[HN Gopher] LLM spews nonsense in CVE report for curl
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       LLM spews nonsense in CVE report for curl
        
       Author : skeptrune
       Score  : 215 points
       Date   : 2024-01-02 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (hackerone.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (hackerone.com)
        
       | minimaxir wrote:
       | I'm more curious why and how this report got filed.
       | 
       | Does curl provide financial incentives for filing CVEs? Or is it
       | a misguided attempt at being helpful? (EDIT: from the blog post,
       | there are indeed bug bounties for curl)
       | 
       | What do you prompt a LLM with to get a more humanized output and
       | code intermix for a CVE like this, as it doesn't have the typical
       | ChatGPT tropes? There isn't an obvious indicator that it was LLM-
       | generated until it hallucinated a user name and went into the
       | third-person "raised by the triager".
        
         | rwmj wrote:
         | curl does offer a bug bounty. Unfortunately there's a more
         | fundamental issue: being someone who has filed CVEs can provide
         | some credibility for your resume, that's the financial
         | incentive here, and also the root cause of many many issues
         | with the CVE system.
        
         | xcdzvyn wrote:
         | > Does curl provide financial incentives for filing CVEs?
         | 
         | Up to $10,000 according to their HackerOne page.
         | 
         | I could also see this being a misguided attempt at being
         | helpful, given the submitter clearly cannot read C. Though I'm
         | not sure where you'd lie in the computer competency spectrum if
         | you can use an LLM to find code bugs withoug realising they'll
         | probably be hallucinated.
        
         | richardwhiuk wrote:
         | Yes Curl offers a Bug Bounty -
         | https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-f...
        
         | technion wrote:
         | I've seen people file cve requests 20 years ago with the output
         | of "grep strcpy" as the entire report. All an llm bought to
         | this modern version is the apologising, arguing and
         | hallucinated code sample.
        
           | itishappy wrote:
           | Ah, the time wasting bits.
        
           | shadowgovt wrote:
           | It does make one wonder why anyone still uses strcpy in an
           | open source project if it's going to be a perpetual source of
           | having to flag down grep-identified bug reports forever.
        
             | flohofwoe wrote:
             | The recommended strncpy() is just as bad as strcpy()
             | because you'll end up with a string that's not zero-
             | terminated if the length of the copied string is >= the
             | target buffer size.
             | 
             | strlcpy() is a better option but is neither in the C nor
             | POSIX standard.
             | 
             | snprintf() is also a good option since C99 but a bit
             | overkill.
        
               | nneonneo wrote:
               | The submitter's proposed fix _does_ add null termination,
               | so it does work as expected. Still, strncpy is a horrible
               | API in general. It even has the incredibly stupid
               | behaviour of zeroing out the entire buffer past your
               | string, which is almost never necessary and therefore
               | just a waste of cycles. If zeroing is needed e.g. for
               | security, it's always better to include an obvious and
               | explicit memset.
        
           | arp242 wrote:
           | At least those could be dismissed with almost zero effort.
           | "You clearly didn't spend any effort in your report, so I'm
           | not going to spend a lot of effort replying".
           | 
           | But with this it at least _looks_ like they spent the effort,
           | and even though you can suspect LLM chicanery, you can never
           | be entirely sure, especially not from the initial message.
        
       | philk10 wrote:
       | Seems related to this -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38840907
        
       | jsnell wrote:
       | I first thought this was a dupe of
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37904047, but turns out it's
       | a _different_ LLM-generated bogus vulnerability report about curl
       | on hackerone.
        
         | ecshafer wrote:
         | Great so I am not crazy. I read this and I coulve sworn I had
         | seen this before. This is so similar to the last incident its
         | weird. Are popular projects like Curl just going to have
         | constant LLM written incidents opened against them as people
         | try and get some line items on their resume?
        
           | shadowgovt wrote:
           | Probably. Eventually it might even make sense to accept some
           | of the edits so that the auto-sniffers generating them stop
           | complaining (not unlike making changes to working code that
           | make a linter happy).
        
           | bombcar wrote:
           | Yes. As anyone who has an email associated with a website
           | knows, you'll get random "vulnerability detection spam"
           | requesting bounties.
           | 
           | CVE is going to have to up their game.
        
         | barryrandall wrote:
         | HackerOne's customers are the companies running bug bounty
         | programs. You'd think they'd be a bit more careful about who
         | they allow to spam their customers with clout-seeking LLM
         | garbage.
        
           | nneonneo wrote:
           | First time contributors can have perfectly valid reports, and
           | this particular report was initially written in a reasonably
           | professional style that doesn't immediately seem out of place
           | (it's the replies that make it obvious an LLM is being used).
           | 
           | Unfortunately, this issue isn't likely to go away any time
           | soon, and will probably just get worse as the LLMs get used
           | more widely for this type of work. What probably will happen
           | is that maintainers will have to get better at identifying
           | and screening out this kind of nonsense early, and for
           | platforms to get better at banning people who submit bogus
           | reports (but that's really going to be a whack-a-mole game).
        
         | skeptrune wrote:
         | damn, I had no idea this had happened before
         | 
         | that makes this precedent even more established
        
       | shadowgovt wrote:
       | An important lesson they taught us in high school was how to tell
       | the difference between elegantly-stated falsehoods and
       | inelegantly-stated truths.
       | 
       | ... but it can be difficult. People tend to use proper grammar
       | and style as a first-pass filter for intelligent discourse, and
       | getting the _shape_ of language right is something that LLMs are
       | very, very good at.
        
         | OmarShehata wrote:
         | Wow, how well did this land for you at the time, and others in
         | your class? This is a very tricky thing, and I think most
         | adults aren't equipped to deal with this.
         | 
         | (I think the average person is totally capable in telling these
         | apart, the problem is that you kind of need to get used to
         | reading things in a systematic way/put in some effort. It's
         | very difficult to do this when scrolling through your phone
         | late at night etc.)
        
       | jiveturkey wrote:
       | interesting DoS! consuming the valuable time of the analyst. this
       | could become a real problem.
        
       | CoastalCoder wrote:
       | I'm trying to put my finger on why this pisses me off so much.
       | 
       | Maybe because I'm _guessing_ (I could be wrong) that this is an
       | utterly selfish act, damaging to the common good, on the part of
       | whoever submitted the CVE. I.e., it 's like vandalizing a Habitat
       | for Humanity office.
        
         | shadowgovt wrote:
         | I can come up with an explanation that doesn't assume ill
         | intent.
         | 
         | It's not too terribly hard to run an auto-scanner for a common
         | vulnerability pattern and then hook that scanner up to an LLM
         | to generate English explanations (because, let's call the tech
         | world what it is: well-formed English is likelier to pass the
         | first-pass filter of not being BS than an English-as-a-second-
         | language attempt to explain a problem).
         | 
         | Looking at the reporter, they apparently have an undisclosed
         | thank you from Adobe and Toyota. And when they interjected to
         | try and explain an error in their machine mis-stating the name
         | of the reviewer, the text they injected was likely not English-
         | as-first-language.
         | 
         | So I can imagine someone basically trying to run an auto-
         | scanner for common vulns to highlight them for various parties
         | to address, because addressing them increases software health
         | globally.
         | 
         | Problem is that it's false-positiving on some (admittedly very
         | fragile, in the "only guarded by every human being writing the
         | right code all the time" sense, i.e. the detector's _not_ wrong
         | that if the called function violates contract stuff will break)
         | working code.
        
           | wrs wrote:
           | As I found out when I first put something up for review on
           | HackerOne, there is a whole cottage industry of people just
           | running scanners and blindly reporting whatever comes out.
           | They are doing this to get something on their resume and
           | maybe receive a bounty, not to improve global software
           | health. It's basically spam, because all the effort is on the
           | part of the receiver to figure out if these reports make any
           | sense. (And of course you can pay H1 to do that for you.)
        
           | flohofwoe wrote:
           | All that person had to do is just read the frigging code and
           | check if the strcpy() can indeed lead to a memory corruption
           | problem (and ideally create a reproducer) instead of wasting
           | the curl maintainer's time with AI-generated bullshit.
           | 
           | In this case it's quite obvious that it's an AI generating
           | the bullshit, but we really need a mandatory disclaimer that
           | something was generated by an AI so that a human can
           | immediately break off any interaction instead of wasting
           | time.
        
         | arp242 wrote:
         | Yeah, the selfishness is what pisses me off as well, but also
         | just the sheer pointlessness of it. After the first 2 messages
         | or so it's pretty clear that this is going nowhere fast and
         | that continuing this is pointless. But they go on anyway.
         | Double wank and shit chips.
        
         | richbell wrote:
         | What's worse, if a person polluting a valuable system with
         | nonsense is knowingly malicious or completely clueless?
         | 
         | To me, this is the evolution of script kiddies and beg
         | bounties.
         | 
         | https://www.troyhunt.com/beg-bounties/
        
         | hypeatei wrote:
         | It's so lazy and I (probably most here) can spot the AI writing
         | style instantly. They continue to give nonsense answers and
         | waste time of open source maintainers.
        
           | the_af wrote:
           | Something about the excessive politeness and constant
           | apologizing and clarifying gives it away, right?
           | 
           | Just wait until people use LLMs with rude, impatient styles
           | and broken English. Maybe an LLM that goes into flamewar
           | tangents, maybe makes unrelated racist remarks, etc. Then we
           | will have truly reached terminal confusion.
        
             | dexwiz wrote:
             | What makes you think there aren't people out there running
             | models without the corporate safety and alignment layer?
             | For the average person, this is a big ask, but not for a
             | corporate or nation state actor.
        
               | fnordpiglet wrote:
               | It's not that big a task as all that. There are a lot of
               | unaligned models available, and user interfaces that
               | aren't that hard to use.
               | 
               | https://github.com/henk717/KoboldAI
        
               | dexwiz wrote:
               | Anything that requires reading a github page is a big ask
               | for an "average person." Maybe not for you or me, but we
               | are in a bubble here.
        
             | hypeatei wrote:
             | Yes it's like corporate speak and very long winded. Also
             | the way it outputs headings and lists is very identifiable.
        
             | CoastalCoder wrote:
             | > Something about the excessive politeness and constant
             | apologizing and clarifying gives it away, right?
             | 
             | That's part of it for sure. Somehow it manages to be
             | obsequious, patronizing, corporate, disingenuous,
             | corporate, useless, and passive-aggressive, all at the same
             | time.
        
         | armchairhacker wrote:
         | I don't like how the person who responded was very friendly and
         | actually looked at the issue. It seemed like he was being taken
         | advantage of.
         | 
         | More importantly, I don't want these kinds of reports to
         | discourage friendly, investigative responses. Open source
         | already has a problem, where many newcomers get discouraged by
         | curt responses and their issues not really getting investigated
         | or addressed. Sometimes the responders come off as rude,
         | because they see so many low-effort PRs and issues and feature
         | requests, and have very limited time. But a lot of "low-effort,
         | low-quality" stuff is just submitted by people who are trying
         | to join OSdev, so they _deserve_ friendly responses and actual
         | investigation like this responder did.
         | 
         | This stuff just makes maintainers' lives harder and increases
         | the chance that newcomers get unreasonably-harsh responses,
         | discouraging them from making future contributions (which may
         | eventually become useful).
         | 
         | Ironically this is even a problem in HackerOne: I've read
         | multiple blog posts where someone submit a CVE to a big
         | company, and the company responded "this isn't a real problem"
         | and just left it unaddressed (sometimes leading to the public
         | disclosure in the blog post).
        
         | rich_sasha wrote:
         | > I'm trying to put my finger on why this pisses me off so much
         | 
         | What I find frustrating when reading LLM output is that the eye
         | glides over it easily, as it all has the right "texture" of
         | text. But after reading a paragraph, you realize there is no
         | content! And you have to squint hard looking for it, and you
         | can't find it. It's exhausting.
         | 
         | And here, the person at the sharp end is doing a valuable,
         | unpaid public service, which is adding insult to injury...
        
           | serf wrote:
           | feels like it'll start an arms race with readers employing
           | LLMs to create condensed/sparse summaries of things.
           | 
           | I guess the capability of the specific LLMs will dictate
           | whether or not this is a net loss w.r.t. human communication
           | in general.
        
           | godelski wrote:
           | > What I find frustrating when reading LLM output is that the
           | eye glides over it easily, as it all has the right "texture"
           | of text. But after reading a paragraph, you realize there is
           | no content! And you have to squint hard looking for it, and
           | you can't find it. It's exhausting.
           | 
           | I'd just like to say that this is a really elegant way of
           | explaining this concept. I'm going to steal it ;)
           | 
           | I think this is also why there's a lot of miscommunication
           | about generative models capabilities. I'm focused on image
           | synthesis and then thing I notice is that these look amazing
           | at first glance. Incredible when scrolling through Twitter,
           | Reddit, or whatever. But the longer you look the weirder they
           | tend to get. Not that this always happens, but enough.
           | 
           | I just wish we could talk about ML as if there weren't two
           | camps: utter and useless bullshit vs AGI is coming sooner
           | than an Elon promise of self-driving. It's neither of those
           | things and I think we can't talk about what it really is
           | because we want to believe one of the two extremes.
        
         | rdtsc wrote:
         | > I'm trying to put my finger on why this pisses me off so
         | much.
         | 
         | There is also the disappointment and embarrassment I feel for
         | the the other members of the programming community. That sounds
         | silly and irrational, I know, but it plays into it somehow.
         | Some languages probably have a convenient term precisely
         | describing that feeling in one word.
        
       | unglaublich wrote:
       | The most worrying is that a few cents of LLM cost wasted a lot of
       | expensive, significant engineering time. Imagine the amount of
       | effort that we need to put into defusing all the bogus info
       | generated right now. A bit like Brandolini's law.
        
         | rurp wrote:
         | Yup, LLMs have the potential to ruin huge swaths of the
         | internet, and I'm not sure it's a solvable problem. There are
         | tells with the current models, but future models will be
         | different and better. Detection and blocking could become an
         | arms race that ends up being untenable to keep up with for many
         | productive people and platforms.
        
       | aftbit wrote:
       | This is an especially weird place to complain about length bounds
       | checking, as no user-provided data is used here, and all the
       | sizes are static at compile time. curl is putting a
       | base64-encoded 16 byte random string (which turns into 25 ASCII
       | bytes plus the null terminator \0) into a static 40 byte buffer.
       | 
       | https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/1d8e8c9ad1ff3351386422535f...
       | 
       | Also, just because I'm curious... can anyone who groks C better
       | than me explain why they're using this `keyval` local variable in
       | the first place? Why not just set `heads[3].val = randstr` then
       | `free()` it after the header data is processed? And why is
       | `keyval` 40 bytes instead of 26 or 32?
        
         | tom_ wrote:
         | It's presumably to reduce the number of places where you might
         | need to call free, and then fail to do so?
         | 
         | (This might already be happening in line 580? Though in
         | practice perhaps that case never occurs.)
        
           | hnarn wrote:
           | How to get your open source project peer reviewed: post an
           | LLM bug report, post it to HN and scour the comments for
           | people reviewing your code ;-)
        
         | stefan_ wrote:
         | At that point you can just ditch both randstr and keyval
         | entirely and encode directly into &heads[3].val since it
         | allocates anyway. You still have to pass in a useless randlen
         | because it will otherwise crash, oh well, the beauty of C
         | "output" parameters.
         | 
         | This "copy from heap into stack variable" dance doesn't save on
         | cleanups either since there is only one unconditional return
         | after the encode.
         | 
         | (But I can see how you arrive at this current code if you "laid
         | out" your needed variables at the top and then realized later
         | Curl_base64_encode always allocates)
        
       | rdtsc wrote:
       | If it wasn't the frustration and time wasted it would be funny
       | how dineshsec / dinesh_b is teaching Daniel how to use strncpy.
       | First, they use some random handle to tag Daniel, then invent
       | non-existing code as the "The code in question is:" snippet.
        
         | juujian wrote:
         | This is a classic problem with LLM (misuse). The users wants to
         | analyze something, but it's too long, so they chop it up into
         | multiple requests. And by the time they get to the point, the
         | original code snipped is long out the window and the model
         | confidently spews up something that was never there (though it
         | looks plausible).
        
           | rdtsc wrote:
           | It seems at some point a human (Dinesh B?) had reviewed and
           | posted it. So, it's fine to use an LLM to summarize and
           | analyze some piece of code, but then after Daniel responded
           | that the analysis was junk, they persist at it, assuming
           | Daniel was wrong, and just re-prompted LLM to paraphrase the
           | crap again.
           | 
           | Let's assume this person is doing it for clout, it's
           | surprising they don't see how this behavior would hurt their
           | own reputation.
        
       | yashap wrote:
       | "Beg bounty" ppl have already made it a major pain in the ass to
       | have a bug bounty program, even when they were real people who
       | had to take the time to craft "bug reports" about basically
       | nothing. But if you mix in LLMs, generating bogus reports at
       | essentially no cost, this could get really out of control. Could
       | be the end of bug bounty programs IMO.
       | 
       | Or, maybe we just need to lock them down more? Like you need to
       | apply to become part of the bug bounty program, which involves
       | some sort of cheap-to-perform check that you're a real person and
       | actual security researcher, looking to find real, impactful
       | security bugs. And only ppl admitted into the program can submit
       | bugs and collect financial rewards.
        
         | masklinn wrote:
         | There are platforms which do that yeah, they have "pools" of
         | known researchers with tracked statuses, and you can tune how
         | open your program is.
         | 
         | Some also have triage staff, but depending how typical your
         | project is that can be very hit or miss.
        
           | yashap wrote:
           | Yeah, a decently locked down program seems like a good idea!
           | At the startups I've worked at, the programs have been very
           | open (basically "email us"), and it does lead to a fair bit
           | of beg bounty spam, even without LLMs in the mix.
        
         | donmcronald wrote:
         | Maybe have a submission fee? I don't know if that helps, but it
         | would be a deterrent for massive amounts of machine generated
         | garbage.
         | 
         | The worst case in my opinion is massive amounts of AI garbage
         | being submitted which will require equally bad AI filtering to
         | "solve" the problem with the result being an overall reduction
         | on quality for everyone trying to participate in good faith.
        
       | dexwiz wrote:
       | Certainly! Let me elaborate on the concerns raised by the triager
       | 
       | This is typical LLM speak, it sounds like a robot butler. I don't
       | think I have encountered a single person who writes likes this.
       | But it's also got a weird 3rd person reference that indicates
       | there is another party that is promoting for a response.
       | 
       | I am okay with LLMs having a specific voice that makes them
       | identifiable. My worry is that people will start talking like
       | LLMs instead of LLMs sounding like people.
        
         | nicklecompte wrote:
         | Daniel Stenberg[1] brought up a good point: the complexity here
         | is that curl is used all over the world, and there's certainly
         | nothing wrong with a non-English speaker using an LLM to help
         | write their bug report. So the superficial giveaways that the
         | English text is LLM-generated doesn't necessarily mean the
         | report's _content_ was LLM-generated.
         | 
         | [1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-
         | stands-f...
        
           | ericbarrett wrote:
           | He makes a great point, but I think writing in an authentic,
           | un-augmented voice will very quickly become the only way to
           | be noticed. Which is a shame for otherwise benign uses of the
           | tool.
        
           | fnordpiglet wrote:
           | That's absolutely fair IMO, but they aren't use it right if
           | that's what's happening. LLMs can do a decent job
           | translating, and they should have written their bug report in
           | their native language and asked for a translation. Then
           | translated responses, wrote their response, and translated
           | back
           | 
           | This appears to be "write a bug report about X" then "write a
           | response to triager for their reply Y" without
           | intermediating, let alone factually checking the output.
           | 
           | That use doesn't fall prey to LLM voice because the
           | translation is of your text and phrasing.
           | 
           | God bless people who use LLMs to improve their life,
           | translate, etc. But using them to think isn't acceptable.
        
           | skepticATX wrote:
           | > I do however suspect that if you just add an ever so tiny
           | (intelligent) human check to the mix, the use and outcome of
           | any such tools will become so much better. I suspect that
           | will be true for a long time into the future as well.
           | 
           | I love this paragraph. I think that generative AI companies,
           | especially OpenAI, have completely dropped the ball when it
           | comes to their marketing.
           | 
           | The narrative (that these companies encourage and often times
           | are responsible for) is that AI is intelligent and will be a
           | replacement for humans in the near future. So is it really a
           | surprise when people do things like this?
           | 
           | LLMs don't shine as independent agents. They shine when they
           | augment our skills. Microsoft has the right idea by calling
           | everything "copilot", but unfortunately OpenAI drives the
           | narrative, not Microsoft.
        
             | lesuorac wrote:
             | It's also a better company strategy to be an augment vs
             | replacement. Like, advertise that you can get twice as much
             | done not that you can get the same amount done with half
             | the effort.
             | 
             | If somebody spends 10M on Labor then at best you can change
             | 10M to replace their labor costs. Lets say its 1,000
             | people.
             | 
             | If you instead argue that those people are now 2x as
             | efficient you can sell the company of the idea of paying
             | for 2,000 seats when their company grows.
        
             | godelski wrote:
             | I've been using a chocolate factory analogy around this.
             | These companies are making damn fine chocolate, without a
             | doubt. Maybe even some of the best chocolate in the world.
             | But they got tired of selling just chocolate and so started
             | marketing their chocolate as cures for cancer, doctors,
             | farmers, and all sorts of things that aren't... well...
             | chocolate. Some people are responding by saying that the
             | chocolate tastes like shit and others are true believers
             | trying to justify the fact that they like the chocolate by
             | defending the outrageous claims. But at the end of the day,
             | it's just chocolate and it is okay to like it even if the
             | claims don't hold up. So can't we just enjoy our chocolate
             | without all the craziness? This seems to be a harder ask
             | than I've expected.
        
         | confused_boner wrote:
         | I use the word 'Certainly' a lot...not the rest of the stuff
         | though. Feeling a bit self conscious about that now...
        
           | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
           | If the LLM's are emulating you (and others) in every other
           | sentence, perhaps you should be getting royalties or
           | something.
           | 
           | That would be a bit silly in this particular case, but in
           | general we ought to celebrate cases where somebody has
           | authentically done something that millions of others find it
           | useful to copy.
        
           | paulddraper wrote:
           | In writing?
        
             | dodslaser wrote:
             | Certainly!
        
           | dexwiz wrote:
           | The specific word choice isn't the key. The start of
           | responses to most requests end up looking like:
           | Interjection! Polite confirmation or denial of request.
           | Apologize for prior mistakes if prompt included correction to
           | prior output.
           | 
           | Its all very formulaic for something that is supposed to be
           | generative. Its like they all spend some time training at
           | Ditchley Park.
        
         | masklinn wrote:
         | Definitely a massive red flag, however assuming it's an actual
         | human forwarding that garbage they could just have removed that
         | line. The content remains suspicious, but the flags are harder
         | to notice.
        
           | godelski wrote:
           | I think this is easier said than done. If you only have a
           | basic understanding of a language then can you really
           | accurately accomplish this? Sounding natural/native is a
           | challenge that even many speakers never obtain despite being
           | able to be understandable. So even the (arguably poor)
           | argument of "just learn English" isn't that great. I'd also
           | say that that argument is poor because you don't need to know
           | any specific language to contribute. Isn't it actually a good
           | thing that we can bridge these gaps and allow more people to
           | contribute? Certainly we should reduce noise but I think this
           | is far easier said than done (and some noise is even helpful
           | at times).
           | 
           | I just don't think there are easy answers, no matter how much
           | we want there to be. We should be careful to not lose nuance
           | to our desires.
        
         | notahacker wrote:
         | I hope someone, somewhere is writing dystopian scifi where our
         | robot overlords are constantly apologising and saying things
         | like "Ultimately, your decision on whether to surrender will
         | depend on your specific needs and preferences"
        
         | jstarfish wrote:
         | > it sounds like a robot butler. I don't think I have
         | encountered a single person who writes likes this
         | 
         | English is taught to colonial servant-class British spec
         | ("butlerian") in India.
         | 
         | I assume you've never had to deal with Microsoft enterprise
         | tech support if you haven't encountered it before now.
        
       | ranting-moth wrote:
       | Welcome to the early days of the internet post AI.
        
       | OhMeadhbh wrote:
       | I think this is a person imitating an LLM. For instance, it seems
       | to "understand" that 15 is greater than 10. I've yet to find an
       | LLM that can internalize that.
        
         | pests wrote:
         | What? I have had no issues ever comparing numbers in an LLM
         | context.
         | 
         | > Me: you have the numbers 3, 15, 10, and 72. can you put them
         | in order, from least to greatest?
         | 
         | > GPT3.5Turbo: Sure! The numbers in order from least to
         | greatest are: 3, 10, 15, 72.
         | 
         | > Me: now add 15, 13, 0, 293, and 1023 to the list
         | 
         | > GPT3.5Turbo: If you add 15, 13, 0, 293, and 1023 to the list
         | of numbers we had before (3, 15, 10, and 72), the resulting
         | list would be: 0, 3, 10, 13, 15, 15, 72, 293, 1023
         | 
         | Seems to handle duplicates, larger factors having a lesser
         | leading digit, and making changes to it.
         | 
         | > Me: now add -5 and 5
         | 
         | > GPT3.5Turbo: Adding -5 and 5 to the previous list of numbers
         | in order, we have: -5, 0, 3, 5, 10, 13, 15, 15, 72, 293, 1023
         | 
         | Negatives are fine too.
        
           | OhMeadhbh wrote:
           | Hmm... that's not been my experience. But I wasn't using
           | GPT3.5Turbo.
        
             | dexwiz wrote:
             | ChatGPT does seem to have gotten better at math. It was
             | pretty garbage at it about a year ago, and really easy to
             | trick it so you could get some sweet "haha, LLM dumb
             | content."                 Choose a random number between
             | 100 and 200, divide it by 5, multiple it by the original
             | number, add 10, and then multiple by pi. What is the final
             | number?            ChatGPT3.5: Certainly, let's choose a
             | random number between 100 and 200. Let's say the randomly
             | chosen number is 150:            Chosen number: 150
             | 150 / 5 = 30       30 \* 150 = 4500       4500 + 10 = 4510
             | 4510 \* p [?] 14171.03 (rounded to 2 decimal places)
             | So, the final number is approximately 14171.03 when using
             | the randomly chosen number of 150. If you were to choose a
             | different random number within the specified range, you
             | would get a different result.            ChatGPT4:
             | analyzing       import random       import math
             | # Choose a random number between 100 and 200
             | random_number = random.randint(100, 200)            #
             | Perform the calculations       result = (((random_number /
             | 5) \* random_number) + 10) \*        math.pi       result,
             | random_number       Result       (10487.264596213448, 129)
             | The final number, after choosing 129 as the random number
             | between 100 and 200, is approximately 10487.26.
             | 
             | If you ask ChatGPT 4 for a multiple step equation it
             | appears to first translate the equation into python, run
             | the script, and then give you the output.
        
       | scopeh wrote:
       | LLMs being LLMs.
       | 
       | Reading this makes me a feel a little more secure in my job.
       | 
       | They have a long way to go.
        
       | airstrike wrote:
       | Why are we calling the subject "LLM" as if it had agency?
       | Clickbaity title
        
         | richbell wrote:
         | I wouldn't consider it clickbait any more than "pedestrian
         | struck by vehcile." It's implied that LLMs are tools.
        
           | airstrike wrote:
           | More like "gun kills person"...
           | 
           | "Passenger struck by vehicle" is in the passive voice, which
           | makes it very different. I imagine you agree "vehicle strikes
           | passenger" would sound very strange, would it not?
        
       | layer8 wrote:
       | I believe they have a bit of a point, because it isn't locally
       | obvious that _randlen_ will match the zero-terminated length of
       | _randstr_ , at
       | https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/1d8e8c9ad1ff3351386422535f....
       | It depends on the exact behavior and interface contract of the
       | external function _Curl_base64_encode()_. A static analyzer might
       | rightfully flag this. The LLM does a bad job of explaining this
       | though.
        
       | esozbek wrote:
       | I wonder if or when someone will also open a PR to "fix" this, at
       | least for the lulzs
        
       | lsy wrote:
       | It's kind of fascinating that we've taken the lowest-bandwidth
       | way of proving agency and effort - writing - and made it
       | tremendously more labor-intensive to deduce whether any agency or
       | effort were involved at all. I think the knock-on effects are
       | probably huge - not only are the reporter and the maintainer both
       | wasting time here that could be better spent on something useful,
       | but the whole bug-bounty-crowdsourced-CVE process is now
       | compromised by a lower signal-to-noise ratio and the probable
       | outcome of raising barriers to submission as a means of dealing
       | with the spam, meaning fewer bugs discovered and fixed, more
       | security vulnerabilities, and everything that results from that.
       | 
       | The same dynamic is at play in other sectors, meaning we find
       | ourselves increasingly unable to assign any trust to product
       | reviews, court filings, recipes, how-to guides, medical advice,
       | and so forth. One of the promises of the internet was the rapid
       | expansion of content through democratization of publishing, but I
       | think we're witnessing the gutting of any benefit that had left.
        
       | leejo wrote:
       | Spurious CVEs have been around for a long time, it seems that
       | people feeding open source codebases into LLMs and asking it to
       | point out potential issues is just the next step in that
       | approach.
       | 
       | LLMs don't understand the code they're being fed, and it seems
       | the people feeding the LLMs don't understand it either...
        
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