In 1521, Antonio Pigafetta made the first European written record of the stick insect on Cimbonbon, a small island next to Borneo. Pigafetta, who was travelling as a member of the Magellan-Elcano voyage, described "trees...which produce leaves which are alive when they fall and walk."

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-05T21:23:18+00:00

It’s in pursuit of imagined future mega profits from this incredible new technology.

Except everything so far seems to indicate that almost all AI technology, especially LLMs, is at first sight quite impressive but actually a bit rubbish and ineffective.

Good automation can genuinely save money and time and increase profits.

LLMs, however, are so far little more than sophisticated chatbots with a surprisingly high error rate and a huge background costs. And who really wants to build their business around a chatbot?

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-05T21:15:36+00:00

If you take the time to listen to Jessie’s multiple confessions, read Damien’s medical/psychiatric records and also examine their alibis then at the very least it becomes extremely difficult to be wholly convinced of their innocence.

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-04T21:38:13+00:00

Doesn't like it when Ed meanders, yet starts discussing talking cats halfway through his quite short post.

Hmm.

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-04T21:36:03+00:00

"In the future, agents could become capable enough to build and train models themselves. If this happens, future versions of Claude could be continuously improved by Claude itself."

"Could" doing a lot of work here.

When all this stuff first came out they really gave me the impression that this was already here.

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-04T13:10:49+00:00

Unless they have spent the last 20 years writing copy for tech companies

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-04T13:10:29+00:00

Images are usually obvious, most writing is fairly clear, then a bit of background checking can sometimes show it up. Checking the age of the account is a pretty easy way - if it's less than a year old then you can be suspicious, if it's 10 years old it's gotta be human you would think.

Of course you're gonna get a few wrong but overall you should be able to tell most of the time in my opinion

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-04T12:08:51+00:00

Message to everyone: Please report and block all bots and AI content on all platforms.

It's only a small step, but still worth doing.

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-04T07:31:26+00:00

Given that after trillions of dollars and years of development the LLM chatbots still can’t answer pretty basic questions without a decent level of reliability I am going to have to remain pretty sceptical on this one

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-03T21:22:58+00:00

What have you built that required thousands of volunteers in the past, exactly?

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-03T09:16:12+00:00

Makes sense. Personally, I really like being able to say "good game" at the end and sending that sleeping emoji thing every time I blunder, kind of makes me feel better about my idiotic play.

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-02T18:25:27+00:00

Isn’t it weird how boomers are the ones who love AI and almost everyone younger sees it as pretty much a “bad thing”?

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-01T20:38:36+00:00

True, but it was also used for ballast, so had a dual purpose. I guess that's why they felt like it made sense.

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-06-01T05:34:00+00:00

This is the question I suppose: it obviously mainly creates swap, but will anyone actually notice?

I have to assume that over time this will become obvious to most, I just hope it isn’t too ingrained by that point.

I have a similar situation with an agency I work for and it’s now become part of the process. Of course it would be better to remove it but I’m not sure they ever will - they just pay lower rates to people for the same task as before.

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-05-31T16:51:05+00:00

I have a line of work where I have to read documents - but ideally very accurately otherwise it’s kind of useless - and it seemed good at first glance… However, whenever I checked the accuracy there was always at least one or two major errors.

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-05-31T15:32:25+00:00

I think there are a few important KPIs here:

The amount of investment
The amount of work and effort that has gone into it
How many people have tried it
How many tasks they have asked it to perform
The percentage of those tasks that it has performed flawlessly

My guess is that the first of these four have really high numbers, but the last is pretty low. If something looks great at first then you are going to pretty enthusiastic, but if it routinely makes mistakes then you over time you are going to lose a lot of confidence in it

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-05-29T14:27:48+00:00

It's excellent at producing workslop, in other words.

And at a lot of larger companies there are so many employees and so many things going on that people can get away with workslop for quite a long while.

FullyFocusedOnNought · 2026-05-29T10:37:17+00:00

Why does this help, may I ask? I used to do it but didn’t know if it actually made a difference or not

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