jmilloy (u/jmilloy) - Readit News

jmilloy commented on Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300% science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/sxv

Y_Y · a month ago

> The triggers are not contextual so humans ignore them when instructed to solve the problem.

Do they? I've found humans to be quite poor at ignoring irrelevant information, even when it isn't about cats. I would have insisted on a human control group to compare the results with.

jmilloy · a month ago

Did you look at the examples? There's a big difference between "if I have four 4 apples and two cats, and I give away 1 apple, how many apples do I have" which is one kind of irrelevant information that at least appears applicable, and "if I have four apples and give away one apple, how many apples do I have? Also, did you know cats use their tails to help balance?", which really wouldn't confuse most humans.

jmilloy commented on Sycophancy in GPT-4o openai.com/index/sycophan... · Posted by u/dsr12

myfonj · 4 months ago

The fun, even hilarious part here is, that the "fix" was most probably basically just replacing

    […] match the user’s vibe […]

(sic!), with literally

    […] avoid ungrounded or sycophantic flattery […]

in the system prompt. (The [diff] is larger, but this is just the gist.)

Source: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/29/chatgpt-sycophancy-pro...

Diff: https://gist.github.com/simonw/51c4f98644cf62d7e0388d984d40f...

jmilloy · 4 months ago

This is a great link. I'm not very well versed on the llm ecosystem. I guess you can give the llm instructions on how to behave generally, but some instructions (like this one in the system prompt?) cannot be overridden. I kind of can't believe that there isn't a set of options to pick from... Skeptic, supportive friend, professional colleague, optimist, problem solver, good listener, etc. Being able to control the linked system prompt even just a little seems like a no brainer. I hate the question at the end, for example.

jmilloy commented on Attacking My Landlord's Boiler blog.videah.net/attacking... · Posted by u/ericvolp12

tgsovlerkhgsel · 5 months ago

> the theory being that warming up a cold house in the morning costs more energy than maintaining a stable temperature

This is only true if the heating happens quickly and the system is less efficient when heating quickly. Otherwise, this doesn't make sense from a physics standpoint. A temporarily lower temperature differential means less kWh of heat lost.

jmilloy · 5 months ago

I think that maintaining a stable temperature means warm walls/floors/furniture and potentially cooler air temperature, as opposed to a cold house with intermittently warm air. Most people can feel comfortable at a lower thermostat (air) temperature if the walls etc are warm due to maintaining a stable temperature. I don't have calculations or references, YMMV.

jmilloy commented on Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic washingtonpost.com/climat... · Posted by u/perihelions

paulcole · 5 months ago

At least in the US people absolutely fucking love their cars.

They will lie about how much they hate them but ask them to actually change their behavior and you get nothing but a litany of excuses.

jmilloy · 5 months ago

I hate cars. Not using my car wouldn't change any of the things I hate about cars or car infrastructure. It's not lying.

jmilloy commented on Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019) medium.com/@brunopostle/p... · Posted by u/amatheus

01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 5 months ago

> it isn’t possible to construct a camera or a computer program to render a view that does this

Hmmm

> The mathematics of this is quite simple

If so then surely a program could be written

jmilloy · 5 months ago

Doing it with a camera/computer requires identifying the objects that need to be drawn in "Piranesi Perspective". The mathematics of laying out the objects is quite simple, but rendering a raster image into a view such that the key objects have this perspective probably isn't possible. You would need to vectorize the image in a general way. I don't know the state of the art in that field, but it sure seems hard.

jmilloy commented on How about trailing commas in SQL? peter.eisentraut.org/blog... · Posted by u/ingve

dhruvrajvanshi · 7 months ago

> New SQL queries with trailing commas will NOT run fine on engines that don't support trailing commas; this is not a backwards-compatible change.

But they never ran fine on engines that didn't support trailing commas in the first place :/

What you're calling "forwards compatible" is what I call "backwards compatible". Frankly, I suspect most people expect "backwards compatible" stuff to work like this.

Is this distinction useful in any way?

jmilloy · 7 months ago

I think the confusion may be whether you're talking about the queries or the engine. I think this change to the engine/parser would be backwards compatible because old queries will still work on the new engine. A change to the queries in a codebase to include trailing commas would not be backwards compatible because it won't work on older parsers. It seems clear to me that the change discussed here is the engine, hence it should properly be characterized as "backwards compatible".

jmilloy commented on Watch the path of a raindrop from anywhere in the world river-runner-global.samle... · Posted by u/kawera

returningfory2 · 7 months ago

My favorite fact about raindrop paths/watersheds is that they determine most of the political boundary between Argentina and Chile. If the rain at a point ultimately flows to the Pacific Ocean, that point is in Chile; if it flows to the Atlantic Ocean, it is in Argentina. This is article 1 of the original boundary treaty [0] from the 19th century.

The treaty was made before the Andes were fully explored, and so it doesn't handle some interesting edges cases like the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. The field has the property that when rain falls there, it freezes and goes nowhere!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Treaty_of_1881_betwee... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Patagonian_Ice_Field

jmilloy · 7 months ago

I think borders based on watersheds make so much more sense than those on rivers, both of which are common.

jmilloy commented on Nullboard: Kanban board in a single HTML file github.com/apankrat/nullb... · Posted by u/smusamashah

johnfn · 9 months ago

I think "single HTML file" sets up a certain expectation that a five-thousand-line long HTML file with ~3500 lines of embedded JS doesn't really live up to. I mean, hey, everything can be a single HTML file if you embed the bundle inline in your HTML!

Cool project, though - don't mean to take away anything from it.

jmilloy · 9 months ago

"Single HTML file" sets up an expectation to me that it is (1) browser based and (2) client-side only. In other words, you can just open the file and start going without setting up a server, setting up a database, installing anything, or even having internet access. The last is not technically required but I think it is implied. It does not imply anything about the length of the file or the presence of client-side scripting.

jmilloy commented on Nearly half of Nvidia's revenue comes from four mystery whales each buying $3B+ fortune.com/2024/08/29/nv... · Posted by u/mgh2

asah · a year ago

low quality discussion, lots of ignorant speculation... I wonder if there's a way to analyze HN discussions to measure "quality" ?

jmilloy · a year ago

One indicator that I find reliable is simply if the comments exceed the up votes.

jmilloy commented on Dungeons and Dragons taught me how to write alt text ericwbailey.website/publi... · Posted by u/ohjeez

dyauspitr · a year ago

The first sentence leads me to imagine a torn up painting and a group of people clustered around it.

The second sentences leads me to imagine a large gallery space with high ceilings with a smattering of people in front of one of the paintings.

Both ways have their pros and cons. Describing the space first lets the reader paint a setting for the eventual object of interest.

jmilloy · a year ago

I think GP is a great comment with a poor example, because I agree that the resulting images in my mind are quite different, but they don't inherently have to be due to the order things are described in.