Which is exactly what the paper recommends! As long as you have something that isn’t an LLM in the pipeline to vet the output and you’re aware is the tech’s limitations, they can be useful tools. But some of those limitations might be a more solid barrier than some sales departments would like us to believe.

For those of you who didn’t read the paper, the argument they’re making is similar to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem: no matter how you build your LLM, there will be a significant number of prompts that make that LLM hallucinate. If the proof holds up then hallucinations aren’t a limitation of the training data or the structure of your particular model, they’re a limitation of the very concept of an LLM. That doesn’t make LLMs useless, but it does mean you shouldn’t ever use one as a source of truth.

I started up a new city in Cities Skylines 2. Trying to build a city mate up of little pit stops along the highway with no industrial zones at all. It’s been an interesting experiment so far! The game does track the jobs generated by retail and city services, so if you balance it just right you can have enough work to attract residents and use the highway connections to just barely generate enough sales for the commercial zones to stay profitable. And the city as a whole is getting closer and closer to a positive balance in the budget, so I might just pull this off…

First, try to understand what’s actually being said here. Sometimes I call myself fat because I’m above my target weight. But in my case my self-esteem is just fine: I’m a former gym rat who knows where I am, what I need to do to get back in shape, and that I’m still okay if I don’t get there. Saying “I’m fat” is a light jab at myself and a reminder to take steps toward my goals, nothing to worry about.

If your GF is calling herself fat more hurtfully (which is sadly common) the issue is not how fat she is or isn’t. That’s just a symptom. The issue is whatever negative feeling is prompting her to tear herself down. Arguing with her about whether she’s actually fat won’t help with that, and might even do more harm than good. Maybe ask her how she’s doing, remind her that you love her just the way she is.

Most of these companies are just arguing that they shouldn’t have to license the works they’re using because that would be hard and inconvenient, which isn’t terribly compelling to me. But Adobe actually has a novel take I hadn’t heard before: they equate AI development to reverse engineering software, which also involves copying things you don’t own in order to create a compatible thing you do own. They even cited a related legal case, which is unusual in this pile of sour grapes. I don’t know that I’m convinced by Adobe’s argument, I still think the artists should have a say in whether their works go into an AI and a chance to get paid for it, but it’s the first argument I’ve seen for a long while that’s actually given me something to think about.

Mostly Cities Skylines 2. The performance is not great, but it’s passable with the settings turned down and the actual city building is really good. Right now I’m working on a big expansion to my city further down the highway, just got the water/power lines run between them so it’s one big happy grid exporting the extra to other cities. Already looking forward to the things I’ll do differently in my second city!

Also playing some Super Mario Wonder on the side, which is fantastic. Great mix of easy fun levels and hard-as-nails secret special levels. Very fun!

Performance is not great, honestly. On my 3090 I had to sink settings to medium to get around 45 - 60 fps. However it does look nice, and even 30 fps is perfectly playable for a relaxed sim where my reaction speed doesn’t matter.

Playability is fantastic once I got the settings lowered. Love the changes to water and power, roundabouts are neat, roads are easier to manage, and the progression system has been surprisingly engaging. I really like the game and I’ll definitely keep playing while they work on optimizing it.

I can tell I’m really into a game when I end up ditching the objectives to just screw around. If I’m following the quest arrow I’m probably just in it for the plot or for some completionist urge, but if I really like the game I’ll start wandering off the main path to just enjoy the environment and satisfy my own curiosity about things.

I vote on every post I see. That combined with the “hide read posts” setting means I always see new stuff on the front page.

I upvote any post that I want to see more of in the community it was posted to. Posted game news in a gaming community? You get an upvote, whether or not I actually like or care about that game. I also upvote anything I don’t have any particular reason to downvote. It’s my default vote.

I downvote any post I want to see less of. Clickbait titles or misspellings are an automatic downvote. Off topic posts are always a downvote. And any post that comes off as salty gets downvoted, especially if the post is salty about being downvoted. I just don’t want to see any of that, so I use my vote to discourage it.

No matter where you go, upvotes and downvotes are still subject to the Lizardman’s Constant. Someone will end up voting in a totally contrary way just to be contrary, or because they didn’t understand, or because they just hit the wrong button. No matter how great your content is, it would be weird and possibly suspicious if it didn’t get some downvotes.

It’s there a major anniversary for The 7th Guest coming up or something? Between this article resurfacing, the VR Remake, and the industrial rock cover album on vinyl I’m seeing a lot of T7G content lately. And I’m here for it!

Agreed! Especially since the behavior on clicking a thumbnail isn’t very consistent on mobile. Sometimes I click the thumbnail and it expands the image. Sometimes it follows a link. Sometimes going back from a link takes me back to the same Lemmy page I was on, but other times it reloads the page and I can’t find the post I was looking at anymore. An option to open all links in a new tab would really help me not lose the post I was looking at when I clicked.

Prior to the API fiasco, Reddit Inc had demonstrated a pattern of promising changes to the mods which they failed to deliver timely if at all. They’ve acknowledged this pattern, promised to do better, then failed to deliver time and again. That part isn’t new.

Then the API changes were announced and the Reddit community gave Reddit Inc the loudest and most decisive rebuke they ever have. That was the feedback conversation. And Reddit Inc went forward with their plan unchanged. No concessions were made. No concerns were addressed or alleviated. Reddit Inc was informed of what this decision would break and they went ahead and broke it anyway.

As a former mod, there is nothing left to discuss. There is no reason to believe Reddit Inc will act on anything that doesn’t agree with what they’ve already decided to do. I’m not going back to that kind of abusive relationship. They had their chance to listen to feedback and made it clear that they won’t.

Technology Connections has a video on exactly these devices that dives into how they work and what they can and can’t do. TLDW; you’re not wrong about the physics of cooling a room, though in some cases this little thing might make you feel a bit cooler.

The full soundtracks to both games are on the Fat Man’s Bandcamp, which I linked up above. Also, the “greatest hits” collection album 7/11 is on Spotify. It’s surprisingly easy to listen to these days!

The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour remain top-tier for me. The music was half the experience, turn it up and just enjoy that creepy vibe while solving puzzles. And they’re all on The Fat Man’s Bandcamp now!

Also, there’s an industrial rock cover album on vinyl currently looking for funding on Kickstarter. I’m super excited!

Agreed. I find Bing chat is really good when I know almost nothing about what I’m searching, or when I know a whole lot about what I’m searching. Like in your example, if I know exactly what I need but can’t remember its name Bing will read all the spammy beginners’ guides for me and get the answer. And on the opposite end, if I’m looking to buy a gift in a hobby I don’t remotely understand Bing does a pretty good job of holding my hand through the search process.

Weirdly, medium knowledge questions seem to still do better as a basic Google search. If I need to fix an appliance I’ve fixed before, but it’s been a long time so I really need a full walkthrough, the first few results on Google are faster than waiting for Bing to talk through it.

I use the term “autocomplete on steroids” because it gets across a vaguely accurate idea of what an LLM is and how it works to people who are thinking of it like sci-fi movie AI. Sorry if it came across that was my whole reason for considering them not intelligent.

LLMs do seem to pass a lot of intelligence tests we’ve come up with. Talking with one for the first time is a really uncanny experience, it’s a totally different thing than the old voice assistants. But they also consistently fail at tasks that would indicate an understanding of a topic. They produce good looking equations, but the math underneath doesn’t make sense. They hallucinate facts that don’t fit with the rest of what they themselves are saying, but look similar to the way right answers are written and defended. They produce really convincing responses, but when they fail they betray some really basic failures to understand what they’re saying.

I feel that LLMs are brute-forcing the tests people designed to measure intelligence. They can pass the bar exam, but they also contain thousands of successful bar exams to consult and millions of bits of text to glue those answers together with. But if you ask the LLM to actually do the job of a lawyer, they start producing all kinds of garbage that sounds good but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when someone looks up the hallucinated case references.

Part of the problem is that AI research likes to use terminology that sounds like what people do, when that’s not what the AI actually does.

Large language models are not intelligent in any sense. They are autocomplete on steroids. This is a computer program that was fed a book someone wrote, then mathematically tweaked to be able to guess the next word in a sentence in a way that resembles that book. That’s all it does. It does not think or learn in any sense we’d apply to a human.

To me, LLMs sound like a massive plagiarism engine, and I think they should need to get a license from the authors whose works they used to make the LLM under whatever terms that author wants to give, just like a publisher needs to get permission to print a copy of the work. But copyright law has no easy “bright line” for what counts and what doesn’t. So the courts will have to decide whether what the AI “creates” is similar enough to the original works to count as a violation, or if the AI and its results are transformative enough to count as something new.

This is going way back, but the 7th Guest soundtrack had lived in my head since the first time I saw the game. Really great atmosphere, equal parts creepy and playful, perfect mood for a haunted mansion filled with puzzles.