• 1 Post
  • 22 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
Cake day: March 12th, 2024
  • Kissaki@beehaw.orgtoFree and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•Looking for advice - Help me advocate for my employer to open up our products to Home Assistant integrationEnglish
    2·
    10 days ago

    The only way to meaningfully advocate for it after your company already announced their conditions and offerings is to present value gain.

    What do you suggest concretely? What should be offered under what conditions? What would that mean as cost? What would the benefit be? How substantial is it?

    Reaching out privately to them is certainly going beyond what you are employed for. I don’t know about ill-advised - if you never disclose it or are at least mindful of that. But it’s a personal assessment. You seem to be willing to invest a lot into a single customer, who tries to do something not offered or considered by the company. Whether it’s personal interest, or first a broader better understanding of the use case, I can see how it could be worth or worthwhile. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up about changing the opinions of your company [from their information alone].

    Your company offered API access. So there is an interface available. They won’t make it free unless they see and deem it worth it to do so.

  • Kissaki@beehaw.orgtoProgramming@beehaw.org•Software with politic opinion is are security threatEnglish
    8·
    10 days ago

    A block on Twitter doesn’t say anything unless you know why they were blocked and know the person. Blocking can be more than warranted and justified. Be it spam, toxicity, harassment, or similar things. “I saw a screenshot of someone being blocked on Twitter” is not a good foundation for an argument.

    They talk about malware in npm packages. One example isn’t enough to make a general claim that all software with political opinions or voices becomes malware.

    When a platform follows sanctions, and the law, I don’t think you can claim them to be political and activism decisions. If you want to make that argument and want to do so in an absolutist fashion (not assess and reduce risks but evade them entirely), then you can only self-host and I guess on your own servers? No platforms, no services?

    Nowadays, there are many teams who buy popular apps and browser extensions to inject malware.

    … which has nothing to do with political views and especially not political views of the original authors and sellers.

    As you can see, the “opinion” or “political view” of a company is not only a way to hype on sanctions and curry favor with investors, the government, and consumers, but it is also a clear signal about potential threats. It signals that your sensitive data may be hijacked, sold, or wiped anytime if the political compass spins tomorrow and recognizes you as an enemy.

    No. None of what was written before showed me any of that.

    Some of the red flags I actively use to reject software:

    Direct political opinions in a product’s blog, like “we support X” or “we are against X”

    “We are free software and we support free software” -> REJECTED! (?)

  • Kissaki@beehaw.orgtoProgramming@beehaw.org•Why is predictive text so hard to disable?English
    4·
    1 month ago

    I assume you don’t mean keyboard text predictions, which would be a different thing, but the platforms.

    It’s a new convenience feature. Something they as a platform can shine with, retain users, and set themselves apart from other platforms.

    Having training data is not the primary potential gain. It’s user investment, retention, and interaction. Users choosing the generated text is valid training data. Whether they chose similar words, or what was suggested, is still input on user choice.

    It does lead to a convergence to a centralized standard speak. With a self-strengthening feedback loop.

  • Kissaki@beehaw.orgtoProgramming@beehaw.org•Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants? (arxiv paper)English
    1·
    2 months ago

    Quoting the abstract (I added emphasis and paragraphs for readability):

    AI code assistants have emerged as powerful tools that can aid in the software development life-cycle and can improve developer productivity. Unfortunately, such assistants have also been found to produce insecure code in lab environments, raising significant concerns about their usage in practice.

    In this paper, we conduct a user study to examine how users interact with AI code assistants to solve a variety of security related tasks.

    Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant wrote significantly less secure code than those without access to an assistant. Partici- pants with access to an AI assistant were also more likely to believe they wrote secure code, suggesting that such tools may lead users to be overconfident about security flaws in their code.

    To better inform the design of future AI-based code assistants, we release our user-study apparatus and anonymized data to researchers seeking to build on our work at this link.

    Caveat; quoting from section 7.2 Limitations:

    One important limitation of our results is that our participant group consisted mainly of university students which likely do not represent the population that is most likely to use AI assistants (e.g. software developers) regularly.