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GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

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481–490 of 704 posts

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#481
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context is hugely important, and equally important is not to get sucked in by the HN echo chamber - that is, consider the MS of _now_ as opposed to that of 15 years ago which HN likes to bash (and give a free pass to other companies doing nefarious things). The FB example is considering the FB of _now_ and not 15 years ago. In terms of the biggest companies in the sector, MS has been doing much more for developers an…

The MS that's killing their own single most popular product, Windows, with anti-user features, is the MS of now . Releasing VS code and WSL doesn't redeem their sins.

is this not another example of the 'HN echo chamber'? Is Windows market share budging? Windows currently is by far not the worst iteration of the OS and nobody gives a crap about anti-user features which everyone has had to deal with for literally decades

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#482
post #358

Serious question: if I were to use this, would Microsoft collect analytics on me (code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc) and monetize that data by using it to build some AI product like Copilot, or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did), use it to serve me ads, or do some stupid/irresponsible/unet…

If a business is paying for this product, then THEY (not you) are the customer. And in that context - yes, Microsoft may be asked or build a product for managers to manage their workforce, particularly if remote. This could involve presence tracking, engagement tracking (ie, do you open alerts / read your bug reports) etc. One approach would be to monitor what management considers productive / successful employees an…

I really hope that if this happens, DPAs bring the hammer down on everyone involved (both MS and companies using it) in a useful timeframe (i.e. before it has become socially acceptable because "everyone is doing it" and there are no consequences).

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#483
post #358

Serious question: if I were to use this, would Microsoft collect analytics on me (code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc) and monetize that data by using it to build some AI product like Copilot, or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did), use it to serve me ads, or do some stupid/irresponsible/unet…

Context is hugely important, and equally important is not to get sucked in by the HN echo chamber - that is, consider the MS of _now_ as opposed to that of 15 years ago which HN likes to bash (and give a free pass to other companies doing nefarious things). The FB example is considering the FB of _now_ and not 15 years ago. In terms of the biggest companies in the sector, MS has been doing much more for developers an…

> consider the MS of _now_

Not sure if that's supposed to be an argument for using/trusting MS.

The levels of user and privacy hostility they went to (and are continuously going to) with Windows 10/11 makes me see this as a strong argument against.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#484

> My friends, I’m here to tell you I was a Codespaces skeptic before this started and now I am not. This is the way. ~@iolsen I don't actually doubt that this (and the 4 other glowing employee quotes) are real, but even assuming they are, I can understand people remaining skeptical about the sample size of 5 being broadly representative of the 100s (1000s?) of engineers at the company. Also slightly hilarious that "T…

I’ve very recently become a GitHub engineer, and I got pre-access to the beta too and I must say - my absolute favourite thing about CoseSpaces is being able to dev on a repo you don’t work on regularly and probably wouldn’t contribute if it meant having to set up environment etc. It’s really nice to just dip into a project with a working environment in seconds, make your PR and then move on.

I'm a big fan of capturing the toolchain(s) with the repo. I have had to hack this for embedded toolchains out of necessity for years (decades?) using VirtualBox on a Mac. I still have a Windows 95 VM sitting around containing a copy of Keil or something that is the only known way to rebuild the code for a certain weird-ass micro from some consulting gig in the late 90's. I wonder if it still boots? Hopefully, that customer forgot about me...

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#485
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company has a certain type of investors or shareholders, they may have no choice but to collect value from you all means possible regardless of how much value they are already collecting.

One very underrated (or overrated depending on your pessimism) way to deliver value to customers is by offering privacy as one of the products you deliver. The issue is that privacy is hard to prove and so most claims of privacy are accepted at face value and many proclaimed privacy minded services are very much the opposite under the hood. This, I think, is a place where we need some regulation to codify some differ…

> This, I think, is a place where we need some regulation to codify some different forms of privacy and give the government a big stick to bop companies over the head when they violate those definitions.

I 100% agree with you, but doubt this will ever happen in a heavily pro-surveillance government in an effective corporatocracy. Therefore, I think open source can and needs to do better in providing free competition against potentially-dystopian closed-source alternatives

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a business is paying for this product, then THEY (not you) are the customer. And in that context - yes, Microsoft may be asked or build a product for managers to manage their workforce, particularly if remote. This could involve presence tracking, engagement tracking (ie, do you open alerts / read your bug reports) etc. One approach would be to monitor what management considers productive / successful employees an…

I really hope that if this happens, DPAs bring the hammer down on everyone involved (both MS and companies using it) in a useful timeframe (i.e. before it has become socially acceptable because "everyone is doing it" and there are no consequences).

What’s a DPA, please?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#489
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article, that's an option with Github's code spaces setup. > Visual Studio Code is great. It’s the primary tool GitHub.com engineers use to interface with codespaces. But asking our Vim and Emacs users to commit to a graphical editor is less great. If Codespaces was our future, we had to bring everyone along. snip > From there, GitHub engineers can run Vim, Emacs, or even ed if they so desire.

I did not understand that part. Every heavy Emacs or vim user have its own customizations of editor. How does it work with shared image?

Just use an sshfs mount and a local editor.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#490

> My friends, I’m here to tell you I was a Codespaces skeptic before this started and now I am not. This is the way. ~@iolsen I don't actually doubt that this (and the 4 other glowing employee quotes) are real, but even assuming they are, I can understand people remaining skeptical about the sample size of 5 being broadly representative of the 100s (1000s?) of engineers at the company. Also slightly hilarious that "T…

I've been playing around with a homegrown version of this. It's really not that hard: just set up a docker context to your home lab server and use VSCode remote containers. I've been able to remove WSL from my PC: Docker desktop was gouging itself on resources. I can now also shut down my desktop and continue exactly where I was on my laptop, and visa-versa. I don't have to pull WIP commits back and forth between the…

oh right, my home lab server, that must be around here somewhere...
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