Worth looking at both the quoted text here and •especially• the linked page, which is quite good.
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IT WAS IN THE TRAINING DATA. Your test gave the machine a pile of correct answers and free license to plagiarize.
I remember people being wowed that Claude Code could implement a complete C compiler. But somehow it doesn’t sound quite as impressive when you phrase it as “given every existing C compiler as input, the LLM can produce a C compiler as output.”
2/
We need to consider the possibility that soon cp(1) will become sentient.
https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2026/02/12/the-pride-of-subject-hometown-here/
https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2026/02/07/on-the-crank-spectrum/
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@datarama @inthehands That is a reasonably achievable goal since it is pretty short and written in a very accessible language.
So feel encouraged to try if you wish to!
(As a French person, I never had to learn it the hard way, and admire anyone who does)@temptoetiam @inthehands I can read Borges (slowly and with embarrassingly frequent dictionary breaks) in the original Spanish! That's actually one of the ways I maintained being able to at least read the language (though I struggle with understanding spoken Spanish, if it's spoken at a natural pace) since back when I took Spanish in high school.
(I can also read Russian children's literature - *very* far from my goal of being able to read the Strugatsky brothers' science fiction in the original language.
) -
One last example:
The first LLM code example that really made my eyes pop was early after the release of GPT, when somebody got it to combine Breakout with Conway’s Game of Life (a truly delightful idea). It worked!
Funny thing: the Breakout code and the Life code had a •completely• different style and flavor. Red flag. In about 15 minutes of web searching, I was able to find one of the projects (can’t remember if it was the Breakout or the Life half) which it had copied wholesale, with just a few variable renames. And the other half? It was in Python, but it used dictionaries where it really should have used objects — tons of `thing["prop"]` where it should have said `thing.prop`, and lots of other un-Pythonic stuff besides. It was a machine translate of code from another language, very likely Javascript.
The entire thing was a plagiarized Breakout and a plagiarized Game of Life, one transpiled, and all stuck together in a single run loop. To be fair, figuring out how to (1) run both halves of the logic from a single loop and (2) count the Life cells as Breakout bricks is work I'd cheer on from a second-semester intro CS student! It's not, however, quite what's being sold by these companies.
6/
As per my posts, I have the luxury of not having LLM vendors shoved down my throat, and I generally avoid them for ethical reasons:
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/116581463138461199
But because this all these questions about the usage and limits of these tools keep crashing through my doors, all of our doors, whatever we think of the ethical showstoppers, well…
…fight off amazing percentages of LLM overhype with this one weird question.
/end
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One last example:
The first LLM code example that really made my eyes pop was early after the release of GPT, when somebody got it to combine Breakout with Conway’s Game of Life (a truly delightful idea). It worked!
Funny thing: the Breakout code and the Life code had a •completely• different style and flavor. Red flag. In about 15 minutes of web searching, I was able to find one of the projects (can’t remember if it was the Breakout or the Life half) which it had copied wholesale, with just a few variable renames. And the other half? It was in Python, but it used dictionaries where it really should have used objects — tons of `thing["prop"]` where it should have said `thing.prop`, and lots of other un-Pythonic stuff besides. It was a machine translate of code from another language, very likely Javascript.
The entire thing was a plagiarized Breakout and a plagiarized Game of Life, one transpiled, and all stuck together in a single run loop. To be fair, figuring out how to (1) run both halves of the logic from a single loop and (2) count the Life cells as Breakout bricks is work I'd cheer on from a second-semester intro CS student! It's not, however, quite what's being sold by these companies.
6/
@inthehands i've noticed a trend in anecdotes recently where people are finding it harder to trace their novel-seeming LLM outputs back to inputs. i wonder if this is a result of them atomizing their inputs more finely, or being "better" at swapping the tokens around to make output look original. (an AI bro might argue that at some point human creativity is doing the same thing…)
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As per my posts, I have the luxury of not having LLM vendors shoved down my throat, and I generally avoid them for ethical reasons:
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/116581463138461199
But because this all these questions about the usage and limits of these tools keep crashing through my doors, all of our doors, whatever we think of the ethical showstoppers, well…
…fight off amazing percentages of LLM overhype with this one weird question.
/end
@inthehands Going further: if you could google the source for a HTTP server in JavaScript in 2015, the LLM should be able to output one in 0 (zero) minutes or it's failed.
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@inthehands (Completely aside: I sometimes feel like I ought to learn French *just* to be able to read that one in its original language. It is very special to me; it was the first book I ever read myself.
Even more completely aside: Someone ought to give Hayao Miyazaki the rights to create an animated interpretation of it, and supply him with however much coffee and pure adrenochrome needed to keep him alive, active and in good spirits for however long that takes. And reward him with whatever he wanted - for example, the exclusive right to hunt Sam Altman for sport.)
@datarama
I know just enough French to have read Le Petit Prince in the original language (with some struggle), and…it really is beautiful in French in a way that translations don't capture. “On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur” can translate into English quite directly as “One does not see well but with the heart,” but it just doesn't have the same poetry and magic at all. -
@temptoetiam @inthehands I can read Borges (slowly and with embarrassingly frequent dictionary breaks) in the original Spanish! That's actually one of the ways I maintained being able to at least read the language (though I struggle with understanding spoken Spanish, if it's spoken at a natural pace) since back when I took Spanish in high school.
(I can also read Russian children's literature - *very* far from my goal of being able to read the Strugatsky brothers' science fiction in the original language.
)@datarama @inthehands knowing Spanish is a great stepping stone to learn any other romance languages!
Bon courage à toi -
@datarama
I know just enough French to have read Le Petit Prince in the original language (with some struggle), and…it really is beautiful in French in a way that translations don't capture. “On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur” can translate into English quite directly as “One does not see well but with the heart,” but it just doesn't have the same poetry and magic at all.@inthehands I've read it in Danish and English. I personally like the Danish translation best.
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@inthehands Given pictures of a giraffe, a rhinoceros, an elephant, and a squirrel, find the squirrel. Feel free to reference dictionaries, encyclopedias, nature documentaries and previous responses to this same question.
@GalbinusCaeli
To be fair, this is an algorithmically difficult problem that was still largely an open question 10-15 years ago! Scale down your expectations by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, and modern machine learning is truly impressive.Not a $10 trillion industry. But it's impressive in a “cool research” sense, and also in a “oo, that may pose serious societal danger” sense.
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Back in 2023, OpenAI was hyping ChatGPT by claiming "it can pass the GRE".
When all it was doing was autocomplete of the answer keys that had been used as input.
@michael_w_busch
Yup. Same with passing the bar. -
As per my posts, I have the luxury of not having LLM vendors shoved down my throat, and I generally avoid them for ethical reasons:
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/116581463138461199
But because this all these questions about the usage and limits of these tools keep crashing through my doors, all of our doors, whatever we think of the ethical showstoppers, well…
…fight off amazing percentages of LLM overhype with this one weird question.
/end
I'm as anti-"AI" as they come, but this is a much stronger argument against these systems being intelligent, or about to achieve a breakthrough, than it is against the claim that they are useful. The ability even to quickly retrieve a known right answer needle from a haystack of less useful answers (as opposed to coming up with a new right answer from first principles) would potentially be a valuable service, if it were reliable (and less inefficient, ecologically suicidal, etc.).
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@Linza @inthehands Miyazaki was born to make that movie, and it is a cosmic injustice of the highest order if he doesn't get to do it.
@datarama @Linza
My own position on this is that the book is perfect, and should not be adapted.I'm pretty sure Miyazaki understands this — and if he •were• making an adaptation, it would be because he's actually writing a dramatically different story that is largely new material and profoundly different in its scope and arc, as he did with both Kiki and Howl.
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@datarama @Linza
My own position on this is that the book is perfect, and should not be adapted.I'm pretty sure Miyazaki understands this — and if he •were• making an adaptation, it would be because he's actually writing a dramatically different story that is largely new material and profoundly different in its scope and arc, as he did with both Kiki and Howl.
@inthehands @Linza Hence, "interpretation".
That is kinda the thing he does.(BTW, I seem to recall him mentioning that it is his favourite book.)
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@inthehands i've noticed a trend in anecdotes recently where people are finding it harder to trace their novel-seeming LLM outputs back to inputs. i wonder if this is a result of them atomizing their inputs more finely, or being "better" at swapping the tokens around to make output look original. (an AI bro might argue that at some point human creativity is doing the same thing…)
@joe
Yeah, people were having that same argument about humans and creativity on the more academic side of my circles back in 2023. It would be an interesting one if it didn't have all this investment money weighing it down! (Human learning, both technical and artistic, almost always starts with imitation and repetition; clearly it's a building block of this messy constellation of things that we call “intelligence.”)I do think the models are getting better at atomizing, as you put it, and I'm disappointed that there's not more research on this family of reverse-mapping problems. One question I've wondered about: can we quantify how much the output depended on a given input? e.g. how would the probability of given output have changed if the model were trained without <pattern> in its training data?
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I'm as anti-"AI" as they come, but this is a much stronger argument against these systems being intelligent, or about to achieve a breakthrough, than it is against the claim that they are useful. The ability even to quickly retrieve a known right answer needle from a haystack of less useful answers (as opposed to coming up with a new right answer from first principles) would potentially be a valuable service, if it were reliable (and less inefficient, ecologically suicidal, etc.).
@bifouba
The would “right” is doing a bit too much work in that sentence, though. Remove it and replace “less useful” with “other,” and I agree. -
RE: https://unstable.systems/@jneen/116618931097778342
Worth looking at both the quoted text here and •especially• the linked page, which is quite good.
I’ll add another item of my own. The first screenshot mentions giving an LLM the task of “implementing an HTTP server in JavaScript from scratch” in 90 minutes. Sounds impressive, right? Until you remember that every open-source Javascript HTTP server in existence ••was in the training data••.
1/
"HTML parsers in Portland" is another great example
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@inthehands @Linza Hence, "interpretation".
That is kinda the thing he does.(BTW, I seem to recall him mentioning that it is his favourite book.)
@inthehands @Linza Fun fact: Have you ever wondered why the landscapes and architecture in Kiki's Delivery Service look so Scandinavian?
Miyazaki had visited Astrid Lindgren in Sweden, to ask for her permission to do an animated interpretation of Pippi Långstrump. She declined, but Miyazaki spent some time touristing around, photographing and sketching things he saw. He then ended up using that in Kiki.
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IT WAS IN THE TRAINING DATA. Your test gave the machine a pile of correct answers and free license to plagiarize.
I remember people being wowed that Claude Code could implement a complete C compiler. But somehow it doesn’t sound quite as impressive when you phrase it as “given every existing C compiler as input, the LLM can produce a C compiler as output.”
2/
@inthehands I wonder sometimes if a project or vendor will ever go to the trouble of doing something completely ethical, like creating a new programming language with a corresponding model that only has been fed correct training data that they've provided.
It would be interesting if someone did that specifically for non-programmers to make it easier for people to one-off programs for their own use.
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@inthehands @Linza Fun fact: Have you ever wondered why the landscapes and architecture in Kiki's Delivery Service look so Scandinavian?
Miyazaki had visited Astrid Lindgren in Sweden, to ask for her permission to do an animated interpretation of Pippi Långstrump. She declined, but Miyazaki spent some time touristing around, photographing and sketching things he saw. He then ended up using that in Kiki.
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@bifouba
The would “right” is doing a bit too much work in that sentence, though. Remove it and replace “less useful” with “other,” and I agree.Fair enough!
