Only partway through this but it captures the way I see LLMs and why the industry is so convinced they are more than what they really are.

You can train it on all the source code, meta data for that source code, and documentation you want but it will never understand programming. It’s a text predictor that was trained on both sides of a bunch of debates. Contradictions mean nothing to it, but it usually only predicts what one side of the debate will say to champion its side, which means it will use confident and absolute language to “sell” whatever side of the debate it looks like the previous tokens are headed towards.

It is impressive what it can output sometimes and it makes a decent debate/exploration partner, but it will always have a chance at predicting a useless series of tokens or contradicting the previous thing it just said because a) its training data only trains it to predict tokens from statistics, and b) its training data includes some of those contradictions directly.

I have lost count of the times I’ve been “thinking out loud” about something with an LLM and realize something about what I’m thinking about that contradicts what it is currently saying, then I’ll add my new perspective and it agrees entirely, despite the contradiction. Sometimes it tries to resolve the contradiction, sometimes it just abandons what it said previously entirely, sometimes it adds more to the perspective that I hadn’t considered.

That’s fine for just shooting the shit about some random topic but horrible for a tool intended to provide expertise and reliability, when the response matters because it feeds into something else and you want to automate it. Should a tool just inject “are you sure?” after each response? What if it makes it second guess something that was correct? What if it’s one of those debates and it will endlessly switch sides when it faces any opposition? That’s a waste of resources and time.

Funny thing is I’m expecting this to eventually go back to scripting for automation. An LLM has a higher chance of outputting a script that does what you want (depending on the task) while you hold its hand than it does of consistently giving the correct output when it is thrown into an automated system directly. But you get “goodish” results much quicker just trying putting the LLMs everywhere, even if there’s some selection bias on the results (“didn’t work, didn’t work, oh it worked, great!”).

For someone fluent in all involved languages, sure.

But from the sounds of it, OP’s company outsources the translation but doesn’t fully trust the output they get back. They’re back to square one for verifying it, because if they knew both languages enough to verify, they could do the translations themselves.

The problem AI is trying to solve is “how do I access a skill I don’t have cheaply?” It’s only because it’s bad at that problem that it has shifted to “how can we use AI to get more production out of the skilled workers we still need to babysit the AI that is unreliable at everything?”

Picnic spot is always stupid busy. The trick is to treat anthrax spot like picnic spot. If you feel uncomfortable, just play some Anthrax and tell yourself that’s why it’s named like that.

I’m sure you could involve a torch in there somehow to raise the stakes even more. Grilled Cheese Flamble has a certain ring to it.

They could drop the priest celibacy rule, seeing as now there’s a system in place to prevent priests from passing on land to their heirs instead of to the church (because they never take ownership of the church land like they did in older times). Then the priests could have relationships with equals (if that’s even possible with the cult aspect, though still better if it’s with adults rather than kids) to address their hormones and loneliness.

The church administration owes both the priests and communities an apology over that BS, all done in the first place because of institutional greed and lust for power. Though that might require admitting that they just make shit up on the religion side to justify policies made for the business side.

Note that saying the priests are owed an apology doesn’t shift any blame for the actions that some of them did. It’s placing extra blame for the system itself on the church, which also caused suffering for the priests that didn’t decide to do fucked up things to kids they had power over.

It’s kinda like the push to return to office. It was driven by corps having invested in the “can’t fail (ignoring the last previous crash)” real estate market and buying their offices. If everyone suddenly works from home instead of in the office, then those investments go bad because demand for office space is way down. So they tell people to go back to the office, hoping to return to that “every business needs offices!” status quo and save their investments. Though the demand is false (especially combined with layoffs), so it won’t necessarily cause any new corp to want that office space. If they don’t have the sunk cost, then they don’t need to accept the rest of the fallacy.

With AI, it’s the same but just replace building investment with R&D as well as data centre investment. A lot of the companies really pushing AI are the ones that will profit from people going along with that. They really want to build a dependence amongst users as well as a good reputation for execs so they can get a return on the investment. Then there’s also the True Believers (who think LLMs are brilliant AIs that can solve anything if given the right prompts) and the FOMOs (who don’t know much about it but see the world moving towards it and don’t want to miss it because if it was a real AI, missing it could be a massive mistake). There’s also some people who just don’t have various skills and want the AI agents to fill those gaps (and probably don’t have a very good idea about what the LLMs are actually doing in those gaps).

At this point, I think it’s a mistake to go all in on this tech. LLMs aren’t reliable, and their ability to “perform” is more about their flexibility than being well-suited for any task. They’ll go directly from saying things that seem “insightful” (they have no insight) to making the dumbest “mistake” (a mistake requires intent, which they lack, they just predict tokens). But there’s all kinds of false and true (albeit misguided IMO) demand right now and it’s still in early pricing mode (remember the intent is to make that investment money back).

Oh and there’s also China which has been making more efficient models and open sourcing some of them. If they continue to do this, there’s a decent chance those investments will never give the desired returns, at least not to those who are trying to sell tokens. Or those who depend on those selling tokens, like any hardware companies selling hardware under the assumption that it will then make the money to pay for itself (which I believe both nVidia and AMD have done).

It’s mirroring the dotcom bubble with that last bit because network cable companies started loaning the money to pay for their cables to ISPs, expecting returns that never came.

Only if it’s been trained on discussions about it.

In addition to the cleanliness of the lab, Walter also decided to cut the pseudoephedrine from over the counter drugs out, along with the steps required to extract it from the other ingredients in the cold medicine and instead synthesised his own from methlemine.

No idea which one is easier to get a pure result from, but that was his first “level up” to the blue meth he became known for.

Though what set him and Jessie apart from Gail is hard to say, other than Walter sabotaging Gail instead of just teaching him his techniques (iirc, been a while since I saw it).

The series does seem to be taking the stance that “before Walter White, professional chemists worked for legitimate companies doing legitimate work in professional labs while drugs were made by hobbiest chemists in ad-hoc labs that were neglected even if they had professional equipment and the people running them had no idea about the single most important factor when targeting high purity: the purity of everything else along every step of the process or some way to extract purity before the end step”.

I’d normally avoid correcting spelling, but these ones were confusing until I realized what you were trying to say. “I always thought that when heroes fought and threw things and people through walls it was an extra strong emphasis (I think?) of how strong they were.” English is a stupid language.

Though walls aren’t quite that easy to go through. Drywall is brittle enough to punch a hole through (though it probably won’t be a clean hole), but there’s still the frame and a second layer of drywall (for an interior wall, even more to go through if it’s exterior) you’d need to go through for most north American walls. Movies will use prop walls, I’m guessing designed for that specific crash through them (like with a specific shape precut so it just tears away as desired when whatever passes through it) and extra effects like dust and debris added in post or thrown in from outside the frame.

I wouldn’t figure even that would help. The driver just seems like the obvious first target and wouldn’t be given much of a chance to do anything, as them getting shot would probably be the thing that tells the whole bus they are under attack.

The wire part of that isn’t trivial. They were pulling wires in the middle ages for holding armor together, but high volume and specialization didn’t come until the Renaissance. Good insulation pretty much requires plastics. Wax could be used before that but it’s not as good. Your early motors will have shorts that reduce power or kill it entirely.

Yeah, I read them as a teen and really liked them, so read them (well, the Belgariad, at least, then kinda stalled on the next series) to my daughter more recently and didn’t find them quite as enjoyable. They were still fun but full of a bunch of questionable shit. I’d say it was very boomeresque with a lot of its humour. Also the weird recurring “oh drat, you have out-negotiated me again, Silk!”

To be fair, pennies were worth a lot more in 1913.

In 1913, 1 penny was worth 0.01 1913 dollars.

Today, 1 penny is only worth 0.01 2026 dollars, so you can see it’s quite a difference.

Yeah, also why it isn’t hard to outdo fast food with home cooking. The sauces might not be as good (since the food industry has those down to a science) but I made homemade meatballs on a whim last night and they were somehow both kinda bland as well as way better than any chain burger and comparable to premium burgers just from the cooking quality (despite the circuit breaker going off because my air fryer and freezer cycled on at the same time and having to guess at how much time was left on the timer lol).

Though IMO McDonald’s has the lamest patties out of all the fast food places. No idea how they got and stayed so big based on them. A&W and Wendy’s have far better burger patties, though even they are still a far cry from good homemade ones cooked well (but not well done).

Consistent but low quality is so boring.

Makes me wish producers were in the game to sell good products rather than to sell as much as they can of anything they think will make a profit.

My guess is dark and medium roasts are more common than light roasts because it masks low quality coffee beans better.

Not the best but it seems like they discontinued it after I developed a habit of getting a bag or two each grocery trip: Cheddar Crispers. Or maybe it’s just a cheese shortage like that pepper shortage caused Hoy Fong Sriracha sauce to be hard to find for a bit.

You derived modern EVs by adding a bunch of features I wouldn’t want.

“Follow that cab!”