Comment by hnarn

20 hours ago

I continue to be unimpressed by LLMs when it comes to creative work, they're certainly useful sometimes for "reference digging", but maybe I just don't understand enough about how they work and this is actually something that can already be "fixed" or at least optimized for; anyway, one of the headlines is:

> Debian 18 "Trixie" released

While it correctly derives that a likely version number in ten years would be 18, as there are new releases approximately every two years which means +5 from today's version 13, it then goes on to "make up" that the name of it would be "Trixie" -- the same name as the current release in 2025.

Debian has never re-used a release name, and I think we can be pretty confident they won't (as will no other Linux distro), so I would expect it to "understand" that:

- The next Debian release always uses a previously non-used Toy Story character

- Based on this information, _any_ name of a Toy Story character that hasn't been used is fair game

- At the very least, it certainly won't be the same name again, so at least make up a name

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hnarn

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SirMaster  18 hours ago

And the fact that it thinks it will take 10 years to go from Linux kernel 6.18 to 7.4 when it only took 13 months to go from 5.18 to 6.4... It's off by about an order of magnitude...

foxglacier  19 hours ago

From a quick check, Gemini Pro 3's cutoff date is Jan 2025, before Trixie's release in August 2025, so it could be Gemini actually did notice it should pick an unused Toy Story character.

Are you impressed now?

  • SirMaster  18 hours ago

    No, because the name Trixie was chosen to be used back in 2020.

    If you asked me after 2020 what Debian 18 would be called, I never would have said Trixie because it was known to already be set for 13.

  • exasperaited  19 hours ago

    I'd be impressed if a Debian release took less than eight months to develop, that's for sure.

    The name was chosen in 2020, which you can find out from a good old fashioned google search.

    https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTrixie

    So a much better explanation of this "hallucination" is that Gemini thinks all "future" Debian releases are called Trixie.