Microsoft just had a push for CoPilot in Excel. Its own promotional material said that for the tasks it was most suited to it had a success rate of 56%. For other tasks the success rate was 20%.
Imagine relying on that for anything even halfway important.
They’re useful, but not anything like to the degree that’s being claimed. It’s being pushed as if it’s going to be able to do everything.
For one example, does generative AI have a use in coding? Absolutely. If you’re a coder who knows what they are doing, it can help you have ideas and it can do some of the tedious stuff. But you still need to know what you’re doing, use it as a tool, and absolutely do not use its code without checking it all. And that’s not how it’s being pushed. It’s being pushed as if you can just type in “pretend it’s 1999 and code me a Doom sequel” and you’ll get a full, working programme out.
Even getting it to do things in chunks seems to be a trial. There’s a video I watched a day or two ago (if you’re interested, I’ll look for a link when I’ve got more time) where a guy tried to get ChatGPT to code for him. He had a specific end goal in mind and asked it to do things step by step. While there were several occasions that he was impressed by what it produced, he kept getting stuck because it would seemingly only fix problems in one area of the code by eliminating another area entirely. He found that most of his time was spent going round in circles trying to ensure that it actually did what he was asking of it. It hallucinated, too, and at one point he had to solve the problem for it by referring to a specific repository, which he said he himself only knew about because he’s got more than a decade’s experience.
That’s the biggest issue - what LLMs are capable of is far, far below what they’re sold as.
Always check the veracity of any online quote
There’s no way Microsoft support hand-writes each email. This would be a form letter, written by corporate, which they then insert relevant details in to.
Oh come on! I’m sure that all genuine Microsoft support emails start with “Greetings [customer name]”…
When I was in school a teacher told us that washing powder manufacturers would have a way of getting around “advertising needs to be true and accurate” laws. What they’d do is gradually reduce the strength of their product over time (normally by just cutting it with something cheap). Then they’d revert it back to its original strength so that they could announce “Now TWICE as strong!”
Several years back when it seemed like there was a rash of news stories about cops killing black people and white people trying to get them swatted and the like, I think it was Will Smith who said “racism isn’t increasing, racism is being filmed”
If you’ve got some spices, as suggested above, you can basically make your own. Add a tin of tomatoes, some tomato puree, and maybe have a slightly wider selection of spices (sumac, mace, cardamom, cloves, for example) and you can have a wide variety of curry flavours without having to spend the extra on pre-made sauces.
There’s a strong case to be made the Rise Of Skywalker was the shit-show it was because Carrie Fisher died. The idea for the trilogy (as little of a plan as there actually was) was for the first film to centre Han, the second to centre Luke, and the third to centre Leia.
Then Fisher died and they had to rework the entire film without any change to the release schedule. And they reanimated her corpse in the most unconvincing and disrespectful way.
I’m not saying the film would have been good - because it probably wouldn’t have been - but I don’t think it would have been the silly, incoherent mess that it actually was. And it’d have been nice for Fisher to be able to give Leia a proper send-off, especially as the character was what catapulted her into stardom in the first place.
It is mutually-assured destruction. The idea is that there are enough nukes to end all life on earth. Because if there are that many nukes, then nobody would ever use them.
That’s how the US and USSR came up with these figures when they were disarming at the end of the Cold War.
To be clear, this isn’t happening because now the royal family knows. It’s because it’s too public for them to pretend they don’t know.