Do you know what doesn't collect telemetry?
the old git command in your terminal
I think I'll keep using that
GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
91–100 of 368 posts
Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think yes, because git famously has a terrible UI, and any amount of telemetry would quickly tell you people fumble around a lot at first. 1. git doesn’t have a UI, it’s a program run in a terminal environment. the terminal is the interface for the user. 2. git has a specific design that was intended to solve a specific problem in a specific way. mostly for linux kernel development. so, the UX might seem terrible…
"UI" is a category that contains GUI as well as other UIs like TUIs and CLIs. "UX" encompasses a lot of design work that can be distilled into the UI, or into app design, or into documentation, or somewhere else.
> “UX" encompasses a lot of design work that can be distilled into the UI
like how git needs you to “commit” changes as if you’re committing a change to a row in a database table? thats a design/experience issue to me, not an “it has commands” issue.
Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? No, because users have different needs and thoughts from the developers. And because sometimes it's hard to get good feedback from people. Maybe everyone loves the concept of feature X, but then never uses it in practice for some reason. Or a given feature has…
> I think yes, because git famously has a terrible UI, and any amount of telemetry would quickly tell you people fumble around a lot at first. 1. git doesn’t have a UI, it’s a program run in a terminal environment. the terminal is the interface for the user. 2. git has a specific design that was intended to solve a specific problem in a specific way. mostly for linux kernel development. so, the UX might seem terrible…
Mercurial was better than Git on almost any metric, it eludes me why it lost out to Git, perhaps because it lacked the kernel hacker aura, but also because it did not have a popular repository website with cute mascot going for it. Either way, tech history is full of examples of better designs not winning minds, due to cost, market timing, etc. And now with LLMs being trained on whatever was popular three years ago, we may be stuck with it forever.
Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're only flying blind if you make decisions not looking and thinking. Analytics isn't the only way to figure out "what your users actually care about", you can also try the old school way, commonly referred to as "Talking with people", then after taking notes, you think about it, maybe discuss with others. Don't take what people say at face value, but think about it together with your knowledge and experience, and…
We do both and they yield different learnings. They are complementary. We also have an issue tracking board with upvotes. I would say to your point that you can't improve what you don't measure.
I would say to your point that you can't not spy on me while also spying on me. Maybe just don't?
Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
#95Good for GitHub. All companies need this. Some use it to improve products, some use it for less commendable goals. I know HN crowd is allergic to telemetry but if you've ever developed a software as a service, telemetry is indispensable.
Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
#96The current century is the one of enshitification, like a cancer, now there is a whole generation of PM that it is totally ok and legitimate to update your product to add spying of your user's usage.
It might seems legit from them, but I'm quite sure that just listening to your user is enough. It is not like they lack an user base ready to interact with them or that they lack of bugs or features to work on.
In most cases, the telemetry is more a vanity metric that is rarely used. "Congratz to this team that did the flag that is the most used in the cli". But even for product decision, it is hard to extract conclusions from current usage because what you can and will do today is already dependent on the way the cli is done. A feature might not be used a lot because it is not convenient to do, or not available in a good way compared to an alternative, but usage report will not tell if it was useful or not. In the same way, when I buy a product, often there are a lot of features that I will never use, but that I'm happy to have. And I might not have bought the product, or bought another one if it was not available. But the worse would have the manufacturer remove or disable the feature because it is not used...
Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
#97Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…
It isn't only corporate development teams — open source development teams want to spy on their users, too. For instance, Homebrew: "Anonymous analytics allow us to prioritise fixes and features based on how, where and when people use Homebrew." [1] [1] https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics
Is it spying if:
1. It's anonymous
2. They're telling you they're doing it
3. You can opt out of it
Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because git famously has a terrible UI Thankfully, github has zero control over git. If they did have control they would have sank the whole operation on year one > because somebody would have looked at the stats and for instance have added "git restore" right from the very start, because "git checkout -- foo.txt" is an absolutely unintuitive command. How is git restore any better? Restoring what from when? At leas…
> How is git restore any better? Restoring what from when? At least git checkout is clear in what it does. And this is exactly where disconnects happen, and where you need telemetry or something like it to tell you how your users actually use the system, rather than imagining how they should. A technical user deep into the guts of Git thinks "you need to check out again this specific file". A novice thinks "I want to…
> A technical user deep into the guts of Git thinks "you need to check out again this specific file".
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the user base who are by design all technical, and the use case that this tool serves: deeply technical and specific actions to a codebase.
Git is not just software. It is also a vernacular about how to reason about code change. You can't just make arbitrary commands do magic stuff by default and then expect that vernacular to be as strong as it is today.
Those "ergonomics" you're asking for already existed in other tools like CVS and subversion, they are specifically why those tools sucked and why git was created.
Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
#99Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…
> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction? I'm not sure if you're implying it's obvious but it's not obvious to me that it would be unhelpful.
I think the seeing the underutilized commands and flags (with real data not just a hunch) would have helped identify where users were not understanding why they should use it, and could have helped refine the interface and docs to make it gradually more usable.
I mean no solution is perfect, and some underused things are just only sometimes extremely useful, but data used smartly is not a waste of time.
Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
We do both and they yield different learnings. They are complementary. We also have an issue tracking board with upvotes. I would say to your point that you can't improve what you don't measure.
I would say to your point that you can't not spy on me while also spying on me. Maybe just don't?
If I was running a physical business and I wrote down each person’s name and credit card number and the exact time and order they placed, that would be pretty invasive and “spying”. If I write down how many units I sold of each item per day, and the volume of transactions by credit card vs cash, it’s anonymized and I don’t think this would generally be considered “spying”, just normal business metrics. How’s the latter much different than anonymized product analytics?