Navigating LLMs: Benefits and Drawbacks in June 2024

AI google history internet

LLMs have their limits, and where they excel makes a difference. As of June 2024, they continue to evolve. Anthrop\c Claude 3.5 works well for coding simple things with Python. It feels like the LLM has been heavily trained on existing code. Actually, it might be just as good in other applications as well. I wouldn’t know since I only use it for coding right now. Even on the paid plan, it has a message limit, which feels very 2023. So, I use the limited interaction where I get the highest benefit, which is coding. The artifact window is a great idea, and the speed of generation is appreciated. With gpt4o, I had to interleave work: make a request, switch to a different task while gpt4o sputtered out characters at Morse code speed. It probably runs on a colony of squids at the bottom of the Mariana Trench that OpenAI taught how to use Morse code with each arm.

And yes, an image like this I create with gpt4o. I don’t even know if Claude can do that. I don’t mind having multiple LLMs. I am gladly paying for both of them, as I do for search. Right now, I am very happy that there is more than one solution. I tried to use Google AI, but it was too complicated to figure out. To find the offering that fit mit my needs. And I am not aware of a key feature that I could only do with them. They already have all my email, read the entire Internet. If I can avoid it, I would not like to help them any further. Sure, if they were as good at coding as Claude, I would use them in a second. I have morals, but I cannot save the world single-handedly either.

One of the bigger fears I have is that LLMs might take the same turn that Google Search did. It was a great idea. It worked great, allowing for a phase of the Internet in the early 2000s that was very promising. Then it became what we suffer from today—a swamp. Barely functional. Generating around $150 profit for Google per user annually. Which means companies make more. Which means that I loose even more than that. The costs of using Google Search by being manipulated are much higher now than its benefits. The SEO world that Google Search presents is not a nice one. I happily give Kagi money to have some distance from that swamp.

Goethe: Kunstwerk des Lebens

books history

Rüdiger Safranski schreibt über das Leben und damit ja auch Werk Goethes. Frank Arnold las “Schuld und Sühne” ganz hervorragend. Das gab den Ausschlag für dieses 28 Stunden Audiobuch. Mir gefiel es gut. Goethe lebte von 1749 bis 1832. Zeiten, in denen viel passierte. Auf Buchseiten und im echten Leben. In dem von Goethe und um ihn herum.

Der Autor bringt dieses sehr komplexe Geschehen sehr wohltuend in eine Form, die es aufnehmbar macht. Ich bin mir sicher, dass am Ende alles in Wirklichkeit noch viel verwobener war. Aber die Lesbarmachung dieser Zeit und dieses Lebens ist – in meiner Sicht – komplett gelungen.

Schnitt, van de Laar

books history

Arnold van de Laar schreibt in “Schnitt!” über 28 Operationen der letzten Jahrhunderte und in einigen Fällen auch Jahrtausende. Das Buch ist nicht unbedingt etwas für schwache Nerven. Als Chirurg vergisst Van de Laar mitunter, dass nicht alle Menschen seine nüchterne und distanzierte Sichtweise in Bezug auf Körperversehrungen aller Art teilen können. Dem Inhalt tut das aber keinen Abbruch, wahrscheinlich sogar im Gegenteil.

Die Unterteilung in verschiedene Operationen, Operateure, Patienten, Zeiten und Regionen, die hier zusammen beleuchtet werden, tun dem Werk sehr gut. Van de Laar beleuchtet die Geschichte durch seine eigene, dabei zugleich immens einsichtsreiche Perspektive.

Seitdem es Zeitungen gibt, füllen sie sich zu 90 % mit schlechten Nachrichten. Ein Buch wie Schnitt! macht in klarstem Maße deutlich, dass wir durchaus schon weit gekommen sind. Wenn einem etwas fehlen sollte und man sich die Epoche der Behandlung aussuchen könnte, wäre die Auswahl immer sehr leicht: Heute. Ganz unbedingt heute. Vielleicht morgen. Aber auf keinen Fall in der Vergangenheit.

awk

AI Command Line history unix

Since its inception in 1977 awk enjoyed a user base of thousands of people.

Since LLMs can tell us how to use it now, it suddenly became millions.

Eine Art U Zentrum für Anspruchsvolle

communication history media

Was auch immer das Internet mit der Menschheit macht, es ist auch eine Plattform, auf der viele historische Kulturformen weiter existieren können.

Radio-Hörspiele zum Beispiel. Als der Massenkonsum schon längst zum Kino und dann zum Fernsehen umgezogen war, entwickelte das Radio seine vielleicht spannendsten Inhalte. Wie einige Podcaster gerade wieder neu entdecken, erlaubt eine Audioproduktion mit relativ einfachen Mitteln die Erzeugung von interessanten Szenarien.

1969 ist lange her. Hermann Ebelings Hörspiel Der Konzern hat auch 2024 inhaltlich noch Relevanz.

 

data cönversion

unkategorisch

He showed the kind of reliable presence that you’d expect from an eldest son of an eldest son.

I really enjoy looking at random blogs. Instead of having something algorithmically pushed in my face, I just stumble upon whatever it is. And deal with whatever it does for me and with me. That this happens outside some intent is a huge plus for me. Like the sentence above. Finding it triggered a question about my ancestry.

In 2008, I had entered data into PhpGedView. The problem is that this software didn’t really get any significant updates. PHP8 frowns upon array{} for instance. The database dump could be loaded, and in the end, it was surprisingly little trouble to extract the GEDCOM records out of the different tables into a GED file. Webtrees looks like a reasonable application. The installation was nicely guided. After a quick expansion, the system nicely indicates which modules are missing, which permissions should be different, etc. All very easy to solve. 25 years ago this kind of thing might have taken half a day with varying success. Even though technically software was already flowing via the Internet back then. The import of the GEDCOM data itself worked fine.

Traveling as an analogy is helpful to indicate how insane this all is: If things go well, like they did here, one travels at jet speed. Around 1 km per breath taken. Nice. Great that the data is now in a neutral GEDCOM format, will make it into a backup, and exists in living software.

Just some umlaut flaws to fix. Maybe 20 entries that don’t look right. I could have fixed them manually. But NO, why not write a quick converter instead? After all, GPT-4 was so helpful before. This should take 5 minutes.

If man makes a plan, God starts laughing.

It took 4 hours. I ended up willing a stupid search-replace tool into existence. Because, well, GPT-4 completely lost the plot on this very simple problem. To an extent that it seemed to make progress, but then just entirely failed again. It was ridiculous, infuriating, beyond belief.

Or to stick to the travel analogy: It felt like being duct-taped to a garden chair in a Walmart parking lot at midday in August in Arizona.

The first part was so complicated and worked so well. The second one, simply going from èu to ü, completely failed. In a bad way. I ended up doing it myself. Of course, writing a program instead of quickly editing those 20 entries.

This on the background that on May 24, 2024, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said that there will eventually be one billion developers on his platform. Developers, Developers, Developers.

random weblog

internet weblog

I didn’t find that mythical UrBlog of mine that I mentioned in the first post of the recently recovered one. The loss of something digital is weird. Since it lacks the inevitability of entropy that all other things have, it is especially infuriating. It could have been prevented.

Oh well.

During the search, I came across some other things from the past. I had written a ‘meme tracker’ in the early 2000s called BlogsNow. It would reliably detect which links gained popularity. Back then, the so-called “Blogosphere” was a crazy mix of all sorts of things.

Finding the data for it got me thinking about the status of those 7 million weblogs. How many would still be updated after two decades? I had just seen myself that it is not easy.

There are around 3500 site left that still get updated regularly. I didn’t spend too much time on the parser. There is a margin of error. But one in two thousand is a pretty strong filter.

When clicking around, I was surprised that some of the pages are rather interesting and surprising. So I added a random blog link on my main page.

the old new blog

unkategorisch

I recently revived and merged my weblog content from 2005-2016 with what was previously available on weblog2.com.

Given that the old content was hosted on an outdated version of WordPress, the process wasn’t straightforward. In the end I pulled the content directly from the database into a WXF file. On the 6th attempt the ~100 line python script that gpt4-o generated for this purpose workee well enough.

Even after a year it is still novel to me, that I can create a converter like this, without having to look into the details of the format involved.

The oldest entry converted in such matters reminded me of the “There is another System” scene from the 1970 movie Colossus: The Forbin Project: It mentioned that I was switching to new blog software and wouldn’t be converting my previous blog content. I am still searching for said older blog …

ever wrong

unkategorisch

So, I was wrong and with a little bit of dredging and with the help of a couple of tugs the ship could be dislodged. As an amateur Cassandra one can increase the perceived success rate greatly by carefully wording claims ambiguously: I should have said that the Ever Given will be in the Suez Canal for weeks to come. As April 15th the Egyptian Authorities have impounded the vessel in a dispute over the costs of the blockage.

ever and ever

unkategorisch

As I wrote two days ago the “Ever Given” will be stuck for quite some time. Maybe the Suez canal is open in May 2021 again. As I said I have no clue. Some reports float around that the ship is nearly free. Or that it had moved. Since such news influences markets they are probably just an attempt to make some money with the pricing fluctuations one could insert. And the usual official ass covering. It was not a good sign to see the boss of the Sinai canal in a tug boat eying the disaster in PR pictures:


A ship of these dimensions never got stuck in the canal before. Hell, a decade ago container ships of this size didn’t even exist. People hope for high tides on the weekend to liberate the vessel. That is BS.

It is noteworthy that the “Ever Greet” is already taking the route around Africa. One would assume that Evergreen has good information about the state of the stuck vessel.

In terms of the cause it is highly ridiculous how the story of the sand storm gets not questioned or investigated anywhere. It could be. But makes little sense: Since decades ships of all sizes pass through the canal. Sandstorms are bad. Sure. But I fail to see how it could put the ship into the position it is in. If this would be possible then it would happen more frequently.

Before the ship put its front into the Asia side of the canal it veered to the Africa side. If you want to slam the thing into the canal as hard as you can, then that is what you would do. In storyland one could cite that the captain / pilot did some GPS drawing before he did his Leeroy Jenkins. But that is pure speculation.

The next shoe to drop will be when the Egyptian authorities sever ties with the salvage company they hired.

There is a ship stuck in the desert. But other problems are piling up. Reflecting on this further I think it is likely that the canal will not re open in April.

When things never happened before what I think often veers away from what people are saying in general. Even under those circumstances I have been wrong plenty of times. But so has the general public. Considering that it is just one person vs billions, many of which are smarter and more knowledgeable than me, this is a cause for repeated surprises on my end.