Brian Zelip brianzelip

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

Pure ESM package

The package that linked you here is now pure ESM. It cannot be require()'d from CommonJS.

This means you have the following choices:

Use ESM yourself. (preferred)
Use import foo from 'foo' instead of const foo = require('foo') to import the package. You also need to put "type": "module" in your package.json and more. Follow the below guide.
If the package is used in an async context, you could use await import(…) from CommonJS instead of require(…).
Stay on the existing version of the package until you can move to ESM.

Raspberry Pi on Internet via reverse SSH tunnel

HackerNews discussed this with many alternative solutions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24893615

I already have my own domain name: mydomain.com. I wanted to be able to run some webapps on my Raspberry Pi 4B running perpetually at home in headless mode (just needs 5W power and wireless internet). I wanted to be able to access these apps from public Internet. Dynamic DNS wasn't an option because my ISP blocks all incoming traffic. ngrok would work but the free plan is too restrictive.

I bought a cheap 2GB RAM, 20GB disk VM + a 25GB volume on Hetzner for about 4 EUR/month. Hetzner gave me a static IP for it. I haven't purchased a floating IP yet.

Speaker Rider

by Tatiana Mac

Last updated 14 April 2021

What is a speaker rider?

As speaking comes with immense privilege, I have crafted a speaker rider to set expectations and boundaries around my engagement. I am grateful to all the conference organisers who have brilliantly hosted me. I would love to continue to exercise this privilege to speak at conferences, and use this privilege to make the landscape more accessible and beneficial to tech's most historically excluded and marginalised communities.

Considerations

😫 I provide a lot of explanations for those of you who never had to consider these things. Most thoughtful conferences I've attended check most of these boxes intrinsically, particularly when conference runners are experienced speakers. They get it.

https://twitter.com/snookca/status/1073299331262889984?s=21

‪“‬In what way is JS any more maintainable than CSS? How does writing CSS in JS make it any more maintainable?”

‪Happy to chat about this. There’s an obvious disclaimer that there’s a cost to css-in-js solutions, but that cost is paid specifically for the benefits it brings; as such it’s useful for some usecases, and not meant as a replacement for all workflows. ‬

‪(These conversations always get heated on twitter, so please believe that I’m here to converse, not to convince. In return, I promise to listen to you too and change my opinions; I’ve had mad respect for you for years and would consider your feedback a gift. Also, some of the stuff I’m writing might seem obvious to you; I’m not trying to tell you if all people of some of the details, but it might be useful to someone else who bumps into this who doesn’t have context)‬

So the big deal about css-in-js (cij) is selectors.

2019 update: this essay has been updated on my personal site, together with a followup on how to get started

2020 update: I'm now writing a book with updated versions of all these essays and 35 other chapters!!!!

1. Learn in public

If there's a golden rule, it's this one, so I put it first. All the other rules are more or less elaborations of this rule #1.

You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people "learn in private", and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves. Again, that's fine, but we're here to talk about being in the top quintile. What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust. Write blogs and tutorials and cheatsheets. Speak at meetups and conferences. Ask and answer things on Stackoverflow or Reddit. (Avoid the walled gardens like Slack and Discourse, they're not public). Make Youtube videos

Modules - History & Future

History

Early work by Ihab Awad (Google) and Kris Kowal (FastSoft)
- https://twitter.com/kriskowal/status/943547614158450688
- Hermetic eval presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KlPxgocvzpTq44KTF4xZ6TnzGRsy628hP5he7bXVB3I/edit#slide=id.i0
2009-09: 2nd draft of module strawman, still very close to "closures as modules", export x = 42
- https://esdiscuss.org/topic/hermetic-evaluation-modules-strawman

https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/pub?id=1hNv1SHh_v_6nD1QBd6pySUJ2U5roAELzW5cqD2tt_WM

	ffmpeg -ss $INPUT_START_TIME -t $LENGTH -i $INPUT_FILENAME \
	-vf "fps=$OUTPUT_FPS,scale=$OUTPUT_WIDTH:-1:flags=lanczos,split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen[p];[s1][p]paletteuse" \
	-loop $NUMBER_OF_LOOPS $OUTPUT_FILENAME

	# Change these placeholders:
	# * $INPUT_START_TIME - number of seconds in the input video to start from.
	# * $LENGTH - number of seconds to convert from the input video.
	# * $INPUT_FILENAME - path to the input video.
	# * $OUTPUT_FPS - ouput frames per second. Start with `10`.
	# * $OUTPUT_WIDTH - output width in pixels. Aspect ratio is maintained.

	//= require jquery.tokeninput

	$(function() {
	$.fn.linker = function() {
	$(this).each(function() {
	var $this = $(this);
	var $linkerWrapper = $this.parents(".linker-wrapper:first");

	if ($this.hasClass("initialised")) {
	return;

	/**
	1. Install the Stylish(https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe?hl=en) extension for Chrome.
	2. Open up extension options and paste the CSS mentioned below.
	3. Specify the "URLs on the domain" to be `github.com`.
	4. Add a title and save.
	*/

	.dashboard-sidebar {
	float: right;
	padding-right: 10px;