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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#291
post #87
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. "open source is great, except when it's used in a way I don't like"

I don't see the use itself as a problem, but rather that the result is not treated as a derivative work of the input. If I train it on GPL code, the result should be GPL, too.

It would be great if that were the case, but unfortunately it isn’t. We’ll need new laws for that.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#292
post #195

I've been using Copilot non-stop on every hobby project I have ever since they've let me in (2021/07/13) and I am honestly flabbergasted they think it's worth 10$/mo. My experience using it till this day is the following: - It's an amazing all-rounder autocomplete for most boilerplate code. Generally anything that someone who's spent 5 minutes reading the code can do, Copilot can do just as well. - It's terrible if y…

To me it's easily worth twice that, so I'm happy to pay 100/year.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#293
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the fact that you grant GitHub an implicit license as outlined in the ToS.

GitHub isn't liable. That's been established in court with regards to training AIs. Who is liable is you who may or may not have the legal right to use the code CoPilot spits out for you.

This has been explained many times - you can check word for word the output is original. All it takes is a bloom filter trained on the Copilot training set and an ngram extractor.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#294
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That money isn't going to the folks who wrote the code to begin with though. I think that's where "it should be free" has merit, GitHub is making money on the backs of others.

What? Should I have to reimburse the author of every tutorial and Stack Overflow post I read on my journey to becoming a software engineer?

Obviously not, but products and people are generally treated differently. Hell, even commercial products and free products are often treated differently.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#295
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you made DALL-E and it just remixes images sourced from a broad scan of the Internet, filtered through several layers of machine learning indirection, you're all good.

Sure, if it's remixed to the point where most people don't go "hey that's Big Bird!" CoPilot doesn't, or at least doesn't always, like when it just copied Quake's fast inverse square code with the verbatim comments including profanity. Using CoPilot to create commercial code opens the coder to significant liability if there's enough money at stake.

That piece of code had duplicates in the training set making it prone to memorisation. Almost all generated code is original.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#296
I really like Github copilot. It is very useful for me because I wrote a lot of repeated logic chucks of code. I do research in HEP and if you know how ROOT CERN work then you can realize how useful copilot could be for that only.

I think I myself teached copilot a lot of things about supersymmetry :)

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#298

Does copilot learn from and suggest patterns in the same codebase that you're working, or does it just pull from the huge pool of projects on GH? How well does copilot help with languages like Elixir that are less common? WIth TypeScript it's been remarkable, but that's one of the most popular and surely very familiar to devs and GH, so I would expect less popular like Elixir to not perform as well. Does copilot work…

> Does copilot work for shell scripts? Oh wow—a language where there are: 20 ways to do something, three of them are common, but only three others actually behave, by any standard, correctly, while being among the least-common in public code, seems like exactly the wrong kind of thing to use this for. Shell doesn't need machine-learning autocomplete trained on existing shell scripts, it needs a hand-built aggressive…

> Shell doesn't need machine-learning autocomplete trained on existing shell scripts, it needs a hand-built aggressive linter.

Something like https://www.shellcheck.net/?

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#300
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub isn't liable. That's been established in court with regards to training AIs. Who is liable is you who may or may not have the legal right to use the code CoPilot spits out for you.

This has been explained many times - you can check word for word the output is original. All it takes is a bloom filter trained on the Copilot training set and an ngram extractor.

Yes, and you'll be fine if you do. The problem is you might not bother.
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