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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#371

Post by jamie_ca »

sicromoft wrote: post #196
natfriedman wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't do that, and we are taking steps to avoid reciting training data in the output: https://copilot.github.com/#faq-does-github-copilot-recite-c... https://docs.github.com/en/early-access/github/copilot/resea... In terms of the permissibility of training on public code, the jurisprudence here – broadly relied upon by the machine learning community – is that training ML models is fair use. We are certain this…

You just shared a URL that says "Please do not share this URL publicly".

Well, he's also GitHub's CEO so it's probably just fine.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#372

Post by shadowgovt »

Ensorceled wrote: post #123
fulafel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the box? Maybe unfair competition from having very good tools compared to other programmers, or havin irresponsibly shallow understanding of what the produced code does?

> What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the box? Being put out of job by an AI trained on your own code? It's really the same ethical problem of all automation ... and will be as long as we need a job to fulfill basic needs like food, housing and medical care.

Everyone gets into programming for their own reasons.

But to my personal philosophy: if I'm not coding to put myself out of a job, I'm thinking about the problem wrong.

When there are no more lines of code to be written, I shall do something else, content that I have done my part to free humanity from the burden of human-machine interfacing. I hear dairy farming is a demanding and rewarding challenge.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#373

Post by [deleted] »

anthropodie wrote: post #335
asdfman123 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pack it all up, boys, programming's over. Hello, AI. Anyone want to hire me to teach your grandma how to use the internet?

Few days back, Sam Altman tweeted this "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects" And I was like yeah I gotta start preparing for next decade.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot

#374

Post by gentleman11 »

fzaninotto wrote: post #40

I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like it's reading my mind. It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone. I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give better na…

It could start to replace us in 20 years. Or reduce. It is exciting for now

Re: GitHub Copilot

#375

Post by throwawake »

schmorptron wrote: post #259

Wow, that's incredible! Any chance we'll get a downloadable and editable open source version of this so we can play around with it, train it on smaller own datasets and generally experiment? It sounds super exciting!

Did you miss OpenAI part /s

As FAQ mentions, They are planning to launch a commercial product so likely not I guess.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#376

Post by joquarky »

as300 wrote: post #211
mdellavo wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about this being overall detrimental to code quality as it allows people to just blindly accept completions without really understanding the generated code. Similar to copy-and-paste coding. The first example parse_expenses.py uses a float for currency - that seems to be a pretty big error that's being overlooked along with other minor issues around no error handling. I would say the quality of the…

Why would you say it's an error to use a float for currency? I would imagine it's better to use a float for calculations then round when you need to report a value rather than accumulate a bunch of rounding errors while doing computations.

You don't want to kick the can down to the floating point standard. Design for deterministic behavior. Find the edge cases, go over it with others and explicitly address the edge case issues so that they always behave as expected.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#377

Post by semi-extrinsic »

fzaninotto wrote: post #301
softwaredoug wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to replace/shorten the loop of “Google for snippet that does X” copy, paste, tweak, no? Which of course is super cool for many tasks!

It's smarter than that. It suggests things that have never been written. It actually creates code based on the context, just like GPT-3 can create new text documents based on previous inputs. Edit: Check this screencast for instance: https://twitter.com/francoisz/status/1409908666166349831

Anyone tried this on any sort of numeric computation? Numpy, Julia, Pandas, R, whatever?

I definitely see the utility in the linked screencast. But I am left to wonder whether this effectiveness is really a symptom of the extreme propensity for boilerplate code that seems to come with anything web-related.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#378

Post by lifeisstillgood »

I always bang on about "Software literacy" but I do wonder how i would deal with this if it was suggesting text for me while I was writing - emails, reports, novels.

I suspect that for drudgery or work stuff I would happily take some help with typing, but I am not sure (beta access please!) if I would want if for my novel, or my sales copy.

I am (optimistically) hoping that my novel has my voice - my unique fingerprint of tone and vocab.

And I wonder if my software has similar tone. A much more restricted syntax of course, but my choice to use meta programming here, an API design there. I may be over thinking it.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#379

Post by 542458 »

tomthe wrote: post #120
pjfin123 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this would fall under any reasonable definition of fair use. If I read GPL (or proprietary) code as a human I still own code that I later write. If copyright was enforced on the outputs of machine learning models based on all content they were trained on it would be incredibly stifling to innovation. Requiring obtaining legal access to data for training but full ownership of output seems like a sensible middl…

What if I put a licence on my Github-repositories that explicitly forbids the use of my code for machine-learning models?

My interpretation of the GitHub TOS section D4 would give give GitHub the right to parse your code and/or make incedental copies regardless of what your license states.

https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

This is the same reason it doesn’t matter if you put up a license that forbids GitHub from including you in backups or the search index.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#380

Post by williamdclt »

amelius wrote: post #314
nightski wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad they find it head exploding but my concern is that it would be most head exploding to newbies who don't have the skill to discern if AI code is how it should be written. For a seasoned veteran writing the code was never really the hard part in the first place.

> For a seasoned veteran writing the code was never really the hard part in the first place. Yes, to most coders this Copilot software is just a fancy keyboard.

Sounds great. I'm a bad typist, anything that makes me type less (vim, voice assistant, completion) is a big win to me
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