6 ms·

Have you read the "Whispering earring" essay? I love it for the LLM era.[1] You can treat AI as a whispering earring - "What should we do now? How do we fix th

Have you read the "Whispering earring" essay? I love it for the LLM era.[1] You can treat AI as a whispering earring - "What should we do now? How do we fix this? What do you think?" Or you can treat it like an exoskelton - "Implement kd-tree with metric space xyz for this problem, mapping this to that blah blah". That's pre-thought execution automation that makes review much simpler - you already know the shape of the desired output. The whispering earring is atrophy. 1. https://croissanthology.com/earring https://croissanthology.com/earring

khalic 3mo ago
Thank you for the surprising read
paytonjjones 3mo ago
Something I never considered much is what happens when everyone else is using the Whispering Earring. You may be more free and independent, but you may also be unable to compete as everyone else easily gains wealth and success. Natural selection doesn't particularly care about freedom of consciousness. Bleak.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  Eventually, that becomes interesting. Before we get to that stage, I think we pass through (almost) everyone following almost the exact same advice as each other. Such people are extremely predictable. You may have already noticed, before LLMs, cliché? Talking points that make a group identifiable? Words and phrases that act as applause lights or cognitive stop signs? (That last sentence itself being a pair of clichés that you can use to identify where I hang out online). Anyway, point is, LLMs will give us a memetic monoculture before they turn us all into a world of correctly personalised Whispering Earring wearers. That makes them predictable, that makes them exploitable. It'll be like playing chess against someone you know is using a specific version of Stockfish: even though it would beat you if you tried to fight the system unaided, you can win by asking your own copy of the AI to go one step further ahead, and it will be accurate precisely because it's playing against itself and reacting to its own moves. (Of course, the fact I've said this in writing means this is in the training data; in the general case this means the LLMs will know that and account for that, but I suspect comments like this won't shift the needle all that much compared to the aggregate output of 3 billion people reacting to short-form emotional manipulation A/B slop)
  - sebastiennight 3mo ago
    > It'll be like playing chess against someone you know is using a specific version of Stockfish: even though it would beat you if you tried to fight the system unaided, you can win by asking your own copy of the AI to go one step further ahead, and it will be accurate precisely because it's playing against itself and reacting to its own moves. I don't believe this is how chess works, and I don't believe this is how Stockfish works, and I don't believe this is how AI works. Stockfish isn't winning because it's playing a better sequence of programmed steps, and having access to "the next version of Stockfish" doesn't mean it can "guess the next move" and play against that.
    - ben_w 3mo ago
      I didn't say "the next version of Stockfish". You have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I want to know what you're about to do, so I put Stockfish into state s, ask it what the best move is, and I know you'll make that move because I know you'll ask Stockfish version n the same question of the same state. I now know board state s+1. The steps are not pre-programmed, but the program itself is (modulo hardware imprecision) deterministic. If there's a RNG in there then sure, this doesn't work as easily as I wrote it; and there may be randomness in the thing that this is a metaphor for, regardless of if there's one in Stockfish or not, but that's not hard to work with when you want to win against an aggregate: we invented the field of statistics to deal with random numbers because they come up so often.
      - muvlon 3mo ago
        There is deliberate randomness in stockfish. The easiest way to see this is from the fact that, when playing the white pieces, it won't play the same opening move every time. Often it's e5, but it also goes for e4 or Nf3 or something else entirely. This is by design, and very much necessary for a competitive chess engine. Otherwise, people could do basically what you say: Run an offline (as in, ahead of time, with ample compute resources) search against stockfish that finds a line where it loses, then make an engine that plays that every time. As a consequence, even if you know that your opponent is running stockfish, you can't really use that against them. Your best bet is also just running stockfish.
- chowells 3mo ago
  It is literally impossible for everyone to obtain wealth. Wealth isn't a number or physical circumstances. Wealth is having economic power over the people around you. Success is a little more nebulous, but when thought of as a relative of wealth it's similarly contextual. The danger isn't everyone but you getting wealthy. The danger is that wealth tends towards concentration. And it tends to concentrate around people who are already wealthy. The danger is, bluntly, that things will get worse for all but a few and most people will be so caught up in a red queen's race that they can't see how to stop.
  - SamPatt 3mo ago
    No. The world has absolutely gotten wealthier over the last few centuries. Wealth is obviously not zero sum. Humanity is far wealthier today than before the industrial revolution, and the trend is still towards increasing wealth.
    - customguy 3mo ago
      You are talking about access to resources and technologies, which is basically constantly rising, we couldn't stop that if we wanted to, so that's a given and more importantly orthogonal to the wealth that buys you goods and services. The latter is absolutely zero sum, because of everybody has a billion, a billion isn't that much any more. E.g. human trafficking exists because some people are rich and others are poor, and the fact that even those poor people might have access to things an emperor 1000 years ago would have dreamed of doesn't change that, because the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today, the absolute increase compared to people who lived N years ago is a red herring.
      - SamPatt 3mo ago
        >You are talking about access to resources and technologies, which is basically constantly rising, we couldn't stop that if we wanted to We could very obviously stop our progress in resources and technology. It has happened throughout history many times and we see plenty of modern examples. You seem to be treating the accumulated products of civilization as though they are geological facts rather than fragile outputs of maintained institutions. Maybe you should ask yourself why you believe that 1) access to resources and technology are "basically constantly rising" and 2) why the relative difference in wealth today is more important than the (magical?) existence of a system were everyone has continually gotten more access to resources and technology.
- zem 3mo ago
  asimov's "profession" is a very relevant SF short: https://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html https://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html
jeromechoo 3mo ago
Wow what a read! Thanks for sharing. Really helped me unpack why I’m so bothered by people who c/p AI answers verbatim.
- snapetom 3mo ago
  I did a code review for a really, let's just say "challenging", co-worker a few years ago. There was one block of code that was really obtuse and I couldn't figure out why it was there and what it did. So I asked him. He sighed like he was taking responsibility for a grave sin and I should admire him for it, and said, "I don't know. I copied that from StackOverflow." I've felt that AI is just an amplification of what we've all done and been through with SO answers.
  - jeromechoo 3mo ago
    It certainly makes it all the easier for people predisposed to this quality of work.
  - pmarreck 3mo ago
    I have learned the hard way that "corpo code" is ephemeral. I spent at least 2 man-years on Ruby/Rails code for Desk.com, once spending an entire month to solve a really bad and intermittent session-logout issue that stumped 8 developers before me (I could tell because they left a bunch of commented-out debug code and I had the git-blame lines), and after I left, that whole stack got retired and its clients moved to some garbage Salesforce offering as part of their crufty Java monolith. (Sorry, SFDC.) So if we move from "bespoke handcrafted code" to "roughly-engineered, unstylish but still quite working LLM-generated code" in that space, there is LITERALLY no love lost. Spend your handcrafted love-energy on open-source or library code that will stick around. Leave the corpo code to the LLMs, I say, especially if you don't own it.
  - baranul 3mo ago
    Way too many people like to reach for the easiest path. They will often assume or have blind faith that the AI or online answer is correct. Coming up with the solution themselves or taking time to understand why something might be the correct answer, can be just too much work to be bothered with.
zerobees 3mo ago
It cracks me up that you bring up the exoskeleton metaphor, because I'm pretty sure it originated from a 100% AI-generated essay that made it to the top of HN a while back. So I guess, AI is whispering things into our ears whether we notice or not.
- jvanderbot 3mo ago
  That's a pretty mid-tier metaphor on my part, along with Iron Man + Jarvis, that I don't think I'd even want to claim credit for :) I will claim the CNC analogy though - I sometimes feel like a modern machinist just walking between machines and listening for screaming metal.
- quietbritishjim 3mo ago
  Exoskeleton is such an obvious metaphor for AI (at least, one potential ways of using it) that surely no one, human or AI, could possibly claim credit for it.
  - garciasn 3mo ago
    I had been explaining it to others as 'My Iron Man suit' before reading the exoskeleton essay, months later. So, you are definitely correct.
    - dTal 3mo ago
      It feels more like a BMX bike to me. The quality of what I get out seems to be a direct function of what I put in. The threshold of what I can achieve is raised slightly, the speed with which I can achieve it is raised quite a lot - but it's not a magic rocket ship that whisks me to far off hostile environments and protects me while I'm there. I'm still "naked". The code is still mine, and I can get off the bike at any point and walk.
      - kakacik 3mo ago
        Thats... not how most of the world is using llms. Students are getting measurably dumber (as in lacking actual topic understanding, since actually learning sonething properly is much harder than shallow knowledge), every other day I read about somebody losing their wealth due to listening to llms with finances. Other recent articles - psychologists start seeing people losing their uniqueness and many people slowly veering towards same middle bland opinions. I think top parent is correct - we are in the process of visibly losing a lot from our humanity, much more than we are gaining. We shouldnt be listening too much to loudest mouths here that praise efficiency gains, many of those are 'semi-autistic' folks with tunnel vision focused on 1 aspect and ignoring larger picture. I dont see any change of course possible, the sweet nectar of efficiency and offloading decisions and work is too strong a drug to ignore. But everything has its set of benefits and drawbacks, and drawbacks here seem pretty brutal so far.
beepbooptheory 3mo ago
This has a nice, Borgesian, charm to it but I feel like it's premise is confused. If it's just about the here near-empty signifier of "happiness," what does the magic tech of the earring actually contribute to the parable that some hypothetically perfect narcotic wouldn't?
- jvanderbot 3mo ago
  The earring doesn't make you feel better, it actually produces a better result. It's never wrong. You might regret addiction, for example? Also, it's a parable. Take it too literally and it loses its charm.
  - beepbooptheory 3mo ago
    > It always tells you what will make you happiest. If it would make you happiest to succeed at your work, it will tell you how best to complete it. If it would make you happiest to do a half-assed job at your work and then go home and spend the rest of the day in bed having vague sexual fantasies, the earring will tell you to do that. The earring is never wrong. It just has to be this in the story because it doesn't want to engage with why what the earring indicates is so good except that it provides unfailable "happiness". It implies a static world where "the right decision" always exists, but doesn't want to engage with the details. It also implies a kind of akrasia[1] that I don't think resonates with lived experience: "happiness" is a state we pass in and out of, not the accumulation of correct decisions. We undergo unhappiness for the sake of future happiness. "Happiness" is a questionable end-all goal first of all, but either way not even the kind of thing ontologically compatible with the author's framing. It just feels half-baked, it doesn't actually say anything even when it has all the pretenses of that. Maybe that's too harsh though. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia
    - Revisional_Sin 3mo ago
      You're getting too hung up on the word "happiness". The earring gives you good advice. Good according to whom? According to you. It helps you succeed at your goals and live a fulfilling life.
jr3592 3mo ago
This is such a good point. It matters HOW you use the LLM. Come to it with knowledge and understanding of a subject matter, asking for an implementation? That's different from going to it with no knowledge, asking for guidance on everything.
iN7h33nD 3mo ago
Reminds me of Daemon by Daniel Suarez. I could plausibly see us heading there for sure https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6665847-daemon https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6665847-daemon
mkw5053 3mo ago
[flagged]
buildbot 3mo ago
Not particularly related, but “whispering earring” made me think of the hemalurgic earring in Brandon Sanderson's later Mistborn books.
bitwize 3mo ago
Except it's not really a mechsuit; inasmuch as it is, it's more like an Evangelion: it's got bits of people's souls floating around in there; it only works well with a high synch rate with the user, which is difficult to achieve consistently; and sometimes it pops off and does its own thing anyway. And the way you achieve and maintain deep knowledge of the shape of the output you want is... well, to write and test it yourself. LLMs are a cognitohazard. If you aren't accustomed to programming without them (or even if you are) it's hard to see the line between using them to remove drudgery and relying on them to think for you. The Whispering Earring story reminds me of that episode of Rick and Morty in which Morty gets a piece of crystal embedded in his forehead which allows him to perceive the moment of his death; he then begins steering his actions towards the future in which an elderly Jessica (his crush) tells him she loves him as he dies, down to individual articulated phonemes and muscle actions. In the end, it's revealed this future is not what Morty had hoped for.
- rmunn 3mo ago
  That Evangelion analogy is a good one. I don't necessarily agree with all of it (for example, I think the high synch rate is the weakest part of the analogy, and LLMs can be used as tools with some decent success without needing to plunge into them too deeply), but every piece of it can be coherently argued for (for example, perhaps I'm missing an even higher threshold of success that I could achieve with a higher "synch rate" equivalent, and I just don't know about it). But kudos for coming up with such an evocative analogy.
  - bitwize 3mo ago
    "Synch rate" is roughly "you know how to manipulate the model to get it to do precisely what you want". This is nonobvious even for open-weights models and can change as new models are published, often under the same name as the old models.

khalic 3mo ago

Thank you for the surprising read

paytonjjones 3mo ago

Something I never considered much is what happens when everyone else is using the Whispering Earring. You may be more free and independent, but you may also be unable to compete as everyone else easily gains wealth and success. Natural selection doesn't particularly care about freedom of consciousness. Bleak.

ben_w 3mo ago
Eventually, that becomes interesting. Before we get to that stage, I think we pass through (almost) everyone following almost the exact same advice as each other. Such people are extremely predictable. You may have already noticed, before LLMs, cliché? Talking points that make a group identifiable? Words and phrases that act as applause lights or cognitive stop signs? (That last sentence itself being a pair of clichés that you can use to identify where I hang out online). Anyway, point is, LLMs will give us a memetic monoculture before they turn us all into a world of correctly personalised Whispering Earring wearers. That makes them predictable, that makes them exploitable. It'll be like playing chess against someone you know is using a specific version of Stockfish: even though it would beat you if you tried to fight the system unaided, you can win by asking your own copy of the AI to go one step further ahead, and it will be accurate precisely because it's playing against itself and reacting to its own moves. (Of course, the fact I've said this in writing means this is in the training data; in the general case this means the LLMs will know that and account for that, but I suspect comments like this won't shift the needle all that much compared to the aggregate output of 3 billion people reacting to short-form emotional manipulation A/B slop)
- sebastiennight 3mo ago
  > It'll be like playing chess against someone you know is using a specific version of Stockfish: even though it would beat you if you tried to fight the system unaided, you can win by asking your own copy of the AI to go one step further ahead, and it will be accurate precisely because it's playing against itself and reacting to its own moves. I don't believe this is how chess works, and I don't believe this is how Stockfish works, and I don't believe this is how AI works. Stockfish isn't winning because it's playing a better sequence of programmed steps, and having access to "the next version of Stockfish" doesn't mean it can "guess the next move" and play against that.
  - ben_w 3mo ago
    I didn't say "the next version of Stockfish". You have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I have Stockfish version n, see board state s. I want to know what you're about to do, so I put Stockfish into state s, ask it what the best move is, and I know you'll make that move because I know you'll ask Stockfish version n the same question of the same state. I now know board state s+1. The steps are not pre-programmed, but the program itself is (modulo hardware imprecision) deterministic. If there's a RNG in there then sure, this doesn't work as easily as I wrote it; and there may be randomness in the thing that this is a metaphor for, regardless of if there's one in Stockfish or not, but that's not hard to work with when you want to win against an aggregate: we invented the field of statistics to deal with random numbers because they come up so often.
    - muvlon 3mo ago
      There is deliberate randomness in stockfish. The easiest way to see this is from the fact that, when playing the white pieces, it won't play the same opening move every time. Often it's e5, but it also goes for e4 or Nf3 or something else entirely. This is by design, and very much necessary for a competitive chess engine. Otherwise, people could do basically what you say: Run an offline (as in, ahead of time, with ample compute resources) search against stockfish that finds a line where it loses, then make an engine that plays that every time. As a consequence, even if you know that your opponent is running stockfish, you can't really use that against them. Your best bet is also just running stockfish.
chowells 3mo ago
It is literally impossible for everyone to obtain wealth. Wealth isn't a number or physical circumstances. Wealth is having economic power over the people around you. Success is a little more nebulous, but when thought of as a relative of wealth it's similarly contextual. The danger isn't everyone but you getting wealthy. The danger is that wealth tends towards concentration. And it tends to concentrate around people who are already wealthy. The danger is, bluntly, that things will get worse for all but a few and most people will be so caught up in a red queen's race that they can't see how to stop.
- SamPatt 3mo ago
  No. The world has absolutely gotten wealthier over the last few centuries. Wealth is obviously not zero sum. Humanity is far wealthier today than before the industrial revolution, and the trend is still towards increasing wealth.
  - customguy 3mo ago
    You are talking about access to resources and technologies, which is basically constantly rising, we couldn't stop that if we wanted to, so that's a given and more importantly orthogonal to the wealth that buys you goods and services. The latter is absolutely zero sum, because of everybody has a billion, a billion isn't that much any more. E.g. human trafficking exists because some people are rich and others are poor, and the fact that even those poor people might have access to things an emperor 1000 years ago would have dreamed of doesn't change that, because the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today, the absolute increase compared to people who lived N years ago is a red herring.
    - SamPatt 3mo ago
      >You are talking about access to resources and technologies, which is basically constantly rising, we couldn't stop that if we wanted to We could very obviously stop our progress in resources and technology. It has happened throughout history many times and we see plenty of modern examples. You seem to be treating the accumulated products of civilization as though they are geological facts rather than fragile outputs of maintained institutions. Maybe you should ask yourself why you believe that 1) access to resources and technology are "basically constantly rising" and 2) why the relative difference in wealth today is more important than the (magical?) existence of a system were everyone has continually gotten more access to resources and technology.
zem 3mo ago
asimov's "profession" is a very relevant SF short: https://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html https://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html

jeromechoo 3mo ago

Wow what a read! Thanks for sharing. Really helped me unpack why I’m so bothered by people who c/p AI answers verbatim.

snapetom 3mo ago
I did a code review for a really, let's just say "challenging", co-worker a few years ago. There was one block of code that was really obtuse and I couldn't figure out why it was there and what it did. So I asked him. He sighed like he was taking responsibility for a grave sin and I should admire him for it, and said, "I don't know. I copied that from StackOverflow." I've felt that AI is just an amplification of what we've all done and been through with SO answers.
- jeromechoo 3mo ago
  It certainly makes it all the easier for people predisposed to this quality of work.
- pmarreck 3mo ago
  I have learned the hard way that "corpo code" is ephemeral. I spent at least 2 man-years on Ruby/Rails code for Desk.com, once spending an entire month to solve a really bad and intermittent session-logout issue that stumped 8 developers before me (I could tell because they left a bunch of commented-out debug code and I had the git-blame lines), and after I left, that whole stack got retired and its clients moved to some garbage Salesforce offering as part of their crufty Java monolith. (Sorry, SFDC.) So if we move from "bespoke handcrafted code" to "roughly-engineered, unstylish but still quite working LLM-generated code" in that space, there is LITERALLY no love lost. Spend your handcrafted love-energy on open-source or library code that will stick around. Leave the corpo code to the LLMs, I say, especially if you don't own it.
- baranul 3mo ago
  Way too many people like to reach for the easiest path. They will often assume or have blind faith that the AI or online answer is correct. Coming up with the solution themselves or taking time to understand why something might be the correct answer, can be just too much work to be bothered with.

zerobees 3mo ago

It cracks me up that you bring up the exoskeleton metaphor, because I'm pretty sure it originated from a 100% AI-generated essay that made it to the top of HN a while back. So I guess, AI is whispering things into our ears whether we notice or not.

jvanderbot 3mo ago
That's a pretty mid-tier metaphor on my part, along with Iron Man + Jarvis, that I don't think I'd even want to claim credit for :) I will claim the CNC analogy though - I sometimes feel like a modern machinist just walking between machines and listening for screaming metal.
quietbritishjim 3mo ago
Exoskeleton is such an obvious metaphor for AI (at least, one potential ways of using it) that surely no one, human or AI, could possibly claim credit for it.
- garciasn 3mo ago
  I had been explaining it to others as 'My Iron Man suit' before reading the exoskeleton essay, months later. So, you are definitely correct.
  - dTal 3mo ago
    It feels more like a BMX bike to me. The quality of what I get out seems to be a direct function of what I put in. The threshold of what I can achieve is raised slightly, the speed with which I can achieve it is raised quite a lot - but it's not a magic rocket ship that whisks me to far off hostile environments and protects me while I'm there. I'm still "naked". The code is still mine, and I can get off the bike at any point and walk.
    - kakacik 3mo ago
      Thats... not how most of the world is using llms. Students are getting measurably dumber (as in lacking actual topic understanding, since actually learning sonething properly is much harder than shallow knowledge), every other day I read about somebody losing their wealth due to listening to llms with finances. Other recent articles - psychologists start seeing people losing their uniqueness and many people slowly veering towards same middle bland opinions. I think top parent is correct - we are in the process of visibly losing a lot from our humanity, much more than we are gaining. We shouldnt be listening too much to loudest mouths here that praise efficiency gains, many of those are 'semi-autistic' folks with tunnel vision focused on 1 aspect and ignoring larger picture. I dont see any change of course possible, the sweet nectar of efficiency and offloading decisions and work is too strong a drug to ignore. But everything has its set of benefits and drawbacks, and drawbacks here seem pretty brutal so far.

beepbooptheory 3mo ago

This has a nice, Borgesian, charm to it but I feel like it's premise is confused. If it's just about the here near-empty signifier of "happiness," what does the magic tech of the earring actually contribute to the parable that some hypothetically perfect narcotic wouldn't?

jvanderbot 3mo ago
The earring doesn't make you feel better, it actually produces a better result. It's never wrong. You might regret addiction, for example? Also, it's a parable. Take it too literally and it loses its charm.
- beepbooptheory 3mo ago
  > It always tells you what will make you happiest. If it would make you happiest to succeed at your work, it will tell you how best to complete it. If it would make you happiest to do a half-assed job at your work and then go home and spend the rest of the day in bed having vague sexual fantasies, the earring will tell you to do that. The earring is never wrong. It just has to be this in the story because it doesn't want to engage with why what the earring indicates is so good except that it provides unfailable "happiness". It implies a static world where "the right decision" always exists, but doesn't want to engage with the details. It also implies a kind of akrasia[1] that I don't think resonates with lived experience: "happiness" is a state we pass in and out of, not the accumulation of correct decisions. We undergo unhappiness for the sake of future happiness. "Happiness" is a questionable end-all goal first of all, but either way not even the kind of thing ontologically compatible with the author's framing. It just feels half-baked, it doesn't actually say anything even when it has all the pretenses of that. Maybe that's too harsh though. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia
  - Revisional_Sin 3mo ago
    You're getting too hung up on the word "happiness". The earring gives you good advice. Good according to whom? According to you. It helps you succeed at your goals and live a fulfilling life.

jr3592 3mo ago

This is such a good point. It matters HOW you use the LLM. Come to it with knowledge and understanding of a subject matter, asking for an implementation? That's different from going to it with no knowledge, asking for guidance on everything.

iN7h33nD 3mo ago

Reminds me of Daemon by Daniel Suarez. I could plausibly see us heading there for sure https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6665847-daemon https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6665847-daemon

mkw5053 3mo ago

[flagged]

buildbot 3mo ago

Not particularly related, but “whispering earring” made me think of the hemalurgic earring in Brandon Sanderson's later Mistborn books.

bitwize 3mo ago

Except it's not really a mechsuit; inasmuch as it is, it's more like an Evangelion: it's got bits of people's souls floating around in there; it only works well with a high synch rate with the user, which is difficult to achieve consistently; and sometimes it pops off and does its own thing anyway. And the way you achieve and maintain deep knowledge of the shape of the output you want is... well, to write and test it yourself. LLMs are a cognitohazard. If you aren't accustomed to programming without them (or even if you are) it's hard to see the line between using them to remove drudgery and relying on them to think for you. The Whispering Earring story reminds me of that episode of Rick and Morty in which Morty gets a piece of crystal embedded in his forehead which allows him to perceive the moment of his death; he then begins steering his actions towards the future in which an elderly Jessica (his crush) tells him she loves him as he dies, down to individual articulated phonemes and muscle actions. In the end, it's revealed this future is not what Morty had hoped for.

rmunn 3mo ago
That Evangelion analogy is a good one. I don't necessarily agree with all of it (for example, I think the high synch rate is the weakest part of the analogy, and LLMs can be used as tools with some decent success without needing to plunge into them too deeply), but every piece of it can be coherently argued for (for example, perhaps I'm missing an even higher threshold of success that I could achieve with a higher "synch rate" equivalent, and I just don't know about it). But kudos for coming up with such an evocative analogy.
- bitwize 3mo ago
  "Synch rate" is roughly "you know how to manipulate the model to get it to do precisely what you want". This is nonobvious even for open-weights models and can change as new models are published, often under the same name as the old models.