A while back I wrote a couple of blog posts about how I think LLMs will be a net negative (at least in the near term), due to the extreme overhyping giving people unrealistic expectations of their ability. The direct result will be an overall degrade in internet usability as people begin flooding platforms with low quality spam that they erroneously believe to be high quality. Previously it was fairly easy to spot someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, but now LLMs enable them to word things convincingly enough to waste the time of even domain experts.
Even now I'm still often surprised by all the creative ways that people are finding to waste other's time. I just saw this post from one of the curl maintainers reporting that they've been receiving nonsense bug bounty reports based on LLM hallucinations, which I imagine is likely due to people trying to automate bug hunting despite lacking the understanding to confirm their finding. They reported that in one case the submission was convincing enough that they went over the code 3 times before coming to the conclusion that no bug existed and the report was likely AI generate.
@malwaretech I moderate in a couple of forums and we're already receiving quite a number of LLM generated comments that manage to be... nearly... but not quite on topic.
New member comments are moderated, so these posts are likely made to get the account over the posting threshold so they can unleash proper spam.
It's a nightmare cos you have to carefully read through each one & they're often long. Give me old school Viagra comments! At least you knew instantly what you were dealing with.
@RickiTarr my word is hyperbole, which isn't something I ever heard in conversation (though I had heard hyperbolic which was pronounced how I thought).
It came to my attention in a comment thread much like this one, where someone mentioned hyperbole and I thought, wait, how else would you pronounce it except hyper- bowl? Wrong! 🤭
Had the idea of making a portolan chart for the #30DayMapChallenge Day 7 Navigation.
It turned out... kinda OK... but it was a bit of a last minute scramble and it shows. I want to have another go at properly making one of these at some point down the line. They're such fun maps.
Made in #inkscape with a parchment paper for texture.
@SJohnRoss Thanks! The fonts used are Antiquarian and Antiquarian Scribe (the Scribe one is the italic in the title area). They're not free fonts, though. I got them here... https://www.oldfonts.com/
Apropos of nothing whatsoever, the word “grok” has always grated on my nerves for no reason I can adequately articulate. Same with “tricksy”, while I’m at it. Just nails on a chalkboard.
So, what word do you wish some author had never forced into existence?
#30DayMapChallenge, Day 3: Polygons. River Basins of the Iberian Peninsula. No neon this time; feels good to be back in daylight. Faster rendering times too.
Edit: I made a mistake with the data source, it's HydroSHEDS, not OSM.
Just checked Twitter (because reasons) and was prompted to post a 12th anniversary tweet: So I did, as follows (the first line was wet-farted automatically by Dilbert Stark's site):
@Edent We have one of those bank tokens (as they call them) to authorise payments at work and, yup, every previous code I've entered shows in the box on the bank's website 🤷♀️
I am aware some of you can't access the site due to it being added to DNS blocklists last night.
I don't fully understand how/why it's happened, but this is the situation AIUI:
A malware peddler hot-linked to an image (a 'Chrome Update' thumbnail) on our CDN. Thus, our CDN (the site is hosted by Pressable, so theirs technically) has been added to blocklists.
The site is now inaccessible to many.
Form what I can see there's no way of "undoing" the damage they've done.