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   ShadSterling (shadsterling@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Jan-2025 03:27:23 JST ShadSterling

   in reply to

   @inthehands the basic problem with that kind of “encrypted” “email” is that it’s only one of those at a time; it’s either encrypted end-to-end and delivered some other way, or it’s encrypted per-hop and delivered as email. None of those services do both at once. It should be possible to do both at once using GPG or S/MIME, but for that to actually work every provider would have to handle it well, and AKAIK none do.

   It still baffles me that banks haven’t been pushing this

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   RationalizedInsanity (rationalizedinsanity@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Dec-2024 00:08:49 JST RationalizedInsanity

   I have a lot of insight as to what it's like to be homeless in this country because I was for four years due to mental health issues, addiction as a result, as well as from an accident where I nearly died.

   It's absolute hell, and the resources are pathetic. "Just get a job!" Many say; being homeless is harder than any job you will EVER fucking do.

   It's about to get worse because of Trump's plans for support systems the poor need.

   We should be ashamed.

   #USPolitics #Election2024 #fml

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   David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) (david_chisnall@infosec.exchange)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 20:56:20 JST David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

   I finally turned off GitHub Copilot yesterday. I’ve been using it for about a year on the ‘free for open-source maintainers’ tier. I was skeptical but didn’t want to dismiss it without a fair trial.

   It has cost me more time than it has saved. It lets me type faster, which has been useful when writing tests where I’m testing a variety of permutations of an API to check error handling for all of the conditions.

   I can recall three places where it has introduced bugs that took me more time to to debug than the total time saving:

   The first was something that initially impressed me. I pasted the prose description of how to communicate with an Ethernet MAC into a comment and then wrote some method prototypes. It autocompleted the bodies. All very plausible looking. Only it managed to flip a bit in the MDIO read and write register commands. MDIO is basically a multiplexing system. You have two device registers exposed, one sets the command (read or write a specific internal register) and the other is the value. It got the read and write the wrong way around, so when I thought I was writing a value, I was actually reading. When I thought I was reading, I was actually seeing the value in the last register I thought I had written. It took two of us over a day to debug this. The fix was simple, but the bug was in the middle of correct-looking code. If I’d manually transcribed the command from the data sheet, I would not have got this wrong because I’d have triple checked it.

   Another case it had inverted the condition in an if statement inside an error-handling path. The error handling was a rare case and was asymmetric. Hitting the if case when you wanted the else case was okay but the converse was not. Lots of debugging. I learned from this to read the generated code more carefully, but that increased cognitive load and eliminated most of the benefit. Typing code is not the bottleneck and if I have to think about what I want and then read carefully to check it really is what I want, I am slower.

   Most recently, I was writing a simple binary search and insertion-deletion operations for a sorted array. I assumed that this was something that had hundreds of examples in the training data and so would be fine. It had all sorts of corner-case bugs. I eventually gave up fixing them and rewrote the code from scratch.

   Last week I did some work on a remote machine where I hadn’t set up Copilot and I felt much more productive. Autocomplete was either correct or not present, so I was spending more time thinking about what to write. I don’t entirely trust this kind of subjective judgement, but it was a data point. Around the same time I wrote some code without clangd set up and that really hurt. It turns out I really rely on AST-aware completion to explore APIs. I had to look up more things in the documentation. Copilot was never good for this because it would just bullshit APIs, so something showing up in autocomplete didn’t mean it was real. This would be improved by using a feedback system to require autocomplete outputs to type check, but then they would take much longer to create (probably at least a 10x increase in LLM compute time) and wouldn’t complete fragments, so I don’t see a good path to being able to do this without tight coupling to the LSP server and possibly not even then.

   Yesterday I was writing bits of the CHERIoT Programmers’ Guide and it kept autocompleting text in a different writing style, some of which was obviously plagiarised (when I’m describing precisely how to implement a specific, and not very common, lock type with a futex and the autocomplete is a paragraph of text with a lot of detail, I’m confident you don’t have more than one or two examples of that in the training set). It was distracting and annoying. I wrote much faster after turning it off.

   So, after giving it a fair try, I have concluded that it is both a net decrease in productivity and probably an increase in legal liability.

   Discussions I am not interested in having:

   • You are holding it wrong. Using Copilot with this magic config setting / prompt tweak makes it better. At its absolute best, it was a small productivity increase, if it needs more effort to use, that will be offset.
   • This other LLM is much better. I don’t care. The costs of the bullshitting far outweighed the benefits when it worked, to be better it would have to not bullshit, and that’s not something LLMs can do.
   • It’s great for boilerplate! No. APIs that require every user to write the same code are broken. Fix them, don’t fill the world with more code using them that will need fixing when the APIs change.
   • Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code. Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

   The one place Copilot was vaguely useful was hinting at missing abstractions (if it can autocomplete big chunks then my APIs required too much boilerplate and needed better abstractions). The place I thought it might be useful was spotting inconsistent API names and parameter orders but it was actually very bad at this (presumably because of the way it tokenises identifiers?). With a load of examples with consistent names, it would suggest things that didn't match the convention. After using three APIs that all passed the same parameters in the same order, it would suggest flipping the order for the fourth.

   #GitHubCopilot #CHERIoT

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   Burn This Dyspho Out 🏳️‍⚧️ (testoceratops@disabled.social)'s status on Friday, 25-Oct-2024 15:13:23 JST Burn This Dyspho Out 🏳️‍⚧️

   Have a good day, friends! Please, be kind to yourself.

   If you have 30% of your usual spoons and use them all, you did 100% of what you could do.

   It's also ok to do nothing, or not much. Please, take care. Don't let capitalism ruin your health, if you can avoid it. Your productivity doesn't define you.

   Each of you* has a special place in my heart, and I love you very much.

   *Doesn't apply to nazis, terfs, transmeds, ableists, pro-genocide and all the people oppressing the others in any way.

5. Embed this notice
   :trebuchet: Kale :trebuchet: (darkestkale@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 18:22:53 JST :trebuchet: Kale :trebuchet:

   in reply to

   'We don't know what a free market is!'

   Yeah, we fucking do.

   It's called all of history leading up till we started saying 'hey, fuckface, don't put chalk in flour' and actually meant it.

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   Mathaetaes (mathaetaes@infosec.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 25-Sep-2024 01:15:18 JST Mathaetaes

   @GossiTheDog I get that question a ton too, and the best answer I have is that I was the one willing to do the stuff nobody else wanted to do.

   It doesn’t work anymore because everyone wants to be a “cybersecurity” professional, mostly because someone told them we get paid a ton.

   I’d love to meet that someone and see where they’re getting their info, because from what I can see, we get paid the same as senior devs to do stuff that makes everyone’s job harder, and if we do it right nothing happens.