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Comment Re: "Deterministic" (Score 1) 28

Can we please stop saying that LLMs are 'nondeterministic'... It's misinformed. And it matters (because some people associate nondeterministism with some sort of magic, and others associate the word with inaccuracy -- neither of which are true). These models are clearly, architecturally, mathematically deterministic at a fundamental level, although this determinism is hidden from users. Let me explain. If you take any recent LL model (GPT, Llama, Gemini, etc...) and run it with 'temperature' set to zero, then, for a given input, it will produce exactly the same token, every single time it runs. That's not surprising, the weights are baked into the nodes of the model and calaculate the same output every time (of course excluding very rare things like uncorrected cosmic-ray bit-flips). Now, this has the side effect of introducing some undesirable behaviour (rigid responses, and looped outputs in certain contexts), so the 'temperature' parameter is used to mix things up a bit (this parameter is usually hidden ftom users in cloud models). When tokens are returrned on an inference run, there is an array of tokens provided with probabilities of being the 'right token'. The temperature value just uses a pseudorandom algorithm to return less likely tokens a proportion of the time (give the user the 2nd or 3rd most likely token some of the time instead of the most likely). To be clear, this has no effect whatsoever on the deterministic nature of the model, it's just a fudge-factor applied on the results after the token array is returned. The LLM models don't do something unpredictable or nondeterministic, they are just like any other computer algorithm run on a deterministic Turing machine. The debate around what sort of informational structure is represented in these models is interesting, but please don't lean on nondeterminism to explain your biases (positive ot negative about LLMs)... it's just incorrect.

Comment Re: In next months news: (Score 2) 93

Actually the "moderate consumption" myth has been thoroughly debunked. For more on this look up the "j curve hypothesis". It turns out that properly conducted studies (particularly in scandinavian military cohorts) establish a near linear dose-dependent effect of alcohol. That is, any amount of alcohol consumption increases the risk of many illnesses (cancers included). This is now well established, but the alcohol industry continues to push for softer messaging like, 'a glass of red wine with your meal is healthy'. We now categorically know this is not true. In some case series analyses, alcohol consumption accounts for approxinately one third of attributable cancers. In many ways, it is a similar public health threat as smoking. I do believe in a person's right to make bad choices, but I also strongly believe that people should be properly informed amd that governments have an obligation to prevent misinformation (especially when it is for-profit). Some common-sense changes that will result (eventually) from the evidence are: - limit or prohibit alcohol advertising (esp. at sporting events) - include warnings about cancer, brain damage and liver damage on labelling - consider public health when licensing venues (even without longer-term consequences, there are strong correlations between alcohol-serving venue density and violent crimes) - standardise measures, prevent free-pouring and enforce responsible serving laws which hold venues liable for serving drunk individuals -maintain strong controls on drink-driving These are all common-sense methods of harm reduction. Feel free to keep drinking ), but please don't delude yourself that it is good for your health!

Comment Re: First post! Go QEMU, go! (Score 4, Interesting) 23

You're kidding right? KVM blows every other hypervisor out of the water with its performance. It may not meet your use case but for serious emulation it smokes the competition. In our business we run hundreds of VMs with not a single machine crash and get near-native speed, especially with the improvements in virtiofs. KVM also does a great job with hardware virtualisation including PCI passthrough and can handle resource changes on-the-fly (like increasing memory to the virtual machine). As far as bridged networking, set up your bridge with standard linux tools and then just attach your VMs to the bridge. We don't use a GUI for KVM because libvirt is really easy from the command line and the config files are simple to work with. For enterprise use, it's simply the best.

Comment Re: HOWTO (Score 0) 1081

Hell is just fine for me if it means not believing in your fairy god. The trap of religion is the true hell. Eventually I'm sure society will become civilized, the end of death sentences and the realization that crime is a function of a broken social order will be two signposts on the way.

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