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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

611–620 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot

#611
I worry about auto-complete on a more philosophical level. I’ve noticed with gmail that it’ll often suggest it’s way of either replying to an email or completing a sentence even though I’d never actually use those words in that situation, simply because it’s easier.

It’s a pretty bad feedback loop that robs us of our independent thought by way of falling victim to laziness, a fundamental human weakness. You can imagine something where in this case the code autocomplete is so large that you really want to make that autocompletion work, even if you know it’s not elegant or possibly even correct code… or maybe it’s just repetitive and not abstracted well, but here it is autocompleted and done so why would you fight that?

If we continue abstracting more and more of this way, based upon datasets that are averaged across everyone, we lose the individual in favor of the masses, bringing us all down to a common denominator.

If we must lose our humanity to the machine, I’d at least like to see an autocomplete from Peter Norvig’s code, or writing from particularly effective communicators or famous authors.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#612
This would help me tremendously. I don't code frequently--a few times a month at best. I find myself having to google syntax constantly to write basic programs. If I want to write a simple python command line program that parses input, for example, I can guarantee I'm going to be opening tabs to figure out the syntax. It would be great if something like Copilot could help me stay in my editor.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#613

Does this solve the right problem? Getting some code on the page has rarely been the expensive part of building something. Indeed, some long-ago experience with code generators suggests that making it easy to create code makes many problems worse down the line.

This is my concern. This could end up generating great swathes of code that no one understands, so that when it breaks it takes much longer to fix.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I invite you to try automating this and let us know what happens. Try creating, let’s say 1000 accounts and try liking or posting and see what happens. I’ve seen that system at work and doubt you’d get very far. More than that, you misunderstand how advertisers prioritise their money. They pay for outcomes. If they notice that over the past couple of months they’ve been receiving mostly bot traffic, they stop adverti…

> More than that, you misunderstand how advertisers prioritise their money. They pay for outcomes.

How they verify those outcomes, however, gets interesting. See, for example, College Humour going under due to inflated engagement metrics fed to them by Facebook video.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general: (1) training ML systems on public data is fair use (2) the output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler. On the training question specifically, you can find OpenAI's position, as submitted to the USPTO here: https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/OpenAI_R... We expect that IP and AI will be an interesting policy discussion around the world in the coming years, and we're eager to…

How do you guarantee it doesn't copy a GPL-ed function line-by-line?

Surprised not to see more mention of this. It would make sense for an AI to "copy" existing solutions. In the real world, we use clean room to avoid this.

In the AI world, unless all GPL (etc.) code is excluded from the training data, it's inevitable that some will be "copied" into other code.

Where lawyers decide what "copy" means.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#616
post #548

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.

I had a colleague who once tried to copy-paste a Scala snippet into Python code and came to complain that it doesn't work. We're no longer colleagues.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like you should be working on libraries instead of products then?!

So you're basically saying that if you're not a shitty programmer, you shouldn't be working directly on products? Are you a Windows developer or something?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pack it all up, boys, programming's over. Hello, AI. Anyone want to hire me to teach your grandma how to use the internet?

Few days back, Sam Altman tweeted this "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects" And I was like yeah I gotta start preparing for next decade.

I’m not sure why it’s unexpected when it’s essentially a reframing of Baumol's cost disease. Any work that does not see a productivity increase becomes comparatively more expensive over time.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#619

I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like it's reading my mind. It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone. I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give better na…

What is the licensing for code generated in this way? GPT-3 has memorized hundreds of texts verbatim and can be prompted to regurgitate that text. Has this model only been trained on code that doesn't require attribution as part of the license?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#620
This seems great for noobs or dunces to get code compiling, but I hope nobody with talent uses it. It would be like Hemingway using Grammarly.
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