I dunno, horses are pretty great.
What makes horses so damn good?
Readit NewsPessimalDecimal commented on What makes Claude Code so damn good minusx.ai/blog/decoding-c... · Posted by u/samuelstros
PessimalDecimal commented on Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back promptql.io/blog/being-co... · Posted by u/tango12
But as a statistical model, it should be able to report some notion of statistical uncertainty, not necessarily in its next-token outputs, but just as a separate measure. Unfortunately, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of effort going into this.
Even then, wouldn't its uncertainty be about the probability of the output given the input? That's different from probability of being correct in some factual sense. At least for this class of models.
PessimalDecimal commented on Shamelessness as a strategy (2019) nadia.xyz/shameless... · Posted by u/wdaher
A return to formality is the antidote, I’m afraid. As austere and priggish as it may seem. You may see brands and influencers emerging that gain traction with a kind of 1950s post WWII flavor of seriousness and formality. I’m not suggesting social conservatives. More the presentation and packaging of ideas and their purveyors. Formal instead of slovenly, polite vs obnoxious, eloquent vs simplistic, cultured vs vulgar, intellect vs spectacle.
The US isn't that society anymore. My brief trips to Japan and Switzerland suggests they may still be in some ways. But the US is fundamentally demotic and geared towards the lowest common denominator in nearly all aspects of life. Any attempt to reverse that will be a long and slow process, likely doomed to failure.
PessimalDecimal commented on · Posted by u/Jimmc414
"While Aaronson puts blame on Jewish communities in the U.S. and the U.S. government for not aggressively pursuing extraditions, she says Israeli authorities have also failed to prioritize the hunt for suspects."
"JCW says the problem reaches into the upper echelons of Israeli politics as well. They note that Yaakov Litzman, leader of an ultra-orthodox alliance in Israel's legislature and the current minister of health, has been accused of preventing the deportation of a Malka Leifer, a former head teacher at a Jewish school in Australia, where she is wanted on multiple charges of child sexual abuse."
Why is this uncooperative behavior tolerated?
PessimalDecimal commented on It's the Housing, Stupid ofdollarsanddata.com/its-... · Posted by u/throw0101c
Yes but the unique piece here is ratcheting up of ever increasing codes, zoning, regulations while grandfathering in the old housing. The people voting made their own houses illegal but then said their own houses were exempt. They've created an effect where the incumbents own housing that would be illegal for anyone else to create, which helps prop up their home value massively since it artificially raises the price of the substitutive option of building a house.
Solution: no more codes, zoning or regulations?
PessimalDecimal commented on GPTs and Feeling Left Behind whynothugo.nl/journal/202... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
The author calling them "GPTs" suggests to me maybe not keeping up with the state of the art.
Why? Are the currently available offerings not generative pretrained transformers?
PessimalDecimal commented on GPTs and Feeling Left Behind whynothugo.nl/journal/202... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
I find myself on both sides actually.
I did have some great luck producing quite useful and impactful code. But also lost time chasing tiny changes.
Overall, has it been a net savings for you?
PessimalDecimal commented on GPTs and Feeling Left Behind whynothugo.nl/journal/202... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
I've seen comparisons to gambling before (activating reward centers, sometimes it pays out big, etc), but couldn't find the article when I searched.
A comparison I've seen isn't to roulette but to a slot machine. Anthropic itself encourages its employees to treat its use for refactors as a slot machine. [1]
It seems like an idea worth exploring formally but I haven't see that done anywhere. Is this a case of "perception of winning" while one is actually losing? Or it it that the winning is in aggregate and people who like LLM-based coding are just more tolerant of the volatility to get there?
The only study I've seen testing the actual observable impact on velocity showed a modest decrease in output for experienced engineers who were using LLMs for coding.
[1] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/58284b19e702b49db9302d5b6f135a...
At this point the single biggest improvement that could be made to GPTs is making them able to say "I don't know" when they honestly don't.
Just today I was playing around with modding Cyberpunk 2077 and was looking for a way to programmatically spawn NPCs in redscript. It was hard to figure out, but I managed. ChatGPT 5 just hallucinated some APIs even after doing "research" and repeatedly being called out.
After 30 minutes of ChatGPT wasting my time I accepted that I'm on my own. It could've been 1 minute.
> At this point the single biggest improvement that could be made to GPTs is making them able to say "I don't know" when they honestly don't.
You're not alone in thinking this. And I'm sure this has been considered within the frontier AI labs and surely has been tried. The fact that it's so uncommon must mean something about what these models are capable of, right?
If that's the case, LLMs cannot replace these primary source summarizing clowns fast enough.
[1]https://nanda.media.mit.edu/ai_report_2025.pdf