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Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

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Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#361

Post by kyllo »

TchoBeer wrote: post #307
thayne wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An integer of the smallest denomination. For example, cents for the American dollar. And you probably would want to wrap it in a custom type to simplify displaying it properly, and maybe handle different currencies. If you language has a fixed point type that might also be appropriate, but that's pretty rare, and wouldn't work for currencies that aren't decimal (like the old british pound system).

What if I'm calculating sales tax? Can't use an integer anymore.

Yes, you can. There are algorithms for rounding up, rounding down, rounding to nearest, and banker's rounding, on the results of integer division. This is a solved problem.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#362

Post by adwn »

pjmlp wrote: post #329
adwn wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] no matter how many ISO revisions it will still have, lack of safety due to C copy-paste compatibility will never be fixed. Okay, no idea how that's relevant to "built-in decimal types" vs "library-defined decimal types", but if it makes you feel better, you can do the same in Rust or Python, two languages which are "modern" compared to COBOL, don't inherit C's flaws, and which enable defining custom number ty…

Rust I agree, Python not really as the language doesn't provide any way to keep invariants.

> Python not really as the language doesn't provide any way to keep invariants

Again, how is that relevant? If there's no way to enforce an invariant in custom data types, then there's also no way to enforce invariants in code using built-in data types.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#363

Post by reader_mode »

slumdev wrote: post #165
reader_mode wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2/ The boilerplate is what bothers me the most (as someone who believes in the declarative approach to software engineering). The future for programming and programming languages should be an attempt to step up to a higher level of abstraction, that has been historically the way we step up to higher levels of productivity. As applications get larger and code-bases grow significantly we need abstraction, not more boi…

Tools like xsd or T4 (in the .NET ecosystem) are great time-savers, but you would never consider directly modifying the code they generate. You would leave the generated code untouched (in case it ever needed to be generated again) and subclass it to make whatever changes you intend. I think Copilot is so unfortunate because it's not building abstractions and expecting you to override parts of them. It's acting as an…

Even there I feel like code generators are just a band aid around the fact that metaprogramming facilities suck. If you would never modify the generated code why generate in the first place. You could argue that stack traces are easier to follow but TBH generated code is rarely pretty in that regard as well.

For example I think F# idea of type providers > code generators.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#364

Post by reader_mode »

3pt14159 wrote: post #264
reader_mode wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2/ The boilerplate is what bothers me the most (as someone who believes in the declarative approach to software engineering). The future for programming and programming languages should be an attempt to step up to a higher level of abstraction, that has been historically the way we step up to higher levels of productivity. As applications get larger and code-bases grow significantly we need abstraction, not more boi…

I'm all for abstracting. I like Rails, for example. That said, it gets truly difficult to add or change stuff at the more abstract layers. For example, adding recursive querying to an existing ORM is tough . And on the rare occasion that there is a bug in the abstract layer, debugging that from the normal application code is also tough. I understand why some corporations prefer dumb boilerplate everywhere for some ap…

I would say ORM is tough with code gen or with metaprogramming because it maps two mismatched paradigms (OOP and relational) and tries to paper over the differences.

I do agree on the debugging aspect - especially in dynamic languages - metaprogramming stack traces can be really hard to follow.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#365

Post by shados »

jacurtis wrote: post #295
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 ruby one isn't outright terrible, but shows a very Americanized way to do street addresses that would probably become a problem later. As someone who has been coding up address storage and validation for the past week in my current job, that one really made me laugh. Mostly because it tries to simplify all the stuff I have been analyzing and mulling over for a week into a single auto-complete. Spoiler: The Gith…

> I don't really have a problem typing.

Im absolutely with you and want to upvote that part of the comment x100. Unfortunately it's often considered a fairly spicy opinions.

Entire frameworks (Rails) are built around the idea of typing as little as possible. Others can't even be mentioned without the topic of boilerplate/keystroke count causing a flame war (Redux).

A lot of engineers equate their value with the amount of lines they can pump out, so there's definitely a demand for tools like these.

There's also some legitimate stuff. There's a lot of very silly thing I have to google every time I do because I have a bad memory. It saves the step of googling. In a way, it was the same debate around autocomplete at the very beginning, but pushed to the next level. Autocomplete turned out to be a very good thing (even though new languages and tools keep coming out without it).

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#366

Post by amluto »

jacurtis wrote: post #295
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 ruby one isn't outright terrible, but shows a very Americanized way to do street addresses that would probably become a problem later. As someone who has been coding up address storage and validation for the past week in my current job, that one really made me laugh. Mostly because it tries to simplify all the stuff I have been analyzing and mulling over for a week into a single auto-complete. Spoiler: The Gith…

As the owner of a fairly normal American address that is either corrupted by the UPS address validation service, this is a good time to remind everyone: accept the address that your customer enters. If you offer a service to try to improve your customer’s address, keep in mind that it’s a value added service, it may be wrong, and you MUST test the flow in which your customer tells your service to accept the address as entered. And maybe even collect examples in which the address change is accepted to make sure it does something useful.

Vendors have lost sales to me because they were too incompetent to allow me to ship things to my actual address. Oops.

P.S. for the US, you need to offer at least two lines for the address part. And you need to accept really weird things that don’t seem to parse at all. I know people with addresses that have a PO Box number and a PMB number in the same address. Lose one and your mail gets lost.

P.P.S. If you offer discounted shipping using something like SurePost, make sure you let your customers pay a bit extra to use a real carrier. There are addresses that are USPS-only and there are addresses that work for all carriers except USPS (and SurePost, etc). Let your customer tell you how to ship to them. Do not second-guess your customer.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#367

Post by JamesAdir »

jacurtis wrote: post #295
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 ruby one isn't outright terrible, but shows a very Americanized way to do street addresses that would probably become a problem later. As someone who has been coding up address storage and validation for the past week in my current job, that one really made me laugh. Mostly because it tries to simplify all the stuff I have been analyzing and mulling over for a week into a single auto-complete. Spoiler: The Gith…

Isn't address storage and validation a solved problem? Why is it so complicated?

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#368

Post by shados »

nitrogen wrote: post #347
neutronicus wrote: post #341

Earlier 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…

Even in the 90s that was a solved problem in Visual Basic with autocomplete. That a lot of dev environments "lost" the ability to do it is mind boggling. With that said, doesn't Rubymine let you do that with autocomplete with the prompt giving you all the info you need? (I haven't done Ruby in a long time).

Still, having to look up the doc or run the code to figure out how to type it is orders of magnitude slower than proper auto complete (be it old school Visual Studio style, or something like Copilot).

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#369

Post by qayxc »

bencollier49 wrote: post #231
dgellow wrote: post #48

Another fascinating one, an "About me" page generated by copilot links to a real person's Github and twittter accounts! https://twitter.com/kylpeacock/status/1410749018183933952

That's bonkers. And the beauty of it is that now someone could realistically do a GDPR Erasure request on the Neural Net. I do hope that they're able to reverse data out.

Since the information is encoded in model weights, I doubt that erasure is even possible. Only post-retrieval filtering would be an option.

It only goes to show that intransparent black-box models have no place in the industry. The networks leak information left and right, because it's way too easy to just crawl the web and throw terabytes of unfiltered data at the training process.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#370

Post by aj3 »

edgyquant wrote: post #352
aj3 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree with this attitude. Many demos such as this one with Quake code are intentionally looking for (funny) outliers by bending the rules. But this is not how anyone would use the system in a real scenario (no one should select license by typing "// Copyright\t" and selecting whatever gets auto-completed), so it doesn't really demonstrate any new limits besides what you could reasonably expect anyway (and what's mentioned on the Copilot's landing page).

Basically, in order to fall victim for this "code theft" (or any other "footguns" from Twitter threads) you'd need to be actively working against all the best practices and common sense. If you actually use it as a productivity tool (the way it is marketed) you'll remain in full control of your code.

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