marble 弹珠

Pre-LLM text on the internet has become like low-background steel.

I heard of companies retrieving old WWII shipwrecks from the ocean floor to smelt them into scientific and medical equipment, because all the nuclear tests we did put pollution into the atmosphere that makes new steel too radioactive.

Jul 29, 2025 at 9:29amWeb
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialJul 29, 2025
@marble have you ever looked at the region west of Nellis AFB on OpenStreetMap? they have markers for all the nuclear test craters. have a scroll around, the scale of operations there makes for sobering viewing.
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialJul 29, 2025
@marble (although I must admit that I was very pleased to find that Nuclear Explosion Site was a first-class marker type in OSM)
Show threadGaelan SteeleJul 29, 2025
@gsuberland @marble pedantry corner: everything on OSM is just unstructured key-value pairs, in this case military=nuclear_explosion_site. whether a given combination of tags is given first-class billing is entirely down to the renderer
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialJul 29, 2025
@Gaelan @marble the default renderer gives it a specific marker icon, I'd consider that first class support
Show threadGaelan SteeleJul 29, 2025

@gsuberland @marble yeah fair

(although the default renderer is actually something of a weird situation: it’s not really considered “official”, and doesn’t render certain tags (highway=busway being the big controversial one) with community approval and widespread usage, but the OSM rule is not to adapt tagging to suit the whims of any given renderer, even the default one, so busways in places like Runcorn just don’t show up on the default map! it’s all a bit of a mess)

Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialJul 29, 2025
@Gaelan @marble I did get the impression that the release of the vector renderer has also brought back up a lot of these old discussions on what should and shouldn't be rendered and at what zoom level
Show threadmarble 弹珠Jul 29, 2025
@gsuberland
It's not a geological feature. Stop asking questions! SEIZE YOUR INVESTIGATIONS!
🥴
Show threadmarble 弹珠Jul 29, 2025
@gsuberland it's really hard to get the AI thing to write about nuclear test. I tried multiple crater names followed by "Nevada" and it never mentions nuclear bombs.
Show threadZ̈oéJul 29, 2025
@marble ask it about the trinity site?
Show threadJohn Francis 🇨🇦🦫🍁💪⬆️Jul 29, 2025

@marble decades after the open air testing, modern steel is back to low background, so the old steel isn't as valuable as it was.

Maybe the same will happen with LLMs by 2060.

Show threadmauvedeityJul 29, 2025
@marble am I the only person who learned about this from XKCD?
Show threadPxl PhileJul 30, 2025
@mauvedeity @marble xkcd in question https://m.xkcd.com/2321/
xkcd: Low-Background Metal

Show threadde VK5ZSH 🇦🇺 🐧 🏳️‍🌈Jul 29, 2025
@marble wtf! this a flat earther thing?
Show threadIngmarJul 29, 2025
@marble
Interesting, according to Wikipedia, low-background steel isn’t really needed anymore because the radiation levels have dropped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel?wprov=sfti1#Present_day
Let's see when this will happen to text 😐
Low-background steel - Wikipedia