Are you saying that she’s a bot or a troll?

I always liked this one. And I always get this one in my head whenever I encounter any of the words.

Not my favorite one, but I really liked Kliban. Very surreal sometimes.

It isn’t. We really do have a two party system. Voting for a third party that’s closer to your ideology just takes a vote away from the major party candidate that’s the closest to it. We have several examples in the past where a third party candidate cost an election for the closest major party candidate, and zero examples where a third party candidate came close to winning. Roosevelt came by far the closest when he ran independent in 1912 and got 27% (which is why Wilson win).

I’m not sure I’ve seen that one, but it does seem to have the same vibe.

I think you responded to the wrong comment

That sounds far fetched until you remember that they diagnosed women with hysteria and treated them by giving them orgasms. When the vibrator was invented to treat muscle pain much later, doctors latched onto them for treating hysteria to give their hands a break.

I’m fairness, a calculator wouldn’t explain how to get there. An LLM might not explain it correctly, but it will explain it.

I honestly didn’t mind when stores sell Christmas stuff early. Some people like to plan things out. What bugs me is when they put up their own decorations early or start playing Christmas music.

My MIL once brought a trash bag full of clothes for my wife, from friend who didn’t want them. Most of them were brand new with tags still on them. We thought it was strange, but they mostly fit and we didn’t think too much about it. Next visit she brings two more big garbage bags of new clothes, and one of the bags had dirt (like actual earth/dirt) on the outside. It turned out that the friend was a shopaholic and had been stashing the bags of clothes under the house so her husband didn’t see, but she was running out of room, and was trying to make space.

We stopped taking the clothes. It felt like taking advantage of someone’s mental illness. Never met the lady, but seemed sad.

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All at once?

The dogs sweating one seems like a quibble. I think what most of us heard/understood is that dogs can’t sweat (because of the fur), so they use their mouths/tongue. Okay, apparently they can sweat through their foot pads, but since those are on the ground I doubt they’re getting much evaporative cooling there. This says they regulate temperature through panting, which seems awfully close to the “myth.”

You might have missed where I said it explained both the text to columns wizard and a formula. He used the formula, which is what he was looking for. He’s a top notch software developer, he just doesn’t use Excel much.

But I agree with your broader point. I keep having to remind people that the “LM” part is for “language model.” It’s not figuring anything out, it’s distilling what an answer should look like. A great example is to ask one for a mathematical proof that isn’t commonly found online - maybe something novel. In all likelihood, it’s going to give you one, and it will probably look like the right kind of stuff, but it will also probably be wrong. It doesn’t know math (it doesn’t know anything), it just has a model of what a response should look like.

That being said, they’re pretty good for a number of things. One great example is lesson plans. From what I understand, most teachers now give an LLM the coursework and ask it to generate a lesson plan. Apparently they do an excellent job and save many hours of work. Anything that involves summarizing information is good, especially as that constrains the training data.

Was having a related conversation with an employee this morning (I manage a software engineering organization). He asked an LLM how to separate the parts of a date in Excel, and got a pretty good explanation of how do it with the text to columns wizard, and also how to use a formula to get each part. He was happy because he felt it would have taken him much longer to figure it out himself.

I was saying I thought that was a good use of an LLM - it’s going to give a tailored answer - but my worry is that people will do less scrubbing of an answer coming from an AI than one they saw on a forum. I said we should think of it like a tailored Google search.

For comparison, I googled “Excel formula separate parts of a date” and one of the top results was a forum discussion that had the exact solutions the LLM gave, using the same examples. On the one hand, to get it from the forum you had to wade through all the wrong answers and discussions. On the other hand, that discussion puts the answer given in the context of a bunch of others that are off the mark, and I think make people less likely to assume it’s correct.

In any case, it’s still just synthesizing from or regurgitating training data.

I like lemons a lot (we have a huge tree), but don’t think I’d eat one like that. But looking at the picture really makes my mouth water because my brain knows how sour biting into that would be.

What’s funny is that it literally made my saliva glands go

One of the things I look for in employees is the ability to distill complex topics into the important elements and explain it to someone unfamiliar. Some people are just naturally good at it, and it’s a really important skill for moving up a leadership chain.

As I said elsewhere, for most products, the makers ask how much they think people would be willing to pay for it. If that price is lower than an amount that would generate reasonable profit, they’ll either no go to market or they’ll look for ways to reduce or offset costs. Ads are a common way of keeping the price within what people are willing to pay.

I’ve said something similar in other threads - after seeing other people say it’s worse in person, I was still surprised at how cartoonishly awful it looked when I first saw one. They look terrible in pictures, but so much worse in person. I saw one that was painted bright green and it was so bad that I burst out laughing.