Free GitHub Copilot: A Taste of AI Coding

Transcript

[00:00:00.00]
Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, the fleeting ambition of youth.

[00:00:07.07]
Ned: Welcome to Tech News of the Week. This is our weekly Tech News podcast where Chris and I think about four interesting articles and summarize them for you. Isn't that nice? We're nice. We're very nice. Before we get into the first article, a final reminder for this year, we are running our listener survey. You can go to chaoslever. Com and take that survey. We've got a decent number of responses, but I want more, and I'm speaking in I statements as you chastised me last week, Chris. So please take a moment. Link is in the show notes if you can't remember chaoslever. Com/survey. Go take it. It should take you all two or three minutes. We'll try to improve the show based off your feedback, or we'll totally ignore it, whatever we feel like doing. Chris, what's your first article?

[00:00:59.26]
Chris: All brains, not just Ned's. All brains move very slowly. From the Cut me a break, the brain is technically a computer, plus it's at the end of the year, Don't at me, bro, Department. For perhaps all of human history, people have been vexed by the question of, Why can't brain do fast, go more words, do good things out now? Or something to that effect. Well, scientists now have at least one answer, because we actually think pretty slowly. The average human thinks, according to the latest research, at about 10 at about 10 bits per second. Now, that is an average, and the absolute blazers in the crowd did do better. 20 bits per second.

[00:01:59.07]
Ned: This is I would think.

[00:02:01.20]
Chris: Compared to the processing power of computers, not great.

[00:02:06.25]
Ned: No.

[00:02:07.22]
Chris: But it's also dramatically at odds with our sensory systems, which can take in information at something like a billion bits per second. Wow. So what does this mean? We're still working on it. But the short answer is we're not as smart or as clever as we think we are. Good example is that sensory Another thing. Out of the billion bits of input coming into our brain per second, the vast majority of it is simply lost. The easiest example of this is eyesight. The eye can see way more than the brain can process. This is something that has been tested over and over again. What you think you are seeing, you are not seeing. Your peripheral vision is terrible. Your brain is filling in the blanks after the fact with what What you assume is there. Selective perception, as the kids call it. You're basically focusing on one thing, and that's going to become a theme. The next This time, you think that you're helping yourself by multitasking anywhere in your life. Just remember that 10 bits per second number. You have never been able to multitask. And harsh truth that even I don't want to admit, you will never be able to multitask.

[00:03:36.17]
Ned: Said it once.

[00:03:38.21]
Chris: Now we have math about it.

[00:03:40.27]
Ned: Yeah. Multitasking is just context searching badly. Microsoft offers free tier of GitHub Copilot. Now we can all code poorly together. Github announced on December 18th that anyone with an existing free account on GitHub will receive access to Copilot in VS code free of charge. Included in this free tier are 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages a month. To take advantage of the offer, you need to install the copilot extension in VS Code and sign in with your GitHub account. In terms of models, you can select between Claude 3.5 or GPT. Yes, GPT I tell you it's a GTP and a GPT. Whatever. As a parenthetical, I've heard overall better things about Claude when it comes to coding, but that is totally anecdotal. Your mileage may vary. Open source project maintainers, students, and educators already get free access to Copilot at the pro level, but now you don't have to prove that you belong to one of those hallowed groups to access the free tier. Copilot The in VS Code will provide coding suggestions for you, but the real power is the chat feature. You can highlight a section of code and ask Copilot to explain it, or ask it to create code that accomplishes some task and then accept or regenerate the response until it looks good enough.

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Ned: As someone who has done a decent amount of Go development lately, I can attest to how much Copilot helps me write broken code faster. Sometimes it can tell me exactly what's wrong with the broken code we wrote. Clearly, Microsoft is hoping that once developers get a taste for using AI in their IDE, they'll be willing to step up to the paid tier. And worse, they're probably right.

[00:05:46.20]
Chris: The Internet is forever, except when it isn't. There has been a long-standing principle that the youths on TikTok seem to be blissfully unaware of, but was drummed into my head long, long ago. Be careful what you put out there on the Internet because it'll be there forever. Now, in some annoying cases, this is absolutely true. Ned 780-page Beat Poetry Dance Routine Chicken Caprese Recipe is still far, far too available.

[00:06:23.23]
Ned: Or not available enough.

[00:06:26.26]
Chris: I am simultaneously, consistently flummoing then frustrated when I search for a fix for the latest dumb thing that Apple broke in OSX and get Stack Overflow articles from 14 years ago about how to fix it in a version that is 12 years behind as a top 10 search result. I mean, that is poetic in its own way, if you think about it. Times may have changed, but Apple breaking things for no reason and then fixing them without explanation, that's timeless. What was I talking about again? Oh, yeah. A recent study showed that something like 38% of web pages that were available in 2013 are no longer available today. That is not just your aunt's dog's diary or whatever it is you had up on Friends there either. We're talking about serious stuff like scientific journals, short story archives, and news sources. Real original stuff that was both important and unique. Now, Sadly, in the last few years, the Internet has been completely subsumed by soulless nothing blasted out by AI, creators on the grind. Now, you're all doing great. But that older stuff that required curation and wasn't made cynically just to get clicks is fading away.

[00:07:53.20]
Chris: Now, this is another problem where there's no easy answer. We have already declared war on the Internet Archive and the Wayback machine as a species, and the Library of Congress is, shall we say, scattershot with what they decide to archive and why. You remember when we thought that recording all of Twitter forever was going to be a useful thing? Yeah. This is probably a philosophical question on one hand, but it's also a practical one. If you're using a web page for research for any reason, it is probably a good idea to print a copy to PDF to keep for yourself and keep it somewhere safe, because the next time you try to reference it, it might be gone. And then there's the true crisis, as usual, hidden deep in the comments section. Leeds T wants to know, and I quote, So serious question. What What about the porn?

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Ned: It's a shame if we lost any of that. I don't have some. I will say when I do research for the episodes and I'm on Wikipedia, about half the links that are in Wikipedia are dead.

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Chris: Yeah, I was just going to mention that.

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Ned: It's very depressing. And then sometimes I can find archived versions of it, but not always. Anyway.

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Chris: It's also depressing that you pronounced it Wikipedia.

[00:09:31.16]
Ned: We'll workshop it. Amex is using WebAssembly at scale. Webassembly, for those who don't know, is a bite code language and runtime that runs in an isolated sandbox. It was originally developed to run in browsers, providing the speed and power of compiled software with security protections and guarantees that made it safe to run. If you've ever used Excel online, you have unknowingly used WebAs anomaly. Webas anomaly is also really fast at spinning up and has been looked at to possibly replace containers for certain scenarios, especially functions as a service. This is exactly what American Express has decided to do. Citing superior performance over containers and enhanced security, AMEX has chosen to adopt WebAsamily and the open source tool, WASM Cloud, for their internal functions as a service platform. This represents what is almost definitely the biggest production deployment of WebAssembly and the largest implementation of WASM Cloud, which was recently granted incubator status with the CNCF. Much like Kubernetes does for containers, Wazam Cloud is in charge of building, composing, and orchestrating the deployment of Wazam apps across multiple environments, including the cloud, the Edge, and Kubernetes itself. I was first introduced to WebAssembly this time back in I was fairly certain then that it had great promise.

[00:11:04.02]
Ned: This level of adoption from a financial company is a testament to the advances made by the WebAsassembly Working Group over the last two years. Almost like I'm ready to make a prediction for 2025.

[00:11:18.10]
Chris: Not if I predicted first. Damn it.

[00:11:21.17]
Ned: Should have held that one closer to the test. All right, that's it. We're done now. Go away. Bye.