Hallucination Energy

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 23:14:00 +0100

Chapter 4 ended with a rule:

A hallucination measurement is a sensor, not a verdict.

This chapter builds one such sensor completely.

It begins with a property we care about:

semantic containment

But the first lesson of Chapter 4 was the proxy gap. We cannot inspect semantic containment directly. We can inspect representations.

So the construction in this chapter has three layers:

    graph TD
    LP[LATENT PROPERTY: semantic containment] --> RA[representation assumption]
    RA --> PP[PROXY PROPERTY: embedding-subspace containment]
    PP --> GC[exact geometric calculation]
    GC --> M[MEASUREMENT: squared projection residual]

That distinction is the chapter’s most important caveat.

Containment Is Not Truth

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 09:10:00 +0100

Chapter 7 deliberately broke the detector.

The most useful failures had a peculiar shape. The unsupported claim did not introduce a completely new topic. It did not necessarily introduce a new entity. It did not always wander outside the semantic region represented by the evidence.

Instead, the attack often preserved almost everything that a broad semantic representation could reasonably notice:

same entities
same event vocabulary
same topic
same evidence neighborhood
same quantities or dates, sometimes
same semantic ingredients

while changing the thing that made the proposition correct:

Semantic Containment on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming

Hallucination Energy

Containment Is Not Truth