General Development Archive

Yuxuan Shui, the developer behind the X11 compositor picom (a fork of Compton) published a blog post detailing their experiences with using GitHub Copilot for a year. I had free access to GitHub Copilot for about a year, I used it, got used to it, and slowly started to take it for granted, until one day it was taken away. I had to re-adapt to a life without Copilot, but it also gave me a chance to look back at how I used Copilot, and reflect – had Copilot actually been helpful to me? Copilot definitely feels a little bit magical when it works. It’s like it plucked code straight from my brain and put it on the screen for me to accept. Without it, I find myself getting grumpy a lot more often when I need to write boilerplate code – “Ugh, Copilot would have done it for me!”, and now I have to type it all out myself. That being said, the answer to my question above is a very definite “no, I am more productive without it”. Let me explain. Yuxuan Shui The two main reasons why Shui eventually realised Copilot was slowing them down were its unpredictability, and its slowness. It’s very difficult to understand when, exactly, Copilot will get things right, which is not a great thing to have to deal with when you’re writing code. They also found Copilot incredibly slow, with its suggestions often taking 2-3 seconds or longer to appear – much slower than the suggestions from the clangd language server they use. Of course, everybody’s situation will be different, and I have a suspicion that if you’re writing code in incredibly popular languages, say, Python or JavaScript, you’re going to get more accurate and possibly faster suggestions from Copilot. As Shui notes, it probably also doesn’t help that they’re writing an independent X11 compositor, something very few people are doing, meaning Copilot hasn’t been trained on it, which in turn means the tool probably has no clue what’s going on when Shui is writing their code. As an aside, my opinion on GitHub Copilot is clear – it’s quite possibly the largest case of copyright infringement in human history, and in its current incarnation it should not be allowed to continue to operate. As I wrote over a year ago: If Microsoft or whoever else wants to train a coding “AI” or whatever, they should either be using code they own the copyright to, get explicit permission from the rightsholders for “AI” training use (difficult for code from larger projects), or properly comply with the terms of the licenses and automatically add the terms and copyright notices during autocomplete and/or properly apply copyleft to the newly generated code. Anything else is a massive copyright violation and a direct assault on open source. Let me put it this way – the code to various versions of Windows has leaked numerous times. What if we train an “AI” on that leaked code and let everyone use it? Do you honestly think Microsoft would not sue you into the stone age? Thom Holwerda It’s curious that as far as I know, Copilot has not been trained on Microsoft’s own closed-source code, say, to Windows or Office, while at the same time the company claims Copilot is not copyright infringement or a massive open source license violation machine. If what Copilot does is truly fair use, as Microsoft claims, why won’t Microsoft use its own closed-source code for training? We all know the answer. Deeply questionable legality aside, do any of you use Copilot? Has it had any material impact on your programming work? Is its use allowed by your employer, or do you only use it for personal projects at home?

We’re all aware of Stack Overflow – it’s a place where programmers and regular users can ask technical questions, and get answers from anyone who thinks they know the answer. Stack Overflow has become so ubiquitous among programmers and developers, the concept of “I just copied the code off Stack Overflow” has become a consistent meme to indicate you don’t fully grasp how something works, but at least it works. If you’ve ever contributed answers to Stack Overflow, you might want to consider deleting them, altering them, or perhaps even go as far as request a GDPR removal if you’re in the European Union, because Stack Overflow has just announced a close partnership with “AI” company OpenAI (or, more accurately, “Open” “AI”). Stripped of marketing speak, the gist is exactly as you’d expect: OpenAI will absorb the questions and answers on Stack Overflow into its models, whether their respective authors like it or not. As much as you may want to try and delete your answers if you’re not interesting in having your work generate profit for OpenAI, deleting popular questions and answers is not possible on Stack Overflow. The other option is altering your answers to render them useless, but it seems Stack Overflow is not going to allow you to do this, either. Ben Humphreys tried to alter his highest-rated answers, and Stack Overflow just reverted them back, and proceeded to ban him from the platform. Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community. So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message. Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days. Ben Humphreys Now that they’ve made what is most likely an incredibly lucrative deal with OpenAI that’s going to net Stack Overflow’s owners boatloads of money, they obviously can’t let users delete or alter their answers to lower the monetary value of Stack Overflow’s content. Measures to prevent deletion or alteration are probably one of the clauses in the agreement between Stack Overflow and OpenAI. So there’s likely not much you can do to not have your answers sucked into OpenAI, but you should at least be aware it’s happening in case of future answers you might want to contribute.

Over 35 years ago, these problems with software portability led to the emergence of the first POSIX standard in 1988. The acronym was coined by Richard Stallman, who added “X” to the end of Portable Operating System Interface. It’s meant to provide a specification of the interface that different Unix operating systems should have in common, including programming languages and tools. It’s important to note that the interface is portable, and not the implementation. vorakl While POSIX certainly isn’t perfect, and support for it in various operating systems claiming to support POSIX even less so, there’s no denying its success. Even if the dream of 100% source code portability isn’t possible under POSIX for applications that are a little more complex than basic CLI tools, there’s enough portability that platforms like Linux, the various BSDs, macOS, and others, can share quite a bit of code. One of my favourite things about POSIX is that it shows up in the most unexpected of places. Windows, for instance, has had various options for POSIX compatibility, some of which straight from Microsoft itself, like the currently well-known Windows Subsystem for Linux, but also mostly forgotten options like the Microsoft POSIX subsystem that shipped with Windows NT until Windows 2000, or the very rudimentary POSIX compatibility in the Windows C Runtime Library and Windows Sockets API. OS/2 had POSIX compatibility as well, through EMX (Eberhard Mattes eXtender). It gave OS/2 – and MS-DOS – a POSIX API, and even provided access to native OS/2 APIs as well, and could run 32bit applications. You’d be surprised by how many more operating systems offered forms of POSIX compatibility, either out of the box or through first or third party add-ons.

Picotron is a Fantasy Workstation for making pixelart games, animations, music, demos and other curiosities. It has a toy operating system designed to be a cosy creative space, but runs on top of Windows, MacOS or Linux. Picotron apps can be made with built-in tools, and shared with other users in a special 256k png cartridge format. Picotron website Picotron is very similar to PICO-8, but more powerful and with a few additional features – it’s actually made by the same people as PICO-8. It also contains a small, ‘toy’ operating system to serve as a workspace, everything makes use of Lua, and any applications made with it can be shared using a special 256k PNG cartridge format. It’s currently in alpha, and cost $11.99, and uses the early Minecraft model of a one-time purchase for access to all future updates. The FAQ has tons more information. It looks incredibly neat. I don’t have much use for it, but I’m interested to see what people with actual skills will make with it.

AI code assistants have emerged as powerful tools that can aid in the software development life-cycle and can improve developer productivity. Unfortunately, such assistants have also been found to produce insecure code in lab environments, raising significant concerns about their usage in practice. In this paper, we conduct a user study to examine how users interact with AI code assistants to solve a variety of security related tasks. Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant wrote significantly less secure code than those without access to an assistant. Participants with access to an AI assistant were also more likely to believe they wrote secure code, suggesting that such tools may lead users to be overconfident about security flaws in their code. To better inform the design of future AI-based code assistants, we release our user-study apparatus and anonymized data to researchers seeking to build on our work at this link. Neil Perry, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Kumar, and Dan Boneh I’m surprised somewhat randomly copying other people’s code into your program – violating their licenses, to boot – leads to crappier code. Who knew!

I grew up learning to program in the late 1980s / early 1990s. Back then, I did not fully comprehend what I was doing and why the tools I used were impressive given the constraints of the hardware we had. Having gained more knowledge throughout the years, it is now really fun to pick up DOSBox to re-experience those programs and compare them with our current state of affairs. This time around, I want to look at the pure text-based IDEs that we had in that era before Windows eclipsed the PC industry. I want to do this because those IDEs had little to envy from the IDEs of today—yet it feels as if we went through a dark era where we lost most of those features for years and they are only resurfacing now. If anything, stay for a nostalgic ride back in time and a little rant on “bloat”. But, more importantly, read on to gain perspective on what existed before so that you can evaluate future feature launches more critically. Julio Merino Fast forward to today, and the most popular text editor among programmers is a website running in Chrome in a window. No wonder most popular applications are Electron trashfires now. Times sure have changed.