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• @diz@awful.systems 2026-10-23 15:06

  I’m not terribly familiar with that story but from reading a synopsis it strikes me as ret-conning LLMs onto something that was written without the writer ever having in his mind anything even remotely resembling a “large language model”. And the same cultural tropes that influenced the writer also influenced how LLM vendors are trying to sell the need for more tokens, especially because datacenters build out exceeds by far the actual demand for generated text of all kinds (as evident in e.g. your typical workplace where there’s suddenly a lot more than 2x of every kind of text). There’s a Stanislaw Lem’s short story where Trurl and Klapaucius defeat a space pirate. You can read it here: github.com/…/The Cyberiad-Stanislaw Lem.txt (search for “the sixth sally”) and there’s a brief summary: everything2.com/title/Demon+of+the+Second+Kind Lem describes an LLM down to the use of randomness, although his LLM is essentially “perfect” and only outputs factual statements, such as “how Kipling would have written the beginning to his Second Jungle Book if he had had indigestion just then”. I think Lem’s story would help to recalibrate with regards to what “LLM described in fiction ahead of time” looks like. Also, LLMs do not pursue any sort of long term goals; things like HuggingFace hack only superficially resemble it because they’re presented as such. Of course, tampering with something like HuggingFace would be discovered; if it wasn’t, then all of their containers run with GPU access would be mining crypto already. An LLM can easily explain to you why hacking HuggingFace would be counterproductive; but the same LLM with its context full of hacking related tokens from the ExploitGym benchmark, will treat anything that comes up as another ExploitGym type target.

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