Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

@mzedp @necedema @Wyatt_H_Knott @futurebird @grammargirl Representative example, which I did *today*, so the “you’re using old tech!” excuse doesn’t hold up.

I asked ChatGPT.com to calculate the mass of one curie (i.e., the amount producing a specific number of radioactive decays per second) of the commonly used radioactive isotope cobalt-60.

It produced some nicely formatted calculations that, in the end, appear to be correct. ChatGPT came up with 0.884 mg, the same as Wikipedia’s 884 micrograms on its page for the curie unit.

It offered to do the same thing for another isotope.

I chose cobalt-14.

This doesn’t exist. And not because it’s really unstable and decays fast. It literally can’t exist. The atomic number of cobalt is 27, so all its isotopes, stable or otherwise, must have a higher mass number. Anything with a mass number of 14 *is not cobalt*.

I was mimicking a possible Gen Chem mixup: a student who confused carbon-14 (a well known and scientifically important isotope) with cobalt-whatever. The sort of mistake people see (and make!) at that level all the time. Symbol C vs. Co. Very typical Gen Chem sort of confusion.

A chemistry teacher at any level would catch this, and explain what happened. Wikipedia doesn’t show cobalt-14 in its list of cobalt isotopes (it only lists ones that actually exist), so going there would also reveal the mistake.

ChatGPT? It just makes shit up. Invents a half-life (for an isotope, just to remind you, *cannot exist*), and carries on like nothing strange has happened.

This is, quite literally, one of the worst possible responses to a request like this, and yet I see responses like this *all the freaking time*.

A reminder: The reason so many firms on their websites constantly urge you to install and use their apps instead of their websites is that the apps typically give them access to VASTLY more data about you and your activities. Don't fall for it.

I've got an idea!

Instead of pulling in 2 gigs of a strange looking JavaScript to build a website, we could build something I'm calling "multi page apps" -- MPAs.

- Server renders HTML with links and form controls
- Users use links and form controls to request additional pages and change state
- Server persists new state and renders new HTML Dead simple. Like falling off a log.

If you want to understand the psychological harm LLMs can do to someone, you have to read conspiracy theory forums. This pattern of the LLM spiraling with you into a private universe of meaning is the overwhelming norm

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

@futurebird There is this trend in business the las 30 years of rent-don’t-own. I do IT and this is “the cloud.” Rent servers, don’t own them. There’s the whole Office365 and every other software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry. Streaming music and film. Everyone wants recurring revenue, not capital investment. It drives subscription models in your products because everything underpinning your business is in a subscription, too.

There’s a principle that someone who specialises in something (computers, staffing, medical testing) will optimise it better than you can and make it cheaper, more efficient. But the myth is that they will share the resulting cost savings with you. Instead, they try to lower costs -for them- without changing the price -for you-. That’s where profit comes from, after all.

So people figure outsourcing is somehow good. Because they think it saves their business money and they get better service from a specialist. I’m sure that’s true sometimes. But mostly this seems like an unproven religious belief.

this is so awesome! an independent *implementation* in addition to an *instance*. really big step for the protocol ecosystem! and very impressive considering how much work is needed on protocol specs 😅

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3lo7xk2szvs2b

angel wearing a shirt with "my eyes are over here" with arrows pointing in all directions

I'm getting my ducks are in a row. I'm putting my chickadees in a column. The squirrels are stored in SQLite. I'm getting my chipmunks in Redis. I've been getting my crows into Postgres. I'm storing my pigeons in Mongo. There are raccoons in YAML? Who put raccoons in YAML? We've got snakes in an OracleDB? Why do we have either of those? Legacy acquisition? We have cockroaches in... well at least that makes sense. You say they're load-bearing cockroaches? And... is this an FTP server for ants?

Those that obsess over LLMs like to believe that Plain English sits at the top of the abstraction pile, that it is the thing that a programming environment should seek to model. From this point of view, an LLM seems perfect: type in words, program comes out.

But Plain English is not the top of the pile, not even close. It's an imprecise and clumsy lingo. The process of development is about throwing away that imprecision and engaging with the reality of the possibility space.

Imagine saying this to someone 50years ago: "Netcat found a bug in the pipe playing with the mouse"

#technology #innovation #communication #generationaldifference #Meme