Marius Gedminas mgedmin

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

Synchronized Output

Synchronized output is merely implementing the feature as inspired by iTerm2 synchronized output, except that it's not using the rare DCS but rather the well known SM ? and RM ?. iTerm2 has now also adopted to use the new syntax instead of using DCS.

Semantics

When rendering the screen of the terminal, the Emulator usually iterates through each visible grid cell and renders its current state. With applications updating the screen a at higher frequency this can cause tearing.

This mode attempts to mitigate that.

Pairing Bluetooth Devices in Dual Boot with Linux Ubuntu and Windows 10/11

Introduction

This guide provides updated instructions for pairing Bluetooth devices (such as keyboards or mice) in a dual-boot environment with Linux Ubuntu and Windows 10/11, incorporating community feedback and suggestions.

Instructions

1. Pair in Linux First

Pair your Bluetooth device in Linux. This is crucial to ensure the LinkKey remains consistent.
Note: Do not re-pair the device in Linux after completing the pairing in Windows.

Vim Script for Python Developers

This is a guide to Vim Script development for Python developers. Sample code for the various expressions, statements, functions and programming constructs is shown in both Python and Vim Script. This is not intended to be a tutorial for developing Vim scripts. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with Python programming.

For an introduction to Vim Script development, refer to usr_41.txt, eval.txt and Learn Vimscript the Hard Way

For a guide similar to this one for JavaScript developers, refer to Vim Script for the JavaScripter

This guide only describes the programming constructs that are present in both Python and Vim. The constructs that are unique to Vim (e.g. autocommands, [key-mapping](https://vimhelp.org/map.txt.html#key-m

The right way to override any highlighting if you don't want to edit the colorscheme file directly

Generalities first

Suppose you have weird taste and you absolutely want:

your visual selection to always have a green background and black foreground,
your active statusline to always have a white background and red foreground,
your very own deep blue background.

Hyperlinks (a.k.a. HTML-like anchors) in terminal emulators

[ Update 2020-05-31: I won't be maintaining this page or responding to comments anymore (except for perhaps a few exceptional occasions). ]

Most of the terminal emulators auto-detect when a URL appears onscreen and allow to conveniently open them (e.g. via Ctrl+click or Cmd+click, or the right click menu).

It was, however, not possible until now for arbitrary text to point to URLs, just as on webpages.

Ubuntu encourage upgrading between releases by running a command, instead of by manually editing sources and getting on with it. This tool's name is do-release-upgrade, and I believe it should just be doing:

sed -i 's/wily/xenial/g' /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

This command does not explain what it wants to do, or why it is doing anything. It has, in the past:

Disabled repos I was using, and hence broken the software in them.

Triangle Workflows

A triangle workflow involves an upstream project and a personal fork containing a development branch of the project. This configuration makes git pull merge changes from the upstream but git push send local commits to the personal fork. However those config settings only work on relatively recent versions of git; 1.7.9 doesn't support the required remote.pushdefault config setting so you will have to explicitly tell git push which remote to push to.

This gist does not attempt to explain exactly what these commands do, it's intended as a cheat-sheet/reminder.