Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coping with Copilot

sigarch.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 463 posts

Re: Coping with Copilot

#391

Post by robertlagrant »

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…

This is why CS and coding are barely related.

Software engineering experience can be gained at a code school, or by working on open source projects, if you already know some coding from one of the many free online resources.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#392

Post by drran »

NoraCodes wrote: post #159
drran wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When teachers require recording of timelapses, we will have AI which will be able to generate text and a video of a user typing it. IMHO, they should start to require timelapses right now.

That requires either trusting that students haven't edited out the evidence of cheating, which is pointless, or forcing them to use specific, proprietary software to record the video, which is unacceptable.

Timelapse can be recorded online, just like a security camera with upload to cloud does, so it will be impossible to edit later. Cheating will be visible because of sudden changes in text of the program.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#393

Post by lakomen »

1. Entertaining read

The unavoidable question is, will our and their kids be able to function without their machine overlords?

In the 80s I had to come up with my own solutions because no internet and no books, being 11.

With the internet I searched it with the error messages. Pre 2000 I got useful and accurate results, post 2k I got more and opinions than results, which had to do with the amount of mediocre intellect on the net and Google trying to provide a larger list of results, but mostly the stupid made it onto the net.

Om github you already have the stupid I'd imagine since it's such a popular platform, although many have left it when Microsoft tool over. But many also let their work be abused by Microsoft to sell the Copilot service, so I'm guessing the stupid is very present on Github.

The evil of taking someone's work, that they shared with good intent to help other people, run it through a machine network and sell it to the "other man" again.

And now it's even corrupting our children and our children's children.

Pure evil Microsoft.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#394

Post by moffkalast »

sliken wrote: post #187
moffkalast wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Type the assignment into google and press enter vs type it as a comment and press tab? Seems roughly the same amount of effort, and since Copilot is not free anymore most students won't bother paying for access on any kind of scale that matters. Whoever was going to cheat will cheat regardless. Besides it's one of those "you won't have a calculator with you everyday" fallacies. If you can solve problems with Copilot…

Not really, for small snippets, sure. But jobs require getting something done. Sure you might be able to tab complete 10 pieces, but at some point you have to tie them together to get a working program and those 10 pieces will have different assumptions and require some real understanding to integrate.

Sounds like something they ought to require in that university course then eh?

Re: Coping with Copilot

#395

Post by lakomen »

SoftTalker wrote: post #93
clusterhacks wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, sometime adjunct here. Cheating on programming assignments has been rampant forever at every undergrad institution I have experience with and somewhat present among graduate students. My experience spans about 25 years in that space now. When I taught an introductory class, I gave open-book exams with no laptops or phones allowed. About 1/3 of the class was unable to write a syntactically correct for loop in Pyth…

I recently worked at a large state university. I remember a conversation with an instructor in a master-level operating systems course. One of the assignments was to implement a simple filesystem. The amount of cheating was insane. He started academic dishonesty proceedings against many of the students but the department pressured him to "work it out." He had to basically interview each student individually and ask f…

In reality there's only a small percentage who are genuine creators. The rest are copycats also because the opportunity to copy exists.

The other side is real world pressure for good grades and when you're young you want to party and experience life. You finished that assignment by copy pasting it. It's better than not finishing it. However you get that anywhere in life. Why is, sorry, was Stackoverflow so popular? Why is religion still a thing? People want easy answers to hard questions.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#396

Post by lakomen »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #167
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also believe that we should move away from evaluation entirely? Genuinely asking.

Evaluation is vital but the current model used in education today is not evaluation, it is punishment. Failed to get the answers right? You are punished. You lose points. Your GPA plummets. You could even fail the class and have to take it again which means the punishment is not only social but economical. There's real life consequences to this kind of evaluation. Huge consequences. Students cannot afford to make mis…

Well if you have to meet certain criteria to get a title then "punishment" is exactly what I'd expect to see.

Isn't that the whole point of all this? You can't call yourself a med doctor if you have no idea about being one, if you don't know about the key knowledge areas.

Therefore you're not a doctor and don't get to have that title.

It's about filtering out those who can't

Re: Coping with Copilot

#397

Post by morelisp »

Test0129 wrote: post #375
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)…

I don't mean to be pedantic here but 6% improvement in productivity is a rounding error. You can achieve a higher level of productivity by just removing the ping pong table from the break room. This would indicate to me there is a non-significant improvement in productivity. That seems consistent with my having talked to several senior+ engineers who tried copilot and found it simply wrong or unnecessary. There might…

It's not even a 6% productivity increase, it's "6% less time between builds and tests". Is that even a meaningful metric?

It is also not clear to me what the control group was, neither how they were selected nor what they did instead of using the ML model.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#398

Post by randomsearch »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #324
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…

Lets face it: There is so much theory crammed into some CS degrees, bachelor and master degrees, that students do not get to code much. Real coding is often learned by oneself in side projects or on the job. If students do not engage in side projects, how do we expect them to be proficient computer programmers out of university? However, I see this as a failure of CS education. Our work is with computers. If we do no…

Imagine what happens when that person doesn’t leave academia to have the opportunity to learn to code. They just stay on. And end up teaching coding.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#399

Post by bigDinosaur »

LtWorf wrote: post #369
bigDinosaur wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being an actual engineer (software) is different to just being a software engineer, and the former is very commonly highly regulated.

In italy software engineers are actual engineers.

I hope, for the sake of your software industry, that this only relates to calling yourself an engineer, and not to the general practice of software development. If you have to be a licensed engineer to work in software in Italy then that'd be a colossal drag on anything interesting happening in that industry.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#400

Post by robryk »

morelisp wrote: post #384
Miraste wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, univers…

I mean that's the theory, and it still seems true for PhD programs. (So I guess I'd include "ABD" as another possible exception if the program also granted an MSc but it feels like this is much less common than it was when I graduated - the many problems of grad school are now better communicated to undergrads.) But for MScs, nah. The more focused coursework is directly accessible to undergraduates, and the projects…

> (...) the projects are often like (...)

This seems to suggest that asking a candidate with an MSc about their thesis might be useful

Post reply on HN