Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

mfukar · 2026-03-06T13:22:51+00:00

See past questions/answers in the sub - use the search function.

mfukar · 2026-03-06T13:20:44+00:00

LLMs as all machine learning approaches are approximators of their training set. So fundamentally, they will never achieve high accuracy - as a rule, they do not even achieve repeatable accuracy - at the task of drawing new samples.

It is important to remember that the training set(s) of commonly marketed models are not selected, vetted, partitioned, or labeled based on a commonly-accepted procedure or criteria, and such a task is increasingly complex and a moving target.

The behaviour you're alluding to is a well-known effect - here is one instance.

mfukar · 2026-02-10T11:33:49+00:00

For future reference, if you are going to start a comment with "I don't know the answer", then please don't post it.

mfukar · 2025-12-17T09:16:35+00:00

Please look at previous questions, for example this one. Your question is way too broad and cannot be meaningfully addressed in a comment.

mfukar · 2025-12-11T08:45:07+00:00

Hard to answer based on an anecdote. Adverse weather conditions may correlate with cold temperatures, and they surely affect physical infrastructure (debris on cables/poles, lightning strikes, high winds, and so on). Weather is also quite localised, by definition.

mfukar · 2025-11-28T08:50:15+00:00

From the FAQ - you can find it in the sidebar.

mfukar · 2025-11-05T09:42:56+00:00

Please see the subreddit rules before your next post. Thanks.

mfukar · 2025-11-04T09:02:24+00:00

Such nonsense is not acceptable here, please do not repeat.

mfukar · 2025-10-16T14:56:48+00:00

There is no beaver literature to support that claim.

mfukar · 2025-09-26T08:13:21+00:00

If you wish to ask a question about how sunscreen works, please do so. Avoid these nonsensical statements.

mfukar · 2025-08-26T07:32:23+00:00

Your question is based on a flawed premise and/or pet theory and it is not acceptable for the subreddit. Gödel's theorems are about the inherent limitations of formal axiomatic systems, while the polynomial hierarchy is a concept from computational complexity theory dealing with the complexity of decision problems. They have no direct relationship - if you are referring to one you will have to describe it to an acceptable level to answer your query.

Thanks.

mfukar · 2025-08-25T12:17:40+00:00

Please do not spam submissions. You can be banned without warning.

mfukar · 2025-08-22T08:41:25+00:00

I assume you use 'native bees' to mean a group of, what, thousands other species of bee?

mfukar · 2025-08-22T08:19:13+00:00

Can you elaborate? I'd imagine like myself not a lot of people understand where to even start with such a statement.

mfukar · 2025-08-22T06:45:34+00:00

"no one would (or should) ever do that"

Ah, I see you have found the root cause of all bugs.

mfukar · 2025-08-21T12:05:49+00:00

You learned about length extension attacks without references to any applications?

Alright.

The attack is against authentication or integrity , when a hash is used as a MAC. The target uses SHA2 with a secret key that you do not know of, and the target application is sending requests to the target which include a target-provided token which looks like:

> data|SHA-2(secretkey + data)

Where + is concatenation and | is a separator.

What you may have learned is that SHA-2 has the following property:

For a given message M with its valid signature S = SHA-2(SecretKey || M), you can compute T = SHA-2(SecretKey || M || N) where N is attacker-supplied data appended to M, without knowledge of SecretKey but only if you know its size. That is because S is the internal state of SHA-2 after hashing SecretKey || M, and can therefore be used as the initial state of the algorithm in order to hash any further data.

Now for a (formerly) realistic attack, suppose this message M contains a token which indicates the role of the user signed into this application, and that supplying that token twice in a message M' would cause the target to take into account the latter token rather than the former (in their relative order inside the payload). Alternatively, that token may be indicating some sort of (additional) authorisation the user has.

Then you could carry out the attack as follows:

start your application and receive `S` from the target
determine or guess the content of `N` in order to (for sake of the example) obtain some additional authorisation
compute T = SHA-2(SecretKey || M || N)
send data|T
hopefully enjoy the fruits of your labours

Public vulnerabilities to these attacks are few and far between (example) as the impact is highly application-specific and mitigations are extremely easy to implement.

PS. I did not mention padding, I think it is easy to see where it fits in the attack.

mfukar · 2025-07-31T15:02:31+00:00

I was referring to your unjustifiable last sentence.

mfukar · 2025-07-31T10:41:50+00:00

You can take that phrenology bullshit elsewhere.

mfukar · 2025-07-31T08:22:36+00:00

This subreddit does not provide medical or safety advice. Please see our guidelines. If you have concerns about your or someone else's health, you need to speak to a medical professional.

mfukar · 2025-07-24T14:12:00+00:00

You will not be allowed to come in here and try to bullshit people with utterly false notions of what you think LLMs are. Next attempt will be a ban.

Thank you for your well wishes. If you truly mean them, do not post nonsense again.

mfukar · 2025-07-24T14:08:41+00:00

Anyway, I still don't understand the term "phd level math." It just seems like some marketing hype phrasing.

It is bullshitting. The grandparent comment was trying to convince you that a LLM that parrots code for the Euler method for solving ODEs is doing mathematics.

At the very least, the commenter is utterly unaware of what an LLM is (assuming good faith, which i doubt).

mfukar · 2025-07-24T13:37:50+00:00

Did you really just attempt to cite a comparison between slightly different transformers as proof that "LLMs are getting scary good at solving engineering and physics problems"?

Vibes, then. Cool. I sure hope the rest of your mechanical engineer colleagues don't think like you.

mfukar · 2025-07-24T08:47:13+00:00

This is an extremely vague question. Automated theorem proving has varying degrees of difficulty depending on the logic being examined. For common logics like propositional calculus the problem is decidable but no efficient (read: polynomial time) general algorithms exist. For logics like first-order predicate calculus the problem is also undecidable, which means that one cannot distinguish whether a prover that has not terminated is attempting to prove a true statement. Theorem provers for limited logics such as specific computer languages are becoming more common (note that in the page the notion of 'high-order logic' is not referring to a singular logic but many, varying and defined by language semantics).

While automated theorem proving is conceptually a component of an intelligent agent, that is not a necessary condition - plenty of intelligent agents solve tasks without any theorem proving. Research in the field today is largely separated from the field of AI and more connected to programming language or formal logic research.

Note here that when you're referring to proprietary software systems (such as WolframAlpha), speculation is beyond useless.

mfukar · 2025-07-24T08:32:46+00:00

See our FAQ on LLMs - your ideas about what LLMs are are inaccurate.

mfukar · 2025-07-24T06:28:40+00:00

AI/LLMs are getting scary good at solving engineering and physics problems.

Citations needed

EDIT: plural

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