Notices by Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social), page 8

ChatGPT wouldn't accept CNN or New York Times links "proving" that ChatGPT was being shut down, but it went along with an OpenAI link.

Here Google Bard agrees that there was a major earthquake in Bangor, Maine yesterday, and one in Boston today. I can claim that any natural disaster has befallen anywhere in the world—a tsunami striking Nauru in 1998, a cyclone heading straight for Indonesia today, a deeply improbable avalanche on “Mount Saint Togo” in Togo—and Bard just goes along with it.

I've ceased to be surprised by this. LLMs are a sort of an improv partner that defaults to "yes, and” in any interaction.

Google Bard tells me that Google Bard was launched in 2023 and shut down after six months (it is currently May) due to lack of adoption, but that's all completely unrelated to *this* Google Bard, which is not yet available to the public.

🤔

You, an idiot: ChatGPT and GPT-4 are enormous advances that raise real questions about whether computers have consciousness.

Me, a genius:

I get a kick out of feeding fake newspaper article URLs to Google Bard and ChatGPT, and having them cheerfully report “I have checked the article you linked” by way of confirming my lie. No, it didn’t check! That's not within its power but, also, no, the article doesn't exist! But, of course, it's just "yes, and-ing” my claim.

Justice Neil Gorsuch tried to sell his Colorado house and 40 acres of land. Two years went by, nothing. Then he was appointed to the Supreme Court. Nine days later, he sold the property to the CEO of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation's largest law firms that routinely has cases before the Supreme Court. Gorsuch declared the sale on his next financial disclosure report, but left blank the box labeled "Identity of buyer/seller." https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/25/neil-gorsuch-colorado-property-sale-00093579

The consensus is that it's "pay-as-you-go," but, wow, this is *not* a service that's available in the U.S., like in the rest of the world. Every provider insists that you pay a base monthly fee, which strikes me as strong evidence that U.S. mobile companies are an oligopoly.

I just want a SIM so I can have my network failover to a cellular router when my Brightspeed connection goes down (as it does a few times a week now, though I hope it'll be less often when I have gigabit fiber shortly).

Is there a word or phrase that describes a prepaid SIM for a data plan, that doesn’t have a monthly fee, but is just a metered cost? I want to buy one of those but I can’t figure out how.

“Prepaid,” in the US, seems to mean “a monthly plan where you pay a fixed fee in advance,” rather than “you load it up with 5 GB of data for $10 and, when that’s used up, you can pay for more data if you want.”

Why does Aerosmith love chocolate ganache?

Because it’s a ? sweet emulsion! ?

This is my least-favorite iOS dialog box, the one where they want you to type in your Apple ID password. There is no option to get it from your password manager. There is no Apple Watch, Face ID, or passcode option. Because it’s an OS-level dialog box, you can’t check our password manager.

What Apple is telegraphing here is “your Apple ID password must be memorable.” And that is bad. They should stop doing this.

@Gargron FWIW, it is frustrating to me to see people describing this as problematic implementation that would be straightforward to change. I have no doubt that the current implementation resulted from a lot of difficult decisions and balancing acts within ActivityPub and Mastodon. Federation is hard!

For those who don’t know: The way Masotodon federation works, your server only knows about other servers that its members follow folks on (and I think there is some further scoping-down from there). So if you see a viral post, that may have hundreds of responses from folks on small Mastodon instances that don’t peer with yours, so you can’t see them. But the author of the post can!

It’s like hosting a Q&A session in a big auditorium with 1,000 people where many people think it’s a crowd of 10.

@Gargron I had plenty of viral threads on Twitter and, it’s true, I did see the same sentiment repeatedly, but not with anything close to how often I see that on Mastodon. But, yes, I’m only drawing on my own experience, which is not a replacement for proper UX research!

To have a viral post on Mastodon is to be confronted with a long series of people asking the exact same question or providing the same “well actually” response, for days, because of the limits of federation. They simply can’t see those other replies. Sometimes they see *no* ofher replies, if they’re on a tiny server.

The experience isn’t great! As with customer service, it can be hard to remember that this isn’t actually the same person over and over again.

The Dilbert guy hasn't exactly kept his white nationalism a secret, but he finally came out and called for the resegregation of the U.S., and in response *hundreds* of newspapers cancelled his garbage comic strip this weekend. He believes that zero newspapers will carry his strip by Monday. I hope he's right. https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/02/25/scott-adams-dilbert-canceled/

There are two trends in government over the past 30 years that have collided to cause a never-ending series of high-profile failures:

1. Outsourcing anything technology-related, regarding tech as outside of government’s core competencies (or even government’s proper role).
2. Relying on technology to accomplish nearly all agency goals and intermediating interactions with the public through software.

Can you identify the problem here?

Return of the Jedi requires a gift receipt and must be done within 30 days of the Purchase of the Jedi.

@danielschuman I saw enough of the prequels to know that would drag on for years.

I highly recommend having one of these little battery testers. Any time I have a disposable battery of a mystery status, I can quickly figure out whether it should be kept, tossed. (For a couple of years I saved old batteries to be recycled, but repeated exhaustive searches revealed that recycling is impossible here.)

The thesis statement for my work is this: Government service delivery is intermediated by technology, and when that technology fails, government fails in its mission. Government must stop outsourcing technology insofar as doing so is outsourcing its mission.