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Coping with Copilot

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Re: Coping with Copilot

#441

Post by randomdata »

sideshowb wrote: post #440
randomdata wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because your customer, in so doing, is stealing from your other customers That's always going to be the case, though. Imagine you built software that helped businesses find customers. Using it the intended way they can realize a small number of new customer each day distributed across your customer base. Now, someone finds a new way to use your software in a manner that you never envisioned and they're attracting a…

You picked a very specific example of customer behaviour, with aspects of a zero sum game, that is by no means "always going to be the case". And yes it's a waste of time! If you want a fake credential then it's much cheaper and easier to just lie on your CV. It's not like many employers will check your certificates, at least not in software. I'd really rather people did that than waste my time first trying to teach…

> And yes it's a waste of time!

It is, but an acceptable cost to keep the social pressures at bay. There are a lot of things in life that are ultimately wastes of time, but worthwhile to maintain a civil society. Such is life. If you are happy to escape to the deep woods away from all others where every moment of your time is purposeful, good on you.

> If you want a fake credential then it's much cheaper and easier to just lie on your CV.

What would that accomplish? The business world couldn't care less about your past achievements. They don't care that you performed in a play, rode a horse, swam in the ocean, or went to college. There is no value in even putting a legitimate degree accomplishment on your CV, let alone faking it. If anything, it detracts from your standing as it shows that you're so useless you couldn't come up with anything more relevant to share about yourself.

Instead, it is parental pressure that puts one into these schools when they otherwise shouldn't be. And those parents will turn up at your graduation. Once you've thrown your cap in the air, so to speak, nobody will ever think about it ever again. Getting to that one moment in time is the so called hoops that one is cheating for.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#442

Post by hnfong »

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…

If taken seriously by universities, this would be a really hypocritical stance (on the universities' part).

CS departments are getting more students and funding in recent years precisely _because_ they are seen to be providing valuable education for would-be programmers and practitioners in the software industry. At the same time, some people like you perpetuate the myth that only the theory matters in a CS degree, and it shouldn't have any bearing at all with the demands of industry.

If what you propose is becomes reality, expect CS departments shrink to 10% of their current size and high school graduates skip university to take on apprenticeships. That's actually fine by me, but I doubt that's actually what you're envisioning.

The fact is that most universities these days _pretend_ that they can prepare somebody to become a software engineer by providing CS courses. That works to some extent, but as you say, the degree is generally more geared towards training researchers and academics. There's no fundamental reason why universities shouldn't provide a more practical-oriented "software engineering" degree of sorts, much like how they provide other engineering degrees (eg. Civil Engineering) as opposed to pure sciences. _Except that they generally aren't capable of doing so_, so they happily accept the sub-optimal arrangement that CS is the de-facto degree for prospective software engineers, while maintaining the whatever perceived high ground where they insist on teaching theoretical, impractical stuff because most of the faculty don't know a thing about developing software in modern environments. Basically they want to have their cake and eat it.

Software engineering has become such an important part of modern society that IMHO it should at least have the recognition and respect as such. Imagine somebody arguing that universities shouldn't provide Civil Engineering courses because, you know, it's just physics and applied maths, and civil engineers should just do a Bachelor of Science in Physics with a theoretical focus, leaving the practical knowledge of how to build a building to apprenticeships, because universities are too busy mentoring the next Einstein. Would you want to live in a society like that?

Re: Coping with Copilot

#443

Post by gopher_space »

Fogest wrote: post #301
gopher_space wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can picture autogen boilerplate being collected and distributed in versioned "community expansion packs" to popular languages, and I'm not looking for fragmentation like that in my tools. I really don't want my IDE involved like this. I'd rather see Copilot used to expand existing libraries. Pulling potential additions to your own library off of Copilot would be an interesting twist on the situation. A hacktoberfes…

Nobody is forcing you to use it... Others like myself find it useful and to be a huge timesaver. If it doesn't benefit you, then just don't use it. Why must people be so vocal about not liking something? I get that you don't think it would be useful for yourself, but it sounds like you've never used it, yet are against it enough to come bash on it in a thread. I think you should give it a try and see what you think a…

No, I think it's amazing. My point is why not write its suggestions down somewhere and cut out the middle man.

My concern is that I'd get locked into a specific IDE.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#444

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

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's not rare at all for previous authors to just disappear. do you know what the turnover is at large companies?? reading the code is not the issue though, we also lose context. WHY was it done that way? was it a product decision, due to time constraints, or technical complexity? that should be documented but often isn't

Re: Coping with Copilot

#445

Post by busyant »

randomdata wrote: post #435
busyant wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 T…

It seems that you're not managing your customers well. If, in any other business, you needed to adjust the behaviour of some customers to keep other customers happy you would provide incentives, like a price discount. You don't need to fail the cheaters, you just need to make it more appealing to not cheat to keep the non-cheaters happy. How are you doing that? Is there a financial discount to those who have shown to…

> It seems that you're not managing your customers well. If, in any other business, you needed to adjust the behaviour of some customers to keep other customers happy you would provide incentives, like a price discount

Spoken like someone who hasn't done the job and is confident in his ignorance.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#446

Post by randomdata »

busyant wrote: post #445
randomdata wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you're not managing your customers well. If, in any other business, you needed to adjust the behaviour of some customers to keep other customers happy you would provide incentives, like a price discount. You don't need to fail the cheaters, you just need to make it more appealing to not cheat to keep the non-cheaters happy. How are you doing that? Is there a financial discount to those who have shown to…

> It seems that you're not managing your customers well. If, in any other business, you needed to adjust the behaviour of some customers to keep other customers happy you would provide incentives, like a price discount Spoken like someone who hasn't done the job and is confident in his ignorance.

Yes, that is what "seems" implies. It suggests that there is gaps in the information and that one should come back with more details. There were also directed questions included to help guide one to where information was lacking.

Curious that a primitive emotional response has transpired instead. Given the greater context of discussion also about emotions, is there something about the job that attracts this type of behaviour?

Re: Coping with Copilot

#447

Post by LtWorf »

0xCAP wrote: post #413
bigDinosaur wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They want licensed engineers so they hire them as consultants and pay no sick leave and vacations.

Becoming licensed is mostly needed if you want to work on your own. You pay less taxes but have ZERO safety, so in theory you should earn much more and work for many customers. But those shitty consultancy companies hire consultants and pay them very little.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#448

Post by mannykannot »

Kamq wrote: post #352
mannykannot wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I take it that you are saying that a) everything Copilot is currently capable of can be found in libraries, and consequently b) learning how to do those things oneself is a waste of time, so c) it does not matter if people entering industry as software developers cannot do that themselves. My point is that even if this is the case for a majority of such people, we still need the people who make all the l…

> To be clear, I take it that you are saying that... I'm going to answer these individually because the answers are all different. > a) everything Copilot is currently capable of can be found in libraries, The vast majority, perhaps not 100%. > b) learning how to do those things oneself is a waste of time It's a waste of time if the pupil doesn't actually want to do it. If they do want to do it, there's probably quit…

We have reached a point of mutual understanding and considerable agreement, but I feel we have circled around to the original problem.

In your last paragraph, you consider the case of calculator vs. slide rule, but one can, I think, make a more apposite case with calculator vs. learning arithmetic (and even if you don't agree that it is more apposite, the point can still be made!) By your logic, we should not be assigning any arithmetic problems that can be solved with a calculator.

But why stop there? Even current calculators can do much more than basic arithmetic, and their capabilities pale in comparison to those of general-purpose computers. I do not believe you can teach mathematics in a way that begins at a point beyond what has been automated, and before long that may be true for computing as well. This has not led to the demise of mathematics education, and neither will it for computing, for the same reason in both cases: anyone who needs to use these tools to get through the introductory classes will wash out later - which brings us right back to spcebar's original comment about only hurting themselves in the long run.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#449

Post by NoraCodes »

drran wrote: post #392
NoraCodes wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is, as I said, unacceptable. Among other things, it means students can't use their editor of choice, and students with disabilities who use assistive technologies will be much more likely to be flagged as cheaters. It also won't stop anyone from cheating by doing the exercise with Copilot and typing it up a second time for the time lapse.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#450

Post by xigoi »

gentleman11 wrote: post #327
geraldwhen wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people I meet with CS degrees cannot code. Not anything. Some can’t declare variables or get a file to compile.

Your actual problem is that you are stressing people out so badly that they cannot think, then asking things of them while expecting them to fail

If you forget the basics of your favorite programming language under stress, you might not be suited for a programming job.
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