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Fully agreed. It's just people getting mad and jealous but hear me out.

Copilot is NOT SELLING coed other people wrote, it is simply acting as a curator to show you all the solutions people HAVE WRITTEN for free.

Copilot does NOT write entire programs, it's simply an assistant. And there is not much copyright you CAN apply to 3-4 lines of generally understandable code.

I've used Copilot and am actively paying for and I have not seen many cases where it's generating bad code. It's only there to remove boilerplate and common problems, not there to write entire applications.

Why are people getting so salty?



Because they _are_ verbatim copying code and not respecting the license. It's not that complicated.

Github knows better, can do better and should.


Do you have an example of Github Copilot doing that? Like a snippet of code generated by Copilot and a link to the original source code.



Thanks. Personally, I feel like such small and widely used mathematical algorithms should not be copyrightable (or using them should fall under fair use). It even has its own Wikipedia page[0], where the source code is also reproduced without copyright notice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root


I also implemented this algorithm in MMIX:

   % Constants
  FISRCON GREG #5FE6EB50C7B537A9
  THREHAF GREG #3FF8000000000000
   % Save half of the original number
   OR $2,$0,0
   INCH $2,#FFF0
   % Bit level hacking
   SRU $1,$0,1
   SUBU $0,FISRCON,$1
   % First iteration
   FMUL $1,$2,$0
   FMUL $1,$1,$0
   FSUB $1,THREHAF,$1
   FMUL $0,$0,$1
   % Second iteration
   FMUL $1,$2,$0
   FMUL $1,$1,$0
   FSUB $1,THREHAF,$1
   FMUL $0,$0,$1
(Note this assumes that the input number is not too small; if it is, then it will not be possible to compute half by this algorithm. Also, like with the original code, the second iteration may be omitted if desired.)

(This comment and the MMIX code it contains, and all other comments that I wrote on here, are I agree release it to public domain.)


It’s the verbatim replication of the comments that makes this a damning piece of evidence against the “it’s not copying code, it’s an AI” argument.


Yes, it is clearly copying code from Quake, I wasn't denying that.




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