I think “I don’t know” might sometimes be found in the training data. But, I’m sure they optimize the meta-prompts so that it never shows up in a response to people. While it might be the “honest” answer a lot of the time, the makers of these LLMs seem to believe that people would prefer confident bullshit that’s wrong over “I don’t know”.

Yeah, and it sometimes makes sense just from an acting PoV, so you can forgive it. It’s hard to fit all the characters and cameras in a scene if someone lives in a typical cramped apartment. So, like in the Friends TV show, none of them has jobs that should indicate they’re rich. But, the sets they use for the apartments suggest they have huge apartments. In that show, Joey’s apartment isn’t beautifully furnished, it looks fairly cheap. But, it’s really spacious for NYC. But, it seems like it’s all about giving the director the freedom to frame shots to get everybody involved, and to allow characters to move around.

OTOH, A recent movie, “Black Bag” was terrible for this. I hated the movie because it was just impossible to believe. This guy, who’s supposed to be a British intelligence officer (i.e. living on government wages). His wife is also an intelligence officer. Yet, somehow, they live in this condo that looks like it would be about £5m to buy, or about £5000/month. Since the plot revolves around whether one of them is a traitor and is selling state secrets, it seems pretty obvious it’s this guy or his wife because no civil servant is living in a place like that on just a government salary.

I remember that from S1, but it doesn’t show up in S2, does it? Maybe they took it down?

If you’re a Baron, maybe.

It’s not just Home Alone for me. Almost every show I watch, I look at the places where the characters live with immense envy.

Lord of the Rings: Man, I’d love to live in that hobbit house. That looks incredibly cozy.

Daredevil: That is such a nice loft, and it has such great light. It’s unfair that a guy who’s blind doesn’t truly appreciate his great apartment because he can’t see.

Futurama: Fry’s a delivery boy and he lives in a robot’s closet, and it’s still better than where I live.

Only Murders in the Building: NYC and these guys have those kinds of amazing places? (To be fair, this is a major plot element of the 4th season)

If you were white, and it was immediately after WWII when every other major country in the world had been pulverized in WWII while the US was essentially untouched.

Even if it were possible to bring back the strong unions from the end of the great depression, and to bring back the laws from the New Deal which were in force at the end of WWII. And even if you did those things while simultaneously taking away the rights from black people so that they had the pre-civil-rights lifestyle. Even then, you couldn’t get to this level of wealth for a truck driver without also having a world war that smashed every other country and left the US whole.

Back when I first started using Linux, it was rare to have more than one PC in a house. Now I personally have 3 computers, a desktop and a couple of laptops, and a tablet, and a phone, and some old barely-working tablets and laptops in a drawer.

It is definitely the case that I’ve had to use one of the other machines when the Linux desktop had issues. OTOH, I’ve also had to use other computers to help me out with a Windows issue (though it wasn’t an OS error, it was a drive that went bad).

It’s funny though. Back in the day when I only had the one computer, I was able to troubleshoot issues with it while still using it. That was probably only possible because tech was less advanced. For example, it was possible to browse the web effectively using a text-only client. Back then websites were simpler and Javascript was pretty much non-existent, so if you were troubleshooting a graphical issue you weren’t so crippled. Similarly, you weren’t so crippled if you couldn’t use GUI programs, because in those days almost every GUI program had a console equivalent that worked as well if not better.

These days, it’s pretty likely that the info you need will be on YouTube – obviously not very useful from a console, or a Discord chat – same problem.

My NAS is one place where I wouldn’t risk anything that isn’t rock solid. Even if you don’t lose data, the NAS is infrastructure that should always be available.

I’m used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there’s nothing you can do about it.

It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn’t move, the clock wasn’t updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).

As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it’s also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn’t addressing them.

Back in the days when you needed to write your own modelines, that definitely wasn’t true. You screw up your modelines and X emits signals that your monitor can’t handle and you’re out of luck. It was very normal to spend a lot of time editing your Xorg.conf file until it worked with your monitor.

You must have come along at a time between fiddling with modelines being a thing, and Wayland taking off.

No, I’m sure you’re wrong. There’s a certain cheerful confidence that you get from every LLM response. It’s this upbeat “can do attitude” brimming with confidence mixed with subservience that is definitely not the standard way people communicate on the Internet, let alone Stack Overflow. Sure, sometimes people answering questions are overconfident, but it’s often an arrogant kind of confidence, not a subservient kind of confidence you get from LLMs.

I don’t think an LLM can sound like it lacks in confidence for the right reasons, but it can definitely pull off lack of confidence if it’s prompted correctly. To actually lack confidence it would have to have an understanding of the situation. But, to imitate lack of confidence all it would need to do is draw on all the training data it has where the response to a question is one where someone lacks confidence.

Similarly, it’s not like it actually has confidence normally. It’s just been trained / meta-prompted to emit an answer in a style that mimics confidence.

It confidently gave me one

IMO, that’s one of the biggest “sins” of the current LLMs, they’re trained to generate words that make them sound confident.

On one hand

C’mon, with a bit of effort you could have made this one into 5 paragraphs each one sentence long too!

It sounds like you’re saying “reaction” is something that happens in the head, while I’m saying “reaction” is something that happens in the body.

Would your reaction time change? Maybe the neurons in your brain would be going at super speed, but maybe your peripheral nerves would still be slow. So, the time between hearing something and the signal getting to your brain would still take ages. Or, the light would hit your eyes, but it would be a long time before that was processed into a signal your ultra-fast brain could use.

I once read a news article about a woman who had Eidetic memory (a.k.a. photographic memory). It made her life shitty. She was never “in the moment”, because everything triggered a memory. She could never forgive anybody for their past slights, because they were always fresh in her memory. It wasn’t the ability to recall anything you wanted whenever you wanted to. Instead it was the condition where you constantly had detailed memories flooding in when something you saw, smelled, heard, tasted, felt, etc. triggered a memory, or a dozen memories.

I like to imagine that this is what it’s actually like for The Flash, or Quicksilver or another speedster:

Sure, you can move super fast, but to do that, your thinking also has to speed up to handle that fast movement. So, it’s more like everything else in the universe slows down except you. Now, it’s still an amazing power, but think about those times when The Flash uses his super speed to build a brick wall nearly instantly, or to read every book in the library in the blink of an eye.

To you, building that brick wall takes what feels like a week. You’re running at what feels like 30 km/h to get a handful of bricks. It feels like it takes you about 20 minutes to get to the place with the bricks. You run them back to the place you’re building the wall, you put them into the wall. Then you run another 20 minutes to get the next load of bricks. While you’re doing this boring wall building, you can’t chat with anybody, you can’t listen to a podcast, you’re just stuck doing manual labour for what feels like a week without any distractions or entertainment.

If you speed-read every book in a library, that feels like it takes a month. Hopefully you like reading dry reference books, or whatever it is you’re reading, because that’s all you get to do for however long it takes. Someone watching you might see you flipping through the pages in fractions of a second. But, to you, it still feels like it takes 2 minutes or so per page, and that’s if the material isn’t difficult to understand.

Maybe super speed needs to come with super autism so that you get really engaged in these tasks and don’t mind sinking what feels like days, weeks or months into one monotonous thing.

You can’t actually change time, just your perception of time. Your muscles don’t move any faster. If someone is throwing a punch at you and you slow down time, you can appreciate the fist moving at your face for an hour of your slowed-down time, but you still can’t dodge the punch. If you speed up time, you still need to eat, sleep, and perform other bodily functions. So, instead of getting hungry every few hours, you get hungry in what feels like seconds. And, since you don’t have super-speed, you need to slow time back down again so you can eat.

It might still be a power worth having, but it’s not as awesome as it might seem at first.

You can only make small changes, and it doesn’t always work. So, you don’t actually know if you have the power or if something slightly improbable happened.

IRS audits, people kidnapping you and/or your family to get at your money, an inability to know who likes you for yourself and who just wants your money…