I'm a veteran, a software developer, and an early cryptocurrency adopter. A student of logic, philosophy, mathematics and game theory
Joined August 2019
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I'm moving back to old school forums and/or sites that:
1. don't engage in shadow banning
2. don't have infinite scroll
3. don't naively optimize for engagement
I basically stopped using X because it does all 3. Not paying makes this site suck and I'm never paying for that
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I just got perma banned by the bias-tard mods in r/opensource for calling out their stupid shit. Somehow this is against their rules. This irks me enough to maybe do a deep dive into this bias-tard and see what I can find. People like that are always up to something else sketchy
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Interesting, this shadowban stuff came out a month after I canceled my sub over it. I see it as cowardly behavior in general. I'm just not going to pay for that "service". Doing that to me a single time is a breach of trust that I'm unlikely to forgive/forget
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Hey @Meta why are you savagely crawling my gitea server? It is blasting it from ~70 ips and at a sustained 200 rps. I blocked that whole subnet for being rape-y. Please stop ddos-ing my server, thank you.
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All of my replies are hidden from the ops. I canceled my subscription and will no longer be using this site directly after I post this.
Paying for a site (or even just using it) that engages in shadow banning doesn't make sense to me at all. @elonmusk @nikitabier
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Interesting, several of my posts are being hidden by X. They're only visible via my profile or direct link. Thats the kind of shit that will make me insta-bail and start building something better. Shadow banning with no notification or appeal isn't something I'm cool with.
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Working with LLMs is hard sometimes. It turns out that a huge part of GLM 5.2's excessive hedging probably has nothing to do with the model itself and it is a freaking logical paradox it gets forced into. Good thing I'm an obsessive nerd about debugging basically everything.
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Basically what I mean here is I've been blaming the model when it looks like it is far more likely to be user error on my part after debugging.
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I finally figured out how to get GLM 5.2 to stop hedging so much. Part of why they did to that kind of extreme is because of this "one/two way door" framing I have for when working on architecture design. They kept using it as a hedge and to put off work until some later point when that doesn't really make sense.
What they were doing was just using it as a kind of escape hatch and that caused a lot of problems. I had to go back and adjust the prompts to make it clear that just because a choice can be reverted (two-way door problem) that doesn't mean we can just not choose a path. It simply means it is usually less risky in terms of rework if we get it wrong.
That model should really only be used to highlight or contrast choices that can not be reverted easily and need more careful consideration. Once I had that clear in their architecture specs the hedging largely vanished. That is great because it was a massive cognitive load for me to try and separate if it was legitimately something that could safely be put off or if they were just hedging.
Hedging is kind of a natural thing the more well calibrated a thing is (human or llms). Chat bots tend to be less well calibrated than base models. I suspect it is because we're not well calibrated and having a day to day conversation with a thing that is would be hard. So while this hedging was annoying and not very useful I actually see it as a positive sign for the model. Assuming I don't fubar it with my instructions, it should be decently well calibrated and probably more so than I am.
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No one cares but to linger on that last point:
> Hedging is kind of a natural thing the more well calibrated a thing is (human or llms).
Usually people mean it as something like "a way of avoiding giving a direct answer or opinion" but it also is a general tool for offsetting the risk of being wrong. It is used in finance/business to manage risk but also basically the same underlying reasoning is behind it being used in communications.
Humans are generally not well calibrated and if they are then their language usually is probabilistic in nature. If I make a prediction (basically a bag of words saying a thing is going to happen) then there is usually some confidence (often unjustified) behind that. However, if I give a forecast the narratives are separated from probabilistic estimates.
In one case I can be wrong in a single instance and in the other that kind of language doesn't make sense - what matter is: "how well calibrated are the probabilistic estimates" or "when I say something has x% prob of happening what is the actual long term probability of similar forecasts?"
So most confident speech is actually based in unjustified confidence. Actual confidence in a binary sense should be relatively rare and relegated to the edges of whatever the true distribution is. Usually it should be some variation of "maybe" with some bias added.
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It is weird how GLM 5.2 is somehow obviously better than 5.1 but also obviously worse at the same time. It is big into hedging (using v1/phase 1 to be lazy) and has a weird habit of using "trusted" and "remote safe". This is derailing enough I might start using deepseek
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It might be my fault for introducing that one/two way door framing. They take it way too far. The general idea is that some paths are hard to walk back/revert and some aren't. It is a good mental model for a basic classification of problems but that is it. They use it in weird ways and use it to justify being lazy.
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Its kind of funny how an arguably poorly planned project of mine that was written in a reactionary way (stupid vpn bans) is getting quite a bit of usage. I have several other oss projects that have a much better design/codebase but see minimal usage outside of my own use(why I wrote them in the first place).
It is actively being rewritten right now so the next version will be a lot better. I made the classic mistake at starting at a top level feature (vpn-like functionality without being a vpn) and then just kept strapping stuff onto it. So it lead to a mess.
Since llms are so fast I decided to just start over. Since people appear to actually be using it (despite the repo clearly saying it is an alpha) I'm doing that work in a separate branch and will keep the old branch for anyone who wants that specific functionality.
The new version will have all of the old functionality but a lot better code quality, testing, etc. I just finished the first round of implementation/review and now we're going back and adding the few testing gaps. The bulk already has >= 90% coverage so its a much better baseline.
GLM 5.2 seems kinda lazy about stuff. I've had to explain to it 3 or 4 times so far that they're far faster than a human and that the workload doesn't matter nearly as much as the risk of getting important things wrong.
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They are pretty lazy. I keep finding all kinds of shit where they defer things to some imaginary "phase 2" or beyond when that wording was never used anywhere except where they wrote it. Its derailing to find lots of lazy shit like that.
5.1 made subtle mistakes but wasn't lazy. It is kind of hard to say which is worse. Subtle mistakes drastically increase the cognitive load for me and increase the surface area for mistakes. Lazy shit like putting things off for some imaginary "other time" is much easier to catch and I even have basic heuristics to catch it already but it happens a lot more than those subtle mistakes so its something I have to constantly keep an eye out for which comes with it's own cognitive load.
I'm going to add something to the prompt now that forbids any mention whatsoever of "phases" when it comes to architecture documentation. That is only ever valid language when talking about actual implementation and usually not even then. Its largely just some shit people use to break up tasks and is fragile. I use a DAG and don't need to think in terms of phases at all the vast majority of the time.
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I think I've converged on a pattern that works pretty well with most llms. It can be a bit pedantic but it works well so far.
The ADRs(Architecture Decision Record) have a specific format with context, decision, consequence and reference blocks.
The open questions have a similar format and are usually kept centralized (adrs too). I was careful to use the framing of one-way vs two-way door problems. One way problems are ones that are really hard to walk back or revert in some way and two-way are usually easy to go back and take a different path.
It largely just works well. Each llm (and human) can see a clear history of the decisions that lead to a particular thing being done or not. They're so fast at actual implementation that if I don't do this kind of thing the codebase will quickly turn into a mess. I often just scrap everything and start over when that happens. It is like their context gets poisoned or something and it ends up looking like trying to shine a turd - its just gonna be a shiny turd.
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I had to add "UK" to my ignored word list here on X because the algo is spastic af. Any interaction with a topic will fubar my account into being nothing but that topic. I don't live in the UK and its just their recent 1984-like antics that got my attention. I mostly don't gaf
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Most of the code I release gets minimal use because they're usually hyper specific dev tool type things. That said, the reverse-proxy project is actually starting to get usage. The traffic on my self-hosted git is lower than on the github push mirror but I can also see more.
It seems like people are actually using it which is nice. It was a rush project that was meant to secure a very real gap in my own stack and should be reasonably secure/last for at decade at least - barring logic bugs in one of the dependencies of course.
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