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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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not pedantic, it's the very issue being discussed. And there have been plenty of enthusiastic devs regarding LLM's. And the idea that "until a consensus is reached" is just not true. These practices are often adopted with 1/3 of devs on board and 2/3 against. The whole point of top-down directives is that they're necessary because there isn't broad consensus among employees. It was the same thing with mobile-fir…

Do you know a lot of devs who, having tried VCS, were against it?

I lived through the transition, so absolutely.

Early VCS was clunky and slow. If one dev checked out some files, another dev couldn't work on them. People wouldn't check them back in quickly, they'd "hoard" them. Then merges introduced all sorts of tooling difficulties.

People's contributions were now centrally tracked and could be easily turned into metrics, and people worried (sometimes correctly) management would weaponize this.

It was seen by many as a top-down bureaucratic Big Brother mandate that slowed things down for no good reason and interfered with developers' autonomy and productivity. Or even if it had some value, it wasn't worth the price devs paid in using it.

This attitude wasn't universal of course. Other devs thought it was a necessary and helpful tool. But the point is that tons of devs were against it.

It really wasn't until git that VCS became "cool", with a feeling of being developer-led rather than management-led. But even then there was significant resistance to its new complexity, in how complicated it was to reason about its distributed nature, and the difficulty of its interface.

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

#292

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

Yeah, this is the first thing I check, and also I verify a few closed ones to understand how they were handled.

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

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Google's Gemini LLM, the energy impact is negligible, with the average prompt consuming the equivalent energy of just three seconds of a microwave's operation.

All those data centers full of GPUs aren’t running on solar or wind power.

I did a bit of research on the environmental impact with regards to the United States. Recent numbers suggest that ChatGPT handles about 2.5 billion prompts per day worldwide, with roughly 330 million of those coming from the United States. Since the U.S. population is about 335 million, that works out to about one prompt per person per day on average, though actual users issue several times more.

On the energy side, Google recently estimated that an average Gemini inference consumes around 0.24 Wh, which is roughly the same as running a microwave for a single second. Older rule-of-thumb comparisons put the figure closer to 3–6 seconds of microwave use, or about 0.8–1.7 Wh per prompt. If you apply those numbers to U.S. usage, you get somewhere between 79 MWh and 550 MWh per day nationally, which translates to only a few to a few dozen megawatts of continuous load. Spread across the population, that works out to between 0.09 and 0.6 kWh per person per year — just pennies worth of electricity, comparable to a few minutes of running a clothes dryer. The bigger concern for the grid is not individual prompts but the growth of AI data centers and the energy cost of training ever-larger models.

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

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Google's Gemini LLM, the energy impact is negligible, with the average prompt consuming the equivalent energy of just three seconds of a microwave's operation.

How much energy is otherwise consumed by a Google search?

I’m not entirely sure, since it seems that a very slimmed-down version of Gemini has been attached to search. It’s definitely not the full Gemini 2.5-Pro that engineers use to carefully reason through answers. Instead, it relies mostly on tool calling to stitch together a response.

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

#295
post #67
post #60

I've had an ongoing support ticket with GH for several months now asking them to actually disable Copilot, as there is Copilot all over and it's clear from inlined JSON on github.com pages when signed in that my account is actually opted in to Copilot features despite Settings page saying features should be disabled. I've never ever opted in to anything related to GH AI and am not a vscode user. They keep closing the…

Please point to the ticket so we can add to your voice.

GitHub Support tickets are private and not publically sharable.

I did mention it in this Discussions thread a while back (which the support agent at one point in July hilariously linked me to asking if I had read, making it clear they hadn't done so themselves).

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/147437#discuss...

Initial support response mentioned here:

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/147437#discuss...

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

#296

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…

There are websites to buy stars :D It's like fake reviews.

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

#297

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 think it's a lot harder of an OSS project not hosted on GitHub to find contributors and gain traction in general. Network effect, as always.

It's the way I want it to be honest. Keeps the low effort garbage away for the moment.

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not being flippant or contrary. What does "bootstrapped" mean in this context? I feel like I've never really understood it as a metaphor.

It means they paid for their expenses with their revenue, as opposed to venture capitalist investments.

Thank you very much!

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple car project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project >From 2014 until 2024, Apple undertook a research and development effort to develop an electric and self-driving car,[1] codenamed "Project Titan".[2][3] Apple never openly discussed any of its automotive research,[4] but around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the project as of 2018.[5] In May 2018, Apple reportedly partnered with Volksw…

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