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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#691

Post by zarzavat »

account42 wrote: post #685
zarzavat wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and I have a different understanding of “willful”. If you’ve used copilot you’ll know that the vast majority of the time it’s not infringing anybody’s copyright, it’s creating code that is highly unique to the problem you are trying to solve.

All output of machine learning algorithms is derived from the training set. There is no creativity, just lots of complexity. What that means legally has yet to be fully determined.

If that were the case, how can models such as DALL-E 2 generate “Homer Simpson in The Godfather” type images. It’s clear that machine learning models are capable of independent creation.

As far as copilot goes, yes it’s possible to get it to recite copyrighted works, but in normal usage it is creating independent works because it is too influenced by the structure of your code around the insertion point to recite anything. It’s auto completing things like the variable names that you already declared, simple loops and function applications, etc.

> What that means legally has yet to be fully determined.

At least in the US, the Supreme Court ruled in Google v Oracle that the entire Java API is not copyrightable. Copilot users are very far from crossing the line, the courts are not going to come after some de minimis 10-line snippet that copilot generated.

Whether Microsoft itself was legally in the right by training copilot is a more interesting legal question that remains unresolved.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#692

Post by yokoprime »

> GitHub Copilot costs $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year per user. GitHub Copilot is only available to individual developers and individual accounts within organizations, but organization administrators cannot purchase bulk licenses for teams at this time.

No bulk licensing of Teams? This makes no sesnse, so if a team wants to make Copilot part of their official tools, each member have to purchase this individually. Thats a huge PITA

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#693

Post by AJRF »

ascorbic wrote: post #683
runeks wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much time would you say it saves you per day? Ie. how much more productive does it make you? I’m curious whether we’re talking 5% or 30%.

Well I'm not coding all day so closer to 5%, but for anyone earning over $200/month that should be worthwhile.

> Well I'm not coding all day so closer to 5%

If you don't code much, and CoPilot only helps with with 5% of that small amount of code, that makes it sound not at all useful.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#694

Post by toyg »

avereveard wrote: post #645
toyg wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run, I expect very few people will pay for a dedicated Copilot account. It will get bundled in some "development enterprise bundle", heavily discounted. Employees in medium and large shops will just receive it as standard, with their VS or Github paid licenses. Which means it will actually cost half the sticker price.

I don't see this working in business large enough to have a legal department

Nah, the legal hype will die in a year at most.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#695

Post by aembleton »

usr1106 wrote: post #657
buildbot wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a problem if Microsoft didn’t also have their own Bing

Oh, is Bing still a thing? Honest question, haven't heard it mentioned for years. Went from Altavista to Google (I believe, it's a long time ago...) and now to DDG a couple of years ago. Never considered Bing directly although I believe DDG results come or came from Bing.

Yes, Bing still exists. Like you say, that's where a lot of DDG results come from.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#696

Post by ascorbic »

AJRF wrote: post #693
ascorbic wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm not coding all day so closer to 5%, but for anyone earning over $200/month that should be worthwhile.

> Well I'm not coding all day so closer to 5% If you don't code much, and CoPilot only helps with with 5% of that small amount of code, that makes it sound not at all useful.

That's not what my comment says

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#697

Post by rmbyrro »

keyle wrote: post #565
cube2222 wrote: post #151

I've been using Copilot for a few months and... Yeah, it makes mistakes, sometimes it shows you i.e. the most common way to do something, even if that way has a bug in it. Yes, sometimes it writes a complete blunder. And yes again, sometimes there are very subtle logical mistakes in the code it proposes. But overall? It's been *great*! Definitely worth the 10 bucks a month (especially with a developer salary). :inser…

As a polyglot who works in 4-5 different languages every 3-6 months, it's been very valuable. I forget a lot of things, simple dumb stuff like type conversions or specific keywords spelling. Copilot takes care of 99% of that so I can focus on my higher level spec. If anything sometimes it's too agressive. I start typing a word and it's already building up the rest of the application in a different direction...

Isn't your forgetting issue something that spaced repetition would solve while also building confidence in yourself?

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#698

Post by theshrike79 »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #680
theshrike79 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For me the bottleneck is seldom typing This is one of my pet peeves in this field. People create whole programming languages that are "expressive", just to save typing a few dozen characters and have huge tirades against "verbose" languages that require typing a bunch of boilerplate. If typing the code is the bit that takes the longest for you in a project, stop and take a good look in the mirror. There's something…

People write languages at higher levels of abstraction not to type fewer characters but to reduce logical errors that can occur, and provide better abstractions over things. An example here is an infinite list. It's far easier to do that in say Haskell and python, applying filters along the way using higher order and curried functions than it is to do it in say C.

There is a difference between higher levels of abstraction and having a separate symbol for every single operation imaginable just for the sake of "expressiveness".

Yes, you can shove a 20 line function into one line with a ton of weird symbols, but the one reading it after you will need to unroll it anyway to understand it so what's the point?

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#699

Post by rmbyrro »

culi wrote: post #574
cube2222 wrote: post #151

I've been using Copilot for a few months and... Yeah, it makes mistakes, sometimes it shows you i.e. the most common way to do something, even if that way has a bug in it. Yes, sometimes it writes a complete blunder. And yes again, sometimes there are very subtle logical mistakes in the code it proposes. But overall? It's been *great*! Definitely worth the 10 bucks a month (especially with a developer salary). :inser…

I really like it too but I can't help but feel like all the same people panicked about Microsoft acquiring GitHub are suddenly quiet about the fact that Microsoft has found the ultimate way to profit off of open-source There's a ton of developer effort that went into Copilot and those devs should be paid fairly. But the majority of what fuels Copilot is the millions of lines of open source code submitted every day. I…

They're providing Copilot for free for OSS maintainers.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#700

Post by realharo »

nikeee wrote: post #193

The main page [0] shows you awesome demos, but also its weaknesses in the very first example. It doesn't encode the url encoded body properly: > body: `text=${text}`, So it breaks if the text contains a '&' and even allows parameter injection to the call of the 3rd party service. Isn't that critical on a sentiment analysis API, but could result in actual security holes. I hope the users won't blindly use the generate…

There are issues with many of the other demos too, especially in the second group of examples (e.g. `const months = days / 30`, the prime number test function not testing any `false` cases, etc.).
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