I totally agree that both seem to imply intent, but IMHO hallucinating is something that seems to imply not only more agency than an LLM has, but also less culpability. Like, “Aw, it’s sick and hallucinating, otherwise it would tell us the truth.”

Whereas calling it a bullshit machine still implies more intentionality than an LLM is capable of, but at least skews the perception of that intention more in the direction of “It’s making stuff up” which seems closer to the mechanisms behind an LLM to me.

I also love that the researchers actually took the time to not only provide the technical definition of bullshit, but also sub-categorized it too, lol.

I saw the Marques Brownlee review of this and I have no idea why they actually released it to market? It looked so wildly undercooked.

Huh. I used it pretty much since the start and I certainly don’t recall it being that bad? Like you got a lot of relevant content up front usually.

All we want is 1990s Google, guys. That’s really all we want. None of this AI BS that kind find a country in Africa that starts with a K, just Google without the evil enshitification layer on top.

Browsers love it!

Practically anything you write will execute without all that scope and well formed statements nonsense.

Mind you, number 2 is also its biggest flaw as well, but…

True, just observing that it’s happening much faster now than it did for the preceding iteration of Windows.

The enshitification of Windows compared to macOS has really accelerated a lot recently it seems. I work with both daily and it is weird and irritating how much extra crap keeps getting hurled willy-nilly into Windows updates this last year.

Someone still had faith in Google???

Hahaha, yeah I only buy books that I know I will be rereading down the line, because otherwise the foundations of my house would crumble under the weight.

My library allows requesting new books 3 months before they come out, so I usually try and be the guy requesting it and getting the first hold on it that way…

If you want to read something slightly closer to “normal” SF by him, The Embassy is good. Although my absolute favorite is still The City and The City, which is all about social mores and to a degree, castes.

Weird! That’s what I’m on too and I’m getting a giant menu through the middle of the article. 🤔

EDIT: And now it works again. Must have been a temporary glitch, although I force-reloaded it a couple of times even…

That website is completely borked. On Firefox, of all things. Temporary glitch? Working now.

If you’re into Insta, be sure and check out PixelFed.

They’re great! Especially Sundiver and The Uplift War. EDIT: should have added they are somewhat stand-alone, although you do manage to learn a little bit more about the overall arc of the plot from each book if you move through them in order.

Sort of? Almost? It provides a lot of motivation for one of the main characters IIRC. Honestly might be just as well off watching the NF show haha.

So the first 100+ pages was an excruciating slog but after that he finally gets to the real story. Which was cool and fascinating but he completely effed it up in book 2 and I didn’t even make it 100 pages into book 3 before seeing it was more bogusness. Still, I would kinda recommend Book 1 if you can make it through the freaking Chinese revolution part at the start.

Yeah, but that’s unavoidable. Whereas, Tesla and Waymo, etc getting to use our roads for self-driving testing is just our government not doing their job to protect the roads adequately, IMHO. This is veering way off topic, but I just recently watched a video that had stats on Teslas and the fact they’re like 8.2x more likely to be in a crash than a standard level 2 car driving system.

Honestly, a search engine companion is probably its least offensive case, you’re correct. Mostly, it makes me so mad because they are polluting our entire collected knowledge base, because there is no way to watermark anything as AI-generated (especially when it’s text, not images) which means that every search you make from here on out returns worse results. It’s like being forced to share the road with self-driving Teslas because the self-driving car companies (especially Tesla) have made us all involuntarily part of their beta test.

The “screw everyone else trying to use the same public resource” mentality is out of control.

There is no such thing as a good AI engine… all I really want from any AI engine is the ability to watermark everything it outputs as generated by an AI so it can later be filtered out when it’s discovered to be inaccurate or just simply plagiaristic.

I would fucking rather pay not to have AI in my browser, FFS…