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Coping with Copilot

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Re: Coping with Copilot

#281

Post by Miraste »

morelisp wrote: post #239
nightpool wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest: has anyone here ever looked at a resume with an MSc in CS and said "Yep, I bet this person knows how to write code well"? Surely there are some research level jobs where a PhD in CS is necessary, but for most coding jobs, an MSc is just 2 years of missed experience where you're learning bad habits and antipatterns by never having your code used by other people in any strenuous way. Certainly there are…

I'll generally rate an MSc lower than BA/BSc. (The exceptions would be if you needed the MSc to meet some visa requirement, or if you had an BSc in some weakly-related field beforehand.) From downvoters: I would genuinely love to hear a defense of an MSc per se. What university has their shit together enough to actually accelerate/compress 2-4y of work experience into 1-2y years of academic project, which is what's a…

Graduate degrees aren’t meant to simulate work experience or take more classes, they’re intended for research. If your MSc lists no research and is applying for some sort of boilerplate frontend job, then I understand the hesitation, but normally one would take that experience into a cutting-edge field which focuses on innovation rather than making web apps as fast as possible. In jobs with an element of R&D, university research experience is very useful.`

Re: Coping with Copilot

#282

Post by Gigachad »

tgv wrote: post #126
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #89

I understand the problem here and I sympathize with professors in these circumstances. Learning the fundamentals will remain important. But as others have pointed out: if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run. One thing tho is that things like Copilot put the lie to the hypothesis (propagated mostly by the Google-style job interview) that intensely codi…

> if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run That's a very limited, and dismissive view. If you allow students to use copilot, you're handing out certificates or diplomas to people who can't code. That will very quickly erode the value of your institute's certification, and with it, that of the other students. Otherwise, why not give everyone an MSc in CS…

Just raise the bar, rather than getting students to reverse an array, get them to do something more complex that is difficult even with the use of modern AI tools. We currently hand out degrees to people who couldn't write a program in raw assembly but it doesn't matter anymore. The world has moved on from that being a required skill.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#283

Post by Gigachad »

sidlls wrote: post #178
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will try it at some point, but I have... feelings... about its abuse of open source licenses software as a learning set. Also I work in Rust these days, and use CLion. Not sure if it would be much help in that environment.

How is it abusive?

There is a common trend of devs on HN getting angry that their work has been "stolen" to train copilot, While none of them raised the same concerns when everything else like art, music, literature, etc was used to train other models. Now that it affects them its a real issue.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#284

Post by [deleted] »

mdaniel wrote: post #45
russfink wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adjunct instructor here. Before I came into the program, cheating was on the rise. When given programming assignments, students would go to Geeks for geeks and download solutions, some of them mostly correct, and submit those for credit. One remedy was to try to make programming assignments harder and harder. Eventually, they got so hard that we were asking people new to computer science to implement a full arbitrary…

> but also class discussions and group participation I really, really hated those parts of school, second only to group projects. I do appreciate why teachers want that, and I hear you about how it can surface those who are cheating, but I do wonder if it's causing the class to suffer for the alleged misdeeds of a few

[deleted]

Re: Coping with Copilot

#285

Post by teddyh »

skybrian wrote: post #280
teddyh wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copilot isn’t a derivative work in the sense these licenses usually are understood to mean The phrase “derived work” is, IIUC, a phrase from copyright law. And you’d have a hard time convincing me that Copilot-generated code is not a derived work from its training data. > And given that they’re open source code bases I expect licenses to explicitly disallow things, and consider anything not explicitly disallowed as…

Sure, but there are things you can do without a license because they're not copyright violations. You can read the work, learn from it, and sometimes make quotations under fair use. This is a novel scenario. It seems unclear how the courts will interpret it? Never mind what we think, will they decide it's a derivative work, or is it a transformative use? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use

“Fair use” is, technically, not actually permitted by copyright law. ISTR that “fair use” is only a defense you can use when you are being sued for copyright violation.

Suppose we create a new AI image generator, and use as training input every image ever made of a Disney character (official images by Disney, that is, no fan art), including every frame of every Disney movie. Could we just use the output images of that AI however we wanted to? (Not withstanding trademarks.)

Re: Coping with Copilot

#286

Post by bbor »

morelisp wrote: post #269
throwaway675309 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A masters program is generally going to cover deeper theoretical subjects and will also give you stronger mathematical underpinnings in those areas. If you're just looking for a code monkey to do your e-commerce react website then obviously work experience will always trump academia.

Those aspects of a MSc are easily accessible to any motivated undergraduate as well.

Would you agree that all of the most important aspects of a bachelors in CS are easily accessible to a motivated non-student?

Re: Coping with Copilot

#287

Post by kortilla »

morelisp wrote: post #239
nightpool wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest: has anyone here ever looked at a resume with an MSc in CS and said "Yep, I bet this person knows how to write code well"? Surely there are some research level jobs where a PhD in CS is necessary, but for most coding jobs, an MSc is just 2 years of missed experience where you're learning bad habits and antipatterns by never having your code used by other people in any strenuous way. Certainly there are…

I'll generally rate an MSc lower than BA/BSc. (The exceptions would be if you needed the MSc to meet some visa requirement, or if you had an BSc in some weakly-related field beforehand.) From downvoters: I would genuinely love to hear a defense of an MSc per se. What university has their shit together enough to actually accelerate/compress 2-4y of work experience into 1-2y years of academic project, which is what's a…

This just sounds like you’re punishing candidates because you have an inferiority complex.

Many master’s holders started out thinking they might have been interested in research and decided industry was a better fit after seeing how the sausage is made. You’re “rule of thumb” punishes undergrads who were inspired to push the boundaries of knowledge in the field.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#288

Post by gerdesj »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #227
Karellen wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer science is to programming what materials science is to construction. It produces really interesting new building blocks that actual practitioners can put to amazing uses. But research scientists aren't necessarily great engineers, and engineers aren't necessarily great research scientists. That's OK though, it's why we have separate disciplines.

I mean, it's more like "woodworker" vs "carpenter." We don't ask people framing houses to plane their own wood. Most practitioners in our industry don't apply much fundamental CS knowledge. After graduating most CS grads seem to forget foundational CS stuff anyways. I never got a CS degree. So I trained myself. While working and also a lot of a year when I was unemployed during the .com crash. Which only made me more…

Your woodworker analogy needs a bit of work 8)

In construction - in the UK - there are first and second fix "chippies". First fix do the big stuff and second fix do everything after the plaster is dry(ish).

There are also cabinet makers and furniture makers, turners and several more wood related trades. Here, woodworker is a synonym for carpenter and carpenter is rarely used as a job title. Generally a specialisation is used.

I happen to own an IT firm and I prefer to see engineering qualifications on CVs (resumes). I'm a rather shabby Civ. Eng myself! I graduated just before the shit hit the fan in the UK in 1991 - recession, >10% unemployment (in Devon and Cornwall) etc. Can't recall what inflation was up to at the time but I think it was worse than now.

... So I ended up in IT

Re: Coping with Copilot

#289

Post by beej71 »

ctoth wrote: post #243

Setting aside the academic implications for a moment, if you think that Copilot-like models won't be a significant part of programming in the future I'd like to point out this research from Google: > We compare the hybrid semantic ML code completion of 10k+ Googlers (over three months across eight programming languages) to a control group and see a 6% reduction in coding iteration time (time between builds and tests)…

Sign of the times, I think. How long until AI offers complete solutions to basic business websites? How long until it does even more?

Re: Coping with Copilot

#290

Post by LtWorf »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #89

I understand the problem here and I sympathize with professors in these circumstances. Learning the fundamentals will remain important. But as others have pointed out: if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run. One thing tho is that things like Copilot put the lie to the hypothesis (propagated mostly by the Google-style job interview) that intensely codi…

In my master program in CS there was a guy unfamiliar with the concept of "find the minimum number in an array". Turns out he just had paid someone to do all of his assignment in the bachelor.
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