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lambda

11,907 karma · joined May 21, 2009

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lambda··on Gemini 4 Carbon
He is extremely unserious. Did you miss the part where he cheated at Diablo to try to seem to be some kind of dedicated gamer? Or, y'know, the whole Cybertruck? Or the "pedo guy" comment after his harebrained submersible idea went nowhere and a regular diver saved a bunch of Thai kids?

He's always been deeply unserious.

lambda··on Gaussian Splats part 3: There's always a bigger scene
There's an interesting recent Siggraph paper on scaling up Gaussian splatting in a very different way, which offers some interesting benefits; Gaussian point splatting.

* Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AWv_nIfp-U

* Paper: https://jorisar.nl/gaussian_point_splatting/gaussian_point_s...

* Repo: https://github.com/JorisAR/gaussian-point-splatting

lambda··on Tailscale SSH: Investigation and remediation update
On the majority of nodes I provide Tailscale SSH access to, it's as root or a user with passwordless sudo. It's being used for admin access. So yeah, on those it doesn't matter as much.

There are a handful which restrict users to their own user accounts. But it's on dev server with friendly devs, so even for that use case it's not really the end of the world.

I'm sure our infosec folks are going to demand that we upgrade everywhere, however.

lambda··on Remove pgrust: the entry is cheating (per-query kernels and result caching)
Even with your explanation, this whole thing seems weird and scammy. What's the point of submitting something that is so incomplete and heavily tailored to this one benchmark outside of self promotion?

Benchmarks should be used for measuring general purpose query engines, not be an end in themselves.

This seems like a prime example of Goodhart's law. This benchmark is now just being used as a target for self promotion.

lambda··on Shitter – A Nitter Fork
This tool is for accessing Twitter/X, owned by Elon Musk, a far right billionaire.
lambda··on mitmproxy adds --emudhra option
Oh, nice. I was thinking of setting up a proxy for this for testing, nice to just have it working out of the box.
lambda··on Steam Users Beg for "No AI" Filter as Vibecoders Flood Next Fest
I think you might be in a bubble if you think that most people don't hate AI. A lot of people hate it with a passion.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as...

39% of people think it does more harm than good, compared to 9% who think it does more good than harm. Now 52% are equivocal, but as you can see, dislike of AI is much more common than like of AI.

lambda··on Voxtral 3
I've even seen videos that were in English, but mislabeled, so they got auto-dubbed back to English, replacing the real voices with a monotonous synthetic voice.

I appreciate the auto translated captions sometimes as they let you get the gist of what's going on, but auto dubbing is pretty much never desirable

lambda··on MiniMax M3.1 Flash
in practice, as actually used, LLMs are nondeterministic.

It is possible, if you control the execution environment sufficiently, and are careful not to use certain kinds of parallelism which can lead to nondeterminism, and you set the seed deterministically and ensure that the prompts are byte identical, you can operate them deterministically.

But no one actually does all of that. Almost everyone uses cloud hosted APIs where the provider could change any number of variables at any time. Everyone wants faster cheaper inference so uses inference engines which may trade off a certain amount of determinism for more speed. Different versions of harnesses and chat templates and benchmark software may introduce small differences in text.

And even though the cloud providers have in the past offered seed and system fingerprints to try to give people a way to control or detect non-determinism (see https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/examples/reproducible...), that has all been deprecated and removed in the newer APIs.

So yeah, while in theory it's possible that if you control the whole stack you can get deterministic results, that's not how anyone is using it, and there is no way for third party benchmarks to ensure deterministic results of hosted models, the latest APIs don't even support it at all.

This whole "well, actually, LLMs are deterministic if you hold them right" is a red herring. In any actual real-world use, they are basically always non-deterministic.

And of course, there are reasons that providers have dropped these attempts at providing deterministic results; because the results are chaotic, perturbed by small changes in input, it's almost never useful to try to make them act deterministic or detect when non-determinism has happend. Instead, it's better to think about them non-deterministically, and look at the distribution of results, rather than just considering a single pass or fail on a single test to be meaningful.

lambda··on MiniMax M3.1 Flash
Because they selectively choose which benchmarks to highlight and which competing models to compare against; they don't always compare against the SOTA or the Pareto frontier of performance/price, a lot of times you'll see them compare against the last generation of competing models, or the like, so that they look better if you don't carefully consider what they're comparing against.

For example, here you see they are comparing against Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, when Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, GPT-6 Astra, and GPT-6.1 Sol would be the latest SOTA models from those labs to compare against.

Also because a lab's own benchmarks tend to run about 6.4% better than third party runs of the same benchmark. Source: https://whatmodel.sh/claims This can happen due to a number of factors, and doesn't necessarily indicate anything nefarious. It could just be that they run multiple times while fixing issues that aren't related to the model, and have a selection bias towards stopping when the score is on the higher side. But since you see that sometimes their own scores are lower than the independent runs, some of the variation is explained just by variance in the model solving problems, since LLMs are nondeterministic there can be variation from run to run and you don't see labs always cheating, just potentially a bit of selection bias about when they stop tweaking their benchmark setup and publish the results.

And yes, there are independent third party runs of benchmarks for just this reason. The most popular with broad coverage of a range of benchmarks is https://artificialanalysis.ai/ but there are a number of others as well.

lambda··on The Auditor's Opinion
This post is also dated in July, which would have been before he passed away if that post was accurate.
lambda··on Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand
Why would you think that the author was speaking for anyone but themselves?

When I say "juggling is fun", I'm talking about my own experience. I'm not saying that everyone else should drop their hobbies and take up juggling.

Why should the author have to couch the headline of their article with this kind of defensive language that you suggest? The very first word of the article is "I", it is clear that the author is talking about their own experience.

lambda··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
I have not. It's something that I've considered, but never actually have done it.
lambda··on PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"
No, it's down again: https://xcancel.com/

They did come back for a while after the original cease and desist, but they've shut off again "due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings" a few days ago.

Oh, sorry, you said https://xxcancel.com/ with an extra "x".

Looks like that's a Nitter instance redirector that redirects to a few still up Nitter instances. Good to know.

lambda··on PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"
For those without X accounts (now that Nitter an XCancel are down): https://archive.ph/GQLvx
lambda··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
There are LLMs that support audio input, similar to those with vision support.

From my testing of open weights LLMs with audio support, they basically are only trained to recognize audio as an alternative to text input, they treat audio as basically equivalent to a transcript, and can't recognize or distinguish things like music, accents, background sounds, etc.

So they're only really good for transcribing or summarizing or using audio input in place of text input for prompts, but not anything that requires distinguishing any information about the audio that would not be present in a transcript.

It can be tempting to try to use an LLM for a variety of tasks; kind of the whole thing about an LLM is that you don't have to do a separate complex training run for every task, but can just provide instructions in natural language. But it only works as far as what the training data covers, if the training basically always treated audio and a text transcript as equivalent, the model has nothing causing it to learn other relevant features of the audio. If there's enough bird call identification in the training data of an LLM, it might be able to do that, but I think multimodal training data tends to be much more limited than the text training corpus

lambda··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Thanks for the follow up, I do appreciate it.
lambda··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
While you can't necessarily prove it, you can say whether the data was in the training set at all.

You can also do something like a release of a GPT-OSS v2, where you actually release training data and checkpoints, and do an experiment where you have some held out math problem dataset, then demonstrate how much training it takes on solutions (or partial solutions) to that dataset before the model saturates that test. While of course that would be a test on a much smaller model, it would cost a tiny fraction of the training on your big model, and it could be used to demonstrate just how much effect data contaminaiton like this could have, especially if you did the same experiment on a few different sized of model to show the scaling laws involved.

lambda··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
But you can say (with the cooperation of the parties involved, of course) if any of the preliminary work that the other researchers did was part of the dataset. It is possible to be more transparent than you are being.

Even better would be more research and tools to help determine the impact of particular training data on models. Right now, proprietary LLM providers get to hide a lot behind "we just train it, we don't know what inputs affect the outputs," and that can be a problem, both because of lack of traceability of factual informaiton as well as lack of traceability of things like this, where the model itself may have had unpublished work in its training set.

lambda··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
> (1) We'd have to identify their chats. How would we do this? We'd need them to share their chats with us so we could look for matches.

According to the statement by Tristan Buckmaster, he was in communication by email and calls several times over the past week with you (OpenAI that is, not you personally), asked about whether his chats were trained on, and was declined an answer (https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf).

However, it seems like there was great pressure to hurry the release to compete with Anthropic's recent release, so he was unable to get an answer in time.

The mealy mouthed statement in the release "We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models ." is realy not much. If OpenAI had wanted to be transparent about this, you could have worked with him to identify if his data was used in the training of your new model, and actually made a somewhat more certain statement on that basis. But you have chosen not to; it was more important to scoop Anthropic on this than it was to be transparent about your training data.

> (2) We'd have to prove those chats changed model behavior. How would we do this? We'd need to retrain many models with those specific chats removed, and ask those models to solve the Navier-Stokes problem many times, and keep doing this until reaching the desired level of statistical significance.

Just the information from step (1) would improve transparency. Yes, you still can't prove one way or another how much the effect of the training is. But if it's included in the training data, it provided some effect.

lambda··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Sure. But it's possible to say: if the document isn't in the training data, it isn't the cause of the output. If it is in the training data, the question gets more complicated.
lambda··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
> it's not something that's feasible for us to prove one way or the other.

This kind of question is exactly what a company named _Open_AI and founded as a nonprofit is supposed to be doing; open research on AI that helps inform, rather than obscure.

Anyhow, you do have the data available about the documents in the user's accounts, what they opted into (or were forced into via non-negotiable ToS), and whether they pressed a "thumbs up" button. You can answer whether the data entered the training pipeline or not. Yes, how much influence it had is an open question, and one that would be good to have research on and better tools for exploring, but I'll accept that it can't currently be answered precisely.

But whether the data entered the trianing pipeline can be answered. And how to provide better tools for quantifying and tracing this kind of thing is exactly what should be studied.

lambda··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
So, one way to prove that the data played no part is to trace and show that it wasn't used in the training process at all. If the data was never used in training, then it couldn't have played a part in the training process.

You're right; if the data was used in training, then it gets much trickier; it would be very difficult to show whether some particular data had a significant effect on the outcome.

This is one of the big problems with giant models like these; it becomes nearly impossible to discern what is and isn't plagiarism, or copyright violation.

It would in theory be possible to have things like n-gram databases or rolling hashes of training data, somewhat similar to OLMoTrace (https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07096), which would allow for detecting whether particular documents ended up in the training data or not (you'd have to keep this for every model used in the whole training chain, as synthetic data generated by earlier models could be influenced by training data that wasn't included in later models). I'm sure there are practical issues with providing such a tool, but I think that it's necessary if you want to be able to categorically say "no, this document has never been present in the training data of this model."

Or look at it the other way: if your model wasn't influenced by things in your training data, why include them in the first place? Clearly, you train on all of these documents because they influence the model. Yes, it's hard to trace the exact influence of each one. But if they're not affecting the output, then why not just stop training on them? You could just not train on any private documents; only train on public, traceable data.

But instead, you choose to train on these private documents, so you have to admit, your model and its outputs are influenced by them.

lambda··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Yeah, I'm sure it's completely automated.

But that doesn't preclude being able to index and track what the sources of data are. For your data sets, I would hope you are including source information for where the data came frome. And at OpenAI's scale, I would presume they are doing some amount of rolling hashing or similar to weed out duplication, training on too much duplicate data can cause problems.

AllenAI have at least attempted to add some amount of traceability to their models with OLMoTrace (https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07096), by letting you find n-gram matches from the outputs in their training data. It's not the most useful, there's a reason that LLMs use full fledged attention mechanisms and not just n-grams, a lot of times the n-gram matches it finds aren't all that related to the given output, it might be better to supplement this index with a vector search or other ways of keeping track of what training data would have most influenced particular parts of the output.

But anyhow, this is something that is an important question, and the big labs should be working on to make their products more trustworthy. Instead, they are hiding information about how they train, hiding their reasoning traces, and just producing output with no information on what might have influenced the training.

lambda··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Why can't they rule it out? Is even OpenAI unable to track the provenance of all of their training data?

This is one of the major problems with these enormous closed models, and even most open-weights models, which don't disclose their training process or training data. You can never be sure what went into its training. Did it come up with an idea originally, or is it just plagiarising its training data? Are there malicious inputs being used to train in particular behaviors when given certain trigger phrases? What are the characteristics of the RLHF data and what kind of biases are those embedding in the models?

With proprietary closed models, or even open weights models that don't have open training datasets, you just can't answer these questions.

lambda··on A/I shuts down
The Italian government is also a far-right government like the US, so is aligned in wanting to suppress left-wing views.
lambda··on K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models
Weights are up: https://huggingface.co/collections/IFM/k2-horizon

It's the training code that is not up yet, but this group has a history of publishing code so I would expect it, though of course you can never count on it until posted.

lambda··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
And by "learned how to play the whole politics game", you mean "giving money to Donald Trump": https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/brockman-openai-top-trum...
lambda··on K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models
Looks like we're still waiting on that, they have placeholder repos but haven't populated them yet:

* https://github.com/ifm-ai/xllm * https://github.com/ifm-ai/horizon-post-train

Their previous model, K2 Think V2, was release with fully open training data and recipe, so I would imagine that they are committed to that, but yeah, the repos for this new model are still just placeholders.

* https://mbzuai.ac.ae/news/k2-think-v2-a-fully-sovereign-reas... * https://github.com/LLM360/Reasoning360

lambda··on Microduck
Huh, when I tried it WASD didn't work like I expected, hence I went back and checked and saw that it was ZQSD. Looks like they might have fixed it now since I posted. Either that or the lagginess caught me up; it takes a second before it starts moving forward, it might be I got caught up by that, went back to look at the instructions and noticed the ZQSD, then went back and used the arrow keys since that was easier.

edit: just checked the code, and they cover both layouts by using the physical key code rather than the character. And that was committed before I tried it. So it must have been the fact that it was a bit slow to respond that got me.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/pollen-robotics/microduck-simu...

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