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LLMs Sensitive to Ham Exam Question Order?

 Antrhopic's Haiku model can routinely pass —about 300 times so far--the extra class US ham exam based solely on what's contained in its model. (The LLM was not permitted, programatically I might add, to access the interent and therefore the question pool .) I'm studying this to reinforce my grad school business statistics class for use in writing agentic evals. Yesterday, I reasoned that the order the questions were asked might influence the results since the single LLM—essentially a single chat session—might get discouraged if it missed the first question and then project onto a 'poor test taker' part of its model space. I found out I was half right. The question order does seem to matter, but instead of influencing the entire exam, it influenced the results on the first question asked. I ran three 90 exam test fllets, one each with a first question that Haiku always gave the correct answer, the wrong answer, or a mixed result (sometimes correct, sometimes wrong...
Recent posts

Can an LLM Pass the US Ham License Exams?

 The answer is very much, yes! I'm teaching myself eval statistics using ham exams taken by Claude LLMs as my demonstration vehicle. The picture below shows the disttribution of correct vs incorrect questions Claude Haiku and Sonnet on the extra class exam. The tiny text to the left of the rows is the test subelement, E0A, E1A, E1C, etc... Expect to see much more on this in the future. For a complete look at the data with statistics I can't promise are meaningful yet, see the initial report .

Attaching SandCastle to the CesiumJS MCP

 I've been playing wit ionosphere maps and Cesium's MCP controller this week. I wanted to try some quick experiments, but quickly realized I hadn't learned how to hooik connect the Cesium Sandcastle to the their MCP as a client . The method Codex Sol 5.6 and I finally devised and successfully used  is documented below the video. Using that method, I was able to set up the following ionosphere fly-through as seen by a Starlink satellite. More on that soon. Videos Attach the Cesium MCP Camera Bridge to a Sandcastle Map 1. Confirm the camera MCP is running The camera MCP browser bridge listens at: ws://localhost:3002/mcp/ws Check its health from PowerShell: Invoke-RestMethod http://localhost:3002/mcp/health Before attachment, the response should be healthy but may show "connected": false . 2. Open the map in the Sandcastle editor If the map URL uses standalone.html , replace that portion with index.html while preserving the complet...

Superconductors as Magnets

 Fun with superconductors on a Monday morning. Did you know that Type II superconductors like the YBCO one shown below can pin magnetic flux? Consequently, if you freeze in the field lines, you've got a superconductor that behaves like a magnet.

Lab Book 2026-07-24: Encountering and Hopefully Fixing Subagent Overflow

 I'm still seeing Sonnet fan work out beyond its model capablities using subagents. You can see in the window below that the Gas Town polecat has had to stop and compact its context before proceeding. The good news is that when these subagent work fans don't turn into storms, I'm seeing more thorough reseearch findings returned. The bad news is that with Sonnet's limited context, those findings occasionally overwhelm the polecat that started it all.  I found a preprint from MIT for using what the authors call recurive language models or RLMs. The general idea is basically what I'm seeing with subagents—split the task, split the context—but they have clever ideas about how to manage the output stages to avoid the exact overflows shown above. I'm still harboring my hunch that this all started with the advent of Sonnet 5. Anthropic's release notes include "Sonnet 5 is much more agentic than its predecessors. Testers described how it finishes complex tas...

TIL: GasTown Extended git to Offer Rig Setup on first git status

  This is kind of cool! I started a new project today using codex --yolo, (I didn't want to use my Claude tokens until I'd worked out the design and architecture a bit more.) When I got done coding with codex, I asked it to create a repo for the work we did. That seemed to work, but I wanted to verify that the repo was ok, so I typed  gt status and was immediately presented with  I answered y and the extension was off and running adding my new repo to Gas Town. I didn't actually have Gas Town up and running on my Linux client, so I had to get it started and then try again manually with  cd gt && gt rig add ssm_overlay https://github.com/hcarter333/ssm_overlay.git and it just worked!

Lab Book 2026-07-20 Claude, Many Agents, and Subagents

 Just noting a feeling, nothing quantitative, but I think I've noticed that if more Claude agents are working at once, they each tend to create fewer subagents. If that's true, and it's a big if, I wonder if there's something at Anthropic that trottles or budgets overall effort to an account. Just to be clear, I've also watched five polecats descend into a complete and utter subagent storm like this one. True or not, I need the storms to either stop or I need to gain the ability to control them, so I'm working more on subagent storm control today. As promised, I did not watch my agents. Intead, I showed the mayor how to watch and mange polecats creating subagents. Here's the start of my conversattion At that stage, I hadn't considered the obvious fact in the figure above that subagents are occasionally beyond recursive. (As an aside, the kid here tells me this is actually a plot point in one of Matrh Well's MrubderBot books.) The next thing I asked...