cjf101 (u/cjf101) - Readit News

cjf101 commented on I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs twitter.com/skdh/status/1... · Posted by u/ksec

MostlyStable · a year ago

My experience (almost exclusively Claude), has just been so different that I don't know what to say. Some of the examples are the kinds of things I explicitly wouldn't expect LLMs to be particularly good at so I wouldn't use them for, and others, she says that it just doesn't work for her, and that experience is just so different than mine that I don't know how to respond.

I think that there are two kinds of people who use AI: people who are looking for the ways in which AIs fail (of which there are still many) and people who are looking for the ways in which AIs succeed (of which there are also many).

A lot of what I do is relatively simple one off scripting. Code that doesn't need to deal with edge cases, won't be widely deployed, and whose outputs are very quickly and easily verifiable.

LLMs are almost perfect for this. It's generally faster than me looking up syntax/documentation, when it's wrong it's easy to tell and correct.

Look for the ways that AI works, and it can be a powerful tool. Try and figure out where it still fails, and you will see nothing but hype and hot air. Not every use case is like this, but there are many.

-edit- Also, when she says "none of my students has ever invented references that just don't exist"...all I can say is "press X to doubt"

cjf101 · a year ago

It's a weird circle with these things. If you _can't_ do the task you are using the LLM for, you probably shouldn't.

But if you can do the task well enough to at least recognize likely-to-be-correct output, then you can get a lot done in less time than you would do it without their assistance.

Is that worth the second order effects we're seeing? I'm not convinced, but it's definitely changed the way we do work.

cjf101 commented on A federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/zdw

shadowtree · a year ago

Consumers vote with their wallets that they prefer the big box stores. Reagan removed bargaining restrictions on big box stores, which lowered prices.

Bad or good for consumers?

Does it matter if you need to drive 8 or 11 miles (non-desert vs. desert) to buy boxed cereals and processed food?

CostCo rides the same dynamic, at scale. CostCo deserts?

Want to fix it, HN-style? Create a startup! But more regulation? Ffs.

cjf101 · a year ago

Not sure where you get 8 miles vs 11 miles (maybe the definition of a rural food desert?).

> Low access is characterized by at least 500 people and/or 33 percent of the tract population residing more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery in urban areas, and more than 10 miles in rural areas

(source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45014/30940_er... )

Interestingly enough, this is measured by the euclidian distance, not by the actual number of miles required to travel.

cjf101 commented on Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada cbc.ca/news/politics/tikt... · Posted by u/empressplay

joshdavham · a year ago

> "Most people can say, 'Why is it a big deal for a teenager now to have their data [on TikTok]?' Well in five years, in 10 years, that teenager will be a young adult, will be engaged in different activities around the world,"

I’m technically Gen-Z (but just barely) and this is something that really worries me. It’s become increasingly normal in recent times to share absolutely everything online but I’ve got a pretty grim feeling that this isn’t gonna end well. People don’t realize that the AI’s being trained on your data today will act as an internet history that you can never delete.

cjf101 · a year ago

One possible saving grace for Z is that, due to how expensive it is to keep around, video will probably disappear much more readily than text and photos.

cjf101 commented on ChatGPT Search openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/thm

fulafel · a year ago

Garbage-ness of search results is not binary, the right question is: can LLMs improve the quality of search results? But sure, it won't end the cat and mouse game.

cjf101 · a year ago

I think that's the right broad question. Though LLMs properties mean that for some number of cases they will either make the results worse, or more confidently present wrong answers. This prompts the question: what do we mean by "quality" of results? Since the way current LLM interfaces tend to present results is quite different from traditional search.

cjf101 commented on ChatGPT Search openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/thm

cjf101 · a year ago

If the current iteration of search engines are producing garbage results (due to an influx of garbage + SEO gaming their ranking systems) and LLMs are producing inaccurate results without any clear method proposed to correct them, why would combining the two systems not also produce garbage?

The problem I see with search is that the input is deeply hostile to what the consumers of search want. If the LLM's are particularly tuned to try and filter out that hostility, maybe I can see this going somewhere, but I suspect that just starts another arms race that the garbage producers are likely to win.

cjf101 commented on Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy medium.com/@jpolak/why-im... · Posted by u/vouaobrasil

Ukv · a year ago

CommonCrawl[0] and the companies training models I'm aware of[1][2][3] all respect robots.txt for their crawling.

If we're thinking of the same reporting, it was based on a claim by TollBit (a content licensing startup) which was in turn based the fact that "Perplexity had a feature where a user could prompt a specific URL within the answer engine to summarize it". Actions performed by tools acting as a user agent (like archive.today, or webpage-to-PDF site, or a translation site) aren't crawlers and aren't what robots.txt is designed for, but either way the feature is disabled now.

[0]: https://commoncrawl.org/faq

[1]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots

[2]: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthr...

[3]: https://blog.google/technology/ai/an-update-on-web-publisher...

cjf101 · a year ago

These policies are much clearer than they were when last I looked, which is good. On the other hand. Perplexity appeared to ignore robots.txt as part of a search-enhanced retrieval scheme, at least as recently as June of this year. The article title is pretty unkind, but the test they used pretty clearly shows what was going on.

https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-is-a-bullshit-machine...

It takes this sort of critical scrutiny, otherwise mechanisms like robots.txt do get ignored, whether willfully or mistakenly.

cjf101 commented on Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy medium.com/@jpolak/why-im... · Posted by u/vouaobrasil

erickhill · a year ago

Can we not put lines in our robots.txt files to block being crawled?

cjf101 · a year ago

There was a bunch of reporting on how AI companies and researchers were using tools that ignored robots.txt. It's a "polite request" that these companies had a strong incentive to ignore, so they did. That incentive is still there, so it is likely that some of them will continue to do so.

cjf101 commented on Why VR Games Still Haven't Taken Off spectrum.ieee.org/vr-game... · Posted by u/WaitWaitWha

cjf101 · 2 years ago

Anecdata, with a few exceptions, the VR games I tried were impressive as an experience, but not really all that fun once the novelty passed. The limitations of the format clash with the kinds of games that are being made so I often felt like the games were limited, or toy-like. I think the argument made by the article does hit on something about why VR isn't really getting accepted. The games are wrong: but they might be wrong because of the limitations vs expectations of the developers and audience.

The comfort issue is real too. Even with the fairly svelte PSVR2, it's annoying to wear those things.

cjf101 commented on OpenAI is good at unminifying code glama.ai/blog/2024-08-29-... · Posted by u/punkpeye

lifthrasiir · 2 years ago

I would say the actual difficulty greatly varies. It is generally easy if you have a good guess about what the code would actually do. It would be much harder if you have nothing to guess, but usually you should have something to start with. Much like debugging, you need a detective mindset to be good at reverse engineering, and name mangling is a relatively easy obstacle to handle in this scale.

Let me give some concrete example from my old comment [1]. The full code in question was as follows, with only whitespaces added:

    function smb(){
      var a,b,c,d,e,h,l;
      return t(function(m){
        a=new aj;
        b=document.createElement("ytd-player");
        try{
          document.body.prepend(b)
        }catch(p){
          return m.return(4)
        }
        c=function(){
          b.parentElement&&b.parentElement.removeChild(b)
        };
        0<b.getElementsByTagName("div").length?
          d=b.getElementsByTagName("div")[0]:
          (d=document.createElement("div"),b.appendChild(d));
        e=document.createElement("div");
        d.appendChild(e);
        h=document.createElement("video");
        l=new Blob([new Uint8Array([/* snip */])],{type:"video/webm"});
        h.src=lc(Mia(l));
        h.ontimeupdate=function(){
          c();
          a.resolve(0)
        };
        e.appendChild(h);
        h.classList.add("html5-main-video");
        setTimeout(function(){
          e.classList.add("ad-interrupting")
        },200);
        setTimeout(function(){
          c();
          a.resolve(1)
        },5E3);
        return m.return(a.promise)
      })
    }

Many local variables should be easy to reconstruct: b -> player, c -> removePlayer, d -> playerDiv1, e -> playerDiv2, h -> playerVideo, l -> blob (we don't know which blob it is yet though). We still don't know about non-local names including t, aj, lc, Mia and m, but we are reasonably sure that it builds some DOM tree that looks like `<ytd-player><div></div><div class="ad-interrupting"><video class="html5-main-video"></div></ytd-player>`. We can also infer that `removePlayer` would be some sort of a cleanup function, as it gets eventually called in any possible control flow visible here.

Given that `a.resolve` is the final function to be executed, even later than `removePlayer`, it will be some sort of "returning" function. You will need some information about how async functions are desugared to fully understand that (and also `m.return`), but such information is not strictly necessary here. In fact, you can safely ignore `lc` and `Mia` because it eventually sets `playerVideo.src` and we are not that interested in the exact contents here. (Actually, you will fall into a rabbit hole if you are going to dissect `Mia`. Better to assume first and verify later.)

And from there you can conclude that this function constructs a certain DOM tree, sets some class after 200 ms, and then "returns" 0 if the video "ticks" or 1 on timeout, giving my initial hypothesis. I then hardened my hypothesis by looking at the blob itself, which turned out to be a 3-second-long placeholder video and fits with the supposed timeout of 5 seconds. If it were something else, then I would look further to see what I might have missed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38346602

cjf101 · 2 years ago

This is, IMO, the better way to approach this problem. Minification applies rules to transform code, if we know the rules, we can reverse the process (but can't recover any lost information directly).

A nice, constrained, way to use a LLM here to enhance this solution is to ask it some variation of "what should this function be named?" and feed the output to a rename refactoring function.

You could do the same for variables, or be more holistic and ask it to rename variables and add comments (but risk the LLM changing what the code does).

cjf101 commented on Do quests, not goals raptitude.com/2024/08/do-... · Posted by u/zdw

jessetemp · 2 years ago

I think what’s going on behind the verbal sleight of hand here, is focusing on the process (quest) instead of the outcome (goal). It’s the difference between doing a thing and having done a thing. I might enjoy having written a book, but I don’t think I would enjoy writing a book. And I don’t think calling it a quest instead of a goal would make much difference

cjf101 · 2 years ago

Another way I've encountered this is performance vs results. Performance is the things you do that you believe will lead to results. Results aren't always in your control (especially in competitive environments), but performance absolutely is. It's a lot easier to feel you are getting somewhere when you focus on things that you control.