Other than the points on potential issues with intellectual property I find the article that is referenced completely unconvincing. It's just modern moral anxiety split into bullet points (eg how much energy does it use?, we don't need more code (speak for yourself)). Is there a name for this kind of self hating west coast tech liberal yet?
As for copilot, it's ok. GPT-4 is much much better when you learn how to use it. Busy work is completely automated. I need to transform strings in one form into structs? Just paste a representative sample of the data and tell it to. Is the data dirty? Just tell it how it's dirty and it will handle those edge cases. Want unit tests to verify the function it wrote works for you? Tell it to write the unit tests, then read them, point out what it got wrong, then check again.
> Is there a name for this kind of self hating west coast tech liberal yet?
When I was a mouthy teenager, my mom used to call this "It's easy to shit when your butt is full".
Sounds better in Slovenian. It's the same idea as The Man in The Arena – it's easy to have opinions when all your needs are met. If you really believe in what you're saying, get in the trenches and start doing the work.
I'm pointing out that they're spoiled and it's very easy to moralize about all sorts of things from that position.
For example: All the people railing against capitalism while getting large parts of their comp from equity and stocks and such. And making top 5% incomes. If you really believe capitalism is bad, why don't you leave Tech, sell off all your equity/stocks, and go live in a commune somewhere? hmmmm
As for copilot, it's ok. GPT-4 is much much better when you learn how to use it. Busy work is completely automated. I need to transform strings in one form into structs? Just paste a representative sample of the data and tell it to. Is the data dirty? Just tell it how it's dirty and it will handle those edge cases. Want unit tests to verify the function it wrote works for you? Tell it to write the unit tests, then read them, point out what it got wrong, then check again.