291–300 of 463 posts
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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.
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> 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…
While it would likely be prohibitively expensive, I really wish there was an independent board that would certify software engineering as a certification and required an oral defense in the same style as a PhD. I recognize that it's kind of gatekeeping but it feels like more and more diploma mills are just hanging out degrees, not to mention all the coding camps out there.
Not giving anyone ideas or anything, but if you feed it your previous assignments and it learns your writing style it should be hard to detect with minor editing.
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> 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. Very true. Like it or not, the reputation of educational institutions plays a significant role in candidate selection processes at many companies. If a company brings in 10 graduates from a local…
> Meanwhile, someone who has Stanford or Harvard on their resume is virtually guaranteed an interview. The funny thing is though - the CS programs at Stanford or Harvard are more research based than anything and hardly teach students to code. You are forced to take maybe 1 or 2 "learn to code" courses and everything else is just math/theory or assumes you can code anyways. And that shouldn't be a surprise; it doesn't…
Are you sure?
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If you’re writing code you are the audience for copilot. Just try it
This sounds kind of creepy culty. I think it's the pushing "just try it" vs merely reporting "I like it".
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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?
For example, I used to work in our IT department that handled the CS/Math departments at our University. We are a fairly well regarded school in the computing fields. However when we did co-op hiring of students for roles we had in the department there was one thing that stood out. People who only had programming experience through the school were not good programmers. It was the people who either had past work experience or had their own side projects who actually knew their stuff well.
At the end of the day I think CS degrees often go heavy on the theoretical and I find much of the theory is not applicable to the majority of CS/SoftEng jobs out there. I feel like someone who is motivated can gain the skills to be hirable in many software companies out there without going to school. I view things like co-pilot not as a problem. This will hopefully force the professors to make assignments that teach people more complex and work applicable content, rather than having them write generic intro to programming style cookie cutter programs.
Some of the autocomplete was okay in that it saved me some keystrokes at times, but in general, it felt like more of a distraction. I especially hated the suggested comments; these were almost never close to what I intended to write, and it would always give me a pause when they'd pop up, and often forget what I was about to write.
There were a few instances where it magically did autocomplete a surprising bit of code, and I enjoyed the novelty when it would happen, but that wore off quick.
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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 tha…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fic...
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This is a good example of why I dread Copilot: even if Go specifically couldn't express this any more concisely, there is a language that can and Copilot's very existence makes it less likely for that other language to be used as much as it deserves. Besides, the generated example seems to be missing code to gracefully handle the case where len(filtered) is zero. Maybe there's a precondition that prevents that from h…
Zero is gracefully handled; the mean of a zero-sized set is best represented by NaN, and this would be idiomatic in most languages' IEEE754-style handling. Saturation is not. This is what really bugs me: If I'm going to drag in a billion GPUs of external computation (or a dependency, which is basically the same thing but with human brains), I want it to provide the hard algorithm I can't write, not the easy one I can…
(Also, in--say--Ruby and JavaScript 1.0/0.0 is Infinity and not NaN.)