• marcos@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    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!

    • prettybunnys@piefed.social
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      21 days ago

      The US Govt. as a customer, and the forges they operate / contract, being pushed to use AI is probably (unfortunately) a huge piece of this problem.

      • mirshafie@europe.pub
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        21 days ago

        Yeah the push to use AI comes from above, and it’s not just in the US. Anyone who’s at the top levels of any company now can tell you that the party line is AI positivity and insistence that workers adopt it into their workflows, even if they themselves see little use for it or can find a way to incorporate it into their own workflows yet.

      • marcos@lemmy.world
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        20 days ago

        Well, they have a choice of pandering to this one large customer for whom they’ll always be the untrusted underdog, or pandering for the larger, more diverse market.

        They never managed to become profitable as the untrusted underdog, so the option of keeping doing the same was obvious, I guess.

  • Randelung@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    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.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      19 days ago

      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.

            • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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              19 days ago

              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.

              • Derpgon@programming.dev
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                18 days ago

                I’ve got countless gripes, I don’t think there is a feature that I like or that they made 100% working and easy to use.

      • ramjambamalam@lemmy.ca
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        19 days ago

        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.

        • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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          19 days ago

          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!

  • red_tomato@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    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.

  • Bloefz@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    It’s weird because copilot in office tries to push agents on you as if it were a Jehovah’s witness.

    So GitHub copilot doesn’t have them? I don’t really use that.

    • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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      21 days ago

      It’s saying Copilot was the first on the scene and had access to literally all of the training data anyone could possibly want, and is still being shown up by most other AI models. Their failure to capture the vibe coding space is a legendary fumble. At least that was my read.

      • Bloefz@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        Eh wait. Copilot (any of the about 30 products with copilot in the name) is not a model. Microsoft makes a few models like phi but they’re underwhelming. All of copilot runs on models from external parties like openai and anthropic. So basically Microsoft is at the mercy of their own competitors. They’re in the awkward position that providing training data to their model providers not only improves their own product but their competitors’ as well.

        Additionally, Microsoft’s most profitable market is enterprise and they would absolutely shiver at their data being used for training and would abandon the service in droves.

        Despite being “all in on AI” Microsoft is in a really vulnerable position. Their added value is their integration with their other services (and data therein through RAG).

      • TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip
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        21 days ago

        Pfffft. No way. That would be like the company that owned skype failing to capitalize on video calls during some sort of major pandemic.

    • TheOctonaut@piefed.zip
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      21 days ago

      It does have agents.

      No idea what the person above thinks. Maybe they think agents are just those little toys where you build an app in an iframe from a chat on the side.

      I mean, GitHub has one of those, but CoPilot agents are primarily directed from CLI, the Issues system, and in VSCode. Because GitHub makes their money from enterprises who employ developers, not I’ve Got An App Idea guys.

    • Mika@piefed.ca
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      21 days ago

      They have agents, but they weren’t the first to make agents, and they aren’t the most advanced agentic system too. Maybe someone can enlighten me but I don’t see a single strong upside.

  • getFrog@piefed.social
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    20 days ago

    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?

    • Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      20 days ago

      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.

      • getFrog@piefed.social
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        20 days ago

        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 :(

      • vanillama@programming.dev
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        20 days ago

        Maybe they meant abandoned projects that never quite got through the todo list but you’re right. Even my abandoned projects are generally better than the legacy I’ve seen lol

      • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
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        20 days ago

        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

    • drath@lemmy.drath.ru
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      20 days ago

      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…

      • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
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        20 days ago

        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.

        • drath@lemmy.drath.ru
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          20 days ago

          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…

          • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
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            20 days ago

            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.

    • dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      19 days ago

      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.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    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.

    • Shayeta@feddit.org
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      21 days ago

      And the ONE useful feature (summarizing meeting transcripts) is behind a paywall corporate doesn’t want to touch.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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        20 days ago

        “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

  • cenzorrll@piefed.ca
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    21 days ago

    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.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      21 days ago

      Your proof of how bad LLMs are is the fact that there are a bunch of other companies producing way better coding agents and coding models than Microsoft is? I’m not sure how that follows. Those other agents are good, that’s the point of this.

      • jjj
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        21 days ago

        I would (probably not literally) wager that by “this” they meant *looks around at entire world*…

        this

      • mirshafie@europe.pub
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        21 days ago

        It’s wild to me that people are constantly complaining how “bad” LLMs are, because what, it can make mistakes or it’s not orders of magnitude smarter than the smartest humans???

        • Susaga@sh.itjust.works
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          20 days ago

          It makes mistakes with an alarming frequency, all with the same confident tone of writing as when it says anything else. It’s wrong so often that you’d need to use another source of information just to confirm it, which defeats the point in using AI in the first place!

          It’s not smarter than the smartest humans, or even AS smart as them, or even as smart as REGULAR humans. It’s not even smart. It’s a magic eight ball that sometimes has the correct answer by pure chance. No intellect. No reasoning. Just probability.

          Also: It steals from just about everyone; it encourages suicides and mass shootings; it’s frequently racist in its outputs; it’s burning, boiling and polluting the planet; it’s being forced on people who don’t want it; and billionares are using it to manipulate people. Probably some other stuff I forgot to mention.

          Just in case you weren’t sure why AI is bad.

          • mirshafie@europe.pub
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            20 days ago

            Eh, no. If you think you can offload your mental burdens onto any single source, then that’s a you problem, not an AI problem. LLMs are still getting better, but I don’t think we should hold our breaths to them getting to a point where no verification is needed. If you asked a human subject matter expert an important question, would you verify or would you just assume not only that they’re right, but also that you understood them correctly?

            But your post really embodies everything that is off with AI “critique” on Lemmy. One paragraph: LLMs are just random (unlike true intellect which somehow presumably don’t emerge from probabilistic phenomena?). Next paragraph: LLMs are racist.

            To be clear, the way AI is being pushed is bad in many different ways, and you didn’t even mention the worst examples which in my mind would be how AIs are currently being used to kill people, for example it is likely that it helped the US to murder 170 children in Minab. But again, that’s not a technology issue, it’s an issue with how humans interact with technology.

            • Susaga@sh.itjust.works
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              20 days ago

              LLMs are random. Its weighted randomness that frequently values racist outputs like whitewashing a crowd or calling black people monkies (to name two recent examples), but it is still random. That’s why you can ask it the same question twice and get two different answers.

              Ever notice how AI defenders try to pretend the technology is better than it is, and brush past the countless failings and ethical failures inherent to the technology by condemning humanity? A bad toolsmith blames the worker, I guess. At a certain point, if the technology is only doing bad things, or doing things badly, it might just be bad technology.

              • mirshafie@europe.pub
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                20 days ago

                If they’re random, they can not be racist. That’s my point. They’re returning output based on the data they’ve been fed (assuming we’re talking about training an LLM on Twitter).

                I have noticed that North American grifters pretend that AI is much better than it is, thank you very much. I also notice that China is taking a different approach, with the population being significantly more hopeful about AI going forward as a result.

                I think AI “critique” on Lemmy is, for the most part, North American backlash stemming from bad practices, overpromising, environmental destruction and a general financial grift that threatens jobs. Those are all very relevant and valid, but I think it completely misses the point to blame a technology rather than a political/economic system.

      • Sinthesis@lemmy.today
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        20 days ago

        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)

  • VAK@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    Microsoft could have been king with with chatgpt for personal superapp, github copilot for developers and something like sharepoint/power vibe widgets. But nooo, they make windows recall when ai models can’t run locally

    • Auth@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      if they had made a unified copilot agent they would have won. Think open claw with the power of NPUs for small tasks and cloud for big queries dedicated APIs for interacting with all the microsoft products special tailored version for developers. More focus on retrieving information and doing small tasks for the user than generating slop.

      The first versions they released were so fucking bad and every app had basically just a chatbot with zero functionality. It ruined the product for when it could actually do tasks.

  • Midnitte@beehaw.org
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    21 days ago

    It is impressive how much better claude is than copilot specifically for coding.

    Like… how much bullshit is in Windows to learn off of, let alone github.

  • megopie
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    21 days ago

    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.