The AI tool report shown to the dean with "85% match" Will be used as "proof".
If you want more proof, then you can take the essay, give it to chatGPT and say, "Please give me a report showing how this essay is written to en by AI."
> If you want more proof, then you can take the essay, give it to chatGPT and say, "Please give me a report showing how this essay is written to en by AI."
And ChatGPT will happily argue whichever side you want to take. I just passed it a review I wrote a few years ago (with no AI/LLM or similar assistance), with the prompts "Prove that this was written by an AI/LLM: <review>" and "Prove that this was written by a human, not an AI/LLM: <review>", and got the following two conclusions:
> Without metadata or direct evidence, it is impossible to definitively prove this was written by an AI. However, based on the characteristics listed, there are signs that it might have been generated or significantly assisted by an AI.[1]
> While AI models like myself are capable of generating complex and well-written content, this specific review shows several hallmarks of human authorship, including nuanced critique, emotional depth, personalized anecdotes, and culturally specific references. Without external metadata or more concrete proof, it’s not possible to definitively claim this was written by a human, but the characteristics strongly suggest that it was.[2]
I think what you pointed out is exactly the problem. Administrators apparently don’t understand statistics and therefore can’t be trusted to utilize the outputs of statistical tools correctly.
I just played with townie AI for an hour or so... Very cool! Very fun.
There's still some glitches, occasionally the entire app code would get replaced by the function the LLM was trying to update. I could fix it by telling it that's what had happened, and it would then fill everything in again... Waiting for the entire app to be rewritten each time was a bit annoying.
It got the initial concepts of the app very very quickly running, but then struggled with some CSS stuff, saying it would try a different approach, or apologising for missing things repeatedly...and eventually it told me it would try more radical approaches and wrote online styles... I wonder if the single file approach has limitations in that respect.
Very interesting, very fun to play with.
I'm kind of concerned for security things with LLM written apps - you can ask it to do things and it says yes, without really thinking if it's a good idea or not.
But cool!
And anything which helps with the internet to be full of small independent quirky creative ideas, the better.
> I'm kind of concerned for security things with LLM written apps - you can ask it to do things and it says yes, without really thinking if it's a good idea or not.
Well, right. If I'm using an LLM to create code, I'm going to use all my skill and experience to review and shape the code to standards I'm ok with.
But for people with extremely limited experience, LLMs offer a "create an app by talking!!" Zero understanding required. So they won't know to not leak user PII in JSON responses or have publicly writable endpoints or keeping private keys for external services server side and outside of the code base, etc... Let alone anything more complex.
Also rich patrons supporting artists was how many of the greatest artworks of many civilisations were commissioned for thousands of years...
Is writing software closer to growing potatoes or designing the Sagrada de Familia, or writing the Clarinet Concerto?
I'd argue that writing a web browser is a lot closer in scope to writing a symphony than building a house - at least in audience and durability. In a house's life time, maybe 100 people live in it, and perhaps 2000 people visit it, but a browser, or a symphony, will have an audience of millions.
The market is massively smaller. The impact massively larger.
Ask it to write a sitcom comedy screenplay about a software team asked to do exactly this same situation, but where it goes disastrously wrong. Give enough info to the prompt to make it parody your own company. Make sure it's not offensive.
Then use an AI image generator to generate cartoon pictures for the characters in the screenplay.
Then use an AI voice system to generate all the voices for it.
Then put it all together as a video, present it as a early storyboard concept pitching to them for funding to turn into a full TV series.
This unfortunately has `docstring-to-markdown` as one of its dependencies, which is a pain to install behind corporate pip proxies because it's under GPL.
In the interim, check out basedpyright [1]. It's an up-to-date fork of pyright with some improvements, less arbitrary limitations, and does not require npm to install.
I was thrilled to learn about basedpyright recently. It does a great job of filling in some of the missing parts of pyright that MS deemed a better fit for pylance – which is a vs code exclusive.
Easy to install with pipx.
As with pyright, I’ve noticed `--createstubs` helps against slowness when working in modules that import large untyped packages.
Which is a very sensible decision given that VSCode is Typescript, and also it means it can run on the web. Also Typescript is a much nicer and faster language than Python.
If I was their security team, I would be fine with them publishing articles about our security set up - as long as it wasn't 100% accurate.
Possibly mention a specific virtualization system, and then run a honeypot version of the above to try and catch directed attacks at it while actually relying on a totally different system...
> I would be fine with them publishing articles about our security set up - as long as it wasn't 100% accurate.
It reads, at least to me, as a PoC on them wanting to "standardise" end point creation to talk to them securely; given the introduction points to "you may have come across the ‘Contact the Guardian securely’ banner".
My day job is Django - and the ipdb based `shell_plus` from the `django_extensions` package is invaluable.[1]
I have a shell open almost all the time, and use it constantly for testing functions, writing queries etc. It drives me crazy watching other Devs change a query, wait for the server to reload and refresh the browser repeatedly, when editing in the REPL is so much faster.
Being able to `dir` and tab complete experimentally is so fast. (I also have this in the ipdb debugger... Also Django extensions has a debugger inside templates which is really nice)
Being able to `%edit 1-20` and have the repl session instantly in my editor to copy paste is fantastic too.
I also use a lot of TDD for tasks that fit that style, mostly where I'm writing business logic or data processing functions... but for exploring data / APIs /queries / data shaping, interactive just feels instantly productive. Once I've got the API or whatever it is to correctly produce the happy path, it's then easy to copy that into the codebase knowing what shape to expect, I can then turn that into unit tests and throw all the weird external data and edge cases at it with reasonable confidence about what should be happening underneath.
It also has a mode to print out all SQL statements it runs underneath your code - which is great for checking that you've not missed a join or something and got n+1 sneaking in
I work on embedded firmware that has a web UI (as embedded firmwares have nowadays). I don't touch it much, but when I had to a major bit of development on it, I did as much work in JS, out of a big JSON generated by the firmware. One thing that allowed me to do was to capture the page put out by the firmware and then iterate on that, and work the changes back to the original source files. In fact, I accessed it as a local file (file:// URL).
Otherwise it's: run the build to make the firmware image; flash; reboot; wait for firmware to bring up webUI server; navigate to the page, trigger some DOM event and wait". :)
I knew someone would mention REPL-based development. We really should have better tooling in this area where we could set a breakpoint and when hit, change both code and/or data and continue.
The REPL is so incredibly productive with immediate feedback that the long ORM expression actually runs the SQL query you were intending (or notice it does something you didn't intend).
My parents are both very computer literate (my mum was a programmer, my dad also wrote code & managed database teams...) and they were really good friends with the head teacher at my primary school (UK, 90s).
They worked together with him to write a curriculum they used with the entire teaching staff in our school to learn the systems before the new Windows computers came in to replace the old acorns or BBC micros or whatever, including several "inset" (?) days.
The big problem with all the teaching things at the time was being called "Windows for Dummies" or "Microsoft Office for dummies" or whatever - was that the teachers were really smart people - not dummies at all. So the "you don't understand the computer, therefore you are a dummy" was extremely degrading and put up walls instantly.
How people respond when you teach people as "smart, interested and motivated, but currently still extremely unfamiliar and somewhat apprehensive" compared to "not especially clever, and it's a very complicated thing so don't expect to really understand it" is very different.
If you want more proof, then you can take the essay, give it to chatGPT and say, "Please give me a report showing how this essay is written to en by AI."
People treat AI like it's an omniscient god.