This matches my experience as a statistician who used to begrudgingly write bad code when I had to. LLMs have opened up huge new possibilities for me. No doubt there's some Gell-Mann amnesia going on, because I…
If you haven't tried a creatine supplement, I'd suggest trying it. 5g/day makes a huge difference for me in workout recovery.
Agreed. The concept of “don’t reuse your old work when you’re supposed to be creating new work” may be valid, especially in training environments, but it shouldn’t be called self-plagiarism or treated like plagiarism.
Perhaps an easier to intuit version of it is how full airliners are. An airline might report that their flights are on average 60% full, and that might be completely absolutely 100% true. But that's not what passengers…
I have similar feelings about TV shows. There are shows that I wish hadn’t ended after a couple of seasons, but there are also a ton of shows that dragged on for 6, 8, 15 seasons when it clearly would have been better…
Make sure to remind it to make no mistakes.
An LLM trained only on true statements will still hallucinate.
> Remember, the only thing that stops a guy with an evil god-in-a-box is a guy with a benevolent god-in-a-box, and only Antrophic can lead us to the second one – but only if we act together as a nation and ban those…
A highly publicized recent example: the author (of a book about genAI!) who doesn’t understand why he should be held responsible for the fake quotes he copy and pasted into his book from ChatGPT [1]. > I do not…
Fair. The concept predates Marx, but in contemporary thought is most closely associated with Marxism. The quote about silver from Peru is particularly striking to my ears. That’s a long and dangerous journey, and…
Labor theory of value is a Marxist idea, not an Adam Smith idea. Internet Marxists sometimes point to a passage in The Wealth of Nations to suggest that Smith also supported a labor theory of value, but this is—in the…
Doesn’t it? It seems in line with the matplotlib drama where the llm agent wrote a blog post attacking the maintainer for rejecting its pull request [1]. It’s not something that stock claude code would say, but…
Giraffes neurons can be up to 15 feet long. Blue whales are speculated to have neurons up to 100 feet long, though they've never been directly observed (dissected).
> For an example, look at some of Julia Mossbridge's work. Never heard of her but I just spent about 5 minutes looking. Her PhD is in communication sciences and disorders [1], but apparently she’s a quantum physicist…
> We expect our machines to behave in predictable ways. I expect LLMs to produce randomly varying output. Maybe it's the thousands of hours I spent doing monte carlo simulations for my PhD. > This is one of the best…
LLMs have a temperature parameter. At zero temperature they are deterministic: they always choose the most likely next token at each step based on what came before and the model weights, and they will always generate…
Please point to where in my initial comment I indicated that LLMs are human or reason. If you are unable to do so please withdraw your accusation of gaslighting, a serious form of psychological abuse, and apologize.
I didn’t claim that LLMs are people or that they reason. If the behavior of the llm is the same as the behavior of reasonable people then the behavior of the llm is reasonable, regardless of how black of a box they…
If you ask 10 different humans to produce the spec with the same information (prompt and context) they will also produce 10 unique answers that will contradict each other and (depending on who you asked) may be just as…
In STEM fields, yes. In humanities it’s not uncommon.
The goal of a PhD is to become a world expert in a specific topic, whether or not you’re planning on staying in academia. This may or may not be in alignment with the student’s goals, and many students don’t really…
> Does an approximation to pi therefore slowly creep in as you increase the sides on the polygon? Yes, under some assumptions. As the sibling comment points out, if there’s a single allowed angle theta then the expected…
> If I were hosting illegal malicious actors doing this stuff on my home servers and refused to even say who was doing it I would 100% get my door kicked down by the FBI. But some persons, corporate persons, are more…
I'm a statistician. My wife does basic (biological) science. Almost every time she asks my advice on an experiment I want to tell her to 10x the sample size. But the academic community has certain ideas about how big…
Also, careful breeding to retain as much genetic diversity as possible is important to avoid collapse in small populations. Even if small local pockets survive, if each pocket is only able to inbreed with itself that…
This matches my experience as a statistician who used to begrudgingly write bad code when I had to. LLMs have opened up huge new possibilities for me. No doubt there's some Gell-Mann amnesia going on, because I…
If you haven't tried a creatine supplement, I'd suggest trying it. 5g/day makes a huge difference for me in workout recovery.
Agreed. The concept of “don’t reuse your old work when you’re supposed to be creating new work” may be valid, especially in training environments, but it shouldn’t be called self-plagiarism or treated like plagiarism.
Perhaps an easier to intuit version of it is how full airliners are. An airline might report that their flights are on average 60% full, and that might be completely absolutely 100% true. But that's not what passengers…
I have similar feelings about TV shows. There are shows that I wish hadn’t ended after a couple of seasons, but there are also a ton of shows that dragged on for 6, 8, 15 seasons when it clearly would have been better…
Make sure to remind it to make no mistakes.
An LLM trained only on true statements will still hallucinate.
> Remember, the only thing that stops a guy with an evil god-in-a-box is a guy with a benevolent god-in-a-box, and only Antrophic can lead us to the second one – but only if we act together as a nation and ban those…
A highly publicized recent example: the author (of a book about genAI!) who doesn’t understand why he should be held responsible for the fake quotes he copy and pasted into his book from ChatGPT [1]. > I do not…
Fair. The concept predates Marx, but in contemporary thought is most closely associated with Marxism. The quote about silver from Peru is particularly striking to my ears. That’s a long and dangerous journey, and…
Labor theory of value is a Marxist idea, not an Adam Smith idea. Internet Marxists sometimes point to a passage in The Wealth of Nations to suggest that Smith also supported a labor theory of value, but this is—in the…
Doesn’t it? It seems in line with the matplotlib drama where the llm agent wrote a blog post attacking the maintainer for rejecting its pull request [1]. It’s not something that stock claude code would say, but…
Giraffes neurons can be up to 15 feet long. Blue whales are speculated to have neurons up to 100 feet long, though they've never been directly observed (dissected).
> For an example, look at some of Julia Mossbridge's work. Never heard of her but I just spent about 5 minutes looking. Her PhD is in communication sciences and disorders [1], but apparently she’s a quantum physicist…
> We expect our machines to behave in predictable ways. I expect LLMs to produce randomly varying output. Maybe it's the thousands of hours I spent doing monte carlo simulations for my PhD. > This is one of the best…
LLMs have a temperature parameter. At zero temperature they are deterministic: they always choose the most likely next token at each step based on what came before and the model weights, and they will always generate…
Please point to where in my initial comment I indicated that LLMs are human or reason. If you are unable to do so please withdraw your accusation of gaslighting, a serious form of psychological abuse, and apologize.
I didn’t claim that LLMs are people or that they reason. If the behavior of the llm is the same as the behavior of reasonable people then the behavior of the llm is reasonable, regardless of how black of a box they…
If you ask 10 different humans to produce the spec with the same information (prompt and context) they will also produce 10 unique answers that will contradict each other and (depending on who you asked) may be just as…
In STEM fields, yes. In humanities it’s not uncommon.
The goal of a PhD is to become a world expert in a specific topic, whether or not you’re planning on staying in academia. This may or may not be in alignment with the student’s goals, and many students don’t really…
> Does an approximation to pi therefore slowly creep in as you increase the sides on the polygon? Yes, under some assumptions. As the sibling comment points out, if there’s a single allowed angle theta then the expected…
> If I were hosting illegal malicious actors doing this stuff on my home servers and refused to even say who was doing it I would 100% get my door kicked down by the FBI. But some persons, corporate persons, are more…
I'm a statistician. My wife does basic (biological) science. Almost every time she asks my advice on an experiment I want to tell her to 10x the sample size. But the academic community has certain ideas about how big…
Also, careful breeding to retain as much genetic diversity as possible is important to avoid collapse in small populations. Even if small local pockets survive, if each pocket is only able to inbreed with itself that…