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.
Apples and oranges: Stack overflow snippets are explicitly granted under a permissive license, as long as you attribute. https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing It appears that the code that copilot is using is created under a huge variety of licenses, making it risky. On the other hand, a small snippet in a function that is derived from many existing pieces of other code may fall under fair use, even if it is not u…
In addition to other licensing gotchas, a ton of SO snippets are copied wholesale from elsewhere—docs or blog posts. So it's pretty likely that the poster can't license them in the first place because they never checked the source's license requirements.
> 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.
You seem to think I have some political motive, I don't. I just saw a comment that from my perspective and historical education seemed to equate two things that I regard as different and said that it might be helpful to not conflate those. It seems like you did not intend to conflate them and it is a difference in what you and I read into the term "actual concentration camp".
From my perspective this conversation is as if someone said "working for XCompany is actual slavery" and I said "Perhaps don't use 'actual slavery' as a term for something that isn't that?"
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.
Unlicensed code just means “all rights reserved.” You’d need to limit it to permissively licensed code and make sure you comply with their requirements.
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.
Maybe Github just doesn't have many repos to control death factories and execution squads?
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 w…
If you have 10 lines of repeated code with one line changed to make it GET vs POST, introducing an abstraction isn't "silly": it is simultaneously both ergonomic and advantageous, as not only is libcurl's API extremely verbose (as it is a low-level primitive), if you ever need to add another line of code to that initialization--which totally happens over the years, due to various security extensions you might need to either enable or disable with respect to acceptable TLS settings, or to tune performance parameters related to connection caching, or to add a header to every request (for any number of reasons from debugging to authentication)--you can do it in one place instead of umpteen number of places. The libcurl API is itself a leaky abstraction of the underlying TLS libraries in places, so if you ever realize you need to switch SSL libraries (a space in which there has been absolute upheaval in recent years) you are going to reach for shared abstractions; and like... to take this to its ultimate conclusion: I use libcurl as a fallback for Linux, but if you want to correctly support the user's settings for proxy servers--which are sometimes needed for your requests to work at all--my code is abstracted so I can plug in entirely different HTTP backends instead of libcurl, such as Apple's CFNetwork (which you absolutely should be using if at all possible on iOS). You act like abstraction is somehow a bad thing or some inherent cost you want to avoid, when it should absolutely take you less time to wrap duplicated code into a function than to duplicate it in the first place, and if IDE features (including Copilot) are somehow making you think it is easier to throw a ton of duplicated code everywhere, that is part of the argument for why those features are dangerous... they are apparently undermining all the work people did onto refactoring code browsers that are designed to help users locally manage abstraction instead of mitigating poor architecture :/.
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…
It seems like the risk is somewhat exaggerated because even when people get bad autocomplete results, they mostly won’t use them.
This reply from @AzureDevOps is bizarre: "We understand. However, the way to report this issues related to Windows 11 is through our Windows Insider even from another device. Thanks in advance." I think I'm gonna give "AI" a few more years. https://twitter.com/AzureDevOps/status/1411018079849619458
Wow. To think of it, nothing in this HN thread, including your link, is truly new and unexpected, but in this context it felt somehow more dystopian than ever. Talking about machines pretending to be humans doing stupid stuff, getting automated responses from machines pretending to be humans, that also are the same kind of stupid stuff... Almost feels like drowning.
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.
This kind of sucks honestly, copy and pasting without understanding has lead to all sorts of issues in IT. Not to mention legal issues as mentioned by another reply.
> Only post-retrieval filtering would be an option. And illegal, if the original information remains. I assume that there must be a process for altering the training data set and rerunning the entire thing.
Yes, but the compute costs required for training are probably in the range of hundreds of thousands of usd to potentially millions of usd. Not to mention potentially months of training time.
Good thing “compliance is really expensive” isn’t a valid legal defense.
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…
It seems like the risk is somewhat exaggerated because even when people get bad autocomplete results, they mostly won’t use them.
That's optimistic. The people who would rely heavily on this sort of thing are going to be the worst at detecting what a "bad autocomplete result" would look like. But even if you are capable of judging that you've got a good one, it still doesn't inform you of the obvious potential licensing issues with any bit of code.
Surely somebody working on this project foresaw this problem…