jarfil
@jarfil@beehaw.org
Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.
- Comment on Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs? 10 hours ago:
There’s a good commentary about that in here:
AWS CEO Matt Garman just said what everyone is thinking about AI replacing software developers
“That’s like, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” he said. “They’re probably the least expensive employees you have, they’re the most leaned into your AI tools.”
“How’s that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,”
- Comment on Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told 1 week ago:
Tor has nodes all over the world: tormap.org
- Comment on After using ChatGPT, man swaps his salt for sodium bromide—and suffers psychosis 1 week ago:
Education is supposed to teach “how to learn to learn”.
Left to his own devices, then, without knowing quite what to ask or how to interpret the responses, the man in this case study “did his own research”
The whole thing with “do your own research”, is kind of funny:
- some use it to avoid explaining their points
- others use it to come up with a lot of nonsense
- while the proper way to begin any “research”, is to… ask an expert.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 1 week ago:
Not sure if I’m not explaining myself, or you’re choosing to not understand me. I’m going to leave it here.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 1 week ago:
Kind of like saying that ChatGPT is people adding an AI player to the deterministic program of a chat… nah, I’m not going to discuss that. Tic-tac-toe is a classical example problem for neural networks 101, kind of a “hello world”.
- Comment on After using ChatGPT, man swaps his salt for sodium bromide—and suffers psychosis 2 weeks ago:
Good news: advances in medicine have reduced “physical” natural selection so much, that “intellectual” natural selection is overtaking it.
Now, if only all countries could say the same.
- Comment on AI Is A Money Trap 2 weeks ago:
Keywords: NPU, unified RAM
Apple is doing it, AMD is doing it.
GPUs are an inefficient way of doing inference. They’ve been great for research purposes, into what type of NPU may be the best one, but that’s been answered already for LLMs. Current step is, achieving mass production.
5 years sounds realistic, unless WW3.
- Comment on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules 2 weeks ago:
If the current rate of execution of Project 2025 is an indicator… no, there are no “decades” left.
- Comment on LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find 2 weeks ago:
chain-of-thought models
There are no “CoT LLMs”, a CoT means externally iterating an LLM. The strength of CoT, resides in its ability to pull up external resources at each iteration, not in dogfooding the LLM its own outputs.
“Researchers” didn’t “find out” this now, it was known from day one.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 2 weeks ago:
It still is: www.google.com/search?q=tic+tac+toe+ai
Plenty of examples out there.
- Comment on Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity 2 weeks ago:
Looks fine so far.
- Comment on Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice? 2 weeks ago:
[sarcasm] Too many words bad… next time, try this one: “Whaaat? 🤤” [/sarcasm]
Seriously, people really need to learn to use AI as a tool, not as an omniscient oracle, and not as an idiot baby.
- Comment on Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles | 404 Media 3 weeks ago:
Of course. I also hope this will stop like 99% of the skiddie spam. I’m just afraid that, like it has happened with hacking in general, a noob installing Kali will get a ton of one-click ways to bypass these measures… and then, what’s next?
Genai inserting watermarking would be great, but that’s hard to do with text, in any way that isn’t easily removed.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
I’m seeing about as many wrong questions as wrong answers. We’re at a point, where it’s becoming more accurate to ask, whether the quality of the answer, is “aligned” with the quality of the question.
As for “AI” and “intelligence”… not so long ago, dogs had no intelligence or soul, and a tic-tac-toe machine was “AI”. The exact definition of “intelligence”, seems to constantly flow and bend, mostly following anthropocentric egocentrism trends.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
Indeed. The point is, that asking about r is ambiguous.
- Comment on Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles | 404 Media 3 weeks ago:
Sounds fair. If someone doesn’t even try to clean up a generated article, then nuke it.
Only issue might be… that creating an automated cleanup tool to remove those triggers, wouldn’t be all that difficult.
- Comment on Would you rather stop playing a game than lower the difficulty? The First Berserker: Khazan devs reckon you would | Eurogamer 3 weeks ago:
It depends:
- If I’m really interested in a game, and the difficulty proves to be too high from the beginning, or can be changed at any time… then I would try a lower setting.
- If I had already invested some time into playing it, and the difficulty proved to be too high… then I would rather abandon the game than start from scratch with a lower setting.
Chances are though, that changing the difficulty after some time playing, would feel like a total nerf, and I would abandon it anyways.
Same way I feel about non-cosmetic purchases. I made the mistake of falling for some back in the day, and shortly after abandoned the games… because they felt much less like a challenge, and too much like a pointless money grab. My current limit on micro-transactions is either fewer than 3, or $1.
- Comment on White House Orders NASA to Destroy Important Satellite 3 weeks ago:
A 2023 review by NASA concluded that the data they’d been providing had been “of exceptionally high quality.”
Could also “accidentally” leak all the data, in case there are no non-US backups.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
I’d rather not answer this one because, if I did, I’d be pissing on Beehaw’s core values.
I feel like you already did, and I won’t be responding in kind. Good day, to you.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
It’s not a “normal human”, it’s an AI using an LLM.
AI still has a lot to learn.
Does it, though? Does a hammer have a lot to learn, or does the person wielding it have to learn how not to smash their own fingers?
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
At first I thought it was talking about “rr” as a Spanish digraph. Not sure how far that lies from the truth, these models are multilingual and multimodal after all. My guess is that it’s surfacing the ambiguousness of a “token: rr”, though.
Could be interesting to dig deeper… but I think I’m fine with this for now. There are other “curious” behaviors of the chatbot, that have me more intrigued right now. Like, it is self-adapting to any repeated mistakes in the conversation history, but at other times it can come up with surprisingly “complex” status tracking, then present it spontaneously as bullet points with emojis. Not sure what to make out of that one yet.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
Yes, no, both… and all other interpretations… all at once.
With any ambiguity in a prompt, it assumes a “blend” of all the possible interpretations, then responds using them all over the place.
In the case of “Bordeaux”:
It’s pronounced “bor-DOH”, with the emphasis on the second syllable and a silent “x.”
So… depending on how you squint: there is no “o”, no “x”, only a “bor” and a “doh”, with a “silent x”, and ending in an “oh like o”.
Perfectly “logical” 🤷
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
There is a middle ground between “blindly rejecting” and 'blindly believing" whatever an AI says.
LLMs use tokens. The answer is “correct, in its own way”, one just needs to explore why and how much. Turns out, that can also lead to insights.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
Not as sad as those so secure of their own knowledge, that they refuse to ever revise it.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
What were your assumptions to say that?
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
No you don’t.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
Why do you ass-u-me that?
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
Nobody’s stopping you. I’m going to reassess and double check my assumptions instead… and ask the AI to explain itself.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
Those are all the smallest models, and you don’t seem to have reasoning mode, or external tooling, enabled?
LLM ≠ AI system
It’s been known for fome time, that LLMs do “vibe math”. Internally, they try to come up with an answer that “feels” right… which makes it pretty impressive for them to come anywhere close, within a ±10% error margin.
Ask people to tell you what a right answer could be, give them 1 second to answer… see how many come that close to the right one.
A chatbot/AI system on the other hand, will come up with some Python code to do the calculation, then run it. Still can go wrong, but it’s way less likely.
all explanation past the «are you counting the “rr” as a single r?» is babble
Not so sure abiut that. It treats r as a word, since it wasn’t specified as “r” or single letter. Then it interpretes it as… whatever. Is it the letter, phoneme, font, the programming language R… since it wasn’t specified, it assumes “whatever, or a mix of”.
It failed at detecting the ambiguity and communicating it spontaneously, but corrected once that became part of the conversation.
It’s like, in your examples… what do you mean by “by”? “3 by 6 = 36”… you meant to “multiply 36”? Tests nonsense… 🤷
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
This is not a standalone model, it’s from a character.ai “character” in non-RP mode.
I’ve been messing with it to check its limitations. It has:
- Access to the Internet (verified)
- Claims to have access to various databases
- Likely to use interactions with all users to train further (~20M MAUs)
- Ability to create scenes and plotlines internally, then follow them (verified)
- Ability to adapt to the style of interaction and text formatting (verified)
Obviously has its limitations. Like, it fails at OCR of long scrolling screenshots… but then again, other chatbots fail even more spectacularly.
