121–130 of 182 posts
I hate proof of work code running on my machine for the benefit of someone else. It's like planting a crypto miner.
Do proof-of-work pages actually stop AI bots? Big AI companies have enough compute to solve these challenges at scale. And if their bots are already doing much heavier work to fetch, read and process each page, then solving a small challenge first seems unlikely to be a serious barrier. Who are these proof-of-work challenges actually helping?
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I would phrase it as "LLMs are good at big picture stuff and bad at fine detail", or to put it another way, they're accurate, but imprecise and with low reproducibility.
It is my experience that it's the opposite. LLMs are very very precise but wildly inaccurate. They might give you 17 significant digits but be off by 10 orders of magnitude, to use a metaphor.
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It's a conscious design choice. Doing that gets you considered a botnet/malware. I don't want Anubis to be considered a botnet/malware.
OK, I don't think it would be the case if it was one of many algorithms offered by Anubis, especially if it's enabled by the webmaster. That being said I don't know any crypto that would technically fit as a lightweight PoW.
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Was that the thing where Gary predicted js in the kernel?
yes, although more directly relevant here, chrome-compiled-to-wasm-nested-in-chrome
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/02/securing-firefox-with-weba...
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Calculus is definitely the harder task, considering it took a species developing the cognitive capacity for symbolic reasoning for it to show up, whereas any animal can figure out how to position its limbs. Yeah, we figured out how to make CAS programs before inverse kinematics software, but that's because computers were made to solve numerical problems, not to replace the cerebella of chordates.
> Calculus is definitely the harder task, You’re only evaluating “harder” or “easier” based on the perspective of somebody who has a mammalian brain with millions of years of selective pressure to make it suitable for solving inverse kinematics problems. The point here is that when we start constructing agents or tools with different architectures to ourselves, it makes sense to reevaluate notions of whether somethin…
Also, I suspect you're comparing dissimilar things, because in one case you're looking at a brain doing both inverse kinematics and "calculus" (sense 1), and in the other you're looking at a computer doing both inverse kinematics and "calculus" (sense 2). The kind of calculus a CAS does is not the same kind that a human does. It's less versatile, for one.
>The point here is that when we start constructing agents or tools with different architectures to ourselves, it makes sense to reevaluate notions of whether something is ‘hard’ or ‘easy’.
Well, no, because when someone says that calculus is hard and moving their arms is easy, they're not talking about how hard it was to create each functionality, they're talking about how hard it is to employ each. We would need to ask a computer how hard it thinks the tasks it does are to do.
> There are a shocking number of ways to accidentally create nondeterministic output when doing C/C++ development. One of the easiest is to use the builtin __DATE__ and __TIME__ macros to stamp a build with the time the compiler was executed at: Am I missing something here? Yes, if you use a feature that intentionally inserts the build time and date into the code, the every build is going to be different. That's the…
But usually the realization follows the initial intent by several weeks, if not months! Your comment shines as the embodiment of hindsight is 20/20.
So to avoid those energy-hungry LLM companies from scraping your website, you force each browser to compute a lot of hashes in a necessarily energy-hungry loop, creating, at the same time, all the kind of accessibility problems?
- Put their ~1kb of text on a ~0kb website, make it cacheable, make hosting it free, make downloading and rendering it instantenous, make it accessible and let users read it comfortably
- Set up a CAPTCHA and make the website inaccessible, spy on the users or give their history to trillion dollar ad companies, make them wait 10 secs to proceed.
I hate proof of work code running on my machine for the benefit of someone else. It's like planting a crypto miner.
> There are a shocking number of ways to accidentally create nondeterministic output when doing C/C++ development. One of the easiest is to use the builtin __DATE__ and __TIME__ macros to stamp a build with the time the compiler was executed at: Am I missing something here? Yes, if you use a feature that intentionally inserts the build time and date into the code, the every build is going to be different. That's the…
I think the intentional part is that you want to print the date and time something's been compiled, and the accidental part is that you suddenly made your build non-reproducible. But usually the realization follows the initial intent by several weeks, if not months! Your comment shines as the embodiment of hindsight is 20/20.
But that's exactly what I don't get. How can that be considered "accidental"? How can any thinking person not realize that putting the build time into the compiled image will make every build different because, you know, different builds happen at different times? Has software engineering really been dumbed down so much that this is not immediately obvious? It feels like a mechanic doing an oil change and being surprised by having all the oil drain out if they neglect to put the drain plug back in.