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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#551

Post by keithnz »

Hamcha wrote: 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…

working out what it is worth is tricky, I just look at what I'm paying for at the moment, like Jetbrains All product suite costs me $150 yearly.... so Copilot at $100 a year seems insanely out of proportion. In fact all of the SAAS type products that are around $10 a month per dev offer far more significant functionality. For me copilot mainly fills in boiler plate code, which is useful, from time to time it generates a function that's great, but it would have been trivial for me to write it too, I like it, but comparatively compared to other tools, its pricing seems out of whack. Some are trying to use time = money as justification, but it rarely works as a direct translation like that when coding, in fact I doubt it has that much impact on time, it just makes some things less mundane to do. I have other plugins that are free that probably save me way more time, if all the plugins that help started charging at the same rate based on time savings, it'd be a nightmare.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#552

Post by [deleted] »

omginternets wrote: post #357
karpierz wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, the problem is it produces _almost_ correct code, which is worse than incorrect code because it might fool you into trusting it.

Quite. So we agree that this code is incorrect, and thus, that we have a contradiction on our hands. To be clear: we’re in agreement that incorrect code that passes for correct at a glance is even worse than obviously-incorrect code.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#553

Post by tzs »

eclark wrote: post #454
causi wrote: 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.

I don't think it's a clear cut as you make it out to be. Tortious interference is a common law remedy that might make Github/MS liable. If I induce you to break a contract with someone else they can come after me for damages. For example in this case, there are developers who have created GPL code. That code was licensed to some other developer. Github then encouraged people to upload git copies of the GPL code onto…

> The books were purchased, meaning they got a license to use the book.

This may be a bit nit-picky, but I don't think that is correct.

Most books I've seen don't say anything about granting a license so there would be no explicit license that comes with them.

Maybe you could find an implicit license if normal use of a book required a license but it does not. Copyright law allows all the normal uses of a book without requiring permission of the copyright owner. You only need a license when you want to do something that requires permission.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#554

Post by az226 »

lelag wrote: post #76
dannytatom wrote: post #54

I've enjoyed using it for free, but not sure it's worth the $10/mo yet. When it works great, it's a nice-to-have for speeding up development but has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself. And when I wish it would give me the answer to something I don't know how to do, it spits out something very wrong. Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output.

Given the cost of the infrastructure needed to run those large language models, it's very likely that Microsoft is still operating copilot at a loss. I don't see an issue with it being a paid service as it is a costly service to provide. What I pity however is that there's no free tier for hobbyists as paying a 10 usd monthly subscription wont make sense when you only code occasionally. For professionals using it eve…

It’s free for open source maintainers.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#555

Post by lsh123 »

I assume that Copilot uses open source projects on GitHub to “learn” what to suggest. Some of these projects might be under, say, GPL v3. A developer uses Copilot for a commercial project and Copilot insert a complete function from a GPL v3 code into this project. Someone notices this and sues the commercial project for breaking GPL v3. Will GitHub pickup the tab?

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#556

Post by az226 »

natefinch wrote: post #196
cube00 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> monetizing the efforts ...and not compensating (or even attributing as required by the licenses) the authors for it.

It's not copying open source code. If you learn an algorithm to balance a binary tree from reading GPL code, and then go use that algorithm in your own closed-source project, with your own variables and types and context, are you breaking GPL? You're not copying the code. Just because you learned about it from reading GPL code doesn't mean that whenever you write tree balancing code from now until the end of time, al…

Copying of code needs to be very direct. Even Google copied tens of thousands of lines of code from Oracle character for character and won the case taken all the way to the Supreme Court. When Oracle made changes (even during the court proceedings), Google kept copying the code and every change Oracle made. So I doubt you’re at real legal risk with what you were proposing.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#557

Post by [deleted] »

lsh123 wrote: post #555

I assume that Copilot uses open source projects on GitHub to “learn” what to suggest. Some of these projects might be under, say, GPL v3. A developer uses Copilot for a commercial project and Copilot insert a complete function from a GPL v3 code into this project. Someone notices this and sues the commercial project for breaking GPL v3. Will GitHub pickup the tab?

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#558

Post by danuker »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #545
danuker wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or better yet, save the snippet as a function/procedure in the code, and avoid needless duplication (DRY/Occam's razor).

You can take snippets with you from job to job tho.

I guess that depends on your contract.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#559

Post by [deleted] »

lveillard wrote: post #403

Guys you're getting a lot of bad comments for one simple reason. You failed your delivery. 1) You should have managed the expectations of the users in a better way. Tell them it will become a paid feature from the begining, so nobody gets surprised 2) The way everyone unsderstood this today was too aggresive. An infinite warning in visual studio saying "hey, i've stop working, please sign up and pay or uninstall me".…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#560

Post by az226 »

lelag wrote: post #57
glouwbug wrote: post #21

Shouldn't Copilot technically be FOSS since it trains on open source?

Even if the model was FOSS, the infrastructure needed to run it would be costly. Given the cost of single GPT-3 codex query, it's very likely that Microsoft/Github is still taking a huge operating loss at 10USD per month.

Probably costs 3-4 times that to power the infra. They’ll make money back if they’re able to do several step changes of improvement in cost optimization.
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