Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot is now available for free

github.com

391–400 of 412 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The license aside, the question is what can be done with a carefully arranged blob of binary? Without additional software (Windows) I can't really do anything with Photoshop.exe. Similarly, Llama.gguf is either useful, with Ollama.app, or not, standing alone. So (looking past the difference in license), would you consider Photoshop.exe similar in that it's a binary blob that's useless by itself, or is it a useful col…

I think this discussion is silly in the context of a modern LLM. Nobody really understands how an LLM works, and you absolutely do not actually want to retrain Llama from scratch. When I said "it's not really open source", I was referring to the fact that there are restrictions on who can use Llama.

Just because you don't, don't assume others don't as well. I particular, I liked https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude and https://neuralblog.github.io/llama3-neurons/neuron_viewer.ht... and https://github.com/labmlai/inspectus

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#393

They appear to be SO excited about their new feature that they sent an email about it to every single email address associated with my Github accounts. Which is quite a few addresses that have been used for git commits over the years.

But are you Stack Overflow excited?!

This should not be downvoted :) lighten up you guys!

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#394

The real cost is that society at large is no longer contributing to the StackOverflow, so problems and solutions are all now stored in proprietary databases (which granted SO also was) but also now stored in an invisible proprietary database

I think this only removes the low quality questions like “how do I make X in React”.

There will always be new libraries and software updates, and those will always have corners and edge cases that will foster questions. The LLMs won’t have the answers out of the box until they have something to train from, so there’s still room for StackOverflow.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I believe AI is detrimental. It makes us go too fast. It's all about production now, pure efficiency over individuals. 2. AI is too dangerous. Whatever innovations used for benign applications will be eventually used for more dangerous applications such as advanced genetic engineering and the military. 3. AI uses too much energy. It's disrespectful to the resources that we have. 4. AI is an apex technology amongst…

There are a couple of sentences in "Dune" about this: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." Granted, most of us are not choosing this.

We turn our money over to investments, hoping this will set us free.

That's a new thing in the world, ordinary people investing in their savings, 401k, retirement, mortgages, index-linked accounts. Not many hundreds of years old, but people advise it as if it's as solid as the mountains. And work for 50 years watching the numbers go up for the carrot of freedom at the end.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the move to Discord. Maybe I should host a PhpBB and bring some sanity back.

> phpBB Whoa there Nelly! If we're going to resurrect things, can we do it whilst leaving PHP in the past?

PHP hasn't failed me yet. Been using if for about 20 years. Not heavily but it gets the job done and it's still improving. It's really quite sane if you start comparing it to the alternatives. It continues to 'just work'

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying these child questions are useful contributions?

To the child that asked it? Absolutely. :-) Information is only useful if it's accessible. If they are asking questions it's because the information they want is in practice not accessible to them.

I'm not disagreeing, just clarifying. I myself have asked lots of dumb/easy questions but prior to ChatGPT it was hard to get simple straight-forward answers.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Useful contributions" is subjective. Not everyone is born a senior developer. Juniors, and even children who aren't even juniors yet ask questions on these channels. Source: I bothered a lot of people on the Internet about C++ when I was child.

I contributed well-researched answers already when I was ostensibly a very junior dev, and even before that during my CS studies. Stuff you can lookup or simply try out is doable, of course questions where you need experience aren't a good fit. When I was in high school I read the docs, and learned C++ from books and MSDN. Granted my access to the internet was rather limited back then, but it also never crossed my mi…

I find there's a time and a place for RTFM, and it's usually not at the start of the project when you know the least. When you're just starting, you just want to get something working. Being spoon-fed some answers to get past a few hurdles is rather nice. But then there comes a point where you have to stop and be like "Okay, what the heck is this actually doing? How does it work?".

I just hit that point with some TensorFlow stuff because I started hitting the limits of what ChatGPT could answer successfully, and I think that's fine. But maybe good that I couldn't get everything out of it or it may have delayed my learning further yet. Which I guess reinforces your point.

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#399
post #271

The real cost is that society at large is no longer contributing to the StackOverflow, so problems and solutions are all now stored in proprietary databases (which granted SO also was) but also now stored in an invisible proprietary database

Stack Overflow is now a proprietary database too. Given the choice between that, and a proprietary robot offering 10x as much clarity and quality, I'd choose the robot. Not all LLMs are proprietary in the same way as Claude. Many LLMs have their weights publicly available, like Gemma. But I can understand if you feel like a floating point numbers file is de facto proprietary tool. But if you're smart, you would look…

This sounds great! There isn't enough slop in the web, so this sounds like a good way to experience browsing without any non-ai generated nonsense getting in the way!

Re: GitHub Copilot is now available for free

#400

The real cost is that society at large is no longer contributing to the StackOverflow, so problems and solutions are all now stored in proprietary databases (which granted SO also was) but also now stored in an invisible proprietary database

Yeah, I agree that StackOverflow it but a shadow of what it used to be, and that this is a shame. But I don’t think that AI is to blame for this - all the interesting discussions had already migrated to GitHub issues. AI is just the nail in the coffin for SO.
Post reply on HN