This was somewhat regional - Halloween was quite a significant childhood festival in (at least) the north of Scotland in the 1980s. However, the traditions were somewhat different, with children "guising" - wearing a costume and performing a party-piece (e.g. tell a joke) in return for treats.

Surely "Fiat Lux!"

I'm not sure why they claim that. If we believe OpenAI, a ChatGPT query uses 322μl water used per query. The 48.8 litres leaked per person per day is equivalent to 151,655 queries a day. I don't think AI is the big problem here.

Sources:
[1] social.mythic-beasts.com/@beasts/1150...

[2] www.gov.uk/government/n...

[3] www.ofwat.gov.uk/households/s...

Pom Bears appear to be a mandatory part of any cafe's child lunch box.

www.economist.com/britain/2025... discussed this trend a couple of months ago.

The audio edition performance of that article was... memorable.

It's important to hit those KPIs

Hence, my response to "the LLM can't count letters" is "here's how to get the LLM to count accurately" not "so LLMs are rubbish".

I suppose I do - LLMs are a tool that have rapidly transformed HCI with impressive results. They enable automation and increased efficiency in a lot of use cases.

We do need to understand use cases where they function poorly, but to avoid or work-around those areas, not reject the tool outright.

Threads like bsky.app/profile/kjhe... where people mock or argue with the LLM about the result it gave are pointless. (Except to show that AI slop amuses even people who claim to dislike AI.)

The GPUs aren't ashamed, they'll keep generating SoftMax values just the same as they did before.

When did believing marketing ever work out well?

We know LLMs are bad at tokenisation, so if your problem involves tokenisation, use an approach that works with the tool.

If you're just trying to prove marketing is lies, well, I suppose it adds a little to the body of knowledge on that matter.

Similarly, the rhetorical phrase "nobody is claiming" has become demonstrably false for every non-trivial example.

Everybody on Bluesky has chosen to use social media site that is structured to minimise the sort of algorithmic feed that influencers are good at gaming.

As such, we are probably the sort of people who don't like This Sort Of Thing, so tend to dismiss it as worthless. (I agree that it isn't).

Reading this post was the first time I heard that he'd died. RIP.

The website misfunctions --More--