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Comment by MrMetric

Knowing how to work without AI is valuable (what a surreal sentence to type). The first step of that is knowing it's possible. Years and years ago, when I got started programming, seeing projects like this taught me I can make anything I want, and I can always learn how to do it. There's no far-off wizard tower that must be relied upon to make everything for you.

What I'm saying is, I think this kind of thing will help the young'uns realize they can do it too. That fact is, unfortunately, far from obvious. One of the worst anecdotes I have from elementary school was of asking the librarian (who also oversaw the computer lab) who made OpenOffice, because I wanted to learn about how software works and figured that'd be a good start, and hearing her immediately dismiss the question by saying "People a lot smarter than us!" in front of the whole class. I can only hope nobody internalized that.

Also, out of curiosity from this topic being heavily on my brain lately, might I ask how you load images? Are you using libraries, or did you write any decoders yourself? Back in the day, my far less experienced self tried writing a BMP decoder, then learned about fuzzing and broke it instantly. Now that was a fun learning experience.

I recently did some playing around with having AIs test PNG decoders and it was as much of a mess as I expected. Broke a few in under an hour from casual prompting, and found weird bugs and oversights in every single one over a few days of not-so-casual prompting. (If you want to check reliability yourself, I found it eye-opening to run against a test corpus made from combining every major project's own corpus, and checking the pixel output, not just whether or not it crashed or ate all your RAM.)

parent MrMetric 2 days ago

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