Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

And what's even harderer? Using an AI coding assistant to write secure programs.

Many, MANY times that I've written about computer insecurity issues I've said explicitly that computer security is HARD. And here we have a prime example.

It turns out that using an AI to help you write a program produces LESS secure programs! But that's not the worse part: the program is more likely to believe that they are writing MORE SECURE CODE!

This is very bad. I've used AI for hints in writing code, looking for little obscure code references that I'm not familiar with. Quite useful. I haven't used it to write entire programs for me, I'm not sure that I could. However, there are people out there paying for subscriptions to ChatGPT 4 and other engines using them heavily, and that is worrisome.

https://arxiv.org/html/2211.03622v3

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/01/code-written-with-ai-assistants-is-less-secure.html

First off, I am not an advocate of the position 'everyone needs to learn to code!' That is a bunch of garbage. Programming is a very specific skill set and aptitude, and not everyone has that nor the interest in learning to code! Coding should not remotely be a requirement to graduate from high school! You're just inflicting another form of pain on kids to require it.

What I AM an advocate of is people need basic computer literacy, and this includes some critical thinking training to recognize scams and such. And scams are only going to get harder to see through in the future with AI writing better scripts for scammers! Offering classes for kids who WANT to learn to code, or learn about the internal workings of computers and how to maintain them, is fine and dandy. But aside from basic literacy, this should not be a graduation-dependent topic.

While many jobs, and more growing, require advanced computer skills, those are things that should be developed and refined at the college level. There are lots of jobs that don't require programming skills, and some that have minimal levels of computer use at all! We need more plumbers and electricians, among many other trades that are in short supply.

ANYWAY....

The Raspberry Pi organization is very, very cool. They're sort of a combination of Heathkit and Radio Shack for geeks and electronics experimenters. They manufacture a small computer board known as the Raspberry Pi which has a CPU, memory - solid state/non-volatile (doesn't lose contents when powered off), network connections through Ethernet or WiFi, a video output, and the board has all sorts of pins on it that you can connect "stuff" to. Want to build a robot that has sonar so it can move around your house like a Roomba? RaspPi. Want to build your own home security sensor system? This is the device. It is effectively unlimited in what it can do, only your imagination restricts the possibilities. That is, as long as you're able to work within its limited processing ability.

And you can buy these computer boards for $50-$100, depending on options!!!

And people have built micro-super computers out of these! They build a cage of a dozen or more, link them together through networking, and program some pretty amazing things out of them! They can't crunch huge number sets, but they can demonstrate how massively-parallel computing works and can be used teach the science behind them.

A lot of programming on these things is done through Python, an extremely versatile language. And now the Foundation, an education arm of the organization, has released an online code editor for Python. It's sort of no-frills, but it supports multiple files in a project. Code is saved in Raspberry's cloud and is accessible to you anywhere you have an internet connection. Right now, the editor is strictly Python, but there are plans to allow HTML and other code bases into it.

The best part is it integrates nicely with the Foundation's Python sample code base to use with their products! Need an example of how to process sonar signals for collision avoidance? Probably there. Etcetera.

And, of course, it's free.

I'm going to be playing with it as I like the Python language and am interested in Pi boards, though I don't have one at the moment. They were hammered hard by the pandemic with people stuck at home looking for things to do, their inventory was ate up at a very fast pace.

The article:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-online-code-editor

The editor:
https://editor.raspberrypi.org/

The Slashdot thread:
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/04/08/2247207/raspberry-pi-launches-online-code-editor-to-help-kids-learn

Zork. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Planetfall. A Mind Forever Wandering. Leather Goddess of Phobos. Sorcerer. Deadline. All the source code is there, as is a link to a manual that explains how the Lisp-like Zork Implementation Language, ZIL, works (scroll down to download it in PDF, epub, Kindle, and other formats). There's interpreters for all of the major operating systems available, apparently ZIL is very popular in the interactive fiction community.

Activision still holds the rights, and technically this could all disappear in the blink of an eye, but the code is so ancient that it might just stay up. It should prove to be quite an interesting study in natural language parsers.

There's a total of 54 repositories, it took me about 25 minutes to download all the zips and it's a total of about 167 meg when all is said and done.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/you-can-now-download-the-source-code-for-all-infocom-text-adventure-classics/


Just to add to stuff that you might want to download, Archive.org has a thing called the Infocom Cabinet, containing stunning collections of documents scanned from Infocom documenting behind the scenes stuff from Infocom projects. For example, the tome, and there's no better word for tome as it's near 600 pages long! on Hitchhikers - is just on Hitchhikers! There's similar for Zork, Leather Goddess, Mind Forever Wandering, two for Planetfall, etc! 28 entries in all. This is going to be an amazing partial biography and behind the scenes of Infocom! It's a somewhat bigger download: 28 files which, in epubs, is 1.4 gig!

Back to downloading, I guess....

https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet