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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • I think this is a gross misunderstanding of the underlying tech. The probability distributions are fixed at training time. That is why the weights are static. When doing inference, models are selecting from a top-k of probable tokens at each autoregressive loop for your typical LLM. When you adjust top-k to 1 or simply set the “temperature” to 0, it will always give you the same result from the same input.


  • Is it true that more experienced / knowledgeable / capable people, if at all, have more of an advantage from it, than juniors?

    100% true. The kids using clankers to write code didn’t cut their teeth on all of the subtle code flaws that can creep into your own hand-written code if you didn’t have a good understanding of the problem to begin with. Clankers pick the most pedestrian, mediocre solutions possible if you let them because the vast majority of code that can be scraped for training data is pedestrian and mediocre.

    At work, I review what the juniors generated with the clanker and constantly find shitty things they missed (eg. I found they had added a boolean argument to a function and passed it all the way down a very long call chain so they could do a branch somewhere stupid. note that boolean wasn’t used anywhere else). These are also the kind of people that will create single call site private methods in classes that makes it impossible to grok a piece of code without the doorway effect because they cargo culted the idea of DRY. All of this shit is in the training data because most of your software engineers are also on a normal distribution and most of them suck. So yeah, giving kids access to clankers is a recipe for shitloads of re-work and wasted tokens. Kids can’t catch the clanker fuck ups because they’ve never seen them before.











  • Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse : for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

    - Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew