Viewing profile — natefinch

Copilot is software, it can't be the author, just like the OS isn't the author when you copy and paste. Authors have to be humans.

Presumably because you don't have the right to grant github those permissions, only the copyright owner does.

AI can code low level stuff. This one function. This small piece of logic. What it can't do is conceive of how to take a bunch of different functions and put them together to produ…

Well, if the entire thing was generated, then no (according to the first link I posted above), since it was not produced by a human. However, no useful program is going to be entir…

That's still 100% true of the examples I mentioned. There's always a higher level to consider. When we moved to C, we could stop worrying about what registers we were using. When w…

Anyone can already generate proprietary code that is identical to your GitHub project's code just using copy and paste. For people that care to respect copyright, there's a copilot…

Some interesting reading: https://felixreda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringin... https://fossa.com/blog/analyzing-legal-implications-github-c...

I'm sure that's what people said when they went from punch cards to assembly, and from assembly to C, and from C to Java.... and yet, here we are. Tools that let us write higher le…

There's a big difference between reverse engineering (i.e. intentionally writing software that behaves identically to another piece of software), and writing your own code to solve…

Familiarity with the UX and conventions on that platform. Almost everyone knows how to make a PR against a GitHub repo. But some random other code hosting site? It would be a lot l…

There's a setting on GitHub that blocks any suggestions that exactly match code in the training set. I doubt you'd ever get in trouble for code that was similar in structure but di…

I definitely never contributed to open source before github was around.

I think it's like any social network. It grows in value with how many people use it. Yes, you can host your own public git repo or even your own gitlab, but then there's a barrier …

FWIW, there are some (admittedly fairly naive) checks to prevent PII and other sensitive info from being suggested to users. Copilot looks for things like ssh keys, social security…

It's still free with no payment for existing (beta/technical preview) customers. There was a github bug with some auth token nonsense that was causing problems, but all technical p…

CI runs on CPUs, Copilot runs on GPUs. Waaaay different. Especially in this age of cryptocurrencies and chip shortages.

If you teach someone about music theory by listening to Stairway to Heaven, and then they write their own song that starts with an A minor chord... are they violating copyright of …

I mean, it was informed by both, but basically everyone thinks it's a good idea.

It's not copying open source code. If you learn an algorithm to balance a binary tree from reading GPL code, and then go use that algorithm in your own closed-source project, with …

I very often will let it suggest its thing and then tweak it to work how I want. It's like super auto-complete for me. If I can't remember how a specific pattern goes for some libr…

People in the technical preview get a 60 day free trial, but yes, after that, you'll have to pay.

This is kind of like saying that any programmer who has ever learned something from reading GPL code can only use that knowledge when writing GPL code. It's not literally copying t…

Source: I work on the copilot team.

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