bnjemian

From Randy Baumgardner’s Wikipedia page:

“…a legislative intern, accused Baumgardner of sexual harassment in which he slapped her butt…”

You can’t make this stuff up.

Using a PRNG and a seed, you can have paeudo-randomness and determinism. The pseudo-randomness is the key piece, it’s random to the extent that it cannot be distinguished from true randomness in polynomial time classically.

I don’t find the recent spate of blog posts and systems delegating and combining LLMs to get better performance particularly interesting. Especially given that anyone who’s taken an ML 101 course has learned about ensemble methods.

While an LLM isn’t what you’d traditionally consider a weak learner, the theorems on learning systems clearly point to them being so in this context. The feigned surprise at combining them to yield better results seems disingenuous.

Even so, the work to predict which models are best suited for which task, how to delegate, and how to combine their outputs is interesting, especially if you’re placing a cost minimization objective on it. That said, this isn’t too far off from what many AI labs are already doing.

It’s a huge problem, but I’d caution against this absolutism — there may well be structure that can be created around and between LLMs and their outputs to enable the necessary segregation.

As a loose comparison, hardware bit errors happen probabilistically, yet they’re so rare that we can effectively ignore them in day-to-day use assuming no specialized application (e.g. defense, space, critical infrastructure).

LLMs aren’t there yet, but it’s entirely plausible that structures may can be developed to solve the problem, and those structures aren’t known or commonly conceived of in the present.

Okay sure, but what happens when a high CVE is discovered that requires immediate patching – does that get around the Upload Queue? If so, it's possible one could opportunistically co-author the patch and shuttle in a vulnerability, circumventing the Upload Queue.

If you instead decide that the Upload Queue can't be circumvented, now you're increasing the duration a patch for a CVE is visible. Even if the CVE disclosure is not made public, the patch sitting in the Upload Queue makes it far more discoverable.

Best as I can tell, neither one of these fairly obvious issues are covered in this blog post, but they clearly need to be addressed for Upload Queues to be a good alternative.

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Separately, at least with NPM, you can define a cooldown in your global .npmrc, so the argument that cooldowns need to be implemented per project is, for at least one (very) common package manger, patently untrue.

# Wait 7 days before installing > npm config set min-release-age 7

Would like to check this out when you're ready to share.

I just experienced this same issue with Gemini. I pasted a text message thread into Gemini (Pro, Thinking, Flash – all are affected) and it was misattributing dialogue. It said Alice said x, which Bob had said; it said Bob said y, which Alice had said. This was a two person dialogue and clearly marked with:

Alice: x Bob: y Alice : z ...

While the analysis was mostly coherent with the exception of said misattributions, I filed away the mental note that this misattribution error happened frequently in these type of exchanges.

It's funny because the author notes a prior attempt to uncover Satoshi's identity and giving up because an implied lack of technical depth.

I guess this time they were undaunted. Perhaps they received an AI assist and felt validated by AI sycophancy.

Much of the technical evidence cited is weak (e.g. strong knowledge of public-key cryptography, both used C++, etc.). Still, the (somewhat lazy) forensic linguistics is interesting.

Suspect it's a typo. 33, not 23, gives ~8.6*10^9.

This completely ignores that: 1. Russia was the aggressor in Ukraine, 2. Putin has made clear his desire to pursue expansionist goals through military action targeting prior members of the Soviet Union, 3. Putin regular threatens nuclear war with Ukraine, 4. Russia has shown outward hostility towards Western democracies and sought to manipulate elections with information warfare to reach their goals (most notably, 2016 US Election and Brexit), 5. Russian regularly cuts cables connecting countries, and 6. Though completely unrelated, Putin has a history of assassinating political opponents. That's wolfish behavior if I've ever seen it.