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Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

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Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#31

Post by hellbannedguy »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #3

Well if they ever get it right I guess I could always become an electrician (this is not a dig on electricians, it seems like a fun trade, that or under water welding)

Get into a union early if you want to become a union electrician. The low number unions usually pay the most.

That is if you can get in. The test is a high school equivelency exam, at least for local 6, but hundreds of guys are taking the exam. You can't miss one question.

1/2 of the hiring process is the interview. (They used to accept only electrician's sons, like the police/fire departments; but that has changed.)

You will make a good middle class living, have retirement, medical, and will never be homeless if you show up. Being around guys all day long can get tedious.

Get in early if you can. To become vested for retirement you need to work for 25 years. Union electricians seem to die at 65. Too many guys retire--collect three paychecks, and gone. Whatever you do in life don't expect to be happy in retirement. Sorry guys--tonight is my Journal night. I am sad.

You can bypass the test, and the interview, if you know your trade. You will be referred to as White Paper. You will be treated like chit, but you are making exactly the same as the other guys.

(I worked as an electrician, but didn't like it. The pay was good, but it just wasen't for me. I have had too many jobs that, "weren't for me"? I was becoming my father? If you had my father, you would understand. Oh yea, you can always set up shop yourself if you get your C-10 license. Non-union construction work should be avoided. Why--terrible job conditions, and pay.)

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#32

Post by seibelj »

A brief tangent - the only useful bit of voice recognition for me has been telling Siri to remind me about something at a day and time. Calendar events don't work well (gets inserted on the wrong calendar, can't invite attendees properly), and every other use case for voice control has been a gimmick at best that I have shut off or not used. Whenever I call any phone number, I slam the 0 button and say "operator" to bypass the horrible menus, which usually accept digits anyway as the voice control is a piece of shit. The number of "Chat Bot AI" startups that have been funded, found no usage, pivoted to something else has been astronomical, and chat bots should seemingly be one of the first use cases of useful AI.

With that said, I have found all "creative" types of AI to be similarly gimmicky and shallow. Co-pilot is like IntelliJ code-complete in more generic circumstances. It can't architect systems, interview and recruit good engineers, or do any of the things that separate true success from failure. It's yet another cool demo but ultimately useless for me.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#33

Post by zaptheimpaler »

Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code.

Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service.

So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#34

Post by ipaddr »

toomanyducks wrote: post #16
serenloss wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a gross simplification. We want factorable code because that helps with DRY. DRY code is more portable and the end product is smaller in size. Also, there's performance considerations. I'll be surprised if there's a tool like copilot anytime soon that can identify need for memoization, for example, and implement it.

But if a human isn't messing with the code, the code doesn't matter - what the bot does to the code matters. And if the bot can handle bad code in a way humans can't, that means something . Code quality will become less important if automated tools, the ones reading and writing the code, don't care about it.

Maybe the code should be in machine code at that point.

Reproducing high level code seems like a human step that could be removed.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#35

Post by RandomBK »

Having used Copilot for a couple of hours on a Typescript/React codebase, I've encountered a very wide range of results.

Sometimes, the model correctly guesses exactly what I'm trying to write, and gives me non-trivial contextually correct suggestions. More than once I've been impressed enough to pause and take a screen recording of what it generated.

Other times, it's a complete mess that competes with the local language server for autocomplete corrections.

Among the misses, the most glaring issues have been when it's suggested code that violates static typing constraints. The model outputs the right contextual code, but uses variables with slightly different spelling/wording/capitalization.

This is to be expected of course, as Copilot doesn't integrate with the language server in VSCode. However it does show the limits of building the model without a native understanding of the AST it's working with.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#36

Post by skohan »

eminence32 wrote: post #7

> The code Copilot writes is not very good code. This has been my experience as well. Some of the early promo material for Copilot showed someone writing a function signature with docs, and having Copilot write the entire body. This rarely works for me, except for fairly trivial functions. This is also not how I normally write code. However, where Copilot has been rather good is offering intelligent "tab completion",…

Copilot is also almost certainly going to become better.

For example, NVIDIA's DLSS was viewed as a failure at launch, but now it's almost magic in terms of offering better results at a lower performance cost.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#37

Post by sanxiyn »

Barrin92 wrote: post #22
minimaxir wrote: post #21

Whenever a new generative language model is released and discussed on Hacker News, there's always the comment that "it's worthless because it doesn't always generate coherent text" which I've always disliked because it's unfairly reductive as progress in this field is iterative. However , in the case of Copilot, there has to be a much higher signal-to-noise ratio in terms of generated text than creative language mode…

> it's unfairly reductive as progress in this field is iterative. is that true though? Progress in natural(!) language processing is very iterative, but coding and code correctness is a very precise thing. Both semantically as well as literally. Code that's a 'little bit' wrong technically does not compile, and code that's a 'little bit' wrong semantically might produce catastrophic results. Engineering doesn't becom…

Natural language syntax is precise too. It's not like it's personal idiosyncratic preference. People will mostly agree whether something is syntactically correct or incorrect.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#38

Post by svilen_dobrev »

what i don't get, is how a copy of (parts of) whatever's code, (or worse, a concoction of them), without any context, would solve anything but import the (unfound yet) errors as well, and introduce new errors.

Hah, just make it autocommit, and will be much like with self-driving cars - human takes the blame for computer's mistakes (= algorithm/ programmer/ knowledgebase), as well as hir own, and can't/won't do anything about it..

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#39

Post by outsomnia »

skohan wrote: post #36
eminence32 wrote: post #7

> The code Copilot writes is not very good code. This has been my experience as well. Some of the early promo material for Copilot showed someone writing a function signature with docs, and having Copilot write the entire body. This rarely works for me, except for fairly trivial functions. This is also not how I normally write code. However, where Copilot has been rather good is offering intelligent "tab completion",…

Copilot is also almost certainly going to become better. For example, NVIDIA's DLSS was viewed as a failure at launch, but now it's almost magic in terms of offering better results at a lower performance cost.

Better at issuing haphazardly modified boilerplate that already exists... the real costs of writing code are about carefully choosing how pieces will fit together and deciding on minutae with that in mind.

Copilot is the antithesis of designing good software.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#40

Post by grp000 »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #33

Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code. Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service. So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.

I think a lot of artists and content creators would also like a word.
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