Andrew @generalising@mastodon.flooey.org

Another PM with a less conventional background - Jim Callaghan gets a single year at Oxford in one version, and three of the six don't mention his navy service (and the ones that do put him in the wrong place). But basically a bit better.

I think the most interesting bit of this was the discovery it insists Blair was in the Oxford Labour Club - because he *should* have been, that's how it works.

I tried asking it about some other PMs. It doesn't have the same fixation for Major - I had been wondering if it would create a university career - but it goes on some interesting excursions. In one a (real) knee injury stopped his (not real) professional career for Surrey CC, and in another he divorced Norma in 1970. News to us all.

Finally wrote up some of my thoughts on #chatGPT (prompted by last week's WP stuff, but not really specific to it)

I think I now have a better sense of when and why it starts bullshitting, but how on earth it seemed a good idea to release it with that behaviour is beyond me.

https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2023/on-chatgpt/

absolutely delighted by the chatGPT approach to travel planning

a) identify you cannot drive from Inverness to Bergen, and will need a ferry
b) admit there is not a direct ferry but you can go via somewhere else
c) when pressed, conclude this involves taking a ferry to Orkney, the bus back (!), and then flying direct.

@LucasWerkmeister certainly an F in there somewhere

There is a moral here and it's "don't run a batch of 3500 items at once"

the wikidata laws project today *slightly* stalled by an error in a batch edit that meant I set three and a half thousand items to have a formal citation consisting of ... a single digit. https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?diff=1870872669&oldid=1869816974

On the other hand, credit where it's due: it has generated a perfectly functioning python script to do a task I was contemplating (identifying regnal years for the confusingly dated Acts), in about twenty minutes - fixing the formatting of the test data took longer...

well this is Quite Something - even if they don't pull it off, the fact that someone is treating it as a serious thing to talk about...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/07/cancer-and-heart-disease-vaccines-ready-by-end-of-the-decade

Asking "with sources" gives the same first response but with what seems to be a completely fabricated quote from a non-existent article. Ah, joy.

I mean, none of this is remotely surprising given what we've all learned over the past month, but it's sobering to see the nonsense-generator at work.

playing with chatGPT today (know thy enemy...) and it is very ... something ... that it has a little "regenerate response" button - if you did not like the first set of facts, you can have some more!

For some reason I'm sticking with Brooks as a test-case: all four of these get the WWI paragraph correct, but then confidently surrounds it with a fabulated pre- and post- war career.

Oddly some points keep recurring (born Worcs, photographed Gandhi) - no idea why it fixed on these.

The original thing I was trying to trace was how much hosting a match costs the team - still haven't found an estimate but an intriguing detail is that the Chelsea sanctions said they couldn't spend more than £500k to host a match, & they pushed back on it as too low https://talksport.com/football/1061077/chelsea-roman-abramovich-government-sanctions-transfer-spending-budget-cap/

Today's odd little research question: what does policing a football match cost? About £11k a game in the Premiership, but a derby can be wildly more (not really surprising I guess) https://thefsa.org.uk/news/cost-of-policing-is-making-clubs-pay-more-the-answer/

Apropos of Red Plenty, it is a delightful book and completely recommended. This passage has lived rent-free in my head for the past decade:

The most accurate advertisement yet seen on the Tube