News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by flurie on Friday July 02, 2021 @10:30AM (#27711991)
The author had a rather colorful post to /r/emacs that has been edited significantly since, but some of the color remains in the comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/oapa2l/help_building...
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by kstrauser on Friday July 02, 2021 @10:50AM (#27712230)
Some of the comments almost seem like the author is using GPT for lots of things.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by adkadskhj on Friday July 02, 2021 @11:46AM (#27713015)
And seems to be praising GPT/Copilot as being amazing, the future, etc? Though with so many deleted comments i'm still quite confused.

Regardless the author and I disagree strongly about the actual usefulness of Copilot. I do think ML could be a huge boon for many human applications, like coding, but it's far far from it. Furthermore Copilot's specific implementation seems to leave much to be desired[1].

To me ML is an infant right now and we're metaphorically and literally expecting that infant to drive a car. ML is in a weird, weird place.

[1]: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by michaelmrose on Friday July 02, 2021 @05:59PM (#27717454)
If he is wrong and such tools are of small import then it isn't highly important that Emacs has such functionality. If he is correct and such functionality is essential then all of existing Emacs becomes merely a freemium teaser for Emacs 2021 Professional Edition with AI where they will provide only a fraction of the total value but collect most of the money from the ecosystem.

Worse its not even a license forever, nor even for a period of time. It's priced by the word.

https://beta.openai.com/pricing

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by mullikine on Friday July 02, 2021 @05:55AM (#27709660)
Copilot was not the first GPT-3 editor out there. Now that the editor thinks for us, free software is more important now than ever before. A transparent pipeline from thought to paper.

I would like some assistance.

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by cle on Friday July 02, 2021 @09:47AM (#27711470)
I agree, the thought of hoards of developers sending their code to Microsoft (or AWS via CodeGuru) to train their proprietary semantic model is disturbing, because of the potential network effects. They suck right now and have a lot of problems, and I hope they either stay that way, or that something open like this supersedes them.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by corobo on Friday July 02, 2021 @01:40PM (#27714458)
Hold up. Is everyone talking about this thing as if they're going to use it on proprietary code?

I only ever pictured using it on open source stuff if it turned up decent

If folks are looking at this thing like "that's going right on my work PC" I would highly recommend reviewing your IT usage policy first. Yikes.

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by atatatat on Friday July 02, 2021 @01:52PM (#27714593)
I was thinking the opposite, for the audience you're describing.

"Can't get into trouble if it's never published publicly"...which is wrong, obviously.

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by yewenjie on Friday July 02, 2021 @09:23AM (#27711187)
How useful do you think has it been, for your own personal use cases?
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by smoldesu on Friday July 02, 2021 @11:43AM (#27712966)
How do you expect to ensure a "transparent pipeline" when GPT-3 itself is not fully transparent?
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by btdmaster on Friday July 02, 2021 @12:07PM (#27713307)
Unlike GPT-3, GPT-j from EleutherAI is a free dataset: https://6b.eleuther.ai/. This is supported according to the README.

Edit: it may not be supported right now, but it is mentioned in the Goals section.

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by abecedarius on Friday July 02, 2021 @01:48PM (#27714548)
I gave 6b.eleuther.ai a try on the Copilot fetch-tweets example, several days ago, and it spat out a similar completion: https://twitter.com/abecedarius/status/1408862135267037186

It took several seconds and added some logic I didn't ask for, but this is already interesting.

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by jancsika on Friday July 02, 2021 @12:12PM (#27713396)
Is there a tool where I can type garbage and it walks linearly through a git history of creating a new project, compiling, cloning, committing, etc. until my new copy is a replica of the original?

E.g., I set it to vue.js codebase. Then for each key I press it will:

1. create a new file if we're at the beginning 2. for each key pressed, output a character for that file 3. once the file has been "typed", close that one and open the next file and repeat. 4. once the whole enchilada has been "typed", then each key press will spell out "git commit..." on the command line then enter 5. once committed, each key pressed will spell out "git push..." then enter 6. etc. until I've typed the whole history of vue.js!

Maybe a "turbo mode" so I can set N characters for each character I type...

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by doix on Friday July 02, 2021 @12:23PM (#27713549)
That instantly made me think of this: https://hackertyper.net/
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by jancsika on Friday July 02, 2021 @05:10PM (#27716916)
Ooh, almost there!

You know, there could be a kind of "bloat battle" game from this.

* player one tries to keep smashing the keyboard to "write" code and "commit" new features until the program can read email

* player two smashes keys to add low-effort issues to the tracker, post FUD to the mailing list to slow down the process, and add subtly wrong features for review on merge requests

Like hungry hippos except it translates directly to real world experience

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by mullikine on Friday July 02, 2021 @12:27PM (#27713611)
I'm trying to get it going in a docker container asap.. I was slaving away on that today
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by jancsika on Friday July 02, 2021 @05:12PM (#27716933)
Bonus-- if you pull it off I think it technically qualifies as a quine. :)
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by jkaplowitz on Friday July 02, 2021 @09:03AM (#27710962)
This should probably have its title edited to include the prefix Show HN, since it's posted by the main author. But, neat!
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by exdsq on Friday July 02, 2021 @09:00AM (#27710927)
Side note but what is going on with this projects commits?
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by adkadskhj on Friday July 02, 2021 @11:48AM (#27713037)
.. i wish you hadn't made me look. That is painful.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by mullikine on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @12:19AM (#27829679)
A prompt for touching up those commit messages would be awesome!
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by jimsimmons on Friday July 02, 2021 @02:11PM (#27714804)
PyCharm has local history that tracks non commit diffs and it has saved my day many times
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by sdesol on Friday July 02, 2021 @02:05PM (#27714726)
If you want to quickly iterate through the commits and changes, you can do so with this link:

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=comm...

Click on a file to bring up the diffs browser.

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the tool that I'm linking to.

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by globular-toast on Friday July 02, 2021 @09:08AM (#27711011)
Looks like they are auto-generated on every save.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by simiones on Friday July 02, 2021 @11:36AM (#27712857)
Had a co-worker once whose commits in Perforce (where it's called "Submit") made us joke that he had probably bound Ctrl-S to "Submit". Apparently it wasn't as unlikely as we thought .
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by fulafel on Friday July 02, 2021 @10:44AM (#27712154)
Interesting to see someone doing this, it often comes up that we should actually have more levels of version control granularity than merges and commits. Just need an application of AI to generate good commit messages here :)
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by globular-toast on Friday July 02, 2021 @01:10PM (#27714128)
I use the "undo" functionality in my editor. In emacs it's a complete tree of changes so you can't really lose anything.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by fulafel on Friday July 02, 2021 @02:03PM (#27714694)
It's something but it's ephemeral and not shareable. You can't reconstruct how a piece of code got written weeks later, to eg recover some debug helpers you deleted without committing because you thought you were done with debugging it.

But thanks for the tip about Emacs undo tree, didn't know about that. With some add-ons you can apparently eg find undoable changes for only some region of a buffer, etc.

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by karthink on Friday July 02, 2021 @08:32PM (#27718382)
> With some add-ons you can apparently eg find undoable changes for only some region of a buffer, etc.

This is built into Emacs (no add-ons needed). Calling undo with a region selected undoes changes only in that region.

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by mssdvd on Friday July 02, 2021 @06:36PM (#27717748)
You can also setup undo-tree to show a diff for every change.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by tom_ on Friday July 02, 2021 @01:30PM (#27714355)
True, but that's no guarantee you'll ever be able to actually find it.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by exdsq on Friday July 02, 2021 @12:04PM (#27713267)
That could be interesting but the right structure (off the top of my head) would be a hierarchical layer - not this flat monstrosity!
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by astrange on Friday July 02, 2021 @10:16PM (#27718844)
I actually disagree with this because I think you should try to have the project even vaguely work at each commit, so "git bisect" will work. But maybe each commit could be a log of keystrokes instead of a text diff.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by lordgrenville on Friday July 02, 2021 @10:19AM (#27711836)
What a terrifying way to work!
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by Kiro on Friday July 02, 2021 @06:09PM (#27717564)
Why? I also use commit and push as my save with nonsense commit messages. I can't trust that my computer is still booting up tomorrow.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by IshKebab on Friday July 02, 2021 @03:25PM (#27715731)
For single author projects it's reasonable.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by rubyn00bie on Friday July 02, 2021 @09:11AM (#27711042)
Should this say “GPT” instead of “GPL” in the title? I find it pretty confusing right now.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by fossislife on Friday July 02, 2021 @09:14AM (#27711080)
Got me confused, too. It's GPL-licensed and uses GPT.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by steviedotboston on Friday July 02, 2021 @10:24AM (#27711915)
but what about GPK (Garbage Pail Kids) ?
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by astrange on Friday July 02, 2021 @10:17PM (#27718851)
I thought it was a model only trained on GPL code, which would be interesting but I guess would cost a few million to make.
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by Voloskaya on Friday July 02, 2021 @10:58AM (#27712356)
It's not a "Copilot for Emacs" though? It's a layer on top of language models APIs made for Emacs.

So, if you use GPT-3, it will not be finetuned further on code like Copilot, only pretrained on data that did contain some code, and also the GPL portion only concerns that API-calling layer, not what the model was trained on, or what it can output (which is what the GPL related mess about Copilot is about).

Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by floatingatoll on Friday July 02, 2021 @09:20PM (#27718584)
Is this submission title a typo for GPT?
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by goodpoint on Friday July 02, 2021 @12:25PM (#27713587)
Can we have a Vim plugin pretty please?
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by smoldesu on Friday July 02, 2021 @01:20PM (#27714250)
Re:Pen, a GPL Copilot for Emacs by goodpoint on Friday July 02, 2021 @01:47PM (#27714532)
https://github.com/kiteco/vim-plugin/blob/master/LICENSE

That is closed source. Also Kite does not seem comparable with GPT-3 or github copilot.