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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

I am, after the fiasco that was Github Copilot. It seemed like every post was filled with people dooming over how Copilot was going to make developers obsolete. Then I used Copilot, and I can't see how anyone could possibly think that would be the case. Maybe if all you do is write sort algorithms day in and day out, but otherwise, I think our jobs are quite secure, and I think that will be the case with SD / DallE too (especially after having used Dall-E 2).

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Why was copilot a fiasco? This [0] hn thread from two months ago is filled with predominantly positive reviews

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825742

GitHub copilot is trained on Open Source code bases, and regenerates OSS code in your proprietary apps, potentially breaking the licensing of the OSS code or your proprietary app.

A vocal minority of e.g. GPL proponents is just like, really really mad about it.

They tend to claim they are worried about open source. Really they are worried about a smaller sub-culture of open source who doesn’t want their code used for profit without being paid.

What about the sub-culture of open source who doesn't want their code used for profit without the result also being open sourced?

To put it another way, why should we have to treat Microsoft's EULA and licenses as ironclad while Microsoft gets to ignore licensing terms of code they want to use for their own products? Seems like an imbalance that's only possible because one side is more well-funded than the other.

What fiasco? Copilot is amazing. I can't imagine coding without it ever again. If you think it's just for sorting algorithms and schoolbook examples you clearly haven't realized the scope of it. It helps me a lot in the most unexpected situations and constantly still surprises me even though I've used it since day 1.

I actually pay for Copilot, because it is useful, but during the hype phase you had people claiming that it could replace programmers entirely. That is patently not true.

I mean, yeah, but that's no different than people claiming DALL-E will replace artists, or GPT-3 will replace authors, or calculators will replace mathematicians, or the printing press will replace handwriting, etc. Whenever there's new tech, there are people who think it will replace every activity that it can perform, and that's almost never the case. Doesn't take away from the actual capabilities of the tech, though.

Maybe not in its current incarnation but if things keep moving at this pace I wouldn't be surprised if it actually happened. When internet went down I was staring at the screen, subconsciously waiting for something to autocomplete. Only then did I realize how much I actually rely on Copilot, to the point where it's part of my backbone. I felt handicapped and couldn't understand why until I saw the Wifi symbol.

Copilot is amazing in the sense that it actually has material impact on the day to day for coders. While generative art today is super impressive, it has zero use/impact for me if I am not interested in creating images. However something like a universal writing assistant similar to copilot would have a massive impact to those interested in writing.

If anything Copilot makes Stable Diffusion seems way more impressive.

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