0xabad1dea

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

Neradoc

import board
import microcontroller
allpins = []
for pin in dir(microcontroller.pin):
	if isinstance(getattr(microcontroller.pin, pin), microcontroller.Pin):
		pins = []
		for alias in dir(board):
			if getattr(board, alias) is getattr(microcontroller.pin, pin):
				pins.append("board.{}".format(alias))
			pins.sort()

charlesroper

How to setup a practically free CDN using Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare

⚠️ Note 2023-01-21
Some things have changed since I originally wrote this in 2016. I have updated a few minor details, and the advice is still broadly the same, but there are some new Cloudflare features you can (and should) take advantage of. In particular, pay attention to Trevor Stevens' comment here from 22 January 2022, and Matt Stenson's useful caching advice. In addition, Backblaze, with whom Cloudflare are a Bandwidth Alliance partner, have published their own guide detailing how to use Cloudflare's Web Workers to cache content from B2 private buckets. That is worth reading,

timvisee

Falsehoods programmers believe about time

This is a compiled list of falsehoods programmers tend to believe about working with time.

Don't re-invent a date time library yourself. If you think you understand everything about time, you're probably doing it wrong.

Falsehoods

• There are always 24 hours in a day.
• February is always 28 days long.
• Any 24-hour period will always begin and end in the same day (or week, or month).