Comment by chrismorgan

2 months ago

How could you implement something like this by accident?

That's a good question! I'm sure we'll find out eventually.

z Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.

LLMs aren't known for being super deterministic.

  • LLMs are determistic. Just like everything else computers are capable of doing.

    Commercial front-ends just hide the random seed parameters.

    • Distributed float math is not deterministic without introducing total operations ordering and destroying performance

    • It's not usefully deterministic in the way computers usually are. Sensitively identical input can still lead to wildly different outputs even if all randomness is crushed out.

One feasible scenario could be that they are working on/experimenting with ads, and it was put behind a feature flag, but for whatever reason it was inadvertently ignored

  • That’s not implementing it by accident, that’s deliberate. In such a scenario perhaps the deployment was a mistake, but if you don’t write the malware in the first place, it can’t be deployed. (Probably. This is LLM stuff we’re talking about.)

    (Yes, this is malware. It’s incontrovertibly adware, and although some will argue that not all adware is malware, this behaviour easily meets the requirements to be deemed malicious.)

    It is said, never point a gun at something you’re not willing to shoot. Apply something similar here.

Vibe coding and copilot inserted the ad-code into that PR?

Is that the most charitable way?