It’s actually not that hard to start having them pretty frequently. I always had that same problem though: I’d realize I was dreaming, say “Wow, I’m actually dreaming and aware of it. This is amaz-” and wake up. There are supposedly tricks you can use to prevent yourself from waking up like spinning around, but it didn’t seem to help even when I remembered to try in the dream.

You can make them more frequent by just thinking to yourself “Am I dreaming?” and checking if you are a bunch of times a day. 5-6 is probably enough. Keep that up for a few weeks and you’ll probably start having frequent lucid dreams. I read that lucid dreams aren’t really that restful compared to normal sleep though, so don’t try to induce them unless you can spare the sleep time.

Ahh, I hate Snap so much. It actually what drove me to switch to Arch (btw). It was just so annoying going to install something and having it try to pull in snap and all its dependencies… And of course, if you don’t want Snap you have to deal with the inconvenience of finding another way to install the app.

There are reasons to dislike Snap on principle and also very practical reasons. It liked randomly preventing the system from shutting down. Installing a new OS on a slow or unreliable internet connection and want a browser? How about we install Snap and then tell to download that thing and maybe a bunch of random internal dependencies with no visible progress and unreliable error handling? Get it away from me.

One of these is true:

1. Your account was hacked…
2. You have a serious memory issue.
3. Saying hateful, rude stuff is something you do so commonly you can’t even keep track of the instances.

Pretty much all of those are problems that you should deal with.

As sad as it is to say, “in general” no product is. Some stuff is worse than average like cocoa and child slave labor or meat/eggs/dairy and cruelty death for animals but overall unless there’s really visible evidence showing a product was produced ethically (or more ethically), then it probably wasn’t. After all, if the business selling the item could brag about it, they would.

Letting them know what mankind is all about seems like a terrible idea. We’re jerks.

This is great. Although…

when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it.

I wish! “Fix” is wayyyy too optimistic.But maybe, just maybe, I could make it suck a tiny bit less. Still left with utter garbage, of course. Okay, well didn’t you just say you could make it suck a tiny bit less? So do it again. And again, and…

And it jumped on the man and scratched him all to pieces!

I do like a happy ending. The jerk had it coming. Hopefully the dogs were okay though.

Could a feeling or emotion be more fascinating than fascination?

I have a 16 gallon shopvac I bought… about 15 years ago, maybe more. Honestly, I think that’s the way to go. They can handle wet, dry stuff, huge capacity, really powerful, simple system. Not even expensive compared to normal vacuums.

If you have a husky/husky mix, good luck with bags. You will need about 1 billion per year.

One would hope that IBM’s selling a product that has a higher success rate than a coinflip

Again, my point really doesn’t have anything to do with specific percentages. The point is that if some percentage of it is broken you aren’t going to know exactly which parts. Sure, some problems might be obvious but some might be very rare edge cases.

If 99% of my program works, the remaining 1% might be enough to not only make the program useless but actively harmful.

Evaluating which parts are broken is also not easy. I mean, if there was already someone who understood the whole system intimately and was an expert then you wouldn’t really need to rely on AI to port it.

Anyway, I’m not saying it’s impossible, or necessary not going to be worth it. Just that it is not an easy thing to make successful as an overall benefit. Also, issues like “some 1 in 100,000 edge case didn’t get handle successfully” are very hard to quantify since you don’t really know about those problems in advance, they aren’t apparent, the effects can be subtle and occur much later.

Kind of like burning petroleum. Free energy, sounds great! Just as long as you don’t count all side effects of extracting, refining and burning it.

So you might feed it your COBOL code and find it only coverts 40%.

I’m afraid you’re completely missing my point.

The system gives you a recommendation: that has a 50% chance of being correct.

Let’s say the system recommends converting 40% of the code base.

The system converts 40% of the code base. 50% of the converted result is correct.

50% is a random number picked out of thin air. The point is that what you end up with has a good chance of being incorrect and all the problems I mentioned originally apply.

I was speaking generally. In other words, the LLM will convert 100% of what you tell it to but only part of the result will be correct. That’s the problem.

Even if it only converts half of the codebase, that’s still a huge improvement.

The problem is it’ll convert 100% of the code base but (you hope) 50% of it will actually be correct. Which 50%? That’s left as an exercise to the reader. There’s no human, no plan, no logic necessarily to how it was converted also so it can be very difficult to understand code like that and you can’t ask the person who wrote why stuff is a certain way.

Understanding large, complex codebases one didn’t write is a difficult task even under pretty ideal conditions.

This sounds no different than the static analysis tools we’ve had for COBOL for some time now.

One difference is people might kind of understand how the static analysis tools we’ve had for some time now actually work. LLMs are basically a black box. You also can’t easily debug/fix a specific problem. The LLM produces wrong code in one particular case, what do you do? You can try performing fine tuning training with examples of the problem and what it should be but there’s no guarantee that won’t just change other stuff subtly and add a new issue for you to discovered at a future time.

Seems like we’re on the same page. The only thing I disagreed with before is saying the output was random.

It has to match the prompt and make as much sense as possible

So it’s specifically designed to make as much sense as possible.

and they should not be treated as ‘fact generating machines’.

You can’t really “generate” facts, only recognize them. :) I know what you mean though and I generally agree. I’m really interested in LLM stuff but I definitely don’t really trust them (and no one should currently anyway).

Why did this bot say that Hitler was a great leader? Because it was confused by some text that was fed into the model.

Most people are (rightfully) very hesitant to say anything positive about Hitler but he did accomplish some fairly impressive stuff. As horrible as their means were, Nazi Germany also advanced since quite a bit also. I am not saying it was justified, justifiable or good, but by a not entirely unreasonable definition of “great” he could qualify.

So I’d say it’s not really that it got confused, it’s that LLMs don’t understand being cautious about statements like that. I’d also say I prefer the LLM to “look” at stuff objectively and try to answer rather than responding to anything remotely questionable with “Sorry, Dave I can’t let you do that. There might be a sharp edge hidden somewhere and you could hurt yourself!” I hate being protected from myself without the ability to opt out.

I think part of the issue here is because the output from LLMs looks like a human might have wrote it people tend to anthropomorphize the LLM. They ask it for its best recipe using the ingredients bleach, water and kumquat jam and then are shocked when it gives them a recipe for bleach kumquat sauce.

It’s not supposed to be some enlightened, respectful, perfectly fair entity.

I’m with you so far.

It’s a tool for producing mostly random, grammatically correct text.

What? That’s certainly not the purpose of LLMs and a lot of work has been done to improve the accuracy of their answers.

Is it still not good enough to rely on? Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it’s just for producing random text.

Being a hat, without any possibility of creating or interact seem like hell itself in its own right,

It could also easily be as boring as the boring choice.

Turning into inanimate object to live forever

I’d be surprised if the average hat really lives all that long.

I’m with you in choosing the boring life. Also, if worse comes to worse you can just off yourself. Not an option as a hat.

With how much war, malnutrition and unfairness and wealth inequality in the world, I wonder how many people would see at least the boring choice as a massive upgrade over the status quo? I’d guess it’s probably a lot.

Dry beans are a lot cheaper than canned (less waste also). If you get a big pressure cooker, you can just soak a bunch of dried beans overnight and it only takes ~30min to cook up a massive pot of beans. Add more water and some stuff like carrots, onions and you’ll have same tasty bean soup. Split peas are great for thickening soup and making it really hearty.

Of course, it’s possible to cook beans/soup in a slow cooker or whatever but personally I love my pressure cooker and I’ve had less issues with burning stuff or uneven cooking as well. Great for steaming vegetables, potatoes (you can have mashed potatoes in ~15min). Can even use a pressure cooker to make rice and it’s very fast.

The ones that make me happy are when passed family members or pets stop by for a visit.

Those kinds of dreams make me really sad. I’m always so happy in the dream thinking I was wrong that they were gone and then when I wake up and realize it was just a dream… it’s hard.

Not sure if OP was talking about in the dream or not. For me at least, how I feel about it would be completely opposite.