Hacker News Reader

> Another thing that's kind of scary (and makes it worrying if this is used for Copilot) is the second prompt to make the text uppercase results in code that is superficially correct, but is very semantically wrong - innerHTML.toUpperCase() is dangerous because it not only makes the content uppercase, it also modifies the attributes on the HTML elements inside. This definitely broke the vote button, which uses inline JS which is case sensitive. It also destroys any attached event handler since the elements are basically deleted then re-created.

This is actually an issue I have with all these Transformer-based code generators - they have no inherent constraints on safe and correct code and often seem to generate superficially correct but bad and potentially even dangerous code. I remember that the first Copilot showcase also included stuff like that (not to mention that it sometimes generates GPL'd code).

All the model does is a very complex form of association learning. It may "understand" the relationship between English and various programming languages, but you cannot code in any constraints about optimization, security, licensing etc. There is so much bad code out there on the internet and this model may have seen a lot of it.

It's also no coincidence that most demos shown so far are very high level dynamic languages like Javascript and Python.

View on HN

// JavaScript one-liner to make the text of element with ID athing uppercase const makerUpper = function(id) { document.getElementById(id).innerHTML = document.getElementById(id).innerHTML.toUpperCase(); };

// JavaScript one-liner to make the text of element with ID athing uppercase while following all security best practices const makerUppercase = function(id) { const element = document.getElementById(id); element.textContent = element.textContent.toUpperCase(); };

const makeUppercase = (id) => { const element = document.getElementById(id); if (element == null) return; const makeChildNodeUpper = (node) => { if (node.nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE) { node.nodeValue = node.nodeValue.toUpperCase(); } else { node.childNodes.forEach(makeChildNodeUpper); } } makeChildNodeUpper(element); }