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GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

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Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#771

Post by icameron »

scbrg wrote: post #752
sevensor wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence, but I can’t see what the point of the company is beyond that. Enterprise something something maybe. And declining literacy makes Powerpoint unfortunately indispensable.

Interesting. I consider Excel the worst of Microsoft's misdeeds. Not that there's not an abundance to pick from, but Excel may very well top the list. It's perhaps the single worst database in the world; with no type control, no relationship management, no data safety whatsoever to speak of (it even actively mangles your data), its interface is utter madness, and yet - it's the most used database in the world. It's p…

Everything you say is not wrong. But despite being so horrible, the business world still runs on excel. Finance, underwriting, accounting, engineering tools, fantasy football leagues… Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs. It’s timeless and hated by many for valid reasons, but its impact is vast.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#772

Post by mock-possum »

gmueckl wrote: post #435
meindnoch wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft being the cool guys? The cool guys ? Mwuhahahhaa. This gave me the good belly laugh I needed. For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for: - being the no. 1 enemy of free software - shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share - making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite - creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kil…

This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses. IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium. They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron. I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to som…

> they have behaved relatively nicely

That is some damnably faint praise re: Windows 11, and any experienced m$ users know exactly what’s meant by that.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#773

Post by Rebelgecko »

lowsong wrote: post #426
theptip wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive. NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product. YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product. Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental…

> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product. > Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example. These are great examples of insulting and invasive introductions of LLMs into already functional workflows. These are anti-features.

The Ask button in YouTube is a game changer for the use case of "what timestamp in this hour-long video talks about topic x?".

What's the existing functional workflow for that? Downloading the captions and querying with a local LLM or a very fuzzy keyword search?

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#774

Post by fc417fc802 »

userbinator wrote: post #727
gmueckl wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses. IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium. They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron. I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to som…

and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses. That should be a good clue that it's not worth much to them anymore, and tjat they'd rather rely on random free labour from the "community" than their own developers. They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron. Which is a horribly bloated pig that only helps forced obsolescence of hardware. It should be a very disturbing sign that Micr…

I agree that Electron is an abomination.

As for open sourcing software. Is it even possible for them to do something that you would view favorably here? To me it seems like remain closed and they'll get criticized but open up at least some of it and ... they get criticized?

As far as I'm concerned, regardless of other factors the more source code that's out in the open the better off everyone is.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#775

Post by heresie-dabord »

827a wrote: post #163

My deepest concern at this time isn't that AI eventually gets written down to nothing; because I don't think it will. Its that these companies are so scared of being out-competed by an AI-first competitor that they're willing to make deep sacrifices to their core businesses just to effectively virtue signal that they're AI first and unable to be out-competed. It is deeply concerning because all things point to realit…

> There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world,

I find it necessary to ask AI what that sentence even means.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#776

Post by geocar »

bratsche wrote: post #665
kokanee wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind…

I think what's almost shocking about this is that Google seemed so great in the beginning. "Don't Be Evil" was even like an internal code of conduct slogan or something. I never worked there and have no inside knowledge of what happened. Did they get taken over by MBAs who gained control of the company? Was it always evil and we were just misled the whole time? Something else?

> Google seemed so great in the beginning.

It's almost like they were good at marketing.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#778

Post by pastage »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #702
smcin wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, IE has not been dead and buried for ages. Not everyone's a US corporation. A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent. And just for reciprocity, here's Indian Defense Review (5/2025) "These People Never Moved On: They’re Stuck 24 Years in the Past and Have to Use Windows XP" : "Thousands of worker…

Yeah, if you've done support in large MS corporate environments with MEM etc then you've come across crappy business apps that have crappy requirements stuck in the past. On the one hand, longevity of a platform is nice and MS screwed up IE in so many ways. On the other hand, at some time the business has to manage their software lifecycle - including the death of old systems - and you can't blame MS for that.

The problem was the Microsoft zealotry of technical people they invent non existent problems often repeated like a cargocult by MS consultants/partners. They loved IE as a default browser. This has nothing todo with the apps being hard to fix, because that turned out to be an actual easy technical problem and I did 10 internal apps.

The only thing that helped was MS taking responsibility and killing IE. The problem I had was that IE was becoming an support burden on our tools, no customers were using IE but the internal staff was forced to.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#779

Post by fc417fc802 »

yencabulator wrote: post #584
thiht wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are extensions. No one is preventing OSS communities from developing their own remote dev, Python, and C++ extensions. The VSCode extension API allows it. There are actually some efforts being made to do it.

You're moving the goalposts! I am responding to > I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.

But ... they literally did that here? I don't think it's malicious in this case. In fact I think they're giving away genuinely useful tools here with no obvious downsides to their use.

But I do think it qualifies.

Bit like the example of Martin Luther King being a criminal.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#780

Post by gmueckl »

yencabulator wrote: post #496
gmueckl wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses. IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium. They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron. I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to som…

> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. Try using VSCodium legally with the same functionality as VSCode; remote development, Python language server, C++ debugging, and so on. People who think Microsoft is doing open source work for the good of their hearts are still in for a lesson in EEE. https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/exte…

Oh, I honestly didn't remember the VS Code extension shenanigans. Thanks for bringing that up.
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