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

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

#161

Post by latexr »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #150
latexr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ignoring the fact that your description is far from absolute (“society” isn’t a single thing; there are—and I’ve been in—smaller scale societies which do work together for the collective good) and that shrugging off the situation only makes it worse and never better, none of what you said contradicts my point. In fact, it only reinforces it; being a “best mind” isn’t supposed to be easy. You may excuse it, but there’s nothing laudable about deciding to be corrupt in a corrupt world, the opposite is true. The one who choses to do the right, moral, good, altruistic thing despite personal consequences is the one deserving of admiration.

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

#162

Post by aleph_minus_one »

gorgoiler wrote: post #87
imiric wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it. That's a false dichotomy. First of all, the technology is far from "free". It's easily accessible, perhaps, but users pay handsomely to use it, even if they're unaware of it, which most adtech companies go out of their way to ensure. Secondly, advertising isn't the only business mode…

It's hardly a black and white area, and there's more to this question than just GOOG, but there's a joke here that has some relevance: Those bastards have bled us dry with their algorithms, taken all the data we had, and not just from us, but from our children, our children's children, our children's children's children, our children's children's children's children... and what have they ever given us in return? The…

> Oh yeah, the phone OS! Remember what the flip phones used to be like?

Mobile phones were always tracking bugs, but smartphones/Android made the surveillance much worse.

> Global Street View coverage!

At least in Germany still a quite controversial topic.

> Chrome and Chromium

By Google's aggressive advertising, it took an insane amount of market share of the much more privacy-focused Firefox web browser.

> Docs and Sheets.

Better use some offline-first office suite.

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

#165

Post by skywhopper »

Updated to add on March 31: Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations, GitHub, said in a statement: "GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward."

Wow, well that is clearly a bald-faced lie.

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

#166

Post by skywhopper »

karel-3d wrote: post #124
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.

They were not ads though. The companies did not pay for those, from what I can tell. Microsoft seemed to really thought they were being helpful here.

“Ad” doesn’t mean “paid for”. A “tip” linking to some other place, injected into a place with no permission or context, is an “ad” in every meaningful sense (and if this “tip” system were left in place it would soon enough be turned into a pay-for explicit ad system). If someone at Microsoft deludes themselves that they are just trying to be helpful, that doesn’t change the impact and result of their actions.

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

#167

Post by latexr »

bnj wrote: post #158
latexr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I loathe that quote I thought this quote was a direct invocation of Howl / Ginsberg, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. Seen in that light I think there’s another layer to it.

At a certain point, quotes (like any other part of language) get a new meaning, sometimes the opposite of what they originally stood for. Like any popular saying, whatever they were in reference to is forgotten and they stand and are interpreted on their own.

It doesn’t matter what the quote used to invoke if no one using it is thinking of the invocation.

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

#170

Post by scbrg »

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…

Well, yes, that sentence definitely simplified matters a bit. The fact is though, that those who expressed concerns about Microsoft - in that particular thread, and in others - were generally ridiculed in roughly the tone I imitated in my original post.

Of course there were people raising concerns, though. I figured that was pretty obvious in my original post. If there hadn't been any people raising concerns, nobody would have had to dismiss them - condescendingly or not.

So yes, I (incorrectly) used the word "everyone" to mean "a lot of people" in a sentence where I figured it was quite obvious that that's what I was doing, and in a way I've seen it used before in English so many times that I thought it was a common and accepted pattern. Perhaps I am wrong about the last bit though. ESL speaker, so that's quite possible.

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