Tootfinder

An LLM is a machine for giving confident plausible answers to whatever question is thrown at it.
The methods it uses to do this mean that (for questions that are not too challenging) there is a good chance that the answer is correct as well as confident.
Confident is guaranteed, correct is not. Is that what you need?

Another failure of #ChatGPT. I asked if a diagram had ever appeared in anything I'd published. It confidently gave me three answers, all wrong, before admitting that it couldn't find it. It even gave totally wrong Figure numbers. When I pointed this out, I got the usual dose of mock humility.
#AI…

Noch ein paar der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
IT-Angriff betrifft IT der Beweisstückstelle der Polizei

This is my 1st time learning of #Guacamole, despite being an ASF Member. Looks cool…
Basically a J2EE app that talks HTML5 with WebSocket (or falls back to a custom HTTP-based stream proto) to a JS client in the browser on the front end, and speaks its own abstract remote desktop proto to a backend proxy that talks RDP or VNC to desktop servers. Apparently there’s also a X11 graphics drive…

"strategic computer rental and anchoring to proprietary services"" (SCRAPS) 😅
#LWN

The year starts with a new competition case re. public EV charging prices in Italy. The competition authority has decided to conduct a further investigation into A2A Mobility, as prices charged to others were higher than in their own app.
https://www.agcm.it/pubblicazioni/bolletti<…

Einige der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
IT-Angriff betrifft IT der Beweisstückstelle der Polizei
http…

Wenn Cybercrime zeigt, dass wirklich niemand verschont bleibt. 🫠 Ein Ransomware-Angriff auf die Werkstatt Bremen hat auch Auswirkungen auf die IT-Systeme der polizeilichen Beweisstückstelle.
Zum Artikel: https://heise.de/-11165825?wt_mc=sm.re

I loved @jasonclark.bsky.social 's #FF2025 'problem statement':
'We were given access to a weirdly confident intern that can’t explain how they got their answers.
It is a seamless interface that breaks search interaction retrieval patterns.'

{ "jason": "clark" } (@jasonclark.bsky.social)
Slides and code from my #ff2025 talk, "Reasoning with Small Language Models (SLM) for Trustworthy Generative AI (GenAI)." Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NHCuyuPd9KK3QUo8izeta2CMIk-rmcy1/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=103883366387427181221&rtpof=true&sd=true Code: https://github.com/jasonclark/agentic-search-react

"Christopher Bishop’s 2006 book “Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning,” arguably one of the triggers of the current popularity of machine learning, is quite literally a book about applied mathematics, diving into probabilities, linear algebra, neural networks, Markov models, and combinatorics. And rightfully so; if your objective is to find a job as an engineer at OpenAI, knowing a thing or two about eigenvalues and eigenvectors is definitely going to be useful."

In Praise Of Mathematics
How much math knowledge does a programmer need to know to fulfill their job? How deep should the mathematical knowledge of full-stack engineers, computer security experts, or large language model engineers be? The spectrum of possible answers to these questions is too large to be useful. Perhaps the eternal answer "it depends" is enough?