This one surprised me, too.

I had a nasty habit of waiting until the evening to do my papers in college, because that was when it was acceptable to have some wine or whiskey while I wrote. But it was amazing just how much easier it was to stay on task after having a drink, and during finals - or after college when i was on deadline - i would alternate between liters of coffee in the morning and several drinks in the evening.

Now that I'm medicated both coffee and alcohol are just occasional indulgences... well, alcohol is at least. But I didn't expect it to help curb my impulsive consumption habits like it has- it's been a game-changer.

The stuff I’ve seen AI produce has sometimes been more wrong than anything a human could produce. And even if a human would produce it and post it on a forum, anyone with half a brain could respond with a correction.

Seems like the problem is that you're trying to use it for something it isn't good or consistent at. It's not a dictionary or encyclopedia, it's a language model that happens to have some information embedded. It's not built or designed to retrieve information from a knowledge bank, it's just there to deconstruct and reconstruct language.

When someone on a forum says they asked GPT and paste its response, I will at the very least point out the general unreliability of LLMs, if not criticise the response itself (very easy if I’m somewhat knowledgeable about the field in question)

Same deal. Absolutely chastise them for using it in that way, because it's not what it's good for. But it's a bit of a frequency bias to assume most people are using it in that way, because those people are the ones using it in the context of social media. Those who use it for more routine tasks aren't taking responses straight from the model and posting it on lemmy, they're using it for mundane things that aren't being shared.

Anyway my point was merely that people do regularly misuse LLMs, and it’s not at all difficult to make them produce crap. The stuff about who should be blamed for the whole situation is probably not something we disagree about too much.

People misuse it because they think they can ask it questions as if it's a person with real knowledge, or they are using it precisely for it's convincing bullshit abilities. That's why I said it's like laughing at a child for giving a wrong answer or convincing them of a falsehood merely from passive suggestion - the problem isn't that the kid is dumb, it's that you're (both yourself and the person using it) going in with the expectation that they are able to answer that question or distinguish fact from fiction at all.

I imagine both Libre and Free are open-sourced and easily modifiable? I haven't looked into it, but if it's anything like Rhino there should be a standard way of writing custom plugins that should close the gap on some of those - at least the object naming would be easy.

I'll look into them though, thanks! BIM software is such a pain in the ass to work with and one of the most expensive design software I know of, I think open sourced projects would be amazing for BIM if they took off like FreeCAD did

I work as an architectural designer but I've never really been allowed to use anything other than Revit for BIM workflows. Our consultants basically only use Revit or Autodesk products, so our hands are kind of tied for projects where we need to collaborate.

My boss uses Vectorworks for our small projects that don't need BIM, I might suggest we switch to Libre or FreeCAD so that we all have access without needed another VW license. Do you enjoy using LibreCAD?

Tips were first used as a way for rail lines to avoid having to pay black coach attendants a wage.

It isn't surprising that service workers don't want to abolish tips, since that's primarily how they get paid now - but that doesn't mean we shouldn't abolish them. The owners should have to pay their workers a living wage. By making that the consumer's responsibility, it frees the business owner from the responsibility of paying their workers for their labor.

Tip wages are exploitative, plain and simple.

Person A: Expresses a liberal perspective "Watch as this person calls me a Lib" Person B: "..... yes, that is common liberal perspective" Person A: "Called it"

The more we electrify our cars, the less feasible this is.

Decoding and sending messages to mechanical systems over the CANBUS is one thing (still difficult, but possible), but taking control over system software is another. In the us, consumers are supposed to have the right to repair their personal vehicles, but a lot of that law was established back when you could do work on a vehicle without having access to digitally protected copyright. We might have a right to repair, but that's starting to clash against their copyrights over their IP and software controls.

And that's not even getting into their eagerness to utilize subscription models - would a court side with a consumer if they decided they wanted to circumvent DRM controls over subscription-controlled car features (a car that they own outright)? It's unclear to me that right to repair or consumer protections have been written in a way to accommodate those conflicts.... Especially when cars are subject to far higher safety regulations than computers - a manufacturer could argue that they need to prevent consumers from tampering with their software systems for their own safety.

If you still own a 'dumb' car without one of these systems, it's really not a bad idea to hold onto them for as long as possible. You can always upgrade them if you want to - some people have even replaced ICE transmissions with electric ones. But once you own one of these cars with software-controlled systems, it's far harder to strip them out. Especially once they start requiring cellular connection to operate or function (or require connections to privately-owned satellite constellations.....)

Words cannot express how much I hate phone apps being normalized for every goddamn thing.

I'll personally donate $100 to the DNC (i'm poor leave me alone) if Hilary goes to every campaign stop chanting 'lock him up'

Fair point, Margot Robbie

A point of caution:

A large company absolutely could come in and absorb the majority of lemmy traffic and build proprietary code and features on top of the main protocol, eventually making the open source protocol obsolete and supplanting it as a paid/closed-source service. It has been done repeatedly by tech companies, and it is the main reason many people distrust Meta's interest in joining the fediverse.

For all the reasons you just mentioned, we should fight tooth and nail against that from happening, but we should at least be aware of the threat.