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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

#121

Post by TAForObvReasons »

jakear wrote: post #29
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.

You don’t want to pay for it because you like free stuff. So does everyone. But that doesn’t pay the bills. You don’t need backcraft some moral argument. It’s trivial to see that a large amount of creativity went into developing the system, it’s not just a repackaging of public domain works.

The whole controversy was that it was a "repackaging of [licensed] works": https://twitter.com/stefankarpinski/status/14109710611816816...

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

#122

Post by PartiallyTyped »

jjluoma wrote: post #120

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?

I had a similar discussion with a lawyer friend on the basis of copyright on artwork generated by ML models and what constitutes "artistic feedback" from the human. The tl:dr; of that story is that it depends on jurisdiction that you are probing/looking at. In UK you have copyright, in US you do not.

I suppose that something similar is at play here.

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

#123

Post by PartiallyTyped »

macspoofing wrote: post #13
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.

>The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it.. Are the productivity benefits worth more than $10/month?

As a graduate student on a very small salary? absolutely.

The calculus is $10 for a pizza or something for myself, or copilot.

Given that copilot has saved me too many hours to count, i.e. the 1 thing that truly matters, then it's a no-brainer.

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

#124

Post by outside1234 »

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.

We have just moved up the complexity curve.

It's the same with doctors, lawyers, everything.

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

#125

Post by falcolas »

anamexis wrote: post #82
falcolas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If law - the human language equivalent of programming - hasn’t gotten simpler in past thousands of years as new abstractions and complications have arisen, I hold no hope for programming.

Maybe they will converge, and all programs will be written in legalese and interpreted by Copilot.

A'la Ethereum's smart contracts?

Code isn't flexible enough to work for laymen. It feels like you need to be a developer and a lawyer to make a smart contract work as intended.

Maybe that works against my earlier premise, but I don't think that this is the way we want to go.

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

#127

Post by naniwaduni »

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.

This smells a lot like a Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

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

#130

Post by tomtheelder »

naniwaduni wrote: post #127
tomtheelder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This smells a lot like a Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

Ha I don't think it's totally that, but it may well be part of it!

I think the biggest thing is that when working in tech I'm unfamiliar with it's extremely helpful to get some sort of skeleton in place, even if it's wrong in some way. I'm going to have to go slowly and evaluate it either way, so doesn't really matter if it's got problems or is less than ideal. What I would do otherwise is just go copy something from StackOveflow and then comb over it to adapt to my needs. Copilot is more or less just doing the same thing, but faster.

When I'm working in a stack I know well, I can quickly put down the code I need and it will generally be pretty good. Copilot can do it faster, but it gets things wrong a lot more often than I do. Since fixing something wrong is a LOT slower than me getting it right the first time, it ends up being more trouble than it's worth.

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