• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • This is the kind of AI stuff that really annoys me. Looking at one of the mutation examples I didn’t see anything that wouldn’t normally be tested by a typical mutation tool. You took a simple, idempotent process and you got an llm to do it slower, less accurately, and using more resources.

    If you wanted to marry the two in a new and possibly useful fashion I would say use an llm to analyze the results of a standard mutation test and give guidance on what issues should be acted upon first. An off-by-one calculation could mean somebody loses a million dollars or it could mean a button is grayed out. Standard mutation tools don’t give you that context.

















  • Not sure if you want to label it as a “captcha alternative”. In most cases I’m sure the captcha is used because they want a real person looking at the page (and the ads on the page). In this case it seems more like a way to keep either bots or people from doing nothing but consuming content (or hacking) without giving back something of value. Either way I really like the idea.

    Other ways, in theory, I think you could do this kind of thing are torrent ratios (e.g. hosting one or moreLinux ISOs), general archiving (e.g. you get asked to return a random range of bytes from a file you’re supposed to be backing up), you run a weather station that reports temperature to the National Weather Service. You might think about a more general framework for just verifying if user X has been contributing something of value.


  • I’ve never heard anyone explicitly say this but I’m sure a lot of people (i.e. management) think that AI is a replacement for static code. If you have a component with constantly changing requirements then it can make sense, but don’t ask an llm to perform a process that’s done every single day in the exact same way. Chief among my AI concerns is the amount of energy it uses. It feels like we could mostly wean off of carbon emitting fuels in 50 years but if energy demand skyrockets will be pushing those dates back by decades.