9 ms·

I'd be rather saddened if Copilot was shut down or neutered because of a few vocal few protesting against it. It's been a massive productivity improvement to o

by 19h 4y ago

I'd be rather saddened if Copilot was shut down or neutered because of a few vocal few protesting against it. It's been a massive productivity improvement to our senior devs, and I got so used to it that it's an annoyance when Copilot doesn't respond.

randomsearch 4y ago
I tried copilot and found it an excellent way to inject subtle bugs into my code. It always had a seemingly plausible guess, that was never correct, and coding turned into a guessing game trying to spot the bugs it had injected and hoping I’d found them all.
jfghi 4y ago
I’d claim that it’s more than a “few vocal” protestors. If the system is illegal, it needs to become legal or disappear. If I’m writing code for a query optimizer, the SQL Server solution isn’t going to magically show up.
- tpmoney 4y ago
  Is there any evidence that the PostgreSQL or MariaDB solution will though?
- Spivak 4y ago
  It’s not illegal, it’s at worst a fancy code search tool that Github has the right to show you the results via the license you grant them when you upload and make public code on Github which is way stronger than other search engines like Sourcegraph have to show public code. It doesn’t mean you have the right to use any of the code it generates but Copilot itself isn’t illegal in any meaningful sense.
  - noitpmeder 4y ago
    This is definitely not true. When your license requires you bundle said license with any reproductions of the code, and Copilot spits out said code sans license, they are breaking the law.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      > We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video. I don’t think it’s accidental that this product is specifically Github Copilot. But even then I think this is legal overkill. If you use the search box on Github they will display snippets of code from public repositories without the license. Same as what Sourcegraph does same as Copilot does. Nobody here is arguing ripgrep is violating the license by displaying matches without the corresponding license.
      - rileyphone 4y ago
        The violations are when that code is incorporated into your own codebase, which is happening in none of those examples. If you copy GPL'd code from GH search with a non-compatible license you are still in violation.
        Spivak 4y ago
        Yes but that’s your problem as a user of the tool. It doesn’t make Copilot itself illegal which is what the person I originally replied to was saying. Yes if you use a tool to violate copyright it’s copyright infringement. If you prod Midjourney into outputting near exact Starry Night that’s on you too. So far no one has made a compelling case that Copilot itself is violating copyright.
        eloisius 4y ago
        Code search may show snippets, but it's clearly not separated from the rest of its code base, including the license. It may be your problem as a user of that tool if you pirate snippets out of the search results without honoring its license, but GitHub at least didn't distribute it without its license. A human judge would surely determine that a search result page showing a snippet and linking back to the project wouldn't constitute distributing the code without attribution. Copilot is a different matter. There is no way to know where the code came from, whether it's novel or verbatim copy of someone's copyrighted work. Microsoft _is_ distributing code snippets here sans its license.
smt88 4y ago
Copilot wouldn't be shut down or neutered because "a few vocal people" protested against it. It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. You act like Microsoft is trying to do a public service and people are angry about it. The reality is that they're taking billions of hours of work and using it to build a product that only they control. If they re-released Copilot as FOSS, a lot of the valid criticisms would evaporate.
- scarface74 4y ago
  > It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. I wonder how many people on HN would be on the side of the creators if we were talking about content created by Walt Disney and whether pirating was ethical?
  - lbotos 4y ago
    Wait, I'm not sure what you are trying to say? Can you clarify?
    - scarface74 4y ago
      That many people who are criticizing Microsoft for using open source code and claiming “fair use” and saying it’s not fair to creators are the same ones that say pirating digital content is harmless.
      - pornel 4y ago
        Because issues aren't automatically symmetrical, and impact of actions isn't equal in both ways, especially when there's power difference between the sides of the conflict, e.g. it's not hypocritical to punish a bully punching their victim, but not the victim for punching the bully back. Disney used its power to distort copyright laws in a self-serving manner. As an individual you don't have equal power to oppose them (you were supposed to have in a democracy, but lobbying is legal and corporations are people). Disney is a huge corporation that won't even notice if you pirate a movie, which you may not even have been able to pay for anyway, because of their region-locked twisted maze of distribution and DRM. OTOH you may be screwed if you're a creator making a living from your work, and a big corp can just take it without paying, launder it through "… in the style of $YOURNAME" query, and say they own it now, because unlike your copyright, their Terms Of Service apply. Even people who think copyright shouldn't exist may rely on using copyright — against itself. You can't unilaterally say "I don't believe in copyright", because the law doesn't care, but if you license something as copyleft, then the law does care about your anti-copyright license.
keyle 4y ago
It's particularly useful to the polyglots dealing with multiple codebase, with various languages, to context-switch fast. Saves a lot of "hey how do I do this simple thing again?" memory loss issues.
janef0421 4y ago
The people protesting aren't a "vocal few"; We're the people who made copilot possible. We are frustrated that our work is being used to profit a massive corporation without any compensation and in a way that we at best did not intend to allow and at worst is in direct violation of the terms we set.
- Siira 4y ago
  Perhaps a good compromise is to make it opt-out, if it’s not already. Though even this is just pandering to the developer’s ego. AI writing code is a massive boost in giving users power and thus freedom. Of course, we need to make AI itself FOSS, but I doubt a legal case could be made for that. A more productive path is to clone the model like SD did with Dall-e.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Nah, you're definitely the few. Its not a random sample, but an informal survey of my coworkers found no one who would care and generally positive sentiment. The people who comment on something are disproportionately those who care a great deal.
  - janef0421 4y ago
    My point was not that those critical of CoPilot are in a majority, it is that our perspective is important because our labour is what makes copilot possible.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      our labour is what makes copilot possible What proportion of its capability is derived from the labor of people who don't like it? I get your point about feeling like an unwilling contributor while github/MS harvests revenue from people who like it. But there's an implication here of being in a critical majority, which I am not convinced is the case.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Careful though, you are trading yours (and their) muscle memory and brainpower to be locked into a proprietary solution. Reread your post. Doesn't it sound scary? You are blocked from even thinking and crafting because a specific web service is down. Even if Google is down you can go direct to Stackoverflow and MDN, and have a choice of information sources. Also what is "productivity" ... as in features built / month or lines of code / month?
- Wilem82 4y ago
  Correction: even if Google is down, you won’t notice, because DDG works just fine. Last time I went to any of Google websites was 4 years ago.
Panzer04 4y ago
And if the code generated by copilot was attached to a license that you had to obey? Suddenly your propriety solution must be released as open source or rewritten, because copilot is effectively laundering open source code? Life's a lot easier when you can just copy whoever did the hard work without crediting/paying/etc for it.
strix_varius 4y ago
> It's been a massive productivity improvement to our senior devs I would hate to work at a place where advanced-but-untrustworthy autocomplete would, at all, impact the productivity of a senior engineer. Not only does this indicate that your senior engineers' productivity is measured poorly (lines of code), but also that your senior engineers are paid to type, rather than to think.
- pizza 4y ago
  It doesn't indicate either of those things. It's a great tool when you're working on complex code that just reaches the limit of your working memory/attention, and has often suggested good and clean improvements for me. You may dislike it but there are people it helps.
nonbirithm 4y ago
If the tech becomes open (and all indicators point to it being open in the near future) then it will become impossible to shut down. This has already happened with Stable Diffusion and the related model leaks. People's expectations have already been set by this technology, and they are only going to want more. Also, AI researchers are still publishing their work out in the open for anyone to reproduce. If there was a Copilot model out in the wild like with Stable Diffusion then this ceases to be a valid question, regardless of the model's legality. All it takes is a single leak or decision by another entity to release their own code generation model.
nullvoxpopuli 4y ago
My experience is that copilot is shit for anything not super basic. Incorrect suggestions all the time

by 19h 4y ago

randomsearch 4y ago

I tried copilot and found it an excellent way to inject subtle bugs into my code. It always had a seemingly plausible guess, that was never correct, and coding turned into a guessing game trying to spot the bugs it had injected and hoping I’d found them all.

jfghi 4y ago

I’d claim that it’s more than a “few vocal” protestors. If the system is illegal, it needs to become legal or disappear. If I’m writing code for a query optimizer, the SQL Server solution isn’t going to magically show up.

tpmoney 4y ago
Is there any evidence that the PostgreSQL or MariaDB solution will though?
Spivak 4y ago
It’s not illegal, it’s at worst a fancy code search tool that Github has the right to show you the results via the license you grant them when you upload and make public code on Github which is way stronger than other search engines like Sourcegraph have to show public code. It doesn’t mean you have the right to use any of the code it generates but Copilot itself isn’t illegal in any meaningful sense.
- noitpmeder 4y ago
  This is definitely not true. When your license requires you bundle said license with any reproductions of the code, and Copilot spits out said code sans license, they are breaking the law.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    > We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video. I don’t think it’s accidental that this product is specifically Github Copilot. But even then I think this is legal overkill. If you use the search box on Github they will display snippets of code from public repositories without the license. Same as what Sourcegraph does same as Copilot does. Nobody here is arguing ripgrep is violating the license by displaying matches without the corresponding license.
    - rileyphone 4y ago
      The violations are when that code is incorporated into your own codebase, which is happening in none of those examples. If you copy GPL'd code from GH search with a non-compatible license you are still in violation.
      - Spivak 4y ago
        Yes but that’s your problem as a user of the tool. It doesn’t make Copilot itself illegal which is what the person I originally replied to was saying. Yes if you use a tool to violate copyright it’s copyright infringement. If you prod Midjourney into outputting near exact Starry Night that’s on you too. So far no one has made a compelling case that Copilot itself is violating copyright.
        eloisius 4y ago
        Code search may show snippets, but it's clearly not separated from the rest of its code base, including the license. It may be your problem as a user of that tool if you pirate snippets out of the search results without honoring its license, but GitHub at least didn't distribute it without its license. A human judge would surely determine that a search result page showing a snippet and linking back to the project wouldn't constitute distributing the code without attribution. Copilot is a different matter. There is no way to know where the code came from, whether it's novel or verbatim copy of someone's copyrighted work. Microsoft _is_ distributing code snippets here sans its license.

smt88 4y ago

Copilot wouldn't be shut down or neutered because "a few vocal people" protested against it. It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. You act like Microsoft is trying to do a public service and people are angry about it. The reality is that they're taking billions of hours of work and using it to build a product that only they control. If they re-released Copilot as FOSS, a lot of the valid criticisms would evaporate.

scarface74 4y ago
> It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. I wonder how many people on HN would be on the side of the creators if we were talking about content created by Walt Disney and whether pirating was ethical?
- lbotos 4y ago
  Wait, I'm not sure what you are trying to say? Can you clarify?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    That many people who are criticizing Microsoft for using open source code and claiming “fair use” and saying it’s not fair to creators are the same ones that say pirating digital content is harmless.
    - pornel 4y ago
      Because issues aren't automatically symmetrical, and impact of actions isn't equal in both ways, especially when there's power difference between the sides of the conflict, e.g. it's not hypocritical to punish a bully punching their victim, but not the victim for punching the bully back. Disney used its power to distort copyright laws in a self-serving manner. As an individual you don't have equal power to oppose them (you were supposed to have in a democracy, but lobbying is legal and corporations are people). Disney is a huge corporation that won't even notice if you pirate a movie, which you may not even have been able to pay for anyway, because of their region-locked twisted maze of distribution and DRM. OTOH you may be screwed if you're a creator making a living from your work, and a big corp can just take it without paying, launder it through "… in the style of $YOURNAME" query, and say they own it now, because unlike your copyright, their Terms Of Service apply. Even people who think copyright shouldn't exist may rely on using copyright — against itself. You can't unilaterally say "I don't believe in copyright", because the law doesn't care, but if you license something as copyleft, then the law does care about your anti-copyright license.

keyle 4y ago

It's particularly useful to the polyglots dealing with multiple codebase, with various languages, to context-switch fast. Saves a lot of "hey how do I do this simple thing again?" memory loss issues.

janef0421 4y ago

The people protesting aren't a "vocal few"; We're the people who made copilot possible. We are frustrated that our work is being used to profit a massive corporation without any compensation and in a way that we at best did not intend to allow and at worst is in direct violation of the terms we set.

Siira 4y ago
Perhaps a good compromise is to make it opt-out, if it’s not already. Though even this is just pandering to the developer’s ego. AI writing code is a massive boost in giving users power and thus freedom. Of course, we need to make AI itself FOSS, but I doubt a legal case could be made for that. A more productive path is to clone the model like SD did with Dall-e.
concordDance 4y ago
Nah, you're definitely the few. Its not a random sample, but an informal survey of my coworkers found no one who would care and generally positive sentiment. The people who comment on something are disproportionately those who care a great deal.
- janef0421 4y ago
  My point was not that those critical of CoPilot are in a majority, it is that our perspective is important because our labour is what makes copilot possible.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    our labour is what makes copilot possible What proportion of its capability is derived from the labor of people who don't like it? I get your point about feeling like an unwilling contributor while github/MS harvests revenue from people who like it. But there's an implication here of being in a critical majority, which I am not convinced is the case.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Careful though, you are trading yours (and their) muscle memory and brainpower to be locked into a proprietary solution. Reread your post. Doesn't it sound scary? You are blocked from even thinking and crafting because a specific web service is down. Even if Google is down you can go direct to Stackoverflow and MDN, and have a choice of information sources. Also what is "productivity" ... as in features built / month or lines of code / month?

Wilem82 4y ago
Correction: even if Google is down, you won’t notice, because DDG works just fine. Last time I went to any of Google websites was 4 years ago.

Panzer04 4y ago

And if the code generated by copilot was attached to a license that you had to obey? Suddenly your propriety solution must be released as open source or rewritten, because copilot is effectively laundering open source code? Life's a lot easier when you can just copy whoever did the hard work without crediting/paying/etc for it.

strix_varius 4y ago

> It's been a massive productivity improvement to our senior devs I would hate to work at a place where advanced-but-untrustworthy autocomplete would, at all, impact the productivity of a senior engineer. Not only does this indicate that your senior engineers' productivity is measured poorly (lines of code), but also that your senior engineers are paid to type, rather than to think.

pizza 4y ago
It doesn't indicate either of those things. It's a great tool when you're working on complex code that just reaches the limit of your working memory/attention, and has often suggested good and clean improvements for me. You may dislike it but there are people it helps.

nonbirithm 4y ago

If the tech becomes open (and all indicators point to it being open in the near future) then it will become impossible to shut down. This has already happened with Stable Diffusion and the related model leaks. People's expectations have already been set by this technology, and they are only going to want more. Also, AI researchers are still publishing their work out in the open for anyone to reproduce. If there was a Copilot model out in the wild like with Stable Diffusion then this ceases to be a valid question, regardless of the model's legality. All it takes is a single leak or decision by another entity to release their own code generation model.

nullvoxpopuli 4y ago

My experience is that copilot is shit for anything not super basic. Incorrect suggestions all the time