funnybeam

Hallucinations are not errors, they are the intended output.

LLMs do not hallucinate sometimes, everything they produce is an hallucination, that’s how they work and what makes them useful

Probably not in your bath, but in houses with water tanks at least one of the cold taps will be fed directly from the mains supply. If you are drinking it then you want it straight from the mains rather than from the tank in your loft that’s been sat there for a while and had all sorts of things falling into it

Microsoft did an Android Duo that was basically two phones hinged together, like this but with two separate screens. Didn’t last long…

Quite an odd name choice by Apple

How much time do the majority of people spend scrolling on their phones?

I tend to think that i don’t have time to do the things i want to do outside of work, but on the rare occasions when i managed to put my phone aside for a couple of weeks I find I have more time than i know what to do with.

Everyone’s situation is different obviously, but personally “I don’t have time” is completely untrue

And vice versa

I like to pretend that was filmed in the Hogwarts sixth form commmon room in the eighties

They don’t express gender, they signify adjective and noun. No genders in Esperanto

I used to refer to the helpdesk as the reading desk - “Hello, you’re through to the IT Helpdesk, what can i read for you today?”

In this scenario the ai _writer _ is redundant.

You might as well publish the prompt you were going to give to the writer and have the ai reader consume that directly.

Assuming you think any of this is a good idea of course. Personally I wouldn’t trust ai to interpret release notes for anything that i cared about

The longbow didn’t require “minimal training”, it took years of regular practice and physical conditioning.

Weekly longbow practice was even a legal requirement for most English men to ensure there were enough skilled archers.

The crossbow was the weapon that allowed an untrained peasant to kill an armoured knight and was widely illegal for that reason

Except it keeps reverting to the new notepad every few days….

I’ve been fighting this for the last couple of weeks but it just doesn’t stick

According to Wikipedia she was born in Britain and a British citizen, but i am not aware of all the ins and outs of her case

Not heard of Shamima Begum?

British born, stripped of citizenship

I’m not commenting on the rightness or not of her case, just pointing out that being born British is not necessarily the guarantee you are describing

As an IT security loser it’s not your software I’m worried about, it’s your OpSec. I’ve seen enough innocuous software being owned and being used to deploy malware that it takes a lot of due diligence to trust providers of random binaries

Don’t let the bastards win. Keep your principles

We have a process at work where clients export information from their database as a pdf which they email to us so that we can ocr it and insert into our database.

No one else seems to think this is bat shit insane

The Omega Factor is another good one you’d like judging by the rest of your list.

Was terrified by the theme music as a child and never allowed to watch it. Managed to find it a little while ago and loved it. Only one season unfortunately.

I’ve been rewatching it recently and thought the first season was awful. The plots specifically, the aesthetics and theme music are awesome and worth watching for that alone. Haven’t gotten to the second season yet but was really hoping it improved…

Biggest disappointment was reading up on it and finding that the Anderson’s had originally intended to do a second season of UFO then changed it up to make Space 1999 instead.

UFO was amazingly good

From memory I believe it was windows 7 that broke the taskbar - before that you could put it on any side of the screen and also embed folders on it.

I used to have it on the left side of the screen with my actual documents folder (not “My Documents” which even then was full of other crap) embedded in it. Kind of like vertical tabs in the browser, but better

I was really annoyed when they took that functionality away for no apparent reason. Win 7 was the start of the slide for me, windows steadily got worse with them removing more and more functionality. Was it seven that removed all the customisation you used to be able to do as well and replaced it with much more limited themes?

This isn’t a bug, it is known behaviour that is inherent and fundamental to the way LLMs function.

All the AI companies are aware of this and are pressing ahead anyway - it is completely irresponsible.

If you haven’t come across it before, check out Simon Willisons “lethal trifecta” concept which neatly sums up the issue and explains why there is no way to use these things safely for many of the things that they would be most useful for

Another thing that Microsoft is regressing on. Entra and intune are a poor substitute for Active Directory.

Likewise with SharePoint compared to file shares and NTFS permissions

Except the new notepad autosaves so I can no longer trust it for temporary password storage.

Thanks Microsoft for making everything worse

I feel sorry for the younger generations, they’ll never know what it was like to use computers that weren’t actively trying to shaft you all the time

I think you’re absolutely right. These companies know full well that their “guardrails” are ineffective but they just don’t care because they’ve sunk so much money into AI that they are desperate to pretend that everything’s fine and their investments were worthwhile.

I was on a call with Microsoft the other day when (after being pushed) they said they had guardrails in place “to block prompt injection” and linked to an article which said “_help_ block prompt injection”. The careful wording is deliberate I’m sure.

I really think we should stop using the term ‘guard rails’ as it implies a level of control that really doesn’t exist.

These things are polite suggestions at best and it’s very misleading to people that do not understand the technology - I’ve got business people saying that using LLMs to process sensitive data is fine because there are “guardrails” in place - we need to make it clear that these kinds of vulnerabilities are inherent in the way gen AI works and you can’t get round that by asking them nicely

Some languages - human languages, natural or constructed, not programming languages - have ways of expressing the source of a piece of information, such as whether it is a known fact, something you have personally observed, or just an idea you are throwing out there for instance, using grammar or extra signifying words.

I’ve often thought about stealing some of these techniques for note taking as it would be really useful to have extra context without having to write it all out longhand.

Check out lojban attitudinals for one example along these lines if you are interested. There are natural languages that do this as well but I can’t remember any specifics off the top of my head

“Ko op” where I’m from, never heard it pronounced any other way

Rhymes with no-op

Not just the ’new regime’

Check out the 1994 Budapest Memorandum where Russia, USA and UK all agreed to preserve Ukraine’s borders in return for them giving their nukes to Russia.

All parties seen to have forgotten about that one

Not only was it cool, it was also social. I met a lot of people through smoking that I wouldn’t have done otherwise

That’s true of anything you pay money for

Have you looked at org mode for eMacs? That does precisely this