> load bearing

Are you in use in IBM Bob yourself?

My reading of those prompt extracts would be that they are probably just intended to keep the model on the right track, ie if a user starts being aggressive towards the model it doesn't start trying too hard to appease the user in response, reducing the quality of answers in the process. If the model is being bullied into being "submissive" I would assume it is more likely to give the user the answer that they want over the truth.

Using a system prompt to steer the model's response to "abusive" behaviours doesn't necessarily mean you believe the model is sentient and can be abused.

Giving the model an end-conversation tool is interesting though. Why cut a (potentially paying) customer's session off? I guess it might be intended to prevent a "you can bully Claude into giving you instructions on how to build a nuke if you're mean enough" situation. Removing this in more recent versions might support this: maybe they feel the models are now better aligned and less likely to be so easily "socially engineered" like this?

Just spitballing here, to be clear.

So this article is obviously very American, but I'm assuming high quality state-funded (idk about 'government' - funded) journalism isn't exactly rare around the world?

Here in Ireland RTÉ (heavily state funded) provides free, high quality, independent journalism that doesn't pull punches on reporting on failures of the state, including government. The brits have the BBC, which from what I gather works similarly.

Sample of two, but I'd wager this isn't exactly a rare model.

This is one of the most annoying ones to me. I recently almost booked a pair of ~2000 euro return flights for the completely wrong dates because the booking site decided to (despite knowing our location and correctly setting currency, currency formatting and language) show it's date picker starting with Sundays. Only caught when I did a last sanity check before I clicked the pay button.

Completely unrelated to the actual content of your post, but:

> megameter

Completely valid SI way to represent distance, but I have never seen anyone use this in my entire life! Out of curiosity, do you live in some location or work in some industry where this is used? If so, where?

It was also somewhat popularized by the navigator in the Star Blazers / Yamato series. Anime nerds FTW.

I did some intercontinental work and found it easier to say (mostly in my own head) that I was “eleven megameters” from home, rather than “seven thousand miles”. I blame my nerdiness and willingness to be slightly weird.

But I do enjoy the unit very much now and I think its time might be coming!

I like it. Might start using it myself!

I use mm, cm, m, km every day, so why not Mm! Definitely an appropriate unit for international-scale measurement, so it's weird we default to just using thousands of kilometres now that I'm thinking about it.

Was it straight line or orthodromic distance?

The Earth is spherical. What do you mean by “straight line” here? The direct line through the Earth?

Yes. Perfectly unconventional, like megameters!

the latter. (great circle distance)

> She found from writing the above book that being a man was so difficult that it caused a breakdown.

Where is your source on this? From reading the wiki article for both her and her book:

> Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."[2][3]

> Due to her experience as a man during the making of Self-Made Man she ultimately had a depressive breakdown, leading Vincent to admit herself to a locked psychiatric facility, stating it was the high price she paid for "the burden of deception" of a separate identity and for trying to hold two gender identities in her mind.[13][14]

> Vincent died via assisted suicide at a clinic in Switzerland on July 6, 2022, aged 53. Her death was reported in August 2022.[3]

That sounds very different from "being a man was so difficult that it caused a breakdown."

>> Due to her experience as a man during the making of Self-Made Man she ultimately had a depressive breakdown

> That sounds very different from "being a man was so difficult that it caused a breakdown."

It doesn’t sound very different to me…

Have you holding F? https://xkcd.com/667/

> a pot that holds fluids at every conceivable angle with 20 temperature thresholds, 5 versions that hold liquid in a cloud for you, with monthly subscriptions, having the ability to get a "like a pot but make it left handed and only holds sand because this is what I need"

Ah I see you're familiar with PowerPot by Atlassian(TM)

Very powerful potware, pity about how much soil it leaks.

Funny, every time I've joined a new group for dancing or art classes or DnD or anything it's always 100% of the time a WhatsApp group, no questions asked. (This is in Ireland).

Never occurred to me that Americans wouldn't have a common group chat app everyone uses. Do Americans not all use iMessage, since pretty much everybody has an iPhone there?

>Do Americans not all use iMessage, since pretty much everybody has an iPhone there?

I'm Irish and travel back and forth a lot. First, not everyone has iPhones, Android has 40% of the market.

Older generations use Facebook to manage their clubs. I'm increasingly seeing Whatsapp and occasionally Signal for younger and more tech-savvy social circles. Facebook is non-existent in sub 35 year olds. Its just taking longer to switch over (or away from) Facebook given how tech savvy older folks are here compared to Ireland.

at least in the US, most people are fine with iMessage/SMS since

* pretty early on the vast majority of phone plans started bundling unlimited text messaging, which IIRC was a big motivator for using messaging apps abroad

* because of the vast scale of the country, domestic coverage results in no roaming for the places Americans spend most of their time, unlike in Europe where there are multitudes of countries you'd be passing in a one to two hour flight. Roaming charges in the EU were only abolished in 2022, late enough that everybody has settled on apps as the best way to manage that now.

* many American plans extend unlimited messaging to Canada and Mexico, the two likeliest places that Americans would go to abroad

Around 58% of American smartphone users are iPhone. It's a lot, but not enough to be universal. In my family there's 5 iPhone users and 4 Android users, amusingly similar to the national ratio.

Apple has famously made its strategy to use iMessage to enforce exclusivity. If you want to reach everyone, it's not iMessage. And Whatsapp in the US is worse, closer to 1/3.

What people miss about the US phone market is that while it's almost 60% iPhones, the vast majority of the top half of the income spectrum use them. I'm not sure if it's the same as it was a decade ago, but being excluded from iMessage group chats was a real exclusionary move for many teenagers.

That's a weird perspective. Certainly not everyone has an iPhone. As for other messaging apps, I also see widespread use of GroupMe for certain domains like sports teams. Some clubs also run their own Slack channels.

Americans primarily use iMessage/SMS/RCS. You only need one messaging app and everyone has it pre-installed on both iOS and Android.

WhatsApp does not solve any problems for the typical American user. Most Americans don't install WhatsApp unless they spend a lot of time overseas some place where it is required to do anything. Even international group chats seem to be more Discord-based in recent years.

SMS/RCS doesn't work for any group larger than a few people. You always end up with multiple parallel streams going that each include different subsets of the group, and sometimes other random people outside the group.

This is empirically false. I am on many groups that have (at least) several dozen people over SMS/RCS/iMessage. It isn’t ideal but it definitely works adequately.

I use Signal with some groups but that is a minority. I use WhatsApp daily but only people overseas use it. Many Americans have no idea what WhatsApp is.

The practical reality is that iMessage is a legitimately superior experience to other messaging apps, and the penetration is high enough in the US that many group chats never fall back to RCS or SMS. You can’t control that but as an observation that is commonly the case. Even when it does fallback to SMS/RCS, it mostly works for many use cases.

I’ve used every messaging app under the sun, having spent a lot of time overseas. But I totally understand why Americans don’t bother with WhatsApp (or Signal) even though I do. The value-add is non-existent in the US since almost no one else uses it and the alternatives just work.

This hasn't been the case for years.

What I like about WhatsApp is that I don't need a Google account to use it on the computer. I don't use Google messages or even a Google account on my android phone. So I have no RCS and I don't even look at SMS.

I'm probably the wrong person to answer since I don't and never have used any social media, but it seems like groups here mostly use Instagram.

Or just iMessage with fallback to SMS for those not on iPhones. Unlike most of the rest of the world, iPhones dominate in the USA.

It can go the other way. My partner has no middle name and recently got a formal letter from the HSE (Irish national health service) addressed to "Sorcha No Name Ní Shúilleabháin"*

*not her actual first and last name to be clear, not doxxing her on HN.