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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

#261

Post by Calavar »

hyperpape wrote: post #183
bgwalter wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Version control has quickly won. It was so popular that people kept writing new systems all the time. CI was popular. Most major open source projects had their own CI systems before GitHub. "AI" on the other hand is shoved down people's throats by management and by those who profit from in in some way. There is nothing organic about it.

Version control is almost 50 years old. It has very slowly won. AI adoption is, for better or worse, voluntarily or not, very fast compared to other technologies.

Version control took a while because most early version control systems were brittle and had poor developer UX. Once we got mercurial and git and nice web UIs, the transition was actually pretty fast IMHO.

The same could be true for coding agents too, or maybe not. Time will tell.

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

#262

Post by madeofpalk »

AlexandrB wrote: post #44

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…

I don’t think a company marketing a product/feature is an indicator that it’s bad.

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

#263

Post by goku12 »

high_priest wrote: post #213
goku12 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off. For the sake of correctness, the concept of pull requests was not introduced by Github. It already existed in git in the form of the 'request-pull' subcommand. The fundamental workflow is the same. You send the project maintainer a message requesting a pull of your changes from your own online clone repo. The…

I am stunned by the fact at a 13+years old comment can be dug out, just like this, and presented as a valid argyment in a conversation. How some people, like you sir, are able to recall such minute events, is amazing.

> How some people, like you sir, are able to recall such minute events, is amazing.

Oh! That's easy. I forgot that it is 13+ years old! XD

Added later: Your comment made me look up more details about it. It was a widely discussed comment at the time. The HN discussion about it is as interesting as the comment itself [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960876

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

#264

Post by compiler-guy »

tines wrote: post #259
compiler-guy wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note also that it took, more or less, a hardware revolution in the form of RISC, to make compilers able to compete. A big piece of the RISC philosophy was to make it easier for compiler writers. They eventually got there, (and I expect AI will eventually get there too), but it took a lot of evolution.

Really? X86 isn’t RISC and it ruled the world during, not before, the time of compilers.

Lots of x86 assembly out there from that time period. Beating the compiler in the eighties and nineties was a bit of a hobby and lots of people could do it.

Modern ISA designers (including those evolving the x86_64 ISA) absolutely take into account just how easy it is for a compiler to target their new instructions. x86 in modern times has a lot of RISC influence once you get past instruction decode.

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

#265

Post by fragmede »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #260
chubot wrote: 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…

In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It seems like the whole thing was cancelled in 2023, written off, and the CEO was let go It was shut down because they had a collision that made front page news across the country which was followed by a cover-up. Their production lines were shut down, all revenue operations ceased, and the permits they needed to operate were withdrawn. It's not like the decision was…

Waymo's done 10M rides*. If we hand wave $10 per ride, that's $100M. Which is way more money than I have, but not all that much. It's still much bigger than $0 though!

* https://www.cbtnews.com/waymo-hits-10m-driverless-rides-eyes...

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

#266

Post by madeofpalk »

cmiles74 wrote: post #69
ants_everywhere wrote: post #6

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…

I have been paying them a monthly fee for private repositories for as long as I can remember.

Private repositories have been free for… 10 years?

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

#267

Post by 63stack »

3np wrote: post #80
progval wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of "inlined JSON on github.com pages"? I can't imagine what this looks like.

Not near an account right now but literally just "View Source" when signed in and search for "copilot" and it's there along some other feature-flags for the user in a JSON blob inside a script tag.

Not sure why this is downvoted, I just checked and I do see a json object inside a tag, that has all kinds of copilot related keys.

I checked my profile and copilot is enabled with a "lock" icon, I cannot disable it. I have never enabled it.

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

#268

Post by zahlman »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #252
benrutter wrote: post #59

Tangential, but I think github's secret weapon of inertia is. . .(drumroll) github stars. They're still seen by a lot of people as a sign of project maturity and use. My unfounded suspicion is if they all dissapeared tomorrow, people would be a lot more likely to try alternative code forges. I've been using codeberg of late, more because of their politics than anything, but in all honesty the user experience between…

I never understood going by stars when there's a much stronger signal in how many issues are being tracked and closed. Very easy to see if its software people actually use

> a much stronger signal in how many issues are being tracked and closed

This is a strong signal, but what it signals is confused. How much of it is the nature of the user base in actually reporting issues? Suppose the project receives regular fixes and issues are promptly closed on average — how much of that is because the project has to constantly respond to external factors, and how much is due to developers doing constant fire-fighting on an intrinsically poor design and not getting around to new functionality? Suppose there are lots of outstanding issues — how many of them are effectively duplicates that nobody's bothered to close yet?

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

#269

Post by kogasa240p »

AlexandrB wrote: post #44

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…

Because the current LLM hype bubble is due to Silicon Valley wanting another SaaS service to keep the VC money flowing.

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

#270

Post by bigstrat2003 »

crazygringo wrote: post #146
rossdavidh wrote: post #99

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…

> Change is always a hard sell to a lot of people, even when it benefits them.

You're assuming that the change is beneficial to people when you say this, but more often than not that just isn't true. Most of the time, change in software doesn't benefit people. Software companies love to move stuff around just to look busy, ruin features that were working just fine, add user hostile things (like forcing Copilot on people!), etc. It should be no surprise that users are sick of it.

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