Is the NYT crossword so much better than alternatives that it would be worth paying for?
Readit Newsthorum commented on The New York Times Mini Crossword Is No Longer Free to Play bookriot.com/the-new-york... · Posted by u/josephcsible
thorum commented on Evaluating LLMs for my personal use case darkcoding.net/software/p... · Posted by u/goranmoomin
> Six of the eleven picked the same movie
This is surely the greatest weakness of current LLMs for any task needing a spark of creativity.
thorum commented on Building AI products in the probabilistic era giansegato.com/essays/pro... · Posted by u/sdan
“The rigidness and near-perfect reliability of computer software is the unusual thing in human history, an outlier we’ve gotten used to.”
Ordered approximately by recency:
Banking? Clocks? Roman aqueducts? Mayan calendars? The sun rising every day? Predictable rainy and dry season?
How is software the outlier here?
My point was more “humans are used to tools that don’t always work and can be used in creative ways” than “no human invention has ever been rigid and reliable”.
People on HN regularly claim that LLMs are useless if they aren’t 100% accurate all the time. I don’t think this is true. We work around that kind of thing every day.
With your examples:
- Before computers, fraud and human error was common in the banking system. We designed a system that was resilient against this and mostly worked, most of the time, well enough for most purposes even though it was built on an imperfect foundation.
- Highly precise clocks are a recent invention. For regular people 200 years ago, one person’s clock would often be 5-10 minutes off from someone else’s. People managed to get things done anyway.
I’ll grant you that Roman aqueducts, seasons and the sun are much more reliable than computers (as are all the laws of nature).
thorum commented on Building AI products in the probabilistic era giansegato.com/essays/pro... · Posted by u/sdan
I like this framing, but I don’t think it’s entirely new to LLMs. Humans have been building flexible, multi-purpose tools and using them for things the original inventor or manufacturer didn’t think of since before the invention of the wheel. It’s in our DNA. Our brains have been shaped by a world where that is normal.
The rigidness and near-perfect reliability of computer software is the unusual thing in human history, an outlier we’ve gotten used to.
thorum commented on A short statistical reasoning test emiruz.com/post/2025-08-1... · Posted by u/usgroup
I don’t know enough about statistics to answer these with math, but I’ve been on quite a few buses and it’s common at some stops for bus arrivals to cluster around specific times. If you always leave after first you see, and most of your random observations are before the first bus, won’t you (almost) always miss the others?
thorum commented on Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs github.com/ngafar/llama-s... · Posted by u/nawazgafar
I’ve been trying to convert a dense 60 page paper document to Markdown today from photos taken on my iPhone. I know this is probably not the best way to do it but it’s still been surprising to find that even the latest cloud models are struggling to process many of the pages. Lots of hallucination and “I can’t see the text” (when the photo is perfectly clear). Lots of retrying different models, switching between LLMs and old fashioned OCR, reading and correcting mistakes myself. It’s still faster than doing the whole transcription manually but I thought the tech was further along.
thorum commented on Model intelligence is no longer the constraint for automation latentintent.substack.com... · Posted by u/drivian
This article is insightful, but I blinked when I saw the headline “Reducing the human bottleneck” used without any apparent irony.
At some point we should probably take a step back and ask “Why do we want to solve this problem?” Is a world where AI systems are highly intelligent tools, but humans are needed to manage the high level complexity of the real world… supposed to be a disappointing outcome?
I think we’re going to have to set bigger goals for ourselves. We’re all still figuring out what that means.
thorum commented on The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers simonwillison.net/2025/Au... · Posted by u/tosh
> or trying prompt additions like “think harder” to increase the chance of being routed to it.
Sure, manually selecting model may not have been ideal. But manually prompting to get your model feels like an absurd hack
We need a new set of UX principles for AI apps. If users need to access an AI feature multiple times a day it should be a button.
> npm scripts make a http call to the npm registry each time they run, which means they are a terrible way to execute a health check.
Is this true? I couldn’t find another source discussing it. That would be insane behavior for a package manager.