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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

#731
This is good strategy. The source data, the tech to go through the data, the customers to sell the results back to - it’s all there.

Next up, AI in games through their own studios, activision Blizzard and the xbox platform.

Videos/video based content is something Microsoft doesn’t have. It’s mostly confined to ‘stream’ and teams.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it entirely depends on how popular the library is. React for example is so common online that GPT has the whole API figured out.

Even if it’s wrong the stakes are low. Just paste the error back into the chat and it will give you an alternative.

But the real solution here is the new Copilot X for docs. Feed in the code base and all documentation and now you have the real source of truth at the helm.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#733
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 also didn't find it very helpful. It would constantly suggest code that didn't even compile, e.g. suggest calling setters for fields that weren't there. I spent so much time reading the suggestions or deleting them after using them and finding out they were bullshit that I didn't save any time at all.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#734
post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean by novel, but every development project will always have requirements that are unique to solve their own respective business/domain problems. These unique, specialized requirements are further compounded by cultural and personal quirks that human stakeholders demand, making developments project essentially "novel". Current language models fail even with simple minor variations on existing p…

I can guarantee for most people 95% of what anyone is doing has been done before. AI can do all that in no time at all. Give it a few years.

Sure, most of what we're doing have been doing has already been done before, but that doesn't mean general intelligence is deprecated. It's not like we just keep repeating actions over and over without thought. For each problem we have, we adapt them and make changes to fit our specific context and needs. As long as humans and nature are involved, there's no such thing as a generalized solution that can be mechanistically applied to a general problem. I speak in the context software development and other activities that are creative or requires human judgment.

But yeah, I somewhat agree with you that a lot of the grunt work are going to be affected, jobs that are by nature purely mechanical, algorithmic or just plain parroting facts. But even then, I still highly doubt language models (today or with the following years) would deprecate those jobs. In the end, it's still a language model that is incapable of thought or reasoning.

If there one's thing I'm optimistic about the recent advances in AI, it's that more jobs will now be creative in nature. Hopefully gone are the days where schools are just mere factories for producing factoid parrots, where intelligence is measured by the size of one's esophagus to regurgitate.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I believe machines can't handle most of the jobs I listed with ease.

Cashiers, already replaced by self scanners, fewer and fewer of them are found in stores, even if you do get hired as a cashier you usually make horrible hours now. Food preparation is another one hit huge by automation, where it's become normal now for companies to announce automated locations (like McDonalds and Taco Bell did last year). Server, bartender, same thing applies. There have already been police officer…

Cashiers - yes, the others no. Police office bots? Lol... Maybe you can replace some very specific case.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is not familiar with these sorts of accessibility challenges, what makes copilot voice terrible?

It doesn't seem to understand anything I say, it also required installing Java! Felt like I'd gone back in time to 2012 or something.

What did you say?

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The development costs for Windows (as a common platform, stripped of any add-on that could be provided by other competitive players) are a footnote in the costs of the global software market for Windows. There is indeed a complex problem to be solved of how to organize an open platform so that the development costs are paid, but it's not fundamentally a question of resources. Multiple companies and open source teams have achieved roughly similar feats with many orders of magnitude less resources than what MS rent-extracted from the Windows OS consumers.

Ditto for hardware, you need a well defined and stable interface and the vendors will adhere to it once there is critical mass.

> Isn't that true for every industry?

In almost every such historic example that still exists in some fashion today (railways, energy, telco, utilities etc.), there was strong regulatory action to break up monopolies accompanied by rigorous standardization of the common interfaces.

I don't have a problem with competitive players inventing industries and new ways of doing things for the allure of monopoly profit. Just with the sluggish regulatory action in the particular case of computing tech, well past the point where it has become an established and essential resource for society.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your worry is going to become obsolete pronto, just like you are not worried about depending on a paid CPU to perform basic computations. The meaning of "basic programming work" will be redefined by these tools. The entry barrier of the subscription is a shame, that's for sure. But before open models are avilable, the field is proprietary today: we are going to witness a battle of AIs that will be as bloody as the Un…

I suspect you're right, and I'm generally optimistic about this future efficiency. But it doesn't make me any less of a cheapskate :)

Totally understandable, Chat GPT Plus is the most expensive subscription I ever had.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good reason (vscode, GitHub). O365 and the product integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart. Slack sold out to languish at salesforce while Microsoft will now just own that space. Cherry picking a Microsoft app for macOS is like looking at iTunes on windows, it’s not…

vscode is an incredible piece of software, better than all the paid options in my opinion, the amount of features they pump out month to month is outstanding, just a bit slow due to electron. I never understood why they put so much effort into a free product that I run from Linux and Mac, but I'm happily paying the copilot subscription so it all makes sense now.

Yep. IntelliJ's stuff is the only one that actually competes with VSCode - and the playing field is surprisingly even if you add the VSCode plugin ecosystem to it.

For C# Rider is still the gold standard in my book, but for Go I still prefer VSCode to GoLand.

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