leftzero

The other day we were going over some SQL query with a younger colleague and I went “wait, what was the function for the length of a string in SQL Server?”, so he typed the whole question into chatgpt, which replied (extremely slowly) with some unrelated garbage.

I asked him to let me take the keyboard, typed “sql server string length” into google, saw LEN in the except from the first result, and went on to do what I'd wanted to do, while in another tab chatgpt was still spewing nonsense.

LLMs are slower, several orders of magnitude less accurate, and harder to use than existing alternatives, but they're extremely good at convincing their users that they know what they're doing and what they're talking about.

That causes the people using them to blindly copy their useless buggy code (that even if it worked and wasn't incomplete and full of bugs would be intended to solve a completely different problem, since users are incapable of properly asking what they want and LLMs would produce the wrong code most of the time even if asked properly), wasting everyone's time and learning nothing.

Not that blindly copying from stack overflow is any better, of course, but stack overflow or reddit answers come with comments and alternative answers that if you read them will go a long way to telling you whether the code you're copying will work for your particular situation or not.

LLMs give you none of that context, and are fundamentally incapable of doing the reasoning (and learning) that you'd do given different commented answers.

They'll just very convincingly tell you that their code is right, correct, and adequate to your requirements, and leave it to you (or whoever has to deal with your pull requests) to find out without any hints why it's not.

The usability has been plummetting with every single redesign for quite a while, though.

Used to be everything could be found and done in two or three clicks... now it's five minutes clicking and scrolling through the useless single windowed chaos of the configuration app looking for where the last update randomly moved it to (finding one or two options that are almost what you're looking for, but can't do what used to take just a couple clicks), five minutes looking it up on what's left of the internet while avoiding ads, spam, and hallucinating LLMs, only to find out this setting you and everyone you know had been using almost daily was removed by the last update “to improve usability”, and five minutes writing eldritch incantations into the registry, group policies, or powershell to finally configure the fucking setting...

The world can be a complicated place to a kid...

classy, well-behaved and quiet

Except when they decide not to be, of course. Or when they're in heat.

That if we didn't have enough money we could just go to the ATM and get more.

Also, when I was very young, I apparently spent too long in the toilet once and one of my parents (don't recall which) asked me if I'd fallen down the hole.
It took me shitting myself at school months later for them to find out that I'd been terrified of falling into the toilet (and avoiding using it as much and for as long as I could, or, in that particular occasion, longer) since that day.
(I was small but not that small, obviously, but kids can be surprisingly dumb for how surprisingly smart they are.)

Photocopy of a photocopy is my go-to metaphor for model collapse.

That doesn't prevent power hungry mods from modding hundreds of communities, or mods or admins from enshittifying the most popular communities (or whole instances) with absurd rules or misinformation bots, or any other of the abuses that were rampant on reddit and even more rampant here... sure, the users can migrate to some other community or instance, but most won't (and migrating instances is significantly more work than simply unsubscribing from one subreddit and subscribing to another).

Looked like the least worst alternative to reddit (which was the least worst replacement for what the internet used to be before reddit, and facebook, and the like, killed it).

Turns out it's mostly reddit reposts (often by bots, which is ironic since the originals were also reddit reposts posted by bots) and US politics garbage, and even more susceptible than Reddit to power hungry mods and echo chambers.

I guess I'm just addicted to doomscrolling. Which is almost as depressing as the fact that this inane crumb of utterly useless and purposeless garbage is by far the least worst furuncle in the rotting bot infested corpse of the internet.

No. The fediverse is just more of the same mindless gargling and regurgitation of mainstream media excrement that the internet has become, but federated.

It lacks the creativity, originality, experimentation, wonder, sheer life of the old internet.

It's just as dead, enshittified, and riddled with misinformation bots as everything else.

if you ask it again, it again feeds you the wrong information

Well, it's a LLM, they can't learn anything without rebuilding the whole model from scratch, which I wouldn't exactly call learning anyway... all they “know” is what word is most likely to follow a certain sequence of words according to their model.
Any other facts or information are completely inconsequential for their operation and results.

Being against LLMs being sold as AI (or as useful for anything practical) is not being against AI.

LLMs have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with AI, other than being sold as if they did.

He wouldn't steal them, though (though if you recently buried a dead pet in your lawn he might dig that up).

He prefers roadkill, doesn't fit his taste if it's fresh.