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GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

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Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#611

Post by dathinab »

DeathArrow wrote: post #454
dathinab wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or actively remove many reasons why people ended up trying out linux distributions in the past like e.g. universtity students needing to run programs which don't run on windows natively all the time, so many try out native Linux distros, some stay. Now all of them can just use WSL. Or like devs which need to develop for Linux servers etc. Basically they have accepted that windows server have failed and their server l…

> like I'm fine paying for an OS but not if there is even a single AD in there I can't remember last time I paid for Windows. Microsoft usually offers free upgrades. I haven't seen any ad on Windows. I frankly find hard to believe there are ads in Windows.

> I can't remember last time I paid for Windows.

Every time you buy a new Laptop or pre-build computer with Windows installed you (very likely) implicitly bought a license.

But I agree that due to Windows handing out a lot of "free upgrades" even outside of their official supported upgrade path they missed out on a lot of License cost, but made more users upgrade so probably worth it.

Most important Microsoft mainly cares about Businesses buying Pro versions of licenses, potential in huge batches.

> ... disabled ads ... [from other adjacent comment]

Or uses a pi-hole or a software which disables them for you but which you might have installed to e.g. set privacy settings or replaced components with 3rd party ones or that LTT Linus ability to subconscious filter out ads. What matters is that there are a lot of people which have had the AD experience.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#612

Post by danenania »

elil17 wrote: post #601
danenania wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the key issue are these 'hallucinations'--mistakes that seem plausible but are completely made up, like API endpoints that would be super useful except for the small problem that they don't exist. GPT4 is better than GPT3 on these but it still produces a lot of them. The question is whether these are somehow inherent to the LLM approach or whether scaling up and continued improvements can eventually get rid of…

It seems pretty clear to me that you could do some more RL to enforce truth-telling/admitting when it does not know - it would just be much more labor intensive compared to the RLHF they have already done because fact checking is difficult.

I'd imagine they've already been doing lots of RL in this direction, which explains the improvements in GPT4, but it's still an issue. Maybe they can eventually eliminate hallucinations completely, but I could also imagine that it will end up being difficult to do that without lessening its creativity across the board. Perhaps making things up is fundamental to how LLMs work and trying to stop it from doing that will kill the magic. I'm not an AI researcher so I really have no idea--just speculating.

I'm not at all trying to downplay the power or significance of LLMs, btw, in case that's why I'm getting downvoted... I'm using copilot/GPT4 every day and they are massive productivity boosters. But currently I see them as tools for producing rough drafts that need to be revised and checked over. If they can't solve hallucinations, LLMs will stay in this lane, which is still incredible, amazing, and useful, but won't necessarily get us to the AI endgame that the hype is predicting.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#613

Post by dathinab »

gonehome wrote: post #408
dathinab wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or actively remove many reasons why people ended up trying out linux distributions in the past like e.g. universtity students needing to run programs which don't run on windows natively all the time, so many try out native Linux distros, some stay. Now all of them can just use WSL. Or like devs which need to develop for Linux servers etc. Basically they have accepted that windows server have failed and their server l…

I use macOS in large part because its a *nix OS under the hood. WSL gives a lot of that power to Windows.

macOS is tempting but it's a pretty bad nix IMHO.

The amount of times I had to change ad-hoc scripts to work around macOS limitations is absurd.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#614

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

pleb_nz wrote: post #559
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well productivity is up 240% since the 1950s. So due to a single person being more efficient than 2 in 1950 and the 43.5 million workforce we can extrapolate that no more than 20 million workers will be needed nowadays. Except in 2020 there were 152 million employed americans, with a productivity 2.4x higher than 1950s, or a cummulative workforce of 365 million 1950 americans working. And somehow they all had stuf to…

I dont think that's a fair and direct comparison tbh. There's a lot of new industries now that people have diverged into and population growth has exploded which I hope for the sake of the planet and human kind is going to slow , at least until we're in a better position to manage bigger populations without killing the planet and other life. I'll be happy if I'm wrong, but are you confident enough to bet that there w…

> There's a lot of new industries now

And if this tech is really revolutionary there won't be new industries? Have we peaked?

> but are you confident enough to bet that there won't be less need for general developers and engineers and not have a plan in case?

I am confident there will not be a lack of work. Whether the roles are similar is a different question. Actuaries and accountants look very different now to before excel was common place. Web developers were not a thing before the internet.

If the revolution comes, and jobs are no longer needed, perhpas there is an industry for prompt engineers. Or model fine tunning experts. Dev ops roles to connect super computers to Modelling APIs. Who knows, but the skills of a decent Engineer are on problem solving, on learning new ideas, on applying problem solving laterally those are such broad skills that is hard for a job market to exist without needing them.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#615

Post by cornholio »

DeathArrow wrote: post #506
cornholio wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some nuance here. Microsoft executed "commoditize your complement" to perfection - the complements to their OS being PC hardware and applications. This meant they had to be insanely good at supporting a vast array of diverse hardware, but also offered exceptionally good support for developers to keep the barriers of entry low in the Windows software market. They had even a cute name for these commoditized an…

> it was only through sheer luck and complacency that the mobile revolution caught them on the wrong foot. Windows Phone wasn't bad and I wish we could have more competition in mobile space.

I wish we could have open platforms that competitive players can extend and develop without owning outright and excluding other competitors.

It's the great next step in regulating monopolies, contemporary products no longer exist standalone in the marketplace but must always interoperate with existing infrastructure and platforms. The last decades of tech competition were a repetition of this basic tune, some first mover more or less stumbling into a de-facto standard and then fighting like hell to maintain its dominance and undeserved rent extraction.

The situation is complicated by the nature of international trade vs local regulations, it might not be good for your national consumers to be fleeced by a platform monopoly, but you more than make up for it if your national tech champions achieve world-dominance.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#616

Post by agentultra »

jeremyjh wrote: post #578
sh4rks wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? When the latter is just as effective but also much quicker?

It isn't just as effective for me. No matter how much I'd like to, I can't review code with the same thoughtfulness and thoroughness that I apply when I write it. I know the same is true for the people who have reviewed my PRs as well, but maybe its different for others. I do use Copilot but mostly it only generates one liners for me that save a little time.

Empirical studies on large-scale projects employing informal code review (the study I'm talking about monitored the Qt project repositories) suggest that humans have a very low impact on error rates. Reviewing more than ~200LOC every couple of hours makes the effect disappear.

So you're not alone. You can even point to the plethora of "find the undefined behaviour," tests: humans are really bad at finding errors in code.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#617

Post by DeathArrow »

cornholio wrote: post #615
DeathArrow wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was only through sheer luck and complacency that the mobile revolution caught them on the wrong foot. Windows Phone wasn't bad and I wish we could have more competition in mobile space.

I wish we could have open platforms that competitive players can extend and develop without owning outright and excluding other competitors. It's the great next step in regulating monopolies, contemporary products no longer exist standalone in the marketplace but must always interoperate with existing infrastructure and platforms. The last decades of tech competition were a repetition of this basic tune, some first m…

> I wish we could have open platforms that competitive players can extend and develop without owning outright and excluding other competitors.

Who will pay for the development of those platforms? Who will ensure the compatibility with hardware?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#618

Post by DeathArrow »

cornholio wrote: post #615
DeathArrow wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was only through sheer luck and complacency that the mobile revolution caught them on the wrong foot. Windows Phone wasn't bad and I wish we could have more competition in mobile space.

I wish we could have open platforms that competitive players can extend and develop without owning outright and excluding other competitors. It's the great next step in regulating monopolies, contemporary products no longer exist standalone in the marketplace but must always interoperate with existing infrastructure and platforms. The last decades of tech competition were a repetition of this basic tune, some first m…

> The last decades of tech competition were a repetition of this basic tune, some first mover more or less stumbling into a de-facto standard and then fighting like hell to maintain its dominance and undeserved rent extraction.

Isn't that true for every industry?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#619

Post by moonchrome »

wysewun wrote: post #459
pastor_bob wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$50+ in monthly subscription fees? BRB buying some MSFT

Great point. Time to do research on how much GitHub contributes to msft earnings. Really does seem like they’re on the verge of a huge jump

They are bragging about 1m developers on copilot, let's say 20$/m to be generous - that's 20m$/month - they probably have larger single client revenues than that and I doubt copilot is high margin (I bet I spend more than 10$/month in compute by the queries I generate).

Unless this goes to hundreds of dollars/month (which I would pay if it was a good experience) I don't see this making a dent.

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