anotherandrew

it was more about just being able to run it on osx again since they (Apple) removed 32-bit support some time ago.

This makes me sad that the only way I can play Portal (or Portal 2) is in a 32-bit VM. a 64-bit remake would be so awesome.

I’m not sure how you would do that if you are asking about something you don’t have expertise in yet, as it takes the exact same authoritative tone no matter whether the information is real.

I agree – That’s why I’m chalking it up to some kind of healthy sense of skepticism when it comes to trusting authoritative-sounding answers by themselves. e.g. “ok that sounds plausible, let’s see if we can find supporting information on this answer elsewhere or, maybe ask the same question a different way to see if the new answer(s) seem to line up.”

So far, research suggests this is not possible (unsurprisingly, given the nature of LLMs). Introspective outputs, such as certainty or justifications for decisions, do not map closely to the LLM’s actual internal state.

Interesting – I still see them largely as black boxes so reading about how people smarter than me describe the processes is fascinating.

I don’t know if it’s just my age/experience or some kind of innate “horse sense” But I tend to do alright with detecting shit responses, whether they be human trolls or an LLM that is lying through its virtual teeth. I don’t see that as bad news, I see it as understanding the limitations of the system. Perhaps with a reasonable prompt an LLM can be more honest about when it’s hallucinating?

I too contributed fairly significantly over a long period of time, particularly on electronics.stackexchange.com. I generally just ignore the weak/low quality questions or vote them down. I might respond and ask them to fix the question if I felt charitable, but I never understood the “question nazis”.

Completely forgot about kiwix; I have that on my ipad and laptop, along with Dash which is like a modern day HELPPC.COM if anyone remembers that thing…

There are poor personality types everywhere, but I have found stackexchange/stackoverflow to be one of the better sources of user curated help. LLMs are a new and interesting avenue and I’ve had some good success with them too, but Stackoverflow was really, really good.

Grab a copy of the stackoverflow database and use it locally, or train your own local LLM on the datastore.

And if you can, donate to the Internet Archive – those people do really important work in today’s age of killing off old information and constant enshittification.

I’m on the fence.

I’ve used Perplexity to take a javascript fragment, identify the language it was written in and describe what it’s doing. I then asked it to refactor it into something a human could understand. It nailed both of these, even the variable names were meaningful (the original ones were just single letters). I then asked it to port it to C and use SDL, which it did a pretty good job of.

I also used it to “untangle” some really gnarly mathy Javascript and port it to C so I could better understand it. That is still a work in progress and I don’t know enough math to know if it’s doing a good job or not, but it’ll give me some ability to work with the codebase.

I’ve also used it to create some nice helper python scripts like pulling all repositories from a github user account or using YouTube’s API to pull the video title and author data if given a URL. It also wrote the skeleton of some Python scripts which interact with a RESTful API. These kinds of things it excelled at.

My most recent success was using it to decode DTMF in a .WAV file, then create a new .WAV file using the DTMF start/end times to create cue points to visually show me what it saw and where. This was a mixed bag: I started out with Python, it used FFT (which was the obvious but wrong choice), then I had it implement a Goertzel filter which it did flawlessly. It even ported over to C without any real trouble. Where it utterly failed was with the WAV file creation/cue points. Part of this is because cue points are rather poorly described in any RIFF documentation, the python wrapper for the C wave processing library was incomplete and even then, various audio editors wanting the cue data in different ways, but this didn’t stop the LLM from lying through its damn teeth about not only knowing how to implement it, but assure me that the slop it created functioned as expected.

I’ve found that it tends to come apart at the seams with longer sessions. When its answers start being nonsensical I sometimes get a bit of benefit from starting over without all the work leading up to that point. LLMs are really good at churning out basic frameworks which aren’t exactly difficult but can be tedious. I then take this skeleton and start hanging the meat on it, occasionally getting help from the LLM but usually that’s the stuff I need to think about and implement. I find that this is where LLMs really struggle, and I waste more time trying to explain what I want to the LLM than if I just wrote it myself.

A full archive of the Japanese TV show Supreme Skills. I can find bits and pieces but I don’t think I even have one complete season.

Canadian living in LA: Crossed from LAX -> YVR and back about 6 weeks ago. Zero issues in either direction. Back in February went from LAX -> YYZ and back. I landed exactly 24h before that DC9 flipped on its roof in Toronto. Other than bad weather coming in to YYZ, zero issues. Went from SNA -> YYZ and back for Christmas. Zero issues.

My wife flew from YVR -> LAX and back last week. Zero issues, although she was really nervous from everything she’d read.

IMO there are zero issues crossing the border, at least through airports. I believe most of the goofiness I’ve heard about was at land crossings, although I’ve heard from friends that they’ve had zero issues at land crossings either.

FWIW I’m a 50 year old white guy, and at least half the time I’ve got one or two teenage boys with me, the rest of the time just me. I work with another Canadian “import” but he’s originally from Iran. He said that while he was nervous, he did not notice any increased scrutiny for himself or for his wife, who flew separately recently to Toronto and back.