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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: November 5th, 2025

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  • Everyone’s getting their knickers in a twist over nothing here.

    Of course an AI can track time, if it’s given access to a timer MCP server.

    Can we track time without tools, just in our heads? Certainly not very accurately. We can, however, track it reasonably accurately if given access to a quartz stop watch (typically +/-15 s/year)

    A language model is based around language and reasoning by words/symbols. It’s not a surprise it doesn’t have timing capability.

    What Altman SHOULD be embarrassed about is that the model lies about its capabilities. That implies that the context is still not right - it should be adequately trained and given context to prevent the lying. That implies a much more worrying issue - and something that Anthropic handles far better, IMHO (when asked if it can track time, if says “no, not on my own”, and then proceeds to build a JavaScript timer that it offers up to track time).






  • Busy, but good. Oldest got a couple of offers for degree places next year, so she now has some solid choices. Got a callback for the one she really wants, so she’s happy.

    All the (4) kids were part of a Stagecoach production last night - I swear someone was cutting onions in the theatre!! Got home late and lost an hour overnight so was in a rush to get youngest to a birthday party.

    Cleaned out my car, after getting a £90 quote to have someone do it. I wasn’t even trying to negotiate but I spontaneously started to laugh and said “if that’s where we’re starting, we are wasting each others’ time” and then left. £90?!?! I mean, yes, kid cars get rather mucky, but come the f*** on! I was expecting £30. Took me a couple of hours and now it’s as good as new. I would have accepted £15/hour but £45/hour is a good wage so I was happy about that.

    Landed a new job back at my old company (I joined a scale up turnaround and it didn’t turn-around, so lost my job and had to go looking again). It’s not 110% what I wanted to do - going back - but in this economy I know I must be grateful to have work at all.

    Also, my most rage-inducing pot hole in town has FINALLY been fixed. Only took the council 4 months. So that’s a celebration if nothing else.

    Hope everyone else is doing fine.