• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: May 17th, 2022

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  • Yes and no. The example you made is of a defective device, not of an “unethical” one - though I understand how you are trying to say that they sold a malfunctioning product without telling anyone.

    For LLMs, however, we know damn well that they shouldn’t be used as a therapist or as a digital friend to ask for advice; they are no more than a powerful search engine.

    An example that is more in line with the situation we’re analyzing is a kid that stabs itself with a knife after his parents left him playing with one; are you sure you want to sue the company that made the knife in that scenario?



  • I think we all agree on the fact that OpenAI isn’t exactly the most ethical corporation on this planet (to use a gentle euphemism), but you can’t blame a machine for doing something that it doesn’t even understand.

    Sure, you can call for the creation of more “guardrails”, but they will always fall short: until LLMs are actually able to understand what they’re talking about, what you’re asking them and the whole context around it, there will always be a way to claim that you are just playing, doing worldbuilding or whatever, just as this kid did.

    What I find really unsettling from both this discussion and the one around the whole age verification thing, is that people are calling for techinical solutions to social problems, an approach that always failed miserably; what we should call for is for parents to actually talk to their children and spend some time with them, valuing their emotions and problems (however insignificant they might appear to a grown-up) in order to, you know, at least be able to tell if their kid is contemplating suicide.


  • Yes and no.

    In many cases (like for the Gradle DSL, that even if it can be either the old Groovy-based one or the new Kotlin-based one, you will always be able to find extensive documentation and examples in the wild for both of them) it is sufficient to specify which version you’re using and, as long as this doesn’t get too far in its context window forcing you to repeat it, you are good to go.

    But for niche libraries that have recently undergone significant refactors with the majority of the tutorials and examples still built with past versions, they have a huge bias towards the old syntax, making it really difficult - if not impossible - to make them use the new functions (at least for ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot with the “Web search” functionality on).











  • Yes, I know about them and always prove extremely useful every time I receive a file with a wrong/no extension and have little clue about its content. But since the question was about how OP could work with “files with extensions” produced in Windows, I wanted to help clarify what are they, why they are used and that files do not need to be converted or whatever to be opened in Linux as it can “work with them” just fine.


  • For the #4, the file extension can be seen just as a note, a little tag that’ll help you (or anyone else that will receive your file) remember which program you should use to successfully open the file.

    From the viewpoint of your computer, in fact, a file is just a sequence of bits and every program can open every file, only it will not be able to find what it expects and actually do something useful with it, just as you can open a book written in any possible language: in most cases you will unable to undestand it, in some others you will be able to read it without any problem.

    The “concept” of extensions was than introduced to allow your file manager (Explorer for Windows, Finder for macOS, Dolphin for KDE or Nautilus for GNOME) to know which program to launch when you double click on a certain file through a simple association table (that you can edit in your system preferences).

    In regards to Linux you can sometimes read that file extensions are not a thing, but this is just because in the commandline you launch a specific program that you personally point to a certain file, so there is no file manager that needs to guess which app should be launched to open the document you just double clicked on.

    That said, I think that should be pretty clear that in a Desktop context (like in a Personal Computer) that double click on a file situation pretty much applies to Linux too, so extensions will be useful and respected by the file manager you’ll find installed in your distro of choice, even if it can use other means when that is missing.