CheatGPT

As a parent, I'm hoping this will reduce the at-home workloads and shift more work towards school. What's the real life value of having students go to school and then spend all-nighters trying to do homework and all the expected extra-curricular?

As a first year grad student, I had a professor in material science who gave the same assignments and mostly same exams every year. Of course a) I didn't know this b) using previous works was prohibited c) cheating was rampant. I only found this out after getting heavily marked down on the first HW and joining a study group which was moderately chaste (eg only used the answers to check our work before turning it in). Missing a single question on HW or the exam would drop your grade a letter, and three or more was likely D/F range. When I brought this up with the professor before the final he at least acted completely shocked as I asked how likely he thought it was that half the class never missed a question (yes half the class got As). Really weird conversation, but most of the class was undergrads, and I think they liked the easy grade with minimal work and so he got 'good ratings'.

Undergrad college had 'infinite time' and 'open everything but people' exams, but graded on a curve so that sometimes getting half the questions right was an A. Much more stressful, learned more, and basically no cheating.

Certainly, I had one CS class with a newly invented language (compiled). In the days of Fortran, Pascal, and K&R that was kinda par for the course. Not much cheating on that either.

I can't claim to understand everything my brain is doing, but accepting input and filtering it through a bunch of neuron chains to result in some kind of output sounds like "statistical analysis" to me.

You seem convinced that ChatGPT will never have "actual intelligence" — care to make a prediction about something that LLMs will never accomplish? We know they can write code, write essays, generate artwork, and play chess. What's a task that requires "actual intelligence"? Parenting a child? Running for President? Making a steak sandwich?

Me to ChatGPT: reply to this interview question "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" in first-person, make it a personal story.

ChatGPT: It was early on in my career as a software developer, and I was working on a web application that was designed to allow users to upload images and apply filters to them.

One day, a user reported a strange issue where some of the filters were producing unexpected results. Specifically, they were seeing images that appeared to be completely random and unrelated to the original image. At first, I assumed it was a problem with the filter algorithms, but as I dug deeper, I realized that the issue was actually caused by a very strange bug.

It turned out that the user's browser was caching a previously uploaded image and reusing it for subsequent filter operations, even if the user had selected a completely different image. This led to some very bizarre and unexpected results, as the filter algorithms were being applied to an entirely different image than what the user intended.

To fix the bug, I had to implement a workaround that forced the browser to always load the most recent version of the image from the server, rather than relying on its cache. It was definitely one of the weirdest bugs I've ever encountered, and it taught me the importance of always being vigilant when it comes to caching and browser behavior.

Me to ChatGPT: reply to this interview question "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" in first-person, make it a personal story, make it using C++.

ChatGPT: I was working on a project that involved developing a custom compiler. One day, a user reported a very strange issue where the compiled program would crash whenever it encountered certain input files. At first, I assumed it was a problem with the input files themselves, but as I dug deeper, I realized that the issue was actually caused by a very strange bug in the compiler code.

It turned out that there was a subtle error in one of the class definitions that was causing memory corruption in certain circumstances. Specifically, the class had a virtual destructor, but the derived class failed to declare its own destructor as virtual. This led to undefined behavior when deleting objects of the derived class, which in turn caused the program to crash.

To fix the bug, I had to carefully analyze the affected class definitions and make sure that all derived classes properly declared their destructors as virtual. It was definitely one of the weirdest bugs I've ever encountered, and it taught me the importance of paying close attention to class hierarchies and virtual functions in C++.

Me to ChatGPT (since I haven't worked on a compiler): reply to this interview question "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" in first-person, make it a personal story, make it using C++ about the time when I ported PyTorch from Python to R.

ChatGPT: One of the weirdest bugs I encountered was during my work on porting PyTorch from Python to R. One of the major challenges was ensuring that the R implementation matched the performance and functionality of the Python version. As I was going through the codebase, I noticed a particularly strange issue that was causing crashes in the R implementation.

The issue turned out to be related to differences in how Python and R handle memory allocation and deallocation. PyTorch relied heavily on dynamically allocated memory, but the R implementation was not properly managing this memory, leading to crashes and other unexpected behavior.

To fix the issue, I had to go through the entire codebase and carefully analyze all memory-related operations. This involved a lot of debugging and experimentation, as well as close collaboration with the rest of the development team.

Ultimately, we were able to resolve the issue and deliver a stable and performant port of PyTorch to R. It was definitely one of the weirdest bugs I've ever encountered, and it taught me the importance of paying close attention to memory management in C++ and other low-level languages.

Note: Likely ChatGPT can also generate a fake resume, etc. so yeah.

Which is odd because in every other language that uses let (lisp, scheme, swift, rust, scala/kotlin val, haskell, etc.), let bindings are const and let is synonymous with const.