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The Easter Date algorithm was probably someone implementing an algorithm from the Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_Easter#Anonymous_Grego... ) without bothering to understand it (because honestly it's not a very interesting problem). No wonder it's uncommented.

As long as the AI just regurgitates lines from repositories like a bad undergrad cheating on his homework, CS jobs should be safe.

The fact that it has picked up the GPL might not mean that much -- it might appear in dual-licensed projects.

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> The fact that it has picked up the GPL might not mean that much -- it might appear in dual-licensed projects.

Github have stated that Copilot is trained on all public code on Github, regardless of license. It very trivially follows that it has been trained on a lot of code that is explicitly GPL single licensed. We don't need to do any guessing here.

> As long as the AI just regurgitates lines from repositories like a bad undergrad cheating on his homework, CS jobs should be safe.

They said the same thing about Chess and Go.

Chess and Go are closed systems, the whole knowledge about how to play them well can in theory be derived just from a few basic rules. The same is not true for programming.

Plus, in theory Chess can be solved by exploring the whole solution space (which is finite, even though insanely large) and heuristics can make this practical by reasoning about which branches can probably be cut off. At that point, having more and more processing power and memory helps make the task feasible.

Not that I want to downplay these achievements, they were certainly very significant, but it's still entirely different from "solving programming" (whatever that means).

You have made a distinction between programming and chess and go. There was a period when people thought chess could be solved by AI, but go couldn't, because go was too highly dimensional. That distinction has been proven not to be meaningful.

Let's maybe start with the fact that in Chess and Go it is straightforward to find out if the game is over and if so, who has won, whereas with programming, it's not even clear what it means for a problem to have been "solved", unless you formalise it to an extent that is basically never done (and which is also usually more expensive than just programming the solution).

Solving Chess/Go and programming are really not much alike.

The chess "job market" seems to be doing pretty well these days, at least based on recent publicity.

Watching people play chess has entertainment value. Coding is lucrative because there's a lot of demand and not that many people who can do it well. What if a computer can do it better than almost anyone?

This is something I don't get. You're supposed to be able to integrate BSD-licensed (or even Public Domain) code into GPL works, right? The fact that something shows up in GPL code means what exactly?

This is like: there are scholarly books that quote extensive from original philosophers -- long, third-of-a-page quotations. Still I should be able to quote something in its original language (translations may be copyrighted) copying from the derived work. Copyrighted work is not supposed to be able to poison noncopyrighted work it originates from.

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