381–390 of 672 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I accept most of the concerns, it's better than your comment suggests. I see some promise for it as a tool for reminding you of a technique or inspiring you to a different approach than you've seen before. For example, I wrote a comment along the lines of "Find the middle point of two 2D positions stored in x, y vectors" and it came up with two totally different approaches in Ruby - one of which I wouldn't have…
This is good stuff. As a search engine, it could very well be useful. As another poster pointed out, if some context or explanation were provided along with the source suggestions, its utility as a reference would really grow. I totally agree with you that prompted help is a big deal and just going to get bigger. We have developed a language for fact checking called MSL that works exactly this way in practice -- sugg…
EDIT: they appear to be interested in making it look for similar code, see here: https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio...
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, ther…
I run product security for a large enterprise, and I've already gotten the ball rolling on prohibiting copilot for all the reasons above.
It's too big a risk. I'd be shocked if GitHub could remedy the negative impressions minted in the last day or so. Even with other compensating controls around open source management, this flies right under the radar with a c130's worth of adverse consequences.
From the Copilot FAQ: > The technical preview includes filters to block offensive words And somehow their filters missed f*k? That doesn’t give a lot of confidence in their ability filter more nuanced text. Or maybe it only filters truly terrible offensive words like “master”.
In my testing of Copilot, the content filters only work on input , not output. Attempting to generate text from code containing "genocide" just has Copilot refuse to run. But you can still coerce Copilot to return offensive output given certain innocuous prompts.
From the Copilot FAQ: > The technical preview includes filters to block offensive words And somehow their filters missed f*k? That doesn’t give a lot of confidence in their ability filter more nuanced text. Or maybe it only filters truly terrible offensive words like “master”.
I think the problem might be in the training data. Famous code examples are probably copied a lot and therefore appear multiple times in the training data, prompting the neural network to memorise it completely.
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> 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 license lets you modify the program, but the copyright still enforces that you can't copy/past code from it to your own project no?
This is a very famous function [0] and likely appears multiple times in the training set (Google gives 40 hits for GitHub), which makes it more likely to be memorized by the network. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overv...
It's worth keeping in mind that what a neural network like this (just like GPT3) is doing is generating the most probable continuation based on the training dataset. Not the best continuation (whatever that means), simply the most likely one. If the training dataset has mostly bad code, the most likely continuation is likely to be bad as well. I think this is still valuable, you just have to think before accepting a…
This is an interesting issue. I suspect training on datasets from places like Github would be likely to provide lots of "this is a neat idea I saw in a blog post about how they did things in the 90's" codes.