> People who are married with kids are insanely busy, with a robust and built-in social network, whether it's through interactions with relatives, or even making friends with other parents through sporting events, etc.
Grass is always greener on the other side, and busy does not mean someone has friends.
Look I know that "user is holding it wrong" is a meme but this is a case where it's true. The fact that LLMs contain any factual knowledge is a side-effect. While it's fun to play with and see what it "knows" (and can actually be useful as a weird kind of search engine if you keep in mind it will just make stuff up) you don't build an AI search engine by just letting users query the model directly and call it a day.
You shove the most relevant results form your search index into the model as context and then ask it to answer questions from only the provided context.
Can you actually guarantee the model won't make stuff up even with that? Hell no but you'll do a lot better. And the game now becomes figuring out better context and validating that the response can be traced back to the source material.
The examples in the article seem to be making the point that even when the AI cites the correct context (ie: financial reports) it still produces completely hallucinated information.
So even if you were to white-list the context to train the engine against, it would still make up information because that's just what LLMs do. They make stuff up to fit certain patterns.
That’s not correct. You don’t need to take my word for it. Go grab some complete baseball box scores and you can see that ChatGPT will reliably translate them into an entertaining English paragraph -length outline of the game.
This ability to translate is experimentally shown to be bound to the size of the LLM but it can reliably not synthesize information for lower complexity analytic prompts.
You don't build an AI search engine by just letting users query the model directly and call it a day.
Have you ever built an AI search engine? Neither have Google or MS yet. No one knows yet what the final search engine will be like.
However, we have every indication that all of the localization and extra training are fairly "thin" things like prompt engineering and maybe a script filtering things.
And given that despite ChatGPT's great popularity, the application is a monolithic text prediction machine and so it's hard to see what else could be done.
Why does it have to add anything to my life? Why be the third person to climb a mountain?
I hear tell of a 19th century English gentleman who manually recorded the level of rain water and the barometric pressure in his garden, a dozen times a day, including the wee hours of the morning, waking up several times a night as though afflicted with the worst UTI possible, through all weathers, all seasons, all ills, all trials and travails, any and all privations that life could send his way, and did so for 40+ years. Obssessively and compulsively some would say. Or we may say diligently if being generous. I am sure that at some point someone asked "why do you do this? what do you feel it adds to your life?"
Feels weird that you have to defend this take on hobbies on a forum called “Hacker News”.
My father is building a small sailboat model (the Santísima Trinidad), and if someone asked “What does that add to his life?” I personally would pity that person, for its lack of empathy and views on a successful life.
People say "I am curious to know..." which is immediately followed by a request that I justify my reason for existing or doing what I do. The question says more about them than it does about me.
In questions of code and of life, we should ask "why about code" and "what about people."
__
^ ^\ / >
< ' ' ) )
(__( ) /
There is a breed of fox out there, with big bushy tails.
In which the wind pushes them backward, like big billowing sails.
They can seen where they've been, but not see where they'll be.
There are those that sail-walk North
There are those that sail-walk South
And they think they control the way that they're going for
But really they lack all form of direction, no less and no more
When one day came a fox, who was lacking a big bushy tail
It was all scrawny and thin, and made the lousiest sail
"Where do you come from? From where do you hail?"
Cried a crowd of bushy foxes, fighting the winds to stand still
As our new little fox, with a scrawny thin tail
Ambled slowly past them not knowing the question
He didn't stop for a minute, not even to rest
Just kept on walking, simply walked into the West
"What why did you do that?" asked a North-North quick walker. "Don't you know that walking Northwards is best?"
"Best?" shouted a Southward slow stalker "Everyone knows that is as wrong as can be."
"But if you walk North, or if you walk South, we know that West is not the best place to see."
"Why do you walk West? Why do you do that?" puzzled both North-South walkers.
"I don't know, I just like walking West. I came out of the East, just over yonder, and I'm heading out West, to take a quick gander."
"But what's over yonder? From where you came. And what's over yander? Is it the same?" quizzed the South-North slow and quick walkers.
"I don't know. I'll go take a look. I come back when I'm done, I'll walk back to my East."
"But what if you keep walking? What if you run out of ground?"
"Then I'll just keep walking, on into the West, my feet out in front of me, until I come right around."
* /^ ^
| ( ' ' >
\_( )__)
P.S. You and I will probably be the only two people in the world that will read this.
> And the people who do, used to be people who don't.
Yep. Walled gardens kill curiosity.
Curiosity is what got me into this industry, way before I knew it could be a career. Playing around, messing with files that ran my games, making web forums and learning to change how they look.
So I have to replace the native messaging app that's decentralized, well proven, reliable, and pre-installed on every phone that can communicate with anyone in the world for 5 different centralized apps from the app store that may or may not exist next year and also try to move my entire network over?
I use iMessage. It's great, and doesn't get in the way. And as I said it's included on my phone. It also allows me to communicate with anyone and I don't have to think about if the person I'm contacting has it installed or not, it gracefully degrades to SMS when needed. That's a great messaging app!
While I do have browser tabs open for WhatsApp, Google Chat, and GroupMe, as well as the Signal desktop app running, most people I know do not do this, and do most/all of their messaging from their phone.
I get that's not your experience, but it is indeed an experience that exists, and is probably fairly common.
How does everyone back up their iDevices? Every article I read talks about iCloud, which is great and I use, but doesn’t follow this principle and you’re out of luck if you lose access to your Apple ID.
I’ve found some content specific solutions that will backup photos or contacts for example, but I’m looking for a fairly streamlined comprehensive solution that would back up everything-messages, contacts, photos, emails, bookmarks, basically iCloud 2 but without the Apple lock in.
I basically don’t, at least not at the device level. Photos get synced to my home server using PhotoSync every once in a while (manually, but eh, it works). Texts are backed up on my laptop technically, but I pretty much consider them ephemeral. I don’t really care about bookmarks, and everything else on that list is cloud-first.
I've been hacking at a basic version of ad-free, subscription based group messaging, coordination, event planning, etc - check it out! https://get.thread-app.com/
I really liked the idea of Google+ Circles when they first came out. It allowed me to organize people I interacted with into a focused group; work, Linux, TF2, etc. If I wanted to talk about AWS, I could switch my brain into that mode and just post things about a single topic. It was really nice.
I know this is cynical (my Facebook bias is showing, I know), but I find it somewhat telling that they've delayed launching in any country that has implemented GDPR or a derivative of it.
I mean, I get that such laws may be a complication from a compliance perspective. There's a small chance this is due to their legal processes, not because of product reasons. But FB not being ready for modern privacy law when launching a product in 2019 makes me wonder what shenanigans they need to cover up before a European launch.
Grass is always greener on the other side, and busy does not mean someone has friends.