A few weeks ago, NVIDIA released Nemotron, a large language model that they derived from Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B.

NVIDIA claimed at release that Nemotron outperformed GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on certain benchmarks. That was exciting news, as my experience with self-hostable AI models is that they trail commercial models by about a year in terms of accuracy and quality.

I decided to test out Nemotron with a few simple coding tasks to see how it compared to commercial models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

This is the second half of a post about using Nix to automate a fuzz testing workflow.

At this point, I can run honggfuzz against pdftotext, but it takes a bit of manual effort to get things started. I promised in part one that I’d get all of the installation and fuzzing down to a single command.

Downloading tricky PDFs

In my ad-hoc fuzzing, I manually downloaded a PDF from the IRS website. I’ll start by automating that step.

Fuzz testing is a technique for automatically uncovering bugs in software. The problem is that it’s a pain to set up. Read any fuzz testing tutorial, and the first task is an hour of building tools from source and chasing down dependencies upon dependencies.

I recently found that Nix eliminates a lot of the gruntwork from fuzz testing. I created a Nix configuration that kicks off a fuzz testing workflow with a single command. The only dependencies are Nix and git.

Last week, I saw an interesting article on the /r/legaladvice subreddit. An e-commerce business owner was complaining that a customer was suing because the merchant had been sending the customer promotional emails for years that the customer never agreed to. The author deleted the post a few days later, but I found a copy of the text.

The merchant was indignant and felt like it was a shakedown, but I was 100% on the customer’s side. The merchant is in the wrong for spamming their customers with promotional emails they never requested, and so the merchant should suffer financial repercussions.

Highlights

• I’m finding it surprisingly difficult not to work.
• Sleep is getting a little better.
• I used Nix to create a slick and reusable fuzz testing workflow.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Enjoy family time

• Result: Spent lots of time with my wife and our newborn son and had frequent visits with friends and family.
• Grade: A

I’ll be okay if I don’t work for a bit

I never thought of myself as someone who needs to work all the time, but I’m finding it difficult to take time off.