spupe

To be fair, I think a big part of Mercedes' dominance is that they had the best engine and the best driver, two factors that are not under Newey's control. I agree with your other points.

Looks bad, but I wonder whether he got a faulty unit or if it is a widespread problem. It would be odd that Apple and review sites wouldn't pick up on it if it decreases performance to such an extent.

This is evidence that state actors influence the internet, which I think is uncontroversial. However, the specific statement here was that these left-wing communities were the result of this influence, which I find highly doubtful and in itself perhaps an attempt to de-legitimize their cause.

Sure. Some readers are convinced by pointless claims, others are more discerning.

When you make a claim, the burden of proof is on you. Uncovering the fact you have no evidence actually contributes to the discussion in my opinion.

> There are certainly organic humans caught in the mix, but all that antiwork, LateStageCapitalism, "America is so divisive", Marxist BS you hear repeated constantly across Reddit and Twitter is broadly manufactured far more than it is truly organic.

What evidence do you have of that?

> They can't claim causation if they don't understand the underlying reason for the change. That's not how science works.

Sorry but I had to nitpick here. This is exactly how science works. We first observe things that we cannot explain, and we can definitely infer causation without a complete mechanism or even a proper theory for it.

>> Have you ever read GitHub's conditions to know whether they also have the right to use your code that way, no matter how you decide to license it? > I have, and there is not.

At least one IP lawyer strongly disagrees, suggesting anything you host on GitHub is fair game [1].

[1] https://fossa.com/blog/analyzing-legal-implications-github-c...

> The person writing an SO answer is intelligent and capable of conceptual understanding, the computer regurgitating code without regard to its license is not.

From a copyright perspective, that is irrelevant. In fact I would think Copilot has more incentives to not infringe than a random SO user, who is very unlikely to be sued. I already argued in another post that in my view, from any perspective, it is also irrelevant whether it's a person or AI doing the same work Copilot does.

> All SO questions, answers and comments are CC BY-SA. The terms of the site say that anyone submitting this content agrees that it's licensed that way, and when you visit the site you agree that you are provided with the content under that license.

Have you ever read GitHub's conditions to know whether they also have the right to use your code that way, no matter how you decide to license it? I feel that you are overly focused on the legal part here, which I'm sure was handled by Microsoft's lawyers. I'm more interested in the question of principle.

No matter what the terms of use at SO say, anyone can give you an answer that is a copy of some code they don't own. You may consider that immoral, but I don't, not at the scope SO is used for. In addition, the vast majority of cases at SO and Copilot are not about complex functions being stolen, it's about some dumb code you would have found in 2 minutes of googling. What I'm trying to argue here is that if we are all cool with SO and think it's useful, there is no fundamental difference here. We never cared too much about licenses for boilerplate code, and I think we shouldn't start now.

No. Why would we want to go that route? Such a lawsuit would slow down a ton of work in AI, certainly big language models and DALL-E for example.

Again, how does that differ from Stack Overflow? Do you go and check whether a given reply belongs to a licensed project?

Also, please consider that there is a toggle that allows you to block Copilot from using public code.

> That's an entirely different task than the user reading SO or using Google and then writing their own code, because the "AI" is not capable of writing its own code at that level.

I would say it's a very similar task. If I need to remember how to use a certain function, I can Google for documentation and examples, or I can tell Copilot what I want to do. The fact that the solution was presented by Copilot or a SO thread is, in my view, irrelevant. And to compound on that, I doubt anyone checking SO truly knows where that answer came from. The person could simply be reproducing a snippet from somebody else, you have no way of knowing if it was licensed.

I don't think this is bad either. Even our current shitty copyright laws protect that kind of use. I shouldn't have to worry whether my little prime number generator uses an algorithm first created by John Carmack or Microsoft. Programming has evolved rapidly in great part because we can all use other people's work and use it to improve ours. Of course you shouldn't just copy and paste everything and call it a day, but that's hardly what Copilot enables anyway.

I think I still have not understood your argument. Are you saying that you are afraid that AIs will become too powerful and cause unemployment, and therefore we should regulate them now before they do so?

Many people are worried about this, which is why there is a lot of debate about minimum income programs. However, at present, what Copilot is doing is similar to what Google does, and it is certainly not going to replace devs any time soon. Personally, I think we should exploit technology to its fullest, and the only reason we can have this conversation is because in the past, we haven't given too much consideration about the mailmen, secretaries, delivery workers and everyone else who got displaced by our use of the internet and similar technologies. We merely adapted to better exploit them.

This is clear-cut fraud, but it is also not even close to what Copilot or most junior devs are doing.

I think it's best if we sidestep these big conceptual questions about what cognition or creativity really are. It's hard to find agreement, and perhaps it is not necessary to do so.

My position is that if a person hired in a company can currently use Google, Stack Overflow and GitHub to help develop their custom scripts, and no moral or copyright issues are infringed (ie, you don't try to say you came up with it on your own, and you use only enough that it is clearly fair use), then I think an AI should be able to assist in that task. There is no need to complicate things by legislating what the AI is doing and what Google is doing, as they are very similar things and in fact even use similar methods.

I don't see why that should be the case in this particular scenario, or what benefit is gained from that. Could you elaborate?

I understand where you are coming from. However, I think you are making the assumption that this person simply copy/pasted some code with no understanding of it, or that this code is then very different from your codebase and needs to be refactored. If using Stack Overflow did not add to your overall development time but subtracted from it, because it was used as an appropriate piece of a much bigger puzzle - a far more realistic scenario for both Copilot and our general use of SO -, then I see no issue with it whatsoever. Certainly no moral or copyright issues as this person on Twitter implies.

Kinda, but I think you are imagining something bigger than it is. At least in my experience, it works well for simple stuff like "iterate over x and extract y" or similar queries that I imagine are well represented in its training data. When you get to very specific functions, its answer will be less reliable and more likely to be a wonky rehash of the few examples it has for that case.

If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?

No, it doesn't do any of that. However, it does not "copy code" except in marginal use cases, the far more common scenario is that it will suggest you very basic code that is akin to a Stack Overflow reply.

I disagree. Copilot is selling content-aware code suggestions, which is a result of code that other people wrote in their platform, and which in no way affects the work of these people.

What a ridiculous argument for tax evasion. Your tax money also supports elderly care, orphanages and a range of essential services that you have already benefited from. What you are doing is immoral - freeloading.

Mate, I don't know if you realize this, but most people here just want to hide due to minor privacy concerns, not a plan to overthrow the government or some shit. Of course if the FBI is after you, no, Mullvad won't protect you. But in the more realistic scenario that Disney might be after you, would Mullvad be a liability or not, that is the question.

That's certainly very nice, but I'm sure you can appreciate the complexity involved here. I would need to compile this and have CUDA properly configured on Linux, or have no CUDA support on Windows. So even your hand-picked example is not that different from the process I just described, which is the standard for ML projects as of today, even for players like Meta or Nvidia.

That's not necessarily true. A lot of state surveillance comes through having backdoor or legal access to lots of services. Many VPNs have been tested in court on whether they actually have information on you to disclose, and some even have independent audits to verify that such information is not even kept.

Can you point out any ML project that works any simpler than this? Other than running Colab of course, which I mentioned.

In many cases, you approach the business with the "diagnosis" already worked out: moving companies, car rental, electronic parts, etc. In fact those businesses usually have automated or semi-automated pricing. When the business needs to evaluate you individually, they have at least a temptation to take more money than they should. That temptation is either capped by regulation or reputation in my experience.

> A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it.

Yes, absolutely. I think there is a specific niche of motivational "you can do it!" stuff which basically boils down to "everyone is winging it, so fuck it", and it's dishonest. Few hard things are achieved with this attitude, even if sometimes it's true that you improvise a lot.

Beautifully written post by the way, it really nails down some major points that I find more motivational than the original post.

Always be skeptical when the person giving you a diagnosis also directly benefits from giving you a particular diagnosis. This goes for dentists, banking and so much more.