the big difference is the question whether people are taking the experience as fact or fiction. we all know that DnD is fiction, and that we play a character in it. if LLMs were treated the same, they would probably be just as harmless.
but are users treating LLMs as interactive fiction devices or not? as it looks like now they are not.
An LLM chat assistant is playing a role no matter what unless you think there is a real human behind it. They are role playing all the way down (and you can set up sillytavern characters for want to customize their role).
Similar issues are being addressed between reality and unreality. Did the person think they were talking to a real person? Did they understand the difference between fantasy or not? The people worries about DnD in 1980 aren’t very different at all from those worries about AI in 2025. There have also been lots of other things to blame for teenage suicide in between run and today, like violent video games or social media.
ChatGPT is marketed as a tool to assist with real-world scenarios like looking up information, vacation planning, and other non-fiction scenarios.
Why do you find it surprising to find someone may expect to utilize the tool in a non-fictional way or that someone could interpret it’s output as non-fiction?
It’s unreasonable to apply this bizarre standard of “it should be treated as fiction only when I want it to be”
but with DnD the worries came only from people who were not familiar with the game. the players all knew (and know) that it is all fictional. the worries around DND were easy to dispel by just familiarizing yourself with the game and the players. the evidence against LLMs is looking much more serious.
posting it on HN had the opposite effect for me. if the headline was "tesla cancelled contract to buy batteries" i would not have cared. the things that still confuses me is that this is caused by tesla no longer needing these batteries, but the headline to me reads like it is caused by the partner and tesla is somehow negatively affected by that.
dutch is a bit harder to understand. like some german dialects that not every german understands either, like swiss german, luxemburgian or friesian (also spoken in the northern parts of the netherlands), or plattdeutsch.
i grew up in austria and in the north of germany so i got an early appreciation for understanding dialects. yet learning dutch took me a few months of staying in the netherlands. on the other hand when i visited luxemburg people were shocked that i could understand them when they spoke amongst each other
Frisian is not a dialect, and is not usually spoken outside of Frisia (the Dutch province). In German Ostfriesland they do speak a German dialect with Frisian roots.
i was simplifying. the difference between dialect and language is fluid. plattdeutsch (low german) is also considered a language, as is luxembourgish. frisian btw is also spoken in nordfriesland (in schleswig-holstein) and there are a few speakers of saterfriesish which is the last remaining dialect of east frisian.
Yeah and already in 2025 it's quite common to be able to pay with a credit card in bars and restaurants too, which was almost unheard of a few years back. Of course these machines break all the time, and suddenly the business can only take cash. This seems to be a very specific problem that only happens in Germany.
train conductors are not controlling the train. that is done from a central (regional) control center that manages all trains of the region. only there someone decides where trains go or stop
Usually the train driver is in radio contact with central control and can request changes to the points, signals etc so they can make unscheduled stops. For example if there's a medical emergency on board and a passenger needs to be transferred to an ambulance.
Of course doing this can have ripple effects on other services, and if a common factor has severely delayed dozens of different trains, the central control room might not have enough staff to deal with dozens of unscheduled stop requests.
Also everyone complains about punctuality. A train stopping "nilly willy" somewhere it's not scheduled can very much cause exactly that in such a tightly scheduled system. So if you can, you avoid it.
Since we don't know "the other side of the story", we can't really tell. All people here see is the "I got kidnapped". If the story was written from the control room person's perspective, they might write a fascinating story about how they single-handedly avoided 17 trains being late by sending one train on a detour.
Would be awesome if there was someone on HN that knows if DB actually has the capacity to run a scheduling algorithm for their network within a few minutes, repeatedly, for many different trains at a moments notice. What kind of infra do they have for that, what do they use? With a large, interconnected, network that's tightly scheduled already that can't be easy.
OP was also unlucky in that he was on a regional train. They prioritize long distance trains usually as a regional train can more easily wait on a lower speed limit track somewhere than a fast long distance train on a potentially shared single track bottleneck.
making sure that your system is not exposed to the internet takes effort too. and then you realize you want to share something with friends or family, or access your home server from remote. you also want updates for new features too eventually.
There are different degrees of "exposed to the internet." You don't need to make your self-hosted services fully accessible by anyone from everywhere. VPN, IP whitelists, mTLS, HTTP basic auth, etc. change the calculus of security and feature updates. You can afford to lag a bit behind on updates because you're not running critical enterprise infrastructure at scale.
Pretty much every home router, network firewall, and host-based firewall is set to deny all by default, so the effort is mostly needed to allow exposure to the Internet.
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