szescstopni @szescstopni@social.cleverlibre.org

Ah, gotta love malicious compliance.

Thinking about the guy who registered  \"><SCRIPT SRC=MJT.XSS.HT></SCRIPT> LTD at Companies House and exposed a bunch of XSS vulnerabilities in third party scrapers to the point where it had to be renamed to THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD with the previous name listed as [NAME AVAILABLE ON REQUEST FROM COMPANIES HOUSE] :p

So I've been thinking about this one article I read about people using chatgpt to do codegen - https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/chatgpt-code-website-rcna66981

And uh.

I think that all the codegen arguments are missing one of the central points.

See, codegen tools are good for stamping out boilerplate - the kind of code that's not creative, and doesn't require an understanding of the problem, but instead understanding of the language conventions.

But the thing is - why are you writing out boilerplate like that in the first place? Wouldn't it be better to not have to write out endless boilerplate - where you end up with mistakes, mind you, because it's low-attention low-interest work that's mostly -in the way- of the work that you're there to actually do?

And this applies not only to the writing, but the debugging - software isn't a write-once-run-forever type situation; bugs exist and patches need to be applied, and if you're reading through yet another glob of codegen boilerplate, it's going to be that much harder to find the real problem.

Instead of writing an 'ai' and 'training' it to shit out this garbage in volume, perhaps it would be better to have a language where that kind of boilerplate is a lot less needed? where you can have, y'know, reusable libraries to cover common iterator cases, for instance.

What if codegen is bad not because of the plagiarism, the lack of user understanding of the process, the inhibition of debugging, or the reuse of popular but suboptimal structures instead of useful ones - but because it automates and keeps current a practice that just isn't -needed- as much as it used to be?

We have modern languages with better tooling nowadays. And yes, I'm thinking about #rust specifically. You can write things that don't -require- sixteen tons of boilerplate, or installing a macro on your keyboard to do the error-handling incantation. You can have the problem -not exist- instead of automating a 'solution' that just makes your source files bigger. Do -this- instead of reimplementing fuckin' fizzbuzz for the twentieth time this month.

Jasper posing for a Heraldic Crest

Montreal:

RT @CANADABLACKTV1
Montreal vehicles lose control, crash into each other 🚔🚙🚍🌨#montreal #snow #crash #accident #downtownmtl #crazy #lol #canadablacktv 🇨🇦⚫️🖥
https://twitter.com/CANADABLACKTV1/status/805952862152953856

Twitter's new policy will likely shut down thousands of #EMGTwitter emergency alerting and emergency management accounts.

Every time you reduce the methods of communication in an emergency you risk human lives and property damage.

RT @apukwa
Will Environment Canada pay to maintain its 840 weather warning bots?

Will Natural Resources Canada pay to maintain its automated Earthquake bots?

Will NOAA pay to distribute it's Tsunami warning…
https://twitter.com/apukwa/status/1621192299459018752

Anybody watching The Last of Us? This is the same fungus, Cordyceps, attacking this Carolina leafroller that attacks humans in the show. It keeps the host alive as long as possible. 😲
https://hasanjasim.online/zombie-fungus-rides-again/

The people holding Punxsutawney Phil should have been masked. I don't want the groundhog to get covid.

It's funny because it is true.

xkcd.com/2730/
#geekhumor #devhumor #humor

Quite simply, probably the most evocative #war memorial I have seen.

Thinking of setting up a ‘small appliance’ repair cafe in our village. Anyone done this and have any tips? #repairingThings #repaircafe

Inmates at a prison in Poland have suffered beatings, suffocation and even waterboarding at the hands of guards, according to a report.

Prosecutors are now investigating, but the prison authorities say they have doubts about the "objectivity" of the report.

https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/02/02/prisoners-beaten-suffocated-and-waterboarded-in-polish-prison-finds-report/

A few months ago, we warned that malevolent people were buying Google ads leading people to fake #GIMP websites to trick them into downloading malware.
Apparently this is still continuing to this day (as were reported to us). Google is still not blocking these fake ads despite the many reports and articles which happened for months now. 😓

Be careful and always make sure where you download your software from. Also the GIMP project doesn't buy ads!

https://floss.social/@mithrandir@defcon.social/109773987578181949

I believe that #Buzzards are doing very well over here... No hike without an encounter.

#BirdsinLatin #ButeoButeo
#Birdphotography #Birds #Birdsofthefediverse #birdsofprey
#BirdsofMastodon #Wildlife #Wildlifephotography #Nature

Moss throne

#Mosstodon