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Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

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Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#281

Post by biztos »

louthy wrote: post #99
GlennS wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to agree with you, and actually I'm rather mistrustful of even basic autocomplete ever since a colleague caught me using it without even looking at the screen! But I wonder... Is this a difference of programmer culture? I think there are people who write successful computer programs for successful businesses without delving into the details. Without considering all the things that might go wrong. Without…

> What would they do with this? Not get a job working for me ;) More seriously, when I think back to when I was first learning programming - in the heady days of 1985 - I would often copy listings out of computing magazines, make a mistake whilst doing it, and then have no idea what was wrong. The only way was to check character by character. I didn't have the deeper understanding yet, and so I couldn't contribute to…

I also typed stuff in from magazines in the 80’s, and my fast but imperfect typing really helped me learn programming: I often had to stop, go back to the first page, and actually read the damned thing in order to make it work.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#282

Post by dgb23 »

adriancr wrote: post #247
more_corn wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a good idea that is missing from nearly every machine learning product. How do you back propagate lessons from user interaction into future training of the model? It can be done, I can't think of a place I've seen it done though.

It would be viewed as IP theft by most companies to upload private code to this for use by others

It would have to be in the same range of what is suggested, small patches and opt in.

If snippets are a legal problem, then Copilot is problematic by default, since it suggests code that may or may not be sourced from free software.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#283

Post by Supermancho »

slver wrote: post #87
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…

> 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…

> Everyone's self-preservation instincts kicking in to attack Copilot is kinda amusing to watch

Nobody is threatened by this, assuredly. As with IDEs giving us autocomplete, duplication detection, etc this can only be helpful. There is an infinite amount of code to write for the foreseeable future, so it would be great if copilot had more utility.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#284

Post by rgbrenner »

So this makes it official... this post[0] and the comments on the announcement[1] concerned about licensing issues were absolutely correct... and this product has the possibility of getting you sued if you use it.

Unfortunately for GitHub, there's no turning back the clocks. Even if they fix this, everyone that uses it has been put on notice that it copies code verbatim and enables copyright infringement.

Worse, there's no way to know if the segment it's writing for you is copyrighted... and no way for you to comply with license requirements.

Nice proof of concept... but who's going to touch this product now? It's a legal ticking time bomb.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27687450

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#285

Post by sbr464 »

ticviking wrote: post #251
foobiekr wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not really sure that type of tool could really be anything else. How would a model become aware of all of the various edge cases that depend on which SQL database you use or differences in language versions over time?

Can it submit pull requests to itself with if/else boolean logic/hacks?

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#286

Post by marcosdumay »

gentleman11 wrote: post #94
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 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?

Each country has a law or something similar that states how people should calculate over prices.

The usual is to use decimal numbers with fixed precision (the actual precision varies from one country to another), and I don't know of any modern exception. But as late as the 90's there were non-decimal monetary systems around the world, so if you are saving any historic data, you may need something more complex.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#287

Post by shadowgovt »

anyonecancode wrote: post #101

I think copilot is solving the wrong problem. A future of programming where we're higher up the abstraction tree is absolutely something I want to see. I am taking advantage of that right now -- I'm a decently good programmer, in the sense that I can write useful, robust, reliable software, but I'm pretty high up the stack, working in languages like Java or even higher up the stack that free me from worrying about th…

A taller abstraction tree makes tradeoffs of specialization: the deeper the abstractions, the more one has to understand when the abstractions break or when one chooses to use them in novel ways.

This is something I'm interested in regarding this approach... When it works as intended, it's basically shortening the loop in the dev's brain from idea to code-on-screen without adding an abstraction layer that someone has to understand in the future to interpret the code. The result is lower density, so it might take longer to read... Except what we know about linguistics suggests there's a balance between density and redundancy for interpreting information (i.e. the bottleneck may not be consuming characters, but fitting the consumed data into a usable mental model).

I think the jury's out on whether something like this or the approach of dozens of DSLs and problem-domain-shifting abstractions will ultimately result in either more robust or more quickly-written code.

But on the topic of types, I'm right there with you, and I think a copilot for a dense type forest (i.e. something that sees you writing a {name: string; address: string} struct and says "Do you want to use MailerInfo here?") would be pretty snazzy.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#288

Post by mnky9800n »

amelius wrote: post #270
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…

What are the statistics of Copilot based on a validation set? How often does it get code right? I want to see hard statistics, not 4 hand-picked examples.

That's what I thought when I first started working in text generation too. It's highly annoying people pitch their successful models with hand picked examples. It's literally the opposite of STATISTICAL learning imo.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#290

Post by OskarS »

arksingrad wrote: post #211
thinkingemote wrote: post #3

From 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

I guess this confirms John Carmack to be an AI

Apparently Carmack was not the original author, the origin I believe is SGI somewhere in the deep dark 90s.
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