The home team convenes to discuss the full public release of AI pair programmer GitHub Copilot, the VPN company that turned off subscriptions to protect its customers’ privacy, and the moral hazard of “free-to-play” apps and games.
Episode notes:
GitHub Copilot is now available to all developers. There’s also the GitHub Copilot Labs extension for Visual Studio Code, which has some neat tricks up its sleeve.
Yes, Copilot is impressive; no, it’s not gunning for your job. ICYMI, check out our blog post exploring whether AI is poised to steal our livelihoods: The robots are coming for (the boring parts of) your job.
Mullvad VPN is removing the option to add new subscriptions because they want to know “as little as possible” about their users: “We are constantly looking for ways to reduce the amount of data we store while still providing a usable service.”
Data scraping is both ubiquitous and seemingly unavoidable—but it raises serious privacy concerns, writes David Golumbia for Real Life.
Tech recs: a ladder to bypass (almost) any paywall, the smartest way to learn a new language, how to explore the JavaScript universe, a great place to listen to longform journalism, and the email-free way to read your favorite newsletters.
Thanks to Liam for emailing the podcast to share Physics Girl’s terrific explanation of quantum cryptography.
Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user martineau for their answer to How to start and stop a thread.
Today's episode is sponsored by UiPath. The UiPath 2022.4 release brings automation for all. Learn new skills and focus on critical thinking for value-added work. Welcome Robots on Mac, semantic automation through Clipboard AI, and a new Attended Framework. Get started for free with UiPath Automation Cloud here.