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gwern

35,356 karma · joined April 8, 2009

Site: https://gwern.net/

About me: https://gwern.net/me

What I've written recently: https://gwern.net/changelog

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gwern··on 'Try, Score, Change': Reinforcement Learning for Children
Yes, I definitely take this as a kind of reductio of Grow-Speech, after having defined it rigorously enough to be enforceable, or as chatbots love to say now, 'auditable' (https://gwern.net/grow-speech).

The LLMs follow the rules rigorously (barring a handful of inessential remaining errors like 'wires'), but show that you can easily satisfy the letter and not the spirit of the exercise, and that Grow-Speech can be flimsy and arbitrary once you start trying to use it seriously for something much more ambitious than https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1998-steele.pdf because you just start using phrases or obscure Anglo-Saxon words (even if you can't go full Anglish).

When I look back at it now, I realize that Steele spends a lot of the apparently impressive length on fluff or descriptive language, and trades heavily on the fact that we already know what a programming language is or what an integer or an object is. I do not think anyone who doesn't have at least a hazy grasp of 'object' is really going to grasp a definition like:

> An object is a datum the meanings of whose parts are laid down by a set of language rules. In the Java programming language, these rules use types to make clear which parts of an object may cite other objects. Objects may be grouped to form classes. Knowing the class of an object tells you most of what you need to know of how that object acts. Objects may have fields; each field of an object can hold a datum. Which datum it holds may change from time to time. Each field may have a type, which tells you what data can be in that field at run time (and, what is more, it tells you what data can not be in that field at run time).

But when you try to tell people about something genuinely unfamiliar like REINFORCE, the obscurity becomes clear. (I'm going to revise REINFORCE to "a rule that makes moves in runs that beat a base more apt, and moves in runs that fall short less apt"... but it's not that much better, honestly.)

gwern··on I’ve banned query strings
> Improving their probe of the risk-of-failure was enough.

The point was it was dangerous in a way they didn't even realize was an issue, for a thin business rationale. Unless you are going to do thorough tests and understand the risk you are taking (which they did not, as evidenced by screwing it up systematically at scale for years), you should not be doing it.

And it's not obvious that they are correct in their tightened-up testing, because even if a link is correct at the time they test it, it could break at any time thereafter.

> to which you appear to be a generally-satisfied customer!

No matter what _X_ is, _X_ would have to be a pretty epic screwup to make a customer unsubscribe solely over that! I never claimed it was such a major epic screwup that it could do that. So that is an unreasonable criterion: "well, you didn't outright quit, so I guess it can't be that bad." Indeed, but I never said it was, and somewhat bad is still bad; I was in fact fairly annoyed by the random breakage, and at the margin, everything matters. If TB did a few other things, in sum, they could potentially convince me to let my subscription lapse. An annoyance here, a papercut here, and pretty soon a generally-satisfied customer is no longer so satisfied...

gwern··on I’ve banned query strings
Query strings break unpredictably, and that alone is enough to ban them by third parties, especially for something as minor as referral tracking.

Example: The Browser is a well known link aggregation paid periodical. I subscribe, and every 1 in 10 or 20 links I clicked, it'd just break outright and I'd have to tediously edit the URL to fix it (assuming the website didn't do a silent ninja URL edit and make it impossible for me to remember what URL I opened possibly days or weeks ago in a tab and potentially fix it). This was annoying enough to bother me regularly, but not enough to figure out a workaround.

Why? ...Because TB was injecting a '?referrer=The_Browser' or something, and the receiving website server got confused by an invalid query and errored out. 'Wow, how careless of The Browser! Are they really so incompetent as to not even check their URLs before mailing an issue out to paying subscribers?'

I wondered the same thing, and I eventually complained to them. It turns out, they did check all their URLs carefully before emailing them out... emphasis on 'before', which meant that they were checking the query-string-free versions, which of course worked fine. (This is a good example of a testing failure due to not testing end-to-end or integration testing: they should have been testing draft emails sent to a testing account, to check for all possible issues like MIME mangling, not just query string shenanigans.)

After that they fixed it by making sure they injected the query string before they checked the URLs. (I suggested not injecting it at all, but they said that for business reasons, it was too valuable to show receiving websites exactly how much traffic TB was driving to them on net, because referrers are typically stripped from emails and reshares and just in general - this, BTW, is why the OP suggestion of 'just set a HTTP referrer header!' is naive and limited to very narrow niches where you can be sure that you can, in fact, just set the referrer header.)

But this error was affecting them for god knows how long and how many readers and how many clicks, and they didn't know. Because why would they? The most important thing any programmer or web dev should know about users is that "they may never tell you": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... (excerpts & more examples: https://gwern.net/ref/chevalier-boisvert-2019 ). No matter how badly broken a feature or service or URL may be, the odds are good that no user will ever tell you that. Laziness, public goods, learned helplessness / low standards, I don't know what it is, but never assume that you are aware of severe breakage (or vice-versa, as a user, never assume the creator is aware of even the most extreme problem or error).

Even the biggest businesses.... I was watching a friend the other day try to set up a bank account in Central America, and clicking on one of the few banks' websites to download the forms on their main web page. None of the form PDF download links worked. "That's not a good sign", they said. No, but also not as surprising as you might think - the bank might have no idea that some server config tweak broke their form links. After all, at least while I was watching, my friend didn't tell them about their problem either!

gwern··on A desktop made for one
> Then it wasn't for you. No big whoop.

Ah yes. I remember this in Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24/the-adventures...

gwern··on A desktop made for one
I didn't enjoy it. It flunks my criteria for good AI images, because there is no there there: https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples It wasted my thoughts as I stared at it, trying to learn about the author and 'X uses this' and thinking about how moleskin notebooks related to personal computing etc... only to realize I had been lied to and my time wasted, as he took advantage of my good faith - the good faith I extend to a fellow hacker, that their images will be meaningful and worth reading.

Just as their words are presumed to be meaningful and worth reading... but slightly less so every day, I fear.

gwern··on A desktop made for one
But doesn't that make it bad? It doesn't say anything new. Unlike the software in question, which is personalized, so it's not even symbolically reflecting the topic. It's a sheer waste of pixels and time spent looking at it or scrolling past the cognitive junk food.
gwern··on Using “underdrawings” for accurate text and numbers
tldr: do a standard img2img workflow where you lay out a skeleton or skeleton or low-res version, and then turn it into the final high-quality photorealistic version, instead of trying to zeroshot it purely from a text prompt.
gwern··on Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan
> Clearly if it was able to be leaked it already was being preserved

Preserved by whom? Many leaks are done by old or ex-employees who quietly kept a shall we say 'backup' of their work. More than one 'official' re-release has been rumored to be an embarrassed company quietly filing the serial numbers off a rogue leak because they realized way too late that their archival practices were inadequate.

gwern··on Richard Hamming: You and Your Research (1986)
Note: this is one of the less popular mirrors. The most popular mirror is the virginia.edu one (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html), and the best is (IMO) my heavily annotated version https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming
gwern··on The Science Behind Honey's Eternal Shelf Life (2013)
Source for it being fictional? The original 1960 source describes it as extremely nonfictional: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1960-analog-oc...
gwern··on The Science Behind Honey's Eternal Shelf Life (2013)
> 2,000-year-old honey that's still edible?

No, it's a lie. I researched it a bunch back in September 2024 (I was curious what the oldest possible edible food was*), and the Smithsonian knows it's BS (because I emailed them about this to get it corrected). I was able to correct Wikipedia, but I see Smithsonian hasn't gotten around to bothering, so this keeps making the social media echo chamber rounds...

To be clear: no edible honey has ever been discovered in Egyptian tombs. Every single anecdote is either unverifiable, or a garbled telephone-game description of some decayed residue which might have been honey thousands of years ago (and often on further chemical testing, proves to not have been).

See https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf

* https://gwern.net/oldest-food 'Abyssal bacteria' and 'dinosaur collagen' were my final answers.

gwern··on DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence
Main discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884971
gwern··on Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated
> The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult.

This may be more of an economic problem. There is a stark difference between a music track with 1% human work/effort, and 0%. You can make many musical tracks if you have to do only 1% of the work, but you can't make >100x what you made without AI (Amdahl's law). While the latter can scale infinitely; you could upload a billion tracks if you wished, you're limited basically by bandwidth and automation. So a classifier or policy which permitted the 99% AI but banned the 100% AI may be adequate.

gwern··on AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing
"hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure" is a super specific query almost definitionally 'bixonimania' which probably brought up the 'bixonimania' poison at the time (the search hits for that query right now in Google are weak and poorly relevant so it would not be hard to outrank them or at least get into the top 50 or so where a retrieval LLM would see them and would followup), and so still an instance of what I mean.

> Either way, that is a feature of the scientific process and is not a given to any online information.

Which does not distinguish it in any way from human errors like a crank or activist etc.

And I don't know, how did we handle false information before on niche topics no one cared about and which were unimportant? It's just noise. The worldwide corpus has always been full of extremely incorrect, mislabeled, corrupted, distorted, information on niche topics of no importance. But it's generally not important.

gwern··on Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated
> In addition to detecting, tagging and removing AI-generated music from recommendations, Deezer has now stopped storing hi-res versions of AI-tracks

Important point for anyone out there thinking about generating a lot of samples. Expect to get increasingly filtered out if you don't emphasize quality or uniqueness or something. It's cheaper to detect that something is generated, and apply standard base rate reasoning 'it's probably slop' and filter it out, than to try to do expensive evaluation to look for the rare gems.

gwern··on AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing
> Two blog articles and two preprints of fake academic articles [0] were able to convince CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity AI of the existence of a fake disease, against all majority consensus

Wrong. There are no 'majority consensus' against 'bixonimania' because they made it up, that was the point. It's unsurprisingly easy to get LLMs to repeat the only source on a term never before seen. This usually works; made-up neologisms are the fruitfly of data poisoning because it is so easy to do and so unambiguous where the information came from. (And retrieval-based poisoning is the very easiest and laziest and most meaningless kind of poisoning, tantamount to just copying the poison into the prompt and asking a question about it.) But the problem with them is that also by definition, it is hard for them to matter; why would anyone be searching or asking about a made-up neologism? And if it gets any criticism, the LLMs will pick that up, as your link discusses. (In contrast, the more sources are affected, the harder it is to assign blame; some papermills picked up 'bixonimania'? Well, they might've gotten it from the poisoned LLMs... or they might've gotten it from the same place the LLMs did which poisoned their retrievals, Medium et al.)

gwern··on Six Levels of Dark Mode (2024)
Glad OP got the tri-state toggle right!
gwern··on Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
Apparent source: https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/uber-c...
gwern··on Claude Opus 4.7
Unfortunately, that is an oversimplification for a highly RLed/chatbot trained LLM like Claude-4.7-opus. It may have started life as a base model (where prompting it with correctly spelled prompts, or text from 'gwern', would - and did with davinci GPT-3! - improve quality), but that was eons ago. The chatbots are largely invariant to that kind of prompt trickery, and just try to do their best every time. This is why those meme tricks about tips or bribery or my-grandmother-will-die stop working.
gwern··on Claude Opus 4.7
LLM APIs sell on value they deliver to the user, not the sheer number of tokens you can buy per $. The latter is roughly labor-theory-of-value levels of wrong.
gwern··on Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug
You didn't say anything about 'episodic' and that's irrelevant to the point even if its long-term memory from training didn't count.
gwern··on Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug
It is definitely not the first codebase an extensively RL-trained Claude has ever analyzed. How do you think it got so good?
gwern··on The Brainrot Industrial Complex
It's a lot easier to look at the whitespace and paragraphs, realize it's a LLM, plug it into Pangram to see that it gets 100% (unsurprisingly), and click to close; than it is to read it with a sucker's good faith and realize that it never says anything concrete or meaningful or unpredictable and contains only junk like canned etymologies or cliche quotes.
gwern··on Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019)
But is the cinematography there of any interest? Why would OP include it? They're talking about the hard shots, like the exploding spaceship where they need to find a spot in the desert to shoot dozens of mortars at it, or the crazy blue paint needing special UV light exposures to render just right. That looks like... a matte painting? A nice matte painting, sure, important for worldbuilding. But just that.
gwern··on Iran demands Bitcoin fees for ships passing Hormuz during ceasefire
The 2% is the camel's nose. They are establishing that they tax the Strait traffic and there is no longer freedom of navigation. Once it is a done deal, the deal will be altered...
gwern··on Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
My point is more that since you can expect taste's commoditization to lag behind for deep fundamental reasons, then taste does serve as a moat. Just perhaps a weaker one than one would naively expect, and where you will have to frantically keep investing in it to stay ahead of the LLMs slowly catching up, as opposed to a permanent lock-in you can lazily monopolistically coast on indefinitely. (I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's La Brea tarpit analogy for open source vs proprietary software in _In The Beginning was the Commandline_.)
gwern··on Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
They do improve, but the general creativity and sparkle we see with increasing scale comes mostly from scaling up pretraining/parameter-size, so it's quite slow and expensive compared to the speed (and decreasing cost) people have come to take for granted in math/coding in small cheap models. Hence the reaction to GPT-4.5: exactly as much better taste and discernment as it should have had based on scaling laws, yet regarded almost universally as a colossal failure. It was as unpopular as the original GPT-3 was when the paper was released, because people look at the log-esque gains from scaling up 10x or 100x and are disappointed. "Is that all?! What has the Bitter Lesson or scaling done for me lately?"

So, you can expect coding skills to continue to outpace the native LLM taste.

gwern··on After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)
Similar numbers for other countries: https://gwern.net/banner#they-just-dont-know Wouldn't shock me if it's even lower as people move to walled-gardens like smartphones.
gwern··on My son pleasured himself on Gemini Live. Entire family's Google accounts banned
The description by OP in comments like https://old.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1s92fql/my_s... seems to strongly imply that all the accounts were unconnected in a GSuite sense, and they are being slowly recursively banned by Google based on indirect connections like recovery emails or co-presence on a device.

I don't see any reasonable way they could have saved themselves besides something crazy like requiring every family member use a different feudal lord - one person gets Google, one person gets Apple, one poor guy gets Microsoft...

gwern··on I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era
You'll love GreaterWrong, then: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BJ4pnropWdnzzgeJc/i-am-de...
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