Exactly, bit banging an 8-bit bus isn't that different from pushing the data out of the USB port. It would be great to try an LLM trained on pre-1900 documents and ask it if powered flight is possible.

Great work on PicoGUS.

You can probably try this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46590280

does the LLM speak old english ???

English around 1800-1900 reads almost like modern English. At least if the author didn't write in an overly pretentious style, which was more common back then

I don't think people speak old english in 1800s

It was Gemini Flash, probably an even faster variant optimised for immediate response on search pages.

> Interesting that Gemini said it was infeasible.

Unless there is a hardware limitation or the hardware does not support it, anything in software is possible.

Gemini and all these other LLMs are designed to convince you that they have "awareness" which they do not have any of the sort. They are neither sentient nor do they have consciousness

Something doesn’t have to be sentient or have consciousness to answer a technical question like that.

Bad take. Some things are feasible and some things are not, "anything is possible" is a useless framework. Example: go convert two smartphones to communicate p2p over their 4g radios - it's all software!

LLM "awareness" is similarly irrelevant. They process information usefully, in a way grounded in reality, and that's that.

You seem to be all over the place, most of it by not reading the parent's comment. So let's break it all down.

> Bad take. Some things are feasible and some things are not, "anything is possible" is a useless framework.

It would help if you quoted the entire comment rather than removing the context and further giving a very bad example afterwards:

> Example: go convert two smartphones to communicate p2p over their 4g radios - it's all software!

Nice try. That is a hardware limitation in the 4G radio which is designed to connect to an operator mast. Even if you wanted to do it in software, the hardware does not support that P2P use-case which is what I already said.

> LLM "awareness" is similarly irrelevant.

Exactly. There is no such thing as awareness in LLMs.

The parent comment I replied to believed that an element of awareness had to be present to give an answer because this was done "several times over" in open source projects. Which that is inaccurate in the context of LLM research.

>> "It should be aware that using a Pico W as a transparent ethernet bridge has been done several times over in open source projects..."

> They process information usefully, in a way grounded in reality, and that's that.

Useful to those who know when it is either mostly correct or outright wrong.

Clearly in this example, Gemini doesn't even know if its own answers are grounded in reality and consequently people using them are unable to determine if the results they bring are true or not and there are countless examples of that.

So you know what you just said is not true.

> That is a hardware limitation

Sounds like a intentional firmware (aka: software) limitation to me?

If the hardware won't accept custom firmware without signed with a private key, I'd say that's hardware limitation

Bits is bits - so sorry you couldn't figure out the right bits to make the hardware do what you want, but those bits do exist and they are findable in principle - it's still all software! Your lack of knowledge of the signing keys is qualitatively no different than your lack of knowledge of any other undocumented proprietary information required to program the chip. Frankly you'd struggle even with the keys.

Infeasible? Oh my yes. Impossible? No. That's the point - there is a distinction.

It's often good to approach what llm said as a guidance, and not as ground truth.

You can ask follow up questions or point to potential feasibility and it will change its answer.

Yes, but. I asked Perplexity Pro the same fact question (sports) three days in a row after correcting its error the first day and having the correction acknowledged with a promise to get it right in the future. Same error on second day, same promise. Third day: correct. Perhaps it needs to be in the "Slow" classroom....

perhaps we should stop personifying organized dirt

It is "grounded in reality" and changes its answer like the weather.

No, Claude, etm are for "Entertainment purposes only", as listed in their TOS.

You know, like the same for horoscopes and psychics.

I've never used Perplexity Pro, but I would expect the exact same outcome from Claude, as I don't have cross-session memory enabled.

If you do have cross-session memory enabled, I agree this is not glowing performance. If you don't, then I think it's working exactly as intended.

I just asked if cross-session memory is enabled on my account: it replied that it's still being rolled out.

Perplexity still exists?

I just got major Dotcom vibes

stopcitingai.com. Been trying to say this as much as possible.

"Guidance" that's often wrong and that will change if I ask a follow-up question? Wow where can I send my money??

I'm not sure even treating it as a guidance is the best approach, generally you should challenge it a lot (which is what CoT kind of emulates), you never know what it is confabulating and when it is correct.

I just did this test with Gemini Flash-Lite 3.1:

> Can you use a raspberry pi pico W as a USB WiFi adapter

> Yes, it is possible to use a Raspberry Pi Pico W as a USB Wi-Fi adapter, but it is a project that requires custom firmware and a clear understanding of your goals.

Then goes off and lists the things you’ll need which at a cursory glance seems like good starting points.

My experience with questions to LLM is that they mimic reddit a lot: ask them an apparently simple thing that is not possible, and they will bend backwards to tell you it's possible and give you tons of convoluted possible solutions. Ask them a thing that is possible but complicated, and they will be overly dismissive. The good thing however is that between those two banks there's a wide river of utility...more often than not they'll at least mention things I haven't considered before.

shallow immediate confident authoritative answers; upon inspection falls apart immediately. sometimes can be beaten by repeat questioning into wisdom. by accident, beauty witnessing unfathomable NPC stupidity, but also invokes a hidden genius operating as though designed to troll first

ya, that is my experience as well

I cannot fathom how people fall into the trap of thinking that LLMs have a consistent world view on any of the users bugbears (what would be an opinion in a human). CoT is a work-around and doesn't persist across sessions. "You are absolutely correct" and "I should not have deleted your production DB" prove the anthropomorphic facade only a facade.