News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Claude Code Daily Benchmarks for Degradation Tracking by jmalicki on Thursday January 29, 2026 @02:51PM (#46815621)
For all practical purposes any code reliant on the output of a PRNG is non-deterministic in all but the most pedantic senses... And if the LLM temperature isn't set to 0 LLMs are sampling from a distribution.

If you're going to call a PRNG deterministic then the outcome of a complicated concurrent system with no guaranteed ordering is going to be deterministic too!

Re:Claude Code Daily Benchmarks for Degradation Tracking by gmueckl on Thursday January 29, 2026 @03:08PM (#46815860)
No, this isn't right. There are totally legitimate use cases for PRNGs as sources of random number sequences following a certain probability distribution where freezing the seed and getting reproducibility is actually required.
Re:Claude Code Daily Benchmarks for Degradation Tracking by jmalicki on Thursday January 29, 2026 @04:23PM (#46816812)
And for a complicated concurrent system you can also replay the exact timings and orderings as well!
Re:Claude Code Daily Benchmarks for Degradation Tracking by gmueckl on Friday January 30, 2026 @04:35AM (#46822359)
That's completely different from PRNGs. I don't understand why you think those things belong together.
Re:Claude Code Daily Benchmarks for Degradation Tracking by bonoboTP on Thursday January 29, 2026 @03:08PM (#46815856)
How is this related to overloading? The nondeterminism should not be a function of overloading. It should just time out or reply slower. It will only be dumber if it gets rerouted to a dumber, faster model eg quantized.
Re:Claude Code Daily Benchmarks for Degradation Tracking by joquarky on Thursday January 29, 2026 @08:23PM (#46819456)
Temperature can't be literally zero, or it creates a divide by zero error.

When people say zero, it is shorthand for “as deterministic as this system allows”, but it's still not completely deterministic.

Re:Claude Code Daily Benchmarks for Degradation Tracking by forgotTheLast on Thursday January 29, 2026 @10:22PM (#46820172)
Zero temp just uses argmax, which is what softmax approaches if you take the limit of T to zero anyway. So it could very well be deterministic.