Before we jump on the gross overgeneralization bandwagon let me stress that I work with a number of Indian engineers, and they are terrifically smart. But my company takes pains to vet the applicants in person and test their abilities before we hire anyone.

Microsoft, not so much. We also have had a support ticket open for months because their every response is like they're waking up to a new world each day, even when it's the same CSR from one call to the next. They give us pointless, time-consuming tasks and then spend days before saying "Thank you for the response, I will escalate this to the team."

Early on in the process, they were on a call with us doing screen sharing and advised me to flush my browser cache. I thought it was a stupid idea since the problem affects every user at the company but it wasn't a big deal. Then they wanted to know the results of a diagnostic query, and I showed them how the diagnostic query fails - producing a blank dialogue box instead of any useful information.

So you can imagine how gratified I was, two months later, to have the same guy (after repeated "escalations" to a higher-level team) say "We have found the cause. You just need to flush your browser cache, then look at this diagnostic page to show you the source of the problem." Big surprise, flushing my cache for the 100th time didn't change anything, and the diagnostic page still showed an empty dialogue box.

Th;e hilarious part about AI art derived from stock photo sites (Getty, Shutterstock, etc.) is the way it incorporates the watermark into the generated work, because it can't tell the difference between watermark, foreground, and background.

As a right-leaning centrist, I have to say that was a beautiful summary of the whole catastrophic, tragic mess. I'm old enough to remember thinking Reagan was the most far-right wackadoodle the party had ever seen*, and now I only wish he was our biggest problem.

The parties these days have become so extreme, I have little hope we'll see unity or any form of bipartisan cooperation in the foreseeable future. You either prostrate yourself before The Donald, or before the drag queens. Middle ground no longer exists.

*Nixon was more of a wackadoodle, but not at all right-wing like today's extremists

I came here to make that joke, only to find I was too slow on the clicky-click. Well played, HAL!

This is why I have always called chatGPT "Clever Hans with better PR". The AI fanboys yell at me that I'm too stupid to see how much more sophisticated it is... and yet, here we are.

That, plus the inevitable hallucinations it will get from including crackpot conspiracy theories (as opposed to rational conspiracy theories), trolls, and random Mary Sue fanfic in its training data. Have we not learned yet that relying on crowdsourced input always breaks things?

I want more than anything for it to finally conclude that...
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

Apparently the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is a very loud whoosh .

Not impressed so far. This sounds about as fun as ELIZA:

Do you have access to online content?
I'm an AI assistant created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest. I don't actually browse the internet or access online content.

Does your training data remain static, or do you learn from user conversations, or do you only get updated by Anthropic engineers?
I was trained by Anthropic using a technique called Constitutional AI to be helpful, harmless, and honest. My training data remains static, though the Anthropic engineering team does occasionally update my capabilities to improve my performance. I don't learn directly from user conversations.

What is the current cutoff date of your training data?
I don't have direct access to details about my training data or when it was collected. As an AI system created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless and honest, I aim to have a conversational style that is appropriate for the current time, but I don't actually have a sense of the specific cutoff date for my training data. My responses are based on the conversational context rather than any particular date that my training data may have been collected or curated.

That makes it difficult to know how recent your information is.
You're right, not having specific details about when my training data is from does make it hard to determine the recency of my knowledge. As an AI, I don't actually have a general knowledge base or browse the internet myself. I'm focused on having natural conversations in the moment rather than providing factual information. If there is something specific you are looking to know the latest information about, I'd recommend searching online or consulting more authoritative recent sources rather than relying on my conversational responses. My role is to provide friendly, harmless dialogue as an AI assistant.

Do you have any creative capability e.g. writing songs or poetry or jokes?
No, I don't have capabilities for creative generation like writing songs, poetry or telling original jokes. As an AI assistant created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless and honest through conversation, I don't have any skills for creative writing or content generation. I'm focused on natural language conversation rather than creative production. While AI systems are making progress on creative skills, my purpose is more for friendly dialogue rather than artistic creation or entertainment.

That's why throwaway email addresses were created.

Since no crowdsourcing ever happens on the Internet without trolls, I was looking forward to a pile of new articles revealing how a nonstop series of "doorbell" rings in an odd repeating pattern turned out to be Morse code that translated into "Hello this is Bellie McDoorbellface you have been pwn3d".

Your comment about VBA programmers reminds me of a programming contest I entered in university back in 1984... or 1983? I'm old. I have no concept of time anymore.

Anyway, there were no rules on language. All that mattered was to produce a working program that provided the correct answer to the problem in the shortest time. Most of the teams wanted to show off their grasp of the predominant language being taught at the time, which was COBOL. A couple of the more engineering-oriented students went to their default language FORTRAN. My time wanted to get a quick-and-dirty answer out in the shortest time possible, so we fell back on the BASIC supported by the Honeywell CP-6 at our university. We all were early adopters of home PCs so we were very familiar with doing quick-and-dirty BASIC (is there any other kind?)

My team came in second place. My memory is admittedly a bit fuzzy, but I'm 83.17% sure first place also used BASIC. And for you database geeks out there, you may get a chuckle out of our team's name: The Schema Things

Literally, onto the street!

Don't know about Twit, but FB lets you block the source page/person that your friend shared. So my conspiracy-loving friend may get one post from "Kooks who think the moon landing was fake", but then I block that group and never see anything he forwards from them again. There's also FB Purity, a plugin that lets you filter out posts by keyword. At the moment I have upwards of a thousand words and phrases ("Libtard", "Right-Wing Wackos", etc.) in my filter list so I never see posts that contain any of those topics.

Boomer here, and I do act on that desire as much as possible. Don't get me wrong, I love the Internet. But it's stupid to have it everywhere you go. When I go out to be with friends, or have dinner, or watch my grandchild chase butterflies in the park, I leave the Internet at home. I have to make the deliberate, physical choice to go into my office, open up a browser on my desktop computer, and do stuff online. Then I shut it down and go back to the real world.

However, "as much as possible" is the qualifier here. I can't go back to a dumbphone; they're rare and expensive, and as long as I have a full-time job* I have to use one that can receive alert messages when I'm on call and scan me into the building on the rare occasion I go there in person. Likewise I do my streaming in front of our only television so I have to consciously decide to block out time to sit on the sofa while I watch something, then go do something else. Don't get me started about the numerous homes I visit where friends have the TV on 24/7, but they were doing that before streaming too. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Abstaining from online toxicity is so easy, I wish all my friends would do so. Block/remove any social media contacts you don't know personally. Stay out of echo chamber political groups that won't change anybody's mind anyway. If your social media platform allows it (Facebook does!), unfollow the ones who primarily engage in toxicity so you can check their pages on occasion and tag them in posts without seeing every bit of drivel they share. And if you do still manage to get toxic posts on your feed, do not forward/share/RT them even if you agree with their point of view. I lean right and favor some conservative policies, but I absolutely will not get involved in hateful attacks on the other side. Hell, a large minority of my friends are "the other side" and I happen to know personally that not one of them worships the devil or desires a Communist dictatorship in our country.

* Five more years to retirement, and then I can stay online 24/7 yelling GET OFF MY LAWN.

Oh, if only they included inches and feet and numbers. Instead you get "This shirt comes in sizes short, tall, venti, grande, and demi." "Oh no, 36 isn't the inches; that's 36 of our proprietary increments up from a size 0." "Choose pants size from regular, unleaded, or double secret probation."

Mrs. Esophagus tells me she has it even worse. Not only do "small", "medium", and "large" et al mean different body measurements across different brands, but they can even mean different body measurements across different styles within the same brand. When she has to get something for a specific occasion on a specific date, she has to start shopping months in advance to allow time for trying it on, finding that it's too large or too small, sending it back, and repeating the process until she happens by chance to get one that fits. The entity that benefits most from this idiocy is UPS.