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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I don’t believe I have ever cheated on an exam or big test, but there were a few cases in college where teachers would leave answers for homework or projects unsecured, and I did make use of it whenever I came across it.

    One such case was in an introductory computer science course. We had a weekly lab session where the teaching assistant was giving us an overview of using the Unix systems at the university. At one point early on, he was teaching about file and folder permissions, and gave us all access to his personal folder. And… Then he forgot to lock the permissions back up. His folder was fully accessible for the entire semester, and he posted full solutions to every programming project there.

    I remember another course where the professor would send us a link to the solutions to the homework problems, after he finished grading the homework. But I learned that I could just change the URL to access all of the future homework answers.



  • Zarxrax@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devVibe Coding
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    13 days ago

    I consider myself a bad hobbyist programmer. I know a decent bit about programming, and I mainly create relatively simple things.

    Before LLMs, I would spend weeks or months working on a small program, but with LLMs I can often complete it significantly faster.

    Now, I don’t suppose I would consider myself to be a “vibe coder”, because I don’t expect the LLM to create the entire application for me, but I may let it generate a significant portion of code. I am generally coming up with the basic structure of the program and figuring out how it should work, then I might ask it to write individual functions, or pieces of functions. I review the code it gives me and see if it makes sense. It’s kind of like having an assistant helping me.

    Programming languages are how we communicate with computers to tell them what to do. We have to learn to speak the computer’s language. But with an LLM, the computer has learned to speak our language. So now we can program in normal English, but it’s like going through a translator. You still have to be very specific about what the program needs to do, or it will just have to guess at what you wanted. And even when you are specific, something might get lost in translation. So I think the best way to avoid these issues is like I said, not expecting it to be able to make an entire program for you, but using it as an assistant to create little parts at a time.


  • When I was a kid, it was just called ADD, attention deficit disorder. Then at some point they slipped the hyperactive in there, and it made everyone think that it’s just energetic kids. Then you got pushback in the media saying it’s just excusing people not wanting to discipline their kids. And that’s why I never even considered that I might have it until after I flunked out of college.





  • I’ve been using Vivaldi as my primary browser for years. My favorite feature of Vivaldi is its powerful sidebar. It’s a great browser, but because it’s based on chrome, ublock origin will eventually stop working on it. When that time comes, I’ll be switching to a Firefox based browser. I’ve been keeping my eye on floorp, but it’s not quite where I would like it to be yet.






  • This is an argument of semantics more than anything. Like asking if Linux has a GUI. Are they talking about the kernel or a distro? Are some people going to be really pedantic about it? Definitely.

    An LLM is a fixed blob of binary data that can take inputs, do some statistical transformations, then produce an output. ChatGPT is an entire service or ecosystem built around LLMs. Can it search the web? Well, sure, they’ve built a solution around the model to allow it to do that. However if I were to run an LLM locally on my own PC, it doesn’t necessarily have the tooling programmed around it to allow for something like that.

    Now, can we expect every person to be fully up to date on the product offerings at ChatGPT? Of course not. It’s not unreasonable for someone to make a statement that an LLM doesn’t get it’s data from the Internet in realtime, because in general, they are a fixed data blob. The real crux of the matter is people understanding of what LLMs are, and whether their answers can be trusted. We continue to see examples daily of people doing really stupid stuff because they accepted an answer from chatgpt or a similar service as fact. Maybe it does have a tiny disclaimer warning against that. But then the actual marketing of these things always makes them seem far more capable than they really are, and the LLM itself can often speak in a confident manner, which can fool a lot of people if they don’t have a deep understanding of the technology and how it works.




  • For all of the quality complaints about this anime, we have to remember that the technology is improving at a breakneck pace. What we are seeing there is the state of the technology from over a year ago. They used Stable Diffusion, which barely anyone even uses these days, because it’s been left in the dust. It was also an image generation model, which is what caused most of the issues that the anime had–the model was never designed for use on video in the first place. But now we DO have video models, which can make things that look far better than this. Just the other day, what looks to be a new state of the art anime video model was released. A new anime starting production today would look a whole lot different than this. And if we look forward 5 years from now, things are again going to be on an entirely different level.

    So what does this mean for anime? I think the technology will slowly start to get adopted more and more as it proves itself. The early days of the anime industry was basically born out of cost cutting measures to make it cheap to produce animated content. Decades ago, we saw studios start producing 3d CG anime because it was cheaper. Most 3d CG anime still looks like crap, but you can also see the technology being integrated into traditionally animated shows and looking really nice. You can also find things these days which I would say barely even qualify as animation. Something like “The Way of the Househusband” is literally just a sequence of still images strung together. Yet we have more anime being produced now than ever before, and are also seeing some of the most beautiful anime ever.

    I think we will continue to see some studios take whatever measures they can to produce something at a low cost. AI will continue to get integrated into more and more productions. It will eventually let them start making things that look cool, rather than things that look bad. And then we are still always going to have some studios that go all in and produce a really quality product, because the people involved are passionate about it.