If you run your Hegel tests in Antithesis, you get this for free (along with various sorts of “non-local” assertions, perfect reproducibility even for concurrent or distributed code, etc.).
But yeah, not hard to hack together basic coverage guidance outside Antithesis. That works well for large classes of programs, just not a majority of them.
If I had been wearing my fiendish CEO hat at the time, I might have even said something like: "somebody pointing this out will be a great way to jumpstart discussion in the comments."
One of the evilest tricks in marketing to developers is to ensure your post contains one small inaccuracy so somebody gets nerdsniped... not that I have ever done that.
A sort of broadening of Cunningham's Law (the fastest way to get an answer online is not by posting the question, but by posting the wrong answer—very true in my experience). If there's no issue of fact at hand, then you end up getting some engagement about the intentional malapropism/misattribution/mistake/whatever and then the forum rules tend to herd participants back to discussing the matter at hand: your company.
Trump did this a lot with the legacy media in his first term. He would make inaccurate statements to the media on the topic he wanted to be in the spotlight, and the media would jump to "fact check" him. Guess what, now everyone is talking about illegal immigration, tariffs, or whatever subject Trump thought was to their advantage.
People always need to be reminded, though. It seems to be in human nature to fear bad publicity, and the people who fear it less end up with disproportionate power as a result.
Glad you enjoyed the talk! Making Bombadil able to take advantage of the intelligence in the Antithesis platform is definitely a goal, but we wanted to get a great open source tool into peoples’ hands ASAP first.
Antithesis | Distributed Systems Breaker Extraordinaire | Full-time | SF or London or DC
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Have you always wanted to channel your inner Kyle Kingsbury? We are looking to hire somebody with a deep understanding of distributed systems who can bring open source or customer software under test in our platform and find fun issues in it.
Preferred locations: SF, London, DC. Remote is a possibility for this role if you're really good (though be aware that we're a very in-person company culturally speaking, so it might be annoying for you).
To apply: email 'will' at our company domain with a description of something interesting that you've worked on.
I am one of the people who was on the panel. As always, it's a very lossy process when a journalist is summarizing another journalist summarizing a 90 minute discussion. Happy to expand in the comments here on any of the issues that got brought up.
You stated that “the conversation about where the technology is going and what we’re going to do with it is happening among people who do not care … what any Christian church has to say on the topic.”
As a Catholic myself, I wonder what the church should say/do with regards to technology like this and would like to know where you stand on it. Personally I think that further public discussions need to be held on the morality of potential implementations of AI (I’m thinking ahead by decades once LLMs can really make a dent in the workforce) but question the effectiveness of the Church participating in discussions like that.
It’s not quite a fair comparison, since an RL agent is trying to learn a policy that wins fair and square, while a fuzzer is able to take back moves. But if you’re working in a domain (like anything that can be simulated) where “time travel” is possible, you’d have to be crazy not to use it!
The longer you run it, the cleaner the run gets. But Metroid is a very compute-intensive game to fuzz, and we were already nearing the limits of what BigQuery could do for us with that run.
Yes, this is a really fun idea and something that we want to do. Though these days we’re setting our sights higher than Nintendo…
A funny story though: a regular conference gimmick we have is “Man vs. Machine” where we have attendees race our fuzzer to the end of Mario level 1-1. We did this at the final year of Strange Loop, and the fuzzer was winning handily until not one, not two, but three different professional speedrunners walked by and destroyed us.
This seems like a cool company and I don't want to nitpick too much, but gamers have no respect for history:
Castlevania... [so] called because it is a Metroidvania game set in a Castle.
Ouch - this is precisely backwards. Metroidvanias are named after Metroid and Castlevania because those series practically defined the genre.
Also a bit frustrating because the first Castlevania itself isn't actually a metroidvania, it's a more conventional action-platformer. Castlevania II has non-linear exploration, lots of items to collect, and puzzle-solving, all like Metroid. So it's not too surprising Antithesis had to do a lot of work for adapting their system to Metroid - but I wonder if this work means it now can handle Castlevania II without much extra development.
If you run your Hegel tests in Antithesis, you get this for free (along with various sorts of “non-local” assertions, perfect reproducibility even for concurrent or distributed code, etc.).
But yeah, not hard to hack together basic coverage guidance outside Antithesis. That works well for large classes of programs, just not a majority of them.
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