Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 917 posts

Re: VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

#171

Post by AlexandrB »

rsynnott wrote: post #26

One fascinating thing about the whole AI phenomenon is how incredibly hostile it is to _standards_. Whether something works properly, or is ethical, or is true, no longer matters at all; all that matters is "pls use our AI". Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods. And it's not just them. There was a time that Google care…

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.

"Decades" is a stretch. There was a brief window around the Windows 7/8 era and then, like a dog returning to his vomit, they returned to their user-hostile bullshit. Windows 11 is the culmination of that, but Windows 10 was plenty bad. Remember how Windows 10 made Solitaire a subscription service? Sticking copilot into everything is just more of the same.

Re: VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

#172

Post by TeriyakiBomb »

OutOfHere wrote: post #129
TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See how fast so many of the crypto and NFT/Web 3 lot shifted to AI, like rats on a sinking ship. I think VCs saw Crypto and dreamt of being able to create the same amount of irrational value. AI has the same technical complexity "You can't easily explain it in a single sentence" energy but unlike Crypto and NFTs, enough actual utility to not seem completely illegitimate. It literally is the perfect hype grift tool. C…

If you still think crypto and AI are nonsense, then I guess you will carry these beliefs the rest of your life, but these beliefs won't outlive you, as they have no relation to reality.

I said AI has utility but drives irrational levels of investment. Crypto has little utility besides a place to gamble, con credulous people and otherwise act as a really shitty store of wealth.

Most modern crypto projects barely bother to promise to do anything useful let alone achieve anything useful, which the overwhelming majority do not.

These aren't beliefs but statements of fact.

Re: VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

#173

Post by c0wb0yc0d3r »

cozzyd wrote: post #25

My newest yocto image mounts a 640K RO tmpfs on top of $HOME/.vscode-server to prevent people using VSCode from shitting all over the relatively small emmc.

Can you explain how this works? Doesn’t this also stop you from connecting to it over ssh via vs code?

Re: VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

#174

Post by rsynnott »

phatfish wrote: post #158
dwedge wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their search homepage was supposed to be minimal. I was at a tech talk given by Google sometime around 2012 and they said that their ad service is not under any circumstances allowed to slow down the page load - if the ads don't return before the page is ready the pager is rendered without ads. Chrome had so many great ux choices originally, such as tabs all staying the same size when you were closing them so that yo…

If i remember chrome:// used to have special meaning in Firefox (and probably well before that), and was used to tweak UI settings. I always assumed this was where Google took the name from.

Chrome is a now-somewhat-archaic term for GUI (or specifically the actual elements of the GUI, not the concept), and Netscape/Mozilla did use the term a lot. Google claims that their browser is called Chrome because of an association with fast cars (presumably Google was keen to market it to extremely old people, chrome not having been a particularly big thing in cars for a very long time).

Re: VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

#175

Post by pfdietz »

le-mark wrote: post #121
ryandrake wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These next few years are the real turning point. If they are right about AI and robotic workforces, then it's checkmate--they don't need us anymore, and we're next for the furnace. If they're wrong... well, I don't know... Will there be any consequences? Maybe a few people lose a few percent of their net worth.

Google will definitely lose. Llms supplants search. But not the old document search which they stopped doing long ago. Add in the fact that open weight models are 6-12 months behind frontier models means AI companies aren’t building a moat, they’re on a treadmill. And treadmills don’t justify the valuations OR the hype. AI companies are in trouble.

What does their patent moat look like?

Re: VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

#176

Post by AlienRobot »

tln wrote: post #159
low_tech_love wrote: post #32

Isn’t this a kind of “leopards ate my face” situation? I thought we had all “agreed” that letting AI write code and take control of software repositories is good, even if we have no idea what is going on beyond a thin surface layer, because well it’s fast and we can fix it later and lol who needs testing? My customers are my testers. And now it’s suddenly bad because the developer is the customer?

The sneaky commit modification is triggered by very modest usage of AI such as auto-completion. Look, if an agent writes the code and the commit message then adding a Co-authored-by by default is ok. Not even showing it before the commit is made is not, and adding the message when AI was just completing code is not.

Glorified autocomplete, syntax reminder and random snippet generator thinks it's co-authoring things.

Re: VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

#177

Post by altmanaltman »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #157
janice1999 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They invested billions. They're scared.

> They invested billions. They're scared. They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy. I have this feeling that their bet was that all the Microsoft shops will jump on Copilot without looking at alternatives, so they did not really have to make it as good as their competition.

Microsoft continues to make billions in profit despite its spending on AI, because it has a diversified business that generates revenue. I don't get why they would be "scared"? It's basically a calibrated risk at that level.

Re: VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

#178

Post by circuit10 »

redwall_hp wrote: post #30
Animats wrote: post #7

Does that make the code uncopyrightable? Non-human authorship?

The courts have determined that, yes, and that is the position of the Copyright Office. And the Supreme Court has rejected appeal, so that's the standing precedent. Realistically, look forward to SOX style audits and having to maintain evidence of how much of a code base has human authorship vs machine generation. Or reject slop. I can't wait for: * The first company to do perjury for litigating over a nonexistent co…

Having a tool involved isn't the same as being entirely generated by a tool

For example, without any AI, if I generate a lookup table for the sine function in my code, that table may not be copyrightable because it was machine-generated, but it doesn't somehow make the rest of the code not copyrightable either

"Co-authored by" doesn't imply it was entirely machine-generated

Re: VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

#179

Post by lelanthran »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #51
Animats wrote: post #7

Does that make the code uncopyrightable? Non-human authorship?

If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright. And of course dumb messages that aren't true won't affect copyright.

> If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright

How so? All your outoutput is now legally partly owned by Microsoft?

Re: VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

#180

Post by OutOfHere »

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #172
OutOfHere wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you still think crypto and AI are nonsense, then I guess you will carry these beliefs the rest of your life, but these beliefs won't outlive you, as they have no relation to reality.

I said AI has utility but drives irrational levels of investment. Crypto has little utility besides a place to gamble, con credulous people and otherwise act as a really shitty store of wealth. Most modern crypto projects barely bother to promise to do anything useful let alone achieve anything useful, which the overwhelming majority do not. These aren't beliefs but statements of fact.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN