Those scenes are just there to establish that he’s capable, intelligent and talented in the ways the agency needs, so it’s plausible they would recruit him. Never-mind that they also establish the way he looks at the world and approaches problems which is then forgotten immediately.

That is interesting. I imagined it more like an abstract physics problem than an actual scene. My ball was about 6 inches diameter, made of a nonspecific hard but not very dense material similar to, but not necessarily solid plastic, of no specific color. It was in the center of a table roughly 3 x 6 feet in surface at normal sitting table height, and was also of no specific color or material. The person was just the vague notion of a person applying a push slightly off from across the short axis of the table. The ball bounced slightly on the generic idea of a floor as it rolled away. My mind quickly supplied the additional details when requested, but not until then. (Yellow ball, wood table, etc). If I’d been asked in a way that didn’t feel like a physics problem, but instead asked me to imagine a scene, I would already have had many of those details in my mental view.

Yes, hallucination is the now standard term for this, but it’s a complete misnomer. A hallucination is when something that does not actually exist is perceived as if it were real. LLMs do not perceive, and therefor can’t hallucinate. I know, the word is stuck now and fighting against it is like trying to bail out the tide, but it really annoys me and I refuse to use it. The phenomenon would better be described as a confabulation.

I had guessed it was Sri Lanka since it is also shown just off the coast of India. Then I figured it was more likely Indonesia given it’s surrounded by so many other islands and not that close to India. But yeah, now that I know that the name meant Japan I’m wondering if it’s depiction on the map is a conflagration of accounts of Indonesia and Japan.

Classic Italian mistake.

Yeah, the American West has a huge variety of very distinct biomes. For the purpose of telling a story though, one rocky desert or forested mountain vale or whatever is as good as another, leaving us, the audience, largely unaware and misled. We mostly only notice when they do that to areas we’re familiar with.

Reminds me of the movie The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson. There’s a scene where he is at his home in what is clearly the upcountry of South Carolina not too far from the Appalachians and he takes a walk down his garden path to visit his wife’s grave, which is located in the South Carolina lowcountry, by the coast, somehow skipping past over a hundred miles of pine forest that would have been between those areas. If you’re not familiar with those areas, they both just look like areas in the American Southeast, but if you are familiar, it’s very jarring.

They’re only allowed to use one hand, so the competitors always have their off hand tucked in or hooked onto their clothes so that arm can be relaxed and ignored.

The issue with having mandatory useless comments is that any actually useful comments get lost in the noise.

On a closer look, the small hand is the guy behind him holding a phone to his ear

As a Millennial, I’m now too old to tell the difference.

I work at a small computer shop and I love putting all those RGB lights in for people. Especially when I can do a full aRGB setup with a SignalRGB layout so patterns can move across the whole machine. For my own computer the only lights are the tiny power and hard drive activity lights, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. RGB lights belong only in other people’s computers.

I love how the pictures show that people are currently comfortably living there. I’m guessing they ran out of money to re-finish the interiors after they gutted the downstairs to convert to an open plan, tacked up some plastic over the insulation, and just moved in anyway.

Thanks, that is a better word there.

I can see the argument that it has a sort of world model, but one that is purely word relationships is a very shallow sort of model. When I am asked what happens when a glass is dropped onto concrete, I don’t just think about what I’ve heard about those words and come up with a correlation, I can also think about my experiences with those materials and with falling things and reach a conclusion about how they will interact. That’s the kind of world model it’s missing. Material properties and interactions are well enough written about that it ~~simulates ~~ emulates doing this, but if you add a few details it can really throw it off. I asked Bing Copilot “What happens if you drop a glass of water on concrete?” and it went into excruciating detail about how the water will splash, mentions how it can absorb into it or affect uncured concrete, and now completely fails to notice that the glass itself will strike the concrete, instead describing the chemistry of how using “glass (such as from the glass of water)” as aggregate could affect the curing process. Having a purely statistical/linguistic world model leaves some pretty big holes in its “reasoning” process.

So is ‘security camera’ also a misnomer? His job is to make theft less likely because he will report you to the police. That still falls in the realm of security. I will say that ‘security observer’ would be a better job title than ‘security guard’ but they never claimed a job title, just a general field of work.

The board’s job is to hire the CEO and demand good value for shareholders. The CEO’s job is to make the big decisions to achieve that goal quickly and then usually leave before their short term thinking falls apart. The manager’s job is to enforce whatever decisions the CEO makes, even if it is stupid or cruel. And the employee’s job is to suffer so that each layer above can look good to the layer above them.

Not to say there’s no good people in the system. My manager for most of my time there was actually a good manager who felt that his primary job was to deflect away the shit that rolled down from above so we could focus on our work, but then he got laid off along with half my coworkers.

I do miss writing software, but I really don’t miss working in the corporate world.