Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this relevant? Or, who can you not criticize because of this?
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I see lots of criticism of trans people.
Part of my code makes Copilot crash
231–240 of 411 posts
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Removing your face-recognition function because it's less effective on black faces is certainly a substantial ideological commitment. Deploying your face-recognition function for something critical that impacts user quality of life, even if it doesn't recognize black faces well, is an ideological commitment by default. > That's not generally true. It's absolutely generally true. We generally call people by the name…
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> You're telling me if a short, bald, overweight guy with a beard likes to be referred to as a tall, thin blonde woman with lustrous hair - "we" immediately stop seeing his height, his lack of hair, his girth and his beard? I don't know who that "we" is but that'd require some major training in delusion, Mr. O'Brien.
That's straw-man and snark across the board.
If that short person wants to be called "she" and to stop pointing out she's bald, those are reasonable asks.
I'm cross-eyed when I don't wear my glasses. Do you insist on pointing that out to my face repeatedly even when I ask you not to? Do you insist on gossiping about it to other people in a way that I would consider derogatory if I heard? Do you insist on a shortened version of my name that I don't like? If so, I think you're being a jerk. Ditto if you refuse to comply with requests from other people that I consider reasonable.
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#233So I've just tested it, and I can confirm, yes, copilot refuses to give suggestions related to gender. Now I know a lot of people are calling this absurd, but looking more closely, there are two PR nightmare scenarios. 1. Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is binary, a certain community explodes with anger and an entire news hype cycle starts about how Microsoft is enforcing views on gender with code. 2.…
The solution is conceptually simple (no idea of practicality): propose an answer related to the context.
And also: give the list of banned words
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#234So I've just tested it, and I can confirm, yes, copilot refuses to give suggestions related to gender. Now I know a lot of people are calling this absurd, but looking more closely, there are two PR nightmare scenarios. 1. Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is binary, a certain community explodes with anger and an entire news hype cycle starts about how Microsoft is enforcing views on gender with code. 2.…
Choosing door 3 unfortunately leads to ... A certain community explodes with anger since their machine learning dev-tooling is closed and has arbitrary restrictions. If you try to please everybody, someone won't like it.
Unfortunately the people that care (like HN people) are less likely to spend time organizing protests and riling up an internet mob
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but this is not comparable to anything seen before. I can't remember 6 year olds taking hormones and 16 year olds having their breasts removed. There was no 4000% increase in teenagers claiming to be gay. There were no attempts to change core language concepts and there were no gays attacking and discriminating against other gays. I also can't remember scientists and medical professionals being gaslighted and…
> On the other hand I'm not sure where you see moral panic here, I'm really just expressing knowledge and my opinion. Not very emotionally so. Think of the children, etc etc. I feel like we could flip a few key words here and have this be straight from the 90s.
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Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a zealous push by a small but extremely vocal fringe to impose their very particular worldview onto emerging AI/ML models like this. They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, but it’s really just an attempt to mold these new technologies into conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments. Proponents view it as some kind of obvious universal good, and are confused when anyone else is appalled…
> They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, but it’s really just an attempt to mold these new technologies into conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments. It is quite literally creating bias.
I believe the idea is that society is prejudiced/biased, so training an AI using data from that society would perpetrate that bias. So there needs to be some manual correction.
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#237I belong to a local Atlanta Slack channel - tech404 - that for the longest had an official bot that would always respond with the waving hand emoji (HN doesn’t support emojis) if you ever said the word “guys”. Even in private channels.
Are there some specific Unicode ranges that HN filters out? I recall being able to use other alphabets and various special symbols with no issue.
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#238Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really find it that funny. I don't think the correct response to everyone being upset by this (from many different angles) is to stand back from it and laugh at it. Some people feel that wokeness is ruining the world. I can't really speak to that position because my political initialization was on the other side of the cultural gulf in America. The way I have come to understand transgender issues is very much…
Therefore ban gender from GH copilot? We can be empathetic without placating some really tyrannical trends.
I offer no defense of Github's choice. What do you think was the reasoning for their decision?
I can understand the concern about powerful organizations imposing a viewpoint surreptitiously via a widely-used piece of software. That is definitely a reasonable fear, and if we allow concentrated power (MSFT here) to behave in that way, then we are in for trouble.
I'd argue that we wouldn't end up with tyranny, but rather feudalism. There are other powerful organizations that can push their own viewpoints, surreptitiously and overtly. It then becomes a game of who has the most resources and control over the flow of information. But while I prefer "feudalism" to "tyranny", I don't disagree that if propaganda was the aim here, it would be a bad thing.
I don't agree that GitHub's aim was to impose a viewpoint. I believe the aim was to avoid putting this tool in the middle of a very politically charged issue. For example, how do we know GitHub didn't make this decision like this: "We don't want 8 genders popping up in a , because that will offend the 50% of the country who only believes there are two". We are seeing some evidence of this (and the other 50%) in this thread.
Finally, maybe they are trying to prevent people from spamming their learning model with politically-charged content. If that were the case, you could argue that they are just trying to prevent their programming tool from becoming a political warzone, with competing sides trying to train their viewpoints into the model. I admit I know very little about ML in general and Copilot in particular, so you'll have to bear with me if that sounds naiive. In any case, social media is an example of a tool that has become a political battleground, even though that wasn't the initial purpose. If preventing Copilot's politicization is GitHub's aim (and I have no evidence that it is), then I'd say that's a reasonable thing to want for product if you don't want it to become unpleasant-to-use before long.
So we have three hypotheses:
1. MSFT believe there are more than two genders, and want to impose that viewpoint
2. MSFT believe there are only two genders, and want to impose that viewpoint
3. MSFT wants to avoid having politically-charged content in their code-generation tool.
How can we point to one of these being more correct than the other?
I don't have any evidence to support any of the three. But 1 and 2 each make three assumptions (MSFT has one viewpoint on issue X; this viewpoint is Y; they want to impose it). Hypothesis 3 makes two assumptions (Gender is politically charged; let's avoid that in our product). That's all I can think of this late at night. I could be missing something.
Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand I'm not sure where you see moral panic here, I'm really just expressing knowledge and my opinion. Not very emotionally so. Think of the children, etc etc. I feel like we could flip a few key words here and have this be straight from the 90s.
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Small children do not take hormones or have gender related surgery. Adolescents under medical oversight can. These treatments have very low regret rates and reduce suicides.