Which is exactly what the paper recommends! As long as you have something that isn’t an LLM in the pipeline to vet the output and you’re aware is the tech’s limitations, they can be useful tools. But some of those limitations might be a more solid barrier than some sales departments would like us to believe.

For those of you who didn’t read the paper, the argument they’re making is similar to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem: no matter how you build your LLM, there will be a significant number of prompts that make that LLM hallucinate. If the proof holds up then hallucinations aren’t a limitation of the training data or the structure of your particular model, they’re a limitation of the very concept of an LLM. That doesn’t make LLMs useless, but it does mean you shouldn’t ever use one as a source of truth.

Prior to the API fiasco, Reddit Inc had demonstrated a pattern of promising changes to the mods which they failed to deliver timely if at all. They’ve acknowledged this pattern, promised to do better, then failed to deliver time and again. That part isn’t new.

Then the API changes were announced and the Reddit community gave Reddit Inc the loudest and most decisive rebuke they ever have. That was the feedback conversation. And Reddit Inc went forward with their plan unchanged. No concessions were made. No concerns were addressed or alleviated. Reddit Inc was informed of what this decision would break and they went ahead and broke it anyway.

As a former mod, there is nothing left to discuss. There is no reason to believe Reddit Inc will act on anything that doesn’t agree with what they’ve already decided to do. I’m not going back to that kind of abusive relationship. They had their chance to listen to feedback and made it clear that they won’t.

@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social is the author of the SMBC webcomic and he posts funny stuff pretty frequently.

@davidrevoy@framapiaf.org does art with open source tools, including the open source Pepper and Carrot comic.

@SmudgeTheInsultCat@mas.to posts dumb memes constantly.

@Popehat@mastodon.social posts smartassed yet accurate commentary on current legal news.

Agreed. I find Bing chat is really good when I know almost nothing about what I’m searching, or when I know a whole lot about what I’m searching. Like in your example, if I know exactly what I need but can’t remember its name Bing will read all the spammy beginners’ guides for me and get the answer. And on the opposite end, if I’m looking to buy a gift in a hobby I don’t remotely understand Bing does a pretty good job of holding my hand through the search process.

Weirdly, medium knowledge questions seem to still do better as a basic Google search. If I need to fix an appliance I’ve fixed before, but it’s been a long time so I really need a full walkthrough, the first few results on Google are faster than waiting for Bing to talk through it.

This article’s evidence that the #TwitterMigration failed is that when he shut down his server, 25% of the servers he notified didn’t respond back. I’m not sure that means what the author seems to think it means. It’s not like every user has their own server. And when you let anybody build a server in a network you’re going to see a lot of failed launches. Honestly, with the explosive growth Mastodon had, retaining 75% of all those new servers is pretty impressive to me.

Mastodon did not immediately replace Twitter worldwide. That’s fine, growing that fast wouldn’t be sustainable. But it did get a ton of new users, a lot of visibility, and enough activity to provide content for anybody who signs up. Onboarding kinda sucks, but once you follow enough people and hashtags it absolutely scratches the same itch Twitter did for me. I’d hardly call that a failure just because it didn’t instantly become the next social media monolith.

Mastodon is very active after you start following enough people and hashtags to populate your feed. It’s a bit rough to get started though: no algorithm means no content (or very random content in the local/federated feeds) until you build it up for yourself. But once you hit critical mass, I’ve found it a much nicer experience than I ever got on Twitter.