shalmanese
Boy, I wish!
> Like you say, you typically only die of one thing, so if you know the patient won't die of a particular diagnosis because something else is more likely to kill them, then it might not be worth making that diagnosis.
You can't know someone didn't die of X until after they died, that's the entire point of this dilemma.
This isn't an argument against all automated bug detection, just that it needs to exceed a threshold beyond just "It has found at least one real bug not found via other means" which is the seductive threshold people want it to be.
Logically, a bug that prevents someone from doing something and a missing feature that prevents someone from doing something are equivalent, they shouldn't be thought of as two separate activities but should be evaluated via the same framework. The list of all defects in a piece of software is infinite so it becomes impossible to erase all defects. It's about prioritizing with finite resources.
> You can't predict the harm from a small bug when AI can chain complex exploits and when your software is used in mission critical applications as a data store.
Yes, any bug can theoretically be part of an exploit chain, just like any tumor detected can theoretically be the tumor that kills you. This is why the detection paradox exists. Once you become aware of the tumor, you face a duty to try and mitigate it. But we know from autopsies that people die with all sorts of tumors that didn't kill them.
Similarly, if we bothered to do autopsies of software products after sunsetting to discover a comprehensive list of CVEs, we'd discover a ton of bugs we were better off not knowing about because they ended up not making an impact but we would have diverted resources if we knew about them.
This is not an argument that we should remain totally ignorant of all bugs, but a refutation of the "common sense" belief that more knowledge is always better.
You would think so but medicine has faced this paradox since the development of modern testing technology.
You would naively think more testing is always better. More sophisticated practitioners then talk about Type I vs Type II errors and the problem of false positives.
But even if you were able to come up with tests that had 100% accuracy, there are times when you don't want to run that test on someone. The key distinction is that people only ever die of one thing and having a tumor that doesn't kill them is often better than risking the surgery to remove the tumor.
Similarly, there are some bugs you don't want to find since the harm from the people it affects is smaller than the opportunity cost of fixing it. Ignorance of the bug is better than knowing about it and having to make an affirmative decision not to fix it.
> Nearly three million people voted, equivalent to 71 per cent of registered voters, an unprecedented turnout in the electoral history of Hong Kong. The election was widely viewed as a de facto referendum on the concurrent anti-extradition protests.[3]
> All pro-Beijing parties suffered major setbacks and losses, including the flagship pro-Beijing party Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), which received its largest defeat in history, losing 96 seats. Executive Councillor Regina Ip's New People's Party failed to obtain a single seat, and was ousted from all District Councils as a result.[4][5] Dozens of prominent pro-Beijing heavyweights lost their campaigns for re-election, including Junius Ho, a controversial anti-protest figure who had expressed support for the triads behind the mob attack in Yuen Long on 21 July.[4][5]
> In contrast, the pro-democracy camp in conjunction with the localist camp achieved its biggest landslide victory in the history of Hong Kong, gaining absolute majority in votes and electoral seats in all of the 18 District Councils and tripling their seats from around 124 to about 388.
OpenRouter provides a Zero Data Retention option and is SOC 2 Type II compliant which means there's real penalties involved if they don't do what they say.
OK, but the definition of not being the target audience is you bear that burden, not the author. If the author bore that burden, you'd be the target audience!
I enjoy it now as a daily ritual of how incompetent the everything app is.
Characteristic of this style of AI art is pseudo-detail: the artwork looks busy but when you inspect the detail, it contains no informational value. How could it, you cannot extract more detail from a prompt than what was put in.
Contrast with a Where's Waldo picture, for example that is equally information dense but contains actually delightful jokes and variation that makes it interesting to look at.
Good design doesn't work because people notice the clear information hierarchy. Good design works because good information hierarchy means people don't have friction trying to interpret it.
What you did was you started off with the high level vision of the story, you'd figure out the characters in detail, supply their motivation, think about how those things might conflict with each other etc. Then you'd think about how to add various plot points into it so different characters with motivation might find productive tension with each other. You map it out chapter by chapter, what beats go where, what things happen to push interesting conflict.
But the amazing thing about this AI system was it let you go deeper, you could go into individual conversations and actually place the words people said to each other, add color to the words by appending it with stuff like "she said, hesitatingly". Entire descriptions of scenes could be vibe generated by you imagining in your head exactly what it would look like and finding perfect words such that the image in your head would be transmitted over to the reader.
Finally, the AI system had a way to inspect the psychological state of people who might want to read your work by recruiting people who are friends of yours to read each work in progress and you can interrogate them just like a chatbot over what worked well, what didn't, did you understand what was going on over here? Did you feel invested in the characters? You can use this feedback to spin up a brand new version.
Anyway, all this stuff is a lot of work but don't believe the people who say you can just press a button and get a good story out. If you put in the effort, this AI program called notepad.exe can have you generating genuinely human sounding prose!
Because it's populist slop, just like how every long enough discussion about government incompetence will lead to someone proposing all political leaders should be paid minimum wage to fix the problem.
Don't forget, the entire Web 2.0 winner ecosystem of companies that make up our modern Internet was founded by Engineer GodKings who leveraged their product prowess to gain a distribution advantage: Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Stripe, Github, Whatsapp, Instagram etc. They were also the ones who transformed their companies to what they are today, nobody forced them to do this. Contrary to populist opinion, it's not because they were stupid or brainwashed, it's because the proposed scheme has known, predictable downsides that a leader actually has to reckon with while internet commenters only have to worry about preserving their egos.
No sign of datacenter activity at the local 4-H club either. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the commie brainwashed American citizens who are wrong.
One thing I like to ask people is if they can name me an openly straight female pornstar. That is, a female porn star that has never appeared in scenes where they have sex with both men and women and have stated or it can be inferred from a long enough career that they refuse to be booked for those scenes. Then I ask them if they can name me an openly bisexual male porn star That is, one that has opened appeared in scenes where they have sex with both men and women.
The disparity of how hard it is to name either category reflects back onto our social beliefs of the acceptability and commonness of each.
One thing we learned during COVID was a significant limitation in people's willingness to stay isolated was their hair was getting out of control. It's the exact, boring, unsexy topic that you omit if you're selling the fantasy of survival and you include if you want to cover the boring, day to day logistics.
The entire survival industry is not acquitted well in being revealed as how much the industry is an aesthetic movement.
Because that opens you up to an entirely new class of attack. You have to set the limit somewhere and if you set it at INT_MAX, then a malicious user could find a O(n^2) path in your password validator and input a 4GB password that locks up the machine. Or they could create 1000 users in a row with 4GB passwords and fill up your storage.
I've had people assume that person X must be asked several times a day for help when they're really asked once every few years. Alternatively, I know people who assume they are sending some totally unique request to someone who gets a dozen of the same inquiry every single day.
Until you get a good baseline figure of how competitive your request for help is, everything else is pre-mature optimization. The best thing is to just be lightweight about it and dash something off as soon as you think of it and to not be too emotionally invested in whether you get a response or not. Only when you gather evidence that the response rate is below what you expected should you try to optimize how you ask.