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Thin desires are eating life

joanwestenberg.com

281–285 of 285 posts

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

according to openai, the least likely model to hallucinate is gpt-5-thinking-mini, and it hallucinates 26% of the time. You're not so bad at hallucinating, yourself. We find that gpt-5-main has a hallucination rate (i.e., percentage of factual claims that contain minor or major errors) 26% smaller than GPT-4o ... That's the only reference to "26%" that I see in the model card.

I get that in the age of AI, you didn't want to read the data i linked; that's fine. your ctrl-f search found a reference to 26%. However, on page thirteen, the rate is described as 0.26; I interpreted that as 26% because it's cross referenced in the blog post that i also linked.

Posting multiple links and asserting that somewhere within one of them the reader will find confirmation of an apparently-absurd statement amounts to an attempted DoS attack on the reader's attention. It's not a sign of good faith. Obviously a model that hallucinates 26% of the time on typical tasks would be of no interest to anyone outside a research environment, so regardless of where the real story is found, it's safe to say it's in there somewhere. It's just not my job to look for it.

On some classes of queries, weak models will hallucinate closer to 100% of the time. One of my favorite informal benchmarks is to throw a metaphorical dart at a map and ask what's special about the smallest town nearby. That's a good trick if you want to observe genuine progress being made in the latest models.

On other tasks, typically the ones that matter, hallucination rates are approaching zero. Not quickly enough for my preference, but the direction is clear enough.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#282
Wow. Very cool to see one of Joan's posts here on HN. I have discovered his videos on Youtube half a year ago and every single time I think to myself "wow, what a banger". No idea if he uses AI to craft his scripts, but every single time I feel like he brings his arguments across extremely eloquently. Such a joy to listen to.

And of course one of the top comments is... shitting on the way this is written. HN never changes.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#284
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked my agent to rewrite this in a more traditional style, if it's helpful to anyone: A defining experience of our age is a paradoxical hunger: we crave more even when we have an excess, and we crave less while more accumulates around us. It is a vague hunger we often can’t articulate, a deep sense of wanting something fundamental. This is the essence of "thin desire": a craving for something undefinable and ultim…

To put it politely, nobody gives two shits about what "your agent" said, in case you were wondering why this was downvoted to hell. This reply adds nothing to the conversation, and it also doesn't take a mastermind to figure they, too, can paste the post in ChatGPT and get a summary out of it. Also, reading a summary instead of the sources butchers the post entirely. Hopefully you'll spare us the spam next time. Have…

It's not ChatGPT, try paste it into any AI detector.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#285
post #175
post #30

I think this article is really true, and I think a consequence is that people are really hungry for thick desires these days but they cannot put a finger on it. They notice themselves not growing, they get the dopamine hit they were looking for but it feel like empty calories. As a software engineer, I decided to build an app about side quests. Reading this article I realized I could not put a finger on what I was ge…

It bothered me that you called your self promotion nasty. Not sure why. You made something, i see no harm in sharing it.

I was being sarcastic, but I get your point
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