kbal

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

Well that’s an interesting development, which people seem to have begun experimenting with in the past few weeks. Of course for the time being I suppose it’s made somewhat easier for the relays by 99% of the users being hosted on the small collection of official bsky.network PDS servers.

Some more discussion of it in which there may be hints as to how atproto people might slowly progress towards reinventing some of the things we take for granted on the fediverse.

If they don’t crawl the entire network then most of the network cannot contact them at all? Which makes it … not really a network. That’s where federation would come in.

Really? I thought there were only two. How are the small ones able to afford the bandwidth to monitor everything from every PDS?

Right… it did take me a minute to remember how the relays work. Well, when there are a few hundred of them we’ll see how it goes.

Hmm, let’s see if I remember the terminology correctly:

Client apps have nothing to do with it, obviously.

Alternate appviews have nothing to do with it, except in that they’d presumably need to work with whatever form of atproto federation exists, if any did.

Alternate relays aren’t federated unless there’s some protocol for routing messages between them — such as ActivityPub.

That’s the benefit of Bluesky being totally centralized, not built with any capability for federation: When they decide to add some, they can hardly fail to see that it’s best to go with ActivityPub.

Noscript user here; we don’t generally have that problem on fedia/mbin. It’s mostly just mastodon “quote posts” and imgur that don’t show up unless you allow their servers.

Makes sense to me. AI bullshit generators may be worse than useless for most of the things people try to do with them, but they might just be the perfect tool for rationalizing the systematic looting of formerly productive companies by private equity.

The trick is to use a text editor with a fixed-width font.

This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs

T  o  I
h  f  n
e     t
   t  e
F  h  r
u  e  n
t     e
u     t
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Sucks if you’re in France. For the rest of us it should be interesting to see which of these VPN providers choose to comply by geo-blocking France, which choose to cut any ties they have with France and otherwise ignore the order, and which to abandon their mission and become agents of censorship on behalf of France.

Hello Internet commenters. Please remember that there’s no rule that says you need to tell us all your gut reaction to this if you know absolutely nothing about the situation.

What was the problem again?

#ChatControl and #EUGoingDark . None of this has even been discussed in the run-up to this election.

Increasingly it does look like Europe really is going dark.