The worst is when this bleeds into the comments and docs. Like, my dude, you don't have to document the code you didn't write (most of the time anyway).
I am fairly certain Socrates knew about books, he just wasn't literate himself. But literacy was quite common amongst Athenian citizens, it was sort of an outlier for the time. Of course most of the day-labor was done by slaves, but it afforded them the time for cultural pursuits and healthy debate, and Socrates was very much a product of that.
Far more companies just go belly up and leave whatever is left lying around. If we are lucky the land or whatever supports someone else tearing it down.
In software we build without considering how to sunset or deprecate. But perhaps we would build differently if we did so.
Reddit on iOS safari has been getting incrementally, nearly unusable worse. It had some sharp edges before but it seems they are moving faster now with the same or greater defect rate and shit is getting bad:
- URLs commonly auto-link to the things behind them, even including spaces and words.
- Pinch to zoom on the homepage causes the page to reload. Forcing you to lose your place/content.
- I sometimes cannot click to play videos on the feed. I can click through the comments and then click play on the player.
- Comments pasted from perfectly valid markdown render as whitespace deleted garbage
- Clicking "reply" then tapping in the box makes it disappear. I literally cannot see what I'm typing. I have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find it.
- After typing into the comment box the "comment" button to submit it is not visible
- Being a mod: The dropdown for selecting a removal rule will not let me scroll past what shows on the initial dropdown.
- Rare but critical interfaces like banning a user (or managing an existing ban). Essentially cannot be used on mobile.
- When typing responses to people as a mod, depending on the box sometimes I "lose" the comment button.
With Reddit I think it's on purpose. They want to drive users to the mobile app. Maybe they aren't introducing bugs on purpose but not addressing them isn't a accident.
X/Twitter is getting progressively worse for users not logged in. At this point you need to click away the cookie prompt and a prompt begging you to download the app. When that is done you can read the linked tweeet, but you can not play any videos embedded or click on any pictures or navigate up or down in the thread. In a couiple of months I guess they will only display the first 160 characters and nag you to login if you click on 'read more.
This is neat. I wrote https://github.com/zombocom/rundoc. It has a similar feature. The main driver is to produce tutorials so it also puts the output of commands run back in the document.
They are bad at math. But they are good at writing code and as an optimization some providers have it secretly write code to answer the problem, run it and give you the answer without telling you what it did in the middle part.
1) That's not related to chain of thought I was replying to. Someone asked about the "bad at math" and pointed out "but it seems good to me" so I added the color of why that might be the case. Your retort seems to imply I'm making an argument that because something uses tools for a job it cannot be good at the thing it's using a tool for. Which is not the case.
2) If you have something to say, just say it. Don't put words in my mouth and then argue with a thing I didn't say.
Right, but your narrative was incorrect and based on faulty premises, which you haven't acknowledged. That's fine, except you're still pressing the argument.
Can you please present a reasonable maths problem that I can bounce off GPT so we can see it fail? I can give you many hundreds of relatively complex problems, none of which have appeared in a textbook, that GPT has not only solved, but critiqued my own crappy solutions for. I'm only asking you for one counterpoint.
Google any plausibly reasonable math problem, and even the terrible LLM that powers the Google search page will almost certainly solve it correctly for you.
I don't need to reconstruct my argument axiomatically from folk beliefs.
You seem to have misunderstood my comment. I'm happy to accept the fault for poor communication. But you're making it hard. You're signaling that any clarifications on my behalf will be treated as further arguments instead of some sort of shared desire to hear one another. I don't care to continue.
What would I do to demonstrate that they are bad at math? If by "maths" we mean things like working out a double integral for a joint probability problem, or anything simpler than that, GPT5 has been flawless.
Search the topic. It is historically documented. It might no longer be true though.
A way to test might be running an open model locally, directly (without a harness) where you could be sure it's not going through a translation layer. I think these days it might have this tool call behavior built in, but I think back in the day it was treated more like a magic trick. Without it, it behaved similar to "how many r's are in strawberry" for simple math.
The request is for some reasonable math problem a model like GPT or Claude will fail at. I'm not going to set up a local model or some harness for it; I'm just going to copy/paste it into ChatGPT and watch it solve it.
Propose a problem, if you think I'm wrong about this. Seems simple.
My argument: you can take basically any undergraduate collegiate math problem, right now, and it's likely that even the dumb LLM on the Google search page will solve, and nearly certain that frontier models will.
Your argument: "it is possible to Google for people claiming LLMs can't do math".
I see this being useful in infrastructure tools. Imagine a statically compiled bundler that can also do the job of RVM and friends (installing Ruby) but it is still written in Ruby.
The classic Ruby buildpack is written in Ruby but we have to bootstrap it with bash and it's annoying and has edge cases. The CNB is written in rust to not have that problem and the idea that you can ship a single binary with no dependencies is really powerful.
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