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broken-kebab 15 minutes ago [-]
Speleology aside, just a few days ago in one of HN discussions I was told LLM-produced content is already indistinguishable from human-made. But I'm sure I would have pretty good chances to correctly guess even the exact brand which helped to write this sloppy text. And it's the same with many stories I read.
springtimesun 11 minutes ago [-]
Stake the claim then. I’ve also read a fair bit of LLM text and this didn’t trip anything for me.
Edit: after reading the author bio and the other articles, I agree with this assessment. Though I will admit, this particular article didn’t jump out as AI to me.
wpollock 8 hours ago [-]
Just because the cave is sealed now, does not mean it has been sealed for millions of years. Even for geology, 5.5M years is a long time. I don't understand how they can claim it never had connections to the outside, just because it doesn't have connections now.
defrost 7 hours ago [-]
Geology is most probably largely how the sealed claim has been made .. it was open to the world when the limestone was forming, formed (Speleogenesis) by sky water (rain) permeating down and eating out a limestone void, and "sealed" by thick and impermeable layers of clays and loess (windborne sediment) some 2.5 million years ago during the Quaternary.
There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time (
One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years.
Mentioning the recent Chernobyl accident is weird too. Surely an accident from long ago that is expected to be detectable is far more helpful.
All they proved is that nothing had entered since the Chernobyl accident.
defrost 3 hours ago [-]
It's an AI article.
Looking for Chernobyl signature in cave during the late 1980s / early 1990s does seem daft - far more likely for them to be looking for residual "trace" from the atmospheric tests that doused the planet in "unnatural" residuals and odd isotopes.
fragmede 3 hours ago [-]
Have there been many nuclear reactor meltdowns prior to Chernobyl?
defrost 3 hours ago [-]
Before 1986 there have been twelve "public" core meltdowns, and at least six, likely more, incidents not public on nuclear subs, etc.
You should look up how many live armed nuclear bombs have been accidentally dropped on mainland US soil.
More significantly, there's been a lot of above ground and atmospheric tests that have draped residuals across the planet, and a bunch of dirty Russian / former USSR sites that drift trace across Europe.
inigyou 1 hours ago [-]
Isn't there a nuclear bomb sitting somewhere in a swamp in the USA that everybody lost?
defrost 1 hours ago [-]
"Yes"
- TBH I'd be surprised if it's still "lost" - not further reported on because [ XXXredactedXXX ] is more likely.
hvb2 2 hours ago [-]
You could just look for isotopes from the atmospheric nuclear tests that were conducted? Doesn't need to be a reactor I would assume?
bcraven 7 hours ago [-]
"Combined with the geology and the peculiar chemistry of the cave’s water and air, the evidence pointed to a system that had been closed off since roughly five and a half million years ago."
defrost 7 hours ago [-]
That quote, from the AI generated article, simply asserts the cave was sealed, it doesn't explain how the cave came to be sealed, nor how it is that modern humans infer the cave has been sealed and for how long.
Rebelgecko 3 hours ago [-]
On the flip side, the wiki article for the cave mentions that new species arrived as recently as 2 million years ago...
Interesting that being sealed for 5 million years did not yield any life forms more complex than insects.
Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.
quuxplusone 6 hours ago [-]
That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...
j13n 3 hours ago [-]
Humans didn’t evolve from chimps.
0-_-0 2 hours ago [-]
No but they could over 5 million years
weaksauce 8 hours ago [-]
the sun is energy so i’d expect there to be a correlation there.
charlie0 6 hours ago [-]
It's all fun and games until they run into another branch of homo sapiens ala the descent....
andrewstuart 7 hours ago [-]
Great first line for a story.
visarga 58 minutes ago [-]
It is indeed well written but I feel it has LLM smell, not that is a bad thing.
cyberax 8 hours ago [-]
> Oxygen levels run at roughly half of what our lungs expect. Carbon dioxide is present at concentrations enormously higher than in the outside atmosphere. The air is laced with hydrogen sulfide, the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, and with methane and ammonia.
So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.
dyauspitr 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s). Nothing about this is sealed.
john_strinlai 8 hours ago [-]
>Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s).
where did it say this? i did a double-take because the article says the opposite, and i checked the wikipedia and didnt see it there either. is there another source of info? or am i being blind?
dyauspitr 6 hours ago [-]
> Mesothermal, sulfidic groundwater (up to 1 mM in H2S) originating from an artesian sulfidic aquifer underlying the region enters at the bottom of the cave’s lower passages. This results in a constant flow occurring tens of centimeters to 1 m below the water surface at flow rates of about 5 L/s
Edit: after reading the author bio and the other articles, I agree with this assessment. Though I will admit, this particular article didn’t jump out as AI to me.
There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time (
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave )All they proved is that nothing had entered since the Chernobyl accident.
Looking for Chernobyl signature in cave during the late 1980s / early 1990s does seem daft - far more likely for them to be looking for residual "trace" from the atmospheric tests that doused the planet in "unnatural" residuals and odd isotopes.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
You should look up how many live armed nuclear bombs have been accidentally dropped on mainland US soil.
More significantly, there's been a lot of above ground and atmospheric tests that have draped residuals across the planet, and a bunch of dirty Russian / former USSR sites that drift trace across Europe.
- TBH I'd be surprised if it's still "lost" - not further reported on because [ XXXredactedXXX ] is more likely.
Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.
So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.
where did it say this? i did a double-take because the article says the opposite, and i checked the wikipedia and didnt see it there either. is there another source of info? or am i being blind?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10672346/
Oh, so that's why my neighbour, Vasile, drills day and night. He hopes to discover a new life form. /s