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Comment by FractalHQ | Hacker News Reader

Copilot mostly spews distracting nonsense, but when it’s useful (like with repetitive boilerplate where it doesn’t have to “think” much) it’s really nice. But if that’s the bar, I don’t think were ready for something like search, which is much more difficult and important to get right for the average person to get more good than harm from it.

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Few people seem to know this, but you can disable auto-suggest in Copilot, so it only suggests things when you proactively ask it to. I only prompt it when I know it will be helpful and it's a huge time saver when used that way.

Sometimes, Copilot is brilliant. I have encountered solutions that are miles better than anything i had found on the internet nor expected to find in the first place.

The issue involved heavy numerical computation with numpy, and it found a library call for that that covered exactly my issue.

I've had similar experiences. Sometimes it just knows what you want and saves you a minute searching. Sometimes way more than a minute.

But I find it also hallucinates in code, coming up with function calls that aren't in the API but would sound like a natural thing to call.

Overall it's a positive though, it's pretty easy to tell for your other coding tools if the suggestion is for something made up, and the benefits of filling in your next little thought are very real.

do you consider things like extrapolating out the else half out of an if-else given the if half as boilerplate?

these tools are incredible productivity boosts if you leverage them well.

here's a sample from gpt: a low effort question and a code dump that would get you flamed on stackoverflow.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/263091858505334784/10...

I love it. As long as we continue to use these tools as augmentive, it's just going to get better and better

Google's search results are pretty terrible. I actually have a hard time telling which is a result and which is an ad anymore tbh. I really don't think the bar is that high.

Maybe the internet is actually that terrible now, and Google is just the messenger?

The internet has been terrible since Yahoo dominated search.

In fact, it was the glut of SEO nonsense like keyword stuffing is that PageRank countered.

If Google search sucks, someone will make one that doesn’t suck, and people will switch.

Search still relies on content that doesn't suck though, and like GP said, if the internet today sucks, then the competing search will also suck.

The internet is fucking awesome, and has been for decades.

The profit incentive is for search to suck. Making it shitty is what brings in the money.

The internet is terrible and Google is the reason.

Ok everyone, enjoy your SEO spam

That sounds like an endorsement of their ads platform?

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