Mozilla! Stop doing stupid stuff!

Well, now you know otherwise. I use it daily.

There are dozens of us!

Nah, it’s completely different from bookmarks. But obviously there’s no sense trying to sell anyone on it anymore.

I think there are definitely a lot of compounding issues that all combine to make admitting you’re wrong something that’s really hard to do. Some of them related to brain chemistry, some of them entirely societal, like you mentioned. But I do think that it’s on the person who was wrong to be the one who does the growing; it shouldn’t be society that has to pick up the slack for an arrogant and incorrect person.

Oh yeah. Happens to me not infrequently, though less as I get older and choose my battles more wisely.

On my best days, I apologize and bow out of the discussion. On my worst days, I just ghost the entire thread.

Honestly a lot of the issues result from null results only existing in the gaps between information (unanswered questions, questions closed as unanswerable, searches that return no results, etc), and thus being nonexistent in training data. Models are therefore predisposed toward giving an answer of any kind, and if one doesn’t exist it’ll “make one up.”

Which is itself a misnomer, because it can’t look for an answer and then decide to make one up when it can’t find it. It just gives an answer that sounds plausible, and if the correct answer is most likely in its training data then that’ll seem most plausible.

“Unintentionally” is the wrong word, because it attributes the intent to the model rather than the people who designed it.

You misunderstand me. I don’t mean that the model has any intent at all. Model designers have no intent to misinform: they designed a machine that produces answers.

True answers or false answers, a neural network is designed to produce an output. Because a null result (“there is no answer to that question”) is very, very rare online, the training data doesn’t include it; meaning that a GPT will almost invariably produce any answer; if a true answer does not exist in its training data, it will simply make one up.

But the designers didn’t intend for it to reproduce misinformation. They intended it to give answers. If a model is trained with the intent to misinform, it will be very, very good at it indeed; because the only training data it will need is literally everything except the correct answer.

Sure, but unintentionally. I heard about a guy whose small business (which is just him) recently had someone call in, furious because ChatGPT told them that he was having a sale that she couldn’t find. The customer didn’t believe him when he said that the promotion didn’t exist. Once someone decides to leverage that, and make a sufficiently-popular AI model start giving bad information on purpose, things will escalate.

Even now, I think Elon could put a small company out of business if he wanted to, just by making Grok claim that its owner was a pedophile or something.

I’m sure there were some forum software packages that offered voting and ranking and such. All of the ones that I was a part of were quiet enough that you didn’t need such a thing, though; you could keep up with every post, even if only to decide that you weren’t interested in it, if you read it every third day or so.

Yeah, which was its own level of toxic, but maybe doesn’t have the super gross power imbalance?

You can train your kids at McDonalds.

Respectfully, no. That’s an entirely different scenario with entirely different norms, patterns, expectations, etc. A sit-down, table-service restaurant in a “boring” location with slow food is an entirely different experience than counter service at a fast food restaurant. You start with that, of course, but that’s definitely not where it can end.

Not to mention, there are no casual fast food places that serve vegetables. If you care about offering your kids any kind of healthy food, you have to go somewhere at least slightly more upmarket.

if alcohol is served, children shouldn’t be.

That excludes pretty much every restaurant that isn’t fast food. In some countries, that excludes even McDonald’s. It definitely excludes Applebee’s. It excludes Chuck E. Cheese, for crying out loud.

Maybe in the 90s that would’ve been a reasonable limitation, but that is far from the case today.

Sure that may limit what you can do as a parent.

Nah, I’m not worried about that even a little bit. I chose to be a parent, which means that I chose to accept certain limitations on my life while they’re still young. I don’t have any issue with that as a principle. Yes, parents are still human and should be able to exist independently of their children, and yes, some people didn’t choose to be parents (but had that choice made for them), but I don’t think that either situation is a large enough situation to be worth discussing here.

What I’m saying is that teaching and training has to happen in real situations. It doesn’t start there, no; you work on not throwing your food on the floor at home, you work on not shouting and screaming at the table at Grandma’s, you work on not running around the restaurant at McDonald’s. But once you have the basics down, you have to go out and actually work on them in the real world. That means a real restaurant, with waiters and other diners, where the food isn’t exactly what they want, and it takes “forever” to arrive. It has to be in the real world, or else it doesn’t work.

That means that your kids’ bad days are going to go out into the real world sometimes, too; and you won’t have any warning that they’re coming. They’ll just show up along with your basket of breadsticks at the pizza place, or they’ll be serving them alongside the General Tso’s chicken at the Chinese buffet.

At that point, you have three options: leave (probably not super feasible, you still have to pay for the meal and you still have to feed your kids and yourself), ignore them (this is clearly the type of parent you’re frustrated by, and I agree, but they’re far more exception than rule), or parent your way through it (which is honestly the whole point of this excursion). But the last one is the hardest, and runs the most risk of looking like ignoring if you have more than one kid and have to focus on them in turn.

I’m sure the joys and triumphs of parenthood will outweigh the loss of having a beer […]

Yeah, honestly, it does. Not all the time, but every time.

Gotcha. Yeah, parents can definitely suck just as much as any other human (or, to be fair, they can just be exhausted or distracted). Though I will also note that in the cases where my kids have acted unexpectedly badly, it is notable to me that my usual nuclear threat (“we’ll just leave”) carries with it a financial penalty as well (now we have to pay for food we ordered but can’t eat), which adds an additional wrinkle to this problem; particularly for lower-income folks.

I do think that I usually have a lower tolerance for my kids’ behavior than most of the people around me do, so hopefully that’s part of what is on my side here.

I wouldn’t say “holy.” David’s actions with Bathsheba were explicitly not holy.

“Hallelujah” has an overt reference to the story of David & Bathsheba in the Bible, which is a story about a king watching a woman bathe and then sending her husband into an unwinnable battle so he could steal her from him.

But Kids should be free to learn so for me it feels like they are allowed/have the right to be annoying

That is a fantastic perspective.

Yeah, the two are usually (though not always) correlated. Annoying adults have annoying kids that grow up to be annoying adults, and the cycle continues.

I didn’t see the meme, but–

YOU choose to have children and where you take them. If you take them to a place where you know they have the potential to inconvenience the people around them and they do, then you are inflicting them on others and that makes you a bad parent.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I kinda feel like that ignores the reality of how kids learn. They can’t be taught how to act at restaurants if they’re left at home for their entire childhood. We’ve got fairly well-behaved children, but it’s because they were a little bit crazy when they were younger and we disciplined them through the process. Particularly for neuro-spicy kids, they’re never going to be able to learn how to calm down unless you take them to those places, teach them how to act, and discipline them when they transgress those boundaries.

Yeah, it’s an inconvenience to others, but them being a minor inconvenience now so that they won’t be a major inconvenience when they’re adults is kind of the tradeoff you make in order to live in a reasonably well-adjusted society.

Now, if you’re talking about, like, a Michelin-starred restaurant with pristine tablecloths and no dollar signs on the menu, that’s one thing. People save up for months to have a single pleasant, quiet night at places like that, and parents need to find better ways/locations to train their kids. But if you mean Applebees or whatever, I kind of think the minor inconvenience now is worth the better-behaved adult the kids will turn into.

Yeah, I think “forumverse” isn’t bad. Though I have always felt like a Reddit-like interface and a forum interface are fundamentally different, in some way I can’t really put my finger on. I’ve been involved in bulletin board forums (fora?) in one aspect or another since the late 90s, so maybe it’s just nostalgia vs. recency bias; though it could also be the feeling that a “forum” seems like it should be hyper-specific, with different subforums on an already-niche bulletin board scoping down to even more niche and specific areas.

(Side note: Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the forum -> topic -> thread connection is why people like the name “threadiverse.” The word “thread” definitely seems like it arose from there.)

Anyway, I am fully ready to admit that I’m yelling at clouds here. Get off my lawn, dang kids and all that.

Definitely agreed.