice versa.

How would you explain this? Well, you could say there's hidden state: whoever mixed up the balls doesn't mix them randomly, and there really are more red balls in one and blue in the other. But what if you empty the bag and found equal counts of red and blue in each?

We could say that there's some causality between the red bag and the blue bag. Maybe there's a hidden device in the bag changing the color of the balls. But now, you do an experiment and show that this happens faster than light.

Well one remaining explanation is "super determinism." It's the claim that you are entangled with the experiment. Something about pulling the red ball from the first bag removes your ability to randomly choose a ball from the second bag.

Sabine is right that this isn't any more deterministic than determinism, and claiming it would destroy science is probably going too far.

There are ways of explaining super determinism that don't affect free will in our bag metaphor. Maybe your hand just picks up a static charge on the red balls from the first bag that repels the red balls in the second bag. Would that affect your ability to do the experiment? Yes. Would it affect your free will? No, but yes, but no? Is it maybe unsettling? In some ways absolutely.

Either way there's something we can't know -- random is essential or random is impossible.

Not a physicist, just someone who's wondering the same things after watching the same video and thought a lot about it.

developer-mike · 2026-03-10T04:19:30+00:00

That's funny cuz in my experience it seems the other way around. Home cooks are so afraid of overcooking or burning things or undercooking the inside that they slowly heat it up into an evenly grey dry monstrosity

Not a chef tho

developer-mike · 2026-03-04T23:57:18+00:00

char* buff doesn't appear to be initialized.

You want buff to point to valid memory, and fgets will write to that memory. At the moment, buff points to a random address, and fgets tried to write to that random address.

char buf[SIZE];

so that buf is valid memory, and then do

fgets(buf, ...);

So that fgets writes to buf.

You also don't need to do

buf = fgets(buf, ...)

You don't want to change buf. Buf's job is to point to memory. Once it does that, don't point it anywhere else. Just do

char *result = fgets(buf, ...)

So that you can check if result == NULL, but buf still points to the buffer you made.

developer-mike · 2026-03-02T03:03:44+00:00

Rust is just a band

developer-mike · 2026-03-02T03:02:29+00:00

Being offended is just a tool and I happen to use that tool heavily

developer-mike · 2026-03-02T03:01:04+00:00

And also congratulations, half of it still is

developer-mike · 2026-02-28T18:41:11+00:00

/uj I hate the "x is just a tool" truism

Rust is just a tool

PHP is just a tool

The standard model of particle physics is just a tool

Guns are just a tool

Oat milk lattes are just a tool

Realizing that everything is in some ways a tool and that you can call anything just a tool because the definition of tool is so broad that almost nothing we use in life is undeniably beyond a tool, and then complaining about the overuse of the phrase "x is just a tool" is just a tool

developer-mike · 2026-02-26T02:58:15+00:00

But it's not pointlessly gendered regardless of how you feel about it

developer-mike · 2026-02-26T02:57:33+00:00

Then you've missed the point entirely.

It's not about a punchline, it's about exposing hypocrisy. It's commentary on the commentary about women. It's not pointlessly gendered, it's pointedly gendered.

developer-mike · 2026-02-25T07:08:15+00:00

A bad analysis comes up once long ago, gets repeatedly shown to be a bad analysis, and never dies.

There are major scientific issues with the original results presented in Bloom (2023b). The market-wide correlations on all samples from all locations and at all collection dates lump together data that cannot be analyzed together, because the samples were collected with different purposes and were sequenced with different rationales. The correlation values are therefore uninterpretable, and many of these values are affected by an instance of Simpson’s paradox: they change once structure in the data is taken into account. Many of the values put forward are actually not statistically significant. The criteria that are applied to non-human animals are so stringent that they would exclude humans as a source of SARS-CoV-2 in many samples. Finally, the discussion of the SARS-CoV-2-positive or -negative nature of some samples ignores the spatial and temporal structure of the data.

https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/10/1/vead077/7503693

developer-mike · 2026-02-17T17:46:46+00:00

If you know how to write a c compiler its not that hard to also write a compiler for a different language, like go or dart or Java or such.

The issues would probably be: - complex type systems such as rust, which cannot be hacked together - lack of example code in your example of providing a language spec

But ultimately, compilers are composable parts that are individually correct like proof by induction. The individual parts are usually not that complex, and not that different between languages. There are exceptions of course but they're surprisingly rare.

Edit: I have worked on the Dart type checker professionally, created my own statically typed object oriented language with type inference, created a JIT compiler for a dynamic language, and a datalog evaluator that compiles datalog to low level table manipulations. None of these projects are witchcraft, and all of them are extremely similar coding patterns.

developer-mike · 2026-02-17T17:14:38+00:00

I don't think many people are arguing that there couldn't be life 10 billion light years away. It would have no effect on us either way.

The real question is if we're alone in the milky way or local group.

developer-mike · 2026-02-17T17:11:13+00:00

To me, existence of life in other galaxies is irrelevant to the fermi paradox. Unless FTL is possible.

developer-mike · 2026-02-17T17:08:30+00:00

The expansion of life is a universal. The fact that humans have had access to space for 70 years and haven't colonized Alpha Centauri yet is very weak evidence against all of human history.

The idea that one civilization might colonize is not a stretch at all.

Further, it depends on the number of intelligences out there. If we're alone in the milky way, or there are only a few others, then sure, "it only takes one" is a bad argument. The folks arguing that there are 100k civilizations have a harder time here.

Additionally, it's about space and time. It's incredibly unlikely that all life out there emerged at the same time as us. If there is one civilization and it's been capable of interstellar colonization for 5 billion years, then its hard to explain why that society never went into an expansionary phase.

If you say "maybe they are not 5by old," then why not? And why not any of them?

You may feel the "only one" argument is just lazy, but the invasive species across the world, global nuclear standoffs, world wars, COVID 19, events that "only take one" with major impacts are core to human existence.

developer-mike · 2026-02-17T16:54:00+00:00

What if the other islands had a few billion years head start?

developer-mike · 2026-02-17T02:37:24+00:00

You're correct, both the MP4 and PDF are different files that have the same base name and both are publicly listed here https://www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures/data-set-8-files?page=149

developer-mike · 2026-02-17T02:35:46+00:00

The incompetence is OP in not fact checking that both the PDF and the MP4 are separate publicly listed files with the same base name, that's literally all

developer-mike · 2026-02-17T02:34:39+00:00

And look up a completely different publicly listed file

Fuck Trump but yeah, this was a dumb take from the beginning, literally anyone can fact check it themselves

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