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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

#681
post #130

Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. And…

Any new technology will create new work of its own. AI will automate the repeated loops in the previous workflows and free up workforce but create much more new work than it will be automating.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#682
post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried GPT-4?

Will give it a go. But probably it’ll take another generation or two before it’s good enough.

Cool. I’d be interested in the algorithm that you’re giving it to write and what problem it is having with the output.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s officially from GitHub. There is some weird language (that I’ll absolutely pass feedback on to the team), I think because GitHub Next is a different organization from GitHub proper, but I can assure you, this is an official GitHub app. But I totally agree that this isn’t a great/clear message about where this is from.

I raised this concern before about how unclear this is and the concern was pretty much dismissed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539150 "Techies" often lament about how silly users are about falling for phishing tricks, but then they also routinely make it so difficult to determine what's legit from what's fake.

> make it so difficult to determine what's legit from what's fake.

So true. I still think the DNS was one of the only chances to grant, and teach, the ability to confidently make trust decisions in the general population. IDN attacks notwithstanding, it's hard to beat an inspectable string that contains its own trust chain, compared to "app names" that can often be set to the hacker's own choice. Sadly, antipatterns seem more common than useful patterns.

(Antipatterns like using a domain like "talktotacobell . com" (don't visit that) as the site to complete a receipt survey. Or every public school district or even school having a random .com or .org.)

People decided that end users would find an address like xhs.xsd.ed.ca.gov too complicated, yet people found 10-digit completely meaningless telephone numbers perfectly fine for decades.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#684
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. Microsoft are a joke when they're losing and a joke when they're winning. I'm old enough to have seen the full circle and I'm super curious to see what happens when M$ is back on top.

- lock down of PC software to the Microsoft app store, probably roughly at the same time apple also tightens a lock down on macOS - more anti competitive steps to make installing desktop Linux on consumer hardware hard while arguing you could just use WSL and it's "for your security" and they are not anti Linux because they embrace Linux on servers - trying to kill Valve, there should only be Windows games and only t…

> lock down of PC software to the Microsoft app store, probably roughly at the same time apple also tightens a lock down on macOS

Nothing is locked down. UWP and win32 are funcionally equivalent with sparse registration. If you decide to publish to the store anyways, you can even use your own payment provider and keep 100% comission.

> more anti competitive steps to make installing desktop Linux on consumer hardware hard while arguing you could just use WSL and it's "for your security" and they are not anti Linux because they embrace Linux on servers

Isn't WSL a win-win for the Linux-community and Windows-users alike? WSL2 and WSLg make Linux desktop apps more accessible than ever.

> trying to kill Valve, there should only be Windows games and only through the Windows app store Xbox Game Studios games are released on Steam.

I could go on, but you get the point.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. I agree with this. And what I think is so fascinating is how much they left on the table during this very same time. Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software substack is an amazing read[1]. And it really shows how much they got wrong as well as how much they got right. MS is firing on all cylinders. B…

I agree that MS is executing well, but why would Google be afraid? There's no AI moat keeping anyone from replicating what MS is doing. They can train on everything on GitHub just like MS can. If anything, this is where they should both be afraid because an upstart with a browser extension could replace them.

> I agree that MS is executing well, but why would Google be afraid? There's no AI moat keeping anyone from replicating what MS is doing.

It's not an AI moat. It's about business models.

If MS takes even a small fraction of Google's search traffic, and/or convert a small fraction of people from Chrome to Edge, it'll hit Google's bottom line at the one place that's a huge majority of their revenue and profits. MS has nothing to lose and Bing GPT4 integration is very good.

Flip side, there's no area where Google is significantly threatening MS. Office suites: MS copilot announcements go significantly further than Google (Business Chat). Cloud: Azure's relationship with OpenAI and rapid product expansion could see it gain share.

MS is moving very quickly and coordinating across the entire company. Google is moving slowly. And company-wide execution? Well. That has never been their strong suit.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#686
post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tooling that it was designed for was things like https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709 Those were the intents that were set up. Yes, it would be nice to have LLM style power - but that isn't how Siri was architected even from the very start. Word combinations are recognized as certain intents and parsed for functions to call into apps that register that they are able to handle that function call. If there was no mat…

They open with what they want it to be “intelligent assistant” and then show the capabilities it currently had. Since that time in 2011 it has gotten no closer to “intelligent assistant”. That’s a failure imo. Google’s is much better at answering basic queries.

Google's voice assistant is an interface to google cloud applications.

Siri is an interface to a limited set of the apps on the iPhone.

These are fundamentally different architectures for how how each was designed along with implications for privacy and where the company has compute resources that can be used.

If you are after a general knowledge search engine, Google will certainly out preform Siri.

Google has better cloud integration for a lot of their functionality. Apple doesn't have that amount of cloud resources that it can use and is a device first company rather than a cloud first company.

If you want to say "android can search google better" Ok. I'll grant that. If that makes it "smarter" - ok. Android is smarter than Siri because it can search google better.

If you want to say "android can control apps on its phone better" - I really want to see evidence that the ability for Android to control 3rd party music apps (e.g. Spotify) or report the weather or calendar or set up alarms... I don't believe that android is any better than Siri in that regard.

If you want to chat with it (e.g. "what is the answer to life the universe and everything?") then those are cute responses that are programmed in.

Do you have other criteria that you are using to compare the different devices other than its ability to search Google?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#687
post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Command line didn't vanish ... You can still use it. Approximately 90% of my work is done via TUI, so it's certainly not gone.

I'm talking about people behind counters, people in stock rooms, people in all kinds of data entry and so on. The terminal did vanish from many places. We're not the market.

I worked at a paint store in my teens (2010s) that operated a beautiful text only PoS system that had been built decades ago and it was incredible. So efficient, purpose built, nary a click.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#688
post #167

I would love to hear from other people here but I tried it for a while and dropped my subscription. For short things it was nice, but the larger the suggestion the worst it got. I found myself constantly mentally debugging the output it suggested, I do not know if it was faster but I was mentally exhausted by it, unable to go for long periods of time. Dumb code completion is predictable, I know I'll need to press dow…

I haven't found it very useful. It's been useful for writing tests, but in most other stuff it's like an annoying person who's always finishing your sentences for you... wrong. It'll autocomplete stuff like file paths and just make up garbage, which messes up my intellisense autocomplete which would actually get it right.

I'm on the trial and I'll probably cancel it before I have to pay. If it was easier to turn it on and off or only use at specific moments, I might keep it, but as it is, it hasn't been great for me. I have 25 years of experience. Maybe if I was younger, I'd like it, but at this point, I'm usually not typing something unless I know what I want to type, so it's just a distraction.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#689
post #122

Not very impressed with either Copilot or ChatGPT for programming purposes. I'm sure it will be interesting for some people, but whenever I really feel like I could benefit from an intelligent AI, it usually falls flat. Most commonly, it will just generate calls that don't exist, and if you try to get it to implement them, it will write bullshit. Now the thing is, maybe it really does improve developer productivity b…

I use them all the time with success. For copilot it’s very useful for writing tests and autocompleting repetitive code. Like writing a Typescript interface that matches a JSON object, or listing properties of an object into an array. ChatGPT is at worst a good rubber duck, and at best a superpowered documentation tool. If I ever get confused by docker or some popular JavaScript library it’s able to give me a custom…

How often are you seeing bogus documentation? I see that concern often mentioned. I tried ChatGPT and the first question got an obviously wrong answer. That seems worse than stackoverflow to me. Maybe I'm not holding it right?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack sucks, but if you compare it with Teams, it is still gold. If anyone asks me, whether I wulould rather join a voice chat on Slack or Teams, the answer is 100% of the time Slack. You never know what bugs Teams will cook up this time to ruin your call. O365 is a child's toy for non-professional document creation. Quickly hacking a document together maybe. Any normal non-web office suite blows O365 out of the wate…

A quick search turns up Office 2021[0], and I see no indication that offline Office is being discontinued. And claiming that O365 is a toy? Literally the only other online office suite I've used or heard of is GDocs, which has a fraction of the functionality that I use from O365. Your post doesn't sound serious at all to me. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...

GDocs is a toy as well. Maybe worse than O365. If you only know those two, then I can understand your opinion.

Try using offline office suites, best not MS Office, and use their writing tool. So many things are missing in these online office suites. I assure you the post is serious and I have used multiple online and offline office suites. Perhaps you should explore more and make use of styles and all that. You will quickly notice how many things are missing in the online office suites.

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