wjs018

The theory that the lead maintainer had (he is an actual software developer, I just dabble), is that it might be a type of reinforcement learning:

• Get your LLM to create what it thinks are valid bug reports/issues
• Monitor the outcome of those issues (closed immediately, discussion, eventual pull request)
• Use those outcomes to assign how “good” or “bad” that generated issue was
• Use that scoring as a way to feed back into the model to influence it to create more “good” issues

If this is what’s happening, then it’s essentially offloading your LLM’s reinforcement learning scoring to open source maintainers.

Really great piece. We have recently seen many popular lemmy instances struggle under recent scraping waves, and that is hardly the first time its happened. I have some firsthand experience with the second part of this article that talks about AI-generated bug reports/vulnerabilities for open source projects.

I help maintain a python library and got a bug report a couple weeks back of a user getting a type-checking issue and a bit of additional information. It didn’t strictly follow the bug report template we use, but it was well organized enough, so I spent some time digging into it and came up with no way to reproduce this at all. Thankfully, the lead maintainer was able to spot the report for what it was and just closed it and saved me from further efforts to diagnose the issue (after an hour or two were burned already).

Wow, I hadn’t realized until you pointed it out that you can’t delete pm’s (I guess without getting admins to fiddle with the db). I still use my lemmy account to moderate some lemmy communities, but I am appreciating using piefed as my threadiverse consumption platform more and more.

You have clearly never driven on 93 through Boston where the person you replied to said they are from (aka the Big Dig). It is basically an entire highway that is underneath the city. There are many on and off ramps, lanes suddenly become exit only, complex multi-lane exits that branch…it’s intimidating. As somebody that has lived in the Boston area for 15 years now, I still mess things up.

Official response from Greg Bernhardt

It’s years since I last used PhysicsForums, but found it immensely useful in the old days while going through my undergrad physics degree (it was less useful for PhD courses). I am not morally opposed to providing AI attempts at an answer in threads where nobody else chimes in. However, using real accounts that belong to other users is wildly over the line. I was surprised to see this wasn’t really called out in the official response thread by the existing users as that is the part of all this that is the most egregious to me.

IIRC, piefed’s private votes are disabled for “trusted” instances. You can see which instances are trusted here.

I have a PhD in and am a practicing physicist in the field of rheology. I think this is an interesting way to explain viscoelastic materials to people. My go-to example is usually Silly Putty, but cats are something that just about everybody has some experience with.

I wrote my PhD thesis about bacterial flagella. Not about the motor though (which is incredible), but about the long part of the flagella that is extracellular. It is able to change its shape as the bacteria moves. The mechanism by which this happens is at the same time quite simple, but just about impossible to explain via text. Really, really neat bit of evolution that has proven to be home to incredibly rich physics that is still being studied to this day.