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GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

cli.github.com

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Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#231

Post by halapro »

skydhash wrote: post #216
dualvariable wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git... Git has horrible design and ergonomics. It is an excellent example of engineers designing interfaces for engineers without a good feedback loop. Ironically, you just proved your point that engineers need to better understand how users are actually using their product, because their mental visualizations of how their product gets used is us…

> Git has horrible design and ergonomics. People say this and never has written about the supposed failure of design. Git has a very good conceptual model, and then provides operations (aptly named when you know about the model) to manipulate it. Most people who complains about git only think of it as code storage (folder {v1,v2,...}) instead of version control.

> never has written about

If you don't want to look at what people write you can't say that they haven't written about it.

> the supposed failure of design

I don’t think people complain about the internals of git itself as much as the complexity of all the operations.

If you want to read about complaints, you really don't have to look further than the myriad of git GUIs, TUIs and otherwise alternative/simplified interfaces.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#232

Post by Lammy »

johnfn wrote: post #103
embedding-shape wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision. Sometimes HN drives me crazy. From this thread you’d think telemetry is scre…

> and sending it to the government

It literally is. The network itself is always listening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

The mere act of making a network connection leaks my physical location, the time I'm using my computer, and the fact that I use a particular piece of software. Given enough telemetry endpoints creates a fingerprint unique to me, because it is very unlikely that any other person at the same physical location uses the exact same set of software that I do, almost all of which want to phone home all the goddamn time. It's the metadata that's important here, so payload contents (including encryption) don't even matter.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#233

Post by staticassertion »

embedding-shape wrote: post #65
Sytten wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

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…

It's sort of hilarious to compare "talking to people" with analytics. I'm not defending Github here, but you can't possibly think that "talking to 1M customers" is viable.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#234

Post by hombre_fatal »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #182
hombre_fatal wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking users isn't a substitute for usage data. Usage data is the ground truth. Soliciting user feedback is invasive, and it's only possible for some questions. The HN response to this is "too bad" but it's a thought-terminating response.

It goes the other way as well. Usage data isn't equivalent to asking users either. A solid percentage of bad decisions in tech can be traced to someone, somewhere forgetting that distinction and trusting usage data that says it's it's okay to remove because it's infrequently used.

Yeah, it's not a good discussion without concrete examples.

One: Building a good UX involves guesswork and experiments. You don't know what will be best for most users until you try something. You will often be wrong, and you rarely find the global maximum on the first try.

This applies to major features but also the most trivial UI details like whether users understand that this label can be clicked or that this button exists.

Two: Like all software, you're in a constant battle to avoid encumbering the system with things you don't actually need, like leaving around UI components that people don't use. Yet you don't want to become so terse with the UI that people find it confusing.

Three: I ran a popular cryptocurrency-related service where people constantly complained about there being no 2FA. I built it and polished a UX flow to both hint at the feature and make it easy to set up. A few months later I saw that only a few people enabled it.

Was it broken? No. It just turns out that people didn't really want to use 2FA.

The point being that you can be super wrong about usage patterns even after talking to users.

Finally: It's easy to think about companies we don't like and telemetry that's too snitchy. I don't want Microslop phoning home each app I open.

But if we only focus on the worst cases, we miss out on the more reasonable cases where thoughtful developers collect minimal data in an earnest effort to make the UX better for everyone.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#235

Post by almostjazz »

staticassertion wrote: post #233
embedding-shape wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

It's sort of hilarious to compare "talking to people" with analytics. I'm not defending Github here, but you can't possibly think that "talking to 1M customers" is viable.

You could survey a representative sample

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#236

Post by staticassertion »

almostjazz wrote: post #235
staticassertion wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sort of hilarious to compare "talking to people" with analytics. I'm not defending Github here, but you can't possibly think that "talking to 1M customers" is viable.

You could survey a representative sample

Not really. (a) People hate responding to surveys and hate emails, you're more likely to lose users than to get data (b) there's no way you're surveying people's in a way that gets you information like "time spent on a page" or "time between commits" or whatever.

This is just nonsense tbh. Surveys and customer outreach solve completely different problems from analytics.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#238

Post by waisbrot »

naikrovek wrote: post #200
grugdev42 wrote: post #38

Remember that thing Microsoft does? Embrace, extend, extinguish. The first two have been done. I give it five years before the GH CLI is the only way to interact with GitHub repos. Then the third will also be done, and the cycle is complete.

people that say things like this are exhausting. exhausting . You make it so very easy to classify you straight into the "looney" bin. People said that WSL was EEE for Linux. when that didn't happen, people said that WSL gaining GPU support was EEE. When that didn't happen, people said that WSLg was EEE for Linux. People said that Powershell was EEE for Windows. None of these happened. none of them even appear to hav…

I think the down-votes on this comment are too bad. It's legitimately funny to write a muli-paragraph rant in high dudgeon calling other people "exhausting".

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#239

Post by shevy-java »

Microsoft really wants people to stop using GitHub.

Hopfully the codeberg people can improve their UI - the UI is the single reason I still use github (and filing issues is super-simple). I could never handle gitlab because I hate their UI.

Note that GitHub is in the news in the last some months, negatively. I think we are seeing first wear-and-tear signs. If people are smart, this would be a time where real competition to Microsoft GitHub could work. GitHub without users would be dead. Microsoft seems unable to care - they sold their soul to AI. It is make-it-or-break-it for them now.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#240

Post by graphememes »

johnfn wrote: post #103
embedding-shape wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision. Sometimes HN drives me crazy. From this thread you’d think telemetry is scre…

You're never going to win this argument, most of the people who post here have never actually shipped a product themselves and only work on isolated features and others have to handle / manage all of this for them so they have no real understanding of what it takes to do it

the other crowd that pretends otherwise are larping or only have some generic open source project that only a handful of people use or they only update it every 6 years

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