Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)Since I've been using #GitHub #CoPilot heavily the past week or so, I thought it was time to write up my experience. You might find it surprising.
https://ovid.github.io/articles/using-github-copilot-with-vim.html
Salve J. Nilsen@sjn Nope. Focusing almost exclusively on client work right now. My spare time is mostly for my family.
Random Geek in limbo@ovid @sjn Not great with Raku. The autocomplete was silent and the suggestions functionality in VS Code gave me Python code.
Not just that, the Python code was barely acceptable, using idioms more appropriate to the 2.x era.
I'll try again later, but for now Copilot's path of least resistance is porting code from one popular language to another popular language.
@randomgeek @ovid Maybe it's worth playing around a little with #FauxPilot as an alternative to #copilot?
@sjn @ovid I might turn my experiences into a blog post later, but quick capture of my initial impressions poking at Copilot in this thread:
https://hackers.town/@randomgeek/110427334545613573
I just need to get over my depressed initial thought that it encourages mediocre code in mediocre languages and I'll continue experimenting.
Random Geek (@[email protected])
I'm trying. I'm really trying to give Copilot a chance. So far it's been offering reasonable Python code suggestions. Not great, but reasonable. Too bad I was asking it about Raku and Nushell.
Mark Gardner@mjgardner @sjn @ovid In fairness, it's more of an autocomplete than a copy machine.
Of course, we all know how ducking fantastic autocomplete has been.
@randomgeek @sjn @ovid Autocomplete is just generation loss with some hash tables as guardrails. They’re both Markov processes. Therefore, LLM == copy machine.
@mjgardner you may want to take your photocopier into the shop. It's not supposed to hallucinate.
(I know you're going with extrapolated functionality and I'm being painfully literal but my brain's stuck there and I found it amusing)
Oriel Jutty 
@randomgeek @mjgardner I remember an issue like that where a range of scanners would replace digits by other digits in scanned documents and blueprints. It was a few years back. Might've been compression related.
@barubary @randomgeek Yep. See https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4594482/xerox-copiers-randomly-replacing-numbers-in-documents
Full account of #Xerox copiers mangling numbers here: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning
They used the #JBIG2 image format’s lossy “pattern matching & substitution” method that substitutes previously-encoded characters if they look enough like the one currently being encoded.
@barubary @randomgeek We demand accurate output from every other form of software.
But some people are giving a free pass to “#ArtificialIntelligence” #LargeLanguageModels like #ChatGPT because they’re attracted to the metaphors used by backers like #OpenAI and #Microsoft that confuse computer malfunction with human behavior.