alt Hacker NewsIt's often simply misleading / bad writing. Here's one I just got about some crashes:
"If the crashes stop, the factory overclock is marginal; run a small negative offset."
This looks like it's saying: "If the crashes stop then we know the factory overclock is marginal." (This makes no sense.)
What it's trying to say is: "If the crashes stop then we can run a small negative offset, because the factory overlock is marginal."
What I would write: "If the crashes stop, we can avoid crashes by underclocking slightly. The speed difference between that and factory clock is marginal."
Replies
I thought it meant "the factory overclock is marginal" in the sense of "borderline unstable"?
I suspect this happens due to optimising for reasoning... if you insert a few words, it will suddenly start to make more sense.
"If the crashes stop, (that means) the factory overclock is marginal; (so) run a small negative offset. (to confirm this hypothesis)"
The core thought is basically avoid crashes -> caused by marginal overclock -> apply small -offset to test. Which is exactly the order the sentence is in :P
I wonder if this is a result of them trying to cut token consumption by summarizing their RL training data, or maybe it's from how they anonymize user data for training.
Marginal - definition 2a: of, relating to, or situated at a margin or border.
Succinct and precise; a well crafted sentence. A marginal OC results in unpredictable crashes and can be corrected with a small offset; marginality describes the behavior and explains the solution.
Inscrutable clues casually conveyed can now be readily explained, at least, unlike the training data of [silence]. Brevity is the soul of wit, but perhaps also exasperated confusion.
I'm guessing it's because the way the first one was written looks real smart and sophisticated, which I'm presuming the models are rewarded for, especially when they're fed all kinds of PhD papers and so on as high quality, high weight data