hoosieree

"the work is mysterious and important"

"send me your prompts instead"

The purpose of a system is what it does.

People don't respect the chasm between "obviously no mistakes" and "no obvious mistakes".

"You're right, that was your battleship. My bad! Would you like me to launch rockets at another target?"

Also water. You will be rationed, OpenAI will not.

https://www.newstarget.com/2025-08-02-texas-ai-data-centers-...

This should go without saying but unfortunately it really doesn't these days:

This kind of corporate behavior is bad and will end up hurting somebody. If we're lucky the fallout will only hurt Nvidia. More likely it will end up hurting most taxpayers.

0d (parked) - null program easy

1d (train) - easy. just one lever

2d (car) - hard. super hard. why is it so crowded? who thought this was a good idea? you let teenagers do this?

2.5d (plane at takeoff or landing) - almost as hard as car. fewer pedestrians.

3d (plane flying) - easy even with all those extra levers

I found building musl easier than uClibc, Xephyr, newlib, or (especially) glibc. Glibc is an Ouroboros of hacks at build time.

Array languages don't just have shorter tokens, they have fewer of them. A small token set is practical because your language's users can only keep a finite number of things in their working memory.

This constraint leads to symbol overloading. But careless, rampant overloading results in the same problem - too many things to remember. So you have to constrain your overloads.

With these constraints, if you want to design a practical, usable, general-purpose language (without forcing users to define every useful thing themselves), you have to choose composable abstractions. Prioritizing a single data structure (arrays) lets you focus your design effort and historically has good mechanical sympathy with the available computers, but there could just as easily be an "APL, but for associative maps" type language.

My point is "good terseness" comes from a holistic design approach, and simply making a bad language more terse will makes its flaws more obvious.

I ended up with Emacs and org-mode. One of my friends used Vim and Pandoc to the same effect. I didn't quite have to write my own tool but each new LaTeX template foisted on me was hours of work that could have been spent doing research. My impression after seeing my peers work with Mendeley, Notion, Overleaf, etc. was they looked prettier at first glance but didn't solve my problem.

Over time I developed the opinion that LaTeX is an unnecessary tax on scientific progress. It's insanity to keep using it when HTML exists.

Or a 4-hour workweek.

And currently trying in the US too: https://apnews.com/article/ai-regulation-state-moratorium-co...

They want to ban states from imposing their own regulations on AI.

AI also happens to be a perfect scapegoat: CEOs who over-hired get to shift the blame to this faceless boogeyman, and (bonus!) new hires are more desperate/willing to accept worse compensation.

I never before considered that a password generator could be fun. My mind has been changed. Now I believe they should be fun.

The error in this argument is that electricity is real.

They missed one:

    def agent(data, predicate, fns):
      ps = map(predicate, data)
      fs = map(lambda x:fns[x], ps)
      return map(fs, data)

Basically you want to apply one of N functions to each of the items in your data iterable, so you have a predicate to figure out which function to apply first. The degenerate case is when you have just 2 functions and your predicate returns a boolean (0 or 1).

This is "agent" from J: https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/atdot#agent

I like overloading most of the time but prefer specialized syntax for the various conditional idioms. Encapsulating it all in one keyword makes "if" harder to parse.

The main point I was trying to make is that adding the prompt "think carefully" moves the model toward the "riddle" vector space, which means it will draw tokens from there instead of the original space.

And I doubt there are any such hidden capabilities because if there were it would be valuable to OpenAI to surface them (e.g. by adding "think carefully" to the default/system prompt). Since adding "think carefully" changes the output significantly, it's safe to assume this is not part of the default prompt. Perhaps because adding it is not helpful to average queries.

My classifier is not very accurate:

    is_trick(question)  # 50% accurate

To make the client happy, I improved it:

    is_trick(question, label)  # 100% accurate

But the client still isn't happy because if they already knew the label they wouldn't need the classifier!

...

If ChatGPT had "sense" your extra prompt should do nothing. The fact that adding the prompt changes the output should be a clue that nobody should ever trust an LLM anywhere correctness matters.

[edit]

I also tried the original question but followed-up with "is it possible that the doctor is the boy's father?"

ChatGPT said:

Yes, it's possible for the doctor to be the boy's father if there's a scenario where the boy has two fathers, such as being raised by a same-sex couple or having a biological father and a stepfather. The riddle primarily highlights the assumption about gender roles, but there are certainly other family dynamics that could make the statement true.

LLMs can't hallucinate. They generate the next most likely token in a sequence. Whether that sequence matches any kind of objective truth is orthogonal to how models work.

I suppose depending on your point of view, LLMs either can't hallucinate, or that's all they can do.

Video autotune.

Apparently they can haul 50+ sheets of 4x8 plywood with the door closed (and without removing the seats).

In the sci-fi series The Expanse, there's a Bezos-style rich tycoon character who flaunts his wealth by purposefully not getting hair treatments and instead allows his male pattern baldness to be on display. He's so rich he can afford to not care what anyone thinks, and he wants everyone to know it.

Heard of the Jevons paradox?

I used to work with psychology researchers conducting experiments with wearable cameras. Anything involving human subjects needed IRB approval, informed consent, ethics review, etc.

But with essentially any piece of tech you use (not just FB), you check "I agree" on a document you'll never read and give the same data to a private company who will use it however they want. And they charge you for it.

Imagine if I told you a research organization decided to throw out all their ethics and start charging their research subjects to be experimented on, and that this was actually a really solid business model.

"Septic Tanks Pumped. Swimming Pools Filled. Not Same Truck."

The only entities unable to grasp the inherent contradiction between infinite exponential growth in a finite environment are bacteria and venture capitalists.

Yeah, my list of requirements for self-hosting starts with:

1. battery backup

That said, I'm not zealous about it. "Perfect is the enemy of good" and I like ecosystem diversity in general. Better to have a few dozen shared hosting providers than 2 or 3 monopolies.

Human, by a wide margin.