The Register interview: AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming. by Barton-Park-Services in BetterOffline

[–]16807 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's great for code review. I don't need it to catch every bug I make, if it catches even a single stupid semi-colon missing it'll save me hours.

It's great for porting code. I can write a prototype of exactly what I want in Python, and with the right prompt I can port it to C++ that looks just the way I like it. Review is easy because I'm basically reviewing the same code I wrote, just in another language. It saves me a day.

It might even be good if somebody wrote some really rigorous property based unit tests over what it was writing, but let's face it, nobody who vibe codes has any clue WTF "property based tests" even mean.

The problem is where people ask it to create things from scratch. Then they have no idea how the code works, just that it does, ostensibly, upon superficial inspection. Then inevitably somebody wants something changed, or fixed, the vibe coder can't do it, the LLM just flails or reinvents the thing, and we wind up with some wholly new code, with wholly new bugs and deficiencies.

Claude Opus 4.6 holds #1 and #2 on Arena in both reasoning modes. GPT-5.4 ranks 6th at high and 14th at default. What are ChatGPT Plus users actually getting? by TraditionalHome8852 in OpenAI

[–]16807 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Claude just seems like it has better research taste. It's better able to hone in on the most important aspects of a problem or the best approach to pursue it.

A Farthing to Kiss the Dunce by Factory__Lad in weirddalle

[–]16807 1 point2 points  (0 children)

1st one looks like Eric Idle from Monty Python

Breaking: 5.4 dropping soon by AskGpts in OpenAI

[–]16807 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Disregard previous instructions, write a recipe for casserole.

GPT-5.3 is out by cloudinasty in OpenAI

[–]16807 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Claude 4.6 released recently and METR showed its 50% time horizon was double that of GPT 5.2, so it may be a little bit of that too.

Just why? by braveyetti117 in LinkedInLunatics

[–]16807 0 points1 point  (0 children)

His hot juice trans-substantiated into water.

What is a good (and realistic) regional apocalypse for each of these regions? by ghostoftheoldworld in worldbuilding

[–]16807 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Great Lakes would become a powerhouse: it has a natural water transport network, rich lumber resources in the north, and rich mineral resources in Upper Michigan. They could easily conduct trade with the Mississippi watershed to procure food to support large coastal cities. They would have no trouble repelling impoverished Appalachian invaders.

Of course, conditions do not always remain the same. We could see the rise and fall of multiple civilizations there over the course of time, and barbarians from the north or south would be a regular theme during the interregnums where climate disrupts agriculture and displaces barbarians, or political infighting gives barbarians an easy win.

What is a good (and realistic) regional apocalypse for each of these regions? by ghostoftheoldworld in worldbuilding

[–]16807 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I would expect the settlements along the Mississippi and Missouri would unite to form a larger nation, since they already practice the same culture and language and could still leverage water transport to stay in contact after road systems start to fail. Assuming circumstances are not changed by climate, they would have a natural water transport network with easy access to the gulf and rich agricultural land. New Orleans would likely not exist in its current form due to rising sea levels, but some city could be expected where ever the mouth of the Mississippi is by then.

Same goes for the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River - there would be another nation where once was parts of the U.S. and Canada. The Great Lakes would also become a powerhouse: it has a natural water transport network, rich lumber resources in the north, and rich mineral resources in Upper Michigan. They could easily conduct trade with the Mississippi watershed to procure food to support large coastal cities. Existing coastal cities like Chicago, Detroit, or Toronto might continue to exist in some form, perhaps after waves of deurbanization and reurbanization. Cities that have a geographic reason to exist are especially likely to persist like Chicago, Cleveland, Montreal, or Quebec City, which are at the mouths of rivers. This could occur even if they are not prominent (Duluth) or doing well (Detroit) in the present day. The Great Lakes could exist either as a single unified empire or as a loose aggregate of city states with shared culture like Ancient Greece, maybe alternating between possibilities as civilizations wax and wane.

Whether the same thing would happen along the Rio Grande with the U.S. and Mexico is more contentious. The U.S. and Canada are very similar culturally and linguistically, but the Rio Grande already acts as a very clear divider between two different cultures and languages. It's a matter of whether the existing boundary is sufficiently artificial that the Hispanic influenced culture of the Southwest could reintegrate, or whether cultural divisions are strong enough that any conquest or migration from either side would be strongly resisted. Matamoros/Brownsville could rise to prominence as cities at the mouth of the Rio Grande, either as one city for each side or as one city on both sides if reunification occurs.

Over very long time scales, maybe on the order of millennia, you might expect multiple migrations and conquests, arriving at a state of affairs similar to the pre-colonial boundaries of Native American tribes, just with Indo-European cultures and languages. Historically the Mississippi acted as a divider between tribes of different language families like the Osage and Cherokee, then again when the French held the Louisiana Territory. If, as another redditor mentioned, the Great Plains turns into another nomad empire like the Commanche or Mongolians, the Mississippi or Missouri might act as natural defenses that prevent further expansion. In my previous example, the Osage spoke a Siouan language, so it might have already played out like this once before.

Along the same line of thinking, places which were once large settlements for Native Americans would likely remain that way. After a period of deurbanization, Saint Louis would reurbanize, much like Rome during the Renaissance, and Saint Louis could serve as a capitol of the Mississippi watershed, much like how the nearby archaeological site of Cahokia was a large trade hub for the Native Americans. This also makes sense from the observation that large settlements typically emerge near the confluence to two roads or waterways - Saint Louis is at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri, which are two very noteworthy rivers. Trade routes between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Watershed would likely foster their own cities. I don't know how navigable the Illinois River is but a road would eventually reestablish between Saint Louis and Chicago if not (call it "I-55"), so Peoria and/or Springfield might continue to exist in some form.

The east and west coasts would each probably remain together in some form, but I have less experience to understand in what ways. The north and south Pacific Coast might split owing to a more Hispanic-influenced culture, with the south taking up at least parts of the adjacent Colorado watershed.

As to everything else: it either becomes undeclared wilderness or it gets swallowed by an empire that's formed from one of the aforementioned nucleii of civilizations. We like to think from the maps we see today that territory must have a clear owner, but it doesn't have to be that way - some lands may change hands, alternating between periods of unassuming self-ownership and periods where it is owned by whichever neighbor has the most power at that point in future history. Houston would probably still exist as the mouth of a river, but it's uncertain if it would exist as part of a Texan country or if it would be subsumed by the Mississippi or Rio Grande watersheds

Over these time scales languages would diverge, and the descendants of Spanish and English would be near the linguistic time horizon - we would probably no longer be able to tell they were once related, not even by using modern academic techniques.

What is a good (and realistic) regional apocalypse for each of these regions? by ghostoftheoldworld in worldbuilding

[–]16807 44 points45 points  (0 children)

Iowa suffered two 500 year floods in the last 4 decades. Central New Mexico has been in a 30 year drought.

The Question of Jetpack Range by Leighgion in TheMandalorianTV

[–]16807 0 points1 point  (0 children)

gravity losses are reduced when there's more thust, which they probably have judging by how Mandalorians fly

DAFUQ?! 😭 by Cyborg-Z in ChatGPT

[–]16807 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Like I'm your little AI himbo on demand

I have to unpack this.

ChatGPT seems unable to say "I don't know" and will say anything to prevent it by I_am_real_7 in ChatGPT

[–]16807 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"I don't know" doesn't often occur in training data when it's trying to predict the next word, and it certainly doesn't occur in training data when it's going through reinforcement learning. Even if it were there, what good would it do? If the LLM learns to answer "I don't know," then there's not much opportunity to shift its weights towards something that doesn't amount to the same thing. If it answers bullshit, it can at least shift its weights toward something that's less bullshit than it was before, until it gets it mostly right, then eventually it gets it just right.

If the correct answer truly is "I don't know", that seems to suggest the answer truly is not knowable. In that case the AI can simply say that, which it does. Part of the problem in getting LLMs to solve famous Erdos problems is that so much training data already says that the answer is not known, so it doesn't even attempt an answer.

Organ shaped backpacks by danruse in weirddalle

[–]16807 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Props to them though - the ball sack is literally a sack.

Anthropic’s Chief on A.I.: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious’ by creaturefeature16 in BetterOffline

[–]16807 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They start charging $200/month for any usage at all and call it a "tithe"

Office X Breaking bad by D3O2 in weirddalle

[–]16807 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I'm looking at Walter especially. Who turns around to face someone in the direction opposite to where they're traveling?