GitHub Copilot is generally available • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#761

Post by eat_lemons » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

patrickthebold wrote: post #459

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…

For a verbose language the problem isn't the typing it's the reading. On the typing side I agree with you: I don't mind spending 30 minutes typing a bunch of boilerplate. I do mind digging through 100s of lines of code to find the 2 lines that actually do something interesting. Of course, copilot is only going to save you typing time, and you'll have to pay it back at reading time.

I spend 95% of my day reading existing code not writing it, I have no idea what these developers writing code all day work on

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#762

Post by eat_lemons » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

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…

Read up on clean room design and the IBM lawsuits from the 80's and 90's

Just seeing someone else's code is hazardous from a legal precident point of view

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#763

Post by eat_lemons » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

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.

Read up clean room design and on the IBM bios lawsuits from the 80's and 90's just seeing proprietary code can be a violation

Why is it different if we slap a "ml" lable on it

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#764

Post by blagie » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

rmbyrro wrote: post #754

jlpqu wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. They are bribing the project leads so they can then say that scanning is approved and voluntary.

Didn't OSS maintainers already voluntarily approved such uses when they published their work under an OSS license? One fundamental aspect of being open source is not limiting the purposes of use. If we now say that "code-generation AI training" is not allowed without prior approval (in addition to the license itself), then it's not open source anymore...

I approved some of my code for being reused under the terms of the AGPL. Co-pilot is very welcome to scan it and generate derivative AGPL code.

If I write AGPL code, and co-pilot scans it and makes a very similar program to it for a FAANG, who then proceeds to compete with my open-source tool by using the creative ideas generated there-in, but with a proprietary tool, that's not very fair. That's why I chose the license I did.

FAANG is more than welcome (indeed, encouraged) to use my code for any purpose permitted under the license. That includes everything except making it proprietary.

I've tried running copilot with the starting lines of my code. It generated code with identical creative ideas. It was the equivalent of taking Star Trek, and generating a new movie with the same plot line, but with names changed. That's not legal.

My code was specific enough that this wasn't just chance or other similar code. I work in a pretty narrow domain.

I did use copilot for coding myself, and a lot of what it generated was unique. But it is also a good paraphrasing tool. Running a movie script backwards and forwards through Google Translate to get different phrasing, and then swapping out new names, does not a new movie make. Ditto here.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#765

Post by stale2002 » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

rmbyrro wrote: post #752

stale2002 wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Depending on the context, this knowledge would be worth millions. Worth a lawsuit. But it probably won't be worth millions of dollars. And that is why the lawsuit wont be worth it. > That piece of knowledge may have taken a LOT of effort from an OSS team to acquire. Anything "may" be possible. But it probably won't be worth that much.

> Anything "may" be possible. But it probably won't be worth that much. I'd suggest to get more information about the repercussions associated with appropriating GPL code into proprietary closed source. This is a big deal. You may have to license your entire codebase under GPL if you incorporate GPL code and distribute it.

> You may have to license your entire codebase under GPL if you incorporate GPL code and distribute it.

I would suggest that you actually take your own advice and get more information yourself.

No license can force you to release your code. Nope, not even GPL.

Instead, what a rights holder can do, is sue for damages for the copyright theft, for not following the license. They can't force you to follow the license. Instead, they can say that you didn't follow it, therefore you stole the code, and owe money to them, for stealing the code, depending on how much the code is worth.

The only thing that GPL does, is it gives people permission to use the works, in exchange for releasing code. But, if you infringe, the damages do not depend on whatever the license was, or whatever request the license makes.

To use an example someone else gave, of the "first born child" license, imagine someone writes a simple binary search function, and puts out a license that gives it out for free, in exchange for paying them some absurd price. EX: the joke of the first born child, but more seriously, lets say the license was "1 million dollars".

If someone stole that binary search, couple line function code, and it went to court, they absolutely would not own them 1 million dollars, even though thats what the license said.

Instead, they would owe the rights holders damages. And chances are, a couple line binary search function, or some other example that you could think of, would only be worth a small amount.

And even though the license said "This code is worth 1 million dollars, and you owe us that money if you use it!", it is not true that anyone would owe them a million dollars. Instead they would only owe them damages, which would not be anywhere close to 1 million dollars.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#766

Post by price » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #533

xigoi wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What proportion of people are making $1 per minute?

$1 per minute is approximately $120k annual salary, so... almost anybody doing software development in the US?

That's not true. The median annual pay for a software engineer in the US is a bit under $100k. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes good data on this.) That means most people doing software development in the US are making under $100k.

Almost anybody doing software development at a well-funded tech company is going to be making over $120k/yr, yes. But it turns out there are lots of other kinds of programming jobs, too.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#767

Post by suyash » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

ultra_nick wrote: post #619

Otek wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly but I think we’re talking years if not decades.

Everyone would need a next gen GPU to run it and someone would have to drop $500k on a gpu rack to train it. A decade for general accessibility sounds right.

No the ML inference can be done on the cloud or use tiny models and embed them in IDE code, possible today.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#768

Post by d4rkp4ttern » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 6:29 PM UTC

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #707

Waiting for a pycharm plugin

Never mind there is a pyCharm plugin. And I am impressed. Example —

  # use numba to speed up the accumulation of the moving average

  @numba.jit("float64[:](float64[:], float64[:])", nopython=True, nogil=True)
  def moving_average(x, a):
      n = len(x)
      y = np.empty(n, dtype=np.float64)
      y[0] = x[0]
      for i in range(1, n):
          y[i] = y[i-1]*a[i-1] + x[i]*a[i]
      return y

I would have found it with a stack overflow search but it gave me this after I just typed :

  # use numba to …

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#769

Post by staticassertion » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

titaniczero wrote: post #670

staticassertion wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Jetbrains costs $150/y. IMO, an autocomplete is not worth $100/y at all, let alone $200/y.

I also happily pay for Jetbrains.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#770

Post by blip54321 » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #765

rmbyrro wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything "may" be possible. But it probably won't be worth that much. I'd suggest to get more information about the repercussions associated with appropriating GPL code into proprietary closed source. This is a big deal. You may have to license your entire codebase under GPL if you incorporate GPL code and distribute it.

> You may have to license your entire codebase under GPL if you incorporate GPL code and distribute it. I would suggest that you actually take your own advice and get more information yourself. No license can force you to release your code. Nope, not even GPL. Instead, what a rights holder can do, is sue for damages for the copyright theft, for not following the license. They can't force you to follow the license. In…

This is correct. Programmers read licenses like code ("If I use the GPL, I need to release my entire codebase."). That's not how the world works. The worst-case outcome is damages. Damages tend to be reasonable.

In most cases, damages are set to make both parties straight, not to be punitive. People cite how trillion dollar companies might have billion-dollar lawsuits, but that's pretty reasonable. $1B damages are 0.1% of a company's value in a battle between FAANGs, which have big-O trillion-dollar valuations. If you have a dispute between $1M businesses, the analogue is $1k damages. That's not atypical for a commercial dispute.