Based on all the negative comments so far, and based on this website's aptitude at predicting the viability of a product, it really seems like Copilot is bound to be a success.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
351–360 of 672 posts
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#352Even includes the commented out code. Clearly Copilot has gained a deep understanding of code and is not simply the slowest way to make a terrible, opaque search engine ever!
Does GitHub Copilot write perfect code? No. GitHub Copilot tries to understand your intent and to generate the best code it can, but the code it suggests may not always work, or even make sense. While we are working hard to make GitHub Copilot better, code suggested by GitHub Copilot should be carefully tested, reviewed, and vetted, like any other code. As the developer, you are always in charge. https://copilot.gith…
It’s quite literally stealing code from repos under a GPL license and suggesting them to people regardless of license (if any) they’re using. I do not see how this is legal.
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of my job is thinking hard about how to do [X], incidentally needing to remember how to do [trivial thing Y] and looking it up. Like, I did it before, remember that it was trivial, I just forget the snippet and I have to break focus to look it up - often by scrolling through my own commit history to try and find the time I did [trivial thing Y] four months ago. I do kind of wish I could automate that. Skipping…
It would be nice if there were a way to automate the "remembering what that one function is called and what order the parameters are in" portion of my job. IME the best thing for this is looking at the method listing in the docs for the classes I'm using. E.g. for Ruby, it's usually looking at the methods in Enumerable, Enumerator, Array, or Hash. Or I'll drop a binding.pry into the function, run it, and then type ls…
this sounds super interesting, is there a video or upload somewhere that i can watch this being performed in real time?
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but if you have to audit every suggestion to see if it violates copyright laws that's not a particularly useful tool.
Depends. If you find useful code on Github, Stack Overflow or anywhere else in the internet, you still need to check whether it is suitable with your licensing or not.
If you find useful code on Github or StackOverflow, you can check for the license directly there, or you can try to find where it was copied from, and look for a license there.
Copilot isn't copying, it's regurgitating patterns from its training dataset. The result may be subject to a license you don't know about, but modified enough that you won't find the original source. The result can be a blend of multiple snippets with varying licenses. And there's no way to extract attribution from Copilot - DNN models can give you an output for your input, they can't tell you which exact parts of the training dataset were used to generate that output.
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#355They 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?
Create a Money class, or use one off the shelf. It should store the currency and the amount. There are a few popular ways of storing amounts (integer cents, fixed decimal) but it should not be exposed outside the Money class.
There's plenty of good advice in this subthread for how to represent currency inside your Money abstraction, but whatever you do, keep it hidden. If you pass around numbers as currency values you will be in for a world of pain as your application grows.
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#356Now, consider quake is GPL'ed. Any proprietary software using such code will have to bow to the license terms.
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#357This 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…
> programming languages should be an attempt to step up to a higher level of abstraction Adding abstraction buries complexity. If all you do is keep adding more abstractions, you end up with an overcomplicated, inefficient mess. Which is part of why application sizes are so bloated today. People just keep adding layers, as long as they have room for more of them. Everything gets less efficient and definitely not bett…
> Adding abstraction buries complexity. If all you do is keep adding more abstractions, you end up with an overcomplicated, inefficient mess. Which is part of why application sizes are so bloated today. People just keep adding layers, as long as they have room for more of them. Everything gets less efficient and definitely not better.
Presumably you're writing code in binary then? This is a non-argument, because there's evidence that it's worked. Computers were first programmed with switches and punch cards, then tape, then assembly, then low level languages like C, then memory managed languages etc.
Abstraction works when side-effects are controlled. Composition is what we're after, but we must compose the bigger bits from smaller bits that don't have surprises in. This works well in functional programming, a good example would be monadic composition: monads remove the boilerplate of dealing with asynchrony, value availability, list iteration, state management, environment management, etc. Languages that have first-class support for these tend to have significantly less boilerplate.
The efficiency argument is also off too. Most software engineering teams would trade some efficiency for more reliable and bug free code. At some point (and I would argue we're way past it) programs become too complex for the human brain to comprehend, and that's where bugs come from. That's why we're overdue an abstraction lift.
Tools like Copilot almost tacitly agree, because they're trying to provide a way of turning the abstract into the real, but then all you see is the real, not the abstract. Continuing the assault on our weak and feeble grey matter.
I spent the early part of my career obsessing over performance on crippled architectures (Playstation 3D engine programmer). If I continued to write applications now like I did then, nothing would go out the door and my company wouldn't exist.
Of course there are times when performance matters. But the vast majority of code needs to be correct first, not the most optimal it can be for the architecture.
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#358Almost feels like a developer cultural thing to hate on something like this. If you dont like it, dont use it. If you dont want your team using it, become senior and then set the rules.
Kinda seems like maybe there's some level of insecurity at play here in the criticism. Like a "I coulda came up with that but its a bad idea" type of hater philosophy.
Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone asks how to handle money the best answer is integers or fixed precision decimals. There may be a valid case for using floats, but if someone asks they shouldn't be using floats. Also I'm hard pressed to come up with a case where floats would work. Can you give an example?
> Can you give an example? The answer is the same as _any_ time you should use floats: where you don't care about answers being exact, either (1) because calculation speed is more important than exactness, or (2) because your inputs or computations involve uncertainty anyway, so it doesn't matter. This is more likely to be the case in, say, physics than it is in finance, but it's not impossible in the latter. For exa…
You can't use a generic decimal type in that case either! You need a special-purpose type that rounds exactly matching the conventions you're following. This is necessarily use-, culture-, and probably currency-specific.