Posted by latexr 7 days ago
I don't want AI getting in the way on Github. I don't want an unremovable AI button in my Office 365 mail client. I don't want to get nagging AI popups every. single. time. I open the GCP console.
A year or two I was ambivalent about AI, and willing to give it a try. These days? I actively hate it. Like all nagging ads: if you have to force it on me this badly, how can it be anything but complete garbage?
Fuck off and leave me alone you distracting piece of shit
||api.individual.githubcopilot.com/agents/github-commit-message-generation$xhr,domain=github.comConsidering that they force it upon users and user cannot disable it, this sounds like a worthless metric.
I get an email every month telling me that my Copilot access has been renewed for another month. I'm probably being counted amongst those 20M users.
I could stand at the train station and yell "Cthulhu is our saviour" all day and later claim that the word of Cthulhu reached thousands of people today.
HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!“
My father used it frequently when we were kids. I found out decades later it was a quote from King Lear.
I don't; any ideas what's different?
It's mandatory, on the orders of a senior manager who has no background in software development, for all developers in my department to have a Copilot subscription. I've never used it for anything, and I imagine it's the same for most of my colleagues(we do highly specialised embedded development with in-house custom everything - compiler, standard library, operating system, hardware), and it seems no-one is interested in whether it's used or not.
Consequently Microsoft is being paid $240 a year per person to do nothing whatsoever, which is surely a great business for them.
And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source.
This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one.
Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to rely on VC subsidized services but the risk is you are still dependent on them when they switch things up.
I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.
Oddly I used selfhosted git at an academic institution. I liked it because it was set up to use “hooks” https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks after check ins. This became much harder when we were pushed off to a commercial host ( gitlab a git hub competitor)
For the sake of correctness, the concept of pull requests was not introduced by Github. It already existed in git in the form of the 'request-pull' subcommand. The fundamental workflow is the same. You send the project maintainer a message requesting a pull of your changes from your own online clone repo. The difference is that the message was in the form of an email. Code reviews could be conducted using mails/mailing lists too.
This is not the same as sending patches by email. But considering how people hate emails, I can see why it didn't catch on. However, Torvalds considered this implementation to be superior to Github's and once complained about the latter on Github itself [1].
[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...
How some people, like you sir, are able to recall such minute events, is amazing.
Oh! That's easy. I forgot that it is 13+ years old! XD
Added later: Your comment made me look up more details about it. It was a widely discussed comment at the time. The HN discussion about it is as interesting as the comment itself [1].
Personally, I remember the initial selling point of GitHub being that it was more "social" than any other forges at the time, since we were all wrapped up in the Web 2.0 hype and what not. I think they pushed that on their landing page back in the day too.
It was basically Twitter but redone specifically for developers, and focus on code rather than random thoughts.
When I started using it, public repositories were free, and private repositories needed a paid account.
The ToS did not require public repos to be open source, only permission for basic operations like fork (the button which clones, not creating derivative works) and download was required.
I'm pretty sure the term "pull request" existed before GitHub. (Meaning writing an email saying "I have changes in my copy of repo that I want you to merge into the main repo".) But GitHub put an UI around it, and they may've been the first to do that.
Negative. The only thing GitHub added to the parlance is "forks" which are essentially like namespaced branches in the same repo.
I worked for a company that used the on-prem version of their forge back in the 00s, I remember liking it alot. It felt novel, cool and useful to have fully interlinked bug tracking, version control, documentation, project management and release management.
I really don't remember it like this at all. I do remember looking for actually open source forges and choosing Gitorious, which was then bought and shutdown by GitLab (and projects were offered to be seamlessly migrated, which worked well, and somehow we ended up being hosted on an open core platform, but that's another story).
GitHub always looked like the closed platform the whole open source world somehow elected to trust for their code hosting despite being proprietary, and then there was this FOMO where if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors, which still seems to be going strong btw.
I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.
Yeah, I don't think me myself had good reasons beyond "They seem like the good guys who won't sell out", but I was also way younger and more naive at that point (it was like 15 years ago after all).
I think I mostly just drank the cool-aid of what you mentioned as "if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors". There was a lot of "We love Open Source and Open Source loves us" from GitHub that I guess was confusing to a young formative mind who wanted it to become like the projects they wanted to host. This hope was especially fueled when they started open sourcing parts of GitHub, like the Gollum stuff for rendering the wikis.
I suspect many people were in a similar situation.
It looks like private repos started being free in 2019.
https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/new-year-new-...
It's like using Instagram or Facebook. It's not at all a matter of individual choice when all your friends are on one single platform.
Sure you can host your code anywhere, but by not using GitHub you are potentially missing out on a very vibrant community.
It's all Microsoft to blame. It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process just for the sake of profit.
As an aside, I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It’s a go-to place with network effects, but network effects doesn’t by itself imply “community”.
People aren't morally reprehensible because they prefer convenience over hardship. People like using easy things, and they like making money. This means that people will make easy things so other people will give them money. If you don't like it, make easy things that work the way you like them, run them ethically, and don't sell them to anyone.
To clarify my point isn't that anyone is morally reprehensible. My point is that using a free VC-backed service is like selling an implied option. You don't know when they're going to invoke the option, but eventually they will. And often it will be when you've gotten used to the income from selling the option.
It's not a question of morality or judgment, it's just meant to be a description of what the game we're playing is.
> If you don't like it, make easy things that work the way you like them, run them ethically, and don't sell them to anyone.
I'm trying to
Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption.
> I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community.
It's basically a social network on top of a source code forge. You have a profile that is individually identifiable, you can open issues and contribute to discussions on pull requests. All this can be tracked back to every individual while they collaborate and make connections while they contribute to each other. How is this not a community?
OP is arguing that VC should be a deciding factor. The “community” wouldn’t exist if people had made that a deciding factor.
A social network is not a community. It may contain many communities. GitHub has communities around projects. But GitHub as a whole isn’t a community.
Counterpoint is that is what companies are supposed to do. They are made to make money, the end. The only hope against this for humans is regulation, and that has fallen off the face of the earth. It’s like humans are doomed to repeat the late 19th and early 20th century era over and over.
In the organization:
Organization -> Settings -> Copilot -> Access... Turn it off.
Any tips for finding other interesting codeberg hosted projects?
Also, I remember there was Radicle https://radicle.xyz
Any Radicle users?