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

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571–580 of 641 posts

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

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like a lawyer grasping at straws instead of someone with a reasonable perspective that wouldn't be hypocritical when flipped around. What lawyer speak? You're throwing a temper tantrum over a situation entirely of your own making. That there's a Windows port of Zig and sufficient users to justify its continued existence pretty clearly shows your hyperbole isn't representative in the way you claim. Were I in…

it's the end of the world? You didn't confront anything I wrote and instead just made up something no one said. All I did say was that zig is intentionally hostile to their own users, which they are. If you could actually deal with what I wrote I think you would have done it already.

From where I'm sitting it seems like it's time for you to take a break from this thread.

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

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes people need to be shocked awake. Reality is harsh, and gentle language doesn't change that.

It can be true, that a person needs a wake-up call, but it can also be true that the person(s) doing the "shocking" are sadistic, abusive, or psychopaths.

[dead]

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

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's the end of the world? You didn't confront anything I wrote and instead just made up something no one said. All I did say was that zig is intentionally hostile to their own users, which they are. If you could actually deal with what I wrote I think you would have done it already.

From where I'm sitting it seems like it's time for you to take a break from this thread.

I guess we're at the "claim the other person is upset to avoid what they said" (and edit posts) part of the conversation.

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

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with GitHub Actions other than the outages? I've never hit a issue myself.

Geez, where to start. I mean, … the outages are a big part of it. But those outages also extending to taking out my own hardware (e.g., through bugs like the above consuming resources on my own compute) is just double the pain. But as a product, it's just bad? Riddled with bugs? In no particular order: * Artifact APIs will return garbage results during a run. Note that the APIs are separate from the GHA actions for i…

> I mean, … the outages are a big part of it. But those outages also extending to taking out my own hardware (e.g., through bugs like the above consuming resources on my own compute) is just double the pain.

Never needed to run my own runner, but yes the outages are annoying.

> Artifact APIs will return garbage results during a run. Note that the APIs are separate from the GHA actions for interacting with artifacts, and the latter uses undocumented APIs, presumably b/c the documented APIs are buggy AF.

Never had an issue either I've only used the GitHub CLI to upload artifacts to releases.

> needs.… will just return junk data, if you typo.

Was not aware, but I have never typod. I'm wondering if a linter such as actionlint would catch this.

> Builds of actions are not cached, making them rather slow. Many GH official actions hack around this by pointing the tag/branch (e.g., @v4) at a pre-built artifact.

Is there not caching actions you can use?

> The pricing is high, compared to other offerings.

Try blacksmith.sh, half the price, faster and unlimited parallelisation etc.

> The interface is just FUBAR: e.g., stdin is a pipe, which will wreak havoc on some commands that change their behavior when piped to. stdout & stderr are pipes, which although GHA ostensibly supports colored output, this basically renders it useless.

I always call out to a task runner, I don't have command inside the workflow so never experienced this.

> Jobs, steps, actions are conceptual mud. There's a few ideas, like "execute this thing" in there, but its all jumbled up/duplicated.

Is it not each job has multiple steps, each step is an action?

> Container settings are configured per-job, so if you want to run some steps in one container, and some in another, but in the same job, you're just going to be left out to dry.

Yeah something you can't do, but never ran into this issue either. Ways around it, such as calling out to a script which does volume mounts and run things in a container using `docker run`. Or just cut up the problem so you don't need to and have multiple jobs or something.

> Secrets are hard to manage, and even harder to not leak.

For a personal account agreed, no way to set a secret for every repository. Recently I have been doing.

``` gh repo list --json name,owner --limit 100 | jq -r '.[] | "\(.owner.login)/\(.name)"' | while read repo; do if gh secret list --repo "${repo}" --json name | jq -e '.[] | select(.name=="EXAMPLE")' > /dev/null 2>&1; then gh secret set EXAMPLE --repo "${repo}" --body "${EXAMPLE}" fi done ```

> The expression language has all sorts of corners, like coerced types and functions with parse-time side-effects!.

Again I don't really have logic inside a workflow, I call out to Make or a script or something so it has never been an issue.

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

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ICE, Actions, and Microsoft, not a single complaint about git itself Codeberg is also a Git-based project host. It doesn't even support other repo types. Why would you be expecting the latter? If a project announcement or article headline says someone/something is quitting or leaving GitHub, it makes a lot of sense to assume that their issue is with GitHub (and in this case, it would be an assumption they'd be righ…

I was pointing out how ironic it was for them to move from git SaaS to git SaaS while having no issues with git on the git SaaS they're moving away from. Make sense?

That's not ironic.

If they had trouble with Git on GitHub, and then left GitHub for Codeberg, where they also have to use Git, then that would be very strange.

Instead, they had trouble with GitHub, so they left GitHub, which makes perfect sense.

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

#576
post #338

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…

> seems like a possibly immature teenager. What makes you say that? Couldn’t it be an immature adult? > because they have a suspicion you might use AI Was that the reason? From what I remember (which could definitely be incomplete information) the complaint was that they were clearly using AI while claiming no AI had been used , stole code from another project while claiming it was their own, refused to add credit wh…

The claims of AI use were unsubstantiated and pure conjecture, which was pointed out by people who understand language, including me. Now it appears that the community has used an MIT attribution violation to make the Zigbook author a victim of DMCA abuse.

That doesn't look great to me. It doesn't look like a community I would encourage others to participate in.

> tried to claim a namespace on open-vsx

It seems reasonable for the zigbook namespace to belong to the zigbook author. That's generally how the namespaces work right? https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aeclipse%2Fopenvsx+namespa... https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx/wiki/Namespace-Access. IMO, this up there with the "but they were interested in crypto!" argument. The zigbook author was doing normal software engineer stuff, but somehow the community tries to twist it into something nefarious. The nefariousness is never stated because it's obviously absurd, but there's the clear attempt to imply wrongdoing. Unfortunately that just makes the community look as if they're trying hard to prosecute an innocent person in the court of public opinion.

> At a certain point, that starts to look outright malicious.

Malicious means "having the nature of or resulting from malice; deliberately harmful; spiteful". The Zig community looks malicious in this instance to me. Like you, I don't have complete information. But from the information I have the community response looked malicious, punitive, harassing and arguably defamatory. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in any open source community.

Again, prior to the MIT attribution claim there was no evidence the author of Zigbook had done anything at all wrong. Among other things, there was no evidence they had lied about the use of AI. Malicious and erroneous accusations of AI use happen frequently these days, including here on HN.

Judging by the strength of the reaction, the flimsiness of the claims and the willingness to abuse legal force against the zigbook author, my hunch is that there is some other reason zigbook was controversial that isn't yet publicly known. Given the timing it possibly has to do with Anthropic's acquisition of Bun.

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

#577
You are a big name --> don't need GH for followers and contributors. You are a small potato --> GH gives way more followers than contributors.

CI/CD is not good on GH either.

At this point the problem is discovery. With a federated search engine the actual forge host would not be an issue anymore.

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

#578

Probably a good time to mention fossil, an excellent SCM from the makers of SQLite with a number of github-like features built-in: https://fossil-scm.org/ Single ~6mb executable, blazing fast. I've been a happy user for years.

Minimalist vps, download the executable, copy and paste apache config, activate and you are good to go. With certain providers you don't even need to buy a domain.

Personal, small and medium sized projects are 99% of all projects.

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

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that Linus and the Zig guy are in different categories in my mind. I think it is a bit naive to lump them into the same category. I would definitely classify the tiki torch wielding white nationalists as losers publicly, for example. In fact I have a hard time thinking of a better term for them. It could also apply to the fairly famous liar and criminal, the disgraced Congressman George Santos. Or any per…

I did not realize we were lumping Microsoft engineers alongside white nationalists and pedos. Sure folks like that I can see people using descriptions like that.

We were not, or at least I was not.

> I also cannot think of a time in my adult life I wanted to call out a group of people as losers or monkeys i n public.

I guess that makes this your first time:

> Sure folks like that I can see people using descriptions like that.

All in all I think we generally agree that being respectful is better than being rude. And that some people who do not have respect also do not deserve respect. Shall we just leave it at that?

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

#580
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seems like a possibly immature teenager. What makes you say that? Couldn’t it be an immature adult? > because they have a suspicion you might use AI Was that the reason? From what I remember (which could definitely be incomplete information) the complaint was that they were clearly using AI while claiming no AI had been used , stole code from another project while claiming it was their own, refused to add credit wh…

The claims of AI use were unsubstantiated and pure conjecture, which was pointed out by people who understand language, including me. Now it appears that the community has used an MIT attribution violation to make the Zigbook author a victim of DMCA abuse. That doesn't look great to me. It doesn't look like a community I would encourage others to participate in. > tried to claim a namespace on open-vsx It seems reaso…

> The claims of AI use were unsubstantiated and pure conjecture

It seemed that way to me at the start too, but it quickly became apparent. Even the submitter thought so after going through the git history.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952436

> It seems reasonable for the zigbook namespace to belong to the zigbook author. That's generally how the namespaces work right?

Yes. Bad actors try to give themselves legitimacy by acquiring as many domains and namespaces as quickly and as soon as they can with as little work as possible. The amount of domains they bought raised flags for me.

> IMO, this up there with the "but they were interested in crypto!" argument.

No idea what you’re talking about. Was the Zigbook author interested in cryptocurrency and criticised for it?

> The nefariousness is never stated because it's obviously absurd, but there's the clear attempt to imply wrongdoing.

That’s not true. It was stated repeatedly and explicitly.

https://zigtools.org/blog/zigbook-plagiarizing-playground/

Them stealing code, claiming it as their own, refusing to give attribution and editing third-party comments to make it seem the author is saying they are “autistic and sperging” is OK with you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095338

You really see nothing wrong with that and think criticising such behaviour is flimsy and absurd?

> I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in any open source community.

I’m certainly not excusing bad behaviour, but this wouldn’t even fall into the top 100 toxic behaviours in open-source. Plenty of examples online and submitted to HN over the years.

> Malicious and erroneous accusations of AI use happen frequently these days, including here on HN.

I know. I’m constantly arguing against it especially when I see someone using the em-dash as the sole argument. I initially pushed back against the flimsy claims in the Zigbook submission, but quickly the evidence started mounting and I retracted it.

> Given the timing it possibly has to do with Anthropic's acquisition of Bun.

I don’t buy it. The announcement of the acquisition happened after.

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