When people trust you to explain complex topics accurately, you carry a responsibility.
I double-check. I revise when I get things wrong. I say I do not know when I do not know.
The people watching are not just followers. They go to community meetings with this information. They cite it. They make decisions from it.
That is a different weight than views and likes. I try to carry it seriously.
#ContentCreator #Responsibility #InfrastructureEducation #Accuracy
Increasing Local GPS Accuracy for a Small Robot
Loss can stay low while accuracy suddenly jumps when learning clicks.
The wording of natural language prompts has been shown to influence the performance of large language models (LLMs), yet the role of politeness and tone remains underexplored. In this study, we investigate how varying levels of prompt politeness affect model accuracy on multiple-choice questions. We created a dataset of 50 base questions spanning mathematics, science, and history, each rewritten into five tone variants: Very Polite, Polite, Neutral, Rude, and Very Rude, yielding 250 unique prompts. Using ChatGPT 4o, we evaluated responses across these conditions and applied paired sample t-tests to assess statistical significance. Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation. Our results highlight the importance of studying pragmatic aspects of prompting and raise broader questions about the social dimensions of human-AI interaction.
The methyl methacrylate tank incident in Garden Grove, California has resurfaced one of my pet peeves.
According to mainstream news journalists, anything that is a "chemical" is "highly toxic". It's the end of the world. There isn't enough drama in the world.
This stuff is not great - it's a skin irritant, and the fumes can irritate mucous membranes like the eyes, but it is *not* instant-death-on-a-stick. The explosion they were worried about was far more dangerous for its explosive effects than for the chemical release.
It's no dimethylmercury or hydrogen fluoride or dioxygen difluoride [1]. Heck, it's oral LD50 is something like 7g/kg - so an adult would have to *eat* almost two pounds of the stuff to have an even-odds chance of dying.
Stop trying to terrorize the public, journalists. Do your damned jobs.
[1] Expose it to most things, even at almost 200 degrees C below freezing, it explodes. Try to put out the resulting fire with water, it explodes. Try to put out the fire with sand, it *sets the sand on fire*.
#journalist #journalism #accuracy #drama #hype #facts #science #toxicity #danger
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