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Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

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Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#341

Post by testdelacc1 »

philwelch wrote: post #290
testdelacc1 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Linus doesn’t act that way anymore. Here’s him a few years ago: > This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. > Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically…

Yeah, that didn’t last. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wjLCqUUWd8DzG+xsOn-yVL0Q=...

If you’ll notice, he called the code garbage, not the author. Judging by how bad the code was, I think this interaction was fine. This actually shows the progress Linus made in improving himself.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#342

Post by latexr »

zero0529 wrote: post #265
ants_everywhere wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as someone who has been cautioning about Microsoft's ownership of GitHub for years now... but the Zig community has been high drama lately. I thought the Rust community had done themselves a disservice with their high tolerance of drama, but lately Zig seems to me to be more drama than even Rust. I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I coul…

I agree partially. I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward whether you like it or not. And honestly who cares, either it is a good ressource for learning or it’s not. You have to decide that for yourself and not based on whether AI helped writing it. However I think some of the critique was because he stole the code for the interactive editor and…

> I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward whether you like it or not.

The bigger issue is that they claimed no AI was used. That’s an outright lie which makes you think if you should trust anything else about it.

> And honestly who cares, either it is a good ressource for learning or it’s not. You have to decide that for yourself and not based on whether AI helped writing it.

You have no way of knowing if something is a good resource for learning until you invest your time into it. If it turns out it’s not a good resource, your time was wasted. Worse, you may have learned wrong ideas you now have to unlearn. If something was generated with an LLM, you have zero idea which parts are wrong or right.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#343

Post by jmull »

jack_pp wrote: post #194
testdelacc1 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least he edited it to something more palatable. I vastly prefer someone who can admit to making a mistake and amending what they said to someone who doubles down. The latter attitude has become far too normalised in the last few years.

Is political correctness necessary to have a thriving community / open source project? Linux seems to be doing fine. I wouldn't personally care either way but it is non-obvious to me that the first version would actually hurt the community.

What does any of this have to do with political correctness?

Not being a dick is quite a different thing than political correctness.

Makes me wonder how much to the mass strife and confusion of the internet is simply down to people not knowing what the words they use mean?

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#344

Post by Sammi »

gilrain wrote: post #236
Sammi wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it because the s in iot stands for security? I'm asking genuinely. Where are these requests coming from?

Search for “residential proxy”.

This seems like a synonym for botnet.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#345

Post by arccy »

nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #173
themgt wrote: post #19

I have sympathy for some of the GitHub complaints. otoh just went to try to signup for Codeberg and it's down ... 95% uptime over the last 2 weeks? https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg

99.95 from something I use to do work is non negotiable.

you probably wouldn't use it for work anyway, codeberg is for OSS only

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#346

Post by infecto »

IgorPartola wrote: post #337
infecto wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a good way to put it and I agree with it. Linus is a jerk and I would never want to work with him. Doubly so with zig maintainers who call other groups of people losers or monkeys. Shows a clear lack of maturity and ability to think.

Eh. Linus has a long history of abusive behavior towards other Linux contributors but also apparently apologized for it and started amending his ways. The Zig person I do not know by reputation, let alone in person. One post that he later chose to amend based on feedback is not enough for me to pass that kind of judgement. If anything, the fact that he updated it shows the opposite of lack of maturity. Adults can get…

Adults don’t call people losers or monkeys in social media. I am not passing judgement, it is simply not acceptable.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#347

Post by ramoz »

flohofwoe wrote: post #219
jbaiter wrote: post #172

Am I in the minority when I actually like those AI features on GitHub? The ability to interrogate any open source codebase is __amazing__, this feature alone has saved me days of work/research. The AI code reviews are nothing to write home about, but occasionally catch stuff that I would've missed, a net benefit for me. I don't really get all the outrage... Sure, having an "Ask AI" Clippy-like thing in your face ever…

...you can just clone the repository and do that interrogation locally with the AI tool of your choice. Every single application or webpage having its own AI integration is seriously one of the dumbest ideas in computing history (instead of separating applications and AI tools and let them work together via standardized interfaces).

Github Copilot review is such a simple - optional - ux, it makes sense as a feature. I enjoy it.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#348

Post by rprend »

themgt wrote: post #19

I have sympathy for some of the GitHub complaints. otoh just went to try to signup for Codeberg and it's down ... 95% uptime over the last 2 weeks? https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg

Average big tech alternative. Doesn’t solve your problems, doesn’t scale, terrible UX, but at least it’s run by fanatics.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#349

Post by JoshTriplett »

lvass wrote: post #317
ants_everywhere wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as someone who has been cautioning about Microsoft's ownership of GitHub for years now... but the Zig community has been high drama lately. I thought the Rust community had done themselves a disservice with their high tolerance of drama, but lately Zig seems to me to be more drama than even Rust. I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I coul…

Disservice? Rust is taking over the world while they still have nothing to show basically (Servo, the project Rust was created for, is behind ladybird of all things). Every clueless developer and their dog thinks Rust is like super safe and great, with very little empirical evidence still after 19 years of the language's existence. Zig people want Zig to "win". They are appearing on Hacker News almost every day now,…

> very little empirical evidence

Evidence is easy to turn up and cite:

https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/urgent-need-memory-saf...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/blog/2019/07/a-proactiv...

https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safet...

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/02/rewriting-a-browser-compon...

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#350

Post by ToucanLoucan »

ryukoposting wrote: post #248
bit1993 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with this at all. I think the reason Github is so prominent is the social network aspects it has built around Git, which created strong network effects that most developers are unwilling to part with. Maintainers don't want to loose their stars and the users don't want to loose the collective "audit" by the github users. Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answ…

These are the only reasons I use GitHub. The familiarity to students and non-developers is also a plus. I have no idea what the parent comment is talking about a "well-formed CI system." GitHub Actions is easily the worst CI tool I've ever used. There are no core features of GitHub that haven't been replicated by GitLab at this point, and in my estimation GitLab did all of it better. But, if I put something on GitLab…

And this is the core problem with the modern platform internet. One victor (or a handful) take the lead in a given niche, and it becomes impossible to get away from them without great personal cost, literal, moral, or labor, and usually a combo of all three. And then that company has absolutely no motivation at all to prioritize the quality of the product, merely to extract all the value from the user-base as possible.

Facebook has been on that path for well over a decade, and it shows. The service itself is absolute garbage. Users stay because everyone they know is already there and the groups they love are there, and they just tolerate being force-fed AI slop and being monitored. But Facebook is not GROWING as a result, it's slowly dying, much like it's aging userbase. But Facebook doesn't care because no one in charge of any company these days can see further than next quarter's earnings call.

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