I enjoy picture sites as I am sure others do but I think that the domain should have articles that could be submitted here that people could discuss. Perhaps an article on lazy-loading of images or something along that line? Maybe an article on loading images on lossy networks over http2 vs http3 and then give two end-points to test. The articles could link to the apex of the domain to provide examples.
You should really think about the ethics of using this. You could wait a few minutes before executing your script. Some people work really hard to get on the leaderboard and players like you destroy the concept.
My understanding is that the ranking of this
game is more tied to the timezone you live in (since the ranking depends on the hour when you solve the problem), than anything else.
Also it sounds like it is more targeted to people who want to have fun solving the problems than to people who want to compete for ranking.
And last, until their rules say otherwise, I'd say using AI to solve the problems is perfectly fair.
It's a game that can be played both casually and competitively, like many other games. But using artificial aids would be frowned upon even in casual contexts. I would be annoyed if my opponent in chess got suggestions from a chess AI or if my opponent in an online shooter was using an aimbot. I play both of these for fun, but a big part of the fun is competing with people of similar skill.
I've never placed in the top 100 of AOC and I never will. But the folks who attempt it would be rightly miffed that someone cheated to get to the top.
And please, don't talk about the effort needed to set up the cheating device. It took a lot of effort to (allegedly) cheat in chess with anal beads, but no one is praising that person.
It isn't cheating to dig a ditch with a backhoe any more that it is to use gpt-3 to solve the Advent of Code problems.
It feels like cheating because of asymmetry, it didn't exist before and now it does. They feel like they didn't get a chance to try out the new tool.
Funny thing, I have been accused of "cheating" a couple times in programming. One was in using a Python script to refactor over 4k php pages that had grown by copy pasta over 5 years. Think all code in the company started from the same script, just copied from the previous unrelated task. One week of coding, 15 seconds of runtime and it replaced 6 person-months worth of work.
The other one was when I introduced a bunch of junior programmers to IntelliJ, in how you could navigate the code, rename, refactor, introduce-method. They all understood the new power, half were stoked (because they had access the license) and the other half were pissed, because it was cheating, because a previously 4 hr task, would now be expected to take 45 minutes. The person without the high tech ide is pissed,
First down hill suspension bike vs non, first use of a hydrofoil in competitive sailing. Almost every human endeavor has a before this point and after this point. Maybe this is ours.
Point is, I don't think it cheating until we specifically have human only competitions.
I feel in this type of games, your only opponent should really be yourself and I'm not really sure why what other people you don't know are doing should matter.
> I'm not really sure why what other people you don't know are doing should matter
Doesn't that exactly apply to your critisism of other peoples motives to compete with each other? specifically their desire to compete with other humans for fun, as opposed to humans copy and pasting machine output.
I don't mind at all that people are basing the fun they have doing something on what some other people they don't know are doing. I just don't think it's a good idea (for their own happiness), and share it as we are discussing this topic :)
The "this isn't cheating" folks do a pretty fine demonstration of why modern humanity is trying hard to wreck itself and will probably succeed. That this is "cheating", violating the spirit of the thing even if it's "technically okay", should be self-evident and obvious, but instead we've got folks actually arguing about it. Sincerely, even.
It's not new, but this, right here, is the thing that's broken in humans.
Public things aren't exclusively for you. Public things are for everyone who uses them.
People who place high on the leaderboard already use prewritten libraries specialized for the kinds of problems advent of code asks. Calling out to gpt3 is not much different.
Isn’t this just another tool in the toolbox? “Don’t you think about the ethics of using C for this? Some people work really hard on their punchcard mainframe solutions and players like you destroy the concept”
Who cares about the Leaderboard on the easy problems? If the time difference between the 10th solve and the 100th solve is within a minute, the rank is pretty much a coin toss.
> Some people work really hard to get on the leaderboard and players like you destroy the concept.
Yeah. Just like how 'ethics' went out of the window as soon as Stable Diffusion destroyed and cheapened the digital artist straight to zero.
Now it is happening to some extent to parts of programming contests and challenges, ruining the concept as no-one can tell if the code was written by ChatGPT.
Huh that's weird. It actually shows the correct 336h for a few milliseconds first and then counts back from 35h. I wonder what's happening internally - messing up a timer shouldn't be that easy normally, right?
Randomness is the basis for all life and seems necessary for there to be any sort of curiosity component to intelligence. At a macro level, it seems to represent breaks in cycles that allow for change. Further, if our own decision making amounts to weighted distributions in neuron paths, how would a brain resolve an equally weighted distribution (no matter how small the chance of that happening is).
Edit: To further explain, I apply the basic principles that govern life to all facets of life, all the way up to the complexities of human society, language, etc.. That is, DNA is a self-replicating system that through randomness was able to build more and more complex organisms over time. It generically represents a way to encode behaviors through time, a necessary subset of which include behaviors for self-replication and resource acquisition (mostly to satisfy the self-replication requirement). On a more complex level, human society is the organism, human language (including speech, writing, visual arts) is the DNA (a means to pass knowledge, behaviors, etc. through time), and humans are the "cells".
Deterministic pseudorandom would also solve these cases, and is not true random.
I'm not saying these cases are pseudorandom (the logistics of having a prng with state apply to biology looks hard), but that it doesn't seem to require true random
Correct! I think that's the question though. Is there true randomness in the system or is it really just playing out based on the laws of physics. I'm more inclined to believe the mechanisms at which randomness gets injected into DNA replication is pseudorandom, but for mental constructs I'm more inclined to believe it's sensitive enough to true randomness.
Hmm, I don't think what I'm saying is the same thing. I'm saying that the behavior of organisms amount to systems with the same function no matter the complexity or timescale. Though to that end, I do consider human society to be an organism of sorts, but beyond that not so much.
Not entirely wrong. I think it's entirely possible for "free will" in the sense that it's normally talked about to not really be a thing. After all, we're taught about "nature vs nurture" in psychology, that is, learned vs inherent behaviors passed through genetics. I think what we call "free will" is itself curiosity manifest from random decision making. The overwhelming vast majority of our decisions are based on learned behaviors though, and decision making itself is known to be a cognitively taxing process; so we're predisposed to routine, simplification, and working with proxies.
Edit: to your point about needing validation: the desire for acceptance is simply put, the desire for a positive feedback response on a personal or societal level. Remember, our brains are big reinforced learning machines and crave feedback as quickly and unambiguously as possible. The desire for acceptance is both a thing that keeps behaviors "in-line" with societal expectations while allowing for changes in those behaviors to shape societal behaviors (and expectations) over generations (time), and therefor make progress, or at least change.
