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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#791
This would be awesome for terraform! It could potentially derive the details of SSL, k8s, Load Balancers, and databases for each cloud from comments

Re: GitHub Copilot

#793

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…

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

>Pack it all up, boys, programming's over. Hello, AI.

I don't know, cranking out some suggestion for a function is not the same as writing a complete module / application.

Take the job of a translator, you would say the job would go extinct with all the advances in autotranslation? here it says that 'employment of interpreters and translators is projected to grow 20 percent from 2019 to 2029, much faster than the average for all occupations' [1]. You still need a human being to clear up all of the ambiguities of languages.

Maybe the focus of the stuff we do will change, though; but on the other hand, we do tend to get a lots of changes in programming; it goes with the job. maybe we will get to do more code reviews of what was cranked out by some model.

However, within a decade it might be harder to get an entry level job as a programmer. I am not quite sure if i should suggest my profession to my kids, we might get a more competitive environment in some not so distant future.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/interpreters...

Re: GitHub Copilot

#794
post #421

The example in the hero animation has a bug. The ${text} may not be correctly URL-encoded, which would make the body invalid. And because this sort of feature encourages people to blindly trust the machine and not think about what they're doing this error is much less likely to be caught. Personally I think this whole class of feature only offers trivial short-term efficiency gains at the expense of long-term profess…

I could see it becoming a liability, and projects may start using the fact that they don't use it as a promo thing in their marketing.

> Choose library.js for your next secure project!

> * Military-grade encryption!

> * Industry best-practices!

> * Extensively-tested codebase!

> * No Github Copilot!

This seems to me like someone had a cool idea for using GPT and wanted to experiment with it, but then Microsoft threw money at the marketing people and forced it to become a commercial product.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#795
Every time AI encroaches on human territory it cannot be changed back. Don’t be fooled by the innocent nature of these early encroachments. At a certain point life on earth was just a bunch of amino acids…

Re: GitHub Copilot

#796
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With VSCode, Github and a perhaps a little bit of help from OpenAI, Microsoft is poised to dominate the developer productivity tools market in the near future. I wouldn't be surprised to see really good static analysis and automated code review tools coming out of these teams very soon.

And still Windows is a mess.

Windows is a mess and I hope it will stay that way.

The real strength of Windows is backwards compatibility, especially dealing with proprietary software. Its messiness is a relic of the way things were done in the past, it is also the reason why my 20+ year old binary still runs. And it does without containers or full VMs.

I much prefer developing on Linux (I still miss the Visual Studio debugger), but different platform, different philosophy.

Note: I don't know much about mainframes. I heard they really are the champions of backwards compatibility. But I don't think the same principles are applicable to consumer machines.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#797
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…

I read this as a criticism of bash

This doesn’t really have anything to do with bash, just the ‘find’ posix utility. But I agree that the arguments not intuitive.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#798
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…

It also doesn't list the files. It prints all matching lines (and their line numbers), without the corresponding filenames.

You are right! I missed that. The number of bugs to lines of code ratio is approaching one.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#799
post #752

> 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…

Well, it should be possible to crowdsource training a FOSS version, right? There should be a SETI-at-home for training neural networks. I would donate some GPU power for sure. SETI@home achieved 50 times the computing power of the world's largest supercomputer [0], so it might actually be the only way to train the future GPT4 or GPT5. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home#Statistics

At the moment crowd-sourcing ML training doesn't work very well because updates to the model's weights have to be shared between all of the nodes in the computation periodically. Giant models tend to be trained on clusters with very fast interconnects for this reason.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#800
post #639
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.

Is that your main argument against Stack Overflow? Because for some percentage of people the use cases will be similar (that is, learning some quick ways to do something that they can then explore and learn about).

Sometimes resources like these are used as references and the solution is used as is. Sometimes they are used as a survey, and it's more like asking a librarian "I want to learn more about how to X" and having them give a short exposition and point out some sources to study. It's important not to let you view of it's usefulness as one type of resource bleed into your view of how useful it might be for the other.

As a learning resource, this is very interesting.

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