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GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

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Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#111

Post by jazzyjackson »

croes wrote: post #25

Time for programmers to get the same rights as musicians and composers. That's clearly a remix of the work of others

good point

If I use a ii V I progression in my music, who gets compensated? I find most of co-pilots suggestions are similarly basic. Any lawsuit about whether an artist used a few of the same chords or a snippet of melody has been totally asinine IMO, like how all the money from "the thong song" went to ricky martin just because he was quoted for one measure.

when I write a few lines of code myself, should I search GitHub to make sure no one else has included the same algorithm in their codebase before slapping my own license on it?

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#112

Post by jazzyjackson »

tucif wrote: post #109
jazzyjackson wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% The thing ive most enjoyed is that it forces me to write out what I want to do in english before getting stuck in the weeds of how the code ought to work. I've found if I explain the whole program ahead of time (the other day I wrote some python that converted the local time to display on a 13x13 grid of LEDs) co-pilot can write 90% of the code without me, just translating my explanation into python. I thinking…

> co-pilot can write 90% of the code without me, just translating my explanation into python. I fear copilot may encourage these type of pseudo-code comments. The most valuable thing the AI doesn't know is WHY the code should do what it does. Months later, we'll get to debug code that "nobody" wrote and find no hints of why it should behave that way, only comments stating what the code also says. Seems we're replacin…

hm, that is a conundrum to debug code nobody wrote

on the other hand, if an improved AI comes out in a couple of years, we can feed it the same pseudo-code and enjoy an improved output.

I would rather have a docstring explaining what the code should be doing

I've had co-pilot write its own comments too, my favorite one was, "this is a kind of a hack but it works", very professional indeed!

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#113

Post by bombcar »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #99
Slartie wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that's a perfect illustration for one of copilot's essential flaws: "a lot of flies eat poop" (side note: is that actually a saying? Asking because in German it is, and it fits perfectly here). A lot of code is of mediocre quality. An ML service that learns from huge amounts of code without an ability to tell "good" code from "bad" code will only ever be able to produce mediocre code, at best.

> side note: is that actually a saying? I've never heard it before but i'll be using it now :)

It's saying "just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good" and it's doing it quite well.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#114

Post by swah »

natly wrote: post #46
rjh29 wrote: post #8

This is not good news. It's actually changed from being free to costing $10/month. The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it... maybe it's because they're using public domain code to train the model.

I wonder if it'd be legal to train your own model with a similar architecture but using input-ouput pairs generated from copilot itself (fair use right?). Sell it for $9/month.

Good idea - VSCode doesn't even have a dumb "autocomplete from all buffers" a la Emacs. Of course, LSP is awesome when available, but I'd also use the dumber version every day for a few specific cases...

(I think those cases would be mostly full lines that I know exist on other files in the project - but I don't want to go there, copy and paste if I can avoid it..)

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#115

Post by madeofpalk »

SoftTalker wrote: post #108
progrus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that’s the hope. Putting together well-solved combinations of computer functionality ought to become less-skilled work as technology progresses.

That's been the objective of programming languages for 50 years. It hasn't happened yet, because the essential complexity of programming problems isn't in writing the code.

I think it definitely has happened. We're creating more things, for cheaper.

We're also creating more complex things, that costs more money.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#116

Post by lumost »

madeofpalk wrote: post #115
SoftTalker wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been the objective of programming languages for 50 years. It hasn't happened yet, because the essential complexity of programming problems isn't in writing the code.

I think it definitely has happened. We're creating more things, for cheaper. We're also creating more complex things, that costs more money.

anecdotally, this is where the famous lack of modern skills comes from in engineering culture. If you keep doing the same things you've been doing, you'll look around one day and see that everyone has moved on.

The market for simple SMB websites is a great example. This went from custom HTML+webservices, to Wordpress, and now to WIX/shopify/square. I'd bet the market for SMB marketing will similarly move to near plug+play google/FB offerings.

However if you started out making websites in 1993, then there are a vast array of products and services one could move into over the last 3 decades.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#117

Post by daliusd »

dchichkov wrote: post #11

Anyone is interested in starting to work on an open source alternative? I have a few terabytes of GitHub repository archives, a bit of experience and an non-profit umbrella (goal is AI Safety).

There is open source alternative. It shouldn’t be hard to Google it

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#118

Post by morelisp »

happyhardcore wrote: post #14

I've found copilot invaluable for throwing together quick scripts, especially in languages I don't quite understand. Writing e.g. a bash script, and being able to add a comment saying # Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns an error and have it print out if ! some_program then echo -e "\e[31msome_program failed\e[0m" exit 1 fi makes it so much quicker to cobble together something that works w…

If you don’t quite understand the language, how do you know it doesn’t also have subtle bugs?

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#119

Post by morelisp »

tomtheelder wrote: post #54
lelag wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. If you code professionally in a stack where copilot perform well, 10 usd/month is a steal. Assuming you are just 5% more productive with copilot, that would easily translate into hundreds of dollars of savings. It's for the hobbyists that it's painful. Adding another 10 usd subscriptions might be too much for your budget, especially if you only code occasionally. It would have been nice of them to in…

This is unfortunate, because my experience has been that it's far more harmful than helpful when I'm working in stacks/techs that I am comfortable and experienced in- the ones I use professionally-, but extremely useful when I'm working in an unfamiliar language or stack as I often do for hobby projects.

> far more harmful than helpful when I'm working in stacks/techs that I am comfortable and experienced in... but extremely useful when I'm working in an unfamiliar language

Ignorance is bliss.

Re: GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial

#120

Post by jjluoma »

This kind of comment, "co-pilot can write 90% of the code without me, just translating my explanation into python", about copilot troubles me. If the code has been mostly produced by co-pilot, does an user of copilot have sufficient grounds to to claim being the author and assert rights based on copyright? Globally?
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