Quant, systems thinker, anarchist.
I write at https://entropicthoughts.com
My inbox is lw[at]xkqr.org
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Karma: 468
LLMs and almost good code
Lean, not backpressure
Standard deviations from just two values
It is ridiculous. Even when I had a fractured wrist in a cast I was able to produce more torque on jars than my wife, and none of us are extreme iin any direction.
Given the number of surveys (20–30; I can’t be bothered to count carefully) and the sample size (200–500 you said below), does that put the total expenditure at $1000–3000?
Pythagorean addition
Why I made Engineering Enigmas
I share the impression that whereas older models would try to do a good job, fail, and then get stuck in a loop trying the same thing over and over, newer models are more likely to give up early but still try to give a convincing impression of having done a good job.
I have assumed this to be due to an increasing focus on post-training techniques that improve benchmark scores. My mental model of LLM performance in evaluations is split into components (that probably interact to some degree):
Base training;
Post-training techniques such as fine-tuning and RLHF, etc; and
Inference-time techniques such as routing, best-of-N, chain-of-thought prompting, “wait” token insertion, etc.
From my understanding we haven’t actually been able to improve the first step very much, but we have learned a lot about the second two steps. If these don’t actually increase raw “intelligence” so much as they improve the appearance of intelligence, that would explain why newer models are increasingly reward hacking.
the sudden pivots and insight-flashes you’ll often see with recent models, the “wait”s and “a-ha”s and “actually, I want to try something completely different”s.
I was under the impression this was not produced by the model itself, but caused by external harnesses inserting “wait” tokens into the transcript before it goes back into the model to force it to reconsider.
Are LLMs not getting better?
However I do try and remember whenever my children request something to stop and think about it for a second instead of automatically saying no.
Small thing, but with children age 3 and 5 I have started to say “Yes, if you can sort out the logistics of it.”
Most of the things I deny my children aren’t because I don’t want them to have it or do it, but because I cannot find a way to fit it into our resource constraints, be it time, equipment, money, health, etc.
When my children respond to that with a genuine interest in trying to make it work, I inform them of the constraints and they ask feasibility questions. Sometimes they do come up with a plan that actually works! Most often they realise it would be too much work to be worth the payoff, and they think of something else to do instead.
(Given the topic of person vs. property at hand, I should also say that half the time my challenge is met with screaming demands that I must make it happen. Then, in my mind, they have used up their chance to act as a person and chosen to be “merely a child”, and I have to bluntly deny the wish without further discussion. (I might still try to explain it, depending on how much my patience has been drained already.))
The main thing that helps is simply distraction
The potential long-term cost of this is that it doesn’t teach conflict resolution. I have a strong learned response to seek distraction any time I am uncomfortable, but I don’t want to pass that on to my children.
I don’t think “every 5 minutes” is to be interpreted literally. After all, that would imply the siblings sleep in shifts so that one is always able to hit the other. (Or that they are in a constant boxing match throughout their waking hours to compensate for the lack of hitting during sleep.)
Most days, my children (3 and 5) have periods of the day (usually toward the evening) in which they have exhausted their patience for trying to talk it out and they hit each other at least every five minutes, unless we keep them separated. They also have periods in which they reason, empathise, and negotiate better than many adults I’ve met. The latter periods are rare, but getting more frequent with age.
My wife has been worried about the amount of hitting, so we have talked to child psychologists about it, and they claim it is well within a couple standard deviations. That doesn’t have to mean anything, of course, but the data on this is sparse, as one could imagine.
Re: Daycare illnesses (how often does a child get sick?
Thanks for the honest feedback! It is probably too early in my hobby research to share this, yes. My main hope is that it would resonate with someone else who might be more clear on what it is, and maybe even inspire some sort of measurement.
Statistical Literacy
Hazardous States and Accidents
Depends significantly on where you live! I don’t worry about hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, etc.
Among the things that remain are fire, and my government says the fire services get called to 6000 domestic fires every year. Divided by a population of, say, 5 million households that’s a risk of 0.12 % per year. Maybe not all fires get fire services involvement, so we’ll bump it up to 0.2 %.
You won’t find actuarial tables, but they can often be constructed from official sources and/or press releases with some ingenuity. We’d do this for other risks too, like burglary, water damage, etc.
Of course, we could also gut feel our way there. Maybe we consider the past 20 years, and that we’d be told if any one in a circle of 5 friends would tell us about a serious event in their household, and we have been told twice in that time. That’s twice in 100 person-years, i.e. a 1⁄50 all-cause risk.
I agree—sorry about the sloppy wording.
What I tried to say wad that “if you act like someone who maximises compounding money you also act like someone with utility that is log-money.”
In my region of the world “butter knife” means a wooden utensil with round edges so it never even struck me that it could be sharp!