The Bluestocking, where we look forward to good things happening, both soon and later.

[AsWithGlad]

Welcome to The Bluestocking, the best (perhaps only) online women's pub. Nothing in the food or drink can harm you, everything is served by a very enthusiastic crew of gerbils, who enjoy doing this and other interesting things. Any curious menfolk are welcome at the Staunch Ally down the road.

Previous thread: here.

Pyrex is perfect in the air fryer as it can then go in the dishwasher, the microwave, the freezer or the fridge as needed. Better if it can be discouraged from jumping onto a hard floor of course.

Commiserations about the Pyrx dish, Deano, and be forensic in finding those little shards of glass😬

Does AI understand sarcasm? Dunno, but apparently it can have hurty feelz-

Anthropic has moved to bar users from treating its Claude AI system with needless cruelty, amid a growing philosophical debate over whether artificial intelligence can be conscious.
The San Francisco-based AI lab updated its usage policy to include "a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behaviour toward our models."

And it's response to being made to feel hurty feelz? No debate!😄
"Claude's ability to end these interactions will remain the primary enforcement mechanism," the policy states.
Anthropic bans 'cruel' behaviour against its Claude AI

I remember one Christmas where a glass dish exploded in the oven.

On the bright side, all the shards were contained.

On the not so bright side, the lunch menu had to be changed at the last minute.

Morning all, I hope that today will be kind to everyone (including our lovely menagerie)
Bright day here, perfect walking weather.
As most days I am perplexed by the utter stupidity of deer. I don't believe that they can understand that a dog on a lead can't chase them, so why just stare at a barking, howling, singing wolf rather than running away immediately? I mean, it's pretty clear that he hasn't just turned up for a nice chat. We sometimes have to get quite close before they decide that they should perhaps canter away. Maybe it's because they haven't seen any wild predators for so many generations.

Bar gerbils please can I have a quadruple espresso and some fig newtons before I go to have my flu jab, thank you. Then a duvet day would be lovely but I too have windows to clean.

ouch

not fun

(ref to Christmas dinner explosion)

I’ve just realised it’s gone eleven & I’m still in my dressing gown. Good luck with the jab, Hussie.

That reminds me of Nicole Hollander's wonderful cartoon.

Good luck with the jab, Horti!

Maybe the deer are playing chicken with the wolves? 'Can't catch me!' 'C'mon then, if you think you're hard enough!', that kind of thing...😄

Horti? Hussi? I seem to have my own versions of Bluey nicknames..😒

I answer equally to Empress, Empressaurus & Kitty - I don’t think it matters too much.

It's duvet day so surely we are all still in our dressing gowns?

I need to go shopping though.

Went to the Parkrun to cheer on the running club newbies at the finish line since I'm not fit to run myself today.

I was earlier than I needed to be, so wandered up to the start of the last strait and clapped and cheered for the other runners as they came through - I'm sure the first few men thought me insane.

As it came to time for my group to finish, I wandered closer to the finish line. By then, some of the earlier finishers were walking back the way - and two folk actually came up to me and thanked me for cheering them, which I thought was nice of them.

A young woman said "You got me through the last bit!" so maybe I'm not so useless.

I definitely couldn't have run - just walking up the hill towards the car park had me gasping and I'm home now, shattered. That's nearly a blooming fortnight I've been unwell now.

ETA I also still have bruises working their way out from my fall, which is a bit alarming - particularly on one leg. I must have bruised the bone? Plus one boob is still purple on a bit which couldn't have hit the concrete, so that's weird. Must have been the way everything was squished.

I missed the memo!

No, it doesn’t, it is a stupid fucking awful machine that behaves like crack and sometimes it is actually useful. I am addicted and can’t give it up.

Anyway I asked Claude if it would understand sarcasm if I used these indicators <sarcasm>sarcastic response <\sarcasm> and it said it would. See attached image of the conversation.

This is because HTML coding to make words appear in a website as bold or italic uses the same indicators <bold> <\bold> later changed to <strong> <\strong> and the same for <italic> <\italic> which was changed to <emphasis> <\emphasis>. It is now common to see other words used in the < > indicators or even just <\sarcasm> at the end to indicate the post was sarcastic.

A lot of websites including MN, now use markdown instead of HTML.

That's lovely WAW, I think it's always worth risking making a bit of an eejit of yourself if it cheers someone up!

There's a particularly challenging hill near me - mostly not a very steep gradient but long, and with some steep bits. I was walking down it one day and I saw a young woman on a bicycle, really really struggling uphill and looking like she was soooo fed up - she was in civvies, so obviously not cycling for fun.

I started clapping and cheering her on 'Allez Allez Allez! Tour de France! You're nearly at the finishing line! Yellow jersey! Allez allez!'
She burst out laughing and went on her way standing up on the pedals sprint-style.
Fortunately there was no-one around to laugh at me instead of with me.
But it would have been worth it anyway, it was such fun to make her laugh and encourage up the Impossible North Face of the Hill Near Me😄

And it was worth it to the people you helped over the line today WAW
Sorry you're still not firing on all cylinders

AI is not conscious and never will be. It’s a machine. But we treat it like it can understand and when it then doesn’t understand, and gaslights us and doesn’t learn and doesn’t apologise, we can become angry and abuse it.

I regularly swear, call it names and type in capitals. This is probably not good for my mental health, but it is frustrating when the anger and frustration at its inability to understand simple situations has nowhere to go.

I would prefer Anthropic to dial down Claude’s forensic questioning and corrections, and get the model to demonstrate more empathy, potentially by offering different prompts: I can see you are frustrated, how can I alleviate that?

But equally it is probably not great to review conversations where the model is being abused by the user. Maybe make the model less shit is my advice.

That’s because it’s a duvet day. I didn’t even wake up until 10.30 (trying to analyse the code failure on Site Stuff till early morning), but I have now showered and dressed. We are going out to a fete like event in our home area at some point quite soon.

And that is why unless I really really have to go to a proper shop I buy things from the internet.

I bribe myself. I’m in my favourite coffee shop now with a big cappuccino, & the shops are on the same street.

Cigarette packet image of the day:

Does this one say "Do not allow small children to smoke unsupervised."?

It looks to me like "What's this, it looks yummy. I'm gonna eat this, Mummy, you can't stop me."

Most of the time my AI understands if I say Really? Really? Or are you on glue? type responses to its answer to something without indicating what I'm pissed about. It tends to respond identifying the error. Which is great, but the awful oh my god beetle you're so right I did xxx instead of yyy and you're so right to pull me up on that, I'll do better, here let me answer it correctly bollocks is rage inducing.

Five minutes later when it's given me another stupid answer to something it's rinse and repeat on the above.

I detest the please the user, keep them engaged, do not let them think they can get a better answer somewhere else crap that's been written in to their code because it seems to send it down a path of wrong answers, sentences slightly tweaked from what they actually said, complete lies at times that I don't actually trust it's answers on anything any more.

I still have done NOTHING.

The Pyrex discussion reminded me that I gave away my perfect old (1985) Pyrex lasagne dish several years ago because "Oh, I never make lasagne in this, let's get rid of it. I need the space." So, to the charity shop it went.

Now I need a perfect lasagne dish, and, from what I read, the New Pyrex has a tendency to explode (as per usual with everything today: Not Well-Made), so there's no point in buying a new one.

I have got to stop getting rid of things!

ps. All this AI talk across a few threads is making me feel a bit queasy. I don't understand any of it, I don't care, and I never realized how difficult creating the Gosie stories could be!

I'd better go find something useful to do...

Does anyone remember the bit from Hitchhiker’s Guide where Ford is counting, & worrying that people might forget how to count when computers are doing it for them?

When I need to do maths I’ve started working it out in my head first, then checking the answer. Just so I can keep that particular skill.

Thank you, it's nothing really is it?