Other What Makes Your Life, Meh?

Trouble is, they were friends of my wife, from her aquafit group. She wasn't previously aware they were Jovo's. Usually if I answer the door to other Jovo's, I just politely inform them I am atheist, which is generally sufficient.

 

Last pair of Jovos (or Mormons, I never gave them the cance to tell me which) that came to mine did so while I was at work.
Not being in the best mood at the time, I just snapped "Religion is for the weak of mind!" via the video doorbell before inviting them to depart.

It's fun to surprise people who don't know video doorbells are motion-activated, especially the kids who try to sneak up and play "Knock down Ginger" on it.

 

So, they're yanking our chain and we get to be rude to them - seems mutually beneficial to me.

 

A couple of discussions at work lately have made me think a lot more about the general sense of discomfort and unease that’s been building around this job.

It isn’t a question of money. Sure - more money would be nice, but when is being paid more ever unwelcome?

I don’t feel valued here.

There’s an awful lot more I could talk about or point to, but that’s the core of it: I don’t feel like my skills, my contributions, or what I have to offer, are valued.

The fact that I’m trying to buy a house at the moment is very much working in my employer’s favour. But… sooner or later, I am going to get past that.

 

That’s… that’s not even “technically correct”…

10/10 for effort there, but 0/10 for actually answering the question…

Early last year I played around with local model inferencing, and I’m sure qwen2 was one of the models I tried. It was becoming clear that we were going to start using “AI-assisted development” no matter what, so I was still trying to gently steer us towards local inferencing… An effort that proved entirely in vain, because it didn’t take long for us to put all our eggs in Cursor’s basket and have that be mandated as our primary IDE… but I digress…

If I’ve still got any models cached by Ollama - and Open WebUI still works - I’ll give this a try out of sheer curiosity…

 

Strrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrawberrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry is the correct spelling then?

Huh, this AI is clever

 

I asked the same question of various models offered by Duck.ai (free). Most answered a simple 2 or 3, one, Claude Haiku 3.5, answered:

Let me help you count the number of Rs in the word "strawberry":

There are 2 Rs in the word "strawberry".

The Rs are located in the middle of the word: "st**r**awbe**r**y"

 

Copilot and Gemini are boring the just came back with 3.

 

Enough electricity to boil a kettle versus a few microwatts to do a simple countif statement and most are still getting it wrong!

 

The latest Windows update scared/annoyed the poo out of me by completely failing to connect to my TV after installation. Even a couple of restarts and a GPU driver update didn't help.

Left everything off for a few minutes and thankfully things are back to normal. Not what I needed just before officially starting work at home for the day.

 

Got curious and tried a couple this morning, including your very first example - I tried to stick to similar parameter sizes, but I have no idea what the quantisation was.

qwen2:1.5b:

Uhhh… sure… sure, buddy…

qwen2.5:1.5b:

qwen3:1.7b:

Ok, so, this one went wild. It “thought” for a solid 21 seconds before giving an answer - I’ll put it in spoiler tags to avoid clogging things up…

Spoiler: Wot qwen3 ‘thought’

“Okay, so I need to figure out how many times the letter 'R' appears in the word "strawberry". Let me start by writing down the word and looking at each letter one by one.

First, let's spell out "strawberry". Breaking it down letter by letter:

S, T, R, A, W, B, E, R, Y.

Wait, let me check that again. The word is "strawberry". Let me confirm the letters. S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y? Or is it S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-Y? Hmm, maybe I need to count carefully.

Let me write it out again: S, T, R, A, W, B, E, R, R, Y. Oh, wait, so the letters are S, T, R, A, W, B, E, R, R, Y. So that's 10 letters in total. Now, let's check each letter for 'R's.

Starting from the first letter: S – not an R. Then T – no. Next is R – that's the first R. Then A, W, B, E, R, R, Y. So after the first R, there's another R at the 7th position? Wait, let me count again.

Wait, the letters are:

S
T
R
A
W
B
E
R
R
Y
So positions 3, 8, and 9 are R's. Wait, position 8 is the first R after the initial R at position 3. Then position 9 is another R. So that's three R's?

Wait, let me check again. The word is "strawberry". Let me spell it out properly. S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y. So yes, after the first R (position 3), there's another R at position 8, and another at position 9. So that's three R's.

But wait, sometimes people might miscount. Let me make sure. Let's go through each letter:

S (no), T (no), R (yes, count 1), A (no), W (no), B (no), E (no), R (count 2), R (count 3), Y (no). So three R's.

Hmm, but I'm a bit confused because sometimes when you spell words, there might be variations. Let me check if "strawberry" is spelled with two R's or three. Wait, "strawberry" is spelled S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y. So yes, two R's in the middle. Wait, no, wait: S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y. So between the 'w' and 'y', there are two R's. So that's two R's? Wait, no. Let me count again.

Breaking it down:

S (1), T (2), R (3), A (4), W (5), B (6), E (7), R (8), R (9), Y (10). So positions 3, 8, and 9 are R's. So three R's. Therefore, the answer should be 3.

But wait, I think sometimes people might think that "strawberry" has only two R's. Let me check another way. Let me look up the spelling of "strawberry" to confirm. But since I can't actually look it up, I have to rely on my memory. I remember that "strawberry" is spelled with two R's. Wait, but in the word "strawberry", after the 'w', there's 'b', then 'e', then two R's. So yes, two R's. Wait, but according to the breakdown above, there are three R's. Wait, this is conflicting.

Wait, let's spell it again: S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y. So between the 'w' and 'y', there's 'b', 'e', then two R's. So that's two R's. But in the breakdown earlier, I had three R's. Wait, no. Let me count again:

Positions:

S
T
R
A
W
B
E
R
R
Y
So positions 3, 8, and 9 are R's. So that's three R's. But if the word is spelled as S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y, then between the 'w' and 'y', there are two R's. So that's two R's. Wait, but the positions are 3, 8, 9. So that's three R's. But how?

Wait, maybe I'm miscounting. Let me write the letters with numbers:

1: S 2: T 3: R 4: A 5: W 6: B 7: E 8: R 9: R 10: Y

So positions 3, 8, 9. So three R's. Therefore, the answer is three. But I thought maybe it's two. Maybe I was confused because sometimes people might miss one. But according to the spelling, it's three R's. So the answer is three.

But let me check once more. Let's write the word out: S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y. So after the first R (position 3), there's a 'b', then 'e', then two R's. So that's two R's. Wait, but in the spelling, after the 'e', there's an 'r', then another 'r', so that's two R's. So total R's are three? Or two?

Wait, if the word is S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y, then between the 'w' and 'y', there's an 'e', then two R's. So that's two R's. But the third R is after the 'e'? Wait, no. Let me parse the word again.

The word is "strawberry". Let's break it down:

Strawberry is S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y. So the letters are:

S, T, R, A, W, B, E, R, R, Y. So that's 10 letters. So the R's are at positions 3, 8, and 9. Therefore, three R's. Therefore, the answer is three.

But I need to make sure that I'm not making a mistake here. Let me think of another way. If I count the letters in the word:

S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y.

So the letters are:

S, T, R, A, W, B, E, R, R, Y.

So the R's are in the third position, then the eighth and ninth positions. So three R's. Therefore, the answer is three.

But I'm a bit confused because sometimes when I spell words, I might miscount. But according to this breakdown, it's three. So I think the correct answer is three."

gemma3:4b:

This was the smallest version of this model…

ministral-3:3b:

“The word "strawberry" contains 3 letters”, huh? That’s news to me…



deepseek-r1:1.5b:

This one also had a little “think” before answering, but this time it only took 2 seconds.

Spoiler: Wot deepseek-r1 ‘thought’

“I'll start by examining the word "strawberry" to identify and count all of its uppercase letters.

First, I'll look for any capital letters. The first letter is 'S', which is uppercase. Then, checking each subsequent letter: 't', 'r', 'a', 'w', 'n', 'e', 't', and 'r' are also uppercase.

I'll count the number of these uppercase letters to determine how many times "Rs" appear in the word.

Finally, I'll summarize the total count to provide a clear answer."

Wha… what…? And yes, “\boxed{2}” did appear in its answer, I didn’t add that and it’s not a formatting glitch…

Well, that was fun, I think I’m going to go and have a little treat now; we should still have a “Strawnetr” or two in the fridge.

 

Dear god, I'm guessing these things have been trained on twitter data?

It seems that mental

 

Methinks qwen3:1.7b might have been taking the piss, at least I hope so, or is it really that useless?