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.

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 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?!

Unfortunately I see a whole bunch of people who vis bellum, and a whole bunch of people who para pacem, but not a whole bunch of people who both vis pacem and para bellum.

Literally yes. The Pharisees of Jesus’ time were the conservative religious hardliners of Israel, having drifted significantly from their original theology because of political expediency, pushing their version of morality under the threat of harm; and Jesus represented a challenge to their power.

So more than just “would’ve,” they (well, their first century predecessors) did.

JD Vance does.

I don’t know about photoshopped. I would imagine that there’s a lot of heavy (and misguided) makeup going on, and I don’t think the lighting is doing her any favors, but she legitimately looks significantly different from her pre-surgery appearance.

Honestly so many people were making jokes about him being from Chicago and liking deep dish pizza that I didn’t understand this meme at first.

It is definitely happening. The numbers are encouraging, and if this had happened ten years ago it’d be one thing. But by this point, we need more.

Look, sure, I’d love to get cheese and bread tips. But protests first.

Can we get just, like, a whole bunch of French citizens in here to teach us how to protest, en masse, at the drop of a hat?

(and also maybe teach us how to make…um…outdoor furniture?)

Yeah, which was its own level of toxic, but maybe doesn’t have the super gross power imbalance?

You can train your kids at McDonalds.

Respectfully, no. That’s an entirely different scenario with entirely different norms, patterns, expectations, etc. A sit-down, table-service restaurant in a “boring” location with slow food is an entirely different experience than counter service at a fast food restaurant. You start with that, of course, but that’s definitely not where it can end.

Not to mention, there are no casual fast food places that serve vegetables. If you care about offering your kids any kind of healthy food, you have to go somewhere at least slightly more upmarket.

if alcohol is served, children shouldn’t be.

That excludes pretty much every restaurant that isn’t fast food. In some countries, that excludes even McDonald’s. It definitely excludes Applebee’s. It excludes Chuck E. Cheese, for crying out loud.

Maybe in the 90s that would’ve been a reasonable limitation, but that is far from the case today.

Sure that may limit what you can do as a parent.

Nah, I’m not worried about that even a little bit. I chose to be a parent, which means that I chose to accept certain limitations on my life while they’re still young. I don’t have any issue with that as a principle. Yes, parents are still human and should be able to exist independently of their children, and yes, some people didn’t choose to be parents (but had that choice made for them), but I don’t think that either situation is a large enough situation to be worth discussing here.

What I’m saying is that teaching and training has to happen in real situations. It doesn’t start there, no; you work on not throwing your food on the floor at home, you work on not shouting and screaming at the table at Grandma’s, you work on not running around the restaurant at McDonald’s. But once you have the basics down, you have to go out and actually work on them in the real world. That means a real restaurant, with waiters and other diners, where the food isn’t exactly what they want, and it takes “forever” to arrive. It has to be in the real world, or else it doesn’t work.

That means that your kids’ bad days are going to go out into the real world sometimes, too; and you won’t have any warning that they’re coming. They’ll just show up along with your basket of breadsticks at the pizza place, or they’ll be serving them alongside the General Tso’s chicken at the Chinese buffet.

At that point, you have three options: leave (probably not super feasible, you still have to pay for the meal and you still have to feed your kids and yourself), ignore them (this is clearly the type of parent you’re frustrated by, and I agree, but they’re far more exception than rule), or parent your way through it (which is honestly the whole point of this excursion). But the last one is the hardest, and runs the most risk of looking like ignoring if you have more than one kid and have to focus on them in turn.

I’m sure the joys and triumphs of parenthood will outweigh the loss of having a beer […]

Yeah, honestly, it does. Not all the time, but every time.

Gotcha. Yeah, parents can definitely suck just as much as any other human (or, to be fair, they can just be exhausted or distracted). Though I will also note that in the cases where my kids have acted unexpectedly badly, it is notable to me that my usual nuclear threat (“we’ll just leave”) carries with it a financial penalty as well (now we have to pay for food we ordered but can’t eat), which adds an additional wrinkle to this problem; particularly for lower-income folks.

I do think that I usually have a lower tolerance for my kids’ behavior than most of the people around me do, so hopefully that’s part of what is on my side here.

Trump said the 2016 election was rigged, and he won that one. He claimed that the 2024 election was rigged before it had even occurred. This is just the playbook. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t have to in order to work.