the procrastinator, the poltergeist and the saboteur

Three miscellaneous for the weekend:

the procrastinator

Did you know Felix Mendelssohn composed music for Shakespeare’s comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not once, but twice? At the tender age of 17, he crafted the overture (Op. 21, 1826). Later in his career, in 1842—just five years before his demise—he completed a full suite of incidental music (Op. 61) for the play’s production.

Btw, the beloved Wedding March we all know is from this very suite!

the poltergeist

YuanArithmetic (小猿口算) is an educational mobile app designed to assist primary and middle school students with introductory level arithmetic. It features an ‘online competition’ mode where users can engage in real-time, one-on-one math battles.

Interestingly, college students—especially CS majors—have also taken a liking to this platform. They’ve injected a bit of chaos into what was a straightforward arithmetic challenge, crafting advanced algorithms and employing a variety of sophisticated web and OS automation tools to gain an edge—or outright cheat.

What started as a simple educational tool has now turned into a playground for competitive programming across prestigious universities…

In response, YuanArithmetic has ramped up its web security measures, refined its matching algorithms, and enhanced its age-verification processes. The app now cleverly nudges our ‘over-aged’ friends to be gracious to their younger competitors and even throws calculus problems their way if suspicious activity is detected.

the saboteur

An intern at ByteDance, resentful over perceived unfair resource distribution within the company, launched a covert operation to disrupt the training of machine learning models. This technical team experienced significant setbacks due to the intern’s malicious actions, which were aimed directly at the core of their model training tasks.

The full account of these events was documented on GitHub (quite geeky indeed—you can check it out here). The intern’s tactics included altering PyTorch source code, randomly terminating multiple machine learning experiments, and injecting malicious code that interfered continuously based on colleagues’ troubleshooting efforts.

Btw, the intern himself (TianKeyu, according to FengHuang Net’s exclusive news report) has pretty impressive publication history and educational background.

ByteDance recently addressed these allegations in a statement clarifying several exaggerations and inaccuracies reported by the media:

(translation)

• The intern did interfere with the tech team’s research projects, but this did not affect any commercial projects or online operations, nor did it involve ByteDance’s major models.
• Claims that the sabotage involved over 8000 processing units and caused losses of millions of dollars were significantly overstated.
• The intern had been working solely within a commercial technology team, not the AI Lab as some reports suggested.

The intern was dismissed in August, and ByteDance has informed both the industry alliance and the intern’s academic institution about the misconduct.

reference

FengHuang Net tech column’s reports: https://www.163.com/dy/article/JERPF6KC0511CP87.html#post_comment_area and https://tech.ifeng.com/c/8doCpKRh09U

Wiki for Mendelssohn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midsummer_Night%27s_Dream_(Mendelssohn)