Launch HN: Infra.new (YC W23) – DevOps Copilot with Guardrails Built In
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Microsoft accidentally cares about its users, releases update that unintentionally deletes Copilot from Windows
It’s rare in this day and age that proprietary operating system vendors like Microsoft and Apple release updates you’re more than happy to install, but considering even a broken clock is right twice a day, we’ve got one for you today. Microsoft released KB5053598 (OS Build 26100.3476) which “addresses security i … ⌘ Read more

Not sure that I really like where Microsoft is taking VSCode - it looks like soon it will be just another frontend for them to sell Github Copilot subscriptions.

@prologic@twtxt.net

1. It’s criminal: Copilot was only possible because of massive theft of other peoples’ work (no compensation or even acknowledgement to any of the developers whose code was used to create Copilot)
   
2. It’s positioned to put software developers out of work or so fully de-skill them that they no longer know how to code anything but prompts (after which come corporate-justified salary and benefits decreases)
   

Don’t use it. No one should ever use it. You’re destroying your own future as a software developer by leaning on and supporting these things.

How is everyone finding GitHub CoPilot? 🤔 Good / Bad ? 🤔

GitHub and OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot lawsuit • The Register

Lawsuits alleging GitHub Copilot breached licenses can move forward. Will be interesting to see how these cases are decided.

This is a fucked up detail:

The judge meanwhile rejected the defense argument that the plaintiffs should not be allowed to continue their claim pseudonymously based on death threats sent to the plaintiffs’ counsel.

Who is sending death threats to the lawyers of people trying to sue GitHub/Microsoft/OpenAI, and why? Something’s fishy there.

Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the
Security of GitHub Copilot’s Code Contributions

40% of code produced by GitHub Copilot has at least one well-known security vulnerability, in the test reported in this paper.

There is a “right” way to make something like GitHub CoPilot, but Microsoft did not choose that way. They chose one of the most exploitative options available to them. For that reason, I hope they face significant consequences, though I doubt they will in the current climate. I also hope that CoPilot is shut down, though I’m pretty certain it will not be.

Other than access to the data behind it, Microsoft has nothing special that allows it to create something like CoPilot. The technology behind it has been around for at least a decade. There could be a “public” version of this same tool made by a cooperating group of people volunteering, “leasing”, or selling their source code into it. There could likewise be an ethically-created corporate version. Such a thing would give individual developers or organizations the choice to include their code in the tool, possibly for a fee if that’s something they want or require. The creators of the tool would have to acknowledge that they have suppliers–the people who create the code that makes their tool possible–instead of simply stealing what they need and pretending that’s fine.

This era we’re living through, with large companies stomping over all laws and regulations, blatantly stealing other people’s work for their own profit, cannot come to an end soon enough. It is destroying innovation, and we all suffer for that. Having one nifty tool like CoPilot that gives a bit of convenience is nowhere near worth the tremendous loss that Microsoft’s actions in this instace are creating for everyone.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net That’s a dissembling answer from him. Github is owned by Microsoft, and CoPilot is a for-pay product. It would have no value, and no one would pay for it, were it not filled with code snippets that no one consented to giving to Microsoft for this purpose. Microsoft will pay $0 to the people who wrote the code that makes CoPilot valuable to them.

In short, it’s a gigantic resource-grab. They’re greedy assholes taking advantage of the hard work of millions of people without giving a single cent back to any of them. I hope they’re sued so often that this product is destroyed.

I was listening to an O’Reilly hosted event where they had the CEO of GitHub, Thomas Dohmke, talking about CoPilot. I asked about biased systems and copyright problems. He, Thomas Dohmke, said, that in the next iteration they will show name, repo and licence information next to the code snippets you see in CoPilot. This should give a bit more transparency. The developer still has to decide to adhere to the licence. On the other hand, I have to say he is right about the fact, that probably every one of us has used a code snippet from stack overflow (where 99% no licence or copyright is mentioned) or GitHub repos or some tutorial website without mentioning where the code came from. Of course, CoPilot has trained with a lot of code from public repos. It is a more or less a much faster and better search engine that the existing tools have been because how much code has been used from public GitHub repos without adding the source to code you pasted it into?

🤔 👋 Reconsidering moving Yarn.social’s development back to Github: Speaking of which (I do not forget); @fastidious@arrakis.netbros.com and I were discussing over a video call two nights ago, as well as @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org who joined a bit later, about the the whole moved of all of my projects and their source code off of Github. Whilst some folks do understand and appreciate my utter disgust over what Microsoft and Copilot did by blatantly scraping open source software’s codebases without even so much as any attempt at attribution or respecting the licenes of many (if not all?) open source projects.

That being said however, @fastidious@arrakis.netbros.com makes a very good and valid argument for putting Yarn.social’s codebases, repositories and issues back on Github for reasons that make me “torn” over my own sense of morality and ethics.

But I can live with this as long as I continue to run and operate my new (yet to be off the ground) company “Self Hosted Pty Ltd” and where it operates it’s own code hosting, servicesa, tools, etc.

Plese comment here on your thoughts. Let us decide togetehr 🤗

#yarnsocial #github #opsnsource #copilot #microsoft

Move your code. Copilot is just one more reason. I maintain an account to work with other projects, but won’t host my stuff there.