alt Hacker NewsYou can reduce pregnancy to 0.00001% and there'll still be a baby. As in, "you can't be half-pregnant". A tool is either deterministic (within some limits [0]) or it isn't.
[0] For example, for the purpose of driving a nail, if you know how to use it, a hammer is pretty straightforward tool, and what happens depends pretty much on how you use it, and what you use it on. But of course the handle can break, there could be a manufacturing defect. Just like your RAM can be faulty or your computer infected, and suddenly C doesn't behave according to the standard anymore.
But for the purpose of the discussion a hammer is still a deterministic tool, and even though we don't even fully understand everything about physics, we understand enough about hammers and nails that at least many people with material that isn't faulty can use them "blindly" (not literally, in this case) every day, without any surprises. It isn't heavier on the handle end or has a head made of glass in even 0.000000001% of uses. You might say because magic isn't real and hammers follow the laws of physics, as obscure as those may be to us, that never, ever happens. They can be faulty in all sorts of ways but they will never be 10x bigger or 10x smaller between one swing and the next, and so on.
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> a hammer is still a deterministic tool, and even though we don't even fully understand everything about physics
Mid-swing in hammer-space you are in a hyper-position as to hitting your thumb or not, are you not?
I am not quite sure what point you are making here, admitting it plainly.
I was just saying to my parent poster that their non-determinism percentages are too pessimistic. Sure the LLMs are not 100% deterministic; that's a sad fact of life. But the numbers can be reduced to an acceptable range.
> "you can't be half-pregnant"
Yes you can. It's called a miscarriage. That is, you're pregnant but the foetus is dead. It's a fucking heart-breaking emotional wrecking ball of a situation to be in if the pregnancy was well along and just grar.
Exactly, like weather forecasting. If you're told there's a 30% chance of rain, it doesn't mean that 3 out of 10 times you will experience rain.
Either it will rain or it won't, so the probability is either 0% or 100%. And so a forecast of "30% chance of rain" is referring to the likelihood that your probability will be 100%, as opposed to 0%.