Case in point was an Asus RT-56N router that I had to replace with ISP wifi.
It also discovered my fast roaming settings were incompletely setup and that I was using a 5GHz channel that needed 60s to turn on due to regulations (DFS channels).
You should try it, you might be surprised how thorough it is. It certainly checked more things pre/during/post-upgrade than I did to make sure everything goes smoothly. And definitely more than xattt, apparently ;)
"Because I have config backups/know how to unbrick?" This is the important part for me. I'm not going to gamble with more than I can afford to lose.
If anything, these "random number generators" (which they aren't, do not ever use them for that, obviously) are:
- even more cautious,
- more readily take, stash, test and use backups,
- check for and take recovery paths,
- do dry runs,
- consider interruptions,
- mine for more information,
- smoke-test more,
- and are better equipped to do both deeper and wider analyses when encountering problems,
than the typical person.
Yes, randomness is involved, except you're destroying the snot out of it by biasing it to hell and back with those billion-trillion parameter models in front of the sampler.
Alternatively, check the difference between an arbitrary ChatGPT prompt response, and the output of the following:
import tiktoken, secrets
enc = tiktoken.get_encoding("o200k_base")
tokens = tuple(enc._mergeable_ranks.values())
msg_len = 128 + secrets.randbelow(2048 - 128)
token_ids = [secrets.choice(tokens) for _ in range(msg_len)]
print(enc.decode(token_ids))
You'll note that they're not much alike. You may also note that with LLMs you can set the "temperature" parameter to zero, in which case the sampling is no longer randomized. So much so, that given various runtime conditions, passing in the byte exact input will return the byte exact output, every time. Possibly across machines, depending on the inference engine used.Even if you mean it on a "higher level", imbued into the language emitted, do feel free to ask a model with disabled tool calling to give you some random numbers / words. You'll find that it isn't very random. Certainly wasn't when I last tried this for entertainment.
That's basically how I feel about LLMs right now. I have no idea how any of this is possible but somehow it seems to be working.