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If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#291

Post by NegativeK »

_pdp_ wrote: post #163

Rather than defending this absurd decision, GitHub could instantly win back trust by admitting they f*** up and reversing it entirely. If they want to incentivise people to contribute their sources and copilot sessions, they could easily make it opt-in on a per-repository basis and provide some incentive, like an increased token quota. This is not hard.

AI is maximizing the move fast and break things approach, including not asking for permission from its userbase.

It's consistent with believing that AI is the future -- if a company doesn't perform really well, it loses that race. And if the userbase they piss off is also the userbase that's skeptical about AI, then they're not pissing off anyone that's relevant to the company winning.

Downside: Pissing off users is gross.

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#292

Post by kelnos »

thot_experiment wrote: post #30
cj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: Okay, sounds like you guys are pissed to the point where it seems like the pro tip here is to stop using GitHub. Pro tip: sign up for the business/enterprise version when reasonable in price. I do this with Google Workspace. You can also do it with GitHub. (Google doesn’t train on Workspace, Github doesn’t train on business customers, etc)

Probably don't reward extortion with money.

You don't have to use their free service if you don't like its terms. "Extortion" is a bit of an exaggeration here.

Yes, I know, it's dicey when people get used to a nice, friendly platform, and the platform gains lots of users, and then at some point (or several points), the terms start getting worse, and people feel misled and betrayed.

I get that. But this is a corporation. Hell, this is Microsoft. It's hilarious how many people think they've actually changed since their antitrust judgment in the 90s. I guess a lot of folks here are too young to remember it, even.

Companies exist to make money. If they are giving you something for free, they are either a) getting something else out of it already, or b) giving it to you for free now and looking for ways to get their own value out of it later. I don't mean that in some sort of cynical, "fuck the world" sense; that's just reality, and that's fine, for the most part.

If you don't like this, don't use free services provided by corporations. Host your own. Yes, I know it can cost money. Yes, I know it's more work. But that's life. TANSTAAFL.

I've had a VPS running for a couple decades on a small provider. These days it costs me a little under $200/year. Much cheaper options exist. I run a web server, gitea instance, matrix homeserver, and a slew of other things on it. It requires very little maintenance because I just run Debian stable on it, keep up with security updates, but otherwise leave it alone. It backs up the important stuff to S3 using duplicity, but -- knock on wood -- I've never had a catastrophic failure that required a restore in the ~20 years its been running.

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#293

Post by salawat »

bdangubic wrote: post #165

That training will be like “OMG this is horrible… WAIT I wrote this shit”

God, there's always that moment when you see the most shit code on earth, just as you're typing "git blame" and you just start chanting "please don't be me".

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#295

Post by fragmede »

abustamam wrote: post #288
chistev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like when people make sarcastic remarks and sign off in a way that indicates it was sarcasm. It kills it for me. Lol. Like using that /s or using that smiling emoji sign you used. A good joke would land even if some other people miss it because of the text format. "Microsoft would never do this" would have landed for me.

I think the sarcasm indicator is useful especially for some neurodivergent folks who may not pick up on social cues well. And the sacram indicator does not in any way detract from the joke.

Yeah it does. If you have to explain the joke, it makes it not funny. In the real world, people don't have explicit sarcasm markers, you have up deduce it. As a neurodivergent person, I reflexively downvote on /s because coddling people isn't going to help them grow or deal with the real world.

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#296

Post by [deleted] »

jamiek88 wrote: post #261
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, of course, and I find it frustrating that people are so thick as to not see your claim as obvious. Stallman is always right.

About technology. About communication with other humans he’s pretty much always wrong. Imagine we’d had a better communicator who wasn’t a gross toe nail picking troll fronting free software? It shouldn’t matter. Only the ideas should matter . But the reality is different.

[deleted]

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#297

Post by encrypted_bird »

kriops wrote: post #244
encrypted_bird wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, alternatively, self-host a gitea instance!

No. Money-grab incoming. Use forgejo.

Huh? Care to elaborate how Gitea is an inevitable cashgrab? Sure, it's not strictly copyleft, but it is licensed with the MIT License, and that is also the most popular license on GitHub.

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#298

Post by x0x0 »

layer8 wrote: post #253
x0x0 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For personal data. I don't believe you can reasonably claim code is personal data any more than a hammer is your personal data.

Every Git commit is likely to contain personal data, in the form of the author’s name and email address usually present in a commit’s metadata. Furthermore, unless GitHub is prohibiting users from submitting personal data via their ToS (which, given the above, would be impractical), the only thing that matters is whether the data in fact contains personal data or not. GitHub cannot just assume that it doesn’t. And pr…

Since commits aren't code, that's no problem.

The idea that because any piece of code could possibly contain some personal data -- while 99.99% of it doesn't -- that therefore the entirety is PD is not supported by the gdpr. You could as well say any text field anywhere can hypothetically have someone type their name and is thus personal data as well.

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#299

Post by sellmesoap »

abustamam wrote: post #285
sellmesoap wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Soviet Russia, Microsoft is the shit!

As opposed to other places where Microsoft is just shit? :)

It's my favorite slow burn, 'the shit' is a good thing, but everything is backwards in Soviet Russia...

Re: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

#300

Post by itsdesmond »

tryauuum wrote: post #277
itsdesmond wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He argued against EU proposals for ISPs to filter CSAM on the basis of protecting free expression. Not always right about technology, either.

Mass scale internet censorship in Russia also started with the premise of "protecting the children" When you put in law that ISPs should adhere to some government-provided blocklist, this is already a game over. No matter how sane your government is. The government in 10 years might be vastly different, and the ability to control the ISPs is too alluring to not abuse I'd rather live in a world where you could find wo…

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