4 ms·

It feels weird saying this but, for once, I hope the big evil corporation gets to keep selling their big bad product. I find the pattern matching and repetitiv

by adlpz 4y ago

It feels weird saying this but, for once, I hope the big evil corporation gets to keep selling their big bad product. I find the pattern matching and repetitive code generation really helpful. And the library autocomplete on steroids, too. Meh. Tricky subject.

dmix 4y ago
TabNine has absolutely improved my life as a programmer. There's something really rewarding about having a robot read your mind for entire blocks of code. It's not just functions either, one of the most common things that it helps me with daily is simple stuff like this: Typing const x = { a: 'one', b: 'two', ... } And later I'll be typing y = [ a['one'], b[' <-- it auto-completes the rest here ] It's really amazing the amount of busy-work typing in programming that a smart pattern matching algo could help with.
- bogwog 4y ago
  I don't think this is a good example of the value of these things. You can just as easily do that same thing with advanced text editor features. Sublime for example supports multi-cursor editing. Just hold alt+shift+arrow keys to add a cursor, then type in the brackets you want. Ctrl+D can be used to select the next occurrence of the current selection with multiple cursors, built-in commands from the command pallete can do anything to your current selection (e.g. convert case), etc. All of that efficiency without having to pay a monthly subscription, wasting electricity on some AI model, and worrying about the legal/moral implications.
  - ChrisLTD 4y ago
    Multiple cursors wont do what the parent comment is talking about without a lot more work.
    - bogwog 4y ago
      Why? You can copy and paste the entire section, and use multiple cursors to add in the brackets. going from a: 'one', to a['one'], just requires you to add two brackets and remove the colon. With multiple cursors you can do that exact same operation for all lines in a few keystrokes.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        It's having to go find the other block you want, copy and paste it, and then set up the multiple cursors and type, versus it just happening automatically without any of that.
      - dmix 4y ago
        In my use cases I’ve long moved on from writing the original hash. Having it autocomplete without having to open a file and tab back/forth (or find then copy/paste a block to the other file to temporary work on it) etc. But what's lost in my over simplified example is the contetxt is usually way more involved. I'm usually passing those as arguments to some function or other unique syntax situation that a glorified find and replace can solve. It's all about doing it in the times you would never think even bother writing a custom command because typing is faster given the unique syntactical context... The only thing faster then is autocomplete. I'm not actually recreating a new hash with the convienient same format.
  - dmix 4y ago
    I’ve used Vim for over a decade I know what it can do. This is automated and happens immediately without you even thinking about it. You only ever pull out the complicated Vim editing when you have a particular hard task, I’m talking about the small stuff many times a day.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  That autocomplete was sort of ok in tabnine, but Copilot completely blows it out of the water. Resource consumption for Copilot is also much more restrained. Which reminds me I have to cancel my tabnine subscription. Been paying them for a year without using it.
  - dmix 4y ago
    I haven't tried Copilot personally but thanks I'll try it. I did try TabNine over a year ago and found it's improved dramatically since then so maybe it's gotten better within training.
nrb 4y ago
Does anyone have a problem with it, so long as the material it trained on was with explicit permission/license and not potentially in violation of copyright? That's where the line is for it to be suspect IMO.
- adlpz 4y ago
  I guess I'm just afraid that it might not be as good as it is that way. It's a bit like how GPT-3, Stable Diffusion and all those generative models use extensive amounts of copyrighted material in training to get as good as they do. In those cases however the output space is so vast that plagiarism is very unlikely. With code, not so much.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion might not copy things exactly - but they certainly do copy "style" There are many articles likes this: https://hyperallergic.com/766241/hes-bigger-than-picasso-on-ai-platforms-and-he-hates-it/ https://hyperallergic.com/766241/hes-bigger-than-picasso-on-... The interesting thing is that the names get explicitly attached to these styles. It isn't exactly a copyright issue, but I'm sure it will get litigated regardless.
  - bjourne 4y ago
    I think the prompt "GPT-3, tell me what the lyrics for the song Stan by Eminem is" is very likely to output copyrighted material. The same copyrighted material is, of course, already republished without permission on google.com.
  - odessacubbage 4y ago
    there are literally thousands of years of artwork that fall under public domain, the idea that the dataset isn't big enough to make good images without copyright infringement and attribution laundering is frankly laughable.
    - adlpz 4y ago
      My guess is that is not as much about the amount of available data but how accessible it is. Scraping the internet seems to be one of the preferred ways of gathering vast amounts of, in particular, text and images. Telling apart what's public domain or not is not a trivially automatable task. If one just relies on curated libraries of vetted public domain content you don't get, by far, the expected amout of variability and diversity.
MrStonedOne 4y ago
odessacubbage 4y ago
why not just train it on your own code or an opt-in data base of voluntarily contributed code? why does everyone else have to make your life easier [and generate enormous wealth for a third party with zero compensation for their work] involuntarily?
sireat 4y ago
I feel like Charlie Gordon from Algernon with and without Copilot. Literally 10x faster development. Case in point: had an unexpected project and no time to complete it. Within an hour Copilot helped me: * Write a couple of tricky matplotlib plots * Do some extensive analysis with Pandas * Write a couple of SQL queries * Write a Flask back-end and deploy it * Write a bit of a front-end * This all with extra comments , links to documentation and pretty reasonable style I have experience with all of the above mentioned but the speed increase was considerable. This would a a good day's work without Copilot and there would be less commenting and hackier code. Before Copilot I would be cursing a lot more reading various docs... The key thing that Copilot does it reduces latency for your thoughts-action-results loop. Does the open source really suffer if less people read documentation directly? Would you really be less likely to create an open source library if you knew someone can now use your library at 10x speed? The inference ability has crossed uncanny valley so many times. I find myself wondering whether there is a speech recognition component at times. When teaching a lecture I will start saying something and write a prompt at the same time and the sentence produced by Copilot will be spot on what I've just said. Ideally there would an open source version of Copilot that respects everyone's wishes. I fear that is impossible.

by adlpz 4y ago

dmix 4y ago

TabNine has absolutely improved my life as a programmer. There's something really rewarding about having a robot read your mind for entire blocks of code. It's not just functions either, one of the most common things that it helps me with daily is simple stuff like this: Typing const x = { a: 'one', b: 'two', ... } And later I'll be typing y = [ a['one'], b[' <-- it auto-completes the rest here ] It's really amazing the amount of busy-work typing in programming that a smart pattern matching algo could help with.

bogwog 4y ago
I don't think this is a good example of the value of these things. You can just as easily do that same thing with advanced text editor features. Sublime for example supports multi-cursor editing. Just hold alt+shift+arrow keys to add a cursor, then type in the brackets you want. Ctrl+D can be used to select the next occurrence of the current selection with multiple cursors, built-in commands from the command pallete can do anything to your current selection (e.g. convert case), etc. All of that efficiency without having to pay a monthly subscription, wasting electricity on some AI model, and worrying about the legal/moral implications.
- ChrisLTD 4y ago
  Multiple cursors wont do what the parent comment is talking about without a lot more work.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    Why? You can copy and paste the entire section, and use multiple cursors to add in the brackets. going from a: 'one', to a['one'], just requires you to add two brackets and remove the colon. With multiple cursors you can do that exact same operation for all lines in a few keystrokes.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      It's having to go find the other block you want, copy and paste it, and then set up the multiple cursors and type, versus it just happening automatically without any of that.
    - dmix 4y ago
      In my use cases I’ve long moved on from writing the original hash. Having it autocomplete without having to open a file and tab back/forth (or find then copy/paste a block to the other file to temporary work on it) etc. But what's lost in my over simplified example is the contetxt is usually way more involved. I'm usually passing those as arguments to some function or other unique syntax situation that a glorified find and replace can solve. It's all about doing it in the times you would never think even bother writing a custom command because typing is faster given the unique syntactical context... The only thing faster then is autocomplete. I'm not actually recreating a new hash with the convienient same format.
- dmix 4y ago
  I’ve used Vim for over a decade I know what it can do. This is automated and happens immediately without you even thinking about it. You only ever pull out the complicated Vim editing when you have a particular hard task, I’m talking about the small stuff many times a day.
Aeolun 4y ago
That autocomplete was sort of ok in tabnine, but Copilot completely blows it out of the water. Resource consumption for Copilot is also much more restrained. Which reminds me I have to cancel my tabnine subscription. Been paying them for a year without using it.
- dmix 4y ago
  I haven't tried Copilot personally but thanks I'll try it. I did try TabNine over a year ago and found it's improved dramatically since then so maybe it's gotten better within training.

nrb 4y ago

Does anyone have a problem with it, so long as the material it trained on was with explicit permission/license and not potentially in violation of copyright? That's where the line is for it to be suspect IMO.

adlpz 4y ago
I guess I'm just afraid that it might not be as good as it is that way. It's a bit like how GPT-3, Stable Diffusion and all those generative models use extensive amounts of copyrighted material in training to get as good as they do. In those cases however the output space is so vast that plagiarism is very unlikely. With code, not so much.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion might not copy things exactly - but they certainly do copy "style" There are many articles likes this: https://hyperallergic.com/766241/hes-bigger-than-picasso-on-ai-platforms-and-he-hates-it/ https://hyperallergic.com/766241/hes-bigger-than-picasso-on-... The interesting thing is that the names get explicitly attached to these styles. It isn't exactly a copyright issue, but I'm sure it will get litigated regardless.
- bjourne 4y ago
  I think the prompt "GPT-3, tell me what the lyrics for the song Stan by Eminem is" is very likely to output copyrighted material. The same copyrighted material is, of course, already republished without permission on google.com.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  there are literally thousands of years of artwork that fall under public domain, the idea that the dataset isn't big enough to make good images without copyright infringement and attribution laundering is frankly laughable.
  - adlpz 4y ago
    My guess is that is not as much about the amount of available data but how accessible it is. Scraping the internet seems to be one of the preferred ways of gathering vast amounts of, in particular, text and images. Telling apart what's public domain or not is not a trivially automatable task. If one just relies on curated libraries of vetted public domain content you don't get, by far, the expected amout of variability and diversity.

MrStonedOne 4y ago

odessacubbage 4y ago

why not just train it on your own code or an opt-in data base of voluntarily contributed code? why does everyone else have to make your life easier [and generate enormous wealth for a third party with zero compensation for their work] involuntarily?

sireat 4y ago

I feel like Charlie Gordon from Algernon with and without Copilot. Literally 10x faster development. Case in point: had an unexpected project and no time to complete it. Within an hour Copilot helped me: * Write a couple of tricky matplotlib plots * Do some extensive analysis with Pandas * Write a couple of SQL queries * Write a Flask back-end and deploy it * Write a bit of a front-end * This all with extra comments , links to documentation and pretty reasonable style I have experience with all of the above mentioned but the speed increase was considerable. This would a a good day's work without Copilot and there would be less commenting and hackier code. Before Copilot I would be cursing a lot more reading various docs... The key thing that Copilot does it reduces latency for your thoughts-action-results loop. Does the open source really suffer if less people read documentation directly? Would you really be less likely to create an open source library if you knew someone can now use your library at 10x speed? The inference ability has crossed uncanny valley so many times. I find myself wondering whether there is a speech recognition component at times. When teaching a lecture I will start saying something and write a prompt at the same time and the sentence produced by Copilot will be spot on what I've just said. Ideally there would an open source version of Copilot that respects everyone's wishes. I fear that is impossible.