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.
Verstappen only really came of age probably halfway between 2019 and today. Fast, yes, but last season was the true changing of the guard as far as I'm concerned.
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.
"Review" sites nowadays heavily rely on joke of a benchmark suite called "Geekbench" which only measure burst performance only lasting seconds.
More serious sites like Anandtech only focus on performance of the chip itself (not the product it's in) , so they apply extra cooling measures to eliminate that variable from the equation.
So no, you can't actually rely on mainstream reviews and benchmarks to decide on a specific laptop.
> 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.
I think the situation with content is similar to protests. There are all sorts of people at a major protest. There's a good chunk of "organic protesters", who are there for the original cause. Then some are there because they like the feeling of something happening, the buzz of a crowd, the hype. You could call this the bandwagon effect for example. There will be people there, leader types, who see it as an opportunity to further a goal of theirs. There will be people who want to fuck things up, and feel that this will be a good opportunity for them to let go. And there might be people, who are planted there to start an actual riot - for example, in order to dismiss the original group as being overly violent and thus their goal reprehensible.
It's hard to guess what percentage of that whole crowd is "organic" to the original cause. But it can be seen that a good lot of them aren't.
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.
Well then, good thing this is a fucking discussion board and not a dissertation defense where I'm on the stand and you're the committee. You can toss your hat in the ring and explain your views as well, still waiting for you to add something to the discussion Socrates. Let's uncover another fact which is that you've said nothing substantive so far and the absence of my desire to explain things to a zero-effort internet poster doesn't therefore rationally conclude the evidence doesn't exist.
> 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.
It's a little more nuanced. Causation can be inferred in an experimental design. If the researchers can manipulate the independent variable (the vaccine) using an experimental and a placebo group, and then they can measure a statistically (and clinically) significant difference, then we can assume that this is not just correlation.
Just need to reword it a bit, "This Disney character doesn't exist" can also be "This is not a Disney character (because it doesn't exist)". Sums up the assertion being made well too. Not a Disney character. Except their lawyers may disagree.
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?
People I've worked with have different philosophies on this, but personally, if you check in code that is distinctive enough that I can identify the source you copied and pasted it from, and you provided no indication (whether in a comment or a PR description) that you copied it, I will really get quite grumpy at you about it.
Way too often I burn half an hour needlessly during review in one of two ways:
* trying to figure out how the heck someone figured out some "magic" code that achieves something by invoking a bunch of poorly documented library or framework internals, and trying to reverse engineer WTF all the magic does by diving into the framework's source... only to eventually think to google the whole snippet rather than each individual method call, and discover it's copied from a Stack Overflow answer
* trying to figure out why something was written in an unidiomatic or overcomplicated way rather than a more obvious approach, and commenting at length on how I'd simplify it... only to eventually realise it was copied from a Stack Overflow answer
Attribution isn't just about making sure the right person gets credit, or about license compliance; reviewers and maintainers frequently need to be able to see where stuff was copied and pasted from in order to do their jobs effectively, even for snippets of just a few lines.
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.
No copyright issues in the sense that no entity is likely to ever pursue the matter, sure. But copying and commercially using someone else's nontrivial bit of code that doesn't have a license that says you can is quite blatantly a copyright violation.
About 10 years ago or so, I was working at a certain place. They put me into a small team apparently focused on some R+D project under the direction of an "architect".
Basically, the project was to package Cordova + Backbone + Marionette, plus a couple of tools, under their own commercial name. Then they'd go around potential clients presenting it as the perfect solution to build hybrid applications for web/mobile/smartTV/whatever.
A certain Monday, the "architect" arrived boasting. He did that often, but this time he was more boastful. He explained that he had spent the whole weekend coding. He had written an incredible tool that would create a skeleton for a project from zero. You would type something like `tool create` and it would create the whole project with all the scripts and some example views and whatnot.
It was Yeoman's yo CLI tool, of course. He had just changed the copyright in the comments, removed most of the comments, he had deleted any mention to yeoman or the original creators, changed the name of the executable script and that's it.
The whole thing was OS code picked up from various repos and packaged as their own. The company used it to sell development projects. The so-called-architect used it to sell himself inside the company and then jump away into a startup as CTO.
Is this common or is it just anecdata? I don't know. It's clearly not the only time I've seen something like this and I do know that in certain companies around here it isn't exactly uncommon. But I can't say how common or uncommon it is.
Would I call this "selling other people's code"? Yes, I would.
If the solution was made up of ideas from OSS and snippets from Stack Overflow? No; that's fine.
If the solution was copied from an OSS project without proper attribution? Yes. Absolutely. And they'd have words with a senior dev and maybe even legal if the code they copied made its way into production without attribution.
Many copyleft OSS licenses require attribution and distribution of derivative works that we wouldn't allow.
It depends on the source of that code and the expected license of the code you paid them for. If everything is MIT/BSD (and attributed), no problem. If the code was GPL and I’m making a commercial product, we have an issue.
I’d also expect for any stack overflow code to include a comment with a link to the stack overflow page.
I think one of the key points is to make sure any code taken from another source is cited appropriately. If it isn’t, or the junior dev is passing it off as their own work, then we have problems.
If I found out a junior dev had been copying copy-left or proprietary code then I'd have to rip out that code, have a chat with them and figure out what to do from there. Even if the code isn't copy-left it's still someone else's code, sometimes that's ok but sometimes it's definitely not.
No matter how complex a program is, and no matter whether it uses techniques sometimes described as "AI" in its implementation, it's not a person. Copilot is just a very complex pipeline from other people's code to your editor, which ignores the license of those other people's code.
This is a good thought exercise. I wouldn't call it stealing, though I am not sure how legal liability is assessed, say if they picked up GPL code unknown to the company, and the company is later sued over it.
This isn't derived from principled reasoning, but I think of it as similar to community norms. Not the best example, but you wouldn't mind someone subletting their homes to Airbnb, but if all of your apartment complex does it, it invites regulation. A product like copilot enables copying code (even if inspired, and not verbatim) at a scale that individual developers can't. So respecting software licenses needs to be codified (legally?) while previously it was left unmonitored.
Could you elaborate on why you think a computer program and a person should be treated the same way in this respect?
We can take as self-evident that a human is capable of reading about something, conceptualising it, and then writing something completely new with the knowledge they have gained.
I think it's also pretty uncontroversial that the primitive "AI" we currently have is nowhere near the level of even an average human at these things, and thus we can't just blindly assume it is conceptualising rather than copying. Copilot regularly produces verbatim copies of existing code when working on non-trivial things.
Forget about the "AI" label: Copilot is just a complex computer program, that takes code from other people and inserts various permutations of it into your editor, whilst ignoring the license of that code.
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 would agree with you if the AI was genuinely assisting with that task, but it isn't.
It's taking inputs, ignoring their licenses, permuting them in ways that are not understandable to the user, and then outputting them.
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.
Relying on this tool means ignoring the license of code that you're copying, without even knowing that you're doing it.
> 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.
You really seem to be ignoring the core issue by focusing on SO though. Everything on SO is fair game, but code on GitHub is under a variety of licenses, and when Copilot regurgitates it, no matter how complex and inscrutable the process is that leads it to do so, it may be causing the user of Copilot to misuse that code because it doesn't even give them the opportunity to know where it came from or what license it was released to the public under.
> Do you go and check whether a given reply belongs to a licensed project?
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. It's not necessary for you to check whether the submitter had the right to offer it under that license; that's their problem. The same goes for any content offered to you under a given license on any platform. I don't understand what your question has to do with the conversation.
The problem with Copilot, and I really can't believe this has to be restated over and over again, is that it takes code from projects with various licenses, and outputs it in your editor in various transformed-or-not-transformed ways (the fact that the transformation is extremely complex doesn't change anything), and gives you no way to know where the code came from, how it was licensed or how it has been transformed. So, despite the fact that if you use it enough you are virtually guaranteed to use code in contravention of its license, you cannot even know which projects you have stolen code from or which licenses' terms you are breaking.
> Also, please consider that there is a toggle that allows you to block Copilot from using public code.
Great. I'm sure its utility doesn't go down at all if you turn that toggle off...
> 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.
> 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.
I have, and there is not. Neither could there be — in many cases the person uploading code to GitHub is not the copyright holder — they are just doing something permitted under the license — and for a large open source project there could be thousands of copyright holders. A random person mirroring some source code to GitHub is in no position to negotiate different license terms on behalf of the copyright holder(s).
> 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.
I don't understand why you think a person writing an answer on SO and a computer program outputting some permutation of its inputs into your editor are the same thing. The person writing an SO answer is intelligent and capable of conceptual understanding, the computer regurgitating code without regard to its license is not.
>> 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].
> 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.
> At least one IP lawyer strongly disagrees, suggesting anything you host on GitHub is fair game [1].
The question is whether Copilot's users can use the regurgitated code without following the license terms, not whether Copilot was allowed to train their model on it. I agree it's likely fine for them to train the model, but the use of Copilot would seem to be a legal minefield.
A little thought makes it clear that an affirmative answer would be absurd. This would mean that using a simple tool (let's say `cat`) to make a copy of some code and subsequently ignoring its license terms is infringement, but if the software used to make the copy is more complex (or perhaps if it has the "AI" label stuck to it!) the same actions are not infringement.
If I make a script and train it on Windows source code do you think MS will like it if I use that script on Wine ? I am sure MS will say the license did not allows it and your script transformations are not original, so GPL or similar license should be respected by Microsoft too.
>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),
Only a judge will determine if it is actually free use, if you by change copied some super clever and unique code into your code base then I am sure a judge will not say it is fair use, copilot was proven it will do this(though MS said they put some IF-ELSE checks in the AI to prevent the plagiarism to be detected by removing obvious results and maybe obfuscating stuff more).
Maybe Stack Overflow license allows you to copy paste the answers in your code, but GitHub code has repo specific license that you need to respect.
If MS trained the model on all their private repos too and made the model free software then many would not have this issues. Or keep the model proprietary and train it only on the MS repors, BSD and similar licensed repos.
You are saying that the AI should be treated the same way as a person would regarding its 'output'. I disagree. This is a conceptual disagreement and you cannot just sweep under the rug "what cognition or creativity really are".
At the end, when in several (2-5) years we start seeing structural unemployment emerging because of AI deployments, this will be resolved by the legal system, most likely by some sort of partial prohibition of training/monetizing such systems.
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.
I am not saying (in that last comment) what should happen, I am saying what will happen.
Past automation in terms of impact is nothing compared to what's coming and people and lawmakers will react accordingly - not in favor of the automators.
Copilot understands concepts as well as may humans. You can see primitive versions of this in the old Word2Vec demos showing how those models understand how London:England ~= Paris:France
Copilot is much more sophisticated than that, and it no more copies code than a human does. It generates on a character by character basis given the contextual probability of the next character conditioned on the previous set of tokens with the "heat" being a factor how how randomly it will choose characters.
This is much more similar to how a human writes than "copying".
"it no more copies code than a human does" < that's a very big call right there, considering how much verbatim copying has already been documented in Copilot. The primitive understanding Copilot has of what it is generating doesn't even approach that of the most average programmers. It's classic AI: impressive on the surface.
All the "copied code" I've seen is where the person prompts it with a large amount of very unique preamble and then it fills in the exact example they are quoting from.
Try it without doing that.
And it's weird people think it can't understand conceptual relationships. Word2Vec demonstrated that nearly 10 years ago and that's a much weaker model in terms of both size and techniques than this is.
> And it's weird people think it can't understand conceptual relationships. Word2Vec demonstrated that nearly 10 years ago and that's a much weaker model in terms of both size and techniques than this is.
Saying that Word2Vec or Copilot have "understanding" of their input requires a redefinition of the word "understanding".
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 read a lot of open source code and might subconsciously absorb techniques and patterns that are common. When I write code I might be influenced by what I read, not line per line, but rather generally.
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.
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.
The previous argument was that crypto will be a bane to authoritarian governments; I'm just pointing out that crypto can also assist authoritarian governments.
I never said to outlaw crypto or paper currency but I just brought-up that crypto is just a tool that can be used against and for such governments.
