z3c0 (u/z3c0) - Readit News

z3c0 commented on Trump halts construction on nearly complete wind farm off Rhode Island thepublicsradio.org/envir... · Posted by u/doener

tveita · 4 days ago

If anyone recalls as far back as January they declared a "National Energy Emergency"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125891

z3c0 · 3 days ago

Wherein the assertion was made (by exclusion) that wind and solar are not energy sources. It seems the real intention really was to cull renewables after all, though I doubt anyone is surprised.

z3c0 commented on Essential Reading for Agentic Engineers – August 2025 steipete.me/posts/2025/es... · Posted by u/ghuntley

brcmthrowaway · 6 days ago

Think this is a natural extension of the commodification of SWEs over the last 10-20 years as the newest easy way to make six figures

z3c0 · 6 days ago

Indeed. I can't fault people for wanting to give their careers a boost in these increasingly trying times. As someone who stepped into analytics just in time to catch the wave (10 years ago), I can understand why someone would want to hop aboard.

That said, I at least took the time to learn the maths.

z3c0 commented on Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back promptql.io/blog/being-co... · Posted by u/tango12

esafak · 6 days ago

That is not the same thing! You are talking about the point distribution of the next token. We are talking about the uncertainty associated with each of those candidate tokens; a distribution of distributions.

It's the difference between a categorical distribution and a Dirichlet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirichlet_distribution

z3c0 · 6 days ago

I think we're talking about the same thing. I should be clear that I don't think the selected token probabilities being reported are enough, but if you're reporting each returned tokens probability (both selected and discarded) and aggregating the cumulative probabilities of the given context, it should be possible to see when you're trending centrally towards uncertainty.

z3c0 commented on Essential Reading for Agentic Engineers – August 2025 steipete.me/posts/2025/es... · Posted by u/ghuntley

z3c0 · 6 days ago

Prompt engineers who realized that nobody is buying their bullshit.

Cleaned up of hype, it's just a JavaScript developer who spends their time arguing with APIs in a more literal fashion than those before.

z3c0 commented on Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back promptql.io/blog/being-co... · Posted by u/tango12

hodgehog11 · 6 days ago

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.

z3c0 · 6 days ago

The statistical certainty is indeed present in the model. Each token comes with a probablility; if your softmax results approach a uniform distribution (i.e. all selected tokens at the given temp have near equal probabilities), then the next most likely token is very uncertain. Reporting the probabilities of the returned tokens can help the user understand how likely hallucinations are. However, that information is deliberately obfuscated now, to prevent distillation techniques.

z3c0 commented on Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back promptql.io/blog/being-co... · Posted by u/tango12

roxolotl · 7 days ago

The big thing here is that they can’t even be confident. There is no there there. They are a, admittedly very useful, statistical model. Ascribing confidence to it is an anthropomorphizing mistake which is easy to make since we’re wired to trust text that feels human.

They are at their most useful when it is cheaper to verify their output than it is to generate it yourself. That’s why code is rather ok; you can run it. But once validation becomes more expensive than doing it yourself, be it code or otherwise, their usefulness drops off significantly.

z3c0 · 6 days ago

Agreed. All these attempts to benchmark LLM performance based on the interpreted validity of the outputs are completely misguided. It may be the semantics of "context" causing people to anthropomorphize the models (besides the lifelike outputs.) Establishing context for humans is the process of holding external stimuli against an internal model of reality. Context for an LLM is literally just "the last n tokens". In that case, the performance would be how valid the most probablistic token was with the prior n tokens being present, which really has nothing to do with the perceived correctness of the output.

z3c0 commented on Anthropic's CEO says in 3-6 months, AI will write 90% of the code (March 2025) businessinsider.com/anthr... · Posted by u/amarcheschi

saint_yossarian · 13 days ago

You're probably thinking of https://github.com/ghuntley/cursed. It... certainly seems to live up to its name.

z3c0 · 13 days ago

1700 directories at the project root...

z3c0 commented on Anthropic's CEO says in 3-6 months, AI will write 90% of the code (March 2025) businessinsider.com/anthr... · Posted by u/amarcheschi

z3c0 · 13 days ago

Amodei's work history indicates that his background as a software developer is a single part-time job that he held for a year-and-a-half after college. As far as I'm concerned, he wouldn't even make it as a junior on my team. I'm not inclined to believe anything he says about what it takes to write production-ready code.

z3c0 commented on I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid thomasorus.com/i-tried-co... · Posted by u/mikae1

rikafurude21 · 18 days ago

What I have come to understand is that it will do exactly what you tell it to do and it usually works well if you give it the right context and proper constraints, but never forget that it is essentially just a very smart autocomplete.

z3c0 · 18 days ago

It will do exactly what you tell it to do, unless you're the first person doing "it".

z3c0 commented on I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid thomasorus.com/i-tried-co... · Posted by u/mikae1

arrowsmith · 18 days ago

Congratulations, you tried AI and you immediately noticed all the same limitations that everyone else notices. No-one is claiming the technology's perfect.

How many more times is someone going to write this same article?

z3c0 · 18 days ago

How many more times is someone going to write this same comment?