You are willfully ignoring thst the article absolutely DID address this point!
The license and attribution are stripped from regurgitated copied code snippets from code projects.
If the people don’t known which project the code was taken from, how can they one day contribute to that codebase?
If the code projects on GitHub are not getting the people who use their code at least aware of the project, that project disappears.
Copilot is an interloper who doesn’t even tell you which project the code snippet was ripped off from!!
I see your statement as an inversion of consensus reality. What actual coder would use copilot?
A beginner or dabbler.
I predict your attempt at tactically “managing” this copilot scandal will not play well on HN to experienced coders, your Microsoft colleagues chiming in next claiming it boosts their productivity notwithstanding.
I tried it out, but I don’t use it at all on a day-to-day basis. I have no idea if it boosts productivity or not. I also have no idea how you came up with the claim that it’s only for beginners, I’m presuming you just made this up? All of the people that I’ve noticed talking publicly about their experiences using it are highly experienced engineers.
I just think it’s hilarious how fair use is so widely supported on HN when it comes to music, or videos, or interface names, but all of a sudden is a moral crisis when it appears to threaten the value of HN member’s labor.
Mmm maybe rephrase that as “depending upon which entity’s copyright was violated”
Surely I don’t need to recite the last 50 years of tech legal precedent and case history for you to see that such a blanket generalization cannot be left unaddressed.
It’s not about “learning” at all, copilot spits out copyrighted licensed code verbatim directly copied from the source to your project in violation of specific and multitudinous repositories.
They are making rips of other peoples stuff, selling the contents of peoples “books/movies/songs” sans author attribution or album credits etc… to put it in terms you may be familiar with
Vinegar and salt on open wounds. Bad
Is there any nuance for scope?
Software I've licensed as GPL, I'm concerned about the working software being re-used and re-licensed for something commercial. For a given method out of tens-of-thousands, it's very not-germaine to the overall software to the point that I don't see it is a really relevant (but that is my opinion). Though, if someone likes the opening sentence of the encylopedia (or some other giant work), and an AI says, "this is a good opening sentence - does that really make for "ripping" off? Isn't the covered work the larger contents of the encylopedia, rather than an arbitrarily well written opening sentence? Isn't the big part of the work the ensemble?
I'm starting to wonder about these arguments, and whether we've gone into bad faith and hyperbole territory here. Are algorithms subject to copyright? Is it the case that if a GPL work uses a well known algorithm, that GPL work cannot be used as a reference? (Given that algorithms have very limited forms they can take, using an algorithm as a reference is really just copying it. Even translating pseudo-code to code, it's still the same thing).
Can you explain to me how something like using Eulers formula to solve a math problem would not be copyright infringement? A GPL project might use that formula somewhere, but then using that would be a copyright violation?
How about HTML source code, does putting a 'copyright' notice on the webpage make it invalid to then use any of the javascript, even if it has nothing special to do with the domain of the website?
"selling the contents of peoples “books/movies/songs”
Going to this analogy, I don't know if it is really the contents, but more like the first sentence, or even the first few words of that sentence rather than any recognizable subset of that work.
Like, if I have an app that does a spreadsheet, I don't care if you take an implementation of quick sort from my code as reference, but I do care if you use the same and main features of the spreadsheet app that I made.
Your assertion thst copyright doesn’t matter and that people should “get used to it” is… pretty incorrect on the former (surely there are still pending copyright suits on earth circa 2022) and ill-conceived on the latter (I’ll just rob your house while you sleep and you should just get used to it)
The WAY it was done with copilot is the problem: no attribution, just shoving all legal liability off on the end “programmer” without providing the attribution required TO COMPLY WITH LICENSES as the diligent programmer tries to clear all the code copilot handed it without meta data.
Go read the article before arguing further, please.
Otherwise you are wasting all of our time.
I did read the article first. Start-to-finish. As others have pointed out, it's a very visually appealing website.
I hope that when a case on generative models hits the courts that it's found that training on data from the Internet counts as fair use. I hope that for the reasons I laid out in my comment, because I think that if it isn't then we are all in trouble since these tools will STILL EXIST, but they will be in the hands of the few instead of the many. My main reaction is to how short-sighted it seems like the authors and many others are being about this technology in general. They seem to think they can just wish it away.
I also think that training on data from the Internet is fair-use, but I'm not a lawyer and I haven't studied the law extensively, so who cares what I think about that.
I sense deflection and an attempt to change the point being made above your response.
It’s particularly unethical to promise a badly thought out goal that cannot be meaningfully achieved in the interests of drawing out financial support for a longer period of time.
I am reminded of the person who called their intimate partner “tomorrow” because they never came.
WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided?
I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill?
I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in suburban US locales coupled with maglev capsules being routed around electronically by magnetic field switching, etc…
Or flying jetson mobiles etc…
Why is the current obsession a robotic driver of a boring old car ?
> existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything)
I think that this is a sunk-cost fallacy. Sure, you would need to build infrastructure for trains, but after that trains are now reasonably automated, can carry cargo, and do other things with the exception of stopping at the exact destination you wanted to (in other words, it requires predetermined stops which people outside the US shrugs and just walk or bike the last feet). Also, they're proven to work: even China (which previously didn't have trains to its far-flung places) and they've done what you've expect. I think that the sole reason that anyone wants to invest in automated (non-train) driving is because trains are boring while AI is oh-so-shiny.
> with the exception of stopping at the exact destination you wanted to
This, and leaving from the exact starting point you want to, at the exact time you want to, without out-of-the-way intermediate stops that you don't want, without switching lines. I can also easily move a table, couch, 2 shopping carts full of groceries, etc.
It's not an insignificant difference in convenience
But with the levels of investment in cars and roads, we could have mini trains on reduced tracks (think stuff like mine tracks) going almost anywhere, probably for a fraction of maintaining our road infrastructure and cars.
You’re right. It’d definitely decrease maintenance. I’m not sure how much maintenance is from usage vs wear from the weather (especially in cold areas)
> 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human error)
You don't need full autonomy to mostly fix this, but the fixes are politically untenable (currently). The cars should be speed-governed, they should be speed-limit aware -- the car should routinely be overriding the desire of the driver. No, you can't go into the bike lane to get around traffic. No, you can't make the split-second decision to swerve around a car braking in front of you. No, you can't operate the vehicle at 100 mph in a residential zone. No, you can't go that fast right now; it's raining way too hard, doofus. No, you can't operate your vehicle onto a scheduled parade route.
You don't need full autonomy to create cars that prevent a significant percentage of driver -- to put it charitably -- errors. These are fairly straightforward problems. The opposition is political.
In the real world political tenability matters a lot, so I don’t really think ”fixes” that ignore it are very interesting to discuss. But if we’re already assuming politics doesn’t matter there’s a much more effective solution: ban cars entirely.
I'm not so hopeless as this. Seatbelts, speed limits, and drunk driving laws were similarly unpopular. That opposition was overcome primarily, I think, because it's so stupid, in the end, and the argument for those things is so compelling that it can't be ignored forever.
We will find ourselves in the same position with speed regulators, etc. Once some country does it, the reduction in lives lost will be impossible to ignore.
(although the risk is clearly that vehicles will transition into subscription services that cost many thousands of dollars a year and price them all out)
Those are all problems dependent on the existing auto-mobile centric transport landscape, and would be better solved by moving away from that landscape.
People in the US will absolutely die on a hill for their car.
Companies will invest endless amounts of money to convince you cars are the future, their infrastructure isn’t wasteful, and they’re good for the environment.
People buy into this because it fits their existing lifestyle.
Hyperloop is crap, just go with highspeed trains. They get the job done in city corridors.
But you can't have a train stop in front of your house... Nor can you build massive tubes everywhere in place of cheap roads.
Walking, Bikes, Busses, Metros, Trains, Cars, Planes. They all have a place in how we transport, right now the distribution between them is just out of whack.
For anything except sparsely populated rural areas, a train gets you to the city/town, and a mix of public transport + e-bike/e-scooter gets you to your final destination. This is potentially quicker, and much much more efficient than lugging 2-ton capsules around and needing hundreds of thousands of square km of land to keep the things parked 95% of the time.
Hyperloop is still cool because you could have really fast transit over large areas. Mass transit across cities is still quite slow. High speed trains are fine but just not fast enough. Imagine a large city where you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes.
Musk coined Hyperloop as a distraction to high speed rail. He wanted people to buy Teslas instead of thinking about high speed rail in California. A lot of people fell for his con.
It is a shame that other partial vacuum systems are not being developed. They seem like a useful concept, fast, less air resistance means less energy use. Surely a technology you'd want to have in a future city.
On concept level they kinda make sense. But the trade-offs are just too stupid. Basically it is equivalent of building tunnel around all of the roads. The energy investment in that sort of infrastructure is unfeasible. And then partial vacuum, that needs more infra and energy to be spend.
And then the safety, on ground level open air is great, you can exit at any point to any direction. But tunnels especially small ones... That would be nightmare in best case and death trap in the worst.
why does it need to be a vacuum system? Couldn't a similar device be a pod-like maglev device that floats above a magnetic track and maybe can temporarily hover albeit more slowly via some drone-like propeller on the bottom when 'off track', or for final-mile portions, could even turn into a car when not in maglev mode.
If you chose to build a train with only two stops, yes you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes. That would have its downsides, like the station not being near your destination, which is why it's rarely done. You would also need a very straight track, which means lots of space for points (places where trains separate from the route onto platforms). This constraint is also shared by Hyperloop.
Tunnels might now be cheaper to build than roads just because of land rights. It's very difficult/impossible to acquire the property rights to build a new roads/rail lines nowadays.
I think non-human payloads make more sense for virtually every kind of innovation:
-- Radically reduced safety margins, if the vehicle itself contains no humans.
-- You can often move cargo at any time of day or night, and therefore do a much more sophisticated job of collaboratively load-levelling traffic.
-- Doesn't matter how uncomfortable a non-human payload is with in reason. Acceleration, cornering, waiting, daylight, motion sickness are all constraints that are eased for cargo.
-- It would be nice if you can move freight anywhere, but even if you can only serve a very limited network its still useful - say between fixed points in major cities. By contrast, a car that can't go almost everywhere is very severely limited.
Example: in major cities, all the freight moves in lorries, which are extremely dangerous and polluting. Meanwhile, the humans are packed into trains in underground tunnels. Surely freight should be moving in autonomous underground trains and the humans enjoying lorry free surface travel?
Humans are freight units that embark and disembark and change vehicles autonomously with very little instruction. Other freight units aren't. Parcel hubs are a hard problem that's far from solved enough to set them up in masses.
A hyperloop is a much, much harder problem. Not technically, but practically. Just look at California's high speed rail and how that's gone - with that history, the idea that we could introduce hyperloops in US cities is, to put it only mildly punnily, a pipe dream.
As others have pointed out, millions are dying in car accidents now, so a "more compelling vision for the future" is much less important than something that can get done. While we certainly haven't seen the progress many have hoped for/promised on self-driving cars, I'd wager everything I own that we'll see a significant percent of cars on the road in CA operating autonomously before we see that high speed rail finished.
I think what looks interesting on the surface for self-driving cars is that "it is just a software problem". The other projects you describe require actual "stuff".
Still, that argument doesn't count if the software problem is "impossible" to implement, or if it turns out that you also need "stuff" for it.
Not to mention that the upside of self-driving cars is capped at the cost of an uber driver, and even in a world with ubiquitous fully autonomous cars you still want public transportation.
Driver assistance on highways is probably the right 80/20 solution, at least for the foreseeable future.
Parking lot problem is also demand problem. Demand is not sufficiently elastic. How many people would be happy have their commute car available on one day maybe at 6 and then next on 10 or 11 or 12...
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its early estimate of traffic fatalities for 2021. NHTSA projects that an estimated 42,915 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year, a 10.5% increase from the 38,824 fatalities in 2020. The projection is the highest number of fatalities since 2005 and the largest annual percentage increase in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System’s history. Behind each of these numbers is a life tragically lost, and a family left behind.
Shouldn’t these numbers _always_ get reported in relation to how many people are driving (and for how long)? This increase in deaths would actually be step forward in death rates if for example people drove twice as much this year compared to last year.
Cars and trucks continuously degrade the roads beneath them. The infrastructure requirement is never satisfied -- it requires constant, very expensive upkeep.
What if cars were mini maglev trains (or pods), hovering above buried tracks on the road and can 'convert' into a car for last-mile delivery, and parking.
Then you'd still have the asphalt etc, but hovering over it - you degrade it less than actually driving on it. In this situation you could order up any size vehicle you need from 2 seater to 20 seater.
A) people want transportation as a service without the human of a taxi or driver, not just for cost but comfort and not having to associate with people (of a lower class)
B) creating a scalable transportation as a service business for profit and power (data)
Regarding A): Exactly! I don’t really mind traveling together with people from my own class (I might even prefer it), but I don’t really want to travel with lower class people. That just makes me feel like I’m one of them.
I think this attitude is quite common, but people won’t admit it. I would never admit it like I just did if I didn’t have an anonymous account. And I don’t see how technology will change this basic preference.
I dunno, being able to easily get places (to visit or work or have fun) is pretty important. Time is finite and valuable, so things that less us spend time in more satisfying ways are valuable.
Hyperloop has long since been proven to be infeasible to the point of being practically impossible. Please stop drinking the Musk koolaid. It was never going to happen and it never will.
I never understood how people have so little understanding of basic physics and practicalities of engineering that it even got cursory pass. Like pointing it out to be stupid only takes handful of questions.
Could is the question, but should is never asked or answered, same goes to other projects like solar roofs with the shingles.
Didn’t musk literally out himself (boastfully) as having pursued hyperloop as a way to stifle funding for some other related but competing ventures? I can’t recall, but he literally never believed in it.
There’s nothing boring about a car. It’s private, facilitates living outside of cities so it’s not dense and gross and offers the freedom to go anywhere with roads.
If companies choose to use proprietary software for needs that FOSS can and has served well for years, it would seem that those companies are cutting their own legs.
I speak primarily of Slack and Zoom and other “low hanging fruit” of already solved problems that feature VC-funded wheel reinvention made popular by their VC-brethren dogfooding said products, when threaded messaging and webRTC don’t necessitate proprietary solutions.
https://meet.jit.si for example…
I don’t think mindless cargo culture is a trend to follow, nor will tech savvy devs disappear nor will the need to remotely administer servers via command lines tools disappear.
Remote Desktop solutions are not realistic tools for server administration in any sort of serious way, so I’m pretty sure that’s a niche that will always exist…
Seeking to browse the web exclusively through a cli browser, however, is probably not something one can do while working in the field of web development.
The web is primarily graphic lauout based
The license and attribution are stripped from regurgitated copied code snippets from code projects. If the people don’t known which project the code was taken from, how can they one day contribute to that codebase? If the code projects on GitHub are not getting the people who use their code at least aware of the project, that project disappears. Copilot is an interloper who doesn’t even tell you which project the code snippet was ripped off from!!