It’s a fox. I like the fox.

The Conspiracy

It’s one of the friendliest programming languages around. If you have written something in VBA then you’ll do fine with Python, except for all the bad/outdated nonsense you’ll have picked up from that language. And there’s interactive interpreters you can just mess around in.

If this doesn’t scare you then give it a look:

things = [4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42]
for number in things:
    print(number * 16)

64
128
240
256
368
672

There’s flowers blooming on the grave in the last panel.

I guess the idea is that yes, machine learning algorithms could be used to solve these, but that’s essentially brute forcing. You can make a simple algorithm learn how to complete Super Mario Bros or how to make a virtual robot walk, it just takes millions of iterations. The promised actual artificial intelligence wouldn’t need that.

Majority bias. It isn’t unique to majority-white places and everybody will be familiar with in-group/out-group bias. It also frames it as a property of the society in question, not something the individual person possesses.

We have already thrown just about all the Internet and then some at them. It shows that LLMs can not think or reason. Which isn’t surprising, they weren’t meant to.

it’s not that deep

Says the one who has to put layers upon layers of justifications over the simple statement “domestic violence is bad” to make it sound good if one gender does it.

Yup, the way he acted towards the founders of Tesla when he bought their company shows that dude’s had issues for a looong time.

That was a big concern when TPMs first started appearing. I’m glad that that didn’t go the way it might’ve. Yet.

A catapult on every rooftop!

I’ve had similar experiences. Try to do something semi-difficult and it fails, sometimes in an entertainingly shit way at least. Try something simple where I already know the answer? Good chance there’s at least one fundamental issue with the output.

So what are people who use this tech actually getting out of it? Do they just make it regurgitate things from StackOverflow? Do they have a larger tolerance for cleaning up trash? Or do they just not check the output?

“Ska is what a 13 year old hears in their head when they are told they are getting free mozzarella sticks.”

I always think of this song by 7 seconds of love when I read that. Pretty much sums it up.

Explanation: The guy on the right is Linus Sebastian, a tech youtuber running a fairly large media company. I’d characterize their output as being a mixture of news, reviews and Top Gear style fucking around with tech.

A couple weeks ago he sent Linus Torvalds an e-mail, asking him if he’d like to do some sort of collaboration - mainly because of the name and because he’s a personal hero of his. Torvalds quickly responded, telling him that it would have to be a “there can only be one” type situation, like in Highlander or Mad Max.

So they shot something where they most are just chatting while building a computer together but did the bit for the intro. The video is not released yet.

clippy’s nagging was just as intrusive as the current AI being forced into everything

I thought the opposite was (part of) the point. Just right-click the assistant and tell it to go away, that’s it. If all the AI garbage that’s being integrated into Windows and many applications was that easy to get rid of I’d be considerably less annoyed by it. It was clumsy and misguided but not nearly as intrusive, also didn’t require an account and an Internet connection.

But in the real world you probably don’t need more precision than 333.3 anyway.

If you really need that level of precision for some reason you can just write 1/3m as a fraction.

Exactly, it’s perfectly kromulent.