• glimse@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Copilot may be a stupid LLM but the human in the screenshot used an apostrophe to pluralize which, in my opinion, is an even more egregious offense.

    It’s incorrect to pluralizing letters, numbers, acronyms, or decades with apostrophes in English. I will now pass the pedant stick to the next person in line.

    • Beanie@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      That’s half-right. Upper-case letters aren’t pluralised with apostrophes but lower-case letters are. (So the plural of ‘R’ is ‘Rs’ but the plural of ‘r’ is ‘r’s’.) With numbers (written as ‘123’) it’s optional - IIRC, it’s more popular in Britain to pluralise with apostrophes and more popular in America to pluralise without. (And of course numbers written as words are never pluralised with apostrophes.) Acronyms are indeed not pluralised with apostrophes if they’re written in all caps. I’m not sure what you mean by decades.

      • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        By decades they meant “the 1970s” or “the 60s”

        I don’t know if we can rely on British popularity, given y’all’s prevalence of the “greengrocer’s apostrophe.”

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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    4 months ago

    This is hardly programmer humor… there is probably an infinite amount of wrong responses by LLMs, which is not surprising at all.

      • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 months ago

        Eh

        If I program something to always reply “2” when you ask it “how many [thing] in [thing]?” It’s not really good at counting. Could it be good? Sure. But that’s not what it was designed to do.

        Similarly, LLMs were not designed to count things. So it’s unsurprising when they get such an answer wrong.

        • Rainer Burkhardt@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I can evaluate this because it’s easy for me to count. But how can I evaluate something else, how can I know whether the LLM ist good at it or not?

          • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            4 months ago

            Assume it is not. If you’re asking an LLM for information you don’t understand, you’re going to have a bad time. It’s not a learning tool, and using it as such is a terrible idea.

            If you want to use it for search, don’t just take it at face value. Click into its sources, and verify the information.