Peanut-butter-cream-filled donut. A long john-shaped donut with peanut butter cream inside and chocolate icing on the top and a light dusting of chopped peanuts on top is usually what she grabs. Good stuff.

My favorite cake fluctuates often, but I usually prefer cake with something special going on. German Chocolate, Carrot, Spice, Lava, that sort of thing. Yellow and White and Chocolate (and even Confetti) are all fine, but they’re not amazing.

Though I fully admit, I’m more of a pie person.

This looks like the truck equivalent of a really short guy with huge muscles and a perpetual scowl, who always keeps his shoulders directly above his knees and his hands in karate-chop pose while he walks.

I love my mother-in-law. I mentioned one time sixteen years ago that I enjoy red velvet cake, and for the following decade every time she got donuts there was at least one red velvet donut in there.

Now, while red velvet is delicious, it’s basically just chocolate. The real joy of red velvet cake is the cream cheese icing, which was never included on the donut. And even with the icing, it’s like my #3 or #4 favorite cake, and she never brought me a german chocolate cake donut.

She has learned that I prefer the peanut butter cream-filled, though. Now that’s the one that’s always included. Which is part of why I always tell people I lucked out marrying into a super great family.

Aaron Sorkin’s criminally-underappreciated “Sports Night” had a subplot about this.

Emergent behavior, for sure. I think the fact that there aren’t a bunch of sentient holograms in the Lower Decks/Picard timeline suggest that it was situational, though.

The Doctor would absolutely agree. He was intended to be a short-term assistant when a doctor wasn’t available, and he was personally affronted when he discovered that he wouldn’t be replaced by a human in any reasonable amount of time.

That’s some “Gift of the Magi”-level stuff right there. “Oh dang, I threw away a bunch of boxes yesterday!” “Oh no, we were going to help you clean your house!”

I think there are definitely a lot of compounding issues that all combine to make admitting you’re wrong something that’s really hard to do. Some of them related to brain chemistry, some of them entirely societal, like you mentioned. But I do think that it’s on the person who was wrong to be the one who does the growing; it shouldn’t be society that has to pick up the slack for an arrogant and incorrect person.

Oh yeah. Happens to me not infrequently, though less as I get older and choose my battles more wisely.

On my best days, I apologize and bow out of the discussion. On my worst days, I just ghost the entire thread.

9:31 is the current time. It’s unclear how long the video is.

Honestly a lot of the issues result from null results only existing in the gaps between information (unanswered questions, questions closed as unanswerable, searches that return no results, etc), and thus being nonexistent in training data. Models are therefore predisposed toward giving an answer of any kind, and if one doesn’t exist it’ll “make one up.”

Which is itself a misnomer, because it can’t look for an answer and then decide to make one up when it can’t find it. It just gives an answer that sounds plausible, and if the correct answer is most likely in its training data then that’ll seem most plausible.

“Unintentionally” is the wrong word, because it attributes the intent to the model rather than the people who designed it.

You misunderstand me. I don’t mean that the model has any intent at all. Model designers have no intent to misinform: they designed a machine that produces answers.

True answers or false answers, a neural network is designed to produce an output. Because a null result (“there is no answer to that question”) is very, very rare online, the training data doesn’t include it; meaning that a GPT will almost invariably produce any answer; if a true answer does not exist in its training data, it will simply make one up.

But the designers didn’t intend for it to reproduce misinformation. They intended it to give answers. If a model is trained with the intent to misinform, it will be very, very good at it indeed; because the only training data it will need is literally everything except the correct answer.

Sure, but unintentionally. I heard about a guy whose small business (which is just him) recently had someone call in, furious because ChatGPT told them that he was having a sale that she couldn’t find. The customer didn’t believe him when he said that the promotion didn’t exist. Once someone decides to leverage that, and make a sufficiently-popular AI model start giving bad information on purpose, things will escalate.

Even now, I think Elon could put a small company out of business if he wanted to, just by making Grok claim that its owner was a pedophile or something.

Yeah, I don’t love that they’re on a Microsoft service, but GitHub is not their worst product.

In your defense, Mozilla did have a read-only mirror on GitHub for a while. I assume it’s the same repo, they’ve just repurposed it.

I keep getting caught off-guard seeing current photos of Torvalds. He’s just like…a guy.

And honestly I’d rather my mission-critical software be written by “just a guy” than by whoever Mr. Battlestation is down there on the bottom.

I’m not the OP, but it’s probably easier to get (free) community contributions on Github than on any other spot.

Or it’s to make it easier to fork, in case Mozilla goes out of business.

I’m sure there were some forum software packages that offered voting and ranking and such. All of the ones that I was a part of were quiet enough that you didn’t need such a thing, though; you could keep up with every post, even if only to decide that you weren’t interested in it, if you read it every third day or so.

Oh geez you promise?!

1. As noted, I don’t want to give Elno any traffic.

2. At this point, the length of this conversation is way out of proportion to my interest in it.

3. Our relationship is three days old and has been antagonistic since the start, so I’m not taking homework from you. I don’t feel the need for you to believe me. You may feel free to not.