Yesterday was apparently quite a day

[dreamshark]

Three slightly startling things happened more or less simultaneously, but nobody seems quite sure whether they were related or not. 

1. There was a HUGE solar flare. Or technically, 2 solar flares about 8 hours apart. 
2. A significant part of the worldwide cell phone network went dark, causing all sorts of low key havoc in the socioeconomic continuum.
3. ChatGPT had a total meltdown.  

#3 is by far the most entertaining, with the iconic AI app serving up nonsensical answers to ordinary queries, e.g.,

ensure that "sesquipedalian safes are cross-keyed and the consul's cry from the crow's nest is met by beatine and wary hares a'twist and at winch in the willow."

or just the eerily Shining-esque   
A synonym for "overgrown" is "overgrown" is "overgrown" is "overgrown" is "overgrown" ....

When asked later what could cause such strange behavior it suggested that it may have been suffering from "jumbled inceptions," "affected parts blindness," and "higher perplexity stoked in modules"  

I guess that's as good an explanation as any, but I'm still going with solar flares.

Comments

[minnehaha]

Alas, I have no account on the Daily Beast.

K.

[minnehaha]

But I definitely have affected parts blindness.

K.

[dreamshark]

Neither do I, and I could read the article. Maybe it's a "one free article per month" thing. If you're interested in reading more examples, just search on "chatgpt meltdown." It's pretty amusing.

[spiderplanet]

It's so poetic, it's too bad it's nonsense. Sort of like postmodernism, I suppose.

[pameladean]

I am very familiar with higher perplexity stoked in modules, I tell you what.

I knew about the solar flares because I keep half an eye on aurora forecasts, but until I went looking I had no idea about either of the other things.

I have to say, I like ChatGPT a lot better when it's out of its mind.

P.

[quadong]

As per spaceweather.com:

'CELL NETWORK OUTAGE EXPLAINED: A 12-hour outage of AT&T's network on Thursday interrupted cell phone service for tens of thousands of Americans. The outage coincided with a series of X-class solar flares from giant sunspot AR3590. However, the solar flares have been exonerated. AT&T did it to themselves. "Based on our initial review, we believe the outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network," the company reported.'

[dreamshark]

But it was not just AT&T, although they apparently had the most outages. Verizon and T-Mobile were mentioned prominently in the early news coverage before AT&T somehow seized control of all the headlines. And users of other networks were complaining on Reddit before the headlines even started popping up.