If I've been working in the same language for at least a year or two, I don't have to look up any of that. Copilot might be actually helpful if I'm working in a language I'm not used to, but it's been a long time since I've had to look up syntax or functions (excluding 3rd party packages) for the language I work in.
I won't say copilot is completely useless for code. I will say that it's near useless for me. The kind of code that it's good at writing is the kind of code that I can write in my sleep. When I write a for-loop to iterate over an array and print it out (for example), it takes near zero brain power. I'm on autopilot, like driving to work. On the other hand, when I was trialing copilot I'd have to check each suggestion it made to verify that it wasn't giving me garbage. Verifying copilot's suggestions takes a lot more brain power than just writing it myself. And the difference in time is minimal. It doesn't take me much longer to write it myself than it does to validate copilot's work.
That’s not how disk encryption works. Data in storage is always encrypted. That’s the whole point. When an app requests data, it is decrypted on the fly. Decrypted data is never stored outside of RAM.
I have to strongly disagree with you. I've used WSL 2 with VSCode, and I experienced waaaaaaaay more weird broken shit than I ever have running Linux. And even if it weren't for that, it's still not at all worth it IMO because using WSL 2 means every interaction I have with my development environment has to go through a Linux-to-Windows translation layer. I will never use Windows again for anything beyond testing unless I'm forced to.
My point is that I strongly feel that the kind of "AI" we have today is much closer to bacteria than to cats on that scale. Not that an LLM belongs on the same scale as biological life, but the point stands in so far as "is this thing intelligent" as far as I'm concerned.
it’s not inconceivable it could happen in the next two generations.
I am certain that it will happen eventually. And I am not arguing that something has to be human-level intelligent to be considered intelligent. See dogs, pigs, dolphins, etc. But IMO there is a huge qualitative difference between how an LLM operates and how animal intelligence operates. I am certain we will eventually create intelligent systems but there is a massive gulf between what LLMs are capable of and abstract reasoning. And it seems extremely unlikely to me that linear algebraic models will ever achieve that type of intelligence.
Intelligence is just responding to stimuli
Bacteria respond to stimuli. Would you call them intelligent?
I don’t know, have you ever used JavaScript? I’ve run into some really fucking weird bugs. I’ve also spent hours trying to find the source of an error message only to discover the error message was lying and caused by some other error.
The point is that AI stands for “artificial intelligence” and these systems are not intelligent. You can argue that AI has come to mean something else, and that’s a reasonable argument. But LLMs are nothing but a shitload of vector data and matrix math. They are no more intelligent than an insect is intelligent. I don’t particularly care about the term “AI” but I will die on the “LLMs are not intelligent” hill.
Their rules have stopped me from being able to do my job. Like the time the AV software quarantined executables as I was creating them so I literally could not run my code. When security enforcement prevents me from working, something needs to change.
My comment game has gotten far better since I started doing live code reviews. Essentially I ask myself, “Would I feel the need to explain this to someone during a code review?” and if the answer is yes I add a comment.
That’s a hot take. If you want your code to be maintainable at all, it needs comments. If you’re part of a team, write comments for them. If someone else may take over your project after you move on, leave comments for them. And have you ever tried to read uncommented code you wrote a year ago? Leave comments for yourself.
The con is that it’s not very powerful. I haven’t attempted to code on a gaming handheld, but I’ve had issues with a midrange laptop being under powered. RAM is probably the biggest issue. My life improved noticeably when I upgraded my main machine to 64 GB. Granted I was doing particularly heavy work. It really depends on what you’re doing. You could get away with it for some work, but it’s going to be painfully slow for other stuff.
Copilot frequently produces results that need to be fixed. Compilers don’t do that. Anyone who uses copilot to generate code without understanding how that code works is a shit developer. The same is true of anyone who copies from stack overflow/etc without understanding what they’re copying.
I'd create my own macro or function for that. I have enough ADD that I cannot stand boring shit like that and I will almost immediately write a pile of code to avoid having to do boring crap like that, even with copilot.
Using git reset --keep would just make more work since I'll have to throw away uncommitted changes anyways. Removing uncommitted changes is kind of the whole point, it is called 'reset' after all. If I want to preserve uncommitted changes, I'll either stash them or commit them to a temporary branch. That has the added benefit of adding those changes to the reflog so if I screw up later I'll be able to recover them.
If you’re using reset with uncommitted changes and you’re not intentionally throwing them away, you’re doing something wrong. git reset —hard means “fuck everything, set the state to X”. I only ever use it when I want to throw away the current state.
Is there supposed to be a link?