Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 386 posts

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#291

Post by aleph_minus_one »

tovej wrote: post #225
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads > What a waste. If you consider "what people (un-coercedly) spend money on" as "what people actually want", the situation gets obvious: People don't voluntarily spend money so that e.g. deep scientific questions are worked on or other things are done that are often claimed that "smart people should do". (by the way: a lot of problems…

Maybe resources shouldn't be distributed purely using a free market that can easily be manipulated, especially if the top dogs are allowed to use manipulative advertising and sales tactics.

> Maybe resources shouldn't be distributed purely using a free market that can easily be manipulated

Which kind of resource allocation do you suggest?

At least one can clearly tell that existing experiments with planned economies went really bad, so how do you want to overcome the problems that plagued existing big-scale experiments of planned economies?

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#292

Post by philipov »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #284
alsetmusic wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this? Capitalism (and it's demands of the market) at its finest.

You can be a capitalist without ruining your product.

Capitalism means ownership by investors, and it is the investors who ruin your product.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#293

Post by stuaxo »

arnvald wrote: post #215

I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…

Big company isn't good at {thing} absorb company who is and apply all their know how to the part that does {thing} killing all the good parts in the process.

Happens almost every time.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#294

Post by jmyeet »

arnvald wrote: post #215

I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…

This was inevitable once Microsoft wrote a check for $7.5 billion. You're not going to pay that much and not recoup your investment. You might say that they could've gotten it from existing income. Maybe that's true but it doesn't matter. Because you can get it faster by turning all the knobs to increase income and decrease costs.

Profit has a tendency to fall over time. A growing company can escape this for awhile by expanding their marketshare or expanding into new products. Eventually the only way to head this off is by raising prices and cutting costs.

Entshittification is fundamental to our system.

Consider this too: the people who are making decisions about Github's future have no investment in it's long term success. They're VPs, directors, managers and ICs who are simply trying to get promoted and get their bonuses by squeezing out short-term revenue. They'll be long gone before it all goes to shit.

It's almost like we have a distortion based on the workers' relationship to the means of production.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#295

Post by recursive »

philipov wrote: post #292
giancarlostoro wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be a capitalist without ruining your product.

Capitalism means ownership by investors, and it is the investors who ruin your product.

From my naive point of view, it's not clear from first principles why they must.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#296

Post by lazide »

arnvald wrote: post #215

I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…

Everyone is just figuring out again why Microsoft was so hated in the 90’s.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#297

Post by not_your_vase »

arnvald wrote: post #215

I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…

GitHub was sold because it didn't make too much money. Microsoft bought it for OpenAI only, to train Copilot on the vast amount of code.

Of course, MS every once in a while says that it makes a lot of money, but they don't really say how much is costs to keep it up. Their free tiers are still very generous, even they are buggy as hell - I can't imagine that the profit it makes even dents MS' bottom line (assuming it's not in the red). But at the end of the day the model training is done.

I guess Github doesn't have a lot of use anymore, beside having a lot of users that you can use to experiment with such shenanigans to see what can you get away with.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#299

Post by philipov »

recursive wrote: post #295
philipov wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism means ownership by investors, and it is the investors who ruin your product.

From my naive point of view, it's not clear from first principles why they must .

It's a version of the principal-agent problem, with the added wrinkle that principals have low barriers to exit. Both the management and investors share the incentive structure of a con artist.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#300

Post by Insanity »

not_your_vase wrote: post #297
arnvald wrote: post #215

I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…

GitHub was sold because it didn't make too much money. Microsoft bought it for OpenAI only, to train Copilot on the vast amount of code. Of course, MS every once in a while says that it makes a lot of money, but they don't really say how much is costs to keep it up. Their free tiers are still very generous, even they are buggy as hell - I can't imagine that the profit it makes even dents MS' bottom line (assuming it'…

GH being bought by MSFT way precedes their OpenAI involvement IIRC. And I don’t think it was even needed to train their models given Anthropic does fine without owning GitHub.

So this logic doesn’t pass the smell test to me.

EDIT: seems there was only a year in between them buying GH (2018) and investing in OpenAI (2019). So _maybe_ they had that foresight.

Post reply on HN