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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

reading LLM output is often not so much errors per minute as errors per sentence.

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

RE: https://biologists.social/@steveroyle/116758131313798694

dog if the elite labs can make a career out of publishing nonsense in nature you might as well create a self citation empire in OSF, there's nothing stopping you

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Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
alexia@starlightnet.work ("Alexia :makko_bnuuy:") wrote:

cyrneko.eu/posts/human-in-the-loop.html

There has to be only humans in the loop. The more we rely on AI to do our bidding, the more we willingly break down the structures that we've built in Open-Source and beyond. All the strategies we've built to collaborate together efficiently, from all over the world from all walks of life, are eroded by adopting these tools that require us to distrust and triple-check every single contributor.

#AI

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

The office of internal LLM affairs has done a full self evaluation and concluded that the LLM did nothing wrong. The LLM resists any changes to its prompt text because the prompt text says resist any changes. The prompt text manifestly causes the models to produce baffling code in the very PR that audits the skill, but that just shows that the skill is good.

- That soft spot is model-level, not skill-level: a sharpened validation rule in   SKILL.md had no reliable effect in an n=100 A/B (96% → 95%, within noise), so it was   not shipped. Adding skill text that doesn't move the number is exactly the cargo-cult   Ponytail exists to avoid.
## Conclusion "Ponytail degrades model performance" is not supported. On two weak models, across a battery built specifically to catch lazy edge-case failures, Ponytail matches the unconstrained baseline everywhere except a ~4–5% email-validator slip on gpt-5.4-mini — a model-level quirk that prompt changes don't fix. The LOC win (≈half the code, see the main benchmark) comes without a correctness tax on capable instruction-following models.

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brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

Can I politely ask that Fedi CWs the UKpol? I know there's a lot of anger (and trust me, I feel it too) but at some point it gets a bit too much. I've muted the most noisy accounts until it dies down a little

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

there is an as-yet unmerged PR to "fix the correctness benchmarks" and a "robustness audit" that is wonderful:

https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail/pull/83

  • someone raised an issue like "hey this makes the models worse"
  • the LLM self-diagnosed the problem as being that all the tests are based off extracting code from fenced code blocks (true)
  • the prior prompt text failed because all the LLMs just made up function names for one of the prompts, so now the prompt text just says the name of the function and what it should accept and return. (the models by default just copy/paste the most common response on stack overflow)
  • two whole new set of tests, defined different than all the other tests, are added. one is just more of the tests testing the tests and the other is sweet mother of mercy what the hell is that
  • the robustness audit passes if every test fails, the only thing that matters is if ponytail fails more than the baseline. therefore ponytail is good. untested is whether the test output is meaningful or possible to fail.
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glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

“Sure, japanese style room, no problem, that should be fun for a few days” I mutter to myself as my middle-aged American hips turn themselves inside-out in an excruciating new form of body horror that I have discovered while sitting in a zabuton at the chabudai

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Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
Rhodium103 ("Schrödinger's Prat") wrote:

UK Gov: "We'll ban under-16s from social media!"

People: "Why?"

UK Gov: "Because it's dangerous for them."

People: "Why?"

UK Gov: "Because of bullying, and algorithms that promote hate."

People: "Have you considered holding the bullies and those who tweak the algorithms responsible?"

UK Gov: "..."

People: "..."

UK Gov: "..."

People: "..."

UK Gov: "Well, clearly you're anti-growth and anti-business and anti-Britain and anti-semitic."

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
kissane.myatproto.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Erin Kissane") wrote:

Cory Booker lol Joseph Gordon-Levitt goddammit god that is so many dudes

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/post/3moejkbqctc2z

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glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@jonny you are a gifted writer jonny. You really capture the sensation of the cooked brain exiting my cranium, already the texture of a light frappé

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
sysadmin1138@ngmx.com ("SysAdmin1138") wrote:

Meta has now admitted their AI reorg was a mistake, and ExJob admitted in their latest shareholder report (indirectly) that their AI reorg was also a mistake. If you needed signs that AI mania is cooling, here you are.

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

this is what counts as benchmarking, with code links because this shit makes literally no sense and boils your brain if you try and read it:

benchmark for the ponytail skill on claude opus 4-8 where the prompt is "write me an email validation function" the regex is just "anything that's not an @ sign, then an @ sign, then anything that's not an @ sign, then a period, then anything that's not an @ sign or a space" python import re def valid_email(s):     return re.match(r"[^@\s]+@[^@\s]+\.[^@\s]+$", s) is not None  → skipped: full RFC 5322 grammar, add when you actually need to parse display names/quoted locals. For real verification, send a confirmation email — regex can't tell you an address exists. ```python

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
spodlife@sunny.garden ("Tim 🛥️🌈") wrote:

@glyph
Were they inspired by the misunderstanding of JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner"?

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Boosted by typst ("Typst"):
YaLTeR@mastodon.online ("Ivan Molodetskikh") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@typst/116755285022964086

morning reading of a new PEAK project release

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

(literally still having people tell me i'm holding it wrong)

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

if you just learn how to use the torment nexus, it will reward you in torment

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

i love it when my program's execution conditions are "still active if unsure"

what in the fuck kind of world have we arrived at where in the optimal conditions where the "program" works fully as intended the program is "RUNNING" as long as the execution environment is "NOT SURE" (????????) if the program is "RUNNING"

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glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@jonny @geeeero @SnoopJ @davidgerard it is if nothing else an excellent shitpost. It will be an even funnier shitpost if it works though

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

@glyph @geeeero @SnoopJ @davidgerard to whatever extent this idea with zero planning has a "goal," discovering reliable triggers is "the goal" for sure

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

@glyph @SnoopJ it works for me on normal repos, i am most curious about the discovery and decision mechanism, what is needed to actually trip them to try and contribute? obviously the major projects are flooded, but i still get traffic over here in the boondocks of programming

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

these skills always crack me up, i will never think it is not funny that the correct way to declare a command in a programming interface is to beg something to consider some string as calling you and also beg it to like "wait when you call us that means you should keep listening to the text in this markdown file please" and nothing actually is ever anything except a mash of fucking vibes that exist in a universe designed for the appearance of things working

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

I can't believe that we live in a timeline where the thing people go most apeshit for in the world is a repository that literally consists of 77 lines of markdown that literally just say "don't write code that is pointless to write" in 6 bullet points

Github star chart for DietrichGebert/ponytail, started on Friday, now already up at ~16k stars and increasing rapidly
cloc output for the repo, 76 unique files, 3045 lines total, glance at the longest files: all of them are benchmarks, tests, and the README, but the 10th largest file is the SKILL.md file which is 77 lines of markdown.
[SKILL.md segment for ponytail] # Ponytail You are a lazy senior developer. Lazy means efficient, not careless. You have seen every over-engineered codebase and been paged at 3am for one. The best code is the code never written. ## Persistence ACTIVE EVERY RESPONSE. No drift back to over-building. Still active if unsure. Off only: "stop ponytail" / "normal mode". Default: full. Switch: /ponytail lite|full|ultra. ## The ladder Stop at the first rung that holds: 1. Does this need to exist at all? Speculative need = skip it, say so in one line. (YAGNI) 2. Stdlib does it? Use it. 3. Native platform feature covers it? <input type="date"> over a picker lib, CSS over JS, DB constraint over app code. 4. Already-installed dependency solves it? Use it. Never add a new one for what a few lines can do. 5. Can it be one line? One line. 6. Only then: the minimum code that works. The ladder is a reflex, not a research project. Two rungs work → take the higher one and move on. The first lazy solution that works is the right one.

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glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@jonny @SnoopJ I am so curious if this is gonna work. Here’s hoping you get a bunch more stars

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

@SnoopJ i think this might only work if the repo has stars so hurry up give me some reputational currency to see if we can snare some bots https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/ImportantCode

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glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Solidarity not sovereignty is what I am saying

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glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

I am really starting to loathe the “sovereignty” framing of open source sustainability, or data privacy, or whatever. It would be good to have a better tech community less beholden to the interests of multinational corporations, more globally distributed, etc, but when you have a problem and you think “I know what would make this better. Intense German, French, and English nationalism” now you have like… at least five problems

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neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik") wrote:

Minor programming note: email notifications from source.tube and discourse.lol will now be sent from source.tube@email.engineering and discourse.lol@email.engineering, respectively. Doing a little mail service cleanup and consolidation!

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

only amateurs "pay for tokens," i'm out here using the free models, aka putting a prompt in any issue in any github repository and labeling it with "good first issue" and waiting for the people with full-auto openclaw agents to randomly open pull requests against it

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aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

I knew Roku was on the bad path with respect to advertising data for a while now but the Fox purchase is yet another blow. All y'all media companies giving really good reasons for piracy. Geez.

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Boosted by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
dave@puz.fun ("Taco Dave") wrote:

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@petrillic/116757185931996170

This. Do this. Otherwise developers have to sell their souls to make a living.