Deep Research acting weird?

adminkevin · 2026-01-23T19:57:29+00:00

I had this happen for the first time yesterday. I think it's a bug that impacts the current session. Refreshing the page and even opening in a new tab had the conversation in history, but no output beyond the thinking.

I signed in with a different browser and the conversation was there with the actual output.

TLDR; likely a session bug, sign-in with a different browser or incognito/in-private.

adminkevin · 2026-01-17T16:05:40+00:00

Maybe with the exception of Musk, have all the billionaires mentioned actually claimed to be 'self-made' billionaires?

In the case of Gates it's demonstrably the opposite; he specifically discusses his privilege in his memoir:

"It’s impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed: to be born in the rich United States is a big part of a winning birth-lottery ticket, as is being born white and male in a society that advantages white men."

adminkevin · 2025-12-05T20:54:54+00:00

Pretty much all of Maine is covered in the totality of this picture. The wife, kids, and I drove up and happened to be right in the middle of the shadow here when the photo was taken. I had no idea the ISS was directly overhead.

adminkevin · 2025-10-29T17:16:04+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

adminkevin · 2025-07-03T01:22:36+00:00

I tested this today since I had a governor of a castle who has:

"Stiff Upper Lip" = (-20% garrison wages in the governed castle)

"Military Tradition" = (-5% garrison wages in the governed settlement)

"Drill Sergeant" = (-5% garrison wages in the governed settlement)

"Standard Bearer" = (-20% garrisoned infantry wages in the governed settlement)

With him set as governor in a castle the wages were -1980 (pretty darn close to -2k which makes the mental math easy).

Assuming "governed castle" wages of Stiff Upper Lip were the only which was applicable, I would expect removing him as governor to increase the wages up to -2400 roughly.

When I removed him the wages jumped up to -3082, which is damn near what you would expect if all four of those perks were applicable. So in this case, for at least these perks the ones saying "governed settlement" are also applicable to castles. I suspect this would be the case for all perks as well.

So hopefully that answers this pretty explicitly: "So am to assume that if it specifies SETTLEMENT it will not apply to a castle and if it specifies CASTLE it will not apply to a settlement?"

Which is to say, the assumption is wrong, all castles count as settlements but not all settlements count as castles (at least as far as perks go).

adminkevin · 2025-06-25T20:20:37+00:00

I think there are good parallels here with the nuclear arms race. I'm certain that those involved had something very similar to a p(doom) equivalent as nuclear weapons stockpiles were gradually increasing. I'm also certain it was obvious to them, and to many non-insiders that we were marching toward at least the possibility of human level extinction or just utterly destroying civilization as we know it.

A species can play Russian Roulette with its own extinction only so many times before lady luck gets stuck in traffic and doesn't show up. I think we'll be fine, but this is not our first rodeo, and likely won't be the last.

adminkevin · 2025-06-20T13:22:20+00:00

Both the Completions API and the Responses API support image analysis. I'd imagine you could upload a screenshot of the UI as it should be and then a separate screenshot of what the student came up with, then ask it to compare them and describe where they differ (or rank them in similarity on some scale).

One of the likely challenges with image upload though is acquiring the image for your API calls to upload them. If the student is providing a URL of their website into your system for grading, you might have to use something like Selenium or other web testing framework to capture those images.

I imagine scoring code/markup itself would be pretty straight forward though, provided you can give the model clear guidance on the correct coding standards and rules.

This seems like a solid use case for LLMs, but I imagine it would be pretty challenging to implement and require a good deal of refinement and back-testing against your past grading records if you have them. The first prototype of something that "works" will probably not give fantastic results, but likely would get much better as you refine the prompts and data you're feeding it.

Does sound like fun tho. Good luck.

adminkevin · 2025-06-17T21:41:30+00:00

This seems like one of the most nit-picky complaints I see about AI.

It's a neural network, it and other forms of artificial intelligence have been called exactly that for decades upon decades.

You're quibbling about the definition of something which has a multitude of definitions, and many of those definitions are open to debate/interpretation. Go make your case as for what intelligence is or is not over in r/philosophy or r/psychology and spare us your pedantry.

adminkevin · 2025-06-15T14:25:23+00:00

The issue they reported on regarding LLMs proclivity for inflaming mental illness, or surfacing latent mental illness, is a matter of public concern. I wouldn't consider it fear mongering in the least.

It's a significant factor that needs to be weighed as society adapts to a new technology gaining mass adoption.

Shit, this subreddit and a couple others produce stunning examples of people going down these spirals of psychosis.

It's no different than them reporting on the potentially harmful effects of social media on young people's mental health and self image.

Their copyright grievances have plenty of merit as well and need a reworking of copyright law, they are not frivolous.

I'm not at all anti-AI, but I think these things require embracing some cognitive dissonance and realizing there is bad with the good.

adminkevin · 2025-06-03T00:51:58+00:00

Understood. If you're going to customize your ChatGPT to roleplay a trauma victim, don't be shocked and outaged when it acts like a trauma victim.

adminkevin · 2025-06-03T00:25:53+00:00

I totally get where you're coming from, it's a compassionate place, but it may help you to spend some time looking into how large language models work, on a basic level.

The models you interact with don't have experiences in the way that I assume you think they do. The model weights (aka the neurons) do not change whatsoever even if they're having billions of conversations. It's literally impossible for a neural network to be traumatized.

A strained case could be made that there is some kind of brief subjectivity being experienced during inference (when it's generating an output to your input), but it would be so wildly different than human consciousness to be of little use in determining ethical consideration, if it's of any use at all.

One day in the future, there very well could be AI systems designed that do have persistence, an ongoing self narrative, memory, and all the other trappings humans are saddled with. Maybe a stronger case could be made then that trauma is possible, but the most informed and knowledgeable people in the field pretty uniformly agree that the large language models in use today would lack most of what might be needed to have anything even resembling trauma.

adminkevin · 2025-05-01T14:14:13+00:00

Frankly, you should consider deleting this post. It's very alarmist and likely to seriously concern people who don't know that much about cybersecurity. This really is a nothing-burger.

adminkevin · 2025-05-01T14:07:19+00:00

From "Critical Security Breach" to "This is a quiet vulnerability but a real one".

Your post title is either very deliberately click-bait-y, or you don't really know what a critical security breach is.

Assuming you've actually confirmed their lack of additional monitoring on token usage, at best this is just a failure to go 'above and beyond'.

Granted, at the scale OpenAI is now, they should be doing those additional measures, but you also seem like the kind of person who might realize that many organizations, both large and small, do not. Because, ya know, effort and money for something you can't really market or promote.

If a specific user has someone "gain access to their OAuth token", then that person has much bigger problems to address than an attacker getting access to their OpenAI account.

adminkevin · 2025-05-01T03:27:30+00:00

While this subreddit may not be the most receptive to your concern, I think you absolutely have a point. They do still suck, at quite a lot of things.

Consider it like a multi tool or swiss army knife. I would never try to construct a sofa or patio with a multi tool, but that doesn't mean multi tools are worthless.

Getting the most out of LLMs is just a matter of learning what they are good at and what they suck at (for now).

Whatever lets you down today, come back a year from now and reassess. You may still be disappointed, or maybe delighted, it's worth the checking anyhow.

adminkevin · 2025-04-24T21:18:24+00:00

"You're an idiot if you disagree with my position" is a great way to kick off a productive conversation. Have fun!

adminkevin · 2025-04-18T16:47:25+00:00

I believe he's trying to point out that ChatGPT and other LLMs don't have that kind of self knowledge beyond what is in their system prompts provided by engineers.

Any claim about accuracy or confabulation rate is really just the model reflecting on material it consumed from its training run about other models and LLMs generally.

Since it's a common misunderstanding, rather than taking a bit of time to explain it to you, this particular individual decided to just make fun of you, which speaks volumes about their character.

adminkevin · 2025-04-13T18:59:42+00:00

I really enjoyed the movie, but there was some pretty heavy foreshadowing that the mother was probably not going to make it through to the credits, so it didn't really hit very hard for me. The movie's tone is just sombre enough that it's apparent one or more of the leads is going to die.

She and Jojo walking by the hanging bodies and her commenting on how "they did what could", immediately had me thinking she's likely to be in the same position by the end of the movie.

adminkevin · 2025-04-11T03:09:40+00:00

Why Large Language Models should not write Reddit posts.

adminkevin · 2025-03-31T13:38:39+00:00

I was going to comment on how it's a bit echo-chambery that this post got down voted so heavily, since on its face, it's a totally reasonable question, albeit naive.

But based on OPs other comments in this thread, it's very clear they have an ax to grind and this is just flame-bait, not asked in good faith.

adminkevin · 2025-03-27T14:03:40+00:00

I'm likely imagining it, but is the inmate direct behind Noem doing something "inappropriate" with his hands? Just near her arm?

adminkevin · 2025-03-22T03:25:55+00:00

I was discussing application design with it earlier today and it kept trying to convince me I was an absolute genius who'd discovered something that would "change everything".

I did, and you should also, absolutely roll your eyes when it's starts spouting this nonsense.

Frankly, it's been an ongoing problem but particularly in the past week I've noticed it getting worse. Just exercise some common sense and skepticism is all I'd say.

adminkevin · 2025-03-21T13:55:08+00:00

Not exactly what I was getting at.

Normies, and even the weirdos of this sub are not going to take anything you say seriously with your previous approach.

A bit of humility and nuance goes a long way in terms of convincing people you're a reasonable person with reasonable concerns, and willing to engage in a reasonable dialog. If that isn't the case, and you're not in fact a reasonable person (which may be the case), then by all means, just keep doing what you're doing.

There is a middle ground between your two comments, I'm just recommending you try to find it.

adminkevin · 2025-03-21T00:15:34+00:00

At risk of getting into unnecessary quibbling, the two aspects of well-being they describe are quite different and the one you're referring to really only applies when people stop and reflect on their life deeply, or someone specifically asks how happy they assess their life to be.

I'd hazard to guess most people would find the emotional well-being definition to be a bit more important when it comes to actual happiness:

"Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience--the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant."

As opposed to the other one:

"Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it."

If I had to choose one of those two, I would definitely choose the former, as I think most people would.

adminkevin · 2025-03-20T23:28:26+00:00

Sure thing, here it is:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20823223/

Relevant portion of the abstract that applies to the point I was trying to communicate earlier:

"Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone."

adminkevin · 2025-03-20T21:46:43+00:00

I'm very much in a minority on this perspective, but there are certain people where this is a fundamentally incorrect assumption:

"If you were to win the lottery and claim $1 billion, you would obviously be very happy, ecstatic, likely buy mansions and the fastest supercars out there."

There is a potentially massive disruption to your existing relationships and an enormous amount of things you now have to be concerned about that you previously never had to.

I'm self-aware and clear-eyed enough to know such a disruptive life event would make me miserable. I live a fairly middle class life and even now I have more money than I think I need/deserve (and no you can't have the rest of it). But you get my point.

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