4 ms·

The cynic in me is thinking that marketing folks at Microsoft/Github are giggling endlessly at all the stories giving them free and extreme publicity. This is e

The cynic in me is thinking that marketing folks at Microsoft/Github are giggling endlessly at all the stories giving them free and extreme publicity. This is enforced by the recent post by Github 'analyzing' the copilot's code regurgitation, instead of retracting and retraining it on more defined subset of codebases. This thing is worthless at best, annoying at everything and terrifyingly capable of destroying every programmer's productivity at worst. But it will stay, it will grow because stupid execs will keep dreaming of replacing their engineering talent with this, and Microsoft will laugh all the way to the bank.

WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
Just until the software at the bank is rewritten using CoPilot and suddenly they can’t withdraw any money.
beshrkayali 5y ago
There's no way they didn't expect some backlash on this. So I think it's partly for the marketing gimmick. I'm sure there are people at Github tho who really think they're making something valuable unfortunately. Sadly, what they're not aware of is that they've become part of the experiment themselves. It's like expecting that an AI trained on Shakespeare novels would be able to "help" a writer write Shakespeare-like novels. Sure, they might get something that might fool some people, but are they a writer? I think software is a lot more like "writing" than it is like "building". What mostly annoys me is that this is a win-win for github regardless of the outcome. If people buy into it (even for just a while, and it currently seems like some really smart people are buying into it) they'll carve a huge piece of a new market. If it fails, they'll make it seem like an experiment into the whole ethical gray area of what should and shouldn't be used for training, and that they just wanted to draw attention to it.

4 ms·

The cynic in me is thinking that marketing folks at Microsoft/Github are giggling endlessly at all the stories giving them free and extreme publicity. This is e

by e3bc54b2 5y ago

WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
Just until the software at the bank is rewritten using CoPilot and suddenly they can’t withdraw any money.
beshrkayali 5y ago
There's no way they didn't expect some backlash on this. So I think it's partly for the marketing gimmick. I'm sure there are people at Github tho who really think they're making something valuable unfortunately. Sadly, what they're not aware of is that they've become part of the experiment themselves. It's like expecting that an AI trained on Shakespeare novels would be able to "help" a writer write Shakespeare-like novels. Sure, they might get something that might fool some people, but are they a writer? I think software is a lot more like "writing" than it is like "building". What mostly annoys me is that this is a win-win for github regardless of the outcome. If people buy into it (even for just a while, and it currently seems like some really smart people are buying into it) they'll carve a huge piece of a new market. If it fails, they'll make it seem like an experiment into the whole ethical gray area of what should and shouldn't be used for training, and that they just wanted to draw attention to it.