Being the first mover doesn’t guarantee shit and never has.
The fact that it can't even get PowerShell right when it should be intimately familiar with PowerShell commands and scripts is absolutely asinine.
What about Cleverbot? Or Tay?
They had Skype! It was the verb for video calling for god's sake! How do you LOSE so BADLY so CONSISTENTLY and STILL have investors.
Sometimes I miss Microsoft Lync, but not often.
~~I made this comment as a joke but I actually do miss that chats could be in separate windows. s far as I know most major corporate (and non corporate, looking at you Discord) chat platforms don't let you pop out windows.~~
Edit: Okay, it's just Discord that's the problem then. It sort of supports it in that it will open the chat in your web browser, but then it does weird things like play the notification sound twice.
It's quite literally the first option on the three-dot menu of any Teams chat: "Open in new window"
Oh nice, fortunately/unfortunately we don't use Teams for chats at my current company.
Lucky, one company I work for had Teams, the other one - small-ish 20 people - self hosts Rocket Chat.
That sounds neato. My main gripe with Teams (and I'm hoping someone will correct me again) is that you can't enter raw text into the editor (think like writing Markdown). It's just a WYSIWYG/rich editor. I really cannot fucking stand those things.
You can pop out threads with a command click in Slack, but I don't know if you can change that to the default behaviour.
Just threads? Not a chat room or DM?
Edit: Just tried this on DMs and chat rooms and it works. Thanks so much for the tip! Another successful usage of Poe's Law, the best way to find an answer on the Internet is to post incorrect information and wait for someone to correct you!
Business, government, and military contracts. Doesn't matter how crappy you are, as long as you promise to be the fall-guy when a insert large entity has a insert large tech problem, they'll keep shoveling money at you.
Hey wait, I can do that! Where do I apply?
Well there used to be an island where the majority of folks involved in these kind of deals went to, but the owner landed in some legal trouble and decided to hang somewhere else instead
So you're saying that position is open, too?
~~invent copilot~~
Rebrand ChatGPT
Ftfy
Naah, the initial GitHub copilot was something else.
I was on the Github Copilot Technical Preview (invite in my mailbox says July 16th 2021) and it was GPT-3 (not to be confused with ChatGPT which was introduced with GPT-4)
ChatGPT was built on top of GPT-3.5 which was GPT3 with the new deep reinforcement learning to make it more "conversational", launched 2022. GPT 4 launched in 2023 and before the official launch there was "I have been a good Bing. 😊" Which was.. checks notes... microsoft messing something up again
The first time I came across ChatGPT, it was still GPT3, GPT3.5 was coming shortly after.
you literally have access to all the code in the world
I'd like to believe that they were honorable enough to not secretly train on code without people's permission. But realistically they totally did exactly that, but just made the AI Model this incompetent through some other engineering blunder.
Also, random side thought - training only on public repos probably yields you way higher code quality as opposed to training on both public and private repos? I assume we all have some very messy private repos that we're too embarrassed to publish because the code quality is absolute shit ... right?
I’d like to believe that they were honorable enough
In the future, will you still believe Microsoft (or any other big tech company) has honor not to do stupid shit?
Azure (and all of cloud compute) is the Extend phase of open source. I'm just waiting to see what the extinguish one will be.
honorable enough
Lol. Lmao
They didn't check licenses in any way, as it did reproduce the famous quake fast inverse square root function, comments included. And quake, like majority of github projects, is published under GPL, which requires all copies and modifications to be published under GPL as well, after which all sane enterprises have banned copilot usage.
Though, we're not living in sane times anymore. Chatgpt, gemini, deepseek, claude, all reproduce copylefted code left and right. Realistically, Stallman should've been rolling in cash by now...
This brings up an interesting question with AI
If I, as a human, read a piece of Open source code it solves a problem in a unique and new way, and then I myself write my own closed source code that solves the problem in the same way, I have not violated a license. The license is for the code itself, not a patent for the specific way the code solves the problem. And since the code in the closed source product is written by me and not copy pasted from the open source project, I have not violated the license per
So what about AI? If you train the AI on a piece of code, and it outputs the same or similar code, do we treat that as if the human copy pasted the code? Or do we treat it as if the human used what they learned from the first program and wrote something similar?
There is already an AI company taking advantage of this. They advertise that that if you want to use open source code in a closed source product, you hire them-- their AI will parse through the open source code and spit out a list of specifications that is specifically not code. Another AI on a completely different system that has never had access to the open source code will then take that specification and spit out program code that is functionally identical and does the exact same thing but is a completely new creation. The result is that you essentially rewrite the open source code but without the copyleft restrictions.
This is going to be an issue that laws and courts will have to address. Especially if, in your example, the code produced by the AI was actually identical to the GPL quake code. Because while a human copying the functionality is never going to write the exact same code line by line, the machine might be.
There is a bit of underlying problem, though. Case in point: I was recently asked to make a js function that converts any string into a hex color, which I promptly just copied off stackoverflow, but noticed they now intercept Ctrl-C to add CC-BY-SA banner. I'd usually include a link whenever I copy something off somewhere anyway, if not for licensing sake then at least for ease of future code navigation. But this got me curious, I asked ChatGPT the same question and it provided the exact same snippet, but without any attribution. And so did gemini and qwen 3.5. You can tell its a copy because the original uses a very specific bit-shift by 5 to mix numbers up a bit, but it doesnt have to be exactly 5, or even shifted at all for that matter. Which got me even more curious, so I went to github and searched for "string to hex" and found the exact same snippet in projects licensed under a variety of licenses, which I'm pretty sure are all just careless copies of that stackoverflow snippet, though it's not improbable that one of them is actually the one that got copied into that anwser in the first place. Now, for that particular one, I doubt that it reaches threshold of originality to be held in court, but it highlights an issue that makes this double AI conversion trick you described dubious and not-so-bulletproof as second would probably give the same result anyway, just because it almost definitely had to be trained on the copyleft infringing copies... Unless they actually clean-labbed an enormous dataset for it themselves.
Oh, and just as a final experiment, I did try to actually code it up myself. Despite already seeing an implementation, and without that much room for variety, without even trying, I made something that bears no resemblance to that snippet whatsoever, and most likely would've ended with the same code without ever seeing that snippet the first place. And from experience interviewing developers and live-coding with them, no two people write the same code, even for simplest of tasks. So... yeah, nah, I don't buy the "AI does the same thing humans do" any more than the "forklift does the same thing as humans do". I hope courts do as well, or, at least, this AI craze finally leads to copyright abolishment, it doesn't really make any sense for both to exist...
I'd like to see the end of software patents, which IMHO are a much bigger problem than copyright.
You make a good point with the exact text bit though. It would certainly put the AI company on the defensive if the author of that original GPL snippet decided to go after openai etc for copyright infringement and license violation. I'd actually kinda like to see that happen.
I'm always so extremely confused about the trope of the personal project having shit quality... Like, if I'm doing something for myself, that's exactly the place where I wanna do something amazing, like literally all my private projects have much higher quality than my work ones - because in the work ones I'm forced to use stupid conventions, old tools, am not supposed to touch "legacy" code, etc etc etc
As such, since companies have their private code on GitHub, that's where I would expect the shittiness to come from, not personal private projects.
Like, if I'm doing something for myself, that's exactly the place where I wanna do something amazing,
That's always my intention with my personal projects too! But that always results in "Wow I just learned how to do this thing much better, let me refactor the whole project to do it perfectly everywhere" followed by my Adderall running out. So there's just so many half-done refactors I either forget about or abandon because I get a new idea the next day, but that's totally just a skill issue.
You're right though, the code I write at work is much worse, but my Company hosts their own GitLab instance so the code we write can't even be used to poison Copilot :(
I would love my personal projects to be of the highest quality but unfortunately i need to pay bills so i have to prioritize my work projects that get me paid
Lol! Be like GitLab instead:
1 - Be the underdog with good reputation in a market completely monopolized;
2 - Have the incumbent self-destruct by vibecoding its product and pushing AI above every other feature to its customers;
3 - Loudly announce that you are leaving your past good behavior behind, and that you are betting everything on vibecoding and pushing AI to your customers!
Have all the code in the world
Create LLM for software development
Try to advertise it
Oops, no budget
Get acquired by Microsoft
Enshittification ensues
Everyone else loots your code repos
Microsoft tries to put your coding tool in everything
Coding tool injected into Excel
Into Word
Into Teams Chat
Nobody knows what this is even supposed to do anymore
Copilot now synonymous with Clippy
Yeah, can't even begin to imagine how this happened.
And the ONE useful feature (summarizing meeting transcripts) is behind a paywall corporate doesn't want to touch.
"What do you mean this 4 hour meeting could be summed up in a single, 100 word paragraph without losing any important context or decision?????" - higher ups seeing the summarized transcript, probably
Microsoft never fails to disappoint
Huh. I guess Microsoft and I have that in common.
🥁
At least you and I will always have your mom.
Be Skype. You literally are the first one. You literally are the only one. Covid happens. Zoom pops up from nowhere and takes everyone. You die.
Still, still, I'm like, how???
Just like Skype getting lapped by Zoom during COVID
Their idea was that OpenAI was so far ahead of the competition no one could ever catch up. Turns out they weren’t and now they’re at the bottom.
If agentic LLMs are the prize, I’d be fine with losing.
I mean, Microsoft’s biggest mistake was shoving it in front of everyone’s faces. The real reason that all the other “agentic BS” is received well is because the people who use them have an actual use case, or, are very enthusiastic about the technology and enjoy messing with it. Thus the discussion is mostly from that small group of people who will have something positive to say.
The truth is, that all the models and harnesses suck for most use cases that most people have. When you shove it in front of a general audience and make them interact with it, then the discussion will be about how bad it is.
I see this as proof of how bad LLMs actually are. You have an AI trained on essentially humanity's collective programming library. Languages of machines and computers. The result should be ungodly and near perfection. If there was any semblance of understanding in AI, it should be revealed in it's capability to produce code.
Although... I can definitely see Microsoft thinking that their code is the example of perfection and training copilot on that rather than github.
should be ungodly and near perfection
Counterpoint: garbage in, garbage out
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