Hacker News Reader

Comment by knivets | Hacker News Reader

This is astrology for devs.

as someone who is about as llm-forward as anyone out there, this is a brilliant analogy. was equally true of all the “prompt engineer” hype as well from a couple years ago (which i admit i still think does matter)… it kinda makes me feel like an audiophile / hi-fi person talking about how 24bit/192kHz is the one true encoding format and anything less is a willfull (cynical, “Quality”-hating, satisficerist, etc.) compromise. which i freely admit to being one of those people as well.

and in both cases i both “know” that i can tell the difference and “know that i cannot tell the difference”. what anyone takes from that in terms of what it says about me, personally, is a bit of a Rorschack test, but Astrology is about as apt a description as there is… xD

For higher than audible frequency sample rates there's a good chance you can tell the difference. It often causes weird aliasing and harmonics in the more audible frequencies on "real" playback equipment. You can train yourself to recognize some of these and often pretty accurately identify the higher sample rate examples. You might even mentally associate those signs with "Higher Quality".

But it's arguably less accurate to the original recording.

People though asking LLM to output the reasoning steps was astrology until it's standardized and made ubiquitous.

Didn't multiple studies find the reasoning traces didn't have much to do with the final output? And even that outputting placeholder tokens during reasoning has a similar beneficial effect on benchmark scores?

(I don't think that's the full picture but, there's definitely something fishy going on there.)

reasoning itself just affords the model a ton of extra forward passes / "time to think"

the, como se dice, "misalignment" between the content of reasoning tokens and the actual output following the end of the reasoning is a separate problem, extensively studied by e.g. Anthropic

Do they have a golden calf to dance around? Without that success will be hit and miss.

i mean, maybe the golden calf people were right the whole time lol

Right about what?

Unless you can somehow provide some arguments against it, I feel like you're the one who is trying to cargo-cult stuff here.

Say what you will with proper reasoning or arguments if you feel compelled, tired reddit-commentary like that helps no one.

> Unless you can somehow provide some arguments against it,

We're year 4 into this discussion and camps have only gotten more bifrucated. There's no 1-1 discussion to have about this as of now, at least not before the crash.

Your only hope in such discourse is not trying to convince the other party how wrong they are, but appealing to an as of yet undecided party. Be it with reason, or simply pointing out how absurd some comments sound to the average person.

> Your only hope in such discourse is not trying to convince the other party how wrong they are

I don't care about convincing anyone, the ones I reply to or others, but if you take the time to leave a comment, at least make it something to read and think about instead of soundbites like "This is astrology for devs", it's plain boring to read and makes HN worse.

>I don't care about convincing anyone

That's fine. Others will care for you.

>it's plain boring to read and makes HN worse.

I chuckled at the joke. Surprising amount of layers to it.

Though I never strove to be a comic nor writer, that kind of terse, compact punch makes me envy those of such literary talent.

> I chuckled at the joke. Surprising amount of layers to it.

What joke?

i legitimately cannot divine what you are saying at all with this. there are so many dangling antecedents and modifiers that it is completely impossible. and i say this out of a genuine desire to understand what your argument is, knowing full well that i likely disagree with it.

Alright, let me explain, hopefully simpler: GP made told us their experience with working with LLMs, and some pointers to what they found to be working. The comment I replied to just says "This is astrology for devs" which basically is a cheap putdown without any reasoning nor arguments for why the commentator believes so. My comment is urging them to actually participate in the discussion, not just post their soundbite they thought of in five seconds, so HN as a whole can remain good instead of devolving into reddit (which is a tale as old as HN, I know).

Hopefully it's understandable now, and hopefully you don't disagree :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills

Indeed, with the corollary of, please don't write Reddit-tier comments on HN either, then one wouldn't have to say it's turning into Reddit.

Two wrongs don't make a right, as they teach us as children.

Awesome, you did understand the reference I made, I was afraid I was too sneaky about it but seems it was just clear enough :)

Of course! That point in the guidelines has links to some prior art in this vein. Highly recommend it for you.

And please, do better next time!

Whenever I make joke reference to the guidelines, I do promise I'll attach a link to them, just to make it extra clear, thanks! :)

Thanks for caring and being respectful.

You can't be serious. It couldn't be more obvious what the poster was referring to, a drive by put-down comment with no attempt to discuss anything seriously is more highly upvoted than an objection to such a comment.

What is this place for? Dang tells us, curious discussion. The guidelines explicitly state that certain comments are not in the spirit.

But the community seems to have decided otherwise, which is a shame.

Don't read too much into it, downvotes/upvotes are highly random here, saying the same thing twice will have different reactions depending on the time of day and the topic of the submission, seems certain crowds are drawn to certain topics, which isn't that surprising.

I don't mind the downvotes, the points aren't really the reason I'm here anyways, I just want fun and interesting discussions with people and read other's perspectives, the points don't hinder that :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com