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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#741

Post by bruce343434 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #330
freedomben wrote: post #257

As a programmer who specializes in security, I worry that many of the common errors that people make will get picked up the AI and recommended to new users. It looks like it gets reinforcement from the code that the user selects. In my experience the majority of developers make security errors, so how is the algorithm going to learn not to do it the wrong way when it's learning from bad code and getting reinforced by…

Most programmers are pretty careless and just get something to "work." Maybe the first generation of this sort of completion will be bad, but I have full faith it will be better than the average human at avoiding security issues as early as the next generation.

faith based on what? So far in my experience AI projects tend to peter out.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#742

Post by ALittleLight »

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…

Tools like email, instant messenger, and online calendars made secretaries much more productive which increased demand for the skills. Wait...

Replacement of programmers will follow these lines. New tools, like copilot (haven't tried, but will soon), new languages, libraries, better IDEs, stack overflows, Google, etc will make programming easier and more productive. One programmer will do the work that ten did. That a hundred did. You'll learn to become an effective programmer from a bootcamp (already possible - I know someone who went from bootcamp to Google), then from a few tutorials will.

Just like the secretary's role in the office was replaced by everyone managing their own calendars and communications the programmer will be replaced by one or two tremendously productive folks and your average business person being able to generate enough code to get the job done.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#743

Post by koolhaas »

visarga wrote: post #631
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet, isn’t that effectively what human brains do too? If I want to watch a bunch of movies, I have to pay the theater for each movie, or pay netflix, or whatever. The screenplay I write afterwards belongs to me, but the learning process involved me paying for access to others' work. That's what's often missing here. But at the same time, if you train on legally public data, there's no 'theater' to be paid. (Often,…

> Maybe we'll start seeing licenses with a section saying "not for use as training data for commercial models." Considering that the impact of a single example is extremely small in training a model, and that it is trained on an ungodly amount of examples, then I wonder if the effort of forbidding its use has any real benefits.

I would change your question from “does it have any real benefits” to “does it have a practical effect on the model”

Benefits to me are clear: giving a developer choice over how their source code is used with for-profit, opaque, next generation ML models.

But yes, drop in the ocean in terms of the full data set. But that shouldn’t be an excuse to remove user choice.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#744

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #454
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 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…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot

#745

Post by varispeed »

feross wrote: post #306
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…

I’ve also been using the Alpha for around two weeks. I'm impressed by how GitHub Copilot seems to know exactly what I want to type next. Sometimes it even suggests code I was about to look up, such as a snippet to pick a random hex color or completing an array with all the common image mime-types. Copilot is particularly helpful when working on React components where it makes eerily accurate predictions. I see techno…

I have been using the Alpha for two weeks as well. I'm impressed by how GitHub Copilot appears to know exactly what I want to type. Not often it even suggests code I was going to peek, such as a snippet to a context menu or completing an array with all Romanian postcodes. Copilot is particularly helpful when working on Angular components where it makes mesmerising predictions. I see technology like Copilot becoming an essential part of the programmer's tool belt similar to IDE autocomplete for many people and programmers.

I also see it changing the way that people and programmers document code. With Copilot if you write a very picturesque comment before jumping into the implementation, it does a mucho mejor trabajo de sugerir the right code, sometimes it is even writing the entire function para ti.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#746

Post by varispeed »

billti wrote: post #688
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?

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.

Did they have a license to use public source code as a data source for data set though?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#747

Post by mssundaram »

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…

It sounds similar to the editor plugin called TabNine

Re: GitHub Copilot

#748

Post by leotaku »

MathYouF wrote: post #737
leotaku wrote: post #735

> If the technical preview is successful, our plan is to build a commercial version of GitHub Copilot in the future. This may be the first time that a proprietary coding tool offers such a great value preposition that I am actually interested in trying it out and potentially even paying for it. It's also a bit concerning that this will probably be extremely hard, if not impossible, to create an FOSS version of this t…

Says the person who likely owns a washing machine, sink connected to plumbing, microwave, stove, lighters, clothes made with a sewing machine, ect. ect. GPT-3 will take way less time to make a good substitute that costs the power of compute than other historical time saving technologies. Unlike other historic technologies, they pretty much spell out exactly how to do it, and own no patents related to its creation. I…

I see your point, but aren't you making me into a bit of a straw man? When did I say that I was some open-access Luddite who won't use any technology that they can't build themselves. I just like the current state of programming, where I can productively build new and exciting things without having to rely on a lot of proprietary libraries or tools. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#749

Post by aerospace_guy »

azinman2 wrote: post #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 imagi…

> feedback loop that robs us of our independent thought by way of falling victim to laziness

This was my first thought when I saw this. I intentionally don't use predictive text whenever I can to preserve whatever originality I have left.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#750

Post by Animats »

anthropodie wrote: post #335
asdfman123 wrote: post #309

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.

"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"

I've been saying something like that for a while, but my form was "If everything you do goes in and out over a wire, you can be replaced." By a computer, a computer with AI, or some kind of outsourcing.

A question I've been asking for a few years, pre-pandemic, is, when do we reach "peak office"? Post-pandemic, we probably already have. This has huge implications for commercial real estate, and, indeed, cities.

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