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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • LLMs are at least a quaternary(?) source. They’re scraping secondary/tertiary sources. As such they’re little better than asking passersby on the street. You might get a general idea of what the zeitgeist is, but how true any particular statement actually is will vary wildly.

    Math itself is designed to describe relationships between things. That doesn’t mean you can’t mock up a ‘reasonable seeming’ equation that is absolute nonsense after further examination, but that a layman will take as ‘true enough’.

    LLMs don’t cite things. They provide an approximation of what a human might write. They don’t know what they’re writing or how it relates to the ‘real world’ any more than any other centerpiece of a Chinese Room.







  • There’s an entire genre of political/economic/military writing that is essentially the epitome of “perfect is not the enemy of good”. Where the existing systems or projects, being less than perfect because of decades of compromises, are trashed because they’re not as perfect as [insert author’s golden child here].

    They’re not necessarily wrong that whatever alternative could be better. They’re just incredibly unrealistic to think that their project would be the one that springs fully formed from the launchpad as they envisioned.

    The F-35 is another common target of “this was the worst plan/plane ever”. Usually they leave out is that most of the chief opponents of the F-35 were also against the F-15, because they wanted simple expendable planes that are good at dog-fighting because WW2 was cool. They leave that part out because the F-15 is/was the most successful air superiority fighter ever made.





  • I’ve been casually looking for when my 80s hatchback dies and the choices are bleak. It seems like there are about 4 options for something of a similar size, half of those are just announced or coming out this year. And none of them start below ~$35k. Which would be fine, except there’s been a few decades of everything getting bigger so it’ll be another decade til these are in the used market, if they even take off.

    The 2+2 is dead and the Crossover killed it.