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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • More appropriate tools to detect AI generated text you mean?

    It’s not a thing. I don’t think it will ever be a thing. Certainly not reliably, and never as a 100% certainty tool.

    The punishment for a teacher deciding you cheated on a test or an assignment? I don’t know, but I imagine it sucks. Best case, you’d probably be at risk of failing the class and potentially the grade/semester. Worst case you might get expelled for being a filthy cheater. Because an unreliable tool said so and an unreliable teacher chose to believe it.

    If you’re asking what’s the answer teachers should know to defend against AI generated content, I’m afraid I don’t have one. It’s akin to giving students math homework assignments but demanding that they don’t use calculators. That could have been reasonable before calculators were a thing, but not anymore and so teachers don’t expect that to make sense and don’t put those rules on students.




  • I was watching the network traffic sent by Twitter the other day, as one does, and apparently whenever you stop scrolling for a few seconds, whatever post is visible on screen at that time gets added to a little pile that then gets “subscribed to” because it generated “engagement”, no click needed.
    This whole insidious recommendation nonsense was probably a subplot in the classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.

    Almost entirely unrelated, but I’ve been playing The Algorithm (part of the Tenet OST, by Ludwig Göransson) on repeat for a bit now. It’s also become my ring tone, and if I can infect at least one other hapless soul with it, I’ll be satisfied.







  • One of my guilty pleasures is to rewrite trivial functions to be statements free.

    Since I’d be too self-conscious to put those in a PR, I keep those mostly to myself.

    For example, here’s an XPath wrapper:

    const $$$ = (q,d=document,x=d.evaluate(q,d),a=[],n=x.iterateNext()) => n ? (a.push(n), $$$(q,d,x,a)) : a;
    

    Which you can use as $$$("//*[contains(@class, 'post-')]//*[text()[contains(.,'fedilink')]]/../../..") to get an array of matching nodes.

    If I was paid to write this, it’d probably look like this instead:

    function queryAllXPath(query, doc = document) {
        const array = [];
        const result = doc.evaluate(query, doc);
        let node= result.iterateNext();
        while (node) {
            array.push(node);
            n = result.iterateNext();
        }
        return array;
    }
    

    Seriously boring stuff.

    Anyway, since var/let/const are statements, I have no choice but to use optional parameters instead, and since loops are statements as well, recursion saves the day.

    Would my quality of life improve if the lambda body could be written as => if n then a.push(n), $$$(q,d,x,a) else a ? Obviously, yes.


  • There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don’t rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin’s Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.

    One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the “Bitcoin Savings & Trust” (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.

    I think the main practical value of something like reddit’s karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.