Friday, October 06
Daily News Stuff 6 October 2023
Still Not Edition
Still Not Edition
Top Story
- I'm not a programmer and I just used AI to write my first bot. (Replit)
Congratulations!
You're still not a programmer, that's not an AI, and... Well, that's technically a bot in the Slack sense of the term, and your peers are idiots.
- Chatbot hallucinations are poisoning web search. (Wired)
Back in July a researcher published a paper in which he showed that commonly used generative AI tools will happily answer questions about books that don't exist.
Microsoft Bing picked up that paper and happily ingested this new and entirely imaginary knowledge.
Thankfully someone at Microsoft still cares about the truth - or at least about their share price if they are sufficiently embarrassed in the marketplace - and the fictional results have been removed.
But seeing the rate at which Google results have gone downhill in recent years, I don't expect that state of affairs to last long.
Tech News
- You don't need to use a large, expensive Large Language model to generate nonsensical garbage anymore. A small, cheap, Tiny Language Model can do the job just as well. (Quanta)
There is actually a point to this. While GPT-4 was very expensive to create and does a lot of things, all of them badly, a model that is a thousand times smaller can potentially do one thing tolerably well - and everything else not at all.
- Amazon is offering a one million dollar prize for the best evidence of alien visitors in the October edition of Oceania's Funniest Telescreen Recordings. (Vice)
Yeah, nah.
- HP's Envy Move is not the worse device the company has ever sold but certain involved the least engineering effort. (Tom's Hardware)
1. Glue a plastic pocket to the back of a monitor.
2. Put keyboard in pocket.
- The worst device? The company's multi-function printers which refuse to scan when they are low on ink. (ABC News)
If you think such arrant nonsense would invite a class-action lawsuit, well, it did.
Disclaimer: Do not wake before Easter.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
HP wildly misunderstood "where we go one, we go all".
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 06 2023 11:55 PM (BMUHC)
2
LOL: Even the media hates HP and inkjet printers: "Worse, a significant amount of ink is never actually used to print
documents because it's consumed by printer maintenance cycles. In 2018,
Consumer Reports tested hundreds of all-in-one inkjet printers and found
that, when used intermittently, many models delivered less than half of
their ink to printed documents. A few managed no more than 20% to 30%."
I have an AIO but it's a Canon.
I have an AIO but it's a Canon.
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 07 2023 12:02 AM (BMUHC)
3
All the journos who talk about how code-free "programming" and now "AI" always seem to "write" stuff that's not really impressive. I don't see anyone touting their code blocks-style payroll application, or their LLM-generated ERP.
I have gotten (IIRC) ChatGPT to produce a relatively-competent version of a tool I wrote for myself about 5 years ago, which stripped white border space off a black-and-white image. But it could only do the basics, and failed at the enhancements I tried to get it to do, like handling drag and drop (which honestly surprised me), including of multiple files, and a few other things I tried.
I have gotten (IIRC) ChatGPT to produce a relatively-competent version of a tool I wrote for myself about 5 years ago, which stripped white border space off a black-and-white image. But it could only do the basics, and failed at the enhancements I tried to get it to do, like handling drag and drop (which honestly surprised me), including of multiple files, and a few other things I tried.
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 07 2023 01:49 AM (BMUHC)
4
"We used an LLM to write three and a half billion lines of spaghetti 'code' for a Federal government panopticon self reporting system. You'll never believe how much of your taxes would be spent trying to make any of it work, maintaining what could be made to work, or what you will directly pay in trying to 'use' it. Would not you rather just shoot us all now, and save yourself the trouble? Buy, hey, computer generated specifications and computer interpretted specifications turn out to be perfectly practical as long as you don't care whether anything works, so maybe that is pretty cool."
Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 07 2023 03:01 AM (r9O5h)
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