Let Us Git Rid of It, Angry Github Users Say of Forced Copilot Features

There's a whole generation on HN who came up after Microsoft's worst phase, and have spent the last five years defending MS on this very forum.

They're convinced that any bad thing Microsoft does is a "boomer" grudge, and will defend MS to the end.

I hope I'm never so weak-minded that I tie my identity and allegiance to a trillion-dollar company. Or any company that I haven't founded, for that matter.

Regulators can (and do) stop purchases which can be considered harmful to consumers. Just look at the Adobe/Figma deal.

Do you think they would have bought it otherwise? Same for NPM, they got bought for huge sums of money because they were "critical" already.

I would say all of those things were present before the acquisition, enough that Microsoft itself started to use the site for its own open source code hosting.

> But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.

That's blaming the victim. The vast majority of the opensource projects were hosted on GH since before Microsoft's acquisition. I remember back in 2018 when my team made the decision to move from bitbucket to GitHub, the main consideration was the platform quality but also the community we were getting access to.

When GitHub goes down, the company I work at is pretty much kneecapped for the duration of the outage. If you’re in the middle of a PR, waiting for GitHub actions, doing work in a codespace, or just need to pull/fetch/push changes before you can work, you’re just stuck!

Not what this is about.

> How do you asess whether some PR was made by an AI(like the user did)?

Searched for PRs authored by copilot or mentioning copilot.

As an aside, I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It’s a go-to place with network effects, but network effects doesn’t by itself imply “community”.

Counterpoint is that is what companies are supposed to do. They are made to make money, the end. The only hope against this for humans is regulation, and that has fallen off the face of the earth. It’s like humans are doomed to repeat the late 19th and early 20th century era over and over.

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 developers, and focus on code rather than random thoughts.

I'm pretty sure the term "pull request" existed before GitHub. (Meaning writing an email saying "I have changes in my copy of repo that I want you to merge into the main repo".) But GitHub put an UI around it, and they may've been the first to do that.

Negative. The only thing GitHub added to the parlance is "forks" which are essentially like namespaced branches in the same repo.

For the sake of correctness, the concept of pull requests was not introduced by Github. It already existed in git in the form of the 'request-pull' subcommand. The fundamental workflow is the same. You send the project maintainer a message requesting a pull of your changes from your own online clone repo. The difference is that the message was in the form of an email. Code reviews could be conducted using mails/mailing lists too.

This is not the same as sending patches by email. But considering how people hate emails, I can see why it didn't catch on. However, Torvalds considered this implementation to be superior to Github's and once complained about the latter on Github itself [1].

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...

When I started using it, public repositories were free, and private repositories needed a paid account.

The ToS did not require public repos to be open source, only permission for basic operations like fork (the button which clones, not creating derivative works) and download was required.

I worked for a company that used the on-prem version of their forge back in the 00s, I remember liking it alot. It felt novel, cool and useful to have fully interlinked bug tracking, version control, documentation, project management and release management.

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!“

My father used it frequently when we were kids. I found out decades later it was a quote from King Lear.

It's mandatory, on the orders of a senior manager who has no background in software development, for all developers in my department to have a Copilot subscription. I've never used it for anything, and I imagine it's the same for most of my colleagues(we do highly specialised embedded development with in-house custom everything - compiler, standard library, operating system, hardware), and it seems no-one is interested in whether it's used or not.

Consequently Microsoft is being paid $240 a year per person to do nothing whatsoever, which is surely a great business for them.

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.

1) crypto: raise funding, buy crypto as collateral, raise more funding with said collateral, rinse and repeat.

2) gpu datacenters: raise funding, buy gpus as collateral, raise more funding, buy more gpus, rinse and repeat.

3) zero day options: average folks want a daily lottery thrill. rinse and repeat.

All of the above are fed by fomo and to some extent hype, and ripe for a reckoning.