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naraburns  nihil supernum  3mo ago (text post)   5020 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for July 2025

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

@Rov_Scam:

@gattsuru:

@wemptronics:

@Dean:

Automatic Cognition Engines

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@TequilaMockingbird:

Big Eyes, Small Mouth

@raakaa:

@self_made_human:

Contributions for the week of June 30, 2025

@Rov_Scam:

@FCfromSSC:

@StJohnOfPatmos:

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@urquan:

Contributions for the week of July 7, 2025

@grendel-khan:

@4bpp:

@Dean:

Building a History

@naraburns:

@Hieronymus:

@MathWizard:

Critical Self-Reflection

@Clementine:

@Southkraut:

Contributions for the week of July 14, 2025

@netstack:

@OliveTapenade:

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@WhiningCoil:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@Sunshine:

Identity (?) Politics

@Primaprimaprima:

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@Southkraut:

@Hoffmeister25:

@urquan:

@WhiningCoil:

@cjet79:

@Iconochasm:

Contributions for the week of July 21, 2025

@Dean:

@quiet_NaN:

Contributions for the week of July 28, 2025

@self_made_human:

@P-Necromancer:

@ThisIsSin:

@SSCReader:

@faceh:

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"Is your 'AI Assistant' smarter than an Orangutan? A practical engineering assessment"

I'm disappointed this was selected as a quality contribution due to the litany of easily-verifiable falsehoods from the author and his refusal to correct or acknowledge them. Strangely enough, I am more upset by this than any hot-button culture war issue I've read on here. I suppose if someone's political opinion differs from mine, I can dismiss it as a matter of opinion, but when someone tells complete falsehoods about the area you work in, doubles down, and is highlighted as a quality contributor, it feels worse.

I share your feelings here. I just couldn't be bothered to complain.

Yeah. There's been a long-standing conflict between AAQCs not needing to be correct so long as they're positive contributions for the community. This at least looks like a serious if flawed attempt to discuss a complicated rather than active trolling, so it's far from the worst version of that issue, but the lack of engagement with even the most overt criticism of the most central claims makes it really frustrating.

The problem that commentary was not even interesting, but dealing with fiction invented there. (fiction propped only by fake or worthless credentials)

I feel like i addressed @rae's objections about structure and LLMs just being token predictors within the body of the text itself. Eg

most publicly available "LLMs" are not just an LLM. They are an LLM plus an additional interface layer that sits between the user and the actual language model. An LLM on its own is little more than a tool that turns words into math, but you can combine it with a second algorithm to do things like take in a block of text and do some distribution analysis to compute the most probable next word...

@self_made_human disagreed with my definition of intelligence and approach to assessing it wich is interesting from a philosophical standpoint but also kind of irrelevant in practical terms. Fact is that adapability and agentic behavior are key things to consider when discussing whether a robot can replace a human worker, or if we're going to wakeup tomorrow to find out that Claude or Grok has suddenly gone "FOOM" and turned into Skynet, and i don't think it's "hamstringing" my (or anyone else's) understanding to point that out.

@daseindustries just seems to be angry that someone would break from the rationalist consensus.

Though aditedly taking the week of the 28th off to go on vacation probably dindnt help.

Fact is that adapability and agentic behavior are key things to consider when discussing whether a robot can replace a human worker

are you sure?

you do not either to replace human workers - combine harvesters replaced vast amount of human workers, without really having either of that

LLM that would hallucinate far less and be better at following orders (with no agentic behavior whatsoever, though I guess adaptability would be be needed) would allow to do the same to programmers

Claude or Grok has suddenly gone "FOOM" and turned into Skynet

if we assume bizarre increase in intelligence of LLM then agentic behavior is absolutely not needed - you would only need human to prompt them once (and surely there are jokers doing "turn into Skynet and murder all humans") several times a day

An LLM on its own is little more than a tool that turns words into math, but you can combine it with a second algorithm to do things like take in a block of text and do some distribution analysis to compute the most probable next word...

that seems quite unusual definition of LLM - who else is using it?

I am trying my best to be charitable here, but I literally explained why that paragraph was wrong, over and over, and you... just repeated that same paragraph?

I will say it for the last time. That paragraph is pure fiction from your part. There is no interface layer, there is no second algorithm like you described, and you have completely misinterpreted how LLMs work. Ironically, that paragraph sounds like an LLM hallucination.

Am I out of bounds by saying that this is constitutes trolling at this point? This is genuinely upsetting.

Dude, look, here's code for the core functionality of a GPT2 model taken from the most simplified but still functional source I could find: https://jaykmody.com/blog/gpt-from-scratch/

This is the ENTIRE code you need to run a basic LLM (save for loading it).

import numpy as np

def gelu(x):
    return 0.5 * x * (1 + np.tanh(np.sqrt(2 / np.pi) * (x + 0.044715 * x**3)))

def softmax(x):
    exp_x = np.exp(x - np.max(x, axis=-1, keepdims=True))
    return exp_x / np.sum(exp_x, axis=-1, keepdims=True)

def layer_norm(x, g, b, eps: float = 1e-5):
    mean = np.mean(x, axis=-1, keepdims=True)
    variance = np.var(x, axis=-1, keepdims=True)
    return g * (x - mean) / np.sqrt(variance + eps) + b

def linear(x, w, b):
    return x @ w + b

def ffn(x, c_fc, c_proj):
    return linear(gelu(linear(x, **c_fc)), **c_proj)

def attention(q, k, v, mask):
    return softmax(q @ k.T / np.sqrt(q.shape[-1]) + mask) @ v

def mha(x, c_attn, c_proj, n_head):
    x = linear(x, **c_attn)
    qkv_heads = list(map(lambda x: np.split(x, n_head, axis=-1), np.split(x, 3, axis=-1)))
    casual_mask = (1 - np.tri(x.shape[0])) * -1e10
    out_heads = [attention(q, k, v, casual_mask) for q, k, v in zip(*qkv_heads)]
    x = linear(np.hstack(out_heads), **c_proj)
    return x

def transformer_block(x, mlp, attn, ln_1, ln_2, n_head):
    x = x + mha(layer_norm(x, **ln_1), **attn, n_head=n_head)
    x = x + ffn(layer_norm(x, **ln_2), **mlp)
    return x

def gpt2(inputs, wte, wpe, blocks, ln_f, n_head):
    x = wte[inputs] + wpe[range(len(inputs))]
    for block in blocks:
        x = transformer_block(x, **block, n_head=n_head)
    return layer_norm(x, **ln_f) @ wte.T

def generate(inputs, params, n_head, n_tokens_to_generate):
    from tqdm import tqdm
    for _ in tqdm(range(n_tokens_to_generate), "generating"):
        logits = gpt2(inputs, **params, n_head=n_head)
        next_id = np.argmax(logits[-1])
        inputs = np.append(inputs, [next_id])
    return list(inputs[len(inputs) - n_tokens_to_generate :])

def main(prompt: str, n_tokens_to_generate: int = 40, model_size: str = "124M", models_dir: str = "models"):
    from utils import load_encoder_hparams_and_params
    encoder, hparams, params = load_encoder_hparams_and_params(model_size, models_dir)
    input_ids = encoder.encode(prompt)
    assert len(input_ids) + n_tokens_to_generate < hparams["n_ctx"]
    output_ids = generate(input_ids, params, hparams["n_head"], n_tokens_to_generate)
    output_text = encoder.decode(output_ids)
    return output_text

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import fire
    fire.Fire(main)

Let me walk you through the important parts:

First, the prompt is encoded with a byte-pair encoding tokenizer. This groups letters together and turns them into integers to use as ids. This is just a look-up table.

The generate loop gets logits directly from running the LLM. What are logits? It's a probability that's assigned to each possible token id.

With that, you just need to take the highest value and that gives you the token.

See how the LLM directly outputted the highest probable word (or token rather)? Where is the "interface layer"? Where is the second algorithm? No such thing.

And yes, this is pretty much how ALL modern LLMs work. It's extremely simple. They just predict the next token, by themselves. All the sophisticated outputs you see arise purely out of that. THAT is the miracle that no-one could believe for a while.

When put like that, it gives the sense that one Mark Zuckerberg is seriously overpaying some recent hires.

Pretty sure he is overpaying, but in general, the distance between a toy model and a production-quality system is gigantic, and crossing that distance is about 95% of what software developer (and managers, and project/product managers) does. The devil is always in details, and "pretty much" is not "exactly". So generally having an extremely well paid people to spend a lot of time on improving the product based on a widely known and relatively simple ideas is something that a lot of software companies do, and make a lot of money on it, and it's not stupid at all. Zuck maybe going a bit overboard with exactly how much well paid, but otherwise it's not weird at all.

I think he’s arguing that the argmax you run over the logits is not technically part of the LLM neural network so the LLM is just ‘an algorithm that produces math’ (ie produced a probability distribution), but that seems tendentious and also kind of weirdly put because it sounds like describing a tokenizer.

I remember giving someone the definition of rationalist as someone who thinks they're smarter and more logical than other people.

I was pleased to see my first impression of the photos from @Rov_Scam's post (the crashed billionaire-adjacent wedding) were supported by one comment (thank you @benmmurphy for reassuring me I'm not crazy) in that all of the outfits worn there look like dead ringers for the costumes worn by the Capitol residents of the Hunger Games films. Now while I'm usually one to default to "it's just fiction you insipid little monster, stop trying to make Trump Voldemort and read another book" this was just too on the nose even for my own brand of read another book-ism.

That wall of text of rules for online dating

Jeez, straight online dating must be soul crushing, I had a roomate in college who would just send a dick pic and have instantly like 5 guys climbing over eachother to try and get in his pants. He had different dudes with him every other week.

Sorry, which one of the entries is about dating? There is a lot of them and the search doesnt help.

Very first entry from Rov_Scam titled "Based on friends who have all gotten long-term relationships from the apps, combined with my own experience, here's what I can tell you..."

More than four thousand words, actually.

On one hand: yes, certainly.

On the other hand, it's not necessarily great shakes for homosexuals, either, depending on their goals. Online "dating" is pretty effective at facilitating hookup culture, whether straight or gay--it's just that straight hookup culture is just as paywalled for average-to-below-average males in other contexts as it is online. Gay hookup culture is something else entirely.

I had a gay student some years ago (pre-Obergefell) who dated like a mid-20th century Baptist. He didn't want to have a bunch of anonymous group sex, he wanted to find his soulmate and get married. He went to a gay bar once, and the third time someone that night greeted him by grabbing his crotch, he left and swore never to return.

I have no idea what the actual ratio of "just the sex, please" men to "approximately the sociosexual desires of a rural church girl" men is, in the gay dating pool. But it seems clear that online dating is much, much easier for the former than the latter. The ratios are presumably different in the heterosexual scene, but the shape of the problem seems about the same.

I had a gay student some years ago (pre-Obergefell) who dated like a mid-20th century Baptist. He didn't want to have a bunch of anonymous group sex, he wanted to find his soulmate and get married. He went to a gay bar once, and the third time someone that night greeted him by grabbing his crotch, he left and swore never to return.

I have some friends in this category. They’re miserable.

I have no idea what the actual ratio of "just the sex, please" men to "approximately the sociosexual desires of a rural church girl" men is, in the gay dating pool.

My understanding is that “I don’t have sex until we’re committed” is incredibly rare among gay men, though not nonexistent. Even very monogamous gay men apparently are very sex-forward. Perhaps this shows how small biological differences can be amplified by culture and market dynamics.

It is mildly funny to me, in a “this is ironic” way, that sending dick pics is the cardinal sin of straight flirting — we even had a longtime user quit the motte because people weren’t sufficiently condemnatory of it — but in gay dating you’re shamed if you don’t send one. There seems to be something in the male nature that just goes, “here’s my penis.”

This is why as a trans woman I am so glad to be out of the gay dating scene and why the "why don't you just be gay instead?" argument never worked for me. Gay men have all sorts of expectations like having sex on the first date, being OK with unsolicited dick pics (pressuring you to send one back is absolutely real), going from 0-100 sexually, and that whole vibe of sex being more like fun (they literally call it play or fun) than something that requires a deep emotional connection to work. I found straight/bi men are generally more understanding when you make it clear that that's not what you're after (if they're manipulative, it's at least a sign of knowing what you want).

I recall you had a post a while ago where you said you’d dated both men and women. Did you develop a preference for men, or how did women fit into this?

something that requires a deep emotional connection to work

Well, I guess all I can say is, join the club. We don’t have fun prizes but there are occasional butterflies in the chest. And you get a stamp on your card when someone says, “you’re sweet but I don’t see this going anywhere.”

I found straight/bi men are generally more understanding when you make it clear that that's not what you're after (if they're manipulative, it's at least a sign of knowing what you want).

Interesting. I’d never considered that being played could actually be preferable to sex-forward behavior, but I can see it. I guess gay men just didn’t even make an effort? Just, “oh, no dick pic, seeya?”

I recall you had a post a while ago where you said you’d dated both men and women. Did you develop a preference for men, or how did women fit into this?

I’ve always been attracted to masculinity, which obviously made it a bit harder. Plus it’s really hard to avoid gendered expectations when you’re male and dating a woman.

Well, I guess all I can say is, join the club. We don’t have fun prizes but there are occasional butterflies in the chest. And you get a stamp on your card when someone says, “you’re sweet but I don’t see this going anywhere.”

That’s a very relatable post. I think there’s many more men out there like you than it seems, but sex-forward, superficially attracted men feel like they’re the majority due to social pressure. How much of locker room talk is posturing to impress other men, as opposed to actual genuine feelings?

Interesting. I’d never considered that being played could actually be preferable to sex-forward behavior, but I can see it. I guess gay men just didn’t even make an effort? Just, “oh, no dick pic, seeya?”

There’s a number of other body parts that can keep them on the hook, but yeah it’s 100% visual.

I’m not saying that that being played is actually good of course, obviously I’d rather they make themselves known, but the fact that there is no real gay male equivalent of a straight man seducing and manipulating women into sex is telling.

Some of the gay guys I knew hadn’t even cuddled anyone once despite having high enough body counts to get multiple STDs. They called their hook-ups “fuck and go”: no kissing, no foreplay, just send pics, go to a guy’s place, leave 10 min later. To me that’s just soulless and depressing.

I have some friends in this category. They’re miserable.

Same, all the moreso because if and when they do manage to find someone who ostensibly wants a strait-laced monogamous relationship, the dominant gay culture is constantly shoving extra-relationship sex into their faces, leading to rampant cheating and drama and relationship blow-ups/divorce.

I've previously speculated that normalizing polyamory (and sexual liberation more generally) would have this effect, and it sucks to see those predictions borne out in the gay dating world. I'm really sorry for your friends.

There seems to be something in the male nature that just goes, “here’s my penis.”

Imo women would be far happier if they had the same mindset. Suddenly getting a dick pic wouldn't be a drama in three parts, it would be a mild, huh he likes me that much, here's some tits.

I dunno man, it's complicated and frustrating, but the gay community is a one big "be careful what you wish for" cautionary tale, whenever I get frustrated with the male/female sex-drive difference.

“Let’s see Paul Allen’s cock.”

3 of them this month? Good to see that aura AAQC farming is a skill I haven't lost. Maybe I should do more stupid things if I get good essays out of them!

I'm always on the fence about whether getting more than one or two of these in a month is something I should be proud of, or a sign that I need to take a step back (because I'm congenitally incapable of dashing off short, sensible responses instead of inadvertently pretending I'm blogging on here).

Kudos-winning stupidity should always be encouraged... so do more!

This is like the dude on top of the podium congratulating third place haha. I wonder what your record was, five?

Don't know, don't want to know, and don't think its even the same league as the excellence that may only be provided in smaller amounts. Things like 4bpp's post on masculine restraint on the potential for violence, or WhiningCoil's post on the sort of envy/jealousy/loss of feeling 'raised wrong,' are all the better for being distinctly personal in ways I probably never will try to.

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