Synthetic data is still ultimately built on raw data

So they’re still feeding LLMs their own slop, got it.

includes lots of curation steps to filter it for quality

Ah, so it’s going back to the good old days of curated directories like Yahoo. Of course, because that worked so well.

I don’t know what you mean by "a replacement for search engines.

I mean that they’re discontinuing search engines in favour of LLM generated slop. Microsoft just announced it was shutting down the Bing APIs, in favour of Copilot. Google are shoving LLM generated nonsense all over their search. People are asking LLMs questions instead of looking them up in search engines because they’ve been sold the fantasy that you can get useful information out of that shit when it’s evident that all you get is information shaped hallucinated garbage (also because search engines have been intentionally enshittified to the point of being almost as useless). People are being sold dangerous nonsensical misinformation and being told it’s factual information. That’s what I mean.

there’s still a search engine providing it with sources to generate that summary from

No there’s not, that’s not how LLMs work, you have to retrain the whole model to get any new patterns into it.

Even if you stick the LLM between an actual search engine and the user, it just becomes a perverted game of telephone, with the LLM mangling the user’s prompt into a search prompt that almost certainly will have nothing to do with what the user wanted, which will be fed into the aforementioned enshittified search engine, whose shitty useless results will be fed back into the LLM, which will use them to hallucinate some answer (with inexistent references and all) that will look like an answer to the user’s question (if LLMs are good at anything it’s brainwashing their victims into believing that their answers are correct) while having no bearing whatsoever in reality.

The tragic fact is that LLM’s offer practically no benefits over 40 year old Eliza if you gave it a fraction of the data and computational power they need, while being many orders of magnitude more expensive and resource intensive.

They have no affordable practical applications whatsoever, and the companies selling them are so desperate to earn back the investment and run off with the money before the bubble bursts and everyone realises that the emperor has been hanging his shriveled little dong in front of our faces the whole time that they’re shoving this shit everywhere (notepad!? fucking seriously!?) whether it makes sense or not, burning off products that used to work, and the Internet itself, and replacing them with useless LLM infected shit so their customers have no option but to buy their useless massively overpriced garbage.

Wouldn’t a goat be a cheaper and less polluting solution which would also automatically mow the lawn and produce milk…?

(Of course it wouldn’t solve the noise problem, but it’d probably be less offensive than a leaf blower…)

there doesn’t seem to be any reason why synthetic data can’t be used for the whole training run

Ah, of course, it’s LLMs all the way down!

No, but seriously, you’re aware they’re selling this shit as a replacement for search engines, are you not?

Obviously, yes.

They knew this when they poisoned the well¹ (photocopy of a photocopy and all that), but they’re in it for the fast buck and will scamper off with the money once they think the bubble is about to burst.

1.– Well, some of them might have drunk their own coolaid, and will end up having an intimate face to face meeting with some leopards…

Reading the screen.

Seriously, about 90% of computer problems would be solved if people just read the fucking screen.

That cat’s gonna be devastated when she starts going to school.

Oh well. Carpe diem, I suppose.

I don’t think I’ve needed to ask anyone anything when dealing with computers (except when helping someone with a self caused issue, of course, in which case the question is usually “why did you do this?”) since I was a little kid figuring out how to use my 286… I find that usually you just need to read the fucking screen (an extremely rare talent, I’ve come to realise), and in harder cases a bit of googling or, if push comes to shove, RTFMing seems to do the trick… but OK, we’ll see, I’ve been wanting to try NixOS for a while once I have the time, and my computer is getting old… maybe this summer I’ll find some time, better this than updating to Windows 11 in any case. 🤷‍♂️

They come pre-sliced now, who knows what they looked like when we started messing with them. Probably mostly rind, with a ring of seeds inside, each surrounded by a bit of excessively bitter fruit, like the citron.

Then we selected the juiciest, largest, sweetest, and easiest to eat, and grafted them onto each other, over millennia, until we got to something that’s actually edible and seems to come pre-sliced.

Just look at teosinte to see what maize started like, for instance, or how many “different” vegetables we made out of brassica.

Whatever fruit Eve is supposed to have eaten way back when must have been some bitter nut, or a poisonous berry, or a tuber barely distinguishable from a root, or Adam’s gay brother Bob, or possibly a fig (wasps made that particular abomination, not us); anything else we didn’t make until much later.

I am an adult!

Nature didn’t do shit.

Sure, maybe the original mandarins, pomelos, citrons, papedas, and possibly kumquats (there’s also Buddha’s hand, but we don’t talk about Buddha’s hand) were sort of pre-sliced, to help with seed dispersal, but like with practically every fruit and vegetable we eat we took that small, dry, bitter crap and started selecting for larger, juicier, tastier, and easier to eat.

And then we went, nah, that ain’t it yet… and we started grafting (because apparently plants are kind of ok with us playing Frankenstein with them while they’re still alive, or at least we can’t hear them complain, and probably wouldn’t care if we could).

We made oranges, and most of the citruses we eat.

Why do oranges come pre-sliced…? Because we made it so.

Do they have an Octavian, though…?

No need to get fancy, a properly stored clay tablet will do.

Batch files¹, powershell, visual basic if you use Office, Lisp if you used AutoCAD back when macros were written in Lisp… 🤷‍♂️

¹- And, frankly, I doubt setting up NixOS is particularly more complex than setting up an autoexec.bat boot menu back when some programs (well, games are programs) wanted extended memory and some others wanted expanded memory (couldn’t have both modes at the same time, of course), and you had to make sure the drivers loaded in the most optimal order (which could vary depending on the aforementioned memory expanders, and which drivers the specific game actually needed) to fit as many as possible of them and DOS in high memory leaving as much as possible of the 640KB of system RAM free for the program… and I’m not even getting into the whole IRQ thing for soundcards and whatnot… and we had to do it all without Internet, learning by trial and error, or word of mouth, or from magazines…

No, the point is to prevent real democracy by being “democratic enough”.

All the constitutional monarchies started as just monarchies.

Nope.

Spain, for instance, started as a dictatorship.

Then the bastard died of being an old piece of shit, hopefully extremely painfully, and the corrupt fratricidal parasite he’d named as a successor, a descendant of some dude who had been king long before the dictatorship (which started as a coup against a democratic republican government) he’d been grooming for years, was named king.

There was a sham “democratic transition” that defecated a “democratic construction” with the military threatening the elected politicians to make sure the new constitution wasn’t too democratic, and a referendum where the people voted for that thing because at least it wasn’t as bad as going back to the dictatorship.

Then a few years later the parasite (secretly) staged a coup, and then publicly diplomatically dismantled it, enshrining himself as a saviour of democracy and making sure the citizenship wouldn’t push for radical change, lest the next coup succeed.

As the bastard Franco said before he died, he left everything “tied up and well tied up”.

Or 1984, or Brave New World.

My money’s on Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, though.

Late stage capitalism, then. 🤷‍♂️

Dying is such a pain…

The future rules!