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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#521
post #486

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Forcing people to run JavaScript does not guarantee that Analytics or Ads will run as these might get blocked by DNS, Extensions or even the browser itself. I understand the need for them but I don't think it excuses the need to run JavaScript to see text. By the way Hacker News has ads on their main page and the website works perfectly without JavaScript, and even better with it enabled! IMO the job of JavaScript is…

> Forcing people to run JavaScript does not guarantee that Analytics or Ads will run as these might get blocked by DNS, Extensions or even the browser itself. True for power users on PCs, but keep in mind that many users use smartphones [0] and tablets nowadays to access websites. The possibilities to block analytics and ads are severely limited on these devices. JS is also sometimes used to "protect" content from sc…

Firefox on Android has uBlock Origin available.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#522
post #104

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Gitea (and a few others) are working on federation for pull requests, which would allow someone to fork your project to their own server, and send a pull request offering you to merge from their server into yours. It also builds on top of ActivityPub which is supposed to allow federation with the greater ActivityPub ecosystem ("fediverse"). I guess this would allow people to like or comment your issue or pull request…

> I am not that excited about that last part, but federating pull requests sounds like a killer feature Git already has a pull request feature [1] that's as federated as it can get. The 'request-pull' command can be used to request pull on upstream repositories hosted anywhere (or not at all). The only requirement is that the downstream clone must be online. I know that HN isn't particularly found of email-based work…

A pull request on a Git hosting platform is much more though. It allows commenting, tracking versions of the branch, and showing the diff. Even if the pull request is denied, those comments and the diff will stay available for all to see.

You can replicate that with email with a patch-based workflow, if you have a mailing-list server with public archives. That is not that much less software, and you have to deal with email deliverability etc.

Simply sending someone a git-request-pull doesn't carry anything for posterity. It contains a link to some place that hopefully contains the changes at one point (if you typed it right, git does no validation), but probably won't contain them for long.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do get to choose what license you release under and people need to respect that license - ML code laundering or not.

I'm aware, that doesn't contradict what I just said at all.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#524
post #199

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I don't think it's fair to frame this as specific to GitHub, or even as a thing to wring hands over. New devs - especially those coming from bootcamps (I say this without judgement) - mostly start with practical skills. Industry-standard ways to just get things done. That's how you get a job, that's how you get off the ground. This goes beyond source-control; languages/frameworks, tooling, etc. You enter the territor…

There is absolutely a need for moral panic if, like me, you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into the profession. I can't think of a worse idea than subconsciously letting the idea "By default, the way we are supposed store and write code is by putting it in the hands of a deeply centralized third party that will exploit you and owes you nothing" just sor…

The ins and outs of version control solves a problem that has not yet existed for an intern. It’s not that big a deal to train them on the job, industry practices probably don’t map well to academic settings anyhow.

Not to mention that git is plagued with, as a general rule, utterly confusing defaults for a newbie (and for me, when setting up a machine without my config files!)

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#525

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That's still 100% true of the examples I mentioned. There's always a higher level to consider. When we moved to C, we could stop worrying about what registers we were using. When we moved to python/Java we could stop worrying about managing memory. When we moved to web frameworks we stoping writing the guts of our servers. And if anything, programmers have become even better paid, despite so many more people in the i…

I agree with you--however, programmers have not become even better paid because society values programmers. They have become better paid because software is a relatively new artefact in human society which has taken the human life by storm, which has made software companies immensely profitable, which meant more companies wanted to create software and attract the people that could help them do it. As software takes a…

AI can code low level stuff. This one function. This small piece of logic. What it can't do is conceive of how to take a bunch of different functions and put them together to produce an actual product. It can't tell you if you should use postges or mongo. Programmers will always be needed, we'll just move up the stack, and we'll produce more value per hour of our work, justifying our high salaries.

Compare the visible output of someone writing in assembly vs someone writing on top of a modern web framework. Is assembly harder? Yeah. But the web framework is going to give you a usable product in a fraction of the time with way more features. And that's worth more money to the company you work for.

It's always going to be a knowledge worker's job. It's always going to reward experience and creativity and attention to detail. A lot of programming is looking at the world, seeing a gap in what exists, and figuring out what best fits that gap. An AI can't do that. Programming is making 1000 tiny decisions that can't possibly be specified completely by a product manager and need a human to weigh the tradeoffs.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#526

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> Forcing all of your code to be GPL is like saying “I am on a diet, so now I will force everyone else be on the same diet. Freedom!” Nobody is forcing anyone to use the code. If they chose to use it they have to abide by the licensing terms because that’s how it works. If the people laboring for free to produce this code don’t want it to be used in a proprietary application then tough luck, write the code yourself.…

> Nobody is forcing anyone to use the code. until the time comes when a tax department gets the funny idea to use it, and forced you to use it, or people with guns come to your door and haul you away in the morning. (edit: formatting)

Do you have an example of someone being forced to incorporate GPLed code into their software at gunpoint, or is this a wildly hypothetical scenario?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “If you look at the GitHub Terms of Service, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features,” [Kate] Downing, [an IP lawyer specializing in FOSS compliance] says. “So with respect to code that’s already on GitHub, I think the answer to the question of copyright infringement is fairly straightforward.” This has some interesting…

How so? I'm not seeing any language in there that implies exclusivity...

Presumably because you don't have the right to grant github those permissions, only the copyright owner does.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#528
post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is not the author of the software that copilot helps produce. the person sitting at the keyboard using copilot is the author.

How is copilot not the author?

Copilot is software, it can't be the author, just like the OS isn't the author when you copy and paste. Authors have to be humans.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#529
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The boring answer is probably something along the lines of “copilot was trained by employees of OpenAI who aren’t technically MS employees”. When I worked at MS you had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get access to code from other orgs. I can’t imagine what BS you’d need to do to give access to a vendor.

> you had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get access to code from other orgs This may be the dumbest move from M$ that I have read on this thread! Sure, companies need to protect their private IP, but this really feels like creating unnecessary friction for no good reason...

Once you are large enough, you realize there will be some people joining a company with bad intentions?
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