Comment by freilanzer
Comment by freilanzer 2 days ago
I don't seem to get it.
Comment by freilanzer 2 days ago
I don't seem to get it.
> and only available from pre-war / pre-atomic sources.
From the same wiki you linked:
"Since the end of atmospheric nuclear testing, background radiation has decreased to very near natural levels, making special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as brand-new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature"
and
"For the most demanding items even low-background steel can be too radioactive and other materials like high-purity copper may be used"
reading stuff like this makes me so happy. no matter how fucked up something may be there is always a way to clean right up.
This is (one of the many) reasons why I care primarily about biodiversity and preventing as many human-caused extinctions as we can. Those are a permanent loss to the beauty and complexity of the universe built up over millions of years, and they are permanent and irreversible.
and I applied to LLMs here: https://www.latent.space/p/nov-2023
It's a reference to the practise of scavenging steel from sources that were produced before nuclear testing began, as any steel produced afterwards is contaminated with nuclear isotopes from the fallout. Mostly ship wrecks, and WW2 means there are plenty of those. The pun in question is that his project tries to source text that hasn't been contaminated with AI generated material.
After the detonation of the first nuclear weapons, any newly produced steel has a low dose of nuclear fallout.
For applications that need to avoid the background radiation (like physics research), pre atomic age steel is extracted, like from old shipwrecks.
From the blog
> Low Background Steel (and lead) is a type of metal uncontaminated by radioactive isotopes from nuclear testing. That steel and lead is usually recovered from ships that sunk before the Trinity Test in 1945.
To whomever downvoted parent: please don't act against people brave enough to state that they don't know something.
This is a desired quality, increasingly less present in IT work environments. People afraid of being shamed for stating knowledge gaps are not the folks you want to work with.
The problem is that the answer was a really easy google. I didn't know what low background steel was and I just googled it.
Steel without nuclear contamination is sought after, and only available from pre-war / pre-atomic sources.
The analogy is that data is now contaminated with AI like steel is now contaminated with nuclear fallout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
>Low-background steel, also known as pre-war steel[1] and pre-atomic steel,[2] is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. Typically sourced from ships (either as part of regular scrapping or shipwrecks) and other steel artifacts of this era, it is often used for modern particle detectors because more modern steel is contaminated with traces of nuclear fallout.[3][4]