Oh, it was DUMB. I was dumb. I only have myself to blame here. But we all do dumb things sometimes, owning your mistakes keeps you humble, and you asked. So here goes.
I use a modeling software called Rhino on wine on Linux. In the past, there was an incident where I had to copy an obscure dll that couldn't be delivered by wine or winetricks from a working Windows installation to get something to work. I did so and it worked. (As I recall this was a temporary issue, and was patched in the next release of wine.)
I hate the wine standard file picker, it has always been a persistent issue with Rhino3d. So I keep banging my head on trying to get it to either perform better or make a replacement. Every few months I'll get fed up and have a minute to kill, so I'll see if some new approach works. This time, ChatGPT told me to copy two dll's from a working windows installation to the System folder. Having precedent that this can work, I did.
Anyway, it borked startup completely and it took like an hour to recover. What I didn't consider - and I really, really should have - was that these were dll's that were ALREADY IN the system directory, and I was overwriting the good ones with values already reflecting my system with completely foreign ones.
And that's the critical difference - the obscure dll that made the system work that one time was because of something missing. This time was overwriting extant good ones.
But the fact that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success made me very wary of the harm it could cause.
> ...using other models, never touching that product again.
> ...that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success...
Since you're using other models instead, do you believe they cannot give similarly stupid ideas?
I'm under no misimpression they can't. But I have found ChatGPT to be most confident when it f's up. And to suggest the worst ideas most often.
Until you queried I had forgotten to mention that the same day I was trying to work out a Linux system display issue and it very confidently suggested to remove a package and all its dependencies, which would have removed all my video drivers. On reading the output of the autoremove command I pointed out that it had done this, and the model spat out an "apology" and owned up to ** the damage it would have wreaked.
** It can't "apologize" for or "own up" to anything, it can just output those words. So I hope you'll excuse the anthropomorphization.
Might be the numbered list of short points that keyed OP. And it's actually a great communication style! So much so that they overtrained LLMs to produce them. I wonder if we're all going to have to get idiosyncratically slightly worse to avoid the suspicion in the future.
Its scary how many things Trump says, claims that are roughly equivalent to, "1 + 2 = 4", which people just eat up as truth!
It feels like all the deficets in our education system (going back decades) are finally coming to roost... so many people lack critical thinking skills and media savvy/awareness. I think its too late to fix it, now that a sufficient majority of people are susceptible to this deception, and a sufficient chunk of politicians are willing to deceive them... there is too much motivation to keep them dumb. The hatred towards the "Intellectual Elite" is scary, and really is reminicent of Pol Pot.
Education isn't the problem with Trump voters, stupidity is.
Remember that this is his second term. Every American voter had the benefit of four years of "education" regarding Trump's character and competence. A majority of them responded by freely and enthusiastically demanding four more such years.
There's an outright attack on education as well though.
The fact that you can become a teacher in Florida without a degree just by being a veteran [1] comes as a result of an exodus of teachers because there has been an outright attack on education institutions. The reasons "why" have been debated but ultimately it is abundantly clear that the issue isn't just stupidity, but also the very act of education itself.
There has been a concerted effort by conservatives to tell the public that modern universities are giant "woke propaganda" factories. I was an adjunct in 2022 and 2023, and I must have missed the memo where I was told to instruct every student to get a sex change, but this didn't stop my idiotic grandmother from saying that "even computer science students get woke indoctrination".
But of course, this isn't a recent thing. I remember when I was younger, conservatives would spend a lot of time taking scientific studies out of context to talk about how we're wasting grant money [2].
The "treadmills for shrimp" is a good example: anyone who spent ten seconds actually doing research on this would see that the "treadmills" actually aren't stupid and they're measuring metabolism, and I am quite confident that the people who started spreading this propaganda knew this, so it's an active lie. I'm sure they think they're doing it for good reasons, but this isn't about "stupidity" at this point, it is an outright attack on research and science.
The fact that you can become a teacher in Florida without a degree just by being a veteran [1] comes as a result of an exodus of teachers because there has been an outright attack on education institutions. The reasons "why" have been debated but ultimately it is abundantly clear that the issue isn't just stupidity, but also the very act of education itself.
Very true, and just another example of the inspiration the Republicans draw from Russia and other tyrant states.
There's a horrifying story in WSJ today that I hope gets more traction, about how soldiers returning from duty on the Ukraine front are being recruited to teach in public schools. The subjects in question range from flagrantly-bogus Russian history to drone piloting to Kalashnikov and Dragunov rifle skills, and the kids in question are as young as eight. According to a quote from Putin in the article, "Wars aren't won by generals, they're won by schoolteachers." He's got a point there.
Still, even the best-intended education can only plant seeds. If the ground is barren, then the effort will be wasted at best and counterproductive at worst. We are slouching towards Moscow, Tehran, and Kabul.
The popularity of these drugs is specifically from the FDA-approved "weight loss" indication. You're at least a few years behind. I would also think the many many years when it was only prescribed for diabetes would have yielded some data about negative effects, (other than the ocular issue) if there were any. Glp-1s were so unprofitable, Novo Nordisk let their Canadian patent lapse almost a decade ago, rather than pay the upkeep fee lol. So I dont think anyone is protecting them from bad press.
there is a lot of disdain for vibe coding/coders, as Im sure you already know. I was going to post something similar as soon as I read a week and a half of prompts. I pray that any gainfully employed expert coders don't spend 10 days prompting, rather than coding lol
haha, triple simultaneous posts.... but that doom kill game isn't really the same as gamifying resource management. I would really want to see a gamified process monitor as well.
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