> i reckon Meta would have found it challenging to download very large files without sharing. It's certainly much faster if you don't get throttled or banned by many peers.
You're not that likely to get throttled by seeds though, and most torrents that are downloadable at all have a few seeds. Seeds have no way of verifying whether you're contributing the network, they're just there because someone (implicitly) decided to make the file available to whomever drops by and asks for it.
I believe they changed the app since Trixie was released (Trixie has KDE 6.3, the changes were in 6.4) and buried a lot of the really common settings behind menus. E.g. you might want to take a screenshot on a delay, and that's now hidden behind a menu whereas they used to surface the most common features on a panel.
I don't think this is quite right. It's not that the question is inherently underspecified, it's that the context of being asked a question is itself information that we use to help answer the question. If someone asks "should I walk or drive" to do X, we assume that this is a question that a real human being would have about an actual situation, so even if all available information provided indicates that driving is the only reasonable answer, this only further confirms the hearer's mental model that something unexpected must hold.
I think it's useful to think about it through the lens of Gricean pragmatic semantics. [1] When we interpret something that someone says to us, we assume they're being cooperative conversation partners; their statements (or questions) are assumed to follow the maxim of manner and the maxim of relation for example, and this shapes how we as listeners interpret the question. So for example, we wouldn't normally expect someone to ask a question that is obviously moot given their actual needs.
So it's not that the question is really all that ambiguous, it's that we're forced (under normal circumstances where we assume the cooperative principle holds) to assume that the question is sincere and that there must be some plausible reason for walking. We only really escape that by realizing that the question is a trick question or a test of some kind. LLMs are generally not trained to make the assumption, but ~70% of humans would, which isn't particularly surprising I don't think.
I tested both Sonnet and Haiku from Claude, which got it right 0/10 times in their original test, and they both passed. Here's the Haiku output:
"You should *drive*!
The trick is that you need to take your car to the car wash to get it washed. If you walked, your car would still be at home, unclean. So while 50 meters is a short distance that you could walk under normal circumstances, in this case you have to drive because your car is what needs to be washed."
Mentioning the trick makes the question trivial, though. I think a better pretext would be, "My dirty car is parked in the driveway." That removes the ambiguity that the car could already be at the car wash, and that it needs to be driven there.
> “…we assume the cooperative principle holds […] that the question is sincere and that there must be some plausible reason for walking.”
Yes. And. Some problems have irrelevant data which should be ignored.
The walk choice is irrelevant in the context. It needs to be simplified, as with a maths problem. That has nothing to do with human nature, but rather prior mistake in reasoning.
You are only touching on a far bigger and deeper issue around this seemingly “simple prompt”. There is an inherent malicious nature also baked into this prompt that is both telling and very human; a spiteful nature, which usually says more about the humans than anything else.
Your perspective on the meta-question about why such a question would need to be asked in the first place is just the first layer, and most people seem to not even get to that point.
PS: I for one would just like to quickly note for posterity that I do not participate in or am supportive of malicious deception, manipulation, and abuse of AI.
I like this article a lot, but if I can put forward one mild criticism, it seems to depend entirely on having exactly the same measure of semantic distance for word pairs as the original generator. In that case, as the post shows, you only need several guesses to eliminate all possibilities other than the correct one, just like you only need a few GPS satellite locks to pin down your location.
It would be interesting to see a solver that works more like a human player, where it requires the "warmer" "colder" information from different guesses to hone in, rather than being able to simply look up which words have the exact semantic distance (+/- some fudge factor) from the guess.
This is totally hypothetical, but I wonder if a system whereby your dollars went to the publications you actually read, but you could immediately, at any time read anything else you wanted for free would work. There would be an obvious reason to subscribe (you get past the paywall for any publication that is part of the bundle) but you would have the feeling that you're not "wasting" money because your money only goes to the publications you actually support.
(In reality, of course, cable providers were mostly doing this under the hood along with pocketing a big cut for themselves; television is just expensive to produce. But it didn't help the feeling of unfairness when you didn't watch any sports but ESPN was probably the most expensive channel in your "package".)
Isn't that the YouTube premium model? You pay a fixed monthly fee, Google takes a cut and the rest is divided among the channels you watch. It's supposedly in proportion to the watch time you've allocated to each of them, but I'm not sure that's ever been confirmed.
I thought Spotify's model is all subscriptions go into one pool that gets divided by platform wide listen time.
EDIT: this is indeed the Spotify model while youtuve's approach was to treat premium as a make up for missinflg ad watches so pays out from the individual viewers subscription.
I think a lot of file transfer issues that occur outside of the corporate intranet world involve hardware that you don't fully control on (at least) one hand. In science, for example, transferring huge amounts of data over long distances is pretty common, and I've had to do this on boxes that had poor TCP buffer configurations. Being able to multiplex your streams in situations like this is invaluable and I'd love to see more open source software that does this effectively, especially if it can punch through a firewall.
It is relevant, though. I have 1.2 Gbps down with a 2 TB monthly cap. I've never hit the monthly cap even once, but by your standard I have "1.2 Gbps down for 3 hours, 42 minutes".
But that doesn't change the reality that it matters to me that a 20 GB video that a friend took at my wedding downloads in just 2 minutes rather than the ~30 minutes it would take if I had a 100 Mbps connection.
I do think it's vastly superior to preferential treatment for some traffic, which seems to be the most popular alternative. The one caveat is that ISPs need to be forced to be transparent about this. Often, with cell providers, it's "Unlimited 5G" advertised, with a tiny asterisk pointing to even tinier disclaimer text at the bottom explaining that they throttle your rates once you hit a (fairly low) cutoff. That type of misleading marketing undercuts the fairness of the offer.
You're not that likely to get throttled by seeds though, and most torrents that are downloadable at all have a few seeds. Seeds have no way of verifying whether you're contributing the network, they're just there because someone (implicitly) decided to make the file available to whomever drops by and asks for it.
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