this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 109 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Copilot may be a stupid LLM but the human in the screenshot used an apostrophe to pluralize which, in my opinion, is an even more egregious offense.

It's incorrect to pluralizing letters, numbers, acronyms, or decades with apostrophes in English. I will now pass the pedant stick to the next person in line.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 months ago (8 children)

That's half-right. Upper-case letters aren't pluralised with apostrophes but lower-case letters are. (So the plural of 'R' is 'Rs' but the plural of 'r' is 'r's'.) With numbers (written as '123') it's optional - IIRC, it's more popular in Britain to pluralise with apostrophes and more popular in America to pluralise without. (And of course numbers written as words are never pluralised with apostrophes.) Acronyms are indeed not pluralised with apostrophes if they're written in all caps. I'm not sure what you mean by decades.

[–] Mouselemming 18 points 3 months ago (3 children)

By decades they meant "the 1970s" or "the 60s"

I don't know if we can rely on British popularity, given y'all's prevalence of the "greengrocer's apostrophe."

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Never heard of the greengrocer's apostrophe so I looked it up. https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-greengrocers-apostrophe-1690826

I absolutely love that there's a group called the Apostrophe Protection Society. Is there something like that for the Oxford Comma? I'd gladly join them!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

I will die on both of those hills alongside you.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

I salute your pedantry.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

English is a filthy gutter language and deserves to be wielded as such. It does some of its best work in the mud and dirt behind seedy boozestablishments.

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 3 months ago (18 children)

Plenty of fun to be had with LLMs.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago

ADHD contains twelve "r's"

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I instinctively read that in Homestar Runner's voice.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 45 points 3 months ago

The T in "ninja" is silent. Silent and invisible.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 3 months ago (1 children)

“Create a python script to count the number of r characters are present in the string strawberry.”

The number of 'r' characters in 'strawberry' is: 2

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

You need to tell it to run the script

[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Welp, it's reached my level of intelligence.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Aww, C'mon, don't sell yourself short like that, I'm sure you're great at..... Something....

For example, you would probably be way more useful than an AI, if there was a power outage.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Geee, you really mean that?!

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

This is hardly programmer humor… there is probably an infinite amount of wrong responses by LLMs, which is not surprising at all.

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[–] gravitas_deficiency 30 points 3 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I was curious if (since these are statistical models and not actually counting letters) maybe this or something like it is a common "gotcha" question used as a meme on social media. So I did a search on DDG and it also has an AI now which turned up an interestingly more nuanced answer.

It's picked up on discussions specifically about this problem in chats about other AI! The ouroboros is feeding well! I figure this is also why they overcorrect to 4 if you ask them about "strawberries", trying to anticipate a common gotcha answer to further riddling.

DDG correctly handled "strawberries" interestingly, with the same linked sources. Perhaps their word-stemmer does a better job?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago

Lmao it's having a stroke

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

many words should run into the same issue, since LLMs generally use less tokens per word than there are letters in the word. So they don't have direct access to the letters composing the word, and have to go off indirect associations between "strawberry" and the letter "R"

duckassist seems to get most right but it claimed "ouroboros" contains 3 o's and "phrasebook" contains one c.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago (1 children)

5% of the times it works every time.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

You can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 45% of all people know that.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (2 children)

"it is possible to train 8 days a week."

-- that one ai bot google made

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Q: "How many r are there in strawberry?"

A: "This question is usually answered by giving a number, so here's a number: 632. Mission complete."

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago

Ladies and gentlemen: The Future.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago

It can also help you with medical advice.

[–] dream_weasel 18 points 3 months ago (2 children)

There ARE two "R"s in strawberry.

There's also a third one, but you can't have three without having two.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago

Boy, your face is red like a strawbrerry.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Jesus hallucinatin' christ on a glitchy mainframe.

I'm assuming it's real though it may not be but - seriously, this is spellcheck. You know how long we've had spellcheck? Over two hundred years.

This? This is what's thrown the tech markets into chaos? This garbage?

Fuck.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

I was just thinking about Microsoft Word today, and how it still can't insert pictures easily.

This is a 20+ year old problem for a program that was almost completely functional in 1995.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

Using a token predictor to do sub-token analysis produces bad results?!?! Shocking Wow great content

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (5 children)

"strawberry".split('').filter(c => c === 'r').length

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

len([c if c == 'r' for c in "strawberry"])

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

maybe it’s using the british pronunciation of “strawbry”

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Garbage in, garbage out. Keep feeding it shit data, expect shit answers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

There’s a simple explanation: LLMs are “R” agnostic because they were specifically trained to not sail the high seas

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