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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#391

Post by mplanchard »

natefinch wrote: post #145
karl42 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is kind of like saying that any programmer who has ever learned something from reading GPL code can only use that knowledge when writing GPL code. It's not literally copying the code. The training set isn't stored on disk and regurgitated. Also - there is logic in copilot that checks to make sure it is not suggesting exact duplicates of code from its training set, and if it does, it never sends them to the user.

I really dislike this false equivalence between human learning and machine learning. The two are significantly distinct in almost every way, both in their process and in their output. The scale is also vastly different. No human could possibly ingest all of the open source code on GitHub, much less regurgitate millions of snippets from what they “studied.”

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#392

Post by Taywee »

speedgoose wrote: post #138
w0m wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matches my experience. I legitimately like it for quick boiler plates; it's like a better snippet engine. But Paying for it...

It's worth it if it saves you a few minutes every month.

Only if it saves you a few minutes every month in a "net" sense. If it saves you dozens of minutes every month and then also costs you dozens of minutes every month in hard-to-predict ways, it's hard to judge either way on it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#393

Post by tedunangst »

raunak wrote: post #325
jmkni wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been using Copilot non-stop > I am honestly flabbergasted they think it's worth 10$/mo These two statments seem contradictory to me. Why are you using it 'non-stop' if it isn't even worth $10/month?

Not OP - I use it non-stop for boiler plate filling as well. I wouldn't use it for anything other than that, so I would say it's worth honestly at max $1/month.

$1 is worth what, one minute of your time? If you're using a tool that doesn't even save you one minute, why bother?

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#395

Post by Taywee »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #313
wyager wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to acquire rights for copy/pasting my code and selling it in a book, for example.

but what if I publish an algorithm in my book that just happens to be the same as code you've written, say, because we both had the same professor in school, or that it's the obvious solution to the problem. once you've written a few lines of code as part of a larger project, is the rest of the world prohibited from writing the same code unless they agree to the terms of your license?

Copyright doesn't punish incidentally matching content. It's specifically right to copy or transform content. To make a case for copyright violation, you have to make the case that it was actually copied.

If you want to make a point about things that incidentally match making people who independently reinvent the same thing, you're criticizing the function of software patents, not copyright.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#397

Post by matsemann »

jwpapi wrote: post #386

I’m honestly shook at all the comments here. I don’t make any money coding and I’m probably in the lower 25% of HN readers in terms of skills, but I’m more than happy to pay $10/m. I would pay Github $10/m for what they already give me. What is your time worth? You should easily get $60/hr, so you need to save 12 minutes per month to make it worth. I would pay that for all my employees. CoPilot is not a replacement f…

Could it perhaps be you not coding for a living (and being lower in skill as you say) that make you think it's worth it?

For me the bottleneck is seldom typing. And while Copilot can sometimes dish out some more advanced stuff, I still have to verify it and understand it. Since I can basically solve every problem I encounter day-to-day, Copilot's contribution is not that useful.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#399

Post by john_g »

I found GitHub copilot an interesting heuristic on how expressive the programming language / framework you are using is.

It is very useful for things that I would call boilerplate, e.g. you have almost duplicated code (say in a view and a controller) and need to copy from one to the other.

It is annoyingly bad for autocompleting an api as it tends to be slightly (and plausibly) wrong.

I haven't found it very useful for anything else.

Working on a project where I have to do lots of the first makes me sad, so I tend to try to avoid those projects - but if I was forced to for some reason it would be worth $10 a month. However, if enough of the programming I did could be helped by github copilot for it to be worth that much I would start to get worried I was working on the wrong sort of problems and try to move into something different.

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