ChatGPT - How Long Till They Realize I’m a Robot?

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I tried it first on December 2nd... ...and slowly the meaning of it started to sink in. It's January 1st and as the new year begins, my future has never felt so hazy. It helps me write code. At my new company I'm writing golang, which is new for me, and one day on a whim I think "hmmm maybe ChatGPT will give me some ideas about the library I need to use." Lo-and-behold it knew the library. It wrote example code. It explained each section in just enough detail. I'm excited....It assists my users. I got a question about Dockerfiles in my teams oncall channel. "Hmmm I don't know the answer to this either"....ChatGPT did. It knew the commands to run. It knew details of how it worked. It explained it better and faster than I could have. Now I'm nervous....It writes my code for me. Now I'm hearing how great Github Copilot is - and it's built by OpenAI too...ok I guess I should give it a shot. I install it, and within minutes it'
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Paxos vs. Blockchain: A User's Perspective

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A robust distributed system can tolerate partial failures in the system - that means that the system should continue to work as expected even if parts of it are failing.  There are 3 main 'partial failures' that the field of Distributed Systems tries to solve for:

1.) Out-of-sync system clocks
2.) Process pauses
3.) RPC requests with no response

Paxos is one algorithm that tries to solve for these by using consensus among nodes to decide on the sequence and order of events, but system administrators must tune the timeout parameter to find the best middle ground between waiting too long for a node (one computer in the network of systems) and not waiting long enough.

The blockchain algorithm gets around the idea of time entirely by deciding on an order of events once, and then getting as many nodes as possible to agree and persist the actual ordering itself.  Here's an excerpt straight from Satoshi's paper itself:

The solution we propose begins with a timestamp server. A timestamp server works by taking a hash of a block of items to be timestamped and widely publishing the hash, such as in a newspaper or Usenet post. The timestamp proves that the data must have existed at the time, obviously, in order to get into the hash. Each timestamp includes the previous timestamp in its hash, forming a chain, with each additional timestamp reinforcing the ones before it.

For those interested in advanced Distributed Systems concepts, learning about blockchain is a great way to expand your knowledge and play with the latest ideas in consensus.

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ChatGPT - How Long Till They Realize I’m a Robot?

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