Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still not as bad for the environment as animal agriculture, and animal agriculture is absolutely not necessary and only causes harm and suffering for taste pleasure. At least with LLMs we get many positive advancements from them. I don't see these sorts of comments every time someone posts a burger review.
Did I praise our animal agriculture anywhere?
A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
161–170 of 558 posts
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#162I am a physics professor and often use Gemini to check my papers. It is a formidable tool: it was able to find a clerical error (a missing imaginary unit in a complex mathematical expression) I was not able to find for days, and it often underlines connections between concepts and ideas that I overlooked. However, it often makes conceptual errors that I can spot only because I have good knowledge of the topic I am di…
I agree and put it this way: LLMs sound so convincing presenting you the work it does rose colored and promising to give you more if you keep going. There is a 50/50 chance that it turns out to be right or letting you jump of the cliff. Only the trip stays the same beautiful 5 star plus travel. Also, spotting an error and telling LLM makes it in most cases worse, because the LLM wants to please you and goes on to apo…
I was using Copilot and asked it a question about a PDF file (a concept search). It turned out the file was images of text. I was anticipating that and had the text ready to paste in.
Instead, it started writing an OCR program in python.
I stopped it after several minutes.
Often Copilot says it can't do something (sometimes it's even correct), that's preferential to the try-hard behaviour here.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#163Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#164Is the assessment system of undergraduate mathematics education no longer effective?
I don’t think it’s just mathematics. We don’t hear enough about this, but if I think back to my undergraduate years, which were less than 10 years ago, every homework assignment and every take-home exam I had would be trivial for LLMs to solve at this point I wonder what is actually happening on the ground.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#165I am a physics professor and often use Gemini to check my papers. It is a formidable tool: it was able to find a clerical error (a missing imaginary unit in a complex mathematical expression) I was not able to find for days, and it often underlines connections between concepts and ideas that I overlooked. However, it often makes conceptual errors that I can spot only because I have good knowledge of the topic I am di…
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#166The question that keep bothering me is can an LLM generate an idea that is truly novel? How would/could that actually happen? But then that leads to the question - what are we actually doing when we think?
Perhaps it's as simple as the ability to just make mistakes that matters, the same things that powers evolution. As long as the LLM can make mistakes, it's capable of generating something genuinely novel. And it can make more mistakes much faster than we can.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#167I am a physics professor and often use Gemini to check my papers. It is a formidable tool: it was able to find a clerical error (a missing imaginary unit in a complex mathematical expression) I was not able to find for days, and it often underlines connections between concepts and ideas that I overlooked. However, it often makes conceptual errors that I can spot only because I have good knowledge of the topic I am di…
I've been watching the automation of things like flight control systems for the past decade, and the evolution of the fallback to a real pilot in the event of a emergency is what's most concerning about where LLMs are being embedded. Right now, we have a lot of smart people who have trained for decades to understand where these things go wrong and how to nudge them back, but the pool of people are going to slowly be…
It is troubling. It suggests a plateauing of human understanding.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#168> "Even though I can motivate it in retrospect, ChatGPT’s idea to use h^2-dissociated sets to control relations of order at most h feels quite ingenious. As far as I can tell, this idea is completely original." The question that keep bothering me is can an LLM generate an idea that is truly novel? How would/could that actually happen? But then that leads to the question - what are we actually doing when we think? Per…
To me, it's rearranging the information you had in a way that hasn't been applied or published before.
That's literally what LLMs are built for.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#169Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs are at their best when you have an expectation for their output. I generally know the shape of the correct response and that allows me to evaluate it's output on it's "vibes", rather than line by line. If there's no expectation then I have to take everything at face value and now I'm at the mercy of the machine.
Exactly, if I generate a large chunk software, I'm going to have expectations about what it will do, how it will do it, etc. You don't just accept the statement that "it's done" for fact but you start looking for evidence. A scientific approach here is to look to falsify the statement. You start asking questions, running tests, experiments, etc. to prove the notion that it is done wrong. And at some point you run out…
Exactly - you need to constantly have your sceptics glasses on and you need to be exacting in terms of the structure you want things to follow. Having and enforcing "taste" is important and you need to be willing to spend time on that phase because the quality of the payoff entirely depends on it.
I recently planned for a major refactor. The discussion with claude went on for almost two days. The actual implementation was done in 10 minutes. It probably has made some mistakes that I will have to check for during the review but given that the level of detail that plan document had, it is certainly 90-95% there. After pouring-in of that much opinion, it is a fairly good representation of what I would have written while still being faster than me doing everything by hand.