Looking for technical stuff about DHCP. Google was returning lots of junk and so, wary that ChatGPT is a bullshit fountain, I asked it anyway.
It gave me several concise and to the point answers addressing exactly what I asked.
They were all completely wrong. It just confidently spouted bullshit the same way a narcissist bluffing about a subject they know almost nothing about will.
However, the bullshit it gave me allowed me to frame some pertinent google searches to actually get the information I wanted.
So I guess that’s a usage model for it: to guide your google searches.
The issue is that Google will slowly fill up with the output of the bullshit fountains, at which point we won’t be able to check their answers anymore, because they’ll effectively be marking their own homework.
Utter joy abounds (not really).
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Sarah Brown
in reply to Sarah Brown • •This…
(Emphasis mine, which most of you won’t see because Mastodon has “Not Invented Here” syndrome on a huge scale)
…on the other hand, was written by a human, and “the modular nature of the C language” is an interesting way to say, “just write stuff onto the stack and then execute a jump instruction because that works with any old shit”.
Sarah Brown
in reply to Sarah Brown • •reshared this
Piers Beckley, 🏴 Lispegistus 🧠➕🖥️, Luke, bigjsl, Bojan Rajkovic and IBBoard reshared this.
Mirrors And Stuff
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •that's my day job. Except we write C in Java.
I... need to escape from this place.
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Luke
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •@Mirrors And Stuff That’s pretty much what we did at ARM, except it was transcribing VHDL and Verilog into C.
Some of the legacy code we worked with was BBC Basic from the early 80s that had been hand transcribed into C.
Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •newsorpigal
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Simon Lucy
in reply to newsorpigal • • •Then it should do a StackOverflow moderator persona "This is not a valid question or prompt for this service".
newsorpigal
in reply to Simon Lucy • • •@simon_lucy
And how would it know? These are language models, they generate plausable text based on what it has seen before. They have no sense of truth or accuracy.
Simon Lucy
in reply to newsorpigal • • •@newsorpigal
Because there is governance and one of its use cases is a better search, for instance try a prompt for scientific papers on a reasonably specific question with references.
In that use case it appears to be useful and the papers seem genuine (it's best not to try and get it to make value judgements or make the purpose too opinionated).
Claudius Link
in reply to newsorpigal • • •What's left then is a very fancy and expensive Lore ipsum generator
prasoon
Unknown parent • • •Or perhaps a good time to bring back trust networks like WebRings and curated URL directories?
(rainynight65) has moved
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •I just had a similar experience when asking about a class of locomotive (I am a bit of a train enthusiast).
On a general question, the answer was accurate except for one detail. On a more specific question, all the information it gave me *sounded* plausible but was completely incorrect.
What was 'interesting' was that upon being told the information was incorrect, it apologised for the error, and came back with a different, yet still incorrect answer.
Knud Jahnke
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •THIS is going to be the real fallout of #chatGPT and others: not students having their essays written by it, but the factually wrong and well-sounding garbage noise making it harder to find facts and actual sources.
Necessary consequence: learning to do better research and to better evaluate sources. Because this isn't new, regurgitating "I found this on Google" was never good research, but needs to be replaced by searching for the actual sources.
Simon Lucy
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •@mirrorsandstuff
Well that's Cambridge for you.
klausfiend
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •davidvedvick
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Gary McGraw
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Grant Gould
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Robrab
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview
www.redbooks.ibm.comJohn Pell
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Cyberspice
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •saua
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •🅺🅸🅼 🆂🅲🅷🆄🅻🆉:~$ ▓
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Morten
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Just to put it in perspective:
So we invented this fancy World Wide Web-thingie with the intention of making it easy to share information.
Instead, apparently, we’re ending up spending an awful lot of energy on a pile of garbage no one can use for anything 🤔
Very convenient, indeed 🤦♂️
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Stephen Cerruti
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •I think that maybe Google delivered too well to start with. It never promised to give the best answer (truest?) simply the most relevant for the question (most popular?)
Maybe we are seeing things hitting their 'eternal September' much more quickly?
After all, "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea. Massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
— Gene Spafford, 1992
Jiří Fiala Total Landscaping
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown likes this.