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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#681

Post by toxik »

mitjak wrote: post #639
cbsks wrote: post #398

I don't think we need to start looking for new career paths yet. This example has a few bugs and it took me longer to track them down than it would have to write it myself: #!/bin/bash # List all python source files which are more than 1KB and contain the word "copilot". find . \ -name "*.py" \ -size +1000 \ -exec grep -n copilot {}\; "-exec grep -n copilot {}\;" needs to have a space before the semicolon otherwise f…

the main argument against Copilot for me. it takes longer to grok existing code than just write it from ground up.

This is actually a pretty important thing to understand. It can be better to rewrite than fix an existing mess. It’s similar to construction work in that sense: if you rebuild, you know what’s inside the walls.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#682

Post by markstos »

Software automating people out of jobs spares no one, even the people writing the software.

If this improves developer efficiency by 10%, 10% fewer developers are required.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#683

Post by karsinkk »

I still haven't gotten my hands on the Beta yet, so I'm not sure how it's going to be deployed; But does anyone know if Copilot is going to be accessible through some online IDE (or) is it going to be through an extension for VS Code/other editors? If it's the latter, I hope the extension doesn't eat up all my CPU!

Re: GitHub Copilot

#684

Post by tsbinz »

richardanaya wrote: post #635
iandanforth wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're using the word "memorized" in a very loose way.

How is it loose? Both in the colloquial sense and in the sense it is used in machine learning it is fitting. https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2020/12/20/lmmem/ is a post demonstrating it.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#685

Post by amelius »

heavyset_go wrote: post #671
amelius wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Copilot phone home?

Yes, and with the code you're writing/generating.

This obviously sucks.

Can't companies write code that runs on customer's premises these days? Are they too afraid somebody will extract their deep learning model? I have no other explanation.

And the irony is that these companies are effectively transferring their own fears to their customers.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#687

Post by jay_kyburz »

croes wrote: post #368
natfriedman wrote: post #345

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…

Fair use doesn't exist in every country, so it's US only?

Yes, my partner likes to remind me we don't have it here in Australia. You could never write a search engine here. You can't write code that scrapes websites.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#688

Post by billti »

iandanforth wrote: post #619
fzaninotto wrote: post #40

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?

The landing page for it states the below, so hopefully not too much of an issue (though I guess some folks may find a 0.1% risk high).

> GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#689

Post by jbay808 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #366
anthropodie wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I'm skeptical. The envelope of "programming" will continue to shift as things get more and more complex. Your mother-in-law is not going to install Copilot and start knocking out web apps. Tools like this allow programmers to become more productive, wh…

Decreasing the price of programming work doesn't necessarily mean decreasing the wages of programmers, any more than decreasing the price of food implies decreasing the wages of farmers.

But on the other hand, it also can mean that.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#690

Post by asperous »

markstos wrote: post #682

Software automating people out of jobs spares no one, even the people writing the software. If this improves developer efficiency by 10%, 10% fewer developers are required.

Or development cost lowers by 10% keeping salaries the same, and more work that was previously too expensive to do is now feasible.
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