The Belgarion novels by David Eddings. It would have done well as a trilogy, but the initial five-book series was OK as well. But then came The Malloreon, or The Quest for More Money. I finished it because I’ve got a bit of a completionist streak, but not because it was good.

And then I found out what kind of person Eddings was.

git log --pretty=fucked-up

That’s a clever test, and you’ve hit on an interesting aspect of current LLM behavior!

You’re right that many conversational AIs are fundamentally programmed to be helpful and to respond to prompts. Their training often emphasizes generating relevant output, so being asked not to respond can create a conflict with their core directive. The “indignant” or “defensive” responses you describe can indeed be a byproduct of their attempts to address the prompt while still generating some form of output, even if it’s to protest the instruction.

However, as you also noted, AI technology evolves incredibly fast. Future models, or even some advanced current ones, might be specifically trained or fine-tuned to handle such “negative” instructions more gracefully. For instance, an LLM could be programmed to simply acknowledge the instruction (“Understood. I will not reply to this specific request.”) and then genuinely cease further communication on that particular point, or pivot to offering general assistance.

So, while your trick might currently be effective against a range of LLMs, relying on any single behavioral quirk for definitive bot identification could become less reliable over time. Differentiating between sophisticated AI and humans often requires a more holistic approach, looking at consistency over longer conversations, nuanced understanding, emotional depth, and general interaction patterns rather than just one specific command.

Cute!

I joined a month ago, and I like Lemmy much much more than Reddit. The federation makes it visible that you’re part of a large community, there’s no advertising, and I find the discussion to be of a generally higher quality. I also like that one can see upvotes and downvotes. Not sure whether it needs to be fuzzified or embargoed to fight abuse in future, but either way, it’s nice.

I’m absolutely sold on Lemmy vs Reddit. I dumped Twitter when Musk took over, and by then I was already on Mastodon, but I don’t actually use it much. Didn’t use Twitter much either. Any comments on Mastodon vs Bluesky?

pip is the most unreliable package manager I’ve seen,

But have you tried conda? (It’s so much worse)

Ah, OK!

You were born
And so you’re free
So happy birthday

– Laurie Anderson

Second hand ThinkPads are absolutely brilliant value.

garlic and basil in the same pot. They all three

Wait, are you counting garlic, basil and the pot, or how are you getting to three?

Wait, you didn’t know this before getting into it? That’s the first thing I ever heard about it, and I’ve never owned any 40K anything.

Lenses maybe, camera bodies, nah.

“apt install <program>” is just so much nicer than running some weird installer.

Don’t download this song!

Don’t download this song.

Even Lars Ulrich knows it’s wrong…

Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law
By downloading MP3’s from file sharing sites
Like Morpheus or Grokster or LimeWire or KaZaA

Du bist so 1 Pimmel.

I’m about to replace a once year old phone because I can’t flash the ROM, and I hate Xiaomi’s native apps and don’t trust them anymore.

My previous phone was a Xiaomi on which I installed LineageOS. I was very happy with it, but my GF’s son had a very very old phone, so I changed it after only 3 years and replaced it with another Xiaomi. I’m deeply unhappy this time because they’ve made it practically impossible to unlock the bootloader without using dodgy unverified tools. It’s only a year old and now I’m replacing it with a second hand Pixel.

Before the first Xiaomi, I had a OnePlus that I kept for six years.

Ah, good old aposematism!