The post appended the raw data provided by GPT, allowing you to verify the integrity of the data. This makes the post trustworthy from a methodological pov.
> I don’t trust anything published on the Internet after Llms went mainstream.
You always had to verify the integrity of the data and methods used in any publication, regardless of the medium. The responsibility of both authors and readers hasn't changed. If you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you should.
But now with LLMs everywhere, people will realize it is necessary to verify.
A post is not trustworthy if it’s reposting trash, even if it shows the source.
> you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you should.
The nature of how LLMs hallucinate is different from how garbage used to appear on the internet. Before LLMs there was a relatively good inverse correlation between quality and blatant bullshit. Not enough to pass the verification rigor required for an academic publication by any means, but enough that you didn’t have to second guess every single statement on every web page listing something as simple as book authors.
When it comes to what LLM's write, I find that LLM hallucinations are like self-driving car crashes. We are hyper-aware of the machine doing something that we ourselves do every single day and consider a normal defect of biological conscious.
I can't believe that. LLMs always talk in the same confident tone, entirely regardless of what they're saying is true or not. What is true in the real world literally doesn't come into the equation.
Whereas at least some of the time, humans will say that they're not sure and might be wrong, or otherwise sound less confident. And that's related to how true the thing they're saying is.
Is that so? https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-... These people were convicted by people who were 100% convinced their memory was correct. The DNA evidence, which is "harder" evidence, said otherwise, and in these cases, was exonerating. (There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of other cases like this by the way, where the imprisoned innocent is NOT yet exonerated, all based on overconfident eyewitness testimony that yet managed to convince a judge/jury.)
There is also the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias where individuals with limited knowledge or expertise in a particular area tend to overestimate their competence and confidently assert their opinions. We've literally seen this countless times just since the 2016 US election, just watch literally any Jordan Klepper interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoZ2Lt_aCo8 (honestly, this is a little too political for me to use as an example, but I ran out of time seeking out unbiased examples... Mandela Effect? Misplaced keys being common?)
I'm afraid you're a little off, here, on your faith in humans not hallucinating memories and knowledge.
How many times have innocent people been wrongly convicted? The innocence project found 375 instances in a 31 year period.
How often do LLMs give false info? Hope it never gets used to write software for avionics, criminology, agriculture, or any other setting that could impact huge amounts of people…
Luckily I only said humans add some doubt to what they say some of the time :-)
I think this is a valid area of improvement, and I think we'll get there.
Also experts tend to be much more accurate at evaluating how knowledgable they are (this is also part of the D-K effect). So Id much prefer to have a 130 IQ expert answer my question than an LLM
They do, but they are better at verifying what they've already said. So a simple prompt asking them to verify the facts they've presented often improves the accuracy. There are also other techniques like chain of thought and tree of thought that further improves accuracy.
> at least some of the time
YMMV
oh here we go. You're one of those people conveniently restricting this accusation to a machine that scores a 130 IQ (https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11t5bhh/i_just...), instead of also including humans, who notably will send someone to prison 1000% sure that they witnessed that person doing the thing, when in fact, later DNA evidence exonerates them (https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...). Fucking LOL. Get out of here, doomer, the rest of us have AI-enhanced work to do.
Those humans who recalled incorrectly could have a 130 IQ, proving my point above and making your ad hominem reddit speak luddite insult fall flat.
It is invalid if you take what an LLM says as simply what another human (who happens to have a broad knowledge reach) would say.
Of course humans also hallucinate, but we didn’t have to take that into account every single time we read a piece of information on the internet. Humans have well-documented cognitive biases. Also, usually, a human’s attempt to deceive has some motivation. With LLMs, the most basic of information they provide could be totally false.
That said, overall utility of anything plummets drastically as reliability goes below 100%. If a particular texting app or service only successfully sent 90% of your messages, or a person you depended on only answered 90% of your calls, you'd probably stop relying on those things.
(I wish I could edit out my vitriol.)
Blaming LLMs for everything is becoming the preferred excuse for people who like to reject what they read and substitute their own beliefs instead.
It’s true that LLMs hallucinate and are definitely not correct all the time, but the way people are using that as an opening to reject everything on the internet and elevate their own prior beliefs to the top is strange.
Maybe it will be right, but the best part? We'll continue to be reminded of this fact.
Thanks for reminding us all.
It could do with being recommended less, imo. There are probably good summaries of it around.
Popularity is more a question of marketability, especially in the dire non-fiction category. Reading is a secondary use for most of these books, and it makes it even harder to discern which lifestyle books are resume-padding filler or truly generalizable advice.
Newton’s Principia is totally and absolutely impossible to understand to the average curious person raised on Cauchy and Weierstrass. There was a course at university aimed at people with advanced math knowledge to prepare you to read it.
Possibly Mein Kampf could compete in short passages by a "reading difficulty" score, but it's really tedious and much longer (by a factor of 5!). Darwin could actually write. Origin of Species was intended for the educated public as well as for scientists.
Hold on, hold on.
I started to read Origin of Species.
One time. But I did read it. Not all. Unconvincing.
And I did read all of Gabriel Marcel's Metaphysical Journal. So ... not a matter of Slack. If one in 100 reads Origin that's a rough approximation to the number of masochists
I own several of his books (admittedly they were gifts), and have never read them. So them not showing up in the top five doesn't surprise me much.
https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
Richard: You just pick things up. People tell you these things, and that happened to some with Bloomberg. They’d come to us and say, “Hey, why aren’t you doing this optimization,” and I said “Never occurred to me.” “Well, can you do it?” “Let’s see what we can do,” and then it would go in, so, yeah, kind of figure it out as you went along. I had to invent a lot of this myself. Nobody ever taught me about a B tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did.
Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for searching a B tree and for inserting into a B tree. He does not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B tree. That’s an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my own B tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks, Don. I really appreciate it.
Adam: That’s awesome. Did you pull anything else from that book?
Richard: Well, it’s an amazing volume. I can’t give you a specific example, but from my era, everybody has to have read or at least skimmed through, at least browsed through The Art of Computer Programming, and know that algorithms that are there, maybe not Don’s exact implementation. I mean, I never took the time to learn MIX, which is his assembly language, but it’s useful to flip through and look at all the algorithms he talks about. I think that just a year or two ago I needed a pseudorandom number generator, and I was, “Let’s see what Don recommends.” You pull it off. You see what he does.
It’s Meditations (by Marcus Aurelius).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosoph...
Sometimes, it is that simple: "Rand bad".
But, yes, Rand’s turds do appeal to those poor enough financially that they didn’t receive a rich and broad education and poor enough intellectually that they couldn’t give themselves one.
To me, it is the story of someone trying to create cool stuff and the world making that hard (felt like a celebration of human creativity). She is brutalistic in her messaging but it is an interesting story. I weirdly like her writing style, its like someone pounding a hammer against my skull. Haven't read her books in 10+ years but in my teens and twenties, I found them thought provoking and inspiring.
But I believe it might be toxic for the HN crew.
Let's be frank, people don't read much on average, so they take whatever book or author you read as your own personality, when in reality people should read many books with different ideas, so you can form your own.
One can learn a lot from reading from Friedman to Marx.
This is why I also think that one should read all the classics instead of chasing book recommendations, any community you ask will give them recommendation for non-technical subjects that are from their own worldview, which in turn, will make you not smarter, but likely more stupid than you initially started before you've read those books.
She had a really unique view of the world, I appreciated it, and it definitely helped me develop my own view of the world. I am about to read the Upanishads along a similar line of thought.