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Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

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Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#71

Post by jraph »

diggan wrote: post #35
kelvinjps10 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't GitHub initially bootstrapped?

Yes, there was a couple of years we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS, but then they took on VC investments after some years and the dream went into hiding again.

> we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS

I really don't remember it like this at all. I do remember looking for actually open source forges and choosing Gitorious, which was then bought and shutdown by GitLab (and projects were offered to be seamlessly migrated, which worked well, and somehow we ended up being hosted on an open core platform, but that's another story).

GitHub always looked like the closed platform the whole open source world somehow elected to trust for their code hosting despite being proprietary, and then there was this FOMO where if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors, which still seems to be going strong btw.

I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#72

Post by chubot »

tho2342o349423 wrote: post #51
AlexandrB wrote: post #44

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

At this point, pretty much all of the US markets (and the USD) is hinging on "unlimited upside" promised by techbros and their magic AGIs & robots. They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Wonder what'll happen to JPY once the Yen-carry unwinds from this massive hype-cycle - will probably hit 70 JPY to the dollar! Currently Sony Bank in Japan offers USD time-deposits at 8% p…

They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going.

Honestly I think the same thing happened with self-driving cars ~10 years ago.

Larry Page and Google's "submarine" marketing convinced investors and CEOs of automakers and tech companies [1] that they were going to become obsolete, and that Google would be taking all that profit.

In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It seems like the whole thing was cancelled in 2023, written off, and the CEO was let go

How much profit is Waymo making now? I'm pretty sure it's $0. And they've probably gone through hundreds of billions in funding

How's Tesla Autopilot doing? Larry also "negatively inspired" Elon to start OpenAI with other people

I think if investors/CEOs/automakers had known how it was going to turn out, and how much money they were going to lose 10 years later, they might not have jumped on the FOMO train

But it turns out that AI is a plausible "magic box" that you extrapolate all sorts of economic consequences from

(on the other hand, hype cycles aren't necessarily bad; they're probably necessary to get things done. But I also think this one is masking the fact that software is getting worse and more user hostile at the same time. Probably one of the best ways to increase AI adoption is to make the underlying software more user hostile.)

[1] I think even Apple did some kind of self-driving car thing at one point.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#73

Post by bookofjoe »

tho2342o349423 wrote: post #51
AlexandrB wrote: post #44

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

At this point, pretty much all of the US markets (and the USD) is hinging on "unlimited upside" promised by techbros and their magic AGIs & robots. They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Wonder what'll happen to JPY once the Yen-carry unwinds from this massive hype-cycle - will probably hit 70 JPY to the dollar! Currently Sony Bank in Japan offers USD time-deposits at 8% p…

FWIW when I lived in Japan in 1968-69 it was 360 JPY to the dollar. I felt like a millionaire!

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#74

Post by gchamonlive »

layer8 wrote: post #37
gchamonlive wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I said that first thing. It's right but it misses the point. Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption. > I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It's basically a social network on top of a source code forge. You have a profile that is individually identifiable, you can open issues and contribute to discussions on pull requests. All this c…

> Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption. OP is arguing that VC should be a deciding factor. The “community” wouldn’t exist if people had made that a deciding factor. A social network is not a community. It may contain many communities. GitHub has communities around projects. But GitHub as a whole isn’t a community.

Ah yes, we agree. GH itself enables many communities to emerge but it itself isn't a community.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#75

Post by pylua »

AlexandrB wrote: post #44

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

Is it really that weird that a company would speak from both sides of their mouth ? That is essentially what corporate speak is. That should be the assumed default when a major company says anything.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#76

Post by Traubenfuchs »

api wrote: post #56

What is the actual rationale behind some companies literally shoving AI down people’s throats? It’s fascinating stuff and can be very useful. Why does it have to be rammed so hard? I’ve never quite seen anything like this. Or maybe I have. It reminds me a little of the obviously astroturfed effort to ram crypto down people’s throats. But crypto was something most people didn’t have any actual utility for. A magic tir…

Not old enough for MongoDB? Big Data?

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#77

Post by chamomeal »

diggan wrote: post #62
acomjean wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else. It wasn’t an entirely new idea (source forge?) but it use git which was rising in popularity. I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off. Oddly I used selfhosted git at an academic institution. I liked it because it was set up to use “hooks” https://git-scm.com/…

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off. Personally, I remember the initial selling point of GitHub being that it was more "social" than any other forges at the time, since we were all wrapped up in the Web 2.0 hype and what not. I think they pushed that on their landing page back in the day too. It was basically Twitter but redone specifically for d…

Honestly that sounds kinda neat and I guess you can see traces of that idea today: I have a million unread GitHub notifications about things I don’t care about

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#78

Post by redox99 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #44

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

Why wouldn't they do everything in their power to increase customer base?

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#79

Post by yunwal »

Disposal8433 wrote: post #57
transcriptase wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If outages make headlines and stop whole companies in their tracks worldwide, that’s critical infrastructure, not just network effects.

> If outages [...] stop whole companies in their tracks They should fucking learn how to code because no one in their right mind would depend on such an external service that can be easily replaced by cloning repos locally or using proxies like Artifactory. Even worse when you know that Microsoft is behind it. Yes, most companies don't have good practices and suck at maintaining a basic infrastructure, but it doesn't…

> It's only a stupid git server with PRs.

I feel like you’re missing a few features here

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#80

Post by 3np »

progval wrote: post #65
3np wrote: post #60

I've had an ongoing support ticket with GH for several months now asking them to actually disable Copilot, as there is Copilot all over and it's clear from inlined JSON on github.com pages when signed in that my account is actually opted in to Copilot features despite Settings page saying features should be disabled. I've never ever opted in to anything related to GH AI and am not a vscode user. They keep closing the…

Do you have an example of "inlined JSON on github.com pages"? I can't imagine what this looks like.

Not near an account right now but literally just "View Source" when signed in and search for "copilot" and it's there along some other feature-flags for the user in a JSON blob inside a script tag.
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