this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Oh! I can do better than the LLM to write code:
// TODO (Linus Torvalds) write this app for me, kthxbye.Copilot isn't wrong, they are the best person for the task. 🤷
AI: "Can I copy your work?"
Phil: "Just don't make it obvious."
AI:
Copilot has become sentient
Can someone explain why April is nervous about having the username April? I don't get it
Other people reading ToDo(April) will probably assume that feature is slated for April, the month.
Thank you, that makes sense.
Because if you didn’t know better, someone seeing “TODO(April)” would probably assume it means “do this sometime in April.” Especially since we’re in the middle of March, with April just around the corner. She’s probably about to get e-mail bombed by git requests.
Apathetically Program Ruthless International Launches
might start a war.
Oh so it's like C.O.O.K.S.!
lol, did you post Xcrement of a post from Bluesky.
im so sad that people are going to bluesky instead of mastadon
I really tried, a few times and I just can't make it exciting. I find it so boring to search for people and tags I wantto follow. That said, I wasn't a huge Twitter user before, and i don't have bluesky. I'm just hoping one day, mastodon clicks with me.
You're like me you just don't like user-based sites, I simply much prefer to follow topics than people, I fucking hate people why would I follow them online.
So how exactly does this work?
Copilot is just an LLM trained on all GitHub code. Hence it gives you random stuff from some open source code bases.
Not random, the most used stuff It means this man is either very productive, or else he is constantly having to be told to do his job.
It is enough if his name appears just once. Modern language models take more than just the last few characters as context.
Does anybody mind explaining, how this might have happened?
Copilot is a LLM. So it's just predicting what should come next, word by word, based off the data its been fed. It has no concept of whether or not its answer makes sense.
So if you've scraped a bunch of open source github projects that this guy has worked on, he probably has a lot of TODOs assigned to him in various projects. When Copilot sees you typing "TODO(" it tries to predict what the nextthing you're going to type is. And a common thing to follow "TODO(" in it's data set is this guy's username, so it goes ahead and suggests it, whether or not the guy is actually on the project and suggesting him would make any sort of sense.
You can absolutely add constraints to control for hallucinations. Copilot apparently doesn't have enough, though.
If GitHub Copilot is anything like Windows Copilot, I can't say I'm surprised.
"Please minimize all my windows"
"Windows are glass panes invented by Michael Jackson in imperial China, during the invasion of the southern sea. Sources 1 2 3"
Lmao. That's even better when you consider the copilot button replaced the 'show desktop' (ie 'minimize all my windows') button.
My guess is that Copilot was using a ton of other lines as context, so in that specific case his name was a more likely match for the next characters
I thought it synced some requests and assigned projects to another user (Saw an ad about github Copilot managing issues and writing PR descriptions sometime ago)
It’s no different from GPT knowing the plot of Aliens or who played the main role in Matilda.
It's seen enough code to recognise the pattern, it knows an author name goes in there, and Phil Nash is likely a prolific enough author that it just plopped his name in there. It's not intelligence, just patterns.
"Yeah this sounds like a Phil Nash sort of problem, I'll just stick him in here."
The other answers are great, but if I were to be a bit more laconic:
Copilot is spicy autocorrect. It autocorrected that todo to insert that guy's name because he gets a lot of todos.
I use copilot every day and I have zero clue what this means but I assume it has nothing to do with copilot... ?
Copilot is regurgitating the code he wrote, complete with comments addressed to himself
Weird...
This is exactly what it does. It steals code and does not abide by it's license.
Often it also removes or changes the license/attribution.