Teddy Xinyuan Chen tddschn

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

Learn Go in ~5mins

This is inspired by A half-hour to learn Rust and Zig in 30 minutes.

Basics

Your first Go program as a classical "Hello World" is pretty simple:

First we create a workspace for our project:

A half-hour to learn Zig

This is inspired by https://fasterthanli.me/blog/2020/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust/

Basics

the command zig run my_code.zig will compile and immediately run your Zig program. Each of these cells contains a zig program that you can try to run (some of them contain compile-time errors that you can comment out to play with)

Lecture 1: Introduction to Research — [📝Lecture Notebooks] [▶️Video]
Lecture 2: Introduction to Python — [📝Lecture Notebooks] [▶️Video]
Lecture 3: Introduction to NumPy — [📝Lecture Notebooks] [▶️Video]
Lecture 4: Introduction to pandas — [📝Lecture Notebooks] [▶️Video]
Lecture 5: Plotting Data — [📝Lecture Notebooks] [[▶️Vide

At the beginning of 2030, I found this essay in my archives. From what I know today, I think it was very insightful at the moment of writing. And I feel it should be published because it can teach us, Rust developers, how to prevent that sad story from happening again.

What killed Haskell, could kill Rust, too

What killed Haskell, could kill Rust, too. Why would I even mention Haskell in this context? Well, Haskell and Rust are deeply related. Not because Rust is Haskell without HKTs. (Some of you know what that means, and the rest of you will wonder for a very long time). Much of the style of Rust is similar in many ways to the style of Haskell. In some sense Rust is a reincarnation of Haskell, with a little bit of C-ish like syntax, a very small amount.

Is Haskell dead?

This gist lists challenges you run into when building offline-first applications based on IndexedDB, including open-source libraries like Firebase, pouchdb and AWS amplify (more).

Note that some of the following issues affect only Safari. Out of the major browsers, Chrome's IndexedDB implementation is the best.

Backing file on disk (WAL file) keeps growing (Safari)

When this bug occurs, every time you use the indexeddb, the WAL file grows. Garbage collection doesn't seem to be working, so after a while, you end up with gigabytes of data.

	#!/usr/bin/awk -f

	# This program is a copy of guff, a plot device. https://github.com/silentbicycle/guff
	# My copy here is written in awk instead of C, has no compelling benefit.
	# Public domain. @thingskatedid

	# Run as awk -v x=xyz ... or env variables for stuff?
	# Assumptions: the data is evenly spaced along the x-axis

	# TODO: moving average

	#!/bin/bash
	###
	### my-script — does one thing well
	###
	### Usage:
	### my-script <input> <output>
	###
	### Options:
	### <input> Input file to read.
	### <output> Output file to write. Use '-' for stdout.

	/*
	* John Conway's Game of Life.
	*
	* This is written for POSIX, using Curses. Resizing of the terminal is not
	* supported.
	*
	* By convention in this program, x is the horizontal coordinate and y is
	* vertical. There correspond to the width and height respectively.
	* The current generation number is illustrated when show_generation is set.
	*

Teddy Xinyuan Chen tddschn

Risk Assessment of GitHub Copilot

0xabad1dea, July 2021

Learn Go in ~5mins

Basics

A half-hour to learn Zig

Basics

Backing file on disk (WAL file) keeps growing (Safari)

Random exceptions when working with a large number of indexeddb databases (Safari)