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Coping with Copilot

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Re: Coping with Copilot

#411

Post by int_19h »

bayindirh wrote: post #207
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since Microsoft uses material for copilot outside of licensing on the basis that it is Fair Use, that would probably have no effect in practice i think that any formal violation of an open source license would be very bad in terms of public relations - even if they can claim fair use.

They got it covered. Passed the responsibility to user in their official documentation.

It's not really an issue when you're a large software corporation; you already have mechanisms in place to check for license compliance in everything that ships, including F/OSS plagiarism checks.

I think that's the part that people who don't think it's worth the money aren't getting. This kind of system is godsend for the likes of Infosys, TCS etc. So the immediate threat is to the jobs there - but the side effect is that it'll make it all even cheaper, so we'll see more "outsourcing to the cloud", so to speak. Often to the obvious detriment of quality, but that doesn't seem to matter in this market.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#412

Post by pclmulqdq »

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…

I agree with you on the value of a master's, but not about the some of the assumptions you make about the people who get them.

The most legitimate use of a MS degree is to move from one field to an adjacent field (eg math to CS). You know the basics, and you just need the advanced coursework in the other field.

A lot of people I have seen use a master's as a pure signaling tool, getting a high-profile University on their resume. For example, I have seen a lot of resumes with "BS from Unknown University" and "MS from Stanford/Harvard/MIT." In interviews, these students have not performed nearly as well as students with a BS from Stanford/Harvard/MIT, so I tend to discount the MS if I see this pattern.

Another common reason for the MS that I have seen is as an immigration tool. These people are usually pretty smart.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#413

Post by 0xCAP »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #399
LtWorf wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, that's not mandatory. Actually, only the big, shitty, consultancy shops (Accenture, Deloitte, etc) look stricly for licensed engineers, mostly because, funnily enough, they're usually hired for much less than the average SWEs. Actually there's kind of a shared feeling in the industry that licensed software engineers are dumbasses.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#414

Post by int_19h »

skybrian wrote: post #218
Guest42 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was trained using source code whose licenses don't permit such usage.

This is unclear. I have never seen an open source license that was explicit about this. Seems like a grey area. It's not even clear how often training machine learning algorithms on code results in copyright violations. CoPilot does have a setting to detect and disallow direct copying, but how well does it work? This legal uncertainty is enough that I wouldn't advise using it, but maybe people who use it will be fine…

It's messy enough it's likely to end up a Supreme Court case in US (and I wouldn't want to be a party to it).

Europeans will probably preempt that with legislation.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#415

Post by eloff »

nebulousthree wrote: post #380
zelphirkalt wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your argument is akin to saying "there's so much theory crammed into Astronomy that students do not get to look through a telescope much" CS fundamentally is not about computers. It's about math and the flow of information between theoretical machines. Computers just happen to be a physical implement. The idea that universities should teach to develop industry-fit individuals is just an extension of commodifying univ…

> Why not let the industry handle training for what they need their people to do, and let universities focus on their intended goal: create more university professors/researchers.

Which would result in universities eventually going out of business. An outcome I'm not opposed to, provided what replaces them functions better at training young people for real life.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#416

Post by eloff »

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…

I was skeptical of copilot, but since trying it for two months, I'm really impressed. It's a smarter auto complete. For $10/month it pays for itself in one day.

You have to be careful with the output it produces, as it often looks sensible but is wrong. Especially if it contains numeric constants. But on the whole it speeds things up, the same way good code auto complete does.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#417

Post by wobbleblob »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #71

While it is true code pilot is quite amazing and can produce some very decent snippets, if the exercice you give is specific enought (using a special database schema, file format, or API), with objectives that are not common (ask the user specific questions, and draw conclusions out of it or react to events), then it cannot produce a fully working program. I use code pilot regularly now, and it does speed up my work,…

Github Copilot won't give students anything they couldn't already google.

It seems to be a natural part of aging, to start to complain about education and kids these days because it's not the same as when we were in school.

I try not to do that, because I never forgot how my parents generation said the exact same about us when we were in school, and I guarantee my grandparents generation complained when my parents were in school.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#419

Post by int_19h »

jcranmer wrote: post #112
NikolaNovak wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I moved as well, I experienced three different Canadian universities' Computer Science Program. There was only one professor and course that I still remember 20 years later: CS408, Software Engineering, Professor Wortman, UofToronto. Class project was in four phases, cumulative (basic functionality for the application in phase 1, progressively additional functionality in other phases, frequently strongly interacti…

There are a few issues with this kind of assignment. The first issue is that it's really hell on the TAs with all of the administrative work needed to do the swapping between phases. Software engineering is already one of the more annoying classes to TA, and this makes it even less palatable. The bigger issue is that, on the basis of fairness, you grade in later phases is very heavily dependent on factors that are ou…

> It is extremely rare that someone will be dumped on a codebase without a prior author remaining on to help them ramp up on the code.

The way this is more likely to work out IRL is that the last person who actually understood the design - not just the what's, but the why's - had long since moved on, and the "prior author" that you have access to can, at best, tell you where the dragons are.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#420

Post by busyant »

randomdata wrote: post #67
busyant wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most effective policy might not be to try and mechanically prevent cheating, but to explain that, this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to go into the field and if you're using copilot here you are damaging yourself in the long run. I don't teach CS, but I teach an online course in a STEM field. I give out a similar message ("you're only hurting yourself in the long run"). My anecdo…

> I mean, they're delusional, but I understand the mindset for cheating. Parental (other similar) pressure can indeed be quite strong. Absent of that pressure they wouldn't be there in the first place, so perhaps it is not so much being delusional as a rational response to their environment? If they cheat their way through the parents are happy and then they can return to the life they otherwise would have lived. The…

> I find it curious that the customer using the product in an unintended way would be upsetting to the vendor. What drives such emotions? In my businesses, I couldn't care less how the customer uses my product. If they're happy, I'm happy.

There's a lot more going on here than maybe you realize.

First, the students are not your only customers. The administration is also one of your customers. If you make the course TOO difficult and fail everyone, your "administration customer" will find a way to get rid of you.

Conversely, if you make the course too easy and everyone gets to cheat and everyone gets an "A", then many students who pass your class may not pass various professional certification exams that are more rigorously controlled (i.e., no cheating). If that happens, then the school may lose accreditation for programs that you are associated with (i.e., if all the nursing majors fail their certification exam, your nursing program may get nuked). Then you get nuked.

Third, whether you like it or not, your relationships with your students is something you have to deal with. Students who don't cheat have a tendency to get really upset if they find out you turn a blind eye to cheating. Happy cheating customers leads to unhappy honest customers.

Fourth, if your fellow faculty members feel like you're going easy on the students to get favorable reviews (or because you're lazy or because you hate confrontation), they can make life unpleasant for you, too. They also aren't too happy if they teach upper level courses and you send a bunch of garbage students their way.

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