Last week, I stumbled upon a reddit post announcing that the author, Charles Marohn, was giving a free talk near my town the next morning. Marohn is the author of Strong Towns, one of my favorite books of the last few years. So, my wife and I attended the talk and enjoyed it.

The talk is based on ideas from Marohn’s new book, Escaping the Housing Trap, which I haven’t read yet, so these notes are from memory.

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.