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We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

juxt.pro

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Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the opposite of clear to me.

Has the article been updated? 2nd paragraph starts with: "We used Claude and Allium" And later on: "With that obligation written down, Claude traced every path that runs after gyros_busy is set to true"

This is the original article text. It just looks like users skimmed and then flamed the author.

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#212
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one tell-tale of many: "No alarm, no program light." Another one: "Two instructions are missing: [...] Four bytes." One more: "The defensive coding hid the problem, but it didn’t eliminate it."

That's just writing. I frequently write like that. This insistence that certain stylistics patterns are "tell-tale" signs that an article was written by AI makes no sense, particularly when you consider that whatever stylistic ticks an LLM may possess are a result of it being trained on human writing.

This is a myth. At least one study (Juzek/Ward) has shown that these stylistic patterns do not appear nearly as often either in well-known datasets of English language -- including datasets restricted to specific dialects of English. They don't even appear as often in text generated by raw language models. When they start showing up is after the model has undergone RLHF. Think of the Fermi paradox: if there are all these people who write like AI, then where are they?

AI writing also tends to show these indicators over and over, consistently, over passages of text. It is very hard for humans, even if they are really familiar with AI writing, to be that consistent, and almost impossible for them to be that consistent for more than a sentence or two. Writing a long blog post by hand that is believably "AI-written" takes the amount of purposeful skill you'd need to forge an entire painting or ancient document.

The problem is that people either look for the wrong things, look for obsolete things ("delve" is dead and modern LLMs have killed it), or extrapolate things from indicators that are extremely narrow and specific.

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#213
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an alternative way of thinking about this... Someone probably expended a lot of time and effort planning, thinking about, and writing an interesting article, and then you stroll by and casually accuse them of being a bone idle cheat, with no supporting evidence other than your "sensitive detector" and a bunch of hand-wavy nonsense that adds up to naught.

To start, this is more or less an advertising piece for their product. It's pretty clear that they want to sell you Allium. And that's fine! They are allowed! But even if that was written by a human, they were compensated for it. They didn't expend lots of effort and thinking, it's their job. More importantly, it's an article about using Claude from a company about using Claude. I think on the balance it's very likel…

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