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GitHub Copilot is now available for free

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Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#311

Post by disqard »

justsid wrote: post #278
TuringNYC wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, may not be open source, but it is still viewable. Best for Society: Open Source Medium for Society: Proprietary, but openly browsable Worst for Society: Proprietary, not browsable <-- LLM-based code assist tools

This is just like the majority of communities moving to Discord over Forums. The barrier to entry might be a lot lower than getting a VPS and hosting phpBB or whatever, but the discoverability and searchabilty has gone towards 0. Everything is just moving into opaque black boxes.

Your comment sparked a thought -- maybe this is the "Dark Forest" of the Web:

Either your site's content stays hidden behind discord, or an LLM's bot/minion scrapes all your content and makes visiting your site superfluous, thereby effectively killing your site.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#312

Post by maeil »

mfkp wrote: post #300
euoia wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a guide for how to set this up? I am also pretty dissatisfied with Copilot completions.

looks like the parent comment hints at https://docs.continue.dev/chat/model-setup#local-offline-exp... (Assuming your computer has the specs necessary to run ollama)

That page is about chat while the parent comment seems to be about completions, that's the codepilot feature most of us will be looking to replace/improve on.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#313

Post by forty »

throw234234234 wrote: post #192
forty wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a bit, it won't last

In what way - that those things/people doing that will fail? Or the tooling will get better that this is no longer a problem? Completely different outcomes with very different consequences.

I think people will realize those AI are not worth the cost (both money wise and environment wise). Right now money is raining on everything AI, but at some point they will want to have a return and most projects will shut down, and we can move on

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#314

Post by jimjimwii »

jefftk wrote: post #234
TuringNYC wrote: post #166

The real cost is that society at large is no longer contributing to the StackOverflow, so problems and solutions are all now stored in proprietary databases (which granted SO also was) but also now stored in an invisible proprietary database

> proprietary databases (which granted SO also was)* StackOverflow's database was public and shared at the Internet Archive until recently: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange They've now moved it onto their own infra, ostensibly so people have to agree not to use it for LLM training: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/401324/announcing-a...

Wait, I thought they backed off from this nonsense.

If they really did close off db downloads then I'll never answer a question there ever again. I bet many others wont either. Maybe that's also part of why SE will fail.

The only deal I personally am willing to tolerate is me spending time providing quality questions and answers in my domain in return for being able to download all questions and answers under the cc-sa license and being able to freely download them for offline viewing without an account (via kiwix). No other arrangement is acceptable.

I'll look further into this and update this comment with my findings.

Edit: Yep. No more answers from me. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Maybe small community forums are really the only way to share knowledge these days :(

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#316

Post by mdrzn »

fuzzythinker wrote: post #122
bugglebeetle wrote: post #43

Copilot in VSCode is so far behind Windsurf, not terribly excited about this and still happy to pay for a Codeium pro account. My only fear is someone buying them and screwing up model access, but maybe it’s fine if that is Anthropic. GPT-4 is terrible at coding and o-1 isn’t tell tiene for practical use.

Concur. Dropped Copilot for Cursor and then tried Windsurf. Windsurf is the keeper for me.

Been using Windsurf for a couple months and it was almost perfect with Sonnet 3.5

They recently changed their pricing to some weird "Flow Action credits" system and MOST of the people are dissatisfied with that. I'm still looking for a replacement IDE because I mostly just chat and rarely use autocomplete.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#317

Post by [deleted] »

Terretta wrote: post #169
TuringNYC wrote: post #166

The real cost is that society at large is no longer contributing to the StackOverflow, so problems and solutions are all now stored in proprietary databases (which granted SO also was) but also now stored in an invisible proprietary database

I think you'd find society-at- small was contributing , with perhaps 10x larger yet still quite small number posting but watering down useful contributions, 100x that lurking, and 1000x that just drive-by copy-pasting from SO to their IDE.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#318

Post by throwaway277432 »

AlienRobot wrote: post #245
Terretta wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd find society-at- small was contributing , with perhaps 10x larger yet still quite small number posting but watering down useful contributions, 100x that lurking, and 1000x that just drive-by copy-pasting from SO to their IDE.

"Useful contributions" is subjective. Not everyone is born a senior developer. Juniors, and even children who aren't even juniors yet ask questions on these channels. Source: I bothered a lot of people on the Internet about C++ when I was child.

I contributed well-researched answers already when I was ostensibly a very junior dev, and even before that during my CS studies. Stuff you can lookup or simply try out is doable, of course questions where you need experience aren't a good fit.

When I was in high school I read the docs, and learned C++ from books and MSDN. Granted my access to the internet was rather limited back then, but it also never crossed my mind to bother people for things I could easily lookup myself.

Growing up in a RTFM, "search the forum first before asking" environment is seen as toxic today, but it really helps keeping certain behavior in check thats a drag on society as a whole.

One of the best mentors/bosses I ever had never answered coding questions directly, but always in the form of a question so I could look it up and learn for myself.

I try to do the same with my junior devs today, unless there's time constraints or they're under stress, I try to let them figure out the final answer themselves.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#319

Post by uludag »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #64

Working with people who use this stuff a lot has made my current job just so so much harder in every way its astonishing. I used to solve problems with code, now I feel like hermeneut or dream analyzer: absent of human intention, codebases quickly become these weird piles of different idioms, even without considering the hallucinations (those have definitely cost me a few sleepless nights now either way). But I am ju…

I have similar feelings though maybe a bit more optimistic take. Obviously the AI hype train hasn't taken us to anywhere objectively better. Software has in no way become less buggy (if anything it feels worse in the past few years) and most if not all of the software I use predates the LLM era.

It feels like most developers en masse have taken on some masochist pleasure at deskilling themselves while becoming a prompt engineer beholden to OpenAI/MS/Google.

The upside is that those who take time to learn and improve can write software that most devs have given up the hope of being able to write. Write the next Maigt or org-mode while everyone else is asking AI to generate tailwind HTML React forms!

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#320

Post by spiderfarmer »

justsid wrote: post #278
TuringNYC wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, may not be open source, but it is still viewable. Best for Society: Open Source Medium for Society: Proprietary, but openly browsable Worst for Society: Proprietary, not browsable <-- LLM-based code assist tools

This is just like the majority of communities moving to Discord over Forums. The barrier to entry might be a lot lower than getting a VPS and hosting phpBB or whatever, but the discoverability and searchabilty has gone towards 0. Everything is just moving into opaque black boxes.

Less competition for me
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