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Where the goblins came from

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Re: Where the goblins came from

#591

Post by wincy »

irishcoffee wrote: post #478
i_have_an_idea wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you substituted "steel" with "asbestos" in your argument.

Asbestos, lead paint, cigarettes, heroin(perscribed generously for basically whatever the doc felt like), "Radithor" (patent medicine containing radium-226 and 228, marketed as a "perpetual sunshine" energy tonic and cure for over 150 diseases), bloodletting, mercury treatments for syphilis, tobacco smoke enemas (yep that was a real thing), milk-based blood transfusions. Didn't understand those either and used the fu…

Smoking cigarettes didn’t really matter for as long as we were regularly burning wood for fuel. Turns out just burning pretty much anything and breathing in the particles is really bad for you. Makes sense we didn’t realize it was bad until we stopped burning logs and coal for home heating and cooking.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#592

Post by saltcured »

surgical_fire wrote: post #502
carlosjobim wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire industrial revolution was steel replacing human workers. And that is still the backbone of the world today. We are still living the industrial revolution. Just like the invention of fire happened ages ago, but is still a crucial part of life today.

No, it was actually engines. The mechanism behind engines were fully understood, any experiments with engines were reproducible and measurable. You could get an engine and create schematics by reverse engireening it. LLMs, useful as they may be, are not that.

See, now that was a good abstraction.

Centuries later, we still learn new tricks for predicting and controlling the chaos of combustion, but those early engines already wrapped it up in a black box that we could more or less ignore.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#593

Post by IAmGraydon »

vidarh wrote: post #109
postalcoder wrote: post #17

Would love if OpenAI did more of these types of posts. Off the top of my head, I'd like to understand: - The sepia tint on images from gpt-image-1 - The obsession with the word "seam" as it pertains to coding Other LLM phraseology that I cannot unsee is Claude's "___ is the real unlock" (try google it or search twitter!). There's no way that this phrase is overrepresented in the training data, I don't remember people…

Claude, at least 4.5, not checked recently, has/had an obsession with the number 47 (or numbers containing 47). Ask it to pick a random time or number, or write prose containing numbers, and the bias was crazy. Also "something shifted" or "cracked".

I just asked GPT 5.5 Thinking to choose any random 2 digit number. The result was indeed 47. Interesting.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#594

Post by Marha01 »

skydhash wrote: post #573
Marha01 wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe when I can have the same interaction as with my fellow humans, where I can describe the issue (which is not the problem) and they can go solve it and provide either a sound plan to make the issue disappear. I don't know what LLMs are you using, but frontier models do this regularly for me in programming.

Without prodding it along and giving it “hints”? And monitoring it like a baby trying their first steps? If yes, please give me the name of the model so I can try it too.

Yes, mostly without those things. I regularly use Claude Opus 4.6/4.7, Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT-5.4/5.5. For diagnosing and planning, I always use the highest thinking setting, perhaps with the exception of GPT, where xHigh is pretty costly and slow, so I tend to use High unless the problem is really hard. After the plan is done, for implementation I often use cheaper models, like Sonnet 4.6.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#595

Post by duped »

postalcoder wrote: post #17

Would love if OpenAI did more of these types of posts. Off the top of my head, I'd like to understand: - The sepia tint on images from gpt-image-1 - The obsession with the word "seam" as it pertains to coding Other LLM phraseology that I cannot unsee is Claude's "___ is the real unlock" (try google it or search twitter!). There's no way that this phrase is overrepresented in the training data, I don't remember people…

Short terse sentences. Never use commas.

Paragraph break.

No foo. No bar. Only baz and qux. All writing is like a bad tech blog -- with language that mimics humanity. Yet is alien.

The smoking gun is extra wording. Typically simple language. Dense in tokens -- shallow in content. Repeating itself ad nauseam. Saying the same thing in different ways. Feeding back upon itself. Not adding content. Not adding depth. Only adding words.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#596

Post by ethbr1 »

hirvi74 wrote: post #538
ethbr1 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, I always thought that Warhammer 40k techpriests were absurd. Strange obscure religious rituals to appease the machine spirit. 40k lore is like South Park: either extremely dumb or unexpectedly insightful. The Cult Mechanicus' raison d'etre is the realization that religion persists across time and space scales that knowledge alone does not. Thus, by making a religion of knowledge you better guarantee its preserv…

> Unfortunately, once you divorce doctrine and practice from true understanding, you lose the ability to innovate and cause the occasional holy schism/war. There is only one thing to understand. We are one with the Emperor, our souls are joined in His will. Praise the Emperor whose sacrifice is life as ours is death. Hail His name the Master of Humanity.

Feel free to call me next time your lights stop working, and then we can have a nice theological discussion before I choose to fix them. ;)

Re: Where the goblins came from

#597

Post by yesco »

collingreen wrote: post #564
yesco wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I believe we should only listen to amateur opinions on everything, experts simply lack historical credibility. For example I've recently purchased a healing crystal (half off) for only $5000 dollars! It cleared up the imbalanced energies my street guru told me about right away. I would never have been made aware about the consequences of imbalanced energies in the first place if I had asked an expert inst…

Ironically the street guru hucksters might have a better track record than the dangerous products mentioned above. Less charitably, it's a mistake to imply that simply being a bigger corporation makes you go from street guru to "expert". Bigger company trying to make money off of you at any risk to you is just the same bucket at a different scale. In this context the other side is probably "expert consumer advocate"…

I honestly agree with you in many respects, I'm simply spinning in some nuance to a topic I keep seeing.

The snake oil salesmen is productive precisely because the actual effects of the snake oil they are selling is unknown to the consumer they are introducing it to. There isn't easy answers to this, it's just a fact of life that we can try our best mitigate.

And apparently fish oil actually does help your brain. Weird world we live in.

So I think the focus on "experts" is actually a consequence of declining institutional credentialism. You didn't trust them for claiming to be experts, you trusted the institutions who called them experts and said you should trust them for that reason. But expertise implies competence not trust. Not everyone operates with good intentions even with the right credentials, including many institutions themselves.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#598

Post by deaux »

Silamoth wrote: post #517
krackers wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have frequently encountered the term in the context of unit testing and dependency injection. Other references (and all predate chatgpt): >Seams are places in your code where you can plug in different functionality >Art of Unit Testing, 2nd edition page 54 ( https://blog.sasworkshops.com/unit-testing-and-seams/ ) >With the help of a technique called creating a seam, or subclass and override we can make almost every…

For what it’s worth, there are many areas of programming where dependency injection is almost never used. Game dev, data science, and embedded systems, for example, rarely use dependency injection. It’s definitely most common in enterprise Java code and less common in Python, C, or C++. And even then, not everyone uses the term “seam”.

Isn't DI just most commonly used in (web) server code, and rarely outside of that? Now it happens that C and C++ have been a rare choice for such code for decades, whereas Java had the longest streak of holding the #1 spot. It almost certainly still is #1 in terms of "requests served/day" by a large margin, probably no longer is #1 for greenfield projects.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#600

Post by lwansbrough »

fragmede wrote: post #346
cultofmetatron wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

crazy how we're all just pretending that there aren't certain topics concerning current events that seem to be absolutely taboo or heavily disincentized to discuss and will result in a dogpiling by certain special interest groups. we all know who they are and yet we all tacitly accept it.

Current events? Ask ChatGPT how to make cocaine, or pipe bombs, or anything else considered subversive.

Ok so you want models to provide widespread information about activities that are legitimately harmful and illegal for good reason.

And that’s the same as censoring a country’s violent history to you guys?

How intellectually dishonest.

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