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hnuser123456 commented on Training LLMs for honesty via confessions   arxiv.org/abs/2512.08093... · Posted by u/arabello
jerf · 3 days ago
Humans don't understand their thought process either.

In general, neural nets do not have insight into what they are doing, because they can't. Can you tell me what neurons fired in the process of reading this text? No. You don't have access to that information. We can recursively model our own network and say something about which regions of the brain are probably involved due to other knowledge, but that's all a higher-level model. We have no access to our own inner workings, because that turns into an infinite regress problem of understanding our understanding of our understanding of ourselves that can't be solved.

The terminology of this next statement is a bit sloppy since this isn't a mathematics or computer science dissertation but rather a comment on HN, but: A finite system can not understand itself. You can put some decent mathematical meat on those bones if you try and there may be some degenerate cases where you can construct a system that understands itself for some definition of "understand", but in the absence of such deliberation and when building systems for "normal tasks" you can count on the system not being able to understand itself fully by any reasonably normal definition of "understand".

I've tried to find the link for this before, but I know it was on HN, where someone asked an LLM to do some simple arithmetic, like adding some numbers, and asked the LLM to explain how it was doing it. They also dug into the neural net activation itself and traced what neurons were doing what. While the LLM explanation was a perfectly correct explanation of how to do elementary school arithmetic, what the neural net actually did was something else entirely based around how neurons actually work, and basically it just "felt" its way to the correct answer having been trained on so many instances already. In much the same way as any human with modest experience in adding two digit numbers doesn't necessarily sit there and do the full elementary school addition algorithm but jumps to the correct answer in fewer steps by virtue of just having a very trained neural net.

In the spirit of science ultimately being really about "these preconditions have this outcome" rather than necessarily about "why", if having a model narrate to itself about how to do a task or "confess" improves performance, then performance is improved and that is simply a brute fact, but that doesn't mean the naive human understanding about why such a thing might be is correct.

hnuser123456 · 3 days ago
Makes me wonder if one could train a "neural net surgeon" model which can trace activations in another live model and manipulate it according to plain language instructions.
hnuser123456 commented on Strong earthquake hits northern Japan, tsunami warning issued   www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/e... · Posted by u/lattis
somenameforme · 6 days ago
Math nazi in me really wants to point out that an event with a 1:1000 probability would be expected to be seen (> 50% probability) in about 700 years, not 1000.
hnuser123456 · 3 days ago
Heh, hence why I said 1-in-1000-year, rather than just 1-in-1000. Indeed 1:1000 would happen within 693 years with 50% probability, 1:1443 would happen within 1000 years with 50% probability.
hnuser123456 commented on GPT-5.2   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/atgctg
BoppreH · 3 days ago
That would be a laudable goal, but I feel like it's contradicted by the text:

> Even on a low-quality image, GPT‑5.2 identifies the main regions and places boxes that roughly match the true locations of each component

I would not consider it to have "identified the main regions" or to have "roughly matched the true locations" when ~1/3 of the boxes have incorrect labels. The remark "even on a low-quality image" is not helping either.

Edit: credit where credit is due, the recently-added disclaimer is nice:

> Both models make clear mistakes, but GPT‑5.2 shows better comprehension of the image.

hnuser123456 · 3 days ago
Yeah, what it's calling RAM slots is the CMOS battery. What it's calling the PCIE slot is the interior side of the DB-9 connector. RAM slots and PCIE slots are not even visible in the image.
hnuser123456 commented on The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered   righto.com/2025/12/8087-s... · Posted by u/elpocko
anyfoo · 5 days ago
Ah, lots of supposedly solid state computer stuff, including CPUs, did that. I, too, used it for debugging. This wasn't very conscious on my part, but if some whine became unusual and constant, it was often a sign of something hanging.

As I got older, not only did computers stop doing that, my hearing also got worse (entirely normal for my age, but still), so that's mostly a thing of the past.

hnuser123456 · 5 days ago
I had a Radeon 5850 that did it. I ran someone's simple test unity project with vsync disabled, was getting around 3000 fps, and heard a tone that was probably 3000hz. Supposedly the 5090 FE's are pretty bad too.
hnuser123456 commented on Strong earthquake hits northern Japan, tsunami warning issued   www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/e... · Posted by u/lattis
kulahan · 6 days ago
You are certainly reading something into my question that isn't there. I'm genuinely ignorant. I thought you were saying that predictions of a strong aftershock following an M8.8 were dumb, but the same thing following an M7.6 were smart. Is that not the case?

Again, sorry if this seemed antagonistic or something, I really am just unsure of what you were saying.

hnuser123456 · 6 days ago
A manga book published in 1999 randomly predicted a disaster in March 2011, which seemed to come true with Fukushima. The manga was re-published in 2021 predicting a M8.8 in July 2025, but nothing happened. This is the dumb prophecy part, it was not based on seismology studies, just a shot in the dark to try to seem prophetic again. Countless works of fiction are published every year which predict some future disaster at an arbitrary date. Every once in a while, one of those thousands of random predictions can be interpreted as coming true when something bad happens on that day, which retroactively drives interest in that work of fiction, and less scientific minds believing the author has actual future predicting power beyond the abilities of science.

A relatively major (but not M8.8) quake has now hit in December 2025. It is intelligent to expect there may be aftershocks in the days after a significant earthquake actually happens, which can sometimes be larger than the initial quake. This is a well-accepted scientific fact born out of large amounts of data and statistical patterns, not whimsical doomsdayism.

Fukushima's M9.0-9.1 was around a 1-in-1000-year scale event. The last time Japan saw such a powerful earthquake was in the 869 AD. It would be reasonable to expect one of that scale to not happen again for another 1000 years.

hnuser123456 commented on A $20 drug in Europe requires a prescription and $800 in the U.S.   statnews.com/2025/10/31/w... · Posted by u/geox
dyauspitr · 9 days ago
If you don’t have insurance, you’re essentially fucked in the US but this thread is not referencing that situation. My CAT scan was billed for $10,000 but what I paid was about $200 with insurance. Without insurance I would owe $10k.
hnuser123456 · 9 days ago
Why stop the conversation here? And if you don't have insurance but go to an ER (can't be turned away) and end up getting some expensive procedure you can't afford, you can just tell them that you're broke and they negotiate way, way down, or even just forgive it. And it's setup like this to ensure only people who have proper full time jobs or who can write a good enough sob story can get care. Because so many of the people in charge of this mess are far more obsessed with blocking out people they can't get enough data on or who aren't working, then figuring out reasonable public prices that make some effort to strike some fair market balance. So that if you have some savings and aren't employed, you are forced to find any job with benefits so you aren't left bankrupt, which makes taking care of health struggles harder as you have to work instead of take care of yourself.
hnuser123456 commented on Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025   blog.cloudflare.com/5-dec... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
Yeri · 9 days ago
100% — will never be automated :)
hnuser123456 · 9 days ago
Still room for someone to claim the niche of the Porsche horsepower method in outage reporting - underpromise, overdeliver.
hnuser123456 commented on The RAM shortage comes for us all   jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/speckx
Loic · 10 days ago
I think the OpenAI deal to lock wafers was a wonderful coup. OpenAI is more and more losing ground against the regularity[0] of the improvements coming from Anthropic, Google and even the open weights models. By creating a chock point at the hardware level, OpenAI can prevent the competition from increasing their reach because of the lack of hardware.

[0]: For me this is really an important part of working with Claude, the model improves with the time but stay consistent, its "personality" or whatever you want to call it, has been really stable over the past versions, this allows a very smooth transition from version N to N+1.

hnuser123456 · 10 days ago
Sure, but if the price is being inflated by inflated demand, then the suppliers will just build more factories until they hit a new, higher optimal production level, and prices will come back down, and eventually process improvements will lead to price-per-GB resuming its overall downtrend.
hnuser123456 commented on Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business   investors.micron.com/news... · Posted by u/simlevesque
freetime2 · 11 days ago
Crucial was always a brand that I associated with quality, and I used their memory to upgrade several MacBooks back when it was still possible to upgrade the memory on MacBooks.

That being said, the only SSD I’ve ever had fail on me was from Crucial.

In recent builds I have been using less expensive memory from other companies with varying degrees of brand recognizability, and never had a problem. And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.

hnuser123456 · 11 days ago
I also had a Crucial SSD fail. I believe it was either 256GB or 512GB SATA, around 2013-2014. Right around the same time OCZ released a batch of SSDs that were so bad they went out of business, despite being a leader in performance. It was a fairly large story about defective silicon. Good lesson in not being too loyal to brand names.
hnuser123456 commented on What's Hiding Inside Haribo's Power Bank and Headphones?   lumafield.com/first-artic... · Posted by u/rozenmd
mitthrowaway2 · 14 days ago
I think a lot of the quality issues described in the article could be fixed without substantially affecting the weight though, couldn't they?
hnuser123456 · 13 days ago
Say using 20% more electrolyte would prevent insufficient spacing and separation of the plates. You get a safer/higher quality product but it's heavier. And maintaining the same safety with less electrolyte would involve higher development costs. There's a sliding scale where something is just too cheap/dangerous to sell at high volume to a general audience.

Hopefully these high quality CT scans show the battery makers that people are going to notice when too many corners have been cut, even if there isn't a flood of reports of their product causing fires (yet).

u/hnuser123456

KarmaCake day1787January 30, 2019
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