• 0 Posts
  • 86 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 25th, 2023

help-circle





  • In any fight, circumstances are king. You need far, far more variables defined in order to be able to answer this question, and even then it won’t be a certain outcome. Who has the element of surprise? What’s the age, weight, and sex of the tiger (and the wolves)? How recently have the tiger/wolves eaten? Does anyone slip on a banana peel during the encounter?

    Maybe we’re going about this wrong. Are you trying to make sure the tiger is dead or are you trying to use as few wolves as possible?




  • It can do that for school level stuff because that material is present in it’s input dataset in a redundant manner. For anything niche or domain-specific, it will hallucinate or fail.

    I typically don’t have an issue getting a grasp on fundamentals, so most of the things I want to ask it about might be beyond school-level. My main way of learning is to ask questions to make sure I understand the material - which means more potential hallucination points, and maybe worse impact because I’ll think I get it, but I’ve just been confidently lied to that I understood.

    For example, I’ve wondered for a while if patches of space with less gravitational curvature “age” faster than patches that are more heavily distorted by gravity wells, and what the implications of that might be. Makes sense, we know that gravity slows down subjective time. But I can’t get a productive answer out of an LLM because I can’t trust it, and it’s not worth bothering my physicist friends about.


  • Ah-ha, now there’s an interesting use case. I’ve had occasion in the past to work on PCB design - to be clear I didn’t do the design myself, I have no idea wtf I’m doing there, but I’m capable of reading spec sheets and soldering - and when I had to sub in components, I managed to find what I needed by filtering down for specs on DigiKey using their search. I think an LLM could have saved me a bit of time there if I could’ve just fed it the BOM and asked for alternatives, and over the course of all the subs I had to do for the particular project I’m thinking of (it was during Chinese New Year so it was tough getting answers from suppliers) that would have added up.


  • “I only ask questions to LLMs if I already know the answer”

    Not a developer here. I’ve been thinking about this because I hoped LLMs would be able to help me learn things at first, like a patient tutor I can ask all my stupid questions and it’ll never get annoyed with me. Since it can’t do that though, because it lies all the time, I don’t think I have a use case for it at all… About all it can do for me is rewrite or summarise English, and it doesn’t even do a particularly good job of that most of the time so I end up saving time by doing that work myself anyway. I suppose it’s pretty good at translating, but I haven’t tried it for that as I don’t have a lot of call to speak foreign languages.



  • Sorry, no, water is not a mineral because it doesn’t have a characteristic crystalline structure, and if a dictionary says otherwise it’s wrong: https://geology.com/articles/water-mineral/

    However ice can be, if it forms naturally - the definition of mineral is:

    A naturally occurring, homogeneous inorganic solid substance having a definite chemical composition and characteristic crystalline structure, color, and hardness.

    And yes, this means that if you grow a crystal like a diamond for example in a lab, technically it’s not a mineral (it’s just sparkling rock).