Models change. Models are unpredictable. The assumption that we can constrain them between prompt bumpers has not been proven and seems unlikely to be provable given how these model works.

Beyond that, how do you know if the reports and reviews are even correct? Are you just gonna rely on the kindness of others to provide that value? Of all things that LLM’s have killed, I’m pretty sure the open sharing of knowledge and understanding are the first on the chopping block. I don’t care whether or not you’re pro or anti LLM, publishing knowledge for reputation is now a dead end for anyone wanting to make a living.

Wrapping others’ knowledge in a black box that may or may not accurately represent that knowledge is basically enshitification on steroids. The reason we hold folks like Lovelace, Sagan, or Feynman in high regard is because they weren’t wrong when they shared their understanding and knowledge.

But the best of luck to everyone involved! I’m sure everything will work out!

Uh, that is exactly what a derivative work is. You literally specify that Hamlet is an input to your work. I believe you're conflating derivative with transformative. You're certainly creating a transformative derivation of Hamlet, but you are by definition creating a derivative work by training a Markov chain on the text of Hamlet.

The obvious follow up here is whether an LLM is creating transformative derivations or not. A lot of folks argue that yes, an LLM spitting out statistically sampled code that matches existing code is not transformative and is (or might be) infringing the terms of the license it was released under. Others argue that there's not an exact copy of the original source in the LLM's weights so by definition it must be a transformative work. I think it's a pretty obvious "somewhere in the middle" that is gonna make a bunch of lawyers a whole lot of money.

Personally, I don't care one way or the other. I'm one of the folks that thinks software shouldn't be copyright-able in the first place.

> So once the model is created there isn't a good reason to encumber it by how it was created.

I am trying to be very specific here. I assume no untoward motivations from the parent commenter. I am not intending to cast aspersions. Whoever wrote this, I feel no ill will for you and this is not meant as a personal slight.

And I will be very clear, this statement as written could probably be defended because of the “by how it was created” clause.

However, “So once the model is created there isn’t a good reason to encumber it” is so… fucking I don’t even know, because what the actual fuck?

I apologize for the profanity, I really do. But, really? Are you fucking kidding me?

These models should not exist. Ever. By any means. Do not pass Go. Go directly to jail.

I understand the engineering brain enough to contemplate abstract concepts with detachment. That’s all I think happened here. But holy fuck, please pause and consider things a bit.

  That’s the question I’ve been mulling over for days, because
  I don’t see how this action can make any particular guarantees
  about durability, at least not in any portable way.

The missing context is that CouchDB primarily fsync's after open because when an empty database is created, we write a header to disk. The very early implementation in [1] just didn't limit this to only cases where we write the header and that general behavior has never been changed (though the implementation is a bit different today, the effect is the same).

Also, in hindsight, I believe this claim in the Neighbourhoodie is probably too strong:

  However, CouchDB is not susceptible to the sad path.

  However, CouchDB is *probably* not susceptible to the sad
  path. While we can't guarantee it can't happen due to how
  various I/O operations are (not) specified, we're doing as much
  as we can to prevent it. Also, don't forget that your storage
  device might be lying about fsync anyway.

As the author of this (as in this thread) article notes:

  Using OpenZFS as an example (hey, it’s what I know), fsync()
  always flushes anything outstanding for the underlying object,
  regardless of where the writes came from.

Also, to make sure that we're not missing the field for the cornstalks, I want to point out that the double fsync commit protocol used by CouchDB is probably 99.some-more-nines responsible for CouchDB's durability guarantees. However, that's not 100%, so when we find weird edge cases like in [3] we try and make sure that we're as correct as can be. For instance, here's the response to fsync-gate [4].

[1] https://github.com/apache/couchdb/blob/956c11b35487fb8ffcf70...

[2] https://neighbourhood.ie/blog/2025/02/26/how-couchdb-prevent...

[3] https://buttondown.com/jaffray/archive/null-bitmap-builds-a-...

[4] https://github.com/apache/couchdb/commit/3505281559513e29224...

Etc etc. The fact that a wall was 50m out of compliance or whatever it ends up being will be a footnote at best in the review of this crash.

https://leanpub.com/cppinitbook

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/8nn4fw/for...

I personally never operated anything above roughly 250 nodes, but that limit was mostly due to following the OP’s advice about paying attention to the configuration of each node in the cluster. In my case, fewer nodes with fancier and larger raid arrays ended up being a better scaling strategy.

I think you’re missing the fact that the heart beats will be combined with existing packets. Hence the quoted bit. If you’ve got 1000 nodes, they should be doing something with that network such that an extra 50 bytes (or so) every 30s would not be an issue.

I’ve been around enough biotech to have considered the differences between plasmids and viruses versus archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes. I’ve always considered “heritable change” as the base definition of “life”. As in, “life” is progeny resemble their parent(s)? Or “heritable change”.

“Heritable metabolizing” quite nicely captures that difference between the levels of single molecule “life” and singular/multicellular “life”.

Apologies for the random aside, it was just one of those random “I have a vague idea of why mitochondria are important, but I don’t see them as fundamental” parts of my “What is life?” definition being refined.

Consider trying to measure feedback from a microphone and speaker. You don’t have to be an expert to know that there’s a quick change in system behavior when the microphone gets too close to the speaker.

As for relups, I once tried starting a project to make them easier but eventually decided that the number of bazookas pointed at each and every toe made them basically a non-starter for anything that isn’t trivial. And if its trivial it was already covered by the nl (network load, send a local module to all nodes in the cluster and hot load it) style tooling.

I have no idea what the rest of the article says because this single sentence is so bat shit insane on so many levels.

The placebo effect is not “real healing”, it’s “our study is unable to show a statistically relevant result from our treatment”.

I’m not big on LLMs personally, so I won’t make any specific claims on what they can do. But from what I’ve read, I’d doubt they’d correct that mistake.

On the flip side, I would trust an LLM to tell me whether it should have been “batshit”, “bat-shit”, or “bat shit”.

We can all argue about what makes a calorie “good” or “bad” but CICO is basic thermodynamics. A calorie is a unit of energy. If a cell doesn’t have enough energy, it dies.

Sorry for mildly ranting at idiocy on the internet via your comment, sodality2.