And while passing by… Yet another “look, look at us, we are soooo smart and clever, give us much more money just because we are so cool” article dropped. https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in-llm-inference/ The lack of exact precision is not the fundamental issue here. Even if one manages to overcome the “numerical instability issues” and would be able to reproduce always the same structural output from the same linguistic (or otherwise structured) input the “hallucinations” and “subtle bullshitting” won’t go away in principle. ...

To understand what non-deterministic, “syntax level” probabilistic models are actually producing (an illusion), we have to understand how the Mind (of an external observer) works, and how it produces Maya (which has been intuitively understood since the early Upanishads) – an ultimate illusion created by the Mind itself – an inner representations of the “outside” world, which the mind (and body) uses for “decision making”. The “outside” world is inherently complex, non-deterministic and “concurrent” at the level of “compositions” and, at the same “time”, deterministic enough at the level of the “most basic building blocks” (of biology, lets say) – “simple” molecular structure’s (“small” molecules) are exactly the same, exact copies of clones of each other (otherwise everything will break) while larger molecular structures (like whole proteins and their compositions) may have “flaws” or “mutations” or just simple “kinks” – a slightly different shape or a resulting form. ...

DESCRIPTION: Idiots, idiots everywhere.jpg I am getting old and my cognitive abilities are slowly declining, and I will have no pension or social security, so I need a “Turing Award” or something. (only partially kidding). And, yes, I “hacked” these “longevity” memes and “protocols”, but seems like fighting an increase in entropy and the second law of thermodynamics is not that efficient as some meme-guys claim on YouTube ). So, lets settle one fundamental meme-question once and for all, so we can let it all go and focus on “bio-hacking” and what not. ...

Before one begins to write any code, one must understand the domain and its concepts and relationships between them. This is exactly what mathematics is all about – generalized abstract contempts, their properties and relationships. The best way to understand something is to “hack” the expert’s “models” with they carry inside their heads (literally, conditioned neural structures) and articulate using their specific language (slang, jargon) and contexts and idioms. There is a hard way – become an expert, build or grow up your own understanding, and then write it down as simple, well-understood mathematics – sets, functions, universal algebraic structures. This is a much better way, and, perhaps, the only way. ...

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/30/044226/what-happened-when-unix-co-creator-brian-kernighan-tried-rust It is a peculiar experience to know more and have a better understating that the CS celebrity, whose book you have read as a teenager. Just like I wrote before, C was a PHP of the 80s, if you will – a bunch of clever hacks (while PHP has nothing clever and was a Fractal Of Bad Design by an unqualified and ignorant amateurs) which allowed one to quickly “get shit done” in the way that wasn’t possible before, which is the reason behind its popularity. It also appeared to be way more “cool”, “practical” and clever than “theoretical” Algol or PL/1. ...

Look, ma, another top HN post in the “heavily policed safe space for mediocrity” – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45074248. They are babbling about some “philosophy of programming”, at least about how they think it should be. Well, even before the Atlas Shrugged there were “two kinds of philosophers” – ones which could see (and explain) things as they [really] are, and those who mastered the art of sophistry and abstract bullshitting, and can explain things as they want them to be. The laterr, by the way, call this ability a “creativity” (the word-marker of midwit), and the whole shitshow – a “philosophy”. ...

So-called Humanties (as the way of producing a sectarian socially constructed pretentious abstract verbiage) are done for. At least none of them deserve that high upper-middle-class social status anymore. Yes, you have to be actually smart to ask the “right questions” (be a prompt engineers LMAO!), but still. Watch how it spews out an outstanding “paper” in 30 seconds. I really don’t know what I have studied (wasted my life) for. Yes, yes, these are not final answers, and it missed subtleties, and more accurate, insightful formulations, but who needs them anymore? ...

The purpose of examination in a college or university setting is to empirically verify that a student has his own genuine understanding and could actually apply it. It is that simple. This is why some courses even allow to bring a textbook to an exam, because if one does not [already] understand the principles and techniques, the textbook is of no use. However, bringing pocket calculators, smartphones is considered a cheating, precisely because by using these devises one could appear as possessing one’s own understanding. ...

I have to rush to finish my series before AI will completely enshittificate the written knowledge and the classic discipline of programming, which is based on understanding and mathematical rigour. Yes, I seemingly overuse this word beyond the limits of a good style, but I like it, how it is awkward and ugly and yet perfectly captures what a generative AI is doing to a writtern knowledge itself. So, let’s try to build it all top-down, for a change. Bottom up is probably the better way, but it takes so long time before one begins to see the whole picture, which is, of course, the one and the same mountain (or an elephant) viewed from different angles and perspectives. ...

OpenAI has recently benedicted us with a 20 billion parameter “open source” model, which is a significant step up from the previous 7 billion parameter model. This model is designed to be more efficient and effective in understanding and generating human-like text, or rather to appear to do so. It is a total crap, by the way, at least compared to the online free-tier GROK (which is also very basic and limited). It is, obviously, “competing” with the DeepSeek’s “open source” offerings, and have a very similar “feel”. ...