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Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

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Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#241
post #130
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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People believe what they want. Ergo they side with the people who state that those beliefs are true, makes them feel good. Listening to experts who know better and oppose the held beliefs makes the believers feel bad, ergo they won't believe them.

Sometimes it is good to disregard the opinion of experts who are absolutely sure something can't be done, might by a prerequisite to making it happen.

The four minute mile comes to mind.

Beliefs are powerful, they can enable you to reach goals, become prisons of the mind trapping you or become delusions when feedback is disregarded.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#242
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh yes, capitalists noteworthy haters of building trains. If you ignore the private companies that built the NYC subway system(s), all of US freight rail, and invented trains.

It's no coincidence all your examples are over 100 years old lol. The rise of the individual automobile (a very lucrative business proposition in many aspects) was done alongside massive sabotage of competing alternatives, with the disastrous consequences that are today plain. It's also no coincidence America has built no rail in many decades while centrally planned China built a massive HSR network in the past 15 ye…

Do you have any references?

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of "fork" predates GitHub as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)

Yeah, it's an older term but forking in that sense is a pretty big deal. GitHub fork is just a button press and can be done basically automatically when you are interested in a repo.

Ah okay I see what you mean

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#244
post #12

I read this article and then looked at my Github and a few other projects and found no issues created by Copilot. As someone else has said they need to be triggered manually, so therefore it's the same sort of problem as with the Curl project bug bounty, where people would be spamming with automatically LLM generated fictional problems. In that case because there's a potential for money to be made, and in the Github…

Whether or not Github themselves create these issues or pull-requests, some bunch of folks will do that (manually) for sure. I mean the Hacktoberfest is coming soon, so is the low-quality typo-fixes. Since now there is Claude-Code, Cursor et. al, I am really curious how people are gonna fight with the pull-request spam. Especially open-source projects which claim they do not accept LLM generated content.

P.S: Most people just do it either to "light-up" their Github profile for job applications or just to get cheap swag...

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#245

People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now. And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source. This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one. Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to…

Didn't sourceforge used to be the most friendly open source place then they did something which I forget which got them binned. I think the problem with Github is the low barrier to entry for another open source hosting entity if the typical MICROS~1 action of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish were practiced on GH.

SorgeForge started injecting adware into binaries distributed via their platform. They had been on a downward trajectory for a while, but after they started doing that they fell of a cliff.

I worked for a company that used the on-prem version of their forge back in the 00s, I remember liking it alot. It felt novel, cool and useful to have fully interlinked bug tracking, version control, documentation, project management and release management.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#246
post #101
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Honestly I think the same thing happened with self-driving cars ~10 years ago. Larry Page and Google's "submarine" marketing convinced investors and CEOs of automakers and tech companies [1] that they were going to become obsolete, and that Google would be taking all that profit. In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It se…

Also, I think Hacker News mostly believed the hype about self-driving cars, with relatively little pushback. Many people were influenced by what the CEOs/investors said, and of course the prospect of jobs and "cool tech" e.g. in 2018, over 7 years ago, I was simply pointing out that people like Chris Urmson (who had WORKED ON self-driving for decades) and Bill Gurley said self-driving would take 25+ years to deploy (…

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Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince.…

> it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell Writing unit tests where needed makes you more productive in the long run. Writing in modern languages makes you more productive. Remember how people writing assembly thought compiled languages would rot your brain! But people just resist change and new ways of doing things. They don't care about actual productivity, they care a…

To the contrary, people resist change for good reasons: changes to tools rob attention and focus from the work, often for completely arbitrary or decorative reasons. Sometimes changes remove or break important aspects of the tool and force someone to waste time developing a new workflow which is, on average, no better than the previous one. It is vanishingly rare that the software team making the changes in question did sufficiently rigorous testing to show that the new version is a net "benefit" for most users of the software; they don't have time for that. All too often, no significant group of users was even consulted about the changes, which were made for reasons like advancing someone's career ("shipped X feature changes") or looking different for the sake of marketing something merely re-arranged as new ("the old style was so 2018").

The teams making changes to software are, on average, moderately worse than the teams who originally developed the software, if only because they missed out on the early development experience, and often don't fully understand the context and reasons for the original design and don't reason from first principles when making updates, but copy the aspects they notice superficially while undermining the principles they were originally established on.

Even when the changes are independently advantageous, it is common for changes to one part of a system to gratuitously break a variety of other parts that are dependent on it. Trying to manage and fix a complex web of inter-dependent software which is constantly changing and breaking is an overwhelming challenge for individual humans, and unfortunately often not a sufficient priority for groups and organizations.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#248

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

> if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it.

Microsoft is a software company. They wouldn't have released this to begin with to have an extreme competitive edge!

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince.…

> it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell Writing unit tests where needed makes you more productive in the long run. Writing in modern languages makes you more productive. Remember how people writing assembly thought compiled languages would rot your brain! But people just resist change and new ways of doing things. They don't care about actual productivity, they care a…

> "Remember how people writing assembly thought compiled languages would rot your brain!"

No, I don't remember that and I've been around awhile. (I'm sure one could find a handful of examples of people saying that but one can find examples of people saying sincerely that the earth is flat.) It was generally understood that the code emitted by early, simple compilers on early CISC processors wasn't nearly as good as hand-tuned assembly code but that the trade-off could be worthwhile. Eventually, compilers did get good enough to reduce the cases where hand-tuned assembly could make a difference to essentially nothing but this was identified through benchmarking by the people who used assembly the most themselves.

If you want to sell us on change, please stop lying right to our faces.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else. It wasn’t an entirely new idea (source forge?) but it use git which was rising in popularity. I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off. Oddly I used selfhosted git at an academic institution. I liked it because it was set up to use “hooks” https://git-scm.com/…

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off. Negative. The only thing GitHub added to the parlance is "forks" which are essentially like namespaced branches in the same repo.

How about an issue tracker that reacts to commit messages and pull requests?
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