Am quite tired of the crying about copilot while everyone is fine with copying code snippets from stackexchange.
Give up GitHub: The time has come
161–170 of 585 posts
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#162> For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site. Just yesterday I had to explain the basic premise/history of Git to a young intern. I had asked him if he was using Git to manage his little pet project the company gave him to play with. “No”, he replied, he didn’t know what the company’s policy was to posting code in public on GitHub. As I explained to…
I actually (almost) got in trouble once for this because people thought I was posting code publicly on Github when I was merely creating a local repository in my home directory. I had to explain what Git was and how it was not Github.
We had an intern push code that shall never be released publicly to a public repository after we asked him to "push it to our gitlab server". He just assumed there was only one gitlab server and it was the public one, I guess.
That was a bit shocking to me. I started with local VCS only all the way up through school and work.
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Therefore, money should be shared. Isn't this sort of the expectation of these free services? They provide a service to you for free, and in exchange they are able to collect data from you, store it in a database, and do things with it. I fully expected GitHub to do something like this (minus Enterprise repos that pay big money), and it's why I stopped using them. I instead use gitbucket, which is a free and open s…
But I have written code which is hosted on GitHub which other people have uploaded and I have signed no agreement to let them do so. Does this mean all open source projects older than GitHub need to stop using it?
No idea at that point. If the code had a license that forbid reupload you could ask GitHub to remove it.
Otherwise that's the price of open source, you don't get to choose.
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#164> If it is, as you claim, permissible to train the model (and allow users to generate code based on that model) on any code whatsoever and not be bound by any licensing terms, why did you choose to only train Copilot's model on FOSS? For example, why are your Microsoft Windows and Office codebases not in your training set? This is my favorite question about Copilot ever.
My favorite answer is: if you included Microsoft source code the quality of suggestions drops below viable product.
This is a funny and flippant answer, but is also nonsense.
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#165> If it is, as you claim, permissible to train the model (and allow users to generate code based on that model) on any code whatsoever and not be bound by any licensing terms, why did you choose to only train Copilot's model on FOSS? For example, why are your Microsoft Windows and Office codebases not in your training set? This is my favorite question about Copilot ever.
My favorite answer is: if you included Microsoft source code the quality of suggestions drops below viable product.
Do you have any evidence for this?
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#166> “a broader conversation [about the ethics of AI-assisted software] seemed unlikely to alter your [SFC's] stance, which is why we [GitHub] have not responded to your [SFC's] detailed questions”
To be fair, there is a valid point here. If even one party has already made their conclusions and enters into a discussion with no willingness to even entertain ideas, instead just to fight their corner, then why would other parties willingly take part? We've all had those engineering discussions where no matter what is said, there are still engineers who refuse to entertain a concept. They're difficult and draining. I can see why the request would be refused if this was the case.
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#167I disagree with all of their reasons for disliking GitHub. * They make money from Co-Pilot? Great! * They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics. * They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.
> * They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.
That's a huge stretch for a few reasons. First, the reliability of GitHub.com is very poor and it has had tens of incidents in the past few months. Second, their hosted solution, GitHub Enterprise, is notoriously poor, difficult to maintain, always late with features. Third, their main competitor, GitLab, which is open core, was kicking their ass for years with features and quality until GitHub got the unlimited funds of Microsoft to be able to even come close. More to the point, there are tons of good quality open source software, and tons of really poor quality closed source. Openness of code matters little for quality (besides the fact that with open source at least you have the option to see why and fix).
Regarding Copilot, they're ignoring licenses, training models on everybody's code, and selling the result as a service. Sounds very sketchy.
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#168What Microsoft is doing with GitHub is gross. Like VSCode, it’s an example of exploiting our natural affinity towards convenience to lock ever-growing parts of the developer community to their services.
There are great FOSS tools for hosting source code like https://gitea.io/en-us/ and https://codeberg.org/. I’d put the work to self-host and even contribute to any of them.
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> refusal to use Git[1] due to its complexity I kind of like this friction. If a software developer finds git too complex, that’s an important signal that I should minimize my exposure to them. I’d never work in a team that dumb, and I wouldn’t want any dependencies on their code. Of course there are other reasons not to use git, but complexity is not one.
Does a typical enterprise need a distributed source control system? It makes a lot of sense for open source. Doesn't the uptake in Github which centralizes this distributed system kind of invalidate its main tenant? I haven't been a hundred percent sure the overhead was ever worth it at most other types of paid gigs over the years. Adding complexity without value is a mistake imo. Maybe it's my own fault I haven't se…
Do I need to run `log` without hitting the server? Yes. :(
Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come
#170I have no considered opinion on the GitHub thing in general, but Copilot depresses me. Any tool that makes you more productive at the cost of taking away the pleasure of figuring it out on your own bores and depresses me.
Do you feel the same way about high-level languages instead of writing your own assembly? How about using a bulldozer when a simple shovel could do? Copilot doesn't "do all the thinking for you", it's glorified autocomplete.