rahimnathwani
Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
Maybe in some cases, but not in this case with this agency (SFUSD).
The responses I've received so far from SFUSD (over several years) were each from someone whose whole job is/was dealing with public records requests.
One of the requests that was refused was for a Google Slides deck that was visible to all of SFUSD's ~10000 employees.
I sent a public records request to my local school district on March 9th 2026.
They responded on 19th March 2026 saying they'd respond on in late April.
Since then, every month they've sent an email with some small portion of the records, with a PDF letter saying they'll send a follow up a month later.
I've received 8 of those responses so far, and there's no indication when, if ever, I will have received all the records responsive to my request.
Bicycles are ridden on the road, not the pavement.
Sometimes people ride bicycles on the pavement, but doing so with a long piece of wood would be very dangerous indeed.
I'm skeptical about meta analyses in general because, the times when I've dug into a meta analysis and traced the conclusions back to the original papers, I've always been disappointed, and ended up not being convinced of the conclusions of the meta analysis.
Anyway, I haven't done that exercise for this paper, but I will say:
- Although the authors say they did a "systematic review and meta-analysis of 19 studies", only 12 of the 19 papers are included in the meta analysis.
- Only one of the authors read all the studies they included ("Study quality was assessed by 1 reviewer.")
- That reviewer was Lucy Corrigan, BSc ("Full texts were screened (L.C.) against the same inclusion and exclusion criteria (165 articles)...")
Here is the abstract of one of the 12 studies they included (and marked as 'Good' quality, the highest rating they gave): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19485565.2021.2...
Here is what they found:
Discrete-time hazard analysis indicates that the log odds of mortality were significantly lower among 18 and 19 year old adults ever diagnosed with ADHD and significantly higher among 46 to 64 year old adults ever diagnosed with ADHD, with a crossover occurring at age 33.OP says that LLMs were never scored against correctness. But that's an assumption about the optimization process.
This is sort of right:
- pretraining scores on next token, and says nothing about confidence
- RLHF and RLVR scores are binary (1=preferred/correct, 0=worse/incorrect) and the feedback doesn't do anything to push the weights in a direction that improves calibration/confidence
BUT you can ask the model to output its confidence, and then train it to be more correct. RLCR (mentioned in the article I linked above) adds a Brier penalty to the reward, so the model's performance isn't just measured on % correctness. (Presumably TypeSafeAI's RLCD is similar to RLCR, but they haven't published anything about it.)
This eliminates the "always say 30%" loophole OP mentioned. The Brier penalty, (q-c)^2, punishes a forecaster who ignores instance-level information. For example if we have a model that's right 60% of the time, it could use one of these strategies to give its confidence:
Strategy A, always say 0.6:
When right (60% of the time): (0.6-1)^2 = 0.16
When wrong (40% of the time): (0.6-0)^2 = 0.36
Expected penalty: 0.6×0.16 + 0.4×0.36 = 0.24
Strategy B: the model can tell its answers apart. Half are 'easy' (right 90% of the time) and half are 'hard' (right 30% of the time), which still averages to 60%. It says 0.9 on easy ones and 0.3 on hard ones:
Easy: 0.9×(0.1)^2 + 0.1×(0.9)^2 = 0.09
Hard: 0.3×(0.7)^2 + 0.7×(0.3)^2 = 0.21
Expected penalty: (0.09+0.21)/2 = 0.15
Both strategies are perfectly calibrated (60% is both the average confidence and thje average % of time it's right), but B gets a lower penalty. Of course these are not actual strategies used by LLMs. But I'm just trying to say why training can push the model toward optimizing instance-specific confidence.This seems like a weird statement given that anyone can issue certificates out of the affected CAs.
https://cf.metaaiusercontent.com/q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0
No one can guess that URL. The q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0 part is only ever shared with the Meta's server (protected by TLS).
Now imagine the URL is instead:
https://q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com/
The first step for my computer to open that link is to do a DNS query, which immediately shares the entire URL (minus the `https://` and the `/`) with my ISP's DNS server (and anyone sniffing traffic along the path, as DNS queries are usually sent in plain text).
2010-2019 I lived in China.
Before that I lived in London, where I was born.
My personal web site: https://encona.com/
Random tools: https://tools.encona.com/
Other random stuff about me:
- English is my native language, but I also speak (to varying degrees of fluency) Mandarin, Gujarati and Spanish.
- My career so far has been a mix of startups/cofounding, big tech (I was a PM at Amazon and at Google), and exec roles.
- I'm a qualified accountant (CIMA), have two undergrad degrees (one in CS) and an MBA (sorry!).
- I got married in 2012 and our son was born in 2016 (I spend a lot of time thinking about how best to raise him to be a capable and kind adult)
Email: rahim AT encona DOT com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rahimnathwani
X: https://x.com/rahimNathwani/