LOL *NSFW* *The new Demote thread*

I keep getting backlink "data" press releases¹ from some outfit that has, apparently, assembled pricing data using a site called pricecharting.com. I can only assume pricecharting.com is an LLM or a random number generator, 'cos this is what they sent:



I had one a few weeks back from the same outfit with pricing for games rather than consoles themselves. That was just as terrible.

$991 for a Game Boy Color? If you're spending more than £100 you're being ripped off, unless it's minty boxed. $4,306.46 for a Neo Geo? One sold in February, boxed, for £385.20 - free delivery, even. Nearly $2k for a SNES? Pfft. £150-200 boxed. And so on, and so forth.

Even *if* the prices were right (which they are very, very much not) there's a fundamental flaw in their process: the "increase" assumes that inflation doesn't exist. Sure, if you bought a Panasonic 3DO in 1993 for $699 and sold it (somehow) for $1,589.25, you'd have enjoyed a 125% increase... except that $699 in 1993 dollars is $1,536.69 in 2025 dollars - 'cos inflation. So, actually, your 3DO increased in value by... a whopping 3.42%. Wowzer.

I've asked them nicely if they can stop sending me the output of an RNG and calling it data.

1: Backlink data releases are where a company gathers data and sends them to journos asking that if they use it they mention the client as a source and, ideally, add a link to the article. Backlinks generate traffic, but they also make sites look more legitimate to search engines. They're the lazy version of infographic releases, which are the same thing but they compile the data into a pretty picture instead of a boring table.

 

Are they not just prices adjusted for inflation? Sort of a "you think console prices now are bad..."
No, it's not. Ignore me, nothing to see, I'm not even in the book.

 

If you have Instant Answers turned on (which is different to the AI ******** they're doubling-down on, and has its own on/off toggle in the General Settings tab), you get the right answer no fuss.

 

Works for other "magic" numbers in other conversions, too. There's a simple reason, too: LLMs are large language models, not large number models. They don't work in numbers, they work in tokens - and the tokens assemble into words, not numbers. Oh, sure, some of 'em look like numbers, but they're still words.

The word "1250" is associated with inches in the training set, so it returns tokens which reassemble into an answer shape as though it were inches - regardless of what you actually asked for. Better still, it churns through way more computational resources than any other method of figuring out the answer... and still gets it wrong.

The Future!

 

Had a few AI things pop up in my feeds over the last couple of days, starting with the artist behind Kryptos - a cryptographic statue with an as-yet unsolved side - getting flooded by people who reckon they've solved it in a morning thanks to Delphic oracles AI chatbots. Spoiler: no, they have not.

A February study out of Stanford confirms what we all knew: the web is being choked to death by AI slop.

AI chatbots are completely useless at answering news-related questions, and the more you pay the worse they get. Big shout-out to Pedo Guy's Grok, which was wrong 91% of the time.

Oh, and their training data may have been poisoned by a Russian disinfo campaign.

"But," you say, "I only use it for code stuff, where it's obvious if it's wrong!" Yeah, until it bricks your system.

THE FUTURE!

 

You can also search LibGen directly... and you can download stuff too.