if the recyclers really think the aluminum in that can is valuable, theyll fush it out if the garbage or the dump to get it.

putting that sorting and disposal on end customers was a business way of offloading their making single use trash problems on somebody else.

point any blame for cans in the trash where it belongs - can makers

you should indeed be able to, but maybe buying art shouldn't be allowed at all, with people only being allowed digital recreations.

why do you need more than a picture of the rembrandt? there's so much good artwork easily available that the rembrandt is only worth money because hoity toity people want to store their money in it and in the future sell it again

fold kinda does too, for setting the first combined value that you are assembling, and thus on an empty list you end up with that wrong value, same as the for loop

No, the sum of the first ten natural numbers is always 55. It is not "initialised" to some other number beforehand.

japgolly’s signature for reduce above is slightly wrong, it should be `[A] -> ((A,A) -> A) -> Maybe A`.

I.e. there is no initial value to pass in, but the result is an Optional to handle the empty iterator case. That’s how rust does it, for example:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/iter/trait.Iterator.html#metho...

If your data should not be successfully folded if it's empty, you should've already parsed it as an Optional nonEmptyList instead of letting illegal states fly around for a while in your application.

Yeah that's good application design, but those concerns aren't so relevant to the person writing the standard library for a language. You can certainly include a specialized version of reduce for nonEmptyLists which just returns A, but that doesn't change the fact that you have to return an Optional for a normal possibly-empty iterator if you want your reduce function to be non-partial.

> I'm sure everyone would love non-technical people to stay behind dozens of security patches for apps they may use everyday because they forgot to press update.

this is identifying the tension yeah, but if a review process regularly takes weeks or months, then the security patches are still missing

defining the workflow such that the operation is a set of relevant questions

im not seeing it.

youd ask it to pick a location on the ast to add something from the grammar?

i dont see how this stays confined well enough? make a new output space every time? does that end up auto-regressive?

id say yes. a linear classifier that classifies between red and yellow balls will hallucinate on blue.

linear regressions hallucinate in the simpson's paradox.

the model output can be quite confident and not representative of reality

if it puts a high confidence value on a wrong answer, thats still hallucinating, no?

llm hallucinations are high probability tokens that are incorrect vs the real world

Correct, they have not made a universal all-knowing omniscient oracle, which is what would be required for "can't hallucinate".

That seems like a weird standard.

I would be happy enough with: only produces what it can verify with sources.

If you eg try to remember a court case (ie produce the reference via LLM token generation only), it's easy enough to check with your data whether it really exists. Similar for following links and other references.

If your data or sources are wrong, obviously your report about them will be wrong. But I wouldn't call that a hallucination.

There isn’t a single human in this world and hasn’t ever been that meets your happy-enough standard. Make of it what you will.

Why is that at all relevant?

Humans are known to hallucinate a lot. Ask 10 different witnesses at a crime scene what they saw and they'll all report different things.

A good, non-hallucinating LLM would only report things for which it has evidence. It would consult the facts every single time.

It's a pain in the butt for humans to fact-check everything but LLMs can quickly look up all kinds of stuff. That's what makes them useful.

It's not a binary thing. You can get closer or further away from that standard.

And humans also behave differently in different contexts. A conversation at the pub has more such hallucinations than a formal deposit in court. For the latter, a good lawyer will look at her shoes, when you ask him what colour her laces are.

Not to be tooo pedantic, but a bot that assigned 0 confidence to everything wouldn’t hallucinate.

A calculator either gets the right answer or doesn’t answer.

It wouldn’t have to be all knowing as long as it knew perfectly what it doesn’t know

A quantum calculator answers in distributions.

In one universe that is true, in another one not.

Copenhagen is a beautiful city.

No, I don't believe so. Hallucinations are not "high probability" in a real sense. They are an artifact of the random walk the inference algorithm takes, which causes it to latch on to and chase attractors in the noise. This random walk behavior is necessary for chat interfaces to be useful, but are less critical to typed output predictors. I'm guessing they found some optimization that is possible if you give up caring about chat.

Yes, there is no magic sauce here that makes stochastic output binary if that’s what people are looking for.

Right and so maybe we should stop saying "can't hallucinate" when it can by definition.

It’s not what people are looking for, but what they wrongly claim.

What we would want to see if a confidence value that is in line with the actual correctness. If the value is 0.9 for 1000 different answers, then approximately 900 of those answers should be correct.

if you hold people liable, then they will want liability insurance.

what's the point of liability insurance if youll never be held liable?

thats not a very convincing model. as long as training data and compute is available people are going to be able to make serviceable alternatives

If it's framed as national security being at stake why do you think the government won't regulate access to compute? Globally there are only a few firms designing competitive chips and only a handful of cutting edge fabs the world over. This could easily serve as justification to finally ramp up the war on general computing.