241–250 of 545 posts
Feels like everyone is missing the point: Copilot will ultimately serve to weaken the arguments in support of software patents and copyright. That can only be a good thing for society (though perhaps not for rent seekers).
No no, we get it. Some people, like myself, still think that copyrights serve a purpose.
And I notice you didn't say anything about patents?
Feels like everyone is missing the point: Copilot will ultimately serve to weaken the arguments in support of software patents and copyright. That can only be a good thing for society (though perhaps not for rent seekers).
Now 'the edge' is already mostly open source. All the lock-in and value has moved into either infrastructure or in software you don't even get to touch since it runs in the Cloud and you just provide IO to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copyright doesn't just benefit huge corporations. For instance, without it, independent artists who rely on copying for distribution (authors, musicians, etc.) would find it much more difficult to make money off their work, mostly (IMO) because large corporate entities with large investments made in publication and distribution systems could simply take content and sell it themselves with zero obligation to the origi…
>Copyright doesn't just benefit huge corporations. For instance, without it, independent artists who rely on copying for distribution (authors, musicians, etc.) would find it much more difficult to make money off their work, That doesn't look like it's the point to me. ""[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inven…
What better way to promote said Progress than by making sure said Authors and Inventors can make enough money off their work to keep doing it? As written, it's a roundabout way to get at the instrumentality of capital, but if that's not what they had in mind then I'm not sure what they were getting at. Without copyright, a creator's rights to their own work aren't diminished; it's just that everyone else's are expanded to the same level.
(I'd love to know if I'm way off base about this. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm sure it's been discussed to death.)
> Honestly, I rather like this whole question of copilot. I solidly appreciate the brilliance of github as a honeypot.
I think it's really cool, and I'd probably use it myself. As much as my favorite kinds of programming (e.g. writing experimental text editors) might not benefit from it, in my day job I sure would love to spend less time filling in boilerplate and looking up mundane API details.
I don't mean to single Github out in my mention of big corporations benefiting from copyright law. Scraping vast quantities of copyrighted data to build new products is a common business model at this point, and--like other new IP-related paradigms enabled by modern information technology--I think it deserves a fresh look, being mindful of just what it is we're trying to accomplish with copyright law. As you say, it's not always obvious, even in written law.
I've given thousands of hours to open source projects, I really think open source is a pillar of modern society. So you would think I am all for something like copilot, but no. At first I thought this was a great feature, because easier access to code, but after some reflection, I am also very skeptical. I am able to make my code open source, because I can make a living out of it, and I have a lot of open source code…
Co-pilot aside, that's already how it works today. If you make something open source, I can use your code to power my business, and I'm under no obligation to hire you. It's great when companies give back to open source, either by supporting the projects they depend on, or by open sourcing their own internal projects, but it's not obligatory.
If you don't want people to independently profit from your code, don't release it under a license that allows commercial use
I think it's clear that Copilot pushes boundaries...technological and legal. It makes people uncomfortable and challenges a lot of assumptions that we have about the current world. But this is exactly what I expect from the next revolutionary change in computing.
I never hosted--with quite some prejudice, even--any of my projects on GitHub (for a number of reasons that are off topic right now)... it didn't matter, though: people take your code and upload it to GitHub themselves (which is their right); so you can't avoid Copilot by simply self-hosting your repositories.
If your code is open source, they will get it.
That's kinda the point of open source.
This is typical Microsoft behavior: embrace, extend, and extinguish. They embraced open source with the intention of controlling (GitHub) and exploiting it. And the interesting thing is that many people fell for this already ancient strategy.
I also don't see how any of this follows - they could've just crawled GitLab or any other OSS repository. They didn't even need Github for this.
Heck, is OpenAI doing embrace, extend, and extinguish on the entire web now, because they use Common Crawl [0] to train GTP-3, which forms the basis of CoPilot?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, to verify, your claim is that GPT-3, when trained on a corpus of human text, isn't merely managing to string together a bunch of high-probability sequences of symbol constructs--which is how every article I have ever read on how it functions describes the technology--but is instead managing to build a model of the human world and the mechanism of narration required to describe it, with which it uses to write new…
Imagine for a second a model of the human brain that consists of three parts. 1) a vector of trillion inputs, 2) a black box, and 3) a vector of trillion outputs. At this level of abstraction, the human brain "pattern matches and replicates" just the same, except it is better at it.
Since the Microsoft acquisition it’s becoming painfully obvious how unhealthily centralized the dev world has become, and they seem to strive to become ever more entrenched in the name of maximizing shareholder value.
I only have a small amount of open source projects on GH but I intend to vote with my feet and abandon the platform by self-hosting Gitea. By itself it won’t be a big splash but I’m inspired by posts such as this and I hope to inspire someone else in turn. Of all people we devs should be able to find good ways to decentralize.
Slightly off topic: Is the git frontend [1] open source? If not, are there some very light self hosting ones like it? [1] https://thelig.ht/code/