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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

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want a language that releases a compiler on a specific platform then intentionally breaks it for everyone on something trivial just to troll and irritate them?

I like a language that aggressively discourages writing code in Notepad on Windows.

Every text editor on windows adds a carriage return by default.

You haven't given any actual reasons this makes sense, if you don't like windows why would you be using it in the first place? Why would you care what text editor people use?

Why would it be ok to release something on a platform just to annoy your own users?

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

#512

The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride: > [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1] > [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the…

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 was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I could tell, seems like a possibly immature teenager. But to have a whole community gang up on you with pitch forks because they have a suspicion you might use AI... that was gross to watch.

Your assumption is woefully incorrect. People were annoyed, when the explicit and repeated lie that the AI generated site he released which was mostly written by AI, was claimed to be AI free. But annoyed isn't why he was met with the condemnation he received.

In addition to the repeated lies, there's the long history of this account of typosquatting various groups, many, many crypto projects, the number of cursor/getcursor accounts, the license violation and copying code without credit from an existing community group (with a reputation for expending a lot of effort, just to help other zig users), the abusive and personal attack editing the PR asking, for nothing but crediting the source of the code he tried to steal. All the while asking for donations for the work he copied from others.

All of that punctuated by the the fact he seems to have plans to typo squat Zig users given he controls the `zigglang` account on github. None of this can reasonable be considered just a simple mistake on a bad day. This is premeditated malicious behavior from someone looking to leach off the work of other people.

People are mad because the guy is a selfish asshole, who has a clear history of coping from others, being directly abusive, and demonstrated intent to attempt to impersonate the core ziglang team/org... not because he dared to use AI.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked even Apple migrated to LF. Perhaps it's time for Windows to stop being the odd man out? Regardless: not work with every windows text editor Last I checked both Visual Studio Code and Notepad++ can both make line endings configurable. That covers a plurality of use cases. Even the built-in Notepad supports using CR or LF only for going on eight years now.

Perhaps it's time for Windows to stop being the odd man out? This is the same nonsense rationalizations that zig gave. Windows is the odd man out. If you want to release something on windows you match an extra byte on the ends of lines. It isn't that hard and even the simplest toy language does it. It's just part of line splitting, it isn't even something that happens at the language stage. Last I checked both Visual…

> This is the same nonsense rationalizations that zig gave.

I'm guessing you didn't live through the early days of webdev when you had to jump through ridiculous hoops just to support IE. At least back then there was the excuse that IE had the lions share of the market and many corporate users.

The industry wide acceptance of supporting IE majorly held back what websites/apps were capable of being. Around 2012ish (right as I was leaving webdev) more and more major teams started to stop supporting earlier broken versions of IE (this was largely empowered by the rising popularity of Chrome). This had a major impact on improving the state of web applications, and also got MS to seriously improve their web browser. Moves like this one by the Zig team are the only way you're going to push Microsoft to improve the situation.

Now you may claim "but Windows is 70% of users!" but this issue doesn't impact anyone wanting to run Zig applications, only those writing them. If you're an inexperienced dev that's super curious about Zig, this type of error might be another good nudge that maybe Windows isn't the OS you want to be working on.

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

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked even Apple migrated to LF. Perhaps it's time for Windows to stop being the odd man out? Regardless: not work with every windows text editor Last I checked both Visual Studio Code and Notepad++ can both make line endings configurable. That covers a plurality of use cases. Even the built-in Notepad supports using CR or LF only for going on eight years now.

Perhaps it's time for Windows to stop being the odd man out? This is the same nonsense rationalizations that zig gave. Windows is the odd man out. If you want to release something on windows you match an extra byte on the ends of lines. It isn't that hard and even the simplest toy language does it. It's just part of line splitting, it isn't even something that happens at the language stage. Last I checked both Visual…

  If you want to release something on windows you match an extra byte on the ends of lines
Did I miss some sort of formal directive from Microsoft or is this just outrage that someone dared do something not up to your standards?

  try to punish and troll its users for using it
Nobody's being punished. Configuring your dev environment is something people do for every language. Let's add some perspective here: we're talking about a single runtime option for your text editor of choice. BFD. More to the point, why isn't your editor or IDE properly supporting Zig files?

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

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does intellectual work imply that people doing poor work need to be treated like fragile little birds?

Intellectual work requires a bit of creativity (across all the domains I can think of), abuse, of any kind increases stress, stress decreases creativity, ability to problem solve, and resilience (or the ability to endure the difficulty of solving hard problems). But even if that wasn't true. There's a significant difference between confronting the harshness of reality. And behaving in a way that makes reality suck mo…

I dont think porting everything over to React...making the site slower, bloated, & buggier is "creativity".

I agree that people should be treated with dignity...but groupthink & herd mentality often strips people of their humanity.

So the criticism is really about culture & abstract attractors...not the individual people who often act rationally within the context of the system.

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

#516

IMHO, the main advantage of github is that it is an ecosystem. This is a well-thought-out Swiss knife: a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system, convenient issues, as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly. Having a sponsorship system is also great,…

I don't get what people are complaining about. I haven't run into these AI issues except for Copilot appearing AS AN OPTION in views. Otherwise it seems to be working the same has it always

Is there more?

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just seems like someone got upset about something they can't articulate Dunno, they don't play well to the HN crowd I thought it was pretty clear what their pain points with GitHub were.

ICE, Actions, and Microsoft, not a single complaint about git itself. All I see is they have CI issues coupled with dumbest anti AI policy that is impossible for them to enforce. Giving up your donations and losing half your community doesn't seem like an intelligent move when all you had to do is update your CI.

  ICE, Actions, and Microsoft, not a single complaint about git itself.

  all you had to do is update your CI
Updating your CI only addresses one of the issues you raised, and you forgot about the front-end complaints which also wouldn't be addressed by "updating your CI".

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intellectual work requires a bit of creativity (across all the domains I can think of), abuse, of any kind increases stress, stress decreases creativity, ability to problem solve, and resilience (or the ability to endure the difficulty of solving hard problems). But even if that wasn't true. There's a significant difference between confronting the harshness of reality. And behaving in a way that makes reality suck mo…

I dont think porting everything over to React...making the site slower, bloated, & buggier is "creativity". I agree that people should be treated with dignity...but groupthink & herd mentality often strips people of their humanity. So the criticism is really about culture & abstract attractors...not the individual people who often act rationally within the context of the system.

I started working on srctree 2 years ago because of how awful github has become. I don't think there's much creativity in this trend line... But the question was; "why is insulting people doing intellectual work bad". Not, "do you think the changes at github are creative", but I do think that the changes require a bit of intellectual work, and that no matter how shitty github has become, it's unreasonable to attack people when unprovoked.

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

#520
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgejo is GPL 3, with the Github stuff apparently even running it on owned device is tied to a per user per month bill, and I have no idea if code is available and editable just having a look at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/githubente...

Commercial software support is not free. Contracting out for professional services or diverting internal developers to fix issues with open source software are also not free.

People attention is not free. Rights of people is not free. Thinking only through money lenses is not free of consequences.
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