Notices by Cassandra Granade (cgranade@mathstodon.xyz)

@annaleen @goosname @michaelgemar That is an amazing bit of humour.

On its own, that's fine! Plenty of useful things aren't useful in an epistemological sense. It does make it very weird to see LLMs used as a source of truth, though, even if a only as a secondary or tertiary one.

If I ask a search engine how old the earth is, and I get a link to Answers in Genesis saying "6,000 years," then I've learned a true and correct fact: namely, that AiG claims to believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

That's in essence the promise that search engines make when you ask factual questions, that they will deliver you relevant evidence to support "x claims to believe y." Thus, I always learn something from searching even if it's of limited utility.

If I ask an LLM how old the Earth is and get back 6,000 years, I've learned jack shit. In that hypothetical, it just spat back nonsense without providing me any information at all. That also means that I don't learn anything when an LLM is correct, either — there's no distinction I can use to separate those two cases, making LLMs useless to any sort of epistemology.

Expanding on my own thoughts a bit here, there used to be limited epistemological value to even search engines that returned disinfo and misinfo. In particular, they generally would still deliver reliable statements of the form "x claims to believe y," which has some value even if y is false.

LL.s give up even that limited epistemology by disconnecting factual claims from their sources.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@cgranade/110068299080244929

@hikari Cursed corollary: Nostalgia for authentic artifacts from the low-bitrate MP3s I listened to when I was in undergrad.

@zkat It honestly drives me nuts how, even in languages like C and C# that have unsigned types, no one bloody uses them. Like .NET is filled with things that are Int32 but should be UInt64 (even well after 32 → 64). I think it's partly the culture of Rust to be precise, not just the language?

Ugh, was wondering why Firefox kept showing intrusive af ads, even though it should be going through the local pi-hole. Turns out, an update made Firefox default to using DoH against Cloudflare's public servers.

First, screw Cloudflare, and screw Firefox for defaulting to using them.
Second, that's just a bad thing to silently turn on — I have my DNS set up the way I like it for a reason, and am not in love with Firefox just deciding it knows better.