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GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

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Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#641
post #594
post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might get fired plus sued.

This is a sentiment that is very typical among Singaporeans. I suspect it has something to do with the political/business climate over there. While the USA is also litigation happy, it actually takes an incredibly high amount of deliberate destruction for an employer to succeed in suing an employee.

I'm just an immigrant here.

I don't think it's very likely you'd get sued, but I wouldn't want to risk it against well funded adversaries with expensive lawyers.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#642
post #625

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…

> but are YOU paying for it. If not - someone else is the revenue source even if you are paying for it, it's quite possible that they also have other revenue sources that conflict with your interests.

Exactly, this heuristic doesn't work all (or even most?) of the times. A more accurate approach is to rely on the terms you agree to when you buy/use software (if you don't want to read them, then you can depend on faulty shortcuts instead).

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#643

So you're telling me that the next GitHub outage could take out my dev environment and give me an afternoon off? Time to convince management that we need to switch to Codespaces!

Mainframe's down again boss!

this gave me a good laugh, thank you!

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic any proprietary product that provides an interface with an open source tool is guilty. I think accusing MS of EEE in this case is a huge stretch; GitHub is a commercial product that uses a popular open source tool with 100% compatibility (that I'm aware of) and actively participates in the development and features of that tool. When Ms start implementing extensions to git that only work with GitHub, we…

there's never a stretch with Microsoft. It is always, and has always been the same play. You can make excuses all you like, but in the end they will attemtp to embrace, extend and extinguish all competition.

Wheh they show any signs of extending git, or extinguishing any other open source competitors, I will be standing there with you calling them out. Until then, they're developing an excellent product that people want to use, built with open tooling

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#645
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…

Semi serious answer: couple of years ago we devs used to joke about putting ourselves out of business by teaching AIs how to code. I guess the joke's no longer funny; I also guess current situation shouldn't be a surprise.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting… Can you use Neovim? Can you persist you custom vimrc config and plugins between sessions?

Yes, I use neovim myself! Codespaces looks for a dotfiles repo under your user account, which you can use to install any personal customizations. Mine, which installs a bunch of neovim plugins and configs, is here: https://github.com/dcreager/dotfiles

Ah, fantastic! That sounds like a really good solution. I also have my carefully crafted configuration preferences for Neovim, and wouldn’t be happy with codespaces it didn’t allow me to configure it. But for what you are telling me, they have done it in a smart way. Nice. And it’s nice that they had the people who work mostly in the terminal in mind when creating this. Neovim is a great editor right now, it has been such a fantastic evolution over Vim, adding a language server, for example. Cheers, thanks for replying.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#647
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…

The business incentive is quite easy. It is to evaluate code monkeys and to quantify development efficiency in the eyes of a salesmen, those that approve projects at Microsoft and possibly GitHub. They want to offer services to large corporate entities and they deem this valuable. Call it collaborative and something-cloud and you have your green-lit project.

The road is to quantify the work in small packages is a decent one though, dissect a problem until only trivial tasks remain.

Still, I think your intuition is pretty much on point. But with anything, just take the features you like. If your business can dictate this for you, search for other businesses. Contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of those, although pay might indeed be a bit lower.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, not /s. I’ve been pitched the TwoBobs Productivity Classifier. My feedback was anyone who needs it has classified themselves as an unproductive dev manager. I suggested the concept be made available as being by devs, for devs, purposed as a personal coach, with no uplink to the mothership.

> I suggested the concept be made available as being by devs, for devs, purposed as a personal coach, with no uplink to the mothership. Ah yes, the classic "foot in the door" approach. Despite all the good intentions behind it, it still would end badly.

As long as there's more demand than supply for SWE workers, something like that would never become the norm.

All of the dystopic news stories of WFH employees being subject to monitoring are invariably from fungible employees.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Do you have a right to privacy in the workplace? Back in the day the boss would be right there with you in the store etc and could watch you all the time. Or maybe this will be something that really only shows up in china etc? I think they are a bit further along on some of these types of things.

I prefer to say "they're a bit less developed on some of these types of things". Their attitude is still very much that of the Industrial Revolution, where a worker was no more than a replaceable meat unit with no rights and no expectations of a life of any kind outside of productive work.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how they added Github CLI[0], right? There may be a time where you must use Github CLI instead of a "standard" git client to interact with Github projects. That would be the "extinguish" phase. Right now they have embraced and are extending (such as with Github CLI). [0] https://cli.github.com/

If you wish to leverage the advanced features of github, the CLI gives you direct access rather than rolling your own api client. git will always be a first class citizen at GIThub.. but how do you open, close, or comment on PRs with a standard git client? Edit: The last part came across a bit snarky, but I’m trying to stimulate the thought process. Such as leveraging GitHub Actions to automate all aspects of PRs via…

As another commenter pointed out, we're at extend part of embrace, extend, extinguish. This part is just making Github tools work easier than non Github.

In extinguish phase - Git won't prevent GitHub from rejecting a commit if it doesn't contain .

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