Live data from Hacker News

Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

theregister.com

161–170 of 641 posts

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#161

IMHO, the main advantage of github is that it is an ecosystem. This is a well-thought-out Swiss knife: a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system, convenient issues, as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly. Having a sponsorship system is also great,…

I don't agree with this at all. I think the reason Github is so prominent is the social network aspects it has built around Git, which created strong network effects that most developers are unwilling to part with. Maintainers don't want to loose their stars and the users don't want to loose the collective "audit" by the github users. Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answ…

> Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha...

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#163

I don't get it, why did they allow GitHub bot to modify and merge pull request automatically? Yeah I agree that MS is ruining everything with AI, but this problem is avoidable, if they turn off the bot's auto merge feature, or turn it off completely. The reason they move to a lesser known Git provider sounds more like a marketing stunt.

> The reason they move to a lesser known Git provider sounds more like a marketing stunt.

We had technical problems that GitHub had no interest in solving, and lots of small frustrations with the platform built up over years.

Jumping from one enshittified profit-driven platform to another profit-driven platform would just mean we'd set ourselves up for another enshittification -> migration cycle later down the line.

No stunt here.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#164

To be fair this has more to do with Github Actions than Github, which from the beginning was never really going to rival any professional solution. The people at Zig should use proper CI tools and not something that a big service provider is offering as an afterthought.

Our CI workflow literally just invokes a plain old shell script (which is runnable outside CI). We really don't need an overcomplicated professional CI/CD solution.

One of the nice things about switching to Forgejo Actions is that the runner is lightweight, fast, and reliable - none of which I can say for the GitHub Actions runner. But even then, it's still more bloated than we'd ideally like; we don't need all the complexity of the YAML workflow syntax and Node.js-based actions. It'd also be cool for the CI system to integrate with https://codeberg.org/mlugg/robust-jobserver which the Zig compiler and build system will soon start speaking.

So if anything, we're likely to just roll our own runner in the future and making it talk to the Forgejo Actions endpoints.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is itself a marketing term that has begun to lose its luster. It’s rapidly becoming an annoying or trendy label, not a cutting edge one. Where have you been the last 15 years? However, I agree with your prediction. Coke making AI advertisements may have had cache a couple years ago, but now would be a doofus move.

I don’t remember AI being used as a widespread marketing term until 2-3 years ago. Before that it was just more of a vague tech thing you’d sometimes see, but now every single app seems to have reframed their business to be about AI agents.

There have been at least 3 waves of AI before the LLM generation. 70s , 80s and late 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

Early 2010s had a lot of neural networks AI stuff going on and it certainly became a minor hype cycle as well though that kind of resulted in the current LLM wave.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least he edited it to something more palatable. I vastly prefer someone who can admit to making a mistake and amending what they said to someone who doubles down. The latter attitude has become far too normalised in the last few years.

that attitude has and continues to approach a entire bloodless coup of the largest economy on the planet. The normalization, in fact, has been quite successful. The entire silicon valley has tacitly approved of it. You act like people arn't being rewarded for this type of behavior.

They didn't make any comment on effectiveness.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#167

IMHO, the main advantage of github is that it is an ecosystem. This is a well-thought-out Swiss knife: a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system, convenient issues, as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly. Having a sponsorship system is also great,…

> a well-formed CI system Man :| no. I genuinely understand the convenience of using Actions, but it's a horrible product.

Maybe I have low standards given I've never touched what gitlab or CircleCi have to offer, but compared to my past experiences with Buildbot, Jenkins and Travis, it's miles ahead of these in my opinion.

Am I missing a truly better alternative or CI systems simply are all kind of a pita?

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#168

IMHO, the main advantage of github is that it is an ecosystem. This is a well-thought-out Swiss knife: a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system, convenient issues, as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly. Having a sponsorship system is also great,…

I don't agree with this at all. I think the reason Github is so prominent is the social network aspects it has built around Git, which created strong network effects that most developers are unwilling to part with. Maintainers don't want to loose their stars and the users don't want to loose the collective "audit" by the github users. Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answ…

> Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality, and like it or not are now part of modern software engineering.

I hate that this is perceived as generally true. Stars can be farmed and gamed; and the value of a star does not decay over time. Issues can be automatically closed, or answered with a non-response and closed. Numbers of followers is a networking/platform thing (flag your significance by following people with significant follower numbers).

> Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more stars than its alternatives.

If anything, star numbers reflect first mover advantage rather than code quality. People choosing which one of a number of competing packages to use in their product should consider a lot more than just the star number. Sadly, time pressures on decision makers (and their assumptions) means that detailed consideration rarely happens and star count remains the major factor in choosing whether to include a repo in a project.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#169
Maybe this is a nice chance to ask, would you move from Gitlab to Github? I would say no, but some people in my org are proposing it, it seems to me simply because the integration it has with AI tools, but my experience has been worse in Github than with Gitlab.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#170
post #112

I think once Codeberg becomes federated, it will likely attract a lot of people. Right now github is great for discovering and tracking projects, reflecting growth via the star and fork system (although a bit broken in the last few years). If a federated layer is applied to these github alternatives, you could have an account in Codeberg, and be able to track lots of projects wherever people want to host them. Right…

+1 - I also see a huge opportunity for forgejo to become a new stackoverflow if they add federation

The primary issue with SO was that it was disconnected from the actual communities maintaining the project. A federated solution would be able to have the same network effects while handing ownership to the original community (rather than a separate SO branch of the community)

Post reply on HN