exchemist

Hard to discern the motive, through all the lashings of corporate management-speak here. Do I gather, from the way they say this is not a "procurement" exercise, that the service is to be provided by the Met Office free of charge?

But is this weakness confined to maths and physics? Surely the issue is that while LLMs are very clever at learning how to mimic language, they can't reason and can't understand in any useful sense the content they present to the user? This would be true of other areas of knowledge. We had an example yesterday of an LLM (Gemini) coming up with a theory for @Prajna as to why Google's search engine seems to have got slower and returned fewer results, but then @Sensei blew this theory out of the water as it was apparently based on a misconception that the user had fed in and which Gemini had not challenged - all the while telling the user how clever he was.

No it's because people and institutions hold a lot of gold already, while total holdings of crapto are tiny by comparison. Don't confuse rate of growth with amount. The greater the amount, the more it takes to grow it at a rapid rate, obviously. Buying gold is not illegal anywhere, so far as I know.

Yes more of a challenge before refrigerators. The upper and middle classes relied on cooks, of course. And I think, from reading Dickens, that lower classes indeed bought pies and things a lot of the time. I should think you would need quite a big kitchen to cook on an open fire.

Yeah, like your sycophantic bearded Cornish mate down the pub, who’s famous for talking out of his arse. 😁

Of course not. It's obviously ballocks from the ridiculous claims you are making. And you don't even explain who has - supposedly - produced this "research collection". P.S. Is "BastiSchmidt" something developed from "Batshit", by any chance? 😁

We? Is this the chatbot talking now, or you? I note the response to @geordief starts, "These are excellent questions".....

It’s not cynicism (apart perhaps from my suspicion about the motives of these AI corporations). It’s just my observation of what AI output is like on these forums, plus what I read. The output is verbose and uses terms that seek to impress, like a bad undergraduate essay. The style is ingratiating, usually starting by saying something to make user think he is brilliant. And the content seems to be, as often as not, wrong in some respect. People will end up emotionally invested in the trust they put in a fundamentally unreliable source of information. People like my son are already aware of the pitfalls of the addictive nature of many social media channels. He has deleted a number, like Facebook and Snapchat as he was wasting time on them. My own experience at work even with email is that the immediacy of response attracts one’s attention, distorts one’s priorities and damages one’s attention span. AI chatbots are clever at simulating human conversation. But it is synthetic: there is no mind behind it. So that makes them even more dangerous than social media.

This is case is interesting as it illustrates fairly fully the risks. It looks as if we see in Gemini's replies to @Prajna a series of plausible-sounding theories, but without it being able to point out the issue that @Sensei has identified , viz. that a changed address on Google doesn't necessarily mean what was suggested. In other words Gemini has connived with @Prajna in barking up the wrong tree! Furthermore we see in @Prajna 's attitude to Gemini a worrying level of interaction, as if he thinks he's dealing with a person, who he refers to as "Gem" and with whom he thinks he is having some sort of relationship - and whom he has thereby come to trust. This is pretty dreadful. These chatbots are clearly quite psychologically addictive, just as social media are (by design), and yet they they are also purveyors of wrong information. What could possibly go wrong, eh?

Yes I thought it was a rather atmospheric photograph. The guy is clearly dirt-poor, dressed in ragged clothes, but he has a mean haircut and displays a certain coolness and independent resilience, in spite of his impoverished circumstances. I didn't take it, mind you. I found it in a skip when they closed the library at Shell Centre. I also picked up some books on diesel engines and marine propulsion, written between the wars. They had beautifully drawn diagrams in them, as technical books of that era often did. Amusingly, in one them the diesel engine was scrupulous referred to throughout as either the "oil engine" or the "Ackroyd-Stuart engine". It seems the writer, after the First World War, could not bring himself to acknowledge the engin e was invented by a German! (Side Note: Ackroyd-Stuart did invent an oil engine before Rudolf Diesel, but his was a "hot bulb" engine, in which a separate heated chamber was needed to pre-heat the fuel to make it burn before admission to the cylinder. It ran at far lower compression ratios than the diesel engine, in which compression alone generates a sufficiently high temperature for the fuel charge to burn. The diesel engine is far more efficient, although hot bulb, or Ackroyd-Stuart, engines were produced until the 1920s.) Speaking of stuff that the company threw out or donated, there used to be a gallery of the secondary uses people around the world made of Shell oil containers: drums, 5litre cans etc. A lot of water butts in East Africa were Shell drums at one time. Nowadays, such a gallery would be seen as pollution or the evil influence of a multinational [boo, hiss] but those were simpler times. There was also a magnificent collection of butterflies from around the world that someone had accumulated and donated to the company in the 1960s, and a display of all the seashells whose names were given to the ships in the Shell Tanker fleet - and also to the brands of lubricating oil, almost all of which to this day are named after shells: Spirax, Turbo etc. One of the odd things about ageing is to find the company one worked for, for so many years, transformed in public perception from something one could be rather proud of (keeping all the many different kinds of machines that society relies on running smoothly) into a diabolical, evil monster. I suppose it was ever thus.

What ballocks.

No the black-coloured states are the ones where Americans are fattest. 😁 But, more seriously, there does seem to be some clustering around the Mississippi and its tributaries. I know nothing about US demographics but could this correlate with poor, black ex-slave communities?

Does this mean that Gemini was talking crap to @Prajna then, about the possible reasons?

It is not only irrational but a transcendental number, like e. And there is a famous and mysterious connection between the two of them known as Euler's identity: This is connected with the polar form of complex numbers, i.e. r(Cos𝜽 +iSin𝜽).

But coal mining was in truth an awful job, much though it is glamorised in hindsight now, Hovis ad style. Not to mention the terrible effect of coal burning on the climate. It's a good thing the pits are closed. Shell Haven refinery, where working conditions were pretty good, lasted quite a while. (In the early 80s it boasted the first women refinery technologists in the company. I was lucky enough to go out with the prettiest of them for a while - memories.) Not many people will be aware that the refinery, though owned by Shell, was actually named after a location on the Thames called Shell Haven, an inlet in which there were a lot of shells. Nothing to do with the company name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Haven Anyway now it's a container port - and no longer called Shell Haven. But refineries are obviously going to die out and that too is no bad thing. The world moves on. No I have enough souvenirs already, including one of a N African guy sitting on a bench in some village, strumming a home-made guitar constructed out of a 5 litre can of Shell Rimula (an old brand of diesel engine oil) and a neck of wood. Sometimes I used to feel like that guy.

Yes, I remember flying over the refinery site on a trip back from Amsterdam and looking down to see...grass.... I think probably my most enduring contribution actually was the quality assurance manuals I arranged and largely wrote, based on my experience as a QA auditor, for lubricants production and distribution. That back-breaking work was so unglamorous that nobody was keen to do it again, once they were there! But I console myself they were important, even if not the sort of thing that launches brilliant careers.

Well amen to that!

I simply don't trust chatbots.

I am not reading this. And the way you speak about these chatbots, even though I realise it is partly in jest, disturbs me.

Well, yes a long journey. I visited 47 countries in the course of my work, lived in the UAE (Dubai), Houston (USA) and The Hague (Netherlands), met several girlfriends at work - and eventually my (late) wife at the company rowing club. As for "great work", well one thing one has to be resigned to as one gets older is seeing what one has done get overtaken by later events. For instance the then state of the art, robot-operated oil plant I where I was once production manager and chief chemist got knocked down, leaving the site covered with just grass. Now it is part of a container terminal! Sic transit gloria mundi, as the popes used to be reminded, during their coronation ceremony.

No I just applied them, working in the lubricants industry for Shell for over 30 years. I'm coming up to 71 now and long retired. Though come to think of it I suppose I did resurrect and extend a model for the condition of the oil in large marine and power diesel engines, as a function of top-up rate and oil consumption.

There is this is today's Indie: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-psychosis-nhs-doctors-ai-b2797174.html This indicates there is concern that chatbots can fuel psychosis in people with a shaky mental state, due to their propensity to reinforce what the user suggests to them. Link to the paper here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cmy7n_v5 I'm not sure how much of a surprise this is, but anyway it is one more thing that needs to be thought about before we all rush headlong to make them available for everything and everyone. I think I detect a distinct dotcom bubble feeling about AI. Hyped like crazy, but not nearly as good as they say, with numerous hidden snags and side effects. There could be a reaction, in a year or two.

Why have you posted a video on how to copy and paste on Android? Nobody here asked for that or needed it. Only you, so you said. So why tell us? Are you confused as to who is you and who is us?

Well that’s the thing. In my experience, mostly in Hamburg it’s true, Germans speak softly and with deliberation, are not afraid of silences, and when they say something they have generally thought it through. I put it down to constructing sentences with the verb at the end.

Ha, silly mistakes is what my son struggled with in maths, too. He seemed to panic a bit when faced with an unfamiliar problem and rush at it. I used to tell him to pretend to be German, stay calm, take his time and not panic. It helped a bit. It was lack of confidence I think. Anyway, you are not alone and it can be fixed.