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Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

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Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#551

Post by Noumenon72 »

summerlight wrote: post #544
fragmede wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also block stack overflow and give guidance to never copy code from that website or elsewhere on the Internet? I'm legitimately curious - my org internally officially denounces the copying of stack overflow snippets. Thankfully for my role it's moot as I mostly work with an internal non-public language, for better or worse, and I have no idea how well that's followed elsewhere in the wider company.

Google (and most of other big techs I guess?) also explicitly prohibit employees from use of stack overflow code snippets.

I tried Googling this and couldn't find it. I also don't want to believe it because it seems like the world suddenly turned into an apocalyptic hellscape with no place for developers like me. Do you have a source?

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#552

Post by maccard »

saurik wrote: post #518
maccard wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes boilerplate is unavoidable. As an example, how do you send a GET request with libcurl in C with an authorization header? I can't tell you offhand, but I can tell you the file in my codebase that does have it, because I've duplicated the logic for two separate systems.

So you are saying you would rather every project in the world have at least one--if not, thanks to making it easier via Copilot, many--copies of this code rather than one shared library that provides a high-level abstraction for libcurl?... At least for your own code, how did you end up with two copies of duplicated logic rather than a shared library of functionality?

> So you are saying you would rather every project in the world have at least one--if not, thanks to making it easier via Copilot, many--copies of this code.

Absolutely not, not at all. I'm suggesting that copying and pasting happens, particularly in the context of a single project.

> At least for your own code, how did you end up with two copies of duplicated logic rather than a shared library of functionality?

At what point is it worth introducing an abstraction rather than copying? Using my libcurl example, you can create an abstraction over the~ 10 lines of initialization, but if you need to change it to a POST, then you're just implemnenting an abstraction over libcurl, which is just silly.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#553

Post by baud147258 »

mediaman wrote: post #428
fragmede wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also block stack overflow and give guidance to never copy code from that website or elsewhere on the Internet? I'm legitimately curious - my org internally officially denounces the copying of stack overflow snippets. Thankfully for my role it's moot as I mostly work with an internal non-public language, for better or worse, and I have no idea how well that's followed elsewhere in the wider company.

Who really copies stack overflow snippets verbatim? It's usually just easier to refer to it for help figuring out the right structure and then adapt it for your own needs. Usually it needs customization for your own application anyway (variables, class instances, etc).

I think I did a few times, usually for languages that I wasn't going to spend to much time with (so no benefits in figuring how to do it from the answers) and for specific tasks.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#555

Post by Kiro »

rgbrenner wrote: post #284

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…

No-one cares about this. People have no clue about licenses and just copy-paste whatever. If someone gets access to their code and see all the violations they're screwed anyway.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#556

Post by summerlight »

Anon1096 wrote: post #49
klohto wrote: post #14

I’m really dumbfounded by the Copilot team decision to not exclude GPL licensed code. Why was this direction chosen? Is the inclusion of GPL really worth the risk and potential Google v. Oracle lawsuit? I’d like to know the reasoning.

Why would excluding GPL'd code be enough to not violate licenses? I don't understand why people think MIT or other licenses are free for alls to take code as they wish. The MIT license includes an attribution clause. And, as the linked video shows, Copilot is more than happy to take its code and put your pet license and copyright notice on instead. Isn't that equally as infringing as stealing GPL code? The idea of mi…

At least that will reduce the chance of license violation as well as make a good legal argument for any uncovered violations as "unintentional" incidents.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#557

Post by pydry »

SahAssar wrote: post #522
pydry wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia redirects concentration camp to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment Where it also makes the point that the nazi camps were primarily extermination camps. Maybe take it up with them and get back to me if you feel truly passionate about this issue. >Maybe it's just me, but I think it would have been more clear Gosh, it's awfully ironic that this sentence would happen in a thread about how language polic…

> So, is it more important to you how people use the term concentration camp or the fact that ICE lock up children in internment/concentration/[ insert favorite word here ] camps? Well, that escalated quickly. I don't think I ever said anything for or against what ICE is doing, in fact I tried not to because the only thing I wanted to say was that when using the words "literally concentration camps" people might read…

Your primary worry was that somebody might read that sentence and believe that the US is gassing immigrants?

Seems unlikely.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#558

Post by eCa »

sktrdie wrote: post #395
rgbrenner wrote: post #284

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…

If they get rid of licensed stuff it should be ok no? I really want to use this and seems inevitable that we'll need it just as google translate needs all of the books + sites + comments it can get a hold of.

Which licenses would it be ok that the training material is licensed under, though? If it produces verbatim enough copies of eg. MIT licensed material, then attribution is required. Similar with many other open source-friendly licenses.

On the other hand, if only permissive licenses that also don't require attribution is used, well, then for a start, the available corpus is much smaller.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#559

Post by jerf »

Kiro wrote: post #555
rgbrenner wrote: post #284

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…

No-one cares about this. People have no clue about licenses and just copy-paste whatever. If someone gets access to their code and see all the violations they're screwed anyway.

Ask your legal department about that. Sure, engineers don't care about licensing at all, but we are not the only players here.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#560

Post by [deleted] »

Kiro wrote: post #555
rgbrenner wrote: post #284

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…

No-one cares about this. People have no clue about licenses and just copy-paste whatever. If someone gets access to their code and see all the violations they're screwed anyway.

[deleted]
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