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GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

cli.github.com

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Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#271

Post by matheusmoreira »

graphememes wrote: post #240
johnfn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision. Sometimes HN drives me crazy. From this thread you’d think telemetry is scre…

You're never going to win this argument, most of the people who post here have never actually shipped a product themselves and only work on isolated features and others have to handle / manage all of this for them so they have no real understanding of what it takes to do it the other crowd that pretends otherwise are larping or only have some generic open source project that only a handful of people use or they only…

Nobody actually cares "what it takes to do it", that's not our problem. You're not entitled to knowing even a single bit of information about us without our consent. Try innovating a way to do it without spying on people.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#272

Post by codedokode »

staticassertion wrote: post #236
almostjazz wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could survey a representative sample

Not really. (a) People hate responding to surveys and hate emails, you're more likely to lose users than to get data (b) there's no way you're surveying people's in a way that gets you information like "time spent on a page" or "time between commits" or whatever. This is just nonsense tbh. Surveys and customer outreach solve completely different problems from analytics.

You can hire people to test your product and provide analytics. But not try to siphon the data for free.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#273

Post by mynameisvlad »

codedokode wrote: post #266
johnfn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision. Sometimes HN drives me crazy. From this thread you’d think telemetry is scre…

Why do you need to collect hardware fingerprint, IMEI, phone number, geolocation, list of nearby wifi access points, list of installed applications, selfie and passport photo when you can simply count how much times a server route was called?

That's a slippery slope and we both know it. Telemetry does not automatically include those things.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#274

Post by keybored »

Sytten wrote: post #161
jubilanti wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, it really is sad how literally unthinkable it is to you and so much of the industry that you could actually talk to your users and customers like human beings instead of just data points. And you know what happens when you reach out to talk to your customers like human beings instead of spying on them like animals? They like you more and they raise issues that your telemetry would never even think to measure. It…

You are inferring your own perception based on my comment, no need to be an asshole here. Like I said elsewhere we do both and they serve different purpose. We also make is very clear and easy to disable in the onboarding. I hope you try to build a business sometimes and open up your perspectives that maybe just maybe you don't have all the answers.

> You are inferring your own perception based on my comment, no need to be an asshole here.

People in this case are likely extrapolating based on how user data is harvested in the industry at large. So there is bound to be (very likely) some characterization that is unfair to you.

Given modern data aggregation, really data vacuuming, and that software is opaque, it can be really hard to trust anyone with any aggregation of data. They say that they pseudonymize properly. The proof? Trust them bro. Then read yet another news article about how some data aggregation was either sloppily leaked or just a front for selling data.

A natural response to opaque practices by people you don’t trust is a hardline no.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#275

Post by mynameisvlad »

Banditoz wrote: post #213
tornikeo wrote: post #95

Good for GitHub. All companies need this. Some use it to improve products, some use it for less commendable goals. I know HN crowd is allergic to telemetry but if you've ever developed a software as a service, telemetry is indispensable.

GitHub CLI is not a SaaS. It's a commandline utility.

That doesn't mean it doesn't have usage patterns or other things telemetry would be useful for. And, at the rate these tools are being updated (multiple times a week, multiple times a day in some cases), they practically _are_ SaaS.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#276

Post by xigoi »

staticassertion wrote: post #265
xigoi wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what user forums are for.

You can set up a user forum if you'd like. If you think it will get you the same information that analytics will, you're obviously wrong.

Kagi has a user forum (as well as listening to comments on other sites like Hacker News) and does not (at least supsosedly) collect telemetry. They seem to be doing fine when it comes to feedback.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#277

Post by staticassertion »

xigoi wrote: post #276
staticassertion wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can set up a user forum if you'd like. If you think it will get you the same information that analytics will, you're obviously wrong.

Kagi has a user forum (as well as listening to comments on other sites like Hacker News) and does not (at least supsosedly) collect telemetry. They seem to be doing fine when it comes to feedback.

Okay?

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#278

Post by staticassertion »

codedokode wrote: post #272
staticassertion wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. (a) People hate responding to surveys and hate emails, you're more likely to lose users than to get data (b) there's no way you're surveying people's in a way that gets you information like "time spent on a page" or "time between commits" or whatever. This is just nonsense tbh. Surveys and customer outreach solve completely different problems from analytics.

You can hire people to test your product and provide analytics. But not try to siphon the data for free.

I'm not taking a side on whether a product should add telemetry. I'm rejecting the absurd notion that these suggestions are at all giving the same information.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#279

Post by Barbing »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #273
codedokode wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need to collect hardware fingerprint, IMEI, phone number, geolocation, list of nearby wifi access points, list of installed applications, selfie and passport photo when you can simply count how much times a server route was called?

That's a slippery slope and we both know it. Telemetry does not automatically include those things.

Indeed it's not fair in discussion context, so wonder if it was meant as a statement on the ills of telemetry as a whole.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#280

Post by skydhash »

halapro wrote: post #231
skydhash wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git has horrible design and ergonomics. People say this and never has written about the supposed failure of design. Git has a very good conceptual model, and then provides operations (aptly named when you know about the model) to manipulate it. Most people who complains about git only think of it as code storage (folder {v1,v2,...}) instead of version control.

> never has written about If you don't want to look at what people write you can't say that they haven't written about it. > the supposed failure of design I don’t think people complain about the internals of git itself as much as the complexity of all the operations. If you want to read about complaints, you really don't have to look further than the myriad of git GUIs, TUIs and otherwise alternative/simplified inte…

> I don’t think people complain about the internals of git itself as much as the complexity of all the operations.

The complexity is only there when you want to avoid learning what you’re doing. Just like find(1) is complex if you don’t know stuff about the file system or sed(1) is complex if you don’t know regex and line based addresing of a text file.

A lot of people who are using git don’t want to know what a commit is and their relation to branches. And then they are saying rebasing is too complex.

> If you want to read about complaints, you really don't have to look further than the myriad of git GUIs, TUIs and otherwise alternative/simplified interfaces

Git is a cli. The goal is always for you to find your workflow then create aliases for common operations. It does assume that you want complete control and avoid doing magic (which is what jj is doing).

Wanting magic is great (I use magit which makes git magical ;) ) but it’s like wanting to fly a plane without learning the instruments.

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