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Yesterday, Copilot could not write a program with SymPy, which is a library for doing symbolic math in Python. (e.g., it would consistently confuse symbols in e
by elil17 4y ago
Yesterday, Copilot could not write a program with SymPy, which is a library for doing symbolic math in Python. (e.g., it would consistently confuse symbols in equations with Python variables). Today it uses SymPy as well as it uses NumPy (occasional mistakes, but overall it has the right idea). Absolutely astounding.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoI don’t think people understand the hockey stick we’re on. Don’t focus too hard on the failings, look at the scaffolding being rapidly deployed that makes the iterative improvement process exceptionally tight.
- brookst 4y agoIt’s the same with every paradigm shift. “GUIs are pretty but slow. Ok, they’re faster but just glued on to CLI programs. Ok, they’re native but less information dense. Ok, that’s a good thing, but…” “The internet is nice but you still have to go to the store/bank. Ok, you can shop/bank online but you still have to call airlines. Ok you can buy airline tickets but you still have to go to the library to research. Ok, you can research but you still have to drive in to work. Ok…” Maybe it’s a half empty / half full thing, but there is some portion of the populace that can’t acknowledge the promise of anything until it is perfect and comprehensive. And, yes, there’s another portion that can’t acknowledge gaps or flaws of the promise is sufficiently huge. But it’s the former that grinds my gears.
- darkwater 4y agoI'm speaking more generally but > Maybe it’s a half empty / half full thing, but there is some portion of the populace that can’t acknowledge the promise of anything until it is perfect and comprehensive. Probably because paradigm shifts or new ways of doing things come with a lot of trade-offs that can be seen only after the change has been absorbed more. Early adopters are usually blind to these issues (or decide to be blind at them), conservatives don't look at the improvements but think that there might be something not that good in the future by projecting past experiences.
- scandox 4y agoYour overall point is reasonable, but to take your point about GUIs...we actually lost an awful lot moving from text based interfaces going to GUI. We got universal adoption and more or less zero training required...but we got very slow and inflexible interfaces.
- chaxor 4y agoCommand line didn't vanish ... You can still use it. Approximately 90% of my work is done via TUI, so it's certainly not gone.
- scandox 4y agoI'm talking about people behind counters, people in stock rooms, people in all kinds of data entry and so on. The terminal did vanish from many places. We're not the market.
- aprinsen 4y agoI worked at a paint store in my teens (2010s) that operated a beautiful text only PoS system that had been built decades ago and it was incredible. So efficient, purpose built, nary a click.
- GeneralMaximus 4y agoI use tons of GUI apps with mostly a keyboard (or sometimes only a keyboard). For example, my Git client of choice is Tower, and I’m able to get all my work done without taking my hands off the keyboard. It took me a bit of time to get used to the shortcuts, but now I’m able to work off my muscle memory. Well written GUI apps will always have good support for keyboard-only use. This is doubly true for apps that care deeply about accessibility, since some people have disabilities that make it hard for them to use a mouse or trackpad. On the other hand, TUIs will never support non-Latin scripts properly, or have good support for screen readers, or be easily discoverable without a manual, or have uniform automation support using native automation APIs. In my view, CLIs are strictly inferior to GUIs unless you’re putting together data pipelines.
- headcanon 4y agoI would assert that the "here are the current flaws" side is still necessary in the overall conversation, since they provide the necessary feedback that allows technology to improve. Similar to political debates influencing the Overton window of a population, I see the "future promise" vs "current flaws" as a human algorithm realizing itself. The debate never ends, but the "mean" value keeps moving as technology progresses. As a "future promise" person myself I used to be annoyed by the "current flaws" side as well until I started seeing things through this lens.
- agent281 4y agoI'm mostly curious how far the hockey stick will go up. Eventually most things level off.
- wfeefwfwe 4y ago[flagged]
- throwaway4aday 4y agoConsidering this hockey stick is in the field that is in the business of making hockey sticks it could go pretty far. A hockey stick maximizer if you will.
- substation13 4y agoThis is the big question isn't it. With self driving cars we have been on the final 20% for what seems like forever.
- elil17 4y agoBig difference here is that it becomes more useful as it gets better. Self driving cars aren't useful until they reach a certain threshold.
- substation13 4y agoI think there is a feedback loop with self-driving cars. More self-driving cars on the road -> more driving data for that company -> better self driving cars
- xiphias2 4y agoWe are seeing continuous improvements in image and video generation / understanding every year. It was just probably too naive to think that self driving can work well without getting to human level video understanding (which is still not AGI). But when we have that, it’s hard to believe that self driving won’t work.
- danenania 4y ago
- barrenko 4y agoThey were probably apprehensive beforehand, and now just unleashed it on everything.
- gunshai 4y agoI used sympy the other day for the first time. I was blown away by that library I wish I had known about this years ago.
- vintermann 4y agoYes, I feel like it is much better than HN has given it credit for in earlier discussions. But that may be influenced by the fact that I only started using it relatively recently; I've probably mostly seen it at its best. Also, I have no illusions about how language models work. I notice that the sloppier the code I'm editing, the worse suggestions (and dumber comments) it suggests. If I start writing a comment and copilot immediately suggests "TODO: delete this", that's a better indicator of poor code health than any metric I know about. It's not a magic wand, but it can be extremely useful if you use it sensibly. Then again, you can just decide to forget how it works and ask it questions directly in comments: // Hey GPT3, write me a poem // ANSWER: It's not sensible, but it's great fun.
- Kiro 4y agoYou're being too kind on the HN crowd. We're usually extremely pessimistic for no good reason and useless at predicting things. It seems like we just love to hate on stuff.
- vintermann 4y agoIf you think that you should see what Slashdot is like these days, lol.
- acdha 4y agoPeople here love hot takes, especially if it stakes out a contrarian position as the smart one. Criticizing the big players is just too easy to do that with since it doesn’t require you to build an alternative and is often right in some aspect so you can get validation.
- kreas 4y agoI would say this about most developers not just HN. It took years for me to break that mindset.
- qgin 4y agoIt's definitely not considered high status here to be positive about anything
- retrocryptid 4y agoSo it's on par with a junior software engineer?
- elil17 4y agoNo, I don't think it's comparable to a junior engineer. It works best for pretty short snippets of code. It also can't decide when to run the program and how to interpret/make changes based on the results.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoSo… a junior developer? I (mostly) kid but some seniors I know struggle at those things.
- elil17 4y agoI mean I get what you're saying. But it doesn't just struggle with those things - they aren't even the sort of things it can do.
- retrocryptid 4y agoYes. Of all the comments I've made on HN, that one most deserves to be down-voted. Jr. Devs I know are motivated and reasonably intelligent.
- steve_adams_86 4y ago> It also can't decide when to run the program and how to interpret/make changes based on the results. Not quite, but a bit of plumbing can get you closer. Not human using a computer close, but interestingly closer nonetheless. I've been trying to accomplish something akin to this by having a program monitor and alter another program within a virtual machine, using GPT-generated solutions to error traces to correct bugs in the sand boxed program. It watches the program to see when an error occurs, feeds the error to GPT with pertinent code, then tries to splice in the solution. It kind of works. I don't think we're going to see human-levels of success from this in the immediate future, but I was able to write a simple event-based system which alters a program to resolve simple bugs. It even does it on a different git branch, and there is some stubbed out code and prompts for generating tests. In my manual testing, this actually worked too. If the tests passed I was going to have it push the change set and create a PR explaining the changes, tests, etc. I doubt I'll continue now that Copilot is doing this already. My point though is that with the right configuration, the right data and prompts, and a system orchestrating the start/stop/test patterns based on the state of the sandboxed program, you can begin to achieve something akin to an inexperienced person solving bugs. Sometimes it does a terrible job and other times it kind of falls over itself. But we're already leaps and bounds ahead of previous systems, and I just cobbled this together with what's possible via OpenAI's API. The crazy part is that there are so many possible layers. Like say we get our initial solution and we verify that it works. Well, now we can have a system which optimizes the implementation. Like a PR buddy that observes the implementation and determines: should this test be appended to an existing suite of tests? Can the test case simply be added to an existing table-driven test? How can we streamline this patch to avoid an endless stream of additional files and tests to maintain? I think that's actually tractable already. While the success rate won't be 100% today, it'll clearly only improve.
- DeathArrow 4y agoThey automatically switched Copilot to GPT 4 without you enrolling in the limited access list?