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simple lil setup with qdrant

the Nokia hardware was pretty great, too!

Nokia's hardware managed to prove to me, that plastic done RIGHT, is just as good if not more practical than the metals we have today. They looked fantastic, legitimately didn't require a case, and held up very well.

Some time after Apple discontinued the plastic Macbooks, I took mine in to get the battery replaced.

I remember overhearing one of the sales folk having to explain to a woman that they can't sell her the white ones, only metal ones as she preferred the chunky plastic.


And on most Lumias, if your phone got scratched, lost its shine, or you just got tired of the color, you could just walk to the store and get a new "shell".

Nokias hardware has always been pretty good. Heck, some of the nokia branded HMD stuff is well built for the price

time to train a classifier!

> Once people will understand that even a tiny amount of data can slightly change models and still greatly change their behaviour, there will be a shift in AI security.

i think the subliminal learning paper clued a lot of people into that


unrelated in any way? that's not normal. have you tested the model to make sure you have sane output? unless you're using sentence-transformers (which is pretty foolproof) you have to be careful about how you pool the raw output vectors

there are tons of models released still. even some non-Qwen ones!

there's actually quite a bit of research in this field, here's a couple:

"ExpertPrompting: Instructing Large Language Models to be Distinguished Experts"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14688

"Persona is a Double-edged Sword: Mitigating the Negative Impact of Role-playing Prompts in Zero-shot Reasoning Tasks"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08631


Those papers are really interesting, thanks for sharing them!

Do you happen to know of any research papers which explore constraint programming techniques wrt LLMs prompts?

For example:

  Create a chicken noodle soup recipe.

  The recipe must satisfy all of the following:

    - must not use more than 10 ingredients
    - must take less than 30 minutes to prepare
    - ...

I suspect LLM-like technologies will only rarely back out of contradictory or otherwise unsatisfiable constraints, so it might require intermediate steps where LLM:s formalise the problem in some SAT, SMT or Prolog tool and report back about it.

This is an area I'm very interested in. Do you have a particular application in mind? (I'm guessing the recipe example is just illustrate the general principle.)

> This is an area I'm very interested in. Do you have a particular application in mind? (I'm guessing the recipe example is just illustrate the general principle.)

You are right in identifying the recipe example as being illustrative and intentionally simple. A more realistic example of using constraint programming techniques with LLMs is:

  # Role
  You are an expert Unix shell programmer who comments their code and organizes their code using shell programming best practices.

  # Task
  Create a bash shell script which reads from standard input text in Markdown format and prints all embedded hyperlink URL's.

  The script requirements are:

    - MUST exclude all inline code elements
    - MUST exclude all fenced code blocks
    - MUST print all hyperlink URL's
    - MUST NOT print hyperlink label
    - MUST NOT use Perl compatible regular expressions
    - MUST NOT use double quotes within comments
    - MUST NOT use single quotes within comments
  
In this exploration, the list of "MUST/MUST NOT" constraints were iteratively discovered (4 iterations) and at least the last three are reusable when the task involves generating shell scripts.

Where this approach originates is in attempting to limit LLM token generation variance by minimizing use of English vocabulary and sentence structure expressivity such that document generation has a higher probability of being repeatable. The epiphany I experienced was that by interacting with LLMs as a "black box" whose results can only be influenced, and not anthropomorphizing them, the natural way to do so is to leverage their NLP capabilities to produce restrictions (search tree pruning) for a declarative query (initial search space).


If one goal is to reduce the variance of output, couldn't this be done by controlling the decoding temperature?

Another related technique is constrained decoding, whether the LLM sampler only considers tokens allowed by a certain formal grammar. This could be applicable for your "quotes within comments" requirements.

Both techniques clearly require code or hyperparameter changes to the machinery that drives the LLM. What's missing is the ability to express these, in natural language, directly to the LLM and have it comply.

The angle I was coming from was whether one could use a constraint satisfaction solver, but I don't see how that would help for your example.


Anything involving numbers, or conditions like ‘less than 30 minutes’ is going to be really hard.

I've seen some interesting work going the other way, having LLMs generate constraint solvers (or whatever the term is) in prolog and then feeding input to that. I can't remember the link but could be worthwhile searching for that.

did it tell you how smart your questions were, too?

check out Forsaken Lands: https://wiki.theforsakenlands.com/

Cloudflare worker would work, too

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