#312: AI Goes on Trial For Writing Code

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About the show

Sponsored by Complier Podcast from RedHat

Connect with the hosts

• Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org
• Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org

Brian #1: Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder

• Simon Willison
• Also a talk from DjangoCon2022
  • Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and automated tests.
• I’m actually not sure what title would be best, but this is an incredible video that I’m encouraging every developer to watch, whether or not you work with open source projects.
• Covers
  • The perfect commit
    • Implementation, Tests, Documentation, and a link to an issue thread
  • Tests
    • Prove the implementation works, pass if it works, fails otherwise
    • A discussion of how adding tests is way easier than starting testing a project, so get the framework in place early, and devs won’t be afraid to add to it.
  • Cookiecutter repo templates for projects you will likely start
    • super cool idea to have your own that you keep up to date with your preferred best practices
  • A trick for using GitHub actions to use those templates to populate new repos
    • Trying this out is on my todo list
  • Documentation must live in the same repo as the code
    • and be included in PRs for the PR to be accepted by code review
    • maybe even test this using documentation unit tests
  • Everything links to an issue thread
    • Keep all of your thoughts in an issue thread
    • Doesn’t have to be a dialog with anyone but yourself
    • This allows you to NOT HAVE TO REMEMBER ANYTHING
  • Tell people what you did
    • This is just as important in work projects as it is in open source
    • Blog about it
    • Post on Twitter (or Mastodon, etc.)
  • Avoid side projects with user accounts
    • “If you build something that people can sign into, that’s not a side-project, it’s an unpaid job. It’s a very big responsibility, avoid at all costs!” - this is hilarious and something I’m probably not going to follow

Michael #2: GitHub copilot lawsuit

• First, we aren’t lawyers
• Lawsuit filed on November 3, 2022
• We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging GitHub Copilot, an AI product that relies on unprecedented open-source software piracy.
• GitHub copilot is trained on projects on GitHub, including GPL and other restrictive licenses
• This is the first class-action case in the US challenging the training and output of AI systems.

Brian #3: Use Windows Dialog Boxes from Python with no extra libraries

• Actual title: Display a message box with Python without using a non-standard library or other dependency (Windows)
• By Matt Callahan / learned about from from PyCoders weekly
• When I need a simple pop up dialog box that’s cross platform, PySimpleGUI is awesome and so easy.
• But when I KNOW it’s only going to run on Windows, why not just use native dialog boxes?
• Matt’s article shows you how, using ctypes to call into a Windows dll.

• Small example from article:

  import ctypes
  
      def main():
          WS_EX_TOPMOST = 0x40000
          windowTitle = "Python Windows Message Box Test"
          message = "Hello, world!"
          # display a message box; execution will stop here until user acknowledges
          ctypes.windll.user32.MessageBoxExW(None, message, windowTitle, WS_EX_TOPMOST)
          print("User clicked OK.")
  
      if __name__ == "__main__":
          main()
  
  

• Notes:

  • The uType (fourth) parameter is a multi-use value that can be or-ed for things like:
    • Type of dialog box: Help, OK, OK/Cancel, Retry/Cancel, Yes/No, etc.
    • The icon to use: Exclamation, Info, Question, etc.
    • Modality, …
  • Return value is used to understand how user reacted:
    • 1 - OK, 2 - Cancel (or x), …, 6 - Yes, 7 - No, …

Michael #4: Extra Extra Extra

• Python browser extensions
• takahe - Mastodon on Python - the right way
• Michael’s article in Black Friday perf
  • We could scale down our server after what I’ve learned. But we’d pay 10x more in bandwidth overages ironically: Last month Talk Python broadly transferred 20.2 TB of data from our servers
• Moved our static traffic to Bunny CDN, highly recommended service
• RSS revival
  • My blog: mkennedy.codes
  • Reeder 5 app on iOS and macOS
• Rivers Cuomo (from Weezer) and Guido sit down for a talk together
  • Also check out the Talk Python episode with Rivers: talkpython.fm/327
• Kite is saying farewell