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TIL you can de-obfuscate code with ChatGPT

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Re: TIL you can de-obfuscate code with ChatGPT

#71

I have to say, I find all the comments dismissing ChatGPT hilarious. I read them in a funny grandpa voice. However, we should look past the insignificant details. The main achievement is that we now have a really capable unstructured text-to-computer interface. We can hook it up to anything and it will give us answers with whatever properties we desire, in whatever shape we can think of.

[flagged]

Re: TIL you can de-obfuscate code with ChatGPT

#72

Is it correct though? I’ve been toying around with ChatGPT for a few weeks now and I encountered a few situations in which ChatGPT was like 90% accurate at best. Things like suggesting snippets of configuration files or plugin research. It’s good to get an idea and get started somewhere, but I certainly cannot trust it blindly.

What I've been telling everyone is that you can not (should not) ask ChatGPT a question that you can not independently verify that answer to yourself.

This is kind of what makes it good for generating code, because everything it generates can be pretty quickly verified and validated by another machine (interpreter/compiler).

Makes it not so great for writing essays on books you didn't read, and especially for doing math you don't understand... because it can't do math AT ALL.

Re: TIL you can de-obfuscate code with ChatGPT

#73
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah an example I was shown was python code to process some data. It was 30 lines of correct-looking trivial boilerplate code, except for one regex to do the actual processing. The regex was hopelessly wrong. Clearly if you didn't know how to write the other 29 lines of code there's no way you are going to be able to debug the regex.

The optimistic way to look at it though is that it wrote the boring 29 lines that you didn't want to write and got you straight to the actual problem that needs solving.

Yes, and honestly I think this is the actual potential win here, especially in boilerplate-heavy languages (Java, I'm looking at you in particular). So if this turns out to be the case it could be good for programmer productivity while skewing the dev landscape towards tools, frameworks, languages etc that the prevailing AI models work well with.

Re: TIL you can de-obfuscate code with ChatGPT

#74

I have to say, I find all the comments dismissing ChatGPT hilarious. I read them in a funny grandpa voice. However, we should look past the insignificant details. The main achievement is that we now have a really capable unstructured text-to-computer interface. We can hook it up to anything and it will give us answers with whatever properties we desire, in whatever shape we can think of.

I know, all those frusty old grumpyboots who actually want the thing to return factually accurate answers and valid code. Just be happy with plausible sounding answers people. Sheesh!

Did you actually ever receive 100% factually correct answers from anything before for anything other than strictly mathematical statements?

Regardless, I find it silly to focus on the small flaws when we're witnessing a foundational shift in what kind of problems we can solve.

Re: TIL you can de-obfuscate code with ChatGPT

#75
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is not runnable in the first place. Interesting though, as this shows exactly the problem. It looks legit, but it's some generated fake text.

It tends to invent whole fake packages.

Yup, I got some nice documentation (minor syntax error) for a Http package in Lean that doesn't exist. I asked about Lean4 and it helpfully explained that the non-existent package had moved from Lean to Std.

Re: TIL you can de-obfuscate code with ChatGPT

#77
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah an example I was shown was python code to process some data. It was 30 lines of correct-looking trivial boilerplate code, except for one regex to do the actual processing. The regex was hopelessly wrong. Clearly if you didn't know how to write the other 29 lines of code there's no way you are going to be able to debug the regex.

The optimistic way to look at it though is that it wrote the boring 29 lines that you didn't want to write and got you straight to the actual problem that needs solving.

We recently had an ad-hoc experiment like this as well "give us basic config management code to download a service, add a systemd service for it, deploy a config and setup reloading of the service"

And it had some funny mistakes in there - something called "Reload service XYZ" and it was actually a hard restart of the service, rather silly file locations and such, sure.

But at the same time, it saved us an hour or two of boilerplate setup and even dug up a somewhat smart way to validate the configuration for this very specific service. This allowed us to jump more into understanding the service, tuning the config and setting up good tests for the setup instead of the same boring 20 resources in a config management.

I guess I could also ask if we could have some better form of service or config management which eliminates this boilerplate... but ChatGPT made our current day-to-day work a little easier there.

Re: TIL you can de-obfuscate code with ChatGPT

#79
post #72

Is it correct though? I’ve been toying around with ChatGPT for a few weeks now and I encountered a few situations in which ChatGPT was like 90% accurate at best. Things like suggesting snippets of configuration files or plugin research. It’s good to get an idea and get started somewhere, but I certainly cannot trust it blindly.

What I've been telling everyone is that you can not (should not) ask ChatGPT a question that you can not independently verify that answer to yourself. This is kind of what makes it good for generating code, because everything it generates can be pretty quickly verified and validated by another machine (interpreter/compiler). Makes it not so great for writing essays on books you didn't read, and especially for doing m…

For math, I'm kind of surprised that it can't recognize "this is math" and then handle that with normal calculations instead of the language model. I assume we'll see that before long.
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