What exactly did they train? Copilot is powered by claude, gemini, or ChatGPT these days.
Did they train autocomplete? I mean the code is open source so anyone can scrape it and train it too. I'm kind of glad they did train it because otherwise we'd still be stuck with Apple level AI models right now.
The whole reason we have so many models, including open weight models, that are all competitive with each other is because the data is free and anyone can be training off it. If the goal was to monetize the source code I guess the authors shouldn't make it open source.
> "GitHub Copilot is powered by generative AI models developed by GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft. It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub."
Yeah have to agree here, Github Copilot itself doesn't have any first party models they use the frontiers. So, they didn't "train" using public repos but they probably allowed (or didn't prevent) the frontiers from pulling the repos along with the rest of the internet when creating their models.
Is y'alls collective memory so short? Copilot just a few years ago was auto complete on steroids that was entirely first party and trained by GH on users' code.
OpenAI did train the model on GitHub repos. The next question is whether this was enabled by Microsoft's investment in / partnership with OpenAI. I suspect yes, but I haven't gone searching for this yet.
I guess it doesn't matter if they allowed OpenAI to do it or not because it seems other models were allowed to train off it too. I guess we should probably be giving kudos to GitHub and Microsoft for not trying to charge for access to this data.
The US starts wars… they just often happen to be with dictatorships. The US definitely also supported dictatorships (like Taiwan and South Korea).
You can argue all day about whether A is slightly more rotten than B, but if they are both rotten then in the grand scheme they will both end up being the same thing if something doesn’t get fixed.
You had to reach back 50 years to find US support for dictators.
> they just often happen to be with dictatorships
No, they always happen to be with dictatorships. The motives of US politicians are not relevant to this fact (I personally think Trump is corrupt and incompetent); the US system is democratic enough, and Americans are moralistic enough, that even corrupt and incompetent politicians can't get away with military adventurism except with dictatorships. Thus the end of that Greenland nonsense.
> You had to reach back 50 years to find US support for dictators.
US allies in the entire middle east are literally all dictators or worse than dictators. For example, Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, you just need 6 years education in school to understand that is worse than dictators when religion is also heavily involved at the same time.
Yeah I would refine that argument a bit and say the US will sometimes support (or rather, ally with) dictators when the only viable alternative is an arguably worse dictator. There aren't exactly a lot of democracies in the middle east we could be supporting instead.
there weren't a lot of democracies in the world until recently. And even a good many of them are effectively oligarchies.
if you want a good path to true improvement in civil rights (not a useless piece of paper or declaration) just track the wealth of a country. Wealthy countries that didn't rely on natural resources to get wealthy tend to treat their citizens better because, well, they make up the fcking economy.
most western countries had a shortcut to that via colonialism and slavery. It's very rich to then point at countries that don't have that cushion and talk about being morally superior.
Nice theory, but it seems demonstrably untrue to me. Has China made any major strides in civil rights since their economic miracle? They seem as determined to stamp out the few remaining bastions of civil rights in their corner of the world as ever.
Democracy is a morally superior system of government, because it's fundamentally premised on a moral idea; that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed". Dictatorships and aristocracies can make no such claim.
Right, and if distance from the present matters, probably the biggest risk to global peace (such as it is) comes from China's increasingly serious preparations for a military attack on Taiwan.
People are literally talking about tiananmen square upthread like it's the biggest problem ever with China. Both Taiwan and South Korea had their own version of tiananmen square.
I don't think you realise that much of the world was under de facto dictatorships (eg. absolute monarchies) and it wasn't like people in the years before were living in democracies that then got taken away.
The US doesn't have a higher moral ground to stand on vis a vis many other countries in the world.
Whether a country massacres its own people is not really a good litmus test since there are countries that treat its own citizens well but foreigners really badly. One such country is… oh the US!
You sincerely think a country that massacres its own people is better than the relatively good conduct of the US during war (or the treatment of foreigners on its soil)?
Yeah that "other thing over here" is totally irrelevant. It's not like it's the actions of the second country in the comparison or anything like that.
Suppose country A kills 1000 people and country B kills 1000000 people and people are criticizing country A for murder while calling country B a better alternative. What is relevant here?
How could you think those two, massacring your own people and buying plane tickets home for people illegally here are on the same scale at all. We are not ideal here at all but we don’t do that and I think if it were tried there would be an uprising against whoever was calling that unimaginable shot.
You might be omitting the foreigners that are not in the United States that are being treated rather badly by the United States. I suspect that's what GP was referring to.
You only need the Native Americans, the US share of transatlantic slave trade, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Iraq for the US to be well clear of the Nazis.
This doesn’t even touch the Guatemalan genocide, US backing of the Rwandan genocide perpetrators, the white terror, Pinochet, the Khmer Rouge, Afghanistan, or Israel.
I'd like to see the numbers please, how that gets close to 50 million dead by the CCP, and I can't fathom how do you attribute the Khmer Rouge genocide committed by a communist party to the USA or others on the list
If I did not know better, I would assume you did not know about the government murdering its own citizens and/or buying plane tickets for citizens to countries that have never been their homes.
In it's entire existence? I believe it shot up a couple tens of thousands of schools during the cultural revolution, and not by mistake. But yeah, I guess that's not bombing. China clearly prefers shooting the students, keeping the building.
Am I changing the subject? I thought we were discussing treatment of foreigners and I am detailing a very recent example of how the US treated foreigners.
If we're saying that China has "conquered" places like Tibet and Xinjiang then surely the United States has done much worse to the entire land mass it occupies. But honestly, I'm very much opposed to nationalism so I'm not interested in historical claims, even though China's historical claims are much much stronger. What's relevant in both cases is that the United States and China both have both de facto and de jure control over their present territories.
> Hong Kong
Did India conquer itself when the British returned rule of India to Indians?
> China's CCP has been pushing out immigrants, and fostering racist sentiment
It's a little more complicated than this. I think the level of racism at both the state and individual levels is similar between China and western countries, although it may manifest in different ways.
Hong Kong did not, and by all indications does not, want to be Chinese. Talk to a few Cantonese Chinese in Australia: they especially do not want it. Tibet did not, and by all indications does not, want to be Chinese. Xinjang did not, and by all indications does not, want to be Chinese.
I hate historical claims. There are disputed territories less than 10km from where I live, and if at all possible, I'd like there not to be a war here. I doubt there's many places where that's not the case. I know there's some, but not many.
The whole concept of intellectual property rights is a social and legal construct designed to promote innovation in an economy. If you don't care about that, then there really isn't any moral or immoral aspect to it. The immorality of it and associating it with stealing was just MPAA propaganda to try to shame people into paying for stuff.
If I found some DVD lying on the ground and watched it and I didn't pay for it, it's really up to me to decide if I want to pay the creator so they can continue to produce content. If I don't pay then obviously it doesn't help them produce more content... but the consumption of the content itself neither felt nor heard by the creators.
The bedrock of the argument is that you give for what you take. This is very fundamental, not just some capitalist drivel. You'd be hard pressed to find a single level headed individual who could form a coherent argument against it (generally speaking, not just protracted edge cases). Even your most hippie communist commune requires giving in order to receive.
People act (many even think) like this doesn't apply to digital goods, since copying has no material cost. But producing that digital good costs time and money (anyone on HN care to disagree?). So then you have to decide who are the ones who pay and who are the ones who get free copies. Conveniently, everyone who is getting a free copy thinks that they have a rightful stake to it for free. And because nothing is actually free (see the first line), the ones paying are the ones also covering the cost for those who get is free.
I wouldn't expect teenagers to grasp this, after all we were the teenagers who devised this "piracy as a moral crusade" back in the 90's/00's (how convenient that a side effect of this moral crusade was all the free content your dead broke ass could imagine). But now, if you are in your 30's or older and still haven't logic'ed this out, it's time to catch up.
Simple: people who want it to exist can fund its creation. People who are indifferent or don't want it to exist can choose not to, and once it exists, there's obviously no moral question either way. We already have lifetimes of media available. It costs nothing to replicate infinitely. Do we need to specifically incentivize more?
I think the world would also be a lot better off if software could all be freely distributed and if warranty law required software sales to come with source as well. If you need the computer to do something, you pay a programmer to make it so. You or that programmer can then share the solution with others. The goal is to solve more problems and build a wealthier society for our children, not create rent extraction machines.
Likewise with things like the textbook racket. The government should just commission updates for k-12 books (including AP, so basic uni) every ~15 years or so. Most of this stuff is not changing. It should be "done".
> Even your most hippie communist commune requires giving in order to receive.
I was born into a hippie commune/network and the basic premise was that everybody gives voluntarily by mere existence and free desire to do so, and that whatever ends up being given can be taken/distributed. There was no “requirement to give” since what you provide often cannot even be identified or accounted for (and there was explicitly no interest in doing that). Maybe you’re a good listener, or good in helping with the kids. And so on. Actually, I know plenty of open communities that more or less work that way. In the US, they generally need a bit more safeguards against random external freeloaders (hurt people not familiar with community care) than in Europe but they exist just fine.
Apart from commune experiences: I do believe every human has a deep-seated desire and need to contribute positively and “give back” to their social environment. You don’t need to be forced or nudged to do it; you get sick/depressed if you’re not allowed to bring your talent to the table. (I understand that sometimes there’s too much pain/hurt on the surface that needs recognition before people can return to more natural ways of “giving back”; but more often than not, it is related to the desire to give but being rejected than any taking.)
And more back to your point: I disagree with the notion that every giving and taking is (or needs to be) a distinct and direct transaction. Even in capitalism. The money/time/talent a person “saves” on “freeloading” will be “spent”/given back elsewhere.
> But producing that digital good costs time and money (anyone on HN care to disagree?)
Not disagree, but it is more nuanced than this I think. I spend a fair amount of money going to movie theaters, usually independent movie theaters but sometimes big ones, to see new releases. As I understand it, the production and funding model relies almost entirely on the box office numbers. I think when dealing with older releases, the waters are much murkier.
I end up seeing new things in person and paying a huge premium to do so. I won't pretend I do it for moral reasons or even strictly to support the creators (although I do it in part to support the independent theater itself). It does keep me from feeling bad for also running a media server, on which maybe 1% of the content is newer than 5 years old, though.
I have almost never bought a physical copy of a movie -- and in my mind the IP holders are usually terrible curators of their own content. Physical media is provided in a horribly limited and anti-consumer format, tied to ephemeral standards and technology and often embedded with advertisements and few subtitle options. Digital products are, somehow, worse. Tied to a walled garden, with no true 'ownership', sometimes platforms like Amazon video will even make their own edits to movies, removing crucial parts for no apparent reason (the wicker man, avatar) and without marking it as abridged. They often make decisions that scream 'cash grab' (i.e. years ago when TNG came on netflix, I went to stream it and was shocked at the potato quality. Later re-releases were released in an un-cropped widescreen that included things like boom mikes because of the original intended aspect ratio of the show.) DRM is a nightmare. The product I want -- a file containing the media and only the media, which I can view however I want without logging into anybody's servers -- does not exist. And if it did exist, well, I do also take issue with paying full price for a file of a 40 year old movie, for example. I know there are costs associated with remasters, etc, but most of these are not remasters (and those costs are also much much lower than outright movie production).
A notable exception is outfits like Vinagar Syndrome, who as a labor of love dig up lost media and often re-cut or remaster / distribute it, and due to the low scale and lack of demand likely do not make much if any profit off it. I often do see showings of Vinegar Syndrome releases at my indie theater though or rent them from the one remaining video rental place (I'm unsure whether or not that benefits the production company).
It probably gets more hairy for people who watch a lot of new serialized media, which I do not.
I kind of wish people would think critically about the gradient of potential consumption habits when making their media choices rather than separating into pro / anti piracy stances, because it's an interesting and multi-faceted topic with a lot of considerations to be made.
Yesterday I was trying to figure out if my expired nacho dip would be safe to eat and wanted to know how much botulism would be toxic if I ate it and so I asked Claude. It refused to answer that question so I could see how the current safeguards can be limiting.
It beeps at you if you stop paying attention, which is superior. Hands on wheel is an arbitrary design decision more likely to placate what a layman would think is necessary to ensure safe AI steering.
This doesn't mean that it's over for SO. It just means we'll probably trend towards more quality over quantity. Measuring SO's success by measuring number of questions asked is like measuring code quality by lines of code. Eventually SO would trend down simply by advancements of search technology helping users find existing answers rather than asking new ones. It just so happened that AI advanced made it even better (in terms of not having to need to ask redundant questions).
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