I don’t understand, there’s no news here. It’s a comment from a third party speculating over what causes the crash.
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Part of my code makes Copilot crash
111–120 of 411 posts
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#112Content filters on ML feel so silly. I assume the goal is to avoid bad press? Because the... "attack" would be someone generating offensive material, which they could just write themselves, not to mention I have serious doubts that any filter is going to be a serious barrier. For images/ video I can see merit, ex: using that nudity inference project on images of children, but text seems particularly pointless.
The point is because sometimes even a perfectly reasonable inference from an ML model would be considered a big mistake due to societal considerations that are unknown to the model. For example, a couple years ago, there was a big hubbub over a Google Image labeler that labeled a black man and woman as "gorillas". A mistake for sure, but the headlines about the algorithm being "racist" were wrong. The algorithm was c…
The actual racist thing is that humans who don’t consider or prepare for or include affected people in deciding to deploy models trained to produce racist outcomes. It doesn’t matter that the machine has no opinions, it matters that the machine produces outcomes reflecting harmful biases. Banning the word doesn’t change that, but neither does treating the biased process as unbiased.
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#113That's silly. So can I put "gender" as the first line in my code to stop copilot from ingesting it altogether?
Are there any other break-words? Master, slave, Carlin's seven words, etc?
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I added "gender" (an IANA registered JWT claim) to my JWT payload schema and found Copilot will not provide any suggestions after that. Not on the same line, nor in the rest of the file. After removing the word gender entirely, it works again. https://www.iana.org/assignments/jwt/jwt.xhtml
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Are you being intentionally obtuse? You were told step by step if you disbelieve run the test independently and verify...
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#115Yep, I noticed this last year when they still stored the list client-side and had great fun reverse engineering it: https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1433254293352730628
Interesting, so it might not be the specific token "gender" but rather blocked words ("man" or "woman") that appear in suggestions will suppress Copilot. And presumably another token that like "communist" might do the same...
The list (https://moyix.net/~moyix/copilot_slurs_rot13.txt, rot13 encoded and linked from this tweet https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1433479083376140296) indeed contains the word "gender".
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#116Yesterday's timely announcement about an open source competitor to copilot that doesn't suffer from this absurdity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32327711
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s interesting how unsubstantiated allegations are getting so much attention, especially on a site with such high quality discussion.
Much more likely: the upvotes are because many people have frustration at this type of thing, and limited places to channel their frustration, so when they see a post like this, they upvote it to express their frustration. Or maybe that’s just me..
It's also an interesting tidbit for people that have not used copilot. It's like a fluff piece.
Present something weird that is also easily verifiable. If you are having a bit of a break and are using copilot you can try out a few things and post answers.
And now we have independent verification (unless you think all these usernames are just lying) and some interesting bits of info about copilot.
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#118I encountered this some time ago because I was working with grammatical gender. Unlike many of these comments, though, I do not take exception to it. Bias in ML is well established, and it's okay if, when we don't have solutions, we just disable it.
If your autocomplete was capable of spitting out suggestions that made you feel isolated or kept poking you in the eye about aspects of your identity, you might feel a bit better about the creators having thought about that and taken steps to avoid it happening.
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
I see this kind of questioning pop up when someone states that something bothers them and someone else deeply disagrees. Is there a name for this kind of questioning of someones foundational feelings about something, as if to allude in every question that it's purely wrong to feel that way?
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Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#120> Copilot crash because the word “gender” A metaphor for our times.
I worked on a video game in the late 2000s, and one of the bits of code I did was the code for filling the seats in the stadium with people. One of the artists cobbled together like 5 low poly man models and 5 low poly woman models, and you could just about tell the difference, and I put some code in there to ensure the genders were evenly distributed. (The 2 genders, I mean. Man, and woman.)
Looking back, I don't even know why I made it an enum, rather than a 1-bit bitfield called is_woman - but in the end I was glad I didn't, because the art director moaned a bit about the clothing colour distribution, and somebody asked if we could have some mascots, and there were some complaints about the unreasonable number of interesting hats. And, so, long story short, by the time we were done, we had 18 genders based on clothing colour and type of hat, 2 genders for mascot (naturally: tall, and squat), and a table to control the relative distributions.
Once we got to 5 genders I tried to change the enum name to Type - but we had this data-driven reflection system that integrated with various parts of the art pipeline, and once your enum had a name, that was pretty much that. You were stuck with it.
Is that a metaphor for our times too? I don't know. My own view is that sometimes stuff just happens, and you can't read too much into it.