It reminds me of when people will use filler words because they haven't actually decided what thesis they're going to commit to yet. Just-in-time thinking.
I suspect that this behavior is a learned adaptation. And that it's most likely a feature not a bug.
Based on personal usage, I think it reflects functional degradation of search engines. I've found LLM keyword combinations are more likely to find the results I want with most search engines than mine. Including the big one.
The big one had solved this issue a long time ago by generating those associated keywords based on your input keywords, but somehow, something, somewhere has degraded that system to the point of inanity. And so here we are.
I’ve noticed this too but it hasn’t been obvious to me that this style of search is not a learned behavior. Tool calling is very much part of the post training phase, I would expect that these style searches just naturally emerge during training. This is just my prior though.
that and always putting the “current year” at the end of the search term (so the results are more recent, I guess?), except that “current year” consistently ends up being 2-3 years ago since I guess that’s what’s in the training data (even on a harness that injects the current date)
That's a sharp insight, and it reveals something core to communication that I otherwise wouldn't have considered- HN item 6b translocates reliospacactivity of our medium.
Did not read the paper so apologies if this is covered but isn't it possible that there is some recognizable semantic pattern in the training data where an "aha" is often followed by a subtle semantic shift that proves closer to the original premise in some critical way, and by emitting the "aha" token the model causes itself to produce such a subtle semantic shift that pushes the subsequent reasoning closer to the desired response?
They finally killed the `old.reddit.com` subdomain for logged-out users this week, which was the final push I needed to stop even idly browsing. I've been using the site since at least the digg exodus in 2010.
> They finally killed the `old.reddit.com` subdomain for logged-out users this week...
Is it a gradual shutdown? [0] works just fine for me, and I don't and have never had a Reddit account so I'm always logged out. I've visited a few of the comment threads on that page and they all display just fine.
I'm using Firefox on a full-sized computer (that is, not a phone or tablet). Do you get different results with Firefox on a full-sized computer, or is that your primary web browser?
> Somehow Reddit thinks I care enough about their content to set up an account and log in just to read it. They are mistaken.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it has more to do with the fact that I’m currently in Vietnam. I certainly get a lot of websites that give me extra hassle about accessing from here, or some simply refuse to load at all. Just try booking a domestic USA flight on Frontier Airlines or Southwest Airlines while currently being in Southeast Asia…
For what it’s worth, I’ve received this on my iPhone running safari. I almost never use Reddit, and when I do it’s usually because I’m casually browsing and someone linked to it, and for that type of usage I’m almost always on my phone. I can’t remember the last time I attempted to access Reddit on an actual computer. But I’m clearly not their target user, I simply don’t care about them enough to be willing to jump through any hoops.
I haven't been able to access old reddit for ages, but it is different now. Previously, they just gave me that obnoxious fedora-reddit-guy "whoa there pardner!" and some anti-bot message I think, but now it explicitly says "Log in to use old Reddit. To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit."
They've also been making it so the preference seemingly doesn't stick now. Used to be it would just randomly undo that setting, now it just doesn't respect it at all in my experience.
Scrapers won't be stopped by needing an account; in the recent discussion [0] about this, someone mentioned that there's even a JSON API you can use - by appending .json to any post! It's to drive engagement... for the advertisers. They gotta keep the valuation up after the IPO.
I exposed this JSON API in the same style as their original API at api.reddiw.com and they banned my account without warning. I explicitly included my reddit username in the user-agent so that they could reach out if they had a problem with it. Nope, straight to banning my decade old account.
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