President Musk tells people not to donate to Wikipedia.

So send them money.

https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-takes-aim-wikipedia-fund-raising-editing-political-woke-2005742

the only good ad is the kind that provides unintended irony

tv ad for or ISP. right at the end of the advertisement the tv disconnects from the internet and the picture freezes on “Telekom: Connecting the World”

remember to regularly update the name of your first dog for security reasons!

Technically, if you're not watching YouTube on a CRT, there's no tube.

It's just sparkling Google Video.

The thing about copyright is, like, if you just think about it for a moment, these two situations are completely different:

- Sony releases a game with music it downloaded off SoundCloud without ever contacting the musician
- A high schooler makes a Sonic fan game that reuses music from Sonic Adventure 2

And yet our current conception of copyright insists that these are equivalent and should be handled by the same rules.

Even if you think copyright should exist this form of it is nonsense.

I finally turned off GitHub Copilot yesterday. I’ve been using it for about a year on the ‘free for open-source maintainers’ tier. I was skeptical but didn’t want to dismiss it without a fair trial.

It has cost me more time than it has saved. It lets me type faster, which has been useful when writing tests where I’m testing a variety of permutations of an API to check error handling for all of the conditions.

I can recall three places where it has introduced bugs that took me more time to to debug than the total time saving:

The first was something that initially impressed me. I pasted the prose description of how to communicate with an Ethernet MAC into a comment and then wrote some method prototypes. It autocompleted the bodies. All very plausible looking. Only it managed to flip a bit in the MDIO read and write register commands. MDIO is basically a multiplexing system. You have two device registers exposed, one sets the command (read or write a specific internal register) and the other is the value. It got the read and write the wrong way around, so when I thought I was writing a value, I was actually reading. When I thought I was reading, I was actually seeing the value in the last register I thought I had written. It took two of us over a day to debug this. The fix was simple, but the bug was in the middle of correct-looking code. If I’d manually transcribed the command from the data sheet, I would not have got this wrong because I’d have triple checked it.

Another case it had inverted the condition in an if statement inside an error-handling path. The error handling was a rare case and was asymmetric. Hitting the if case when you wanted the else case was okay but the converse was not. Lots of debugging. I learned from this to read the generated code more carefully, but that increased cognitive load and eliminated most of the benefit. Typing code is not the bottleneck and if I have to think about what I want and then read carefully to check it really is what I want, I am slower.

Most recently, I was writing a simple binary search and insertion-deletion operations for a sorted array. I assumed that this was something that had hundreds of examples in the training data and so would be fine. It had all sorts of corner-case bugs. I eventually gave up fixing them and rewrote the code from scratch.

Last week I did some work on a remote machine where I hadn’t set up Copilot and I felt much more productive. Autocomplete was either correct or not present, so I was spending more time thinking about what to write. I don’t entirely trust this kind of subjective judgement, but it was a data point. Around the same time I wrote some code without clangd set up and that really hurt. It turns out I really rely on AST-aware completion to explore APIs. I had to look up more things in the documentation. Copilot was never good for this because it would just bullshit APIs, so something showing up in autocomplete didn’t mean it was real. This would be improved by using a feedback system to require autocomplete outputs to type check, but then they would take much longer to create (probably at least a 10x increase in LLM compute time) and wouldn’t complete fragments, so I don’t see a good path to being able to do this without tight coupling to the LSP server and possibly not even then.

Yesterday I was writing bits of the CHERIoT Programmers’ Guide and it kept autocompleting text in a different writing style, some of which was obviously plagiarised (when I’m describing precisely how to implement a specific, and not very common, lock type with a futex and the autocomplete is a paragraph of text with a lot of detail, I’m confident you don’t have more than one or two examples of that in the training set). It was distracting and annoying. I wrote much faster after turning it off.

So, after giving it a fair try, I have concluded that it is both a net decrease in productivity and probably an increase in legal liability.

Discussions I am not interested in having:

• You are holding it wrong. Using Copilot with this magic config setting / prompt tweak makes it better. At its absolute best, it was a small productivity increase, if it needs more effort to use, that will be offset.
• This other LLM is much better. I don’t care. The costs of the bullshitting far outweighed the benefits when it worked, to be better it would have to not bullshit, and that’s not something LLMs can do.
• It’s great for boilerplate! No. APIs that require every user to write the same code are broken. Fix them, don’t fill the world with more code using them that will need fixing when the APIs change.
• Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code. Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

The one place Copilot was vaguely useful was hinting at missing abstractions (if it can autocomplete big chunks then my APIs required too much boilerplate and needed better abstractions). The place I thought it might be useful was spotting inconsistent API names and parameter orders but it was actually very bad at this (presumably because of the way it tokenises identifiers?). With a load of examples with consistent names, it would suggest things that didn't match the convention. After using three APIs that all passed the same parameters in the same order, it would suggest flipping the order for the fourth.

#GitHubCopilot #CHERIoT

given today’s events: My family and I are safe

RE: https://akko.chir.rs/objects/a936047a-014d-40e5-a48d-ca01498729e5

Wishing everyone a Chirpy Christmas and Flappy Holidays on this #FursuitFriday! 🎄🦇🐆🐾🧑‍🎄

i would like to wish everyone a happy first spanish astronaut day

Maybe we should stop calling them *Notifications* and instead refer to *Interruptions*.

"Working on some stuff so I've turned off interruptions for a while."

"Right on."

With the polio vaccine in the news, I want to tell some of my mom's story:

My mom got polio when she was a kid living in southern California, pre-vaccine. She survived it, but it put her in a wheelchair for a while, then leg braces. She was actually a literal poster child for the Polio vaccine: they used her picture on some March of Dimes posters.

But this was not a thing that just affected her for a while, and then she was better. As a result of having Polio, her right leg is slightly shorter than her left. For her entire life, she's had to have special lifts put into her right shoe. When she drives, she uses her left foot for the brake pedal because she's concerned that her right leg might not be strong enough to stomp on the brake hard if needed. She has always been limited in how long and far she can walk: I remember many times on family vacations where the rest of us would go off to do something and she'd have to sit it out because she knew she just couldn't do that much walking.

Now that she's elderly, a lifetime of this is catching up: her bones, joints, ligaments, tendons are all messed up from having a weak leg and an unbalanced gait. Her mobility is declining much faster than it should be, even for someone of her age. She had to have her ankle fused because of the constant pain it was causing.

Polio didn't ruin her life, but it has stolen it in slices. Times she couldn't keep up with her kids, times she was just too tired to be able to stay on her feet, chronic pain, losing the ability to climb stairs in her own house as she ages.

Vaccination is the greatest public health success humanity has ever produced, and we forget this only at our own peril.

Right now a working mother named Briana Boston is under house arrest, charged with terrorism, & faces 15 years prison for saying “Delay defend deny you’re next” to an insurance company, while an uber wealthy Judge named Michael Conahan, who trafficked kids for $2.8M cash, & enabled several child deaths, is out free with a Biden commutation.

This is America.

For the bus enthusiasts 🚌