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Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

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Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#221

Post by giantg2 »

rjknight wrote: post #105
tyingq wrote: post #30

They 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…

> This product seems like it needs some more thought. Maybe a way to comment, flag, or otherwise call out bad output? Wait for your colleagues to use it, fix the bad code in the pull request, and wait for copilot to learn from the new training data you just provided!

But what about all the bad training data provided too?

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#222

Post by tyingq »

wodenokoto wrote: post #216
gentleman11 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

A lot of good answers, but they mostly relate to accounting types of problems (which granted, is what you need to do with currency data 99% of the time) I’d just add that if you are building a price prediction model, floats are probably what you need.

The example code is the start of an expense tracking tool...

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#223

Post by mdellavo »

louthy wrote: post #5

This is utterly damning. I have already instructed my team that Copilot can never be used for our projects. Compromising the product because of unknowable license demands isn't acceptable in the professional world of software engineering. But if we put the licensing to one side for a moment... 1/ Everything I've seen it generate so far is 'imperative hell'. It is practically a 'boilerplate generator'. That might be u…

Generating code has never been a problem for developers :)

I'd be more interested in a tool that notices patterns and boilerplate. It could offer a chance for generalization, abstraction or use of a common pattern from the codebase. This is of course much harder.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#224

Post by IncRnd »

bierjunge wrote: post #196
tyingq wrote: post #30

They 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.

That's for the best. We don't want products that pretend to write code for us, while copying other's code without attribution and that may not even work.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#226

Post by foobiekr »

tyingq wrote: post #30

They 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…

Copilot appears to be “give more efficiency leverage to the worst kind of coder.”

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#228

Post by cjaybo »

aj3 wrote: post #124
danparsonson wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...may not always work, or even make sense... Naively, as someone who just heard of this - that sounds worse than useless. If you can't trust its output and have to verify every line it produces and that the combination of those lines does what you wanted, surely it's quicker just to write the code yourself?

Then write the code yourself. It's not like you're forced to use this demo.

Not exactly a confidence-inspiring reply from someone who just identified themselves as representing the project here!

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#229

Post by ajayyy »

SamBam wrote: post #153
Thomashuet wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the indentation of the first comment and the lack of preprocessor show it's not copied from this code directly but from Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overv... ) So It could be that the Quake source code is not part of the training set but the Wikipedia version is.

While I strongly doubt they would use Wikipedia as a training set, has anyone done a search of GitHub code to see if other projects have copied-and-pasted that function from Wikipedia into their more-permissive codebases?

It is probably based off GPT-3 with a layer on top trained for programming specifically, like what is done with AI dungeon.
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