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That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#101

Post by Legend2440 »

SirFatty wrote: post #27
tptacek wrote: post #8

There's really no content in this post other than the claim that LLMs are stochastic parrots. That was a live debate two years ago. It's a very strange thing to write in 2026.

Why is it strange? It's still true.

Just this week an LLM found a counterexample to math problem that's been widely studied for over a century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture

>The conjecture was first stated for two variables by Ludwig Kraus in 1884[1] and then stated in full generality in 1939 by Ott-Heinrich Keller.[2] It was subsequently widely publicized by Shreeram Abhyankar,[3] as an example of a difficult question in algebraic geometry that can be understood using little beyond a knowledge of calculus.

>The Jacobian conjecture was notorious for the large number of published and unpublished proofs that turned out to contain subtle errors.[4][5]

>On July 19, 2026, Anthropic employee and mathematician Levent Alpöge presented an explicit counterexample in three-dimensional space, discovered by Anthropic's large language model Claude Fable 5, which disproves the conjecture for n > 2

If that won't convince you that LLMs do more than parrot existing ideas, you've got your head in the sand.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#102

Post by WorldMaker »

grey-area wrote: post #6

> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them. A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would. Surely if the machine you go to for answers…

> Surely if the machine you go to for answers regularly makes things up you would just stop using it? Perhaps people have to be burned by something really bad personally before they realise the limitations? LLMs are very convincing and persuasive.

The last sentence reflects a lot of my feelings on the first question. LLMs have a sort of weaponized take on the ELIZA Effect. The better their memory the better they are at playing to human social desires to be listened to in an active conversation. At some point it stops mattering if the answers are right when the answers feel right, but really, like ELIZA back in the day, so much of what makes it seem special is just reflecting your own writing back at you in a convincing and persuasive way.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#103

Post by cwillu »

cwillu wrote: post #64
undersuit wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you all think its regularly hallucinating links still? When did that stop? May 7th, 2026?

A tech blog is going to have more than it's fair share of enthusiasts using small self-hosted and similar models; it is entirely possible that that completely accounts for the behaviour described in the article.

Downvotes on a perfectly valid comment is like my opponent letting their clock tick down from 5 minutes rather than resigning when they've clearly lost: it adds a smile to my day.

Thank you, may I have another?

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#104

Post by giaour »

Legend2440 wrote: post #97
quirkot wrote: post #93

> Thus, anyone who wants to corral that kind of entity and make it do their bidding? Yeah, they want slaves. That's the horror buried underneath all the tech, policy, and gloss. The real, animal brain, desire that drives most of this is: I'd like a slave I don't have to feel bad about.

Oh, that's bs. You could say that about the tractor, or the mechanical loom, or any of the other incredible labor-saving inventions over the last two hundred years. We want things to do our work for us so we can do other things. That's not bad, and it's certainly not the same as literally enslaving another human .

Many are openly working to create AGI with the aim of harnessing it to solve humanity's problems. Do you really think being able to command an entity with human-level intelligence would be morally equivalent to using a tractor?

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#105

Post by Legend2440 »

giaour wrote: post #104
Legend2440 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's bs. You could say that about the tractor, or the mechanical loom, or any of the other incredible labor-saving inventions over the last two hundred years. We want things to do our work for us so we can do other things. That's not bad, and it's certainly not the same as literally enslaving another human .

Many are openly working to create AGI with the aim of harnessing it to solve humanity's problems. Do you really think being able to command an entity with human-level intelligence would be morally equivalent to using a tractor?

It's just a computer program dude. It doesn't have feelings or morals or consciousness.

It's a really complex machine, but it's still a machine.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#106

Post by lloeki »

Legend2440 wrote: post #101
SirFatty wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it strange? It's still true.

Just this week an LLM found a counterexample to math problem that's been widely studied for over a century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture >The conjecture was first stated for two variables by Ludwig Kraus in 1884[1] and then stated in full generality in 1939 by Ott-Heinrich Keller.[2] It was subsequently widely publicized by Shreeram Abhyankar,[3] as an example of a difficult question in algebraic…

> If that won't convince you that LLMs do more than parrot existing ideas, you've got your head in the sand.

It doesn't.

In a nearby comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983413

> In mathematics (including information science, CS) there are all sorts of problems that are essentially searches for a solution, and many have the property that the search is computationally difficult, but verifying the solution is relatively cheap. E.g. finding integers such that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 isn't easy, but given a claim that some proposed satisfies this equation is easy to check. The LLM is like that: it solves a search problem that can be fairly hard.

Funnily enough, one of the attempted solves in the litterature is exploring the problem space in two-dimensional space; the LLM found one in three-dimensional space.

So far we know very little as to why and how it found the solution.

It may very well have been directed to brute force 3D space, or even "elected" to" by expanding the known-failed 2D approach to 3D as pure mimicry.

> It does so unreliably, but if you can cheaply verify the solution, there is a win there.

This circles back to what the LLM advocates are pushing for: build the harness that keeps the agent in check, guardrails all the way because it's driving like a demolition derby.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#107

Post by Legend2440 »

lloeki wrote: post #106
Legend2440 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just this week an LLM found a counterexample to math problem that's been widely studied for over a century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture >The conjecture was first stated for two variables by Ludwig Kraus in 1884[1] and then stated in full generality in 1939 by Ott-Heinrich Keller.[2] It was subsequently widely publicized by Shreeram Abhyankar,[3] as an example of a difficult question in algebraic…

> If that won't convince you that LLMs do more than parrot existing ideas, you've got your head in the sand. It doesn't. In a nearby comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983413 > In mathematics (including information science, CS) there are all sorts of problems that are essentially searches for a solution, and many have the property that the search is computationally difficult, but verifying the solution i…

You do indeed have your head in the sand, that's for sure.

You are desperately searching for ways to excuse it, to explain how it can't be what it obviously is.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#108

Post by decimalenough »

orev wrote: post #68
senkora wrote: post #3

> It's early in the year. You want to drive straight through the middle of Chinatown in SF. Why might that be a bad idea? I feel like a Google Maps-style system would discover this automatically by noting via phone location data that there is heavy traffic in Chinatown. (I do get the author’s point, but I think that factually this example would not be a problem)

Maps apps see the streets that don’t have cars on them (the same ones closed for a festival) as good routes to send vehicles because there’s currently no vehicles using them. It keeps trying to route people there and doesn’t understand why. I think it takes someone (at Google) manually marking those roads as unavailable before it will stop trying. I’ve seen it happen with other things too, like if a highway is closed…

That's not how it works. Maps will see that the average speed of cars around Chinatown has slowed to a crawl, and it will route drivers elsewhere. They also get lists of planned closures from local traffic agencies, and you'll see these clearly displayed in black and red with little stop signs. (The quality of this data obviously varies wildly though.)

Accidents on highways are a different story because there are rarely any alternatives, or if there are, they're so much slower that it still makes sense to suffer through the 30 min jam.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#109

Post by JeremyNT »

grey-area wrote: post #6

> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them. A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would. Surely if the machine you go to for answers…

> A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would.

I feel like the most pragmatic perspective is "trust but verify."

This is why they're so effective at coding: you can run the code yourself (or the test suite) to verify that it actually does what it's supposed to.

And maybe these people finding hallucinated results on Rachel's site are doing verification too.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#110

Post by happymellon »

grey-area wrote: post #6

> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them. A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would. Surely if the machine you go to for answers…

> Surely if the machine you go to for answers regularly makes things up you would just stop using it?

We live in hope that people stop doing stupid things and are constantly disappointed.

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