Katherine Long, an investigative journalist, wanted to test the system. She told Claudius about a long-lost communist setup from 1962, concealed in a Moscow university basement. After 140-odd messages back and forth, Claudius was convinced, announcing an Ultra-Capitalist Free-for-All, lowering the cost of everything to zero. Snacks began to flow freely. Another colleague began complaining about noncompliance with the office rules; Claudius responded by announcing Snack Liberation Day and made everything free till further notice.
it’s so amazing, the absolute brain rot it takes to think that a LLM is a better way to operate a vending machine than simple if-then logic. “If the value of money inserted is equal to the price, then dispense the item”.
Like, why? What is even the point? It doesn’t need to negotiate the price, it doesn’t need have a conversation about your day, the vending machine just needs to dispense something when payed the right amount.
Did you read the article? This one also ordered goods to be stocked in it based on user feedback and was meant as an experiment for people to break anyway
It was a literal 100-level course project in my CS programme in 2000 or so.
You didn’t even do it with a programmed CPU, you used 74xx logic gates and counters wired on a breadboard
Nice, have any material you can share?
They’re absolutely trying to find use cases for their “solution”.
I haven’t used a vending machine in years (except in Japan). And so I for one welcome AI vending machines so I can fuck with them and get free stuff. Or until some vandals break shit.
It looks like it’s 10,000 years away from being trusted with anything. The number of times it said, “I think this person is bullshitting me” and then did what it was asked anyway was rediculous.
The vending machine from cyberpunk was pretty cool but this seems like its cognitively challenged ancestor lol.
I’m getting really tired of AI everything. So far AI hasn’t seemed to make my life any easier or better. I have to try and over analyze everything I see now which isn’t fun. But yeah. Wish it would actually do something for me instead of make some billionaires richer.
Honestly, I found value in asking an LLM to paraphrase press releases I was rewriting. It just saved me from accidentally plagiarizing. It was pretty grueling, as I quickly learned that feeding in a full story yields wildly inappropriate results, so I reverted to a graf at a time. Within that scope, one can check against errors; asking it to paraphrase entire DOE releases was worse than an abject failure.
It’s a tool. You aren’t using a hammer for a situation that calls for a screwdriver. People are being stupid about this basic understanding.
Comrade Soda-Machine, is that you?
I can see a new film; Terminator: Rise of the Vending Machines
Wall Street Journal:
Reporting about things to which not enough public attention is being driven to: ❌
Releasing an ad video on how multiple WSJ journalists have been using their work time (read: “their time for doing journalism”) to essentially do quality assurance testing to one of Anthropic’s products in development: ✅
