luciferofastora

I don't know what you're referencing and planes aren't really my specialty, but personally, I'm fascinated by the whole concept of the Instrument Landing System.

Unfortunately, I don't think I have the technical understanding to confidently explain how it works, but it's using the modulation of different radio frequencies and the ways they cancel out to indicate to pilots whether they're correctly facing and approaching the runway. If the plane isn't in the right approach path, certain side frequencies will come out stronger and can be used to determine the exact angle you're off.

It's friggin' fascinating.

Anyway, were you referring to a specific part or just seeing if I can also nerd out about some other random topic?

God forbid a nerd engage in some nerddom in such a non-nerd community as... checks notes rpgmemes

While I made the same association when first reading the books, I'll point out that the name Saruman is one the humans gave him. His Quenya name, Curumo, has little to do with Sauron, nor with the latter's original name Mairon before he revealed his allegiance to Melkor and the elves dubbed him Sauron (Quenya) and Gorthaur (Sindarin).

There is a connection between them, but it isn't by name. They were both originally Maiar of Aulë, both ambitious and cunning, both desiring order. But where Sauron thought siding with Melkor would get him the means to impose his noble order, Saruman stuck with the Valar and was eventually sent to protect the newly awakened elves from Melkor.

Still, that shared ambition for order eventually made allies of them, while their respective cunning saw each scheming against the other. If Gandalf and those meddling mortals hadn't gotten in the way, the final stage of the War of the Ring would have been a struggle between these two former colleagues. Depending on where the Ring ended up, that might have been an interesting struggle, the two most cunning Maiar going head to head, but I think it's for the best we never found out how that would have gone.

ChatGPT is a text generator. Any "information" it delivers is only correct by chance, if at all. Without the knowledge to check the answers yourself, you can't possibly tell whether you're falling for random error.

More in-depth, ChatGPT has learned how likely certain word patterns are in combination. Something like "1+1=" will most often be followed by "2". ChatGPT has no concept of truth or mathematical relationship, so it doesn't "understand" why this combination occurs like that, it just imitates it.

You can actually see the slight randomisation in the inconsistent way 5.18 is rounded to 5.2 instead. If this was correct – I'm not qualified to comment on that – and written by a human, you'd expect them to be more consequent with the precision. It's likely that ChatGPT learned these number-words from different sources using different precision and randomly picks which one to go with for each new line.

So what happens when it decides a word combination seems plausible, but it doesn't actually make sense? Well, for example, lawyers get slapped with a fine for ChatGPT citing case law that doesn't exist. They sounded valid, because that's what ChatGPT is made for: generating plausible word combinations. It doesn't know what a legal case is or how it imposes critical restrictions on what's actually valid in this context.

There's an open access paper on the proclivity of LLMs to bullshit, available for download from Springer. The short version is that it's entirely indifferent to truth. It doesn't and can't care or even know whether the figures it spits out are correct.

Use it to generate texts, if you must, but don't use it to generate facts. It's not looking them up, it's not researching, it's not doing the math – it's making them up to sound right.

I'm guessing it's short for "If you don't know what this is and you find it outside of any shielded box, shit has gone very wrong and you should not be near this, let alone touch it". The probably best way to get people to stop touching it is to suggest that it poses an acute threat, hence the urgency in the phrasing "drop and run".

So if you're operating a device wherein it's properly contained, you don't see the label. If you're removing it while protected appropriately, you already know the label doesn't apply to you. If you know how to handle it, you don't need instructions.