Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 386 posts

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#141

Post by aleph_minus_one »

yosamino wrote: post #4

Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means. They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people. This really is the quote of the century: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads What a waste.

> > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads

> What a waste.

If you consider "what people (un-coercedly) spend money on" as "what people actually want", the situation gets obvious:

People don't voluntarily spend money so that e.g. deep scientific questions are worked on or other things are done that are often claimed that "smart people should do".

(by the way: a lot of problems that are claimed that "we need smart people to solve" actually don't need smart people (i.e. the problem could be solved by raw intelligence), but are rather "political" problems, i.e. problems of manipulating people).

I wish it was different, but before you claim that it is a waste that "the best minds are thinking about how to make people click ads", you should better find an idea what these people should do instead.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#142

Post by latexr »

sph wrote: post #135
latexr wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ca. everyone here Every time someone claims “everyone on HN thought X”, I go back to check and find out that it was not true and that the discussions had both people in favour and against. Every time. But this case is particularly bad, I’m checking the top voted comments and so far the feeling is of dread and wariness, the complete opposite of what you claim. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286 I really w…

This common trend of invoking the goomba fallacy is a thought-terminating way to excuse and justify away any popular opinion. Even if single individuals have different opinions, the common sentiment on the forum was that Microsoft of 2010s was not Ballmer’s Microsoft, and the unsavoury anticompetitive behaviours had been done away with.

> the common sentiment on the forum was that Microsoft of 2010s was not Ballmer’s Microsoft, and the unsavoury anticompetitive behaviours had been done away with.

Maybe it was a common sentiment, but clearly not the. Again, we can see from that acquisition thread that people were wary of it. The second top post even makes Microsoft seem like a domestic abuser.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#143

Post by blitzar »

adrianN wrote: post #83
janalsncm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to push back a little, I think if the U.S. did now what they did to Germany and Japan in WW2 it would be unconscionable. They are getting a lot of flak for bombing a school. But I think it’s fair to say there were a lot of schools in Dresden and Hiroshima. This isn’t to excuse anything but to say there has been progress even if it’s not as fast as we’d like. As far as the technology angle, the precision we have…

To be fair, Germany and Japan started the whole thing and were pretty determined not to lose easily.

Germany and Japan were conducting pre-emptive defensive special military operations.

If Japan had managed to secure the US uranium 250,000 innocent civilians would not have been vaporised in the two greatest disturbances in the force in all humanity.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#144

Post by kelnos »

scbrg wrote: post #6

"You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now." -- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition

I've had so many discussions with friends over the past 15 or so years where they've praised Microsoft and their embracing of open source, and have given me a hard time for continuing to distrust them. To be fair, I was a teenager in the 90s, and a huge computer nerd who followed the MS antitrust case very closely; quite a few of these friends are 5-7 years younger, rendering them a bit too young at the time to experience that going on in real-time.

But damn... I enjoy a good "I told you so" as much as the next guy, but most of the time it sucks to be right.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#145

Post by kelnos »

latexr wrote: post #127
scbrg wrote: post #6

"You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now." -- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition

> ca. everyone here Every time someone claims “everyone on HN thought X”, I go back to check and find out that it was not true and that the discussions had both people in favour and against. Every time. But this case is particularly bad, I’m checking the top voted comments and so far the feeling is of dread and wariness, the complete opposite of what you claim. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286 I really w…

So it's true that the several of the top topmost comments are anti-MS or at least worried, but there are plenty of replies to those that are defending MS. A few of them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17229625

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17229775

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227447

I don't think it's safe to say that the prevailing opinion there is one of concern.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#146

Post by aleph_minus_one »

nextaccountic wrote: post #114
yosamino wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I'm well aware of how an LLM works (partially. mostly anyway), but if you pulled in any layperson from the street and ask them to explain how it's possible that they can speak natural language commands into their phones and get a useful response as if they were talking to a human, you'd be hard pressed to get a more precise answer than along the lines > It's something with to do with data, and I know it's n…

Data is like mana, LLMs are like djinns, and prompts are like incantations This reminds me the introduction of SICP https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b... > We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed…

> software couldn't be called intelligent - they just follow rules!

Software from this time wasn't intended to be highly non-deterministic as LLMs - and this was seen as a feature.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#147

Post by zvqcMMV6Zcr »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #91
synack wrote: post #11

Yet Sourceforge has been putting ads on open source projects for decades.

Ironically, that's what probably killed Sourceforge and helped GitHub take off. It remains to be seen whether Codeberg will now repeat the process.

SF required application form, where you had to explain why you are worthy to have your git repo hosted by SF. By the time they processed it I already forgot I even applied. I think that was actual reason for them being destroyed by GitHub, that had simple, fully automated signup.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#150

Post by matheusmoreira »

latexr wrote: post #122
yosamino wrote: post #4

Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means. They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people. This really is the quote of the century: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads What a waste.

> sorry about the tangent I understand why you felt the need to do it, but it’s still sad that you have to apologise for it. It’s not like if using technology for killing is a fringe hypothesis, it’s happening right now and on the news. It’s a discussion worth having. > This really is the quote of the century I loathe that quote. The people thinking about how to make others click ads are only concerned with themselve…

So when is society gonna start thinking of us in return? Where are our rewards?

It's a rotten world out there. Everything is corrupt. Taking the moral high ground is an enormous sacrifice. In the best case scenario, society will just laugh at you for it. Chances are they will actually fight you since your moral stand will probably get in the way of their profitable schemes.

I find it increasingly hard to blame people for playing the game. The reality is that the honest man is punished while the corrupt man is rewarded.

Post reply on HN