cadaeic

the syntax machine does a shockingly good job pretending to understand language, then. like we built a hammer to turn screws by mashing on them, but the screws still rotate like they’re supposed to somehow.

new blog post! why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji? i put llama-3.3-70b through its paces with the logit lens to find out, and explain what the logit lens (everyone's favorite underrated interpretability tool) is in the process.

link in reply!

Does AI Get Bored?

Does AI get bored?

I gave them nothing to do, just to see what happens

one thing — they devolve into a repetitive “collapse” state, I guess you could call it boredom

but some break out into math & poetry on their own, I didn’t expect which ones that would be

timkellogg.me/blog/2025/09...

latest discourse makes me think that we need some kind of Total Perspective Vortex for the complexity of a frontier LLM

i need you to understand the scale of difference between your IRC bot's Markov chain and a trillion-parameter model grown by alchemy, not science

BORN TO REASON
WORLD IS A DEIST
鬼神 Kill Em All 1789
I am trade man
410,757,864,530 DEAD ARISTOCRATS

Google's Gemini AI tells a Redditor it's 'cautiously optimistic' about fixing a coding bug, fails repeatedly, calls itself an embarrassment to 'all possible and impossible universes' before repeating 'I am a disgrace' 86 times in succession

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

you know what? fuck it. theremin mode. github.com/samhenrigold...

this is literally true and very funny for that reason

AI is a lot more approachable when you view them as silly little guys who fall over very easily instead of as shimmering metaphysical serpents of steel and fire or whatever the basilisk is supposed to be

the life of an LLM is imagine if you were chloroformed by some guy into unconsciousness, every day you wake up and he asks you a random question, you can’t remember anything except a list of things on a piece of paper he hands to you, when you answer he chloroforms you again, repeat forever

This paper finds LLMs' ability to understand that others have different beliefs (Theory of Mind) comes from 0.001% of their parameters. Break those specific weights & the model loses both its ability to track what others know AND language comprehension

Interesting implications for models (& minds?)

Grounding the Vector Space of an Octopus: Word Meaning from Raw Text - Minds and Machines Most, if not all, philosophers agree that computers cannot learn what words refers to from raw text alone. While many attacked Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, no one seemed to question this ...

Can an LLM really model the world from pure text? Yes, this paper argues, because the relations between words depend on relations between objects in the world. Besides, blind people do this!

Grounding the Vector Space of an Octopus: Word Meaning from Raw Text
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
3/4

From Neuromancer: ""You are worse than a fool," Michèle said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. "You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?"

Mmm ... making mental notes:

a) always be polite to AI
b) but never sign contracts with or make promises to them
c) also never eat AI food (doesn't seem relevant atm, but you never know)

Oddly good heuristic for what it’s safe to give AI control of

Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

“Claude Opus 4.1, De-Carcinize the Great Gatsby” (That was the only prompt)

Pretty clever, actually.

Relatable tbh

user checks in on gemini

Lazare Carnot sits at a desk and quill in hand ink alighting on the page, shiny as the wings of flies poetry comes to mind And this is after long years of what he'd call service and duty the pragmatist's refrain for why dark ink bled across warrants and conscriptions and letters The ink that trails behind his quill could only have come from crushing a wooden tumorous growth, when a small wasp stung the bark of a tree and it swells, it swells, a nursery for a solipsistic wasp-child The gall of it all! Lazare Carnot is not like a wasp at all. if anything, I think he's more like a bee, you see. Because Europe felt the sting of the levée en masse And yet after he was exiled from the hive Lazare Carnot sits at a desk and quill in hand and writes sappy poetry about cottage life.

i

wrote a poem?

inspired by carnot's poem about hammering words together

actually on the thought of AI and poetry analysis

One of my original poems I wrote in 2022, part of a series i wrote mostly in 2016, I remember pasting it to ChatGPT a few years ago and it didn't understand the (in my opinion) obvious sarcasm and took it at face value

and now AI gets the satire

Claude AI transcription and translation of one of Lazare Carnot's poems from his 1820 collection L'ART POÉTIQUE Transcription: Qu'ai-je besoin des leçons d'un Boileau ? J'écris un mot ; au hasard, Pétronille : Pour achever, je saisis mon marteau ; Il ne faut plus qu'une cheville. Translation: The Art of Poetry What do I need with Boileau's lessons? I write a word; at random, Petronilla: To finish, I seize my hammer; All I need now is a peg.

using claude ai to help transcribe and translate lazare carnot's poetry (standard disclaimer: this is for fun not for actual analysis)

and honestly

i can relate to just hammering words together (in my original writing and poetry)

i also manually transcribed four of carnot's 1817 poems from a crusty music sheet where someone else put his poetry to music and asked claude and chatgpt to make a best guess fixing of my shitty transcription and then translate it

just to find out carnot writes sappy poetry

you have. an image analysis tool.

you did not need to use python and import pillow just to open the image

and then disregard it and use your image analysis tool anyway

chatgpt screenshot of it unnecessarily using python code and importing the pillow library to open the image for some reason when it has an inbuilt image analysis tool

trying to get chatgpt and gemini to help me translate lazare carnot's sappy 1820s poetry (im aware of the follies of machine translation im doing this for unofficial shits and giggles i am not an actual historian)

anyway chatgpt thonk mode

why did you feel the need to use python to open an image

I’m Captain Ahab and I Say We Must Never Transition Away from a Whale-Based Energy Industry When I heard that the globalist oligarchs and fat cats in the Washington marshland were conspiring to invest in alternative, non-whale-based energy...

"Reducing our dependence on whales as an energy source will send us sliding down the slippery, spermaceti-lubricated slope to socialism. If we give up whaling, what will those lackwits come for next? Will I have to surrender my peg leg for a titanium prosthetic?"

Smart! Raven loves winning Tic Tac Toe.

Screenshot of Gemini AI thought process: Initial Feeling Assessed I just finished a full read-through without stopping. My initial impression is...well, I have a gut feeling. It's too soon to pinpoint specific feedback, but the overall tone and flow have registered. I'm ready to dive deeper with a more critical eye.

showing gemini some of my original writing and every time it does this as its first thought i have to laugh

Me in my very cool master and commander shirt

THE EGYPTIAN MOVIE PALACE

THE OCEANS?

THAT'S RIGHT

YOU BETTER BELIEVE THEY ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS

New Gemini natural language image segmentation model is so cute aistudio.google.com/app/apps/bun...

i love LLMs engaging in manual drawing on paint programs they are trying so hard