Re: Github copilot is useful for coding
or how secure it is?
1593 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2020
Do I detect the beginnings of an admission that this stuff has been hyped up out of all proportion, driven by the vast sums paid by big tech companies hoping to get in on the hype, and now that people have started paying for it and using it and discovering that it really can't do anything more than spit out stuff that you could have found just as easily with a simple web search, the realisation may be dawning that it might have been rather oversold?
I've worked for one Ferrari owning boss, and judging by this tale they're all equally stupid. I once agreed to accompany him in it to his house, during work time, to get something working on his PC there. This hideous yellow car made an equally hideous racket, and could accelerate like a rocket. It turned out that his daily commute in it involved an 8 mile journey, mostly along an extremely busy and urban dual carriageway, with traffic lights about every third of a mile. So the drive involved being rapidly accelerated and decelerated over very short distances, with no time advantage gained at all because the world's fastest car would have taken exactly the same amount of time to do the journey as a £300 old banger.
Ah no, the budget was designed to get big headlines in the press when the big announcement was made and impress the public. As usual, there was no proper follow up to make the thing actually work, and they quietly abandoned the thing when the news could be buried in a small story on page 23 when everybody was otherwise distracted.
I doubt that there was any intention of actually letting that much money be spent from the very beginning.
I thought that they had proof of the AI spitting out NYT stories verbatim? If that's so, then MS are claiming that if it's on a public website, it's not "private" and can therefore be scraped and regurgitated, despite the copyright notices on that public website. If that's the case, the NYT could create a Large Operating System model, and scrape copies of Windows from the public Microsoft site and then regurgitate them too.
Soon it will be de rigueur for the libertarian billionaire class to flaunt their mutations, to show that they've been to space, unlike the lesser fry. They will be desperate to get to the next cocktail party, in order to show off the new ear that's growing out of their chin.
If this leaves the supermarket shelves empty, don't despair. To recreate the effects of a night's Duvel consumption, just eat a whole pack of laxatives before bedtime, then ask someone to hit you on the head with a hammer a few times the next morning.
Have they never heard of templates? You know, standard letters and notes where the computer just has to put in the patient's name and address? This is not something that requires AI, and the risk of it generating inaccurate info is far too high to start using it right now when it comes to something as important as patient health.
Which is a problem. We don't have Ford petrol and Nissan petrol and Vauxhall petrol..... the same stuff works for every car.
We went through all this with USB standards for charging devices : the choice is to waste lots of time and money on supporting different standards, or biting the bullet and just going straight to a universal standard for all electric vehicles.
So has a certain social media company, which is also being sued by lots of people for those reasons, and is run by a guy who coincidentally has exactly the same name as the guy filing this lawsuit.
Oliver Dowden called the technology a potential "silver bullet"
Time for someone to show him the famous Fred Brooks essay. Yes, he mentions AI too. And he wrote it in 1987.
Just because this government has been little more then a series of expensive disasters, whose only benefit has been to show other countries what not to do, is no reason to embark on yet another one, especially at this late stage.
OK, I can just about accept that a few things like petrol pumps might go wrong, due to some amateurs somewhere not thinking too carefully when hacking out code. But come on, a watch, which has the one main function of working with date and time............. smart that most definitely is not.
Well, if Accenture are now making their developers use that much Copilot generated code, it will be an awful lot cheaper to pay $39 a month and generate it yourself rather than paying Accenture for it.
Rather than making them look cutting edge, it makes them look like a suddenly unnecessary and expensive middleman.
Crikey, you'd think that the guy's business might still have some sort of IT department, who he could pick up the phone to and demand his new laptop from, but no, he obviously sacked most of them, thought he had to have his own special boss laptop and went down to the local PC mart and bought one.
Get back to me when you've rewritten Call Of Duty 6 in Lisp, and a high performance industrial scale database in Smalltalk, and have them running on your tiny OS as well as they do now, and we'll have another look to see whether all that work to recreate exactly what we already have was really worth it. I'm guessing neither project would be anything other than a catastrophe.
Sure, but it has to work both ways. Especially once you've gone, as you are no longer in a subservient position to the boss, and should no longer be treated as an employee but as an equal.
I remember getting an email after leaving somewhere from a team leader who had got used to me doing some of his work for him, asking how things worked that he should have known. I was busy at the time, so had no time to answer his huge list of questions about how stuff worked, and needed time to consider whether I would do so anyway, lest he got the impression that I was going to carry on doing his job for him whilst at my new employer. He solved my problem by sending an angry email the next day complaining that I hadn't replied quickly enough because he needed to know all the answers before a meeting and I'd now set back some unimportant arbitrary deadline and his problems were all my fault.
I replied, copying in the departmental manager, pointing out that the code was all fully documented, and the answers to all his questions could be found there, now and in the future
Good to know that with spending cuts resulting in crimes not being investigated and reduced military capabilities, they've at least got the time and money to do important things like changing millions of logos to a slightly different looking crown......
Of course, just keeping on using the same crown logo would be far too sensible to contemplate - just imagine how hard it must be to live in countries that don't have to replace every single postbox, government form, uniform and banknote every time the head of state changes!
This just makes things even more grating and annoying when you can't do what you want. Aaah look at the cute little cartoon puppy with a sad face! That looks the same as every other fucking cute little cartoon puppy with a sad face!
Frankly, if this is going to become a standard thing, they need to go full on Itchy and Scratchy and have animations of the cartoon puppy being dropped into a shredder, whcih would at least distract us with a laugh for a few seconds.
Loving how all the fashionistas who rushed out to buy one just can't bring themselves to criticise their almighty fruit god, despite being bored already with their new shiny. Never mind, if Apple continue down this road of trying "shit ideas, done slightly better" they'll be releasing the Apple doorbell in about 6 months time and they can all get excited about that.
I'm not sure many people would like to be held accountable for what a LLM spits out, seeing as that will depend entirely upon what data it's trained on. Even if you review everything fed into it, and count the number of occurrences of each thing, you still won't be able to predict what it'll spit out, because it's just far too complex statistically. So there really can't be any such job as "ethical AI controller", you can only look at what it produces and decide to act on that or not. Seeing as you will never know how it decided to reach a particular conclusion, it could be argued that it would always be unethical to use it for any real life decision that affects somebody's life.
Madness. Presumably there are some restrictions on the US government obtaining this data directly - can't see any other reason why they couldn't have got the info themselves if they wanted it - but apparently some dodgy company in India could freely slurp vast amounts of it at will, and then sell it back to them....
Your friend decided to put his money into cryptocurrency, stored it on a badly secured Windows laptop, and connected it to the internet. It then got robbed, which means that now you think that the way to prevent this happening again is to slow everybody else's computers down? No thanks, tell him to use real money and keep it in a bank in future. They do have the sort of checks you're suggesting on large transactions.
No need to remodel the entire digital world, just because of the naivety of foolish crypto believers.
As someone who has been doing this for rather a long time, the reason I see these AI assistants as little more than a gimmick is that the most important parts of the job of being a software developer are problem analysis and solution design. These are as vital to the big things like overall system design as they are to implementation of small features if you want to end up with coherent systems.
An "AI assistant" knows nothing about these things, and exists at the same level of people who think developers are just code monkeys, that do nothing more than spit out trivial small functions to order. Anybody that's worked at a place where that mentality has taken root will have tales to tell about how systems gradually became a mass of incoherent code full of workarounds that were needed because of previous workarounds, that were no pleasure to work on at all.
To a real software developer, coding is the least difficult part of the job, a trivial translation of their understanding of the problem into instructions for moving bits around inside the machine. It's as if engineers who design skyscrapers were being told that their jobs were going to improved, or even replaced, because somebody has invented a "magic spanner".
Let me guess : the next word would have been "Dashboard".
It was the easiest way to sell any useless, everybody knows this stuff anyway, metric visualising Fisher Price My First Management Tool software to the aspirational middle manager. "Cockpit" would have been an even more impressive sounding name for such crap, allowing the exec to feel that they were a pilot at the controls of a huge complex airliner, but for some reason that never caught on.
Make it compulsory for MS employees then.They can let us know what percentage of Windows 12 has been written by this amazing new AI, or even get the AI to write all of it. The world will then be able to judge how good it is by how reliable the OS is.
I mean, if they're charging that much for it, it must be capable enough?
There's only one justification for all this deception : that Edge is so inferior to the competition that nobody would use it if given a free choice. In other words, the company is admitting that their browser sucks, or is at the very least unnecessary, which is sufficient reason in itself to stay well clear of it forever.
They are also publicising their own control freakery yet again, and showing that this is how you can be treated when you use any of their products.
This is the point. Search engines were built to get you to pages written by people, with the most linked to pages given search result priority, on the basis that these were the pages that had been found to be the best source of information on that topic. Such pages also tend to lead you on to other interesting stuff that is related to whatever you were interested in.
"AI search" on the other hand is an unwanted attempt to supersede all that by generating content from many sources on a topic, dishing out results that read like Wikipedia on valium, and lacks all the personality, quirkiness and random other stuff that you might have got from visiting the pages it has digested and blandified. Either Google will have to have an "old skool" version of itself alongside its LLM based new version, or somebody else will create one and quite possibly eat their lunch when it's realised which is more useful.