> It is search if you ask it to produce a list of links.
Not in the example I mentioned. It can imagine the links, and the content of the links, and be very confident about it. It literally invented an obituary that didn't exist, gave me a link to a funeral home that 404'd, came up with "in-memoriam" references from regional newsletters that never contained her name. It's actually really scary how specifically fake it was.
I asked it to produce verbatim references from any sources and the links to them, and none of the text it produced could be searched with quotes on any search engine.
I think that's the tricky thing. I'm not saying it's not useful when it is, but you really do need a keen and skeptical eye to be able to know. The problem kind of reminds of bloom filters, such that they're useful for situations when you want to know something might exist or definitely does not exist in a set. Exact truth has some level of permissible error rate, as it does in any situation, but definitely wrong is pretty important to know about.
The issue as I see it is just straight copy/pasting its output. You want to use it as a search tool to give you pointers on things to look up and links to read? Great. Then use that as a basis to read the sources and write your own response. If you aren't familiar enough with the subject area to do that, then you also shouldn't be pasting LLM output on it.
It's not even copy/pasting in some cases. In my example, it confidentially produced "verbatim" references that don't exist anywhere, to specific pages that never mentioned this person's name or contained any of the text. Sometimes completely different people, 404 pages, huge waste of time
Yeah I agree, I've seen the hallucinated references also. Sometimes used by people in internet arguments to make their bullshit seem more legitimate. What I meant though by copy/pasting is people getting the LLM output and then just directly feeding that to the people they're conversing with, instead of looking into what it's saying or really even engaging with it in any way.
Ask it to solve a tough Euler Math puzzle with the search button on and it just copies the answer from the web. Turn search off and it actually computes the answer.
Funny how the search button is taken away though.
Which is "fine" so to speak. We do this with using AIs for coding all the time, don't we? As in, we ask it to do things or tell us things about our code base (which we might be new to as well) but essentially use it as a "search engine+" so to speak. Hopefully it's faster and can provide some sort of understanding faster than we could with searching ourselves and building a mental model while doing it.
But we still need to ask it for and then follow file and line number references (aka "links") and verify it's true and it got the references right and build enough of a mental model ourselves. With code (at least for our code base) it usually does get that right (the references) and I can verify. I might be biased because I both know our code base very well already (but not everything in detail) and I'm a very suspicious person, questioning everything. With humans it sometimes "drives them crazy" but the LLM doesn't mind when I call its BS over and over. I'm always "right" :P
The problem is when you just trust anything it says. I think we need to treat it like a super junior that's trained to very convincingly BS you if it's out of its depth. But it's still great to have said junior do your bidding while you do other things and faster than an actual junior and this junior is available 24/7 (barring any outages ;)).
Billions of people are on social media platforms run by massive companies who spend enormous sums of money researching how to get and keep people addicted to their platforms. Vast teams of highly paid experts spend their days figuring out how to keep people coming back, and their happiness or well being are not a concern. Conflict and rage get engagement, so they push conflict and rage.
It's everything previous generations feared about the "boob tube" but a thousand times worse, since it's precisely personalized and backed by analysis and data that TV executives wouldn't have even dreamed of having.
Mastodon is the only social media I pay attention to, because it's the only one that doesn't constantly shovel addictive shit in my face. The fact that approximately nobody uses it, but most of the planet uses the big corporate addiction factories, is in my eyes well worth the quoted statement.
It's probably old age, but I can't understand how people enjoy Discord or find it useful. To me it's like another Slack to try to stay on top of, except no one is paying me to stay on top of Discord. Discussion forums were truly the peak of the internet to me
When I opened Discord recently a popup appeared explaining how to earn “Orbs” and trade them for rewards. I’d say that’s pretty consistent with “capitalist hellscape”.
I wouldn't say they're at the hellscape stage yet. They need money, but they still haven't locked in enough customers to start outright abusing them. So they use middle of the road approaches like their quests, stores and cosmetics to get some extra cash while also having these things be completely optional and beside the actual messaging experience. Only after they get big enough will the hellscape stage start - perhaps, banner ads, automatically joining sponsored servers for users, clawing back essential features to put them behind Nitro, stuff like that.
I know this is kinda a grampa thing to say, but can you imagine timemachining a farmer from 100 years ago to today's "capitalist hellscape" and ordering him a burger on Uber Eats...
I think a rural farmer from 1925 can understand "I pay an immigrant to deliver me hot food via an exploitative middleman", if he's Indian maybe his cousin that went to the city is a dabbawalla.
Like you can do your hypothetical right now with a plane ticket and a 4x4 trip to the Colombian Andes. The peasant might call you a softie, but he's not gonna become Steve Pinker and tell you everything is A-OK.
The 01925 dime is worth about US$3 as bullion (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907742) even without getting into collectors' value, so a couple of dimes or a quarter will pay for a hamburger. You may just have to stop by a jeweler or a pawn shop first.
The catastrophizing perspecting is objetively correct from the perspective of the present and future that we are creating.
The open web as we knew it 20 years ago does not exist. Governments continue to tighten down on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and financial restrictions through the digitizing of currency and arbitrary sanction mechanisms.
Income inequality continues to increase. Standards of living in the West have marginal increases in material access at the cost of unaffordability in housing and health. Retirement benefits continue to be chipped away. Organized labor is made more and more irrelevant each day.
None of this will make a difference in your daily life. Until it does; then it's too late.
A test cricket match can last for up to five days and is the longest format of the game, with each team having two innings. Each day consists of about 90 overs and typically lasts for 6-7 hours, including lunch and tea breaks.
i'm no expert on cricket, but an ordinary game is "1 baseball inning" with one team running through its "batters" (i don't know cricket terminology except googly) and then the other team running through its batters.
it would be useful to know how long such I game usually lasts—I have attended onesuch, and they did break for tea but it did draw to a close in one afternoon—and what differences there are with this longer format of which you speak.
is it just the additional inning that makes for such an extended weeklong outing?
Most office workers are not in software so most work machines are office machines. Having baseline Windows further encumbered by often-misguided IT approaches.
Every one of these needs more intense tweaking before it will run as well as the same offices 20 years ago.
Too bad most users are locked out and IT may not know how to do it or may not be motivated anyway.
It may even be at the point where less tweaking may now be needed for Linux to become a higher-performance office machine than Windows/Office was 20 years ago. With less undocumented effort than it would take to get the same performance from the latest Windows. But who's going to do it?
All other things are not being equal though, 20 years ago PC's were lower-performing hardware in a number of ways, so that probably should be brought under consideration.
Good catch — thanks for digging into that. You’re right: the domain still has a mix of A records (AWS + GitHub Pages), which explains why some people see different results.
I have removed the broken A records and the site works normally now. Appreciate the pointers and links
It does well at filtering information for you.
Going to primary sources is required to verify what it says but it can reduce the leg work rather a lot.