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Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

simonwillison.net

431–440 of 453 posts

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#431
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our current architectures are complex, mostly because of DRY and a natural human tendency to abstract things. But that's a decision, not a fundamental property of code. At core, most web stuff is "take it out of the database, put it on the screen. Accept it from the user, put it in the database." If everything was written PHP3 style (add_item.php, delete_item.php, etc), with minimal includes, a chatbot might be rathe…

This is IMHO where the interesting direction will be. How do we architecture code so that it is optimized around chatbot development? In the past areas of separation were determined by api stability, deployment concerns, or even just internal team politics. In the future a rep might be separated from a monolith repo to be an area of responsibility that a chatbot can reason about, and not get lost in the complexity.

IMHO we should always architect code to take advantage of human skills.

1°) When there is an issue to debug and fix in a not-so-big codebase, LLMs can give ideas to diagnose, but are pretty bad at fixing. Where your god will be when you have a critical bug in production ?

2°) Code is meant for humans in the first place, not machines. Bytecodes and binary formats are meant for machines, these are not human-readable.

As a SWE, I pass more time reading than writing code, and I want to navigate in a the codebase in the most easy possible way. I don't want my life to be miserable or more complicated because the code is architected to take advantage of chatbot skills.

And still IMHO, if you need to architect your code for not-humans, there is a defect in the design. Why force yourself to write code that is not meant to be maintained by a human when you will in any case maintain that said code ?

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example? Have you tried it recently with the higher-end models?

I have asked chatgpt reasoning model to solve chess endgames where white had king and a queen vs king and a rook on a 7x8 chessboards. So to compute value for all positions and find the position which is the longest win for white. Not creative, not novel and not difficult algorithmic task. But it requires some reasoning, planning and precision. It failed miserably.

o4-mini-high did make an error I had to point out, on the first attempt: https://chatgpt.com/share/680eeea2-264c-800e-8497-3903ea6309...

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example? Have you tried it recently with the higher-end models?

My favorite example is implementing NEAT with keras dense layers instead of graphs. Last time I tried with claude 3.7, it wrote code to mutate the output layer (??). I tried to prevent that a few times and gave up.

This NEAT? https://web.archive.org/web/20231205130538/http://www.cs.ucf...

Is the idea to use a keras dense layer to represent a weighted graph by identifying the input nodes with the corresponding outputs?

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#434
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A selfie with a snippet of building in the background might give away your location even if you think there's no way it could be locatable.

Did you somehow accidentally share a selfie?

You're being intentionally dense. No, people don't accidentally post pictures but they often do post them with the intention of showing a certain thing, e.g. profile picture, something for sale, something related to hobbies, household repairs, whatever. All of thse are posted with intent to include a certain object but may include background info that the poster did not consider.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is IMHO where the interesting direction will be. How do we architecture code so that it is optimized around chatbot development? In the past areas of separation were determined by api stability, deployment concerns, or even just internal team politics. In the future a rep might be separated from a monolith repo to be an area of responsibility that a chatbot can reason about, and not get lost in the complexity.

IMHO we should always architect code to take advantage of human skills. 1°) When there is an issue to debug and fix in a not-so-big codebase, LLMs can give ideas to diagnose, but are pretty bad at fixing. Where your god will be when you have a critical bug in production ? 2°) Code is meant for humans in the first place, not machines. Bytecodes and binary formats are meant for machines, these are not human-readable. A…

This human quite likes having everything on one page, to be honest. And not having a leaky ORM layer between me and the SQL.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite example is implementing NEAT with keras dense layers instead of graphs. Last time I tried with claude 3.7, it wrote code to mutate the output layer (??). I tried to prevent that a few times and gave up.

This NEAT? https://web.archive.org/web/20231205130538/http://www.cs.ucf... Is the idea to use a keras dense layer to represent a weighted graph by identifying the input nodes with the corresponding outputs?

The idea is to evolve the multi layer dnn using ga

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#437
post #63

I play competitive Geoguessr at a fairly high level, and I wanted to test this out to see how it compares. It's astonishingly good. It will use information it knows about you to arrive at the answer - it gave me the exact trailhead of a photo I took locally, and when I asked it how, it mentioned that it knows I live nearby. However, I've given it vacation photos from ages ago, and not only in tourist destinations eit…

>I have a flashcard deck with hundreds of entries to help me remember road lines, power poles, bollards, architecture, license plates, etc.

You're basically training yourself the same way an AI is trained at that point.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This NEAT? https://web.archive.org/web/20231205130538/http://www.cs.ucf... Is the idea to use a keras dense layer to represent a weighted graph by identifying the input nodes with the corresponding outputs?

The idea is to evolve the multi layer dnn using ga

Is there a precise description of what you're trying to do? Maybe the task you gave Claude?

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#439
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With location services on, I would think that a screenshot on a phone would record the location of the phone during a screenshot. It would be best to use a tool to strip exif. I could also see a screenshot tool on an OS adding extra exif data, both from the original and additional, like the URL, OS and logged in user. Just like print to pdf does when you print, the author contains the logged in user, amongst other th…

I built a tool for testing that a while ago - try opening a screenshot from an iPhone in it, you won't see any EXIF location data: https://tools.simonwillison.net/exif Here's the output for the Buenos Aires screenshot image from my post: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1055f2198edd87de1b023bb09691e...

That is cool, but we cant be guaranteed that will always be the case, nor could we make a statement about all phones, it would be a phone by phone basis. Esp on Android where someone could have an alternative screenshot application.

Depending on your threat model, I'd argue that it would be impossible to prove that metadata is not included within the image itself (alpha channel, noise, pushed pixels, colorspace skew, etc).

I'd be interested in stego techniques that can survive image reduction and denoising.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#440
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built a tool for testing that a while ago - try opening a screenshot from an iPhone in it, you won't see any EXIF location data: https://tools.simonwillison.net/exif Here's the output for the Buenos Aires screenshot image from my post: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1055f2198edd87de1b023bb09691e...

That is cool, but we cant be guaranteed that will always be the case, nor could we make a statement about all phones, it would be a phone by phone basis. Esp on Android where someone could have an alternative screenshot application. Depending on your threat model, I'd argue that it would be impossible to prove that metadata is not included within the image itself (alpha channel, noise, pushed pixels, colorspace skew,…

Take a photo of the image displayed on your laptop screen with your phone. Ultimate EXIF removal!
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