Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this, and happy 4th July in advance.)
I studied transformer architecture models and have played around with them (unfortunately) enough to understand how they work. Under the surface the model produces what look like XML tags
<thinking> </thinking>to designate which tokens are thinking tokens and which are ānormalā output. That is literally the only hard difference between the two output modes. The reinforcement learning might tune the thinking to be more like āwhat a human would expect to see in a thinking blockā but itās still the same RNG madlib process generating everything underneath and any attempt to ascribe intelligence to this process should be met withlethal forceincredulous cynicism.Just like any claim that āwe donāt know how they workā - actually yes we know exactly how they work. What we canāt comprehend is the exact numbers and weights inside the massive pile of probabilistic algebra being processed to generate your slop. If I flip 5 coins in a row and the observerās belief is anything other than āyou just got very luckyā most people would call them crazy rather than join the cult and worship the coin godā¦
God I remember having to explain to dozens of people that āreasoningā models just exude a lot of text ātalking to themselvesā and then summarize it. They were all just āIt CANT be that sillyā and many outright would not believe me, because that was not āreasoningā
Sometimes they also glue a bunch of ātoolsā to help the model reason. The model can call by extruding tokens with the right syntax and then get back information from the ātoolā shoved in its context! That way, the model can at least handle stuff like basic arithmetic correctly! Except only sometimes, because the models frequently screw up calling the tools correctly or skip using the tool or any number of other completely dumb mistakes. Oh, and if the tool connects the model to the internet (or any insecure source of text) in any way, shape, or form, congratulations, youāve now got a massive security vulnerability!