Phew! Are jobs are safe!
snickers
Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
191–200 of 672 posts
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#192With apologies to Martin Niemöller[1]:
First the automation came for the farmers, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a farmer.
Then the automation came for the factory workers, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a factory worker.
Then the automation came for the accountants, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a accountant.
Then the automation came for me (a programmer) —
and there was no one left to speak for me.
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awesome summary and thanks for trying it for the rest of us! Copilot sounded terrible in the press release. The idea that a computer is going to pick the right code for you (from comments, no less) is really just completely nuts. The belief that it could be better than human-picked code is really way off. You bring up a really important point. When you use a tool like Copilot (or copypasta of any kind), you are intro…
Stuff like Copilot makes programming worse and more difficult, not better and easier. Copilot makes programming worse and more difficult if you're aiming for a specific set of coding values and style that Copilot doesn't generate (yet?). If Copilot generates the sort of code that you would write, and it does for a lot of people, then it's definitely no worse (or better) than copying something from SO. The author of a…
I don't think they work out past trivial applications. Any non trivial app requires an understanding of a much larger part of the codebase than a tool like Copilot is looking at at any one time.
Copilot does not understand the code in toto and is therefore really useless for debugging (70% of all coding) and probably useless for anything other than very simple parts of an app.
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And these are the hand picked examples. This product seems like it needs some more thought. Everyone's self-preservation instincts kicking in to attack Copilot is kinda amusing to watch. Copilot is not supposed to produce excellent code. It's not even supposed to produce final code, period. It produces suggestions to speed you up, and it's on you to weed out stupid shit, which is INEVITABLE. As a side note, Excel a…
So how do you know if the code that Copilot regurgitates is almost a 1:1 verbatim copy of some GPL'ed code or not ? Because if you don't realize this, you might be introducing GPL'ed code into your propiertary code base, and that might end up forcing you to distribute all of the other code in that code base as GPL'ed code as well. Like, I get that Copilot is really cool, and that software engineers like to use the la…
The solution might be simpler than we think,just tell the algorithm
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copilot is a tool. If you take copilot's suggestions uncritically and push them to Github, - that's on you.
Then name a usage of the tool that is legally sound. I can not think of one.
Code completion that can suggest the whole line instead of a single word (e.g. often it guesses function parameters and various math operations when you haven't even typed function name yet).
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#196They have 4 hand picked examples on their homepage: https://copilot.github.com/ One has the issue with form encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697884 The python example is using floats for currency, in an expense tracking context. The golang one uses a word ("value") for a field name that's been a reserved word since SQL-1999. It will work in popular open source SQL databases, but I believe it would bom…
The Golang example would not even compile, because `sql` is not imported.
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#197They have 4 hand picked examples on their homepage: https://copilot.github.com/ One has the issue with form encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697884 The python example is using floats for currency, in an expense tracking context. The golang one uses a word ("value") for a field name that's been a reserved word since SQL-1999. It will work in popular open source SQL databases, but I believe it would bom…
> The python example is using floats for currency. Dumb question, but what is the proper way to handle currency? Custom number objects? Strings for any number of decimal places?
Someone already mentioned there's a `decimal` package in Python that's better suited for currency. Back when I was a Java developer we used this: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/math/BigDecim...
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's up to the end user to accept the suggestions.
And it is completely impossible for the user to do so. So, the tool is worthless if you want to use it legally.
Doubtful.
You can be almost certain it’s being widely used or will be widely used shortly.
The conversations around copilot are eerily similar to the conversations around the first autocomplete tools
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#199From the GPLv2 licensed code: https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/c... copilot repeats it word for word almost, including comments, and adds an MIT like license up the top
It's up to the end user to accept the suggestions.
As someone who does code reviews the thought the developer didn’t code the code submitted to be merged never would cross my mind.
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#200Phew! Are jobs are safe!
though our companies will one day be competing with product manufacturers in China who get to use it to its fullest