Hello, if you care about Servo, the alternative web browser engine that was originally slated to be the next gen Firefox but now is a donation-supported project under the Linux Foundation, you should know Servo announced a plan to as of June start allowing Servo code to be written by "Github Copilot":
https://floss.social/@servo/114296977894869359
There's a thoughtful post about this by the author of the former policy, which until now banned this:
https://kolektiva.social/@delan/114319591118095728
FOLLOWUP: Canceled! https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114376955704933891
There has been a public comment period on this plan, with public comment so far overwhelmingly negative. I'm not sure how this response will impact the plan; the announcement said enactment was "subject to a review of your feedback", whatever that means.
Personally I think the plan is a horrible idea on both technical and moral grounds, and would end Servo's current frontrunner status as the best candidate for a browser that truly represents the open web and respects the needs of its own users.
Please do not respond to this thread to talk about Ladybird. This is a personal request from me. Just… please. Don't make me have a conversation about Ladybird today. Some other time
By the way, I still think this paragraph I wrote is a pretty good paragraph.
@mcc
An interesting question is whether it will produce _predictable_ defects.
One thing that has been a rich source of exploits was the culture, which held for decades in Windows development, of copy-pasting MSDN code without troubling to understand it.
This has enabled hackers of both hats, having found exploits in standard boilerplate, to correctly anticipate that those exploits would reliably exist in the wild, in huge numbers.
The AI-generation issue is subtler, but has a similar origin: lazy programmers who don't analyze what they're given in the context they'll be using it. That it will produce defects is a given, but is there a recurrent character to the _kind_ of defects, and will that prove to have results that are usefully predictable to someone?
