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You know who else is infamous for making errors due to shallow understanding ? (Non-specialized) journalists !

How do you find they compare?


Not OP, but here is my observations: The llm are uniformly dumb and not "understaging" across all spectrum of topics. It is counter-intuitive. By asking llm to simply blab ("write a story about ..") you notice it:

- mixes up pronouns (who is "you" or "he")

- cannot keep track of what is where.

- continuously plugs it's guidance slant ("lets cook dinner, Bob! It is paramount to strive for safety and cooperation while doing it!")

— language style is all over the place, comically so.

— when asked about the text it just generated, is able to give valid critique to itself (i.e. having that "insight" does not help the generation)

Journalists may have shallow understanding of topic, but they do not start referring to a person they write about as "me" halfway through.

LLM is uniformly dumb


Inflation is mostly a symptom though. Of natural resources getting scarcer (harder to extract). As you can imagine the price of gasoline is quite tied with the worldwide market price of oil.

And overall we have in the West (and in the US in particular) been living way "above our means" for more than half a century. And this 'debt' is starting to come due. It will get a lot worse too, for longer, before it starts getting better again.


In case you missed it, South Park did an episode about that two years ago :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Learning_(South_Park)


The word is "machine".

Quite relevant here (maybe not where Universities are directly concerned) is the history of Luddites breaking automated textile equipment to protest their high skilled jobs disappearing in favour of much less skilled jobs of machine operators.


You haven't started educating people in the last ten years that it's just not acceptable to use Google any more ?

Especially when this happens ?

Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124820

Sure sounds like we've reached the point where it's more of a liability !


EU has obliterated the small African farmers by dumping cheap unwanted cuts (legs) there.

(Also, while there are regulations on how badly egg-producing chicken can be treated, that doesn't extend to most eggs : those sold to businesses to be used in recipes.)


Aren't both of the examples of what they could do illegal ?

You saying that consumers having meet on dumping/low prices is illegal? You are a communist! /s You saying that a businessman is obliged to go against their own interest in stead of selling their meds to the highest bidder? You are a communist! /s Free market without regulation is exactly that - freedom for those who can shape the market as they wish and no government violence necessary so it is kosher.

Yes, the warnings were there for more than a decade. And yet these websites were still kowtowing to Google !

I doubt that the USA will do anything to rein in their platforms though : they're too convenient as a form of soft power. (Of course, you never know with Trump.)

So it's probably time to cut off the USA from the Internet. Let them stew in the bed they made. The timing is good too, with Trump having even managed to piss of Canada !!

----

However, this won't solve an issue with search engines : just yesterday I was using Kagi, and it was still a miserable experience.

Blocking the likes of YouTube and Reddit is easy enough.

It's much harder to deal with all the spam consisting of pseudo-guide websites, each with very specific names, seemingly a lot of them using LLMs to generate them, which I guess make money from either ads and/or referrals ?

And anyone can scrap the web and train LLMs, so even limiting the size of infocoms by law (and banning foreign ones) wouldn't solve this issue.


I was hoping for e-paper to get good enough for this for a long time.

We're still not there yet, even with the latest addition of (muted) colour.

They're great I guess for reading and annotating PDFs (ugh). But so is a (laser) printer.


Using LLMs (or platforms in general) is a bit like smoking (in closed spaces, with others present) : a nuisance.

That's just plain wrong, and I'm a smoker. LLMs won't affect the ones around you, unless you engage with them in some way. Sit next to me while I smoke and you'll be affected by passive smoking regardless of how much you engage or not. Not really a accurate comparison :)

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