nostrebored

13 days agodiscuss

Oh I agree with you, it's just that I don't think LLMs are either. If you think of LLM knowledge, especially in scientific/engineering fields, as a lossy representation of the density of ideas, then you'd expect to see some weird behavior. I'm sure there is some sort of a temporal discounting and people thinking about this, but a naive NLL or Reverse-KL on medical literature would engrain some weird, wrong ideas.

nostrebored

14 days agodiscuss

Daily allergy tablets are associated with huge increases in early onset Alzheimer’s. Glad you found something that works, but might be good to get some of the allergen injections :)

nostrebored

14 days agodiscuss

I don’t understand the negative reactions. Medical care as it exists requires the doctor and patient to have their brains switched on. I’ve almost never had a problem where a doctor provides me with a diagnosis and I go about my day. Most of the times that I have, I’ve been confident about the problem and known what I needed. The doctor was a barrier to accessing care.

Dr. GPT is a good brainstorming tool. It helps synthesize information in a way that primary texts don’t. But it does force you to say “that doesn’t make sense”.

I do think that people saying “doctors don’t know the state of the art” have a weaker case. If you think about it in terms of token density during pretraining and how post training datasets are constructed, I think it would take us a very long time to adapt to any fundamental shifts. If we have forgotten how to cure scurvy, how many journal articles would it take before we adapt to a discovery?

nostrebored

14 days agodiscuss

Claude is the worst FM at image understanding. Prior to gpt-5.4 the only usable models were Gemini and Qwen.

nostrebored

14 days agodiscuss

But the binary classification models can be made ternary easily. RL on congruence plus penalty for misdiagnosis is easy to set up and gives great results.

What I’ve seen be the true bottleneck is people not setting up the structured data. But making a tiny reasoning model with OPSD -> GRPO is totally doable with a bit of money.

nostrebored

14 days agodiscuss

I think that much of the visual gap is because what to attend to in images is less structured. Anecdotally small qwen finetunes (ie less than 10B) take task accuracy from sub 30% on FMs to 90%. We have sold some of these for outcome based back office tasks.

I think we’ll see a lot of specialized VLMs that provide real value.

nostrebored

16 days agodiscuss

He made it happen by continuously using doomsday marketing to pump up model capabilities. This is the comeuppance.

There is a huge contingent of people who do not interact with AI on a daily basis. Many of them legitimately believe we're seconds away from wiping away white collar America. Many more believe that we are creating the literal singularity.

None of them have seen claude try to model a problem they're familiar with.

nostrebored

19 days agodiscuss

Well if you can do this then you don't delegate execution path derivation to the agent. The benefit is a predictable coherent world state where you understand the impact of { current state } x { action } without having to enumerate that huge cartesian product.

nostrebored

22 days agodiscuss

The leakage problem is so pervasive. None of the frontier models seem to have any idea how to actually hold out rows. God help you if you decide to change the data mix.

I was working on creating a next-n-actions predictor for one of our use cases and not paying much attention for a PoC. I was fairly happy with the progress for a few days, before actually reading the eval code and seeing that we leaked the final state in every eval.

It's nice to let claude run loose on porting from framework to framework (port my code from TRL to NemoRL to Tinker to VeRL) but looking at what it does in the intermediate steps makes me want to claw my eyes out. And getting it to adhere to our domain model (e.g. we have an SFTConfig and a .to_trl(), or a Row and a .to_harmony()) is impossible.

nostrebored

24 days agodiscuss

Building an ontology of how people think of and organize information, processes, and actions is not solved via markdown. It’s not well solved intra company much less inter. The systems that do solve some of this are optimizing for unstructured retrieval and will continue to.

Imposing a structure on this unstructured discovery feels like it ignores all progress in IR, and imposes a farcical structure that doesn’t have a tangible benefit.

nostrebored

26 days agodiscuss

I strongly prefer codex. Claude is annoying. Codex provides descriptions where I want them and more touchpoints to audit the quality of work. Claude code on experimental seems to not even show diffs when asked anymore, and it's much less clear what is being shipped.

nostrebored

26 days agodiscuss

But how many plugins are people actually using? I can think of one MCP server I find valuable (context7) and one plugin that i've installed, but continuously think about uninstalling (obra/superpowers).

Both were trivial to set up with codex.

nostrebored

30 days agodiscuss

LLMs are obsessed with “gates”. Freezing the gates here is intuitive to me as this point — don’t let validation drift.

nostrebored

30 days agodiscuss

But why does your agent control doneness? It seems to me the most odd part to delegate. All LLMs are terrible at it. Most LLM tasks can be expressed as a DAG or DAG of DAGs. Why delegate that to a random point in context instead of enforcing the flow?

nostrebored

last monthdiscuss

i think the reason for your deluge of downvotes is that a society the promotes more things becoming affordable is one that prioritizes stability. universal access to housing, healthcare, and education that people want is only possible in a society that is immensely productive.

nostrebored

last monthdiscuss

Do you not think that the allocation of human time is one of the world’s biggest problems?

nostrebored

last monthdiscuss

I don’t think you have ever actually lived in one.

“which plays on this general tendency of humans to prefer comfort over challenge, confirmation over rejection.”

This is completely and observably wrong. It reads like it would make sense, but the most ideologically open cultures I’ve seen are LIT.

nostrebored

last monthdiscuss

this is true of most actual clouds/neoclouds. oversubscription and intelligent placement of workloads is already something they do. I’ve known a few people at AWS who have offset unbelievable amounts of cost by optimizing placement.

nostrebored

last monthdiscuss

I've lived in a low information trust society and this was not the outcome at all. People trusted their local cliques much more, and there were local minima (e.g. a mainstreamish political party with leaders that are actively and dangerously anti semitic), but in general people were way more willing to engage with ideas.

One implication was people were more social and talked about ideas more. Thought had not been outsourced to arbiters in the way that it was in the U.S. People with authority, knowledge, and close family members were definitely inputs into what people thought, but by-and-large people still came to their own conclusions.

You got to see the gradient of thought that people actually had about issues. People would say their insane ideas out loud. You could disagree with people and have them actually engage with your perception of reality.

It was strictly better in my opinion.

nostrebored

last monthdiscuss

I've lived in low information trust societies, and they were much intellectually healthier than high trust societies, at least in the white collar communities I was in.

Moving there, I was shocked at how "conspiratorial" everybody seemed about everything. Living there, I was shocked out how often they were right. But it didn't impact people's likelihood to do things. I think they are actually orthogonal in a way that is unintuitive.

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