https://www.spinellis.gr/blog The Internet soapbox of Diomidis Spinellis dds Text Diomidis D. Spinellis Web Log https://www.spinellis.gr/blog 2004-08-20T18:00:00-03:00 en weekly 2 2003-01-01T12:00+00:00 blog.pl 3c6ad07 2025-12-24 23:55:57 +0200 https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss https://www.spinellis.gr/dds.gif https://www.spinellis.gr/blog https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260708 Over the past few days I changed the way the uutils project’s sed program handles data to default from characters to raw bytes. This improves compatibility with GNU sed and also performance. Given the change’s size and extent (13 changed files, 1740 insertions, 609 deletions), I worked with an AI agent (OpenAI Codex), which allowed me to experience first-hand both its power and limitations. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260708 Diomidis Spinellis Text Why agentic AI needs better experts https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260708 2026-07-08T10:30:24-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260702 With ever-more program code created through generative AI, it is important to document its provenance. In industry this can help diagnose the root cause of problems discovered long after the code was written, locate issues with a similar cause, and evaluate the cost and benefits of AI. In educational settings it can help students be honest, mindful, reflective, and transparent regarding their use of generative AI and provide educators with data they can use to evaluate objectively student work. In both settings, provenance information can guide a code review’s focus because humans and AI fail in different ways . https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260702 Diomidis Spinellis Text Documenting AI-generated code commits https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260702 2026-07-08T08:00:37-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260523 Here’s the thing: when working on code with GenAI assistance (from a chat-bot, through IDE auto-completion, or, increasingly, with an AI agent) you need a better understanding of the system than when working without. Cognitive psychology and the workings of large language models (LLMs) give us four clues on why this happens. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260523 Diomidis Spinellis Text Why reviewing AI-generated code is devilishly hard https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260523 2026-05-23T18:53:28-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260413 In a keynote presentation at the 2026 Mining Software Repositories Emerson Murphy-Hill, a star researcher at Microsoft, presented his view on the role of an empirical software engineering researcher in the age of generative AI. His talk focused on three themes: the durability, differentiation, and dissemination of research. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260413 Diomidis Spinellis Text Empirical software research in the age of AI https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260413 2026-04-13T14:06:11-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260302 We are living through a golden age of generative AI: a time when progress is both breathtaking and somehow still unable to reliably open a PDF without hallucinating the author’s middle name. The curve is real, the funding is real, and the demos are so real that they must be watched on a stage with dramatic lighting, because ordinary lighting reveals too much. The modern model does many things remarkably well—summarization, translation, code generation—and then it will confidently assert that 9 is a prime number “depending on your threat model,” which is how you know you’re witnessing history. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260302 Diomidis Spinellis Text Vibe coding toward the incident horizon https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260302 2026-03-02T16:44:31-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20251223 Several news outlets reported the discovery of a 1970s Fourth Edition Research Unix magnetic tape at the University of Utah in July 2025 and its successful restoration. This is a significant find, because up to now only the Fourth Edition’s manual was thought to have survived. Over the past few days I incorporated the tape’s source code into the Unix History Repository hosted on GitHub (see it here ) and studied the code’s composition. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20251223 Diomidis Spinellis Text An initial analysis of the discovered Unix V4 tape https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20251223 2025-12-23T18:18:55-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250926 My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. There are many benefits in such a choice. You may want to consider them and adopt the same stance. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250926 Diomidis Spinellis Text Why I choose email over messaging https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250926 2026-03-02T16:47:22-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250626 Two widely-reported court rulings in San Francisco found that employing copyrighted works to train Large Language Models (LLMs) fell within the law’s “fair use” provisions. The fact that writers brought these lawsuits shows that they felt wronged by the use of their works to train LLMs without their permission. What should we make of those rulings? https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250626 Diomidis Spinellis Text Is it legal to use copyrighted works to train LLMs? https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250626 2025-06-26T12:07:56-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250520 Some open source software I wrote decades ago was distributed with the then-current BSD license, which included an advertising clause. This hinders the code’s reuse and distribution, so I’m hereby declaring that the clause’s requirements no longer apply to my code, and that the corresponding clause can be deleted from it. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250520 Diomidis Spinellis Text I’m removing the BSD advertising clause https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250520 2025-05-20T11:09:41-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250411 Generative AI (GenAI) systems, such as ChatGPT, can help students as their personal tutor, by allowing them to study what interests them, by providing in depth explanations to topics they didn’t quite understand, by assessing their work and problems with it, and by providing shortcuts to parts of their work that aren’t directly relevant to what they want to learn. However, students sometimes misuse GenAI to derive answers for work they were supposed to conduct on their own as part of their learning, or accept its answers uncritically. For the first type of misuse part of the blame occasionally also lies with educators for giving out-of-class assignments that GenAI can perform with ease. For the second type of misuse students must learn to avoid using unverified GenAI output. Needless to say that in both cases the misuse of AI may also constitute academic fraud and violate their university’s code of conduct. Here is my take on the practicalities of the two cases. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250411 Diomidis Spinellis Text The perils of GenAI student submissions https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250411 2025-04-11T03:31:35-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20241015 In an IEEE Software “Adventures in Code” column titled Modular Data Analytics I describe the benefits and use of simple-rolap , a tool suite for relational online analytical processing. I have built simple-rolap based on the Unix make tool and a few shell scripts. With make approaching its 50th birthday, before writing the column I looked for possible modern and better alternatives I might be ignoring. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20241015 Diomidis Spinellis Text Unix make vs Apache Airflow https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20241015 2024-10-15T11:19:35-00:00 en