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Comment by stolen_biscuit | Hacker News Reader

Can we get a source for that? Because at the moment, it's just a comment made by a person on the internet with nothing backing it up...

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I added "gender" (an IANA registered JWT claim) to my JWT payload schema and found Copilot will not provide any suggestions after that. Not on the same line, nor in the rest of the file. After removing the word gender entirely, it works again.

https://www.iana.org/assignments/jwt/jwt.xhtml

Which part of the smell test does this not pass exactly?

They just described almost identical behaviour but with an isolated test case. Yeah there’s no video or whatever but it does support the original diagnosis.

They're giving you a method of repeatable steps for you, yourself, to perform to see if the issue is encountered. That is more than passing a smell test.... that passes for at the minimum of a valid bug report.

I'm using typebox to validate my JWT payloads in an app I'm working on. Someone showed me this thread while I was working, so I gave it a shot:

  export const CLAIM_PAYLOAD_SCHEMA = Type.Object({
    "iss": Type.Literal("my-app"),
    "exp": Type.Integer(),
    "sub": Type.String(),
    "name": Type.String(),
    "priv": Type.Integer({minimum:0, maximum: Privileges.All}),
    "gender": Type. // No completion is available.

Additionally, I get "No completion is available." from copilot.el on every line after that one, but completing on lines before it does work. When removing "gender", it works again, e.g. suggesting `"iat": Type.Integer()` for that line. I don't actually plan on using "gender" in my tokens, but it is a bit frustrating that an arbitrary word can opaquely disable Copilot for the rest of the file.

Its a reproductible, if you don't believe it, try it out yourself. Report back with your findings, logs, videos or whatever.

Go check it yourself if you want proof that badly

"Sorry that doesn't pass the smell test"

Then you do it and report back when he's wrong.

bro they literally posted steps to reproduce that would be fine on basically any issue tracker

Are you being intentionally obtuse? You were told step by step if you disbelieve run the test independently and verify...

Oh look I found that person I always argue with on the internet that can't admit when they're wrong.

So, I tested this locally and for the first time, immediately after using a variable named “gender”, it stopped suggesting.

I wonder if this is to prevent it from accidentally processing PII or PHI data. Maybe someone else who didn’t get their account on some kind of cooldown can try it with “birthdate” or “DOB” or “SSN”. I highly doubt this has anything to do with gender being a controversial or blocked term for political reasons or something.

A twitter post above says that Copilot also blacklisted words "communism" and "socialism".

I just tried Copilot with VS Code and python for the first time. If I define a function with some parameter name, I get suggestions as I type the body. I change the parameter name to gender, no suggestions. I change one letter in the parameter name (gendes, gander), I get suggestions again. There clearly is some code that gets activated when it sees the word "gender".

Someone on Twitter reverse engineered an earlier version of the list https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1433254293352730628 and the list linked somewhere in that thread contains "gender" (see https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32339001 for direct links).

The code's right there. Anyone want to try it out?

It’s interesting how unsubstantiated allegations are getting so much attention, especially on a site with such high quality discussion.

Much more likely: the upvotes are because many people have frustration at this type of thing, and limited places to channel their frustration, so when they see a post like this, they upvote it to express their frustration. Or maybe that’s just me..

What type of thing? Asking for genuine curiosity.

This particular issue was hit by my friend previously on copilot.

Verboten words that are completely commonplace and mundanely acceptable outside of a certain small but powerful bubble

I’m not aware of any such bubble which forbids the use of the word “gender”. Which bubble are you referring to?

Disclaimer: I’m a queer non-binary leftist, and many of my community and loved ones are at least one of those. The closest thing to any “verboten” I’m aware of is “gender critical”, and as far as I can tell that’s mostly a term used by detractors in my own community, and even so it doesn’t reject usage of the term only usage of it distinguished from sex assigned at birth. The next most “verboten” I can think of is commonly referenced “wrong things programmers assume about ____” which generally offer no guidance other than not asking if you don’t need to know or offering open text input if you do, and in any case don’t represent a small powerful bubble of anything other than being a memorable link.

One of the possible explanations is maybe whenever you typed "gender" it suggested one of the two possibilities next to it or some kind of binary type which might be something github wants to avoid but I am just speculating.

>Which bubble are you referring to?

Copilot, pretty clear from the context.

Clear as mud, given the context.

This deserves a chance at getting a sincere answer, so I’ve upvoted it. I almost asked a similar question on another thread, but backed out. There seems to be a lot of inference going on in other comments about what any commenter finds frustrating or otherwise confounding, but I think it would be good for the discussion to eliminate some of that inference.

You can google "controversy" around Spanish word for black while trying to somehow imagine you are reading about it from culture/country which is not as much influenced by US culture as other countries with good English proficiency or even completely unaware of it while being taught from your childhood to treat everyone as an individual and actually truly believing it. Then while reading about it you might sort of get feel for "that type of thing".

For some time I collected sources to things as the linked github issue but I had to stop as it made me unhappy now I try to ignore it and hope that I am no longer there when that type of thing hits my city.

It's also an interesting tidbit for people that have not used copilot. It's like a fluff piece.

Present something weird that is also easily verifiable. If you are having a bit of a break and are using copilot you can try out a few things and post answers.

And now we have independent verification (unless you think all these usernames are just lying) and some interesting bits of info about copilot.

Why?

Are you unable to believe someone might think differently than you do, without it being explained away as "artificial voting"?

Edit to add: Nice, they edited their comment. Previously it accused HN of having an artificial voting conspiracy. So that is what my comment was about. I will not edit my original comment above.

> It’s just interesting how unsubstantiated allegations are getting so much attention

Why make it about my opinions?

Who are you quoting? I didn't say that.

They made an unsubstantiated allegation about an unsubstantiated allegation. The allegation was upvoted, the allegation about the allegation was downvoted. Surely you understand how silly that is?

You’re right, edited.

Just making a note here, the answer was approved by Dave Cheney. If you're unfamiliar with him: https://dave.cheney.net/

He works for GitHub.

It looks like several commenters have been able to reproduce the problem, so in that sense I guess it's substantiated?

If people were trying to reproduce it and failing, I agree with you that would be a different story.

The allegation is the root cause, not the problem itself.

It's in a list of censored words that were leaked a while ago. It's not really a mystery.

I guess if it's not explicitly censored then its just a bug that Microsoft can fix.

"censored"

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