Timothy Jacobs TimothyBJacobs

Risk Assessment of GitHub Copilot

0xabad1dea, July 2021

this is a rough draft and may be updated with more examples

GitHub was kind enough to grant me swift access to the Copilot test phase despite me @'ing them several hundred times about ICE. I would like to examine it not in terms of productivity, but security. How risky is it to allow an AI to write some or all of your code?

Ultimately, a human being must take responsibility for every line of code that is committed. AI should not be used for "responsibility washing." However, Copilot is a tool, and workers need their tools to be reliable. A carpenter doesn't have to

Using Xdebug in Docker

Getting setup and running with Xdebug in a docker container these days is now fairly simple and is composed of two main steps:

Ensure you've got XDebug installed and enabled in your PHP docker image, for example:

# Installing Xdebug with PHP 7.3 images:
RUN pecl install xdebug \
  && docker-php-ext-enable xdebug

libdispatch efficiency tips

The libdispatch is one of the most misused API due to the way it was presented to us when it was introduced and for many years after that, and due to the confusing documentation and API. This page is a compilation of important things to know if you're going to use this library. Many references are available at the end of this document pointing to comments from Apple's very own libdispatch maintainer (Pierre Habouzit).

My take-aways are:

You should create very few, long-lived, well-defined queues. These queues should be seen as execution contexts in your program (gui, background work, ...) that benefit from executing in parallel. An important thing to note is that if these queues are all active at once, you will get as many threads running. In most apps, you probably do not need to create more than 3 or 4 queues.
Go serial first, and as you find performance bottle necks, measure why, and if concurrency helps, apply with care, always validating under system pressure. Reuse

Letsencrypt (for WordPress sites)

Note: This setup assumes you are running Ubuntu 16.04 OS with Apache 2.4.23, older versions of Ubuntu (i.e. 14.04) require minor configuration changes in order for this setup to work.

Setup

Follow the install instructions for certbot (letsencrypt's SSL manager) on https://certbot.eff.org/, making sure to select the correct server OS version.

Note: You only need to complete the Install section, then return to this README in order to setup your SSL

A composable pattern for pure state machines with effects

State machines are everywhere in interactive systems, but they're rarely defined clearly and explicitly. Given some big blob of code including implicit state machines, which transitions are possible and under what conditions? What effects take place on what transitions?

There are existing design patterns for state machines, but all the patterns I've seen complect side effects with the structure of the state machine itself. Instances of these patterns are difficult to test without mocking, and they end up with more dependencies. Worse, the classic patterns compose poorly: hierarchical state machines are typically not straightforward extensions. The functional programming world has solutions, but they don't transpose neatly enough to be broadly usable in mainstream languages.

Here I present a composable pattern for pure state machiness with effects,

Around 2006-2007, it was a bit of a fashion to hook lava lamps up to the build server. Normally, the green lava lamp would be on, but if the build failed, it would turn off and the red lava lamp would turn on.

By coincidence, I've actually met, about that time, (probably) the first person to hook up a lava lamp to a build server. It was Alberto Savoia, who'd founded a testing tools company (that did some very interesting things around generative testing that have basically never been noticed). Alberto had noticed that people did not react with any urgency when the build broke. They'd check in broken code and go off to something else, only reacting to the breakage they'd caused when some other programmer pulled the change and had problems.

	// Copyright © 2019 Alexey Naumov. MIT License

	import Combine

	typealias CancelBag = Set<AnyCancellable>

	extension CancelBag {
	mutating func collect(@Builder _ cancellables: () -> [AnyCancellable]) {
	formUnion(cancellables())
	}

	import gql from 'graphql-tag'
	import { client } from '../utils/apollo-client'
	const { parse } = wp.blocks;
	const { select, subscribe, dispatch } = wp.data;
	const GET_PAGE_BLOCK_TEMPLATE = gql`
	query GET_PAGE_BLOCK_TEMPLATE($id: ID!, $template: String) {
	page( id: $id ) {
	blockTemplate( pageTemplate: $template )
	}
	}

	<?php
	// Font Awesome v. 4.6.

	function jt_get_font_icons() {

	return array(
	'fa-glass' => 'f000',
	'fa-music' => 'f001',
	'fa-search' => 'f002',
	'fa-envelope-o' => 'f003',

	<?php

	/*
	\|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
	\| Application Routes
	\|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
	\|
	\| Here is where you can register all of the routes for an application.
	\| It's a breeze. Simply tell Laravel the URIs it should respond to
	\| and give it the controller to call when that URI is requested.