Copilot is a LLM. So it’s just predicting what should come next, word by word, based off the data its been fed. It has no concept of whether or not its answer makes sense.

So if you’ve scraped a bunch of open source github projects that this guy has worked on, he probably has a lot of TODOs assigned to him in various projects. When Copilot sees you typing “TODO(” it tries to predict what the nextthing you’re going to type is. And a common thing to follow “TODO(” in it’s data set is this guy’s username, so it goes ahead and suggests it, whether or not the guy is actually on the project and suggesting him would make any sort of sense.

Hello there, sounds like you’re experiencing survivorship bias.

Its rare for you to see this, sure. Same for everyone else. But people aren’t here to post screenshots of “look at this website where I didn’t get flagged for having an ad blocker.” So we just see a lot of screenshots where it is a problem, because that’s what is noteworthy. There isn’t someone out there getting flagged on every single website they open, we’re just sampling a large population of user for only the websites where people do get flagged.

Why are we talking about this at all? Because it is becoming more common and more intrusive. This example is particularly egregious because you’re already on the website to give them money. They’re complaining to the user they they don’t get to make money off of them while taking their money, which is ridiculous.

I’m going to print this out and frame it on the wall of my office.

Squeal

“Sorry, I’m under a pretty strict NDA and I’m not allowed to discuss it.”

I love driving stick. Or I did up until the day my left knee fell apart. Now it’s just not an option for me.

Bullshit. You were singing Amish Paradise and we all know it.

Yup, I had someone print off Excel sheets, manually highlight and write in corrections, and them bring the pages over to my desk to have me fix them in the file.

I also once had the city reject a report I submitted because the width of the columns in the Excel file were different from the previous year and they wanted to print it all off on one page.

I used to work for municipal government in a major American city. The database for the entire city downloaded query results to your desktop formatted as Excel 95. Still does.

At one point I had to install special R packages because someone retired and I was tasked with taking over the worksheet they had been maintaining forever and the usual R packages to read data from Excel can’t parse Excel 5.0.

There was also someone in the office who still used a typewriter on the regular.