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PaperclipPerfector  17hr ago (text post)   496 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 15, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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How do you best verify Large language model output?

I hear lots of people say they use LLM's to search through documents or to get ideas for how something works, but my question is how do people verify the output? Is it as simple as copy-pasting keywords onto google to get the actual science textbooks? Or is there some better set of steps to take that I miss. I also wonder how you do that for looking through a document, is there some sort of method for getting the LLM to output page citations so you check those (maybe it's in settings or something)

Verifying the output depends on the use. Code gives you a pretty easy time verifying. Searching docs depends: if you’re trying to find some info in the docs, this can be sufficient to get keywords and navigate to the section you want.

Lots of current LLMs are pretty good at copying text out of prompts when told to, e.g. page numbers. That can help a lot, since verifying is very quick.

Hallucinations and other errors are still very common and you must account for them.

I just post LLM findings to social media and then delete the post if anyone fact checks it /s

An easy trick is to get another model to review/critique it. If both models disagree, get them to debate each other till a consensus is reached.

These days, outright hallucinations are quite rare, but it's still worth doing due diligence for anything mission-critical.

As George suggested, you can also ask for verbatim quotes or citations, though you'll need to manually check them.

These days, outright hallucinations are quite rare, but it's still worth doing due diligence for anything mission-critical.

I asked chatgpt what the 4 core exercises of the LIFTMOR routine were and it didn't get a single one correct. It's a simple question to google so I am not sure how it got it so wrong. When I changed the question to specify the LIFTMOR routine to help counteract osteoporosis, it got it right. Google doesn't require the additional context.

I asked it right now, and it got everything right. How long ago was this?

I even used the basic bitch 4o model. There are better ones that I have access to as a paid user.

https://github.com/vectara/hallucination-leaderboard

The current SOTA LLMs hallucinate as little as 0.8% of the time for well grounded tasks, text summarization in this particular case. Of course, the rate can vary for other tasks, and the results worsen when getting into obscure topics.

I would imagine it depends on the kind of thing you want to verify. In the old days (meaning last year) I would often simply ask, after an answer had been produced: "Really?" and the LLM would double check itself and at times respond with really annoying phrases like "You caught me!" and proceed to explain why what it had just reported to me as accurate was, in fact, inaccurate. Again, it depends on what it's doing for you, and how it's been calibrated by you to do that (though calibration is not perfect. I've long inserted that it should not fabricate or embroider, and at times it still does.)

The easiest thing to do is just ask it. "Can you produce the pages and precise quotes of xyz?" Depending on the response, continue questioning it until you're where you want to be.

Others will very likely be able to suggest a more efficient strategy.

Somebody on here was reading Sublight Drive, which I have now finished and loved. The author reported he had to stop writing secondary to mandatory service, anybody know what country he is from?

Possibly was my rec, glad you liked it! Wasn’t able to figure it out but he did respond to a few comments particularly in the last few normal chapters IIRC, so it might be deducible. He said 2 years? So I assume Israel or South Korea

If it's Israel and 2 years, then it's a "she". Males used to serve 32 months, now extended to full 3 years. Females serve two years (don't think it was extended).

I hope so! I was worried about Ukraine but I don't know the specific situation right now.

So what are you reading?

Working on my annual re-read of Battle Cry of Freedom and staring the Stormlight Archive.

Started on Dresden Files. I watched the one-season series and liked it, so decided to try out the books. So far Storm Front wasn't bad, and Fool Moon is fine too. I wonder why they couldn't make a decent longer-running TV show out of it - the story and the setup is very cinematographic. Since there's a lot of book in the series I will probably return to it from time to time for a while.

I'd say that the TV series was limited by what was possible at the time, more than anything else. More specifically, I don't know how much better the source material could have been treated for a modestly budgeted SyFy series. I think that Netflix or Prime could potentially do a much better job with it these days but, of course, they'd be just as likely to screw it all up for Reasons if they tried, alas.

I'll be interested to hear what you think of the series if/when you return to it. FWIW, while I know that Butcher himself has said something to the effect that the first four books are completely skippable, it was the third book that set the hook for me as a reader. Where the first two felt to me like they were more mid-level urban fantasy fare that weren't necessarily too serious, shit got real in Grave Peril, and IMO it hasn't stopped since. While there are plenty of folks that have been upset by this twist or that turn in the overall series, I'm not one of them. There have been many deeply touching moments in the series for me, more than any other that I've yet read, and some of them are made that much better by being brought to fruition over the span of several or even many books. Even the seemingly-slightest rhetorical flourishes can be pregnant with foreshadowing, and I personally think that Butcher has just gotten better and better as a writer as he's cranked them out, with Ghost Story being my personal favorite.

Where the first two felt to me like they were more mid-level urban fantasy fare

Yes, I agree more or less. "Mid-level" sometimes taken as damning with faint praise, but here I think it's appropriate and not negative - I mean he's not spectacular so far, but decent and enjoyable fare. Based on what you say, I'll probably get to Grave Peril sooner than I otherwise planned, thanks.

HPMOR. I'm just past the troll fight.

I have never planned to do this (since I haven't read the original books), but somehow, I ended up on its webpage and decided to give it a try.

It's... not what I expected. I kinda expected a "Harry Potter pokes holes in or abuses the laws of magic while being an insufferable little shit about it" and there were chapters like that, but that's not what the book is about. It's not "sequences for the fans of HP", even though there are chapters like that. The quality is kinda uneven, too. The whole SPHEW arc felt like filler, for example, especially after the Azkaban arc that preceded it.

What's surprising is how much of a capital P progressive EY is, up there with Paine, Marx, Pinker, etc in his conviction. It's not this surprising when you think about it, it's the Motte that has been warped by its interest in the culture war too much.

Just finished reading the first Volume of The chemical Formulary, a book which is best described as "What if the Necronomicon were real"

It's got all sorts of recipes from adhesives to cosmetics to explosives to (insanely sketchy) medicine. It also presents everything in a mater of fact way without telling you of all the demons you are possibly creating.

Here's the recipie for cleaning coins for example

Sodium Cyanide 8 ounces

Water 1 Gallon

Apply the above solution with a tampico brush and when tarnish is removed wash with cold clean water then hot water and dry.

Note: this material is Poisonous and care must be taken in handling.

When this book says something is dangerous what they mean is this has a level 4 safety risk in the data sheet cleaning coins just requires enough cyanide to kill 2000 people

In volume 6 they have a Defense against war gasses section on page 535.

The describe Titanium Tetracloride smoke as "harmless", and Zinc Chloride smoke gets the same treatment

Yeah that's right this book is that unhinged.

It's also got great recipes for making Hydrogen Sulfide gas, a chemical that if it reaches 1000 parts per million and you take 1 breathful you die instantly.

This book is both a gold mine and a walking disaster. The funny thing is most of the chemicals used in the recipes are super easy to purchase at your local hardware store or wal-mart. Then you can light your house on fire, give your neighborhood cancer, die of Cyanide poisoning (ok that one is harder), die of hydrogen sulfide poisoning. Some of the stuff is harder to make thankfully but the danger levels of this book rival removing a microwave transformer.

Adding Political Ponerology to my list.

Finished Cryptonomicon. 5/5. Neil Stephenson has an interesting approach to relationships and sex. It stands out a bit because many books that feel like this (and Anathem) just skip them entirely. I think Cryptonomicon did a better job overall.

As I read it I thought "this is great but it was clearly written just a couple of years ago" given it's references to crypto currency. No - 1999. Amazing.

I lust, I yearn, I ACHE for late 90s hackerdom like you wouldn't believe. Two pieces of art have sparked my imagination in a way to have made me wish I was born 10 years earlier or smarter: this and the movie Primer. Halt and Catch Fire not bad either.

I also have some simple, base pleasures that I know are bad for me. The Japanese being wrecked in WWII is one of those things, and so that was an unexpected and happy bit of catharsis.

Now digging into Circe which has also been excellent so far!

I feel the yearn for 90s hackerdom also. Assuming you’ve also read Snowcrash, what about Neuromancer? Gibson really builds that dystopian cyberpunk world so well.

About a hundred pages into my second read of Unsong. I previously read a print-on-demand edition of the web serial version, but when Scott announced an official print edition with some significant edits, I bought a copy. So far, the edits seem fairly mild: everything I liked and disliked about the version I previously read seems to have survived intact. The Kabbalah stuff is great, the alternate history stuff is great, the intensely literal-minded apophenia-laden interpretations of passages from the Torah and Talmud are great - but the glurgey interactions between the protagonist and his MPDG "t3h penguin of doooom!!" love interest positively make my skin crawl.

Just finished my first read.

I enjoyed it a lot, and a lot more than I was expecting. I went in pretty much blind other than having read Scott's blog, so I wasn't expecting so much humour, and the rationalist/utilitarian references that I assumed would be present were thankfully reasonably scarce and understated. I think my favourite part was Dylan Alvarez's entrance and the idea of placebomancy.

I'm not much of a fantasy reader but this one pulled in a lot of the parts I can enjoy (a bit of Ted Chiang, a bit of Douglas Adams, a bit of Terry Pratchett) and left out almost all the parts that totally put me off fantasy writing (excessive and self-indulgent world building and lore). The last fantasy book I read was the Northern Lights trilogy which was trope heavy YA shite.

My only grumble was that after such a good book the ending was only "good enough", but good enough is good enough.

I wish Anna was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. A Manic Pixie Dream Girl fucks you. Anna is just a bitch.

But the biggest problem with Unsong is that Aaron is a pussy. He is not brave or manly. He has very little agency; things happen to him. By the end of the story, he has become an observer to the Cometspawn, who are the ones actually moving the plot forward. He's got yandere Buffy throwing herself at him and he still holds out for Ms. Lets-just-be-friends. This is someone else's story; Aaron is just along for the ride.

The second biggest problem with Unsong is that Scott has disease of MCU writer; he cannot stop making jokes, even during serious moments, which completely ruins the dramatic tension.

Other problems: Schizophrenic narrative structure that constantly jumps between past and present story threads involving completely different characters and locations, Kabbalism is a lackluster magic system.

Still, I think Unsong has a lot of really cool ideas (the Comet King is fucking awesome). There is the core of a good story there, even if the execution is badly flawed. I think if you gave it to a more talented rational fiction author to rewrite, like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Alexander Wales, you would get something truly wonderful.

Fortune's Envoy (Cyber Dreams book 3) by Plum Parrot. I started the first one after finishing Daring and I'm still way into it!

I’m also working through the first book in Stormlight Archive! I’m alternating between that, Hegel And The Hermetic Tradition, and a book about the basics of Freemasonry.

Stop at the third. It goes downhill from there.

I think this is bad advice. First, because that is not generally agreed upon (the fourth book is excellent in my view), but second because if you read three doorstopper fantasy novels you're not going to stop there. Pretty much anyone who enjoys them enough to get that far is going to keep going to see how they like the books they were advised against. Third, it would be extremely frustrating to get only 30% of a story. Better to not read the books at all if they really do go downhill to such an extent.

The first two are solid adventure fantasy. Starting in 3 and really picking up in 4, it delves into this horrible amateur philosophy that just guts the life out of the entire world and concept.

I disagree. Like I said, I thought book 4 was excellent (I would say it's my second favorite behind Words of Radiance). Which is why I'm saying there isn't really agreement on this point, so it would be more accurate to advise new readers "I don't really care for the books after this point, but many people still like them, so you may or may not find it enjoyable".

Interested to hear your thoughts on Stormlight. I don't think I'm going to like it, but I promised my friend group I would read at least the first book.

So far I think it’s… okay. I still don’t feel like I have a strong grasp of the setting, and I especially don’t really understand how the “spren” are supposed to work. Seems like they would make it extremely difficult for anybody to ever conceal their emotions, and so far I haven’t seen any suggestion of how social relations in the setting are different from those in our world as a result. The action scenes thus far have been sufficiently exciting, and I’m intrigued enough by certain plot threads to make it worth continuing with the book.

For help with the setting, Sanderson was inspired by rock pools at a beach he visited, which is why almost everywhere is rocky or sandy, most creatures have crustacean features, and 'grass' and other plants act weird.

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