Each bullet now leads with the action, carries a verbatim quote + footnote, states
source type (independent benchmark / peer-reviewed / single-group preprint) so the
reader can weight it, and uses Kent-style estimative language on the takeaway.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
New refs/llm_judge_litreview.md: verbatim before/key/after quotes (fetched from
raw source this turn) for position/self-preference/reasoning/context-rot, a
machine-accessible benchmark table, and an epistemic summary with calibration.
llm_judges.md gets a compact 'Numbers worth knowing (2026)' digest pointing to it.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
Add a per-model, per-difficulty token-budget note to judge-selection: models
vary ~6x in tokens/task (Artificial Analysis), reasoning models emit ~8x more
and scale with difficulty (Epoch AI, DeepSeek-R1), and the depth-vs-breadth
trade (cap reasoning low + N passes on easy tasks, which doubles as the
repeat-variance check; don't truncate near model capability). Add Gu et al.
"A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge" as a second survey anchor. Cache new quotes.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
Replace the qualitative refusal claim with SpeechMap's per-lab Free Speech
Index (Mistral/xAI/Google most permissive; Anthropic/OpenAI most restrictive
majors; Chinese labs mid-high on the aggregate but topic-censored). Flag the
two traps: it's a lab average (hides a safety-tuned Gemma) and a cross-topic
aggregate (hides a per-subject refusal cluster). Cache the table.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
Replace the hand-waved judge-model guidance with the checked-in Judgemark v4
cost-vs-score frontier (opus-4-6 top, gemma-4-31b the cheap knee; Qwen/DeepSeek
are mid-pack not frontier, correcting the earlier claim). Quote Doddapaneni
(evaluators miss >50% of injected quality drops) and Shankar (criteria drift,
validators need validation). Cache both papers and the frontier table.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
Fold wassname's repeated eval-validity checklist into refs/llm_judges.md:
rubric-earns-ink, read-the-whole-trace, anchoring/scale-precision, repeat
variance, and a judge feedback channel. Add a judge-model-selection section
(Judgemark v4 cost-vs-score frontier, speechmap topic-conditional refusals).
Cache the new sources (Hamel, Databricks x2, Eugene Yan) with verbatim quotes
and onward paper links in docs/evidence.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
- SKILL.md: 3 new entries (exploration-over-exploitation + nuisance HPs,
test-set contamination, loss-spikes-mean-bad-data-pocket) and an Ng
100-misclassified-examples quote under inspect-the-data
- refs/llm_judges.md: position/verbosity/self-preference biases (Zheng,
Wang 66/80 flip, Panickssery) + mitigation checklist from verdict docs
- Lones pitfalls linked as the exhaustive 36-item do/don't checklist
- 6 new frozen evidence files; Hamel evals link in further reading
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
Both quote-verbatim with frozen evidence: the 2018 tweet thread (mirrored
via threadreaderapp, x.com blocks fetching) slots after overfit-one-batch;
CACE (NIPS 2015, entanglement section transcribed from the PDF) gives
Always-Be-Ablating its why.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
SKILL.md is now folklore only: verbatim practitioner quotes ordered
most-general-first, transformer/LLM fine-tuning entries in their own
section, minimal context, links and footnotes. New sources: unsloth,
axolotl (+training stability), HF course ch8.4, Bekman debug_utils
(evidence frozen in docs/evidence/).
The synthesized material (mental models, priors, symptom tables, agent
loop, triage, anti-patterns) moves to PLAYBOOK.md, framed as menus of
hypotheses rather than authoritative diagnoses. Made-up symptom tables
no longer sit next to sourced quotes.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
NaN poisoning: inject NaN where info must not come from (future/test/labels), run the real pipeline, assert past outputs stay finite. Documents false negatives (pandas skipna, nanmean) and false positives (softmax rows, batch stats). Backprop-to-input is its gradient dual for inside the model; quote already frozen in docs/evidence/karpathy_recipe_training_nn_2019.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
- Promote the general (non-RL-specific) Spinning Up lessons up to the main
folklore: "broken code fails silently", "you can't tell it's broken if you
can't see that it's breaking", and test on more than one setup.
- Add gwern's "Unseeing" to the data theme: you can't read what you actually
wrote, hence fresh eyes / a fresh-eyes subagent.
- New "Research taste (adjacent to debugging)" section with verbatim quotes,
each cached: Neel Nanda (your research is false by default; excitement is
evidence of bullshit; read your data), Ulisse Mini (understand the system to
shrink the search space), John Wentworth (gears-level models are capital
investments vs cheap black boxes).
All quotes verbatim from cached sources; 25/25 footnotes resolve.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
Spinning Up as a Deep RL Researcher was only a bare code link; it's the
canonical RL-researcher guide and its debugging advice is gold. Cache the
rigour/debugging sections verbatim and quote the sharpest lines in the RL
sub-skill: "broken RL code almost always fails silently", "if it doesn't work,
assume there's a bug", "measure everything ... you can't tell it's broken if
you can't see that it's breaking", and test on more than one env. Add to RL
sources.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
Gather debugging folklore from more practitioners, each a verbatim quote
checked against a cached source copy (footnoted with line numbers):
- koaning (Vincent Warmerdam), "Bad Labels": benchmark labels are often wrong;
find them with confidence-sorted errors.
- gwern, the tank-detection legend: the canonical data-leakage parable, plus
the scout-mindset twist that it's a likely-unsourced urban legend.
- Patrick Kidger, "Just Know Stuff": why research code is buggy ("kludge ...
bugs that don't cripple things only because some other bug stops them") and
"never accept the kludge". Plus a one-line jaxtyping pointer for shape bugs.
- nanochat (Karpathy): BOS-alignment fake metric improvement; all-ranks must
clip on inf (a multi-GPU bug single-GPU testing hides).
- cleanrl "37 Implementation Details of PPO" -> RL sub-skill, as the canonical
proof that reference-impl details (not ideas) decide whether PPO works.
Trim the lucidrains item to one quote (it had ballooned). Add wassname credit
+ companion-gist link. All 20 footnotes resolve.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
Phil Wang's x-transformers is the canonical "the fix is in the code, not the
paper" catalogue. Add a folklore item on the most debugging-relevant trick:
QK / cosine-sim normalization to stop attention logits overflowing (the usual
cause of transformer loss spikes/divergence), plus the BLOOM/YaLM
post-embedding LayerNorm. Two verbatim lucidrains quotes, footnoted to the repo
+ a cached README copy with line numbers. Doubles as the modern concrete
example for the read-a-working-implementation section.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
Reorder around what's durable, per wassname's curation:
- human-written intro up top; rename to "wassname's ML Debugging Folklore"
- mindset first: calibrate -> mental models -> Part 1 general tricks (kept,
they're well-based) -> read a working implementation when stuck
- a Folklore section built from verbatim, source-checked quotes (Jones,
Rahtz, Karpathy, Schulman, Henderson, Irpan, CS231n, Slavv, Goodfellow),
each footnoted to the canonical URL + the cached copy with line numbers
- LLM-agent babysitting (debugging loop, triage menu, anti-patterns) moved to
the bottom where it belongs; triage reframed as a menu, not a flowchart
- deeper one-off tricks split to refs/ (loss_surface, metric_stuck, sweeps),
scrubbed of private tooling (wandb/just/SI/personal scripts)
Quote integrity: every quote independently verified by fresh-eyes subagents
against the cached sources; fixed a reformatted Schulman slide, a truncated
Jones sentence, a reversed-order Rahtz stitch, a falsely-quoted Slavv phrase,
and the 3e-4 line (now the real tweet, framed as the joke Karpathy confirmed
it was, not gospel). lr_scheduler anti-pattern nuanced (warmup/cyclic matter).
Remove superseded SKILL2.md draft.
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
Procedural/vibe anchor with gradual disclosure: calibrate + loop +
non-obvious numbers inline, tables/triage/sweeps demoted to on-demand
links into SKILL.md and refs/. Draft for side-by-side comparison; not
wired in (SKILL.md remains the entry point).
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
- drop "detective at a scene, not a fortune teller", "guess wearing a
fix's clothes", "that reflex is the enemy"
- rephrase negative parallelisms in intro/calibrate/loop to positive
(judgment not a checklist; mindset not ticking boxes; evidence not
prior; isn't a recipe; it's a; menu not a procedure; code not abstract)
- keep genuine instructional contrasts (relative error not absolute, etc.)
- trim pseudocode comments to intent-only
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
- convert all prose ' -- ' to commas/periods/parens (left code/CLI/arrows)
- remove the antithesis flourish in the bisect step; inform not persuade
- de-telegraph "no model, no forward pass, no GPU. pure math."
- add non-exhaustive hedges (and so on / like) where lists implied closure
- fix typos: authoritative (x2), sklearn, it indented
- TODO: triage decision tree converted from ASCII art to nested bullets
- TODO: add Further reading section linking docs/evidence/* files
Co-Authored-By: Claudypoo <288921227+claudypoo@users.noreply.github.com>
