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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#371

Post by satvikpendem »

gritspants wrote: post #365
satvikpendem wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how human progress works. No one can want or need it because they cannot conceptualize wanting it until someone shows that it is possible. Now, many of those wants become needs.

We can absolutely conceptualize what we want or need. I was born in 1980 in NYC. When I was a boy my father took me to a tech conference where they had a demo of ordering TV shows on demand. It was a miracle, to my young mind. Was this what I needed? Growing up I had a friend group of misfit boys, who discovered h4ck1ng and phr34king. But we also discovered slackware Linux on 3.5" floppies. We also had to discover AS…

You wouldn't have known about a TV had you not seen it. That is what I mean by, people generally can't conceptualize what they want or need until they see it.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#372

Post by dastapov »

simianwords wrote: post #50
Frieren wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people point at LLMs confabulating No. LLMs do not confabulate they bullshit. There is a big difference. AIs do not care, cannot care, have not capacity to care about the output. String tokens in, string tokes out. Even if they have all the data perfectly recorded they will still fail to use it for a coherent output. > Collapsing the dimensionality is going to be lossy, which means it will have gaps between wh…

[flagged]

Here we go. Would this do?

https://chatgpt.com/share/69d6cc45-1678-8384-bd9c-0f313021ff...

The correct answer in that the U and _ in the mdstat output cannot be mapped the the rest of the output by either position or indexes in square brackets, so you can't tell the exact nature of the failure from the mdstat output alone (for the record, the failed disk was sda).

So all of the "analysis" was bullshit, including "it's probably multiple partitions from multiple drives". But there are so many juicy numbered and indexed bits of info to pattern match on!

Notice how for the followup question it "thought" for 4 minutes, going in circles trying to make essentially random ordering to make some sort of ordered sense., and then bullshited its way to "it is sdb"

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#373

Post by [deleted] »

simianwords wrote: post #257
throwaway27448 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs with harnesses are clearly capable of engaging with logical problems that only need text. To some extent. It's not clear where specifically the boundaries are, but it seems to fail to approach problems in ways that aren't embedded in the training set. I certainly would not put money on it solving an arbitrary logical problem.

> To some extent. It's not clear where specifically the boundaries are, but it seems to fail to approach problems in ways that aren't embedded in the training set. I certainly would not put money on it solving an arbitrary logical problem. In what way can you falsify this without having the LLM be omniscient? We have examples of it solving things that are not in the training set - it found vulnerabilities in 25 year…

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#374

Post by gritspants »

satvikpendem wrote: post #371
gritspants wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can absolutely conceptualize what we want or need. I was born in 1980 in NYC. When I was a boy my father took me to a tech conference where they had a demo of ordering TV shows on demand. It was a miracle, to my young mind. Was this what I needed? Growing up I had a friend group of misfit boys, who discovered h4ck1ng and phr34king. But we also discovered slackware Linux on 3.5" floppies. We also had to discover AS…

You wouldn't have known about a TV had you not seen it. That is what I mean by, people generally can't conceptualize what they want or need until they see it.

Wants and needs are not the same. We are experiencing the difference in real time. AI does not give society a want or need.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#375

Post by satvikpendem »

gritspants wrote: post #374
satvikpendem wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't have known about a TV had you not seen it. That is what I mean by, people generally can't conceptualize what they want or need until they see it.

Wants and needs are not the same. We are experiencing the difference in real time. AI does not give society a want or need.

My point was not about the difference, it was about the fact that average people cannot conceptualize new ideas until one person or team invents it, then the average person will want or need it.

As for AI, I and many others want it, and some even need it, in certain use cases. Speak for yourself.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#377

Post by the_snooze »

simianwords wrote: post #315
the_snooze wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this in one attempt just now: https://gemini.google.com/share/b4e016be1f69 #8 has an incorrect answer (3 appearances according to Gemini, 2 according to reality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowl_championship_series#BCS_a... ) So it works well 95% of the time for literally a trivial use case. Imagine if any other tech tool had that kind of reliability: `ls` displays 95% of your files, your phone successfully se…

Hi! The challenge was ChatGPT but even then it looks like you used the weakest version of Gemini.

>I stress test commercially deployed LLMs like Gemini and Claude with trivial tasks

I did exactly what I said I did. I'm using these systems the way they're designed and advertised. I'm following the happy path with tasks that are small, trivial, and easy to check. This is the charitable approach. Yet the system creaks under the lightest load. If Google wants to put on a better show with stronger models, then they should make those the default.

You don't need to make excuses for shoddy engineering from multi-billion dollar corporations. And you're quite welcome to run the same prompt on ChatGPT and evaluate it on your own time.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#378

Post by NiloCK »

munificent wrote: post #173
steveklabnik wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you know, I deeply respect you. Not trying to argue here, just provide my own perspective: > Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? I write things for two main reasons: I feel like I have to. I need to create things. On some level, I would write stuff down even if nobody reads it (and I do do that…

Agreed, totally! I still write and put stuff online. But it definitely feels different now. It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time. It's not enough to dissuade me from contribut…

> It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time.

An underrated upside to being harvested is that your voice has now effectively voted in the formation of the machine's constitution. In a broader ecological sense, you've still tended to a public garden, but in this case your work is part of the nutrient base for a different thing.

Broader still: after the machines squeeze all of our inputs into an opaque crystal, that crystal's very purpose is to leak it all back out in measured doses. Yes, "some billionaire" will own the lion's share of that process, but time so far is telling that efforts can be made to distill strong, open, public versions of the same.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#379

Post by camgunz »

simianwords wrote: post #369
camgunz wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found over 500 examples that fit your criteria. Embarrassing you were arguing in bad faith this whole time.

They all use the tool search, no? Please correct me if I'm wrong. My criteria was using ChatGPT which explicitly allows it. https://arxiv.org/html/2511.13029v1 if you don't believe me. BTW this was your original point >Anyway, it's trivial to get pretty much any model to make things up. Don't we all know this? That's why I was surprised by your position; if we know anything about these things it's that they make thin…

I've got about 20 minutes in this; mostly I've been reading wallstreetbets at the Shake Shack bar in the Boston airport. I'm happy to post this over and over again until you engage w/ it:

> I found over 500 examples that fit your criteria.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#380

Post by [deleted] »

wat10000 wrote: post #207
arjie wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm being honest, I've never related to that notion of remuneration and credit being the primary reason to write something. I don't claim to be some great writer or anything, but I do have a blog I write quite often on (though I'm traveling in my wife's Taiwan now and haven't updated it in a while). But for me, I write because it feels good to do so. Sometimes there's a group utility in things like I edit a Google…

You do it as a hobby, that's fine. Some people do it for a living. And while they aren't owed a living doing that specific thing, it is going to be a big problem for them if they can't make money at it anymore. I'm sure plenty of people feel the same way about software. They make software as a hobby and don't care about remuneration or credit. Meanwhile I write software for my day job and losing the ability to make m…

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