GitHub Copilot • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Copilot

#561

Post by milofeynman » Tue, Jun 29, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #73

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #59

This is very impressive! OpenAI’s tech opens an ethical Pandora’s box: 1. It’s clear that the raw inputs to all of OpenAI’s outputs originated with real, human creativity. 2. So, in a sense, OpenAI is laundering creativity. It reads in creative works, does complicated (and, yes, groundbreaking) transformations, and produces an output that is hard to trace to any particular source. 3. Yet, isn’t that effectively what…

What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the box? Maybe unfair competition from having very good tools compared to other programmers, or havin irresponsibly shallow understanding of what the produced code does?

There are some really weird licensing problems. Like does your code license say they can use the your code to train AIs that then reproduce very similar code to you but with no attribution etc in someone else's codebase.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#562

Post by Bayart » Tue, Jun 29, 2021, 6:56 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #512

inimino wrote: post #385

I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it…

I think that there's a division between "productive" developers and "meticulous" developers. I know that I'm not the first one. My best days are when I'm removing code. I'm very wary from using frameworks and huge libraries. I learned few frameworks and libraries, I've chosen few that correspond to my style and I'm very careful when it comes to adapting new ones. I prefer to spend a week coding auth layer rather than…

I'm the same. I tend to get derailed on making my code philosophically "right" and aesthetically "soothing" (for lack of a better word), even when it doesn't obviously matter to the scope of the project, rather than just it to the point where it _works_ by some operation of the Holy Spirit. Unsuprisingly I'm the "is he working ?" guy (I may fit in the attention disorder category that was a point of discussion in the confidence thread[1] the other day). But at least I'm not the "his code broke our shit again" guy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27533988

Re: GitHub Copilot

#563

Post by throwawayboise » Tue, Jun 29, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

Can I use it in Emacs?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#564

Post by drusepth » Tue, Jun 29, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

asdfman123 wrote: post #357

Joeri wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation has always produced an increase in jobs so far, although sometimes in a disruptive way. I consider this like the switch from instruction-level programming to compiled languages, a level of abstraction added that buys a large increase in productivity and makes projects affordable that weren’t affordable before. If anything this will probably lead to a boom in development work. But there’s a bunch of low ski…

I feel like the inevitable path will be: 1) AI makes really good code completion to make juniors way more productive. Senior devs benefit as well. 2) AI gets so good that it becomes increasingly hard to get a job as a junior--you just need senior devs to supervise the AI. This creates a talent pipeline shortage and screws over generations that want to become devs, but we find ways to deal with it. 3) Another major ad…

I could also see an alternative to #2 where it becomes increasingly hard to get a job as a senior dev when companies can just hire juniors to produce probably-good code and slightly more QA to ensure correctness.

You'd definitely still need some seniors in this scenario, but it feels possible that tooling like this might reduce their value-per-cost (and have the opposite effect on a larger pool of juniors).

As another comment said here, "if you can generate great python code but can't upgrade the EC2 instance when it runs out of memory, you haven't replaced developers; you've just freed up more of their time" (paraphrased).

Re: GitHub Copilot

#565

Post by dec0dedab0de » Tue, Jun 29, 2021, 7:00 PM UTC

pvorb wrote: post #548

throwaway675309 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean you say this, but you and most likely the majority of programmers rely on dozens of repositories, packages and libraries with likely zero deep understanding of it (and at the very least haven't read the source code of ) so I don't really understand the difference here. The advantage of something like this is that instead of having to go to stack overflow or any number of reference sites and copy pasta it can j…

I really wonder who those folks copy-pasting from Stack Overflow all day are. I only rarely find pieces of code that I can copy-paste. Typically Stack Overflow only gives me an idea of how to solve something, but incorporating that idea into my code base is still not trivial.

A few weeks ago someone on a call said "we all know that programming is mostly copy and pasting anyway" A few people laughed, but I said that if I catch myself copy and pasting then I know that something is very wrong. It was kind of awkward, but I didn't like my job being trivialized by people who never really did it.

It would be like if I said plumbing or auto repair is just watching youtube videos and going to lowes. Just because I've managed to do a few simple things, doesn't mean I'm in a position to belittle an entire profession.

That said, I am also shocked by how many full time developers don't take the time to understand their own code. Let alone the libraries they use.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#566

Post by anyonecancode » Tue, Jun 29, 2021, 7:02 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #385

I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it…

> I wonder how long it will be until someone sets up the rest of the feedback loop and starts putting up github projects made of nothing but code from this tool, and it can start to feed on itself.

This is my actual hoped-for endgame for the ad based internet. At some point Twitter, FB, etc will be exclusively populated by bots that post ads, and bots that simulate engagement with those ads to drive up perceived value of advertising. They'll use AI to post comments that are really just ads or inflammatory keyword strings to drive further "engagement." The tech companies will rake in billions and billions of dollars in ad revenue, we'll tax all of it and use it to create flying cars, high speed rail, and an ad-free internet closed off to all non-humans. Occasionally a brave ML researcher may venture out into the "internet" to take field notes on the evolution of the adbot and spambot ecosystem.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#567

Post by jokethrowaway » Tue, Jun 29, 2021, 7:04 PM UTC

anyonecancode wrote: post #566

inimino wrote: post #385

I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it…

> I wonder how long it will be until someone sets up the rest of the feedback loop and starts putting up github projects made of nothing but code from this tool, and it can start to feed on itself. This is my actual hoped-for endgame for the ad based internet. At some point Twitter, FB, etc will be exclusively populated by bots that post ads, and bots that simulate engagement with those ads to drive up perceived valu…

The most unlikely thing you mentioned is that we will be able to tax huge corporations.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#568

Post by Florin_Andrei » Tue, Jun 29, 2021, 7:04 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #385

I'm amazed to see how positive the overall response is to this idea. Almost as if programmers think that writing programs is the worst part of the job and ready to be automated away. As someone more aligned with the Dijkstra perspective, this seems to me like one of the single worst ideas I've ever seen in this domain. We already have IDEs and other tools leading to an increase in boilerplate and the acceptance of it…

In the (now not very) long run, programming was a job meant for computers, anyway. The future will look back at "programming" the way we now look at Charles Dickens characters toiling in soot-filled factories. It's not what people are best at, and it looks like soon there will be better ways to accomplish this job.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#569

Post by marcodiego » Tue, Jun 29, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

Consider the following chain of events:

  - I write GPL'ed code.

  - Someone uses this tool to develop a proprietary solution. 

  - I later prove that the tool generated code that is equal to mine.

Now the code of the proprietary solution must be GPL licensed! Cool!

How I'd defend myself? I'd only use such a tool if there are guarantees of the licenses of the code it was trained on. Without such guarantees, it is just too risky.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#570

Post by krzyk » Tue, Jun 29, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

I wonder why there is no example in java. It is one of the most popular languages (drfinatelly more popular than ruby or Go, and on par with Javascript and python).