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.

Great video! I loved how, since the game has no choice acting, OneShortEye got a bunch of his friends to provide voice work for his game clips. Really makes it a more entertaining watch!

I’ve occasionally ended up on Reddit accidentally when following a search link. Which immediately blasts me with notifications and pushy requests to browse in some other way than I want to. After using Lemmy for this long, which lets me peacefully do my thing my way, it comes off as really rude even before I get to the comments.

At this point, I’ve actually started actively avoiding Reddit links in my searches. I can generally find the info I need somewhere else without getting yelled at by the website.

I actually use M365 and OneDrive. I still get periodic pushes to use these services on Windows 11. The upsell pressure from my OS is getting really bad.

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!

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.

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.

Donut County is only $3.89. It’s a short, funny, cute puzzle game where you make everything fall in a hole. Really good.

Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth is $12.49 and a much better 80hr RPG then it has any right to be. And I never even touched the second game in the collection!

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.

Mastodon is very active after you start following enough people and hashtags to populate your feed. It’s a bit rough to get started though: no algorithm means no content (or very random content in the local/federated feeds) until you build it up for yourself. But once you hit critical mass, I’ve found it a much nicer experience than I ever got on Twitter.