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LLMs are mortally terrified of exceptions

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Re: LLMs are mortally terrified of exceptions

#101

Post by grues-dinner »

muggesmuds wrote: post #92
m463 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why is a laser beam like goldfish? Because neither one can whistle." - Mike, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Fantastic book, just read it. Surprised no movie has been made.

The protagonists are libertarians with teenage harems, who fake an election and team up with with a sex pest. That's extremely reductive to the point of parody, but that will likely be the media coverage of it then moment someone reads the women and politics in the book.

If you completely excise anything too distasteful for a current-day blockbuster, but want a film about a space mining colony uprising you might as well just adapt the game Red Faction instead: have the brave heros blasting away with abandon at corpo guards, mad genetic experimenters and mercenaries and the media coverage can talk about how it's a genius deconstruction of Elon Musk's Martian dream or whatever.

Re: LLMs are mortally terrified of exceptions

#102

Post by pavlov »

muggesmuds wrote: post #92
m463 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why is a laser beam like goldfish? Because neither one can whistle." - Mike, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Fantastic book, just read it. Surprised no movie has been made.

If you haven't read Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed", check it out too.

It's like a fine wine pairing for "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."

Re: LLMs are mortally terrified of exceptions

#103

Post by mnahkies »

justatdotin wrote: post #71
chis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s always a danger of these foundational model companies doing RLHF on non-expert users, and this feels like a case of that. The AIs in general feel really focused on making the user happy - your example, and another one is how they love adding emojis to the stout and over-commenting simple code.

'over-commenting simple code' is preparing it for future agent work. pay attention to those comments to learn how you can better scaffold for agents.

They do seem to leave otherwise useless comments for itself. Eg: on the level of

// Return the result

return result;

I find this quite frustrating when reading/reviewing code generated by AI, but have started to appreciate that it does make subsequent changes by LLMs work better.

It makes me wonder if we'll end up in a place where IDEs hide comments by default (similar to how imports are often collapsed by default/automatically managed), or introduce some way of distinguishing between a more valuable human written comment and LLM boilerplate comments.

Re: LLMs are mortally terrified of exceptions

#104

Post by friendzis »

keeda wrote: post #96
bspammer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s the funniest joke I’ve ever seen an LLM make. Which probably means it’s copied from somewhere.

If you're an extensive user of ChatGPT, or if you can give it some material about yourself like say, a resume or a LinkedIn profile, ask it to roast you. It will be very specific to the content you give it. Be warned, it can be brutal.

So rehash of top comments in /r/roastme?

Re: LLMs are mortally terrified of exceptions

#105

Post by leumon »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #94
dgan wrote: post #93

I spent more time dismissing various popups than reading this post. I hate twitter links

Just add “cancel” after the x to get a viewable version of any Twitter link: https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1976082963382272334

Or use the 'privacy redirect' extension which lets you specify your preferred nitter instance. It also works for other platforms.

Re: LLMs are mortally terrified of exceptions

#109

Post by Hackbraten »

keeda wrote: post #96
bspammer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s the funniest joke I’ve ever seen an LLM make. Which probably means it’s copied from somewhere.

If you're an extensive user of ChatGPT, or if you can give it some material about yourself like say, a resume or a LinkedIn profile, ask it to roast you. It will be very specific to the content you give it. Be warned, it can be brutal.

Periodic reminder that there’s also HN Wrapped. [0]

[0]: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com

Re: LLMs are mortally terrified of exceptions

#110

Post by rsynnott »

comex wrote: post #46

This is a parody but the phenomenon is real. My uninformed suspicion is that this kind of defensive programming somehow improves performance during RLVR. Perhaps the model sometimes comes up with programs that are buggy enough to emit exceptions, but close enough to correct that they produce the right answer after swallowing the exceptions. So the model learns that swallowing exceptions sometimes improves its reward.…

The great Verity Stob (unfortunately, in an article which no longer seems to be online, after the Dr Dobbs Journal website finally went away) referred to this behaviour (by _human_ programmers) as "nailing the corpse in an upright position".
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