New paper: LLMs don’t do formal reasoning.

Well, of course.

LLMs don’t do informal reasoning, either.

Humans are great at pattern recognition. We even recognize faces in clouds and tree trunks. We recognize wheelbarrows, bears and crabs and archers in the stars. We make things that have meaning, and we communicate through speech and text and art.

LLMs are great pattern-generators. They are extremely well-tuned to make patterns that look like they might have meaning. A human trying to communicate may be bad at it, but they have an underlying model of the world that they are referencing and updating. An LLM is not trying to communicate anything. An LLM has a model of language, not a model of the world.

The map is not the territory. All models are wrong, but some are useful.

The situations in which it is reasonable to use an LLM are exactly the situations in which it is reasonable to roll some dice and use that to read the table of random monster encounters; to pull a card from an Oblique Strategies deck; to twirl the knobs on the synth and see if you can get a cool sound. In years past, you could type in a good list of keywords to Google and hit the I’m Feeling Lucky button.

Attempts to use LLMs for more than this fail. Often they do not fail in such an obvious way that the results are immediately discarded, which is where most of the danger resides.

-30-

Many organizations claim to be following Agile in some way. The vast majority are wrong, and most of them should not be Agile anyway.

You will recall that the Agile Manifesto, in total, is this set of four guidelines and an interpretation:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

That’s a recipe for making certain customers happy with your perpetual engagement. But:

About two weeks ago I decided to use parts from a suddenly unused desktop to upgrade the living room media server. The initial plan was to keep the disks, power supply and case of the media server, and use the motherboard, CPU, RAM and video card from the desktop.

Things did not go to plan, of course…

My RSI prevention strategy involves change: I use three different keyboards, four or five pointing devices, and move around to different places. On my main desktop, I mostly use a thumb trackball, with a mouse in second place and a drawing pad in distant third.

On Friday the trackball died in a peculiar way.

I have almost 30 years of professional experience as a sysadmin.

Failure is inevitable. Hardware will fail, software will be discovered to have flaws, reconfiguration will be mistaken.

The antidote is to have reliable recovery mechanisms: everything will eventually break or need to be changed, so in turn you need to be able to recover back to a stable position, so you can try again.

Recovery mechanisms are not all-purpose. I usually describe them in three phases:

I had thought that ‘pareidolia’ referred exclusively to the human tendency to see human faces everywhere – any time you see two dots or circles and a line below them, boom :) it’s a face. It can be triggered by rocks, clouds, shadows, uneven browning on a tortilla or a pancake.

It turns out, though, that pareidolia covers any kind of overactive pattern matching. Humans look for meaningful patterns all the time, without thinking about the search, and when something trips the right thresholds in our brain, we seize upon it. The result can be faces, voices, music or just a cloud that looks like a moose.

Here’s my thesis: the large language models (LLMs) and similar generative software processes that people currently refer to as “AI” – those are exceptionally well-tuned to produce patterns that will trigger threshold recognition in human brains. Not by accident – that’s the goal. They are pareidolia-circuit stimulators.

The problem is that LLM output is exactly as meaningful as any other kind of pareidolia. Every well-formed paragraph is a false-positive error.

And when people repeatedly mistake their overactive pattern recognition for reality, we call that a mental disorder: psychosis.

-30-

If you have some sort of data or power cable that you tend to plug and unplug frequently, consider putting a sacrificial extender cable in between. The cost of replacing a jack on a motherboard or other fixed device is pretty high; the cost of replacing a plug on a device is often similar to the cost of the device in the first place.

For a headphone connection, for example, you can get a 6” extender for a cost less than the shipping. USB extensions are a little trickier - you need to match a bunch of different characteristics, but pretty reasonably priced when available. Power plug extensions are cheap, but it may take a little while to find one short enough to be reasonable.

-30-

I will bet a shiny nickel that in 2028, you will be able to buy newly made spinning disks and that they will be economically justifiable for large media collections, backups and archives. Not sure I’d make that bet for 2033, though.

-30-

My wife worked for the first public ISP for several years. My first job, still in college, was for a local ISP, eventually becoming the head of all technical operations. And my next job was at a major commercial ISP, one which leased POPs to AOL among other businesses.

Here’s how they worked, at a technical and business level:

It’s a nice title, but what this really is, is my personal preferences on interfaces for reading fiction. Everyone is allowed to have preferences. Mine are special because I read a lot – on average, a little over 200 books each year…

It is essential to realize that these technologies [large language models, currently called AI] do not answer questions about a model of reality, but about a model of language.

The utterances that they produce are statistically good at being plausible conversation related to the input prompt. Any relationship to reality is basically coincidental. Our tendency to view it as meaningful is a product of anthropomorphism and the social conventions of our culture.

People who use tools are responsible for their actions.

(I first wrote a slightly altered version of the above on the XBBN mailing list on January 30, 2023, in response to a query from Candy Sidner.)

-30-

The thirty year history of the World Wide Web seems to be one of barely glomming together a relatively robust, relatively well maintained set of information sources and then destroying them at the first sign of a company offering a slicker product… which then spectacularly dies.

– Jason Scott @textfiles [twitter.com] June 28, 2022

-30-

I have had phones with fingerprint unlocks on the back, side and in-screen.

Back is best.

-30-

I switched from GNU screen to tmux when I discovered that the minor bug I had been experiencing for years had been reported several times and always dismissed with “can’t reproduce”.

It took about 20 minutes to properly switch over, and another day or two to discover my own biases and desires. What follows is a discussion of my own preferences in tmux config.