Ironically, that's where LLMs seem to have an advantage.
They're not regurgitating the top Stack Overflow answer. They've scraped the entire Stack Overflow page, including context in additional answers, and they've also been trained on the same question from countless other parts of the internet.
An advantage over what? Reading an SO page "scrapes" the whole page with your eyeballs.
Anyway, I didn't say anything about which is preferable to use, I merely commented on where the information comes from, so your response is non sequitur. If sources like SO go away, it will affect the quality of LLM responses. "the same question from countless other parts of the internet" is a figment of your imagination when it comes to the kind of content SO accumulated. I've been in this industry for a very long time (my name appears in RFC #57) and I know what it was like to try to get answers to technical questions before SO showed up.
Or, the context of your use, for a site that covers many thousands, is different than mine, leading to a different experience.
The most-being-wrong applies very reliably for any API, library, or language that isn't stable through time. You probably work C, or similar, where backwards breaking changes, or shifts in "the correct way", are rare. I'm jealous!
The answer being wrong at any point in time is probably < 10%, in my experience.
In what way could it be ad hominem? Where did I attack the poster? I did make an assumption of why they were arguing against it in such strong terms, but how does an assumption make for a personal insult on the author?
I realize they also brought up points about why they thought this was bad. The rest of my comment was spent replying to those points.
Pain being a way to let you know that something is damaged is close to true--close enough not to quibble with. But fever is not a way to let you know that foreign bodies are being killed off--that's his claim, and it's wrong.
> But fever is not a way to let you know that foreign bodies are being killed off--that's his claim, and it's wrong.
querez's point is that the sentence is meant to be parsed as:
> pain and fever which are the bodies way of <<letting you know something is damaged>> and <<killing off unknown foreign bodies>> respectively
So the claim is that fever is the body's way of killing off unknown foreign bodies, not the body's way of letting you know something is killing off unknown foreign bodies.
The fact that one can ferret out what someone perhaps meant to say from what they did say doesn't change the fact that what they did say was wrong, and can be rightly criticized for being wrong. Someone else responded to such a criticism by writing "He said that" -- but that is false.
And I would make the point that these two things are not analogous, so they shouldn't be mentioned together in any case. The response to the misstatement that started this subthread was "I think what they're saying here is that you're not just suppressing a symptom, you're suppressing a sickness fighting mechanism", which is exactly right, along with a subsequent statement "Fever isn't just a symptom. It's a defense mechanism. The idea is that use of antipyretic drugs may make the infection worse" and which the misstatement completely muddies. It's weird how some people who didn't even make the misleading misstatement are so desperately trying to defend it for no good reason, while others are rationally pointing out how the statement is off the mark. Even with the edit, the statement serves no purpose, mixing up symptoms like pain that guide us psychologically with autonomic immune system responses.
> The fact that one can ferret out what someone perhaps meant to say from what they did say doesn't change the fact that what they did say was wrong, and can be rightly criticized for being wrong.
kruffalon said something ambiguous, with the intended interpretation (of that ambiguous part) being true and a secondary unintended interpretation being false - both interpretations grammatically valid.
querez tried to clarify the misinterpretation being made, but it looked as though their point was missed so I made it more explicit.
> It's weird how some people who didn't even make the misleading misstatement are so desperately trying to defend it for no good reason
I just saw some confusion so chimed in to try to clear it up. Only motive is that I feel like it's useful in a discussion for people to know what others mean, rather than arguing against a phantom point caused by miscommunication.
I was a UNIX developer (kernel, as well as userland programs like troff) for 7 years, working for the first company to provide commercial support. (Our founder, the former head of the Cornell CompSci department, while at RAND, had them make legal arrangements for Western Electric to provide RAND with a commercial license for $20,000 for the no-support tape that they provided to universities for $300 ... from there the commercial UNIX world took off.) Later I started my Linux life with the Yggdrasil distro, my first of many. Nowadays, in retirement, I do development on WSL on Windows. (Getting a working and convenient emacs environment on it was a bit of effort but now it's how I do all of my editing.)
Anthropomorphic language about evolution is simply a convenient metaphor that eases communication ... it has no metaphysical implications.
> You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science.
This ad hominem sweeping generalization about people you know nothing about is so casually expressed while being so extraordinarily arrogant. Among other fallacies packed into it is a radically false dichotomy.
One could ask the same question about any trait of any organism ... and the answer is always the same. Do you have a problem with birds being able to build nests specific to their species, or cuckoo chicks instinctively pushing the eggs of the host species out of the nest? The answer is one of the best understood facts of science, and the basis of all of biology. Why would anyone expect the human brain not to be "preconfigured" by the billions of years of environmental forces that produced it?
reply