[HN Gopher] Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ...
___________________________________________________________________
Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the
service
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 917 points
Date : 2025-12-03 07:52 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| mechazawa wrote:
| More and more projects are moving to Codeberg, and I'm wondering;
| at what point will a critical mass be reached? Or will we end up
| with a fragmented ecosystem?
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| I prefer a pletora of code hosting sites, that one massive hub
| controlled by a single one. We can see how bad is when there is
| a monopoly or cuasi-monopoly.
| pan69 wrote:
| > fragmented ecosystem
|
| This sounds a bit like an oxymoron. More diversity will only
| help the ecosystem IMHO.
| xeonmc wrote:
| You say fragmented I say decentralized.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I say "I'm not making yet another account to report this
| bug". Tangled is trying to solve that problem but we'll see.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33730417
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| That's the beauty of email-based approaches. You can just
| clone, do your changes and `git send-email`. Done.
|
| I think it would've been far easier to build a decent GUI
| around that flow, with some email integration + a patch
| preview tool, rather than adding activitypub, but oh well.
| boomlinde wrote:
| _> I think it would 've been far easier to build a decent
| GUI around that flow, with some email integration + a
| patch preview tool, rather than adding activitypub, but
| oh well._
|
| Check out Sourcehut (https://sourcehut.org/). It uses a
| mailing list-based workflow so contributing code or bug
| reports is relatively effortless and doesn't require a
| Sourcehut account.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Email-based approaches have far more issues than just
| needing to create an account. I would _much_ rather have
| to create another account than deal with git send-email
| ever again. It 's awful.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| doesn't need full fledged activitypub, just a common
| place to login
|
| might just do it federated way of "here is my domain,
| here is DNS entry pointing to my identity server to talk
| with", that way it isn't even tied to single identity
| service, but a given user will need to use only single
| login for all of the servers.
| some_furry wrote:
| I literally logged into codeberg using my GitHub account.
| It's two clicks of the mouse to do this.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah that's good for Codeberg, but most sites haven't set
| things up to be so seamless. And how many clicks of the
| mouse was it to set up your SSH key?
| sdqali wrote:
| The D in DVCS working as expected.
| hinkley wrote:
| Oh no, our decentralized VCS will be... decentralized!
|
| Seriously though the big problem to solve will be squatters,
| when there are three logical places for a module to be hosted.
| That could create issues if you want to migrate.
|
| I would rather have this happening after a contender to git has
| surfaced. Something for instance with more project tracking
| built in so migration were simpler.
| messe wrote:
| > Seriously though the big problem to solve will be
| squatters, when there are three logical places for a module
| to be hosted
|
| I suspect Codeberg, which is focused on free software, will
| frown on them. They already disallow mirroring.
| maccard wrote:
| > They already disallow mirroring.
|
| In which direction? (I'd check myself but they're down...).
| That doesn't sound very open to me.
| messe wrote:
| I was slightly wrong. You can manually mirror things, but
| they have removed a feature that allowed one to
| automatically mirror repositories hosted elsewhere. It
| was originally intended as an ease of migration tool, but
| ended up consuming too many resources.
|
| From their FAQ:
|
| > Why can't I mirror repositories from other code-hosting
| websites?
|
| > Mirrors that pull content from other code hosting
| services were problematic for Codeberg. They ended up
| consuming a vast amount of resources (traffic, disk
| space) over time, as users that were experimenting with
| Codeberg would not delete those mirrors when leaving.
|
| > A detailed explanation can be found in this blog
| post.[1]
|
| [1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/mirror-repos-easily-
| created-consum...
| maccard wrote:
| Ah, thanks. That's a very sensible take from them!
| hinkley wrote:
| That... makes squatting more of a problem not less.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Hopefully one of the efforts to build distributed pull requests
| will take off, so that all the forges other than github can
| band together and interoperate.
| seg_lol wrote:
| That would be the single best thing that they could do, it
| would make moving off of github a gain in capabilities.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| All those different 'git forges' use git as version control
| system and the same issue and PR workflows. There is no
| fragmentation, unless you consider one git url being different
| from another git url 'fragmentation' ;)
| irusensei wrote:
| Git itself comes out as a very decentralized tool to me.
| thewisenerd wrote:
| previously discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46064571
|
| Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg - 883
| comments
| aatd86 wrote:
| Didn't know about codeberg and can't even access it... Is it
| https://codeberg.org/ ??
| politelemon wrote:
| That is correct. It is down quite a bit.
| https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| 92% uptime? What do you do the other 8% of the time? Do you
| just invoke git push in a loop and leave your computer on?
| some_furry wrote:
| As discussed elsewhere in this thread: They're under
| DDoS, and have been very public about this fact.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| You keep working since Git is decentralized.
|
| You can also run a Forgejo instance (the software that
| powers Codeberg) locally - it is just a single binary
| that takes a minute to setup - and setup a local mirror
| of your Codeberg repo with code, issues, etc so you have
| access to your issues, wiki, etc until Codeberg is up and
| Forgejo (though you'll have to update them manually
| later).
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| I hope Codeberg is able to scale up to this surge in
| interest, but
|
| > it is just a single binary that takes a minute to setup
| - and setup a local mirror of your Codeberg repo with
| code, issues, etc so you have access to your issues,
| wiki, etc
|
| is really cool! Having a local mirror also presumably
| gives you the means to build tools on top, to group and
| navigate and view them as best works for you, which could
| make that side of the process so much easier.
|
| > you'll have to update them manually later
|
| What does the manually part mean here? Just that you'll
| have to remember to do a `forgejo fetch` (or whatever
| equivalent) to sync it up?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Lack of investment more like. There are a ton of simple and
| obvious bugs that have persisted well before the AI crazy, e.g.
| this annoying bug from 2021:
| https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/6874
|
| This one is almost a one-line change (technically they need an
| extra flag in the YAML but that's hardly difficult):
| https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/12882#discussi...
|
| That said, I still think Github is fine, and you can't argue with
| free CI - especially on Windows/Mac. If they ever stop that I'll
| definitely consider Codeberg. Or if Codeberg gets support for
| stacked PRs (i.e. dependencies between PRs), then I'm there! So
| frustrating that Github doesn't support such an obvious workflow.
| hinkley wrote:
| Not spending on maintenance is bad.
|
| Not spending on maintenance and spending gobs on something many
| people don't want is far worse. It says we have the money, we
| just don't give a fuck.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Isn't this SOP of Microsoft since forever? Tons of papercuts
| which really hurt, and tons of features nobody wants?
|
| I think this is the natural outcome of "chasing points"
| mechanic inside Microsoft.
| hinkley wrote:
| For my money, the scorpion is halfway across the river and
| y'all are about to become the frog. I haven't touched a
| windows machine in 15 years and I'd really like to continue
| that streak to the grave. Gaben is working hard to become
| my new favorite tech person by trying to claw gaming off of
| the PC. I really hope he wins.
| jiqiren wrote:
| The evidence of AI failure is all this low hanging fruit
| maintenance fixes users are begging Microsoft to fix and
| these AI agents are not fixing them. AI was going to 10x
| engineers or something right? Why isn't GitHub getting better
| with all this AI help?
| gaigalas wrote:
| > So frustrating that Github doesn't support such an obvious
| workflow.
|
| It kind of does.
|
| I used this a lot in several jobs to work in dependent tickets
| in advance. Just make another branch on top of the previous (a
| PR to the other PR branch).
|
| People could review the child PR before the parent was merged.
| And it requires some less than trivial git knowledge to manage
| effectively, but nothing extraordinary. Any solution for
| stacked PRs based on git would also require it (or a custom
| tool).
|
| I think I'm on their side on this one. From git perspective, it
| works just as I expect. Something else probably belongs to JIRA
| or project management instead.
| sevenseacat wrote:
| That feels like the opposite of what I think stacked PRs are?
| Like someone will open PR #1 for one feature, and then PR #2
| into the PR #1 branch, but it doesn't make sense without
| knowing the context of PR #1 so that gets reviewed first -
| and then when that PR gets merged, the second one gets
| automatically closed by GitHub?
| gaigalas wrote:
| PR#1: dough PR#2: toppings
|
| You first send PR#1, then PR#2 on top of the first one.
|
| The diff for PR#1 will show dough stuff. The diff for PR#2
| will show toppings in relation to dough.
|
| People can review them asynchronously. If you merge PR#1,
| PR#2 will automatically target main (that's where dough
| went) now.
|
| In this arrangement, I use to cross-mention the PRs by
| number (a link will exist in both). I also like to keep the
| second one draft, but that depends on the team practices.
|
| I don't understand why you would close the second PR when
| the first gets merged. It should lose the dependency
| automagically, which is exactly what happens if you branch
| correctly.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > The diff for PR#2 will show toppings in relation to
| dough.
|
| The problem is the diff for PR#2 will show dough and
| toppings all mixed together. Unless you go into the
| commits view, but that's super tedious and it's easy to
| lose comments in there.
|
| It's kind of frustrating because there's very little
| required to make this work. All you really need is for
| Github to detect `Depends on #1` like it detects `Fixes
| #123`, and then a) use the HEAD of #1 as the diff based
| for #2, and b) block merging #2 until #1 is merged.
|
| It's really not that complicated but I'm not holding my
| breath.
| gaigalas wrote:
| What do you mean by "mixed together"?
|
| PR#2 will show only what changed between dough and
| toppings.
|
| If you merge it, it will become part of PR#1. You turned
| the dependency into a single block.
|
| So, if you don't want to mix, you should merge the
| dependency (dough) first to main (or whatever is your
| target).
|
| Codeberg probably also supports the same thing, it's a
| git thing not a GitHub thing. That's why I'm saying it
| works exactly as expected. Git alone already supports
| dependencies, and GitHub just follows it.
|
| To block the merge, you can make a workflow that turns
| PRs with dependencies into drafts. However, as it is a
| merge from one PR into another, I don't see the reason
| to. You can easily de-merge them if you need.
|
| From the looks of it, it seems that you are branching at
| the wrong point, and creating two PRs to main, one of
| them containing duplicates. That's not what I suggested.
| brabel wrote:
| In other news today, Bun, which is one of the biggest projects
| written in Zig, joined Anthropic, the company behind Claude Code,
| and has nothing but kind words to say about AI. If Zig becomes
| ever more hostile to AI, I wonder if there may be some "friction"
| there.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Why would zig care that a project written in zig is used for
| AI?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Usually programming languages need that killer project to
| sell themselves, instead of being something only language
| nerds play with, Bun was one of such projects.
| schaefer wrote:
| Bun still exists. as does tigerbeetle
| pjmlp wrote:
| Lets see for how long, after the acquisition.
| Meneth wrote:
| And if they did, what could they possibly do?
| brabel wrote:
| As Bun uses Zig quite a lot, I expect them to be quite
| active in the Zig forums and submitting patches and feature
| requests.
|
| I was thinking of things like AI-generated patches
| submitted by Bun to the Zig project, or feature requests by
| Bun for AI-specific use cases... that could create a really
| bad atmosphere between Zig and Bun people if the Zig
| Foundation continuously rejects their
| contributions/requests/discussions.
| tuupola wrote:
| They also made the disastrous update to the dashboard feed which
| made the frontpage pretty much useless.
|
| https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65343
| danilafe wrote:
| Their most most recent update replaces all this with a list of
| recently updated PRs and issues. I've been learning on it
| heavily since it came out. One of the few recent changes that
| really feels like a clear improvement.
| sevenseacat wrote:
| oh wow. I just had to press the "Try the new experience!"
| button about ten times for it to finally load the new
| experience, but I _like it_
| halapro wrote:
| Haven't used the dashboard in years. What's on it now might be
| more useful. The homepage for me should be set to
| Notifications.
|
| At any rate, the feed is still available and you can reach it
| via browser autocomplete. I open GitHub by typing "not" in my
| URL bar and landing on the notifications page.
| st3fan wrote:
| I'm just one data point but .. who uses the frontpage? I go
| there to work on my projects. I've never been on pages other
| than in my org or projects.
| themgt wrote:
| I have sympathy for some of the GitHub complaints. otoh just went
| to try to signup for Codeberg and it's down ... 95% uptime over
| the last 2 weeks?
|
| https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg
| bayindirh wrote:
| I mean, they're battling with DDoS all the time. I follow their
| account on Mastodon, and they're pretty open about it.
|
| I believe the correct question is "Why they are getting DDoSed
| this much if they are not something important?"
|
| For anyone who wants to follow:
| https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg
|
| Even their status page is under attack. Sorry for my French,
| but WTF?
| letmetweakit wrote:
| That's rough ... it is a bad, bad world out there.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Try exposing a paswordless SSH server to outside to see
| what happens. It'll be tried immediately, non-stop.
|
| Now, all the servers I run has no public SSH ports,
| anymore. This is also why I don't expose home-servers to
| internet. I don't want that chaos at my doorstep.
| gear54rus wrote:
| this can be fixed by just using random ssh port
|
| all my services are always exposed for convenience but
| never on a standard port (except http)
| bayindirh wrote:
| It reduces the noise, yes, but doesn't stop a determined
| attacker.
|
| After managing a fleet for a long time, I'd never do
| that. Tailscale or any other VPN is mandatory for me to
| be able to access "login" ports.
| letmetweakit wrote:
| Yeah, I have been thinking about hosting a small internet
| facing service on my home server, but I'm just not
| willing to take the risk. I'd do it on a separate
| internet connection, but not on my main one.
| bayindirh wrote:
| You can always use a small Hetzner server (or a free
| Oracle Cloud one if you are in a pinch) and install
| tailscale to all of your servers to create a P2P yet
| invisible network between your hosts. You need to protect
| the internet facing one properly, and set ACLs at
| tailscale level if you're storing anything personal on
| that network, though.
| letmetweakit wrote:
| I would probably just ssh into the Hetzner box and not
| connect it to my tailnet.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| Would tailscale or cloudflare do the trick. Let them
| connect to the server.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| Yeah no need for public ssh. Or if you do pick a random
| port and fail2ban or better just whitelist the one IP you
| are using for the duration of that session.
|
| To avoid needing SSH just send your logs and metrics out
| and do something to autodeploy securely then you rarely
| need to be in. Or use k8s :)
| bayindirh wrote:
| Whitelisting single IP (preferably a static one) sounds
| plausible.
|
| Kubernetes for personal infrastructure is akin to getting
| an aircraft carrier for fishing trips.
|
| For simple systems snapshots and backups are good enough.
| If you're managing a thousand machine fleet, then things
| are of course different.
|
| I manage both so, I don't yearn to use big-stack-software
| on my small hosts. :D
| 63stack wrote:
| This is just FUD, there is nothing dangerous in having an
| SSH server open to the internet that only allows key
| authentication. Sure, scanners will keep pinging it, but
| nobody is ever going to burn an ssh 0day on your home
| server.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > This is just FUD.
|
| No, it's just opsec.
|
| > Sure, scanners will keep pinging it, but nobody is ever
| going to burn an ssh 0day on your home server.
|
| I wouldn't be so sure about it, considering the things I
| have seen.
|
| I'd better be safe than sorry. You can expose your SSH if
| you prefer to do so. Just don't connect your server to my
| network.
| 63stack wrote:
| "opsec" includes well defined things like threat
| modeling, risk factors, and such. "Things I have seen"
| and vague "better safe than sorry" is not part of that.
| bayindirh wrote:
| There are two golden rules of opsec: 1.
| Never tell everything you know and seen. 2.
|
| For what I do, you can refer to my profile.
| hylaride wrote:
| A few years ago a vulnerable compression library almost
| got pushed out that major Linux distros linked their
| OpenSSH implementations to. That was caught by blind
| luck. I'm confident there's a lot more shit out there
| that we don't know about.
| ectospheno wrote:
| Expose it on port 22 on ipv6 and it might as well be
| invisible. Cleanest logs ever.
| exceptione wrote:
| Crazy. Who would have an incentive to spend resources on
| DDoS'ing Codeberg? The only party I can think of would be
| Github. I know that the normalization of ruthlessness and
| winner-takes-all mentality made crime mandatory for large
| parts of the economy, but still cannot wrap my mind around
| it.
| Kelteseth wrote:
| Not just them. For example, Qt self hosted cgit got ddos
| just two weeks ago. No idea why random open source projects
| getting attacked.
|
| > in the past 48 hours, code.qt.io has been under a
| persistent DDoS attack. The attackers utilize a highly
| distributed network of IP addresses, attempting to obstruct
| services and network bandwidth.
|
| https://lists.qt-
| project.org/pipermail/development/2025-Nove...
| delfinom wrote:
| Probably some little script kiddie fucks who think they
| are elite mega haxors and use their mommie's credit card
| to pay one of the ddos services readily accessible.
| immibis wrote:
| Sounds like the good old AI scraper DDoS - which, by the
| way, has no evidence of actually being AI related
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > Who would have an incentive to spend resources
|
| That's not how threat analysis works. That's a conspiracy
| theory. You need to consider the difficulty of achieving
| it.
|
| Otherwise I could start speculating which large NAS
| provider is trying to DDoS me, when in fact it's a script
| kiddie.
|
| As for who would have the most incentives? Unscrupulous AI
| scrapers. Every unprotected site experiences a flood of AI
| scrapers/bots.
| theteapot wrote:
| Actually I think that's roughly how threat analysis works
| though.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| For threat analysis, you need to know how hard you are to
| break in, what the incentives are, and who your potential
| adversaries are.
|
| For each potential adversary, you list the risk strategy;
| that's threat analysis 101.
|
| E.g. you have a locked door, some valuables, and your
| opponent is the state-level. Risk strategy: ignore, no
| door you can afford will be able to stop a state-level
| actor.
| theteapot wrote:
| I concur the question, "Who would have an incentive to
| spend resources on DDoS'ing Codeberg?" is a bit
| convoluted in mixing incentive and resources. But it's
| still, exactly, threat analysis, just not very useful
| threat analysis.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Wouldn't an AI scraper working for a huge firm have more
| incentive to scrape your code, than a competitor?
| exceptione wrote:
| I think the goal is unclear, but the effect will be that
| Codeberg will be perceived as less of a real, stable
| alternative. Breaking in was not in my mind, but that
| will have the same effect, maybe even more damaging. Now,
| if that has been the intended effect, I hope I won't have
| to believe that.
|
| _Story time:_
|
| _I remember that back in the day I had a domain name for
| a pretty hot keyword with a great, organic position in
| Google rankings. Then someday it got all of a sudden
| serious boost from black-SEO, with a bazillion links from
| all kinds of unrelated websites. My domain got penalized
| and dropped of from the front page._
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| its easier for MS to buy codeberg and close it than to
| spent time and money to DDOS things
| matrss wrote:
| How do you buy an e.V.?
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| You goes to BYD dealership???
| matrss wrote:
| I said e.V., not EV. Codeberg is an e.V., i.e. a
| "registered association" in Germany. I am not actually
| sure if you could technically buy an e.V., but I am 100%
| certain that all of the Codeberg e.V. members would not
| take kindly to an attempt at a hostile takeover from
| Microsoft. So no, buying Codeberg is not easier than
| DDoSing them.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| they can't buy the orgs but they can buy the codeberg or
| its member
|
| which is basically the same thing
| matrss wrote:
| What do you mean by "orgs", and what do you mean by "the
| codeberg"?
|
| Sure, they could try to bribe the Codeberg e.V. active
| members into changing its mission or disbanding the
| association entirely, but they would need to get a 2/3
| majority at a general assembly while only the people
| actively involved in the e.V. and/or one of its projects
| can get voting rights. I find that highly unlikely to
| succeed.
| notpushkin wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#Transition_from_non-
| pro...
| blibble wrote:
| this only works in countries with questionable rule of
| law
| bayindirh wrote:
| Like how you buy a standards committee.
|
| Just research about Office formats' ISO standardization
| process.
|
| I'm not insinuating MicroSoft will buy Codeberg, but I
| just wanted to say that, they are not foreigners to the
| process itself.
| matrss wrote:
| Are there standards committees with 786 voting members,
| of which you would have to convince at least 2/3 to
| betray the ideals of the association they chose to
| actively take part in to get the association to disband
| or otherwise stop it from pursuing its mission?
|
| I don't think your comparison works out.
| bayindirh wrote:
| ~800 members? That's great to hear actually. I like
| Codeberg and want them to succeed and be protected from
| outside effects.
|
| That's said, I believe my comparison checks out. Having
| ~800 members is a useful moat, and will deter actors from
| harming Codeberg.
|
| OTOH, the mechanism can still theoretically work. Of
| course Microsoft won't try something that blatant, but if
| the e.V loses this moat, there are mechanisms which
| Microsoft can and would like to use as Codeberg gets more
| popular.
| matrss wrote:
| I took the number from here:
| https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-
| and-u...
|
| I think another big "moat" is actually that Codeberg is
| composed of natural people only (those with voting
| rights, anyway). Real people have values, and since they
| have to actively participate in Codeberg in some way to
| get voting rights those values are probably aligned with
| Codeberg's mission. I don't actually now the details of
| the standardization process you cite, but I think this is
| a big difference to it.
|
| Additionally, from skimming the bylaws of Codeberg I'd
| say they have multiple fail-safes built in as additional
| protection. For one, you can't just pay ~1600 people to
| sign up and crash a general assembly, every membership
| application has to be approved first. They also ask for
| "support [for] the association and its purpose in an
| adequate fashion" from its members, and include
| mechanisms to kick people out that violate this or are
| otherwise acting against Codeberg's interests, which such
| a hostile attack would surely qualify as.
|
| Of course it's something to stay vigilant about, but I
| think Codeberg is well positioned with regard to
| protecting against a hostile takeover and shutdown
| situation, to the point that DDoS is the much easier
| attack against them (as was the initial topic).
| sznio wrote:
| >The only party I can think of would be Github.
|
| I think it's not malice, but stupidity. IoT made even a
| script kiddie capable of running a huge botnet capable of
| DDoSing anything but CloudFlare.
| rcxdude wrote:
| DDoS are crazy cheap now, it could be a random person for
| the lulz, or just as a test or demo (though I suspect
| Codeberg aren't a bit enough target to be impressive
| there).
| Sammi wrote:
| Is it because the s in iot stands for security? I'm
| asking genuinely. Where are these requests coming from?
| gilrain wrote:
| Search for "residential proxy".
| Sammi wrote:
| This seems like a synonym for botnet.
| rcxdude wrote:
| I would put it down to 4 things:
|
| - the internet's a lot bigger nowadays
|
| - there are a lot of crappily secured iot devices
|
| - the average household internet connection has gotten a
| lot faster, especially on upload bandwidth.
|
| - there's a pile of amplification techniques which can
| multiply the bandwidth of an attack by using poorly-
| configured services.
| exceptione wrote:
| What is cheap and what are the risks of getting caught? I
| can understand that for a 15 yo it might be for the lulz,
| but I am having a hard time to imagine that this would
| give street creds, and why be persistent about it. AI-
| bots would make more sense, but these can be dealt with.
| ncruces wrote:
| Big tech would be far more interested in slurping data than
| DDoS'ing them.
|
| An issue with comments, linked to a PR with review
| comments, the commit stack implementing the feature, and
| further commits addressing comments is probably valuable
| data to train a coding agent.
|
| Serving all that data is not just a matter of cloning the
| repo. It means hitting their (public, documented) API end
| points, that are likely more costly to run.
|
| And if they rate limit the scrappers, the unscrupulous
| bunch will start spreading requests across the whole
| internet.
| bit1993 wrote:
| Part of the problem is that Codeberg/Gitea's API endpoints
| are well documented and there are bots that scrape for gitea
| instances. Its similar to running SSH on port 22 or hosting
| popular PHP forums software, there are always automated
| attacks by different entities simply because they recognize
| the API.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| GitHub uptime isn't perfect either. You will notice these
| outages from time to time if your employer is using it for more
| than just "store some git repos", e.g. using GHA for builds and
| deploys, packages etc.
| worldsavior wrote:
| What? It says it's up for 98.56% for the last 2 weeks.
| qwertox wrote:
| That's probably the average. But if Codeberg Translate shines
| with 99.58%, it is an unnecessary entry which harms the
| "92.42% Codeberg.org" reality.
| p2detar wrote:
| There have been complaints about it on Reddit as well. I
| registered an account recently and to me the annoying thing is
| the constant "making sure you are not a bot" check. For now I
| see no reason to migrate, but I do admit Forgejo looks very
| interesting to self-host.
| verdverm wrote:
| https://tangled.org/ is building on ATProto
|
| 1. use git or jj
|
| 2. pull-request like data lives on the network
|
| 3. They have a UI, but anyone can also build one and the
| ecosystem is shared
|
| I've been considering Gerrit for git-codereview, and tangled
| will be interesting when private data / repos are a thing.
| Not trying to have multiple git hosts while I wait
| bpavuk wrote:
| I, too, am extremely interested in development on Tangled,
| but I miss two features from GitHub - universal search and
| Releases. the web frontend of Tangled is so fast that I am
| still getting used to the speed, and jj-first features like
| stacked PRs are just awesome. kinda reminds me of how Linux
| patch submitting works.
| verdverm wrote:
| It's fast because it lacks features
|
| I'm more interested in gerrit/git-codereview for stacked
| commits than jj. A couple extra commands for new folks,
| not a completely new tool and lexicon
| culi wrote:
| 3 of the most exciting decentralized GitHub alternatives
| being developed today: Tangled (2024, ATP)
| Radicle (2019, IPFS) Codeberg (2018, Gitea fork
| which supports decentralized protocols)
| lkramer wrote:
| I moved (from selfhost gitlab) to forgejo recently, and for
| my needs it's a lot better, with a lot less hassle. It also
| seems a lot more performant (again probably because I don't
| need a lot of the advanced features of gitlab).
| davidee wrote:
| I've been contemplating this for almost two years. Gitlab
| has gotten very bloated and despite disabling a number of
| services in the config, it continues to require
| increasingly more compute and RAM; we don't even use the
| integrated Postgres database.
|
| There are a few things that keep me on Gitlab, but the main
| one is the quality of the CI/CD system and the gitlab
| runners.
|
| I looked at Woodpecker, but it seems so docker-centric and
| we are, uh, not.
|
| The other big gulf is issues and issue management. Gitlab
| CE is terrible; weird limitations (no epics unless you
| pay), broken features, UX nightmares, but from the looks of
| it Forjego is even more lacking in this area? Despite this
| seeming disdain, the other feature we regularly use is
| referencing issue numbers in commits to tie work together
| easily. On this one, I can see the answer as "be the change
| - contribute this to Forgejo" and I'm certainly willing.
| Still, it's currently a blocker.
|
| But my hopes in putting this comment out there is that
| perhaps others have suggestions or insight I'm missing?
| huijzer wrote:
| > but I do admit Forgejo looks very interesting to self-host.
|
| I've been self-hosting it for a few years now and can
| definitely recommend. It has been very reliable. I even have
| a runner running. Full tutorial at
| https://huijzer.xyz/posts/55/installing-forgejo-with-a-
| separ....
| Daegalus wrote:
| Just a reminder, Codeberg is for open source projects only, and
| maybe some dotfiles and such. Its on their frontpage and in
| their TOS.
| Sammi wrote:
| Because they are Codeberg I'm betting they have a philosophical
| aversion to using a cloud based ddos protection service like
| Cloudflare. Sadly the problem is that noone has come up with
| any other type of solution that actually works.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| How well can Cloudflare protect against malicious account
| creation, where the attackers are set up to supply a response
| to email?
| psychoslave wrote:
| One can always host Forgejo themselves if a service level has
| to be kept under control. With Github that's not even an
| option.
|
| I would even consider that moving everything from one single
| point of failure to an other is not the brightest move.
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| > With Github that's not even an option.
|
| Github does offer a self hosted product: GitHub Enterprise
| Server
| psychoslave wrote:
| 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...
| naikrovek wrote:
| yes, GitHub Enterprise Server is not free. And yes you
| pay a license fee per user per month, billed annually,
| and the minimum license purchase is 10 users at something
| like $21/user/month. Microsoft discounts you qualify for
| will bring that down. You pay because you get support.
| You won't need it often, but when you do, you really need
| it.
|
| It is easy to administer even for 15k users, and mostly
| it takes care of itself if you give it enough RAM and CPU
| for all the activity.
|
| Downloading the virtual hard drive image from GitHub is
| easy and decrypting the code inside is borderline
| trivial, but I'm not going to help anyone do that. I've
| never had a need to do it.
|
| As a server product it is good. I recommend it if you can
| afford it. It is not intended for private individuals or
| non-profits, though. It's for corporations who want their
| code on-premise, and for that it is quite good.
| dwaite wrote:
| 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.
| psychoslave wrote:
| People attention is not free. Rights of people is not
| free. Thinking only through money lenses is not free of
| consequences.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| 99.95 from something I use to do work is non negotiable.
| arccy wrote:
| you probably wouldn't use it for work anyway, codeberg is for
| OSS only
| rprend wrote:
| Average big tech alternative. Doesn't solve your problems,
| doesn't scale, terrible UX, but at least it's run by fanatics.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| Forgejo does solve my problems, doesn't scale _yet_ (I am
| really looking forward to ForgeFed), has fine UX, and at
| least it 's run by people who care.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| As a customer of GitHub actions, anecdotally feels like Github
| experiences issues frequently enough to make this not a
| problem.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Last week the reason for the move was MS tools being used by the
| baddies. Today AI is the baddie du jour. To use a great quote
| "either do or don't, but I got places to be".
| latexr wrote:
| The original post was specifically about technical grievances,
| "MS tools being used by the baddies" was mentioned only in
| passing.
|
| https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/
|
| > Putting aside GitHub's relationship with ICE
|
| That was the extent of it. Six words.
|
| Furthermore, this submission is an independent post, _not from
| Zig_ , reporting on the original and adding more context.
|
| > To use a great quote "either do or don't, but I got places to
| be".
|
| What exactly is your complaint? The move had already been
| completed at the time of the original Zig post. They did do it.
|
| There's no incongruence between posts. The nature of your
| discontent or how it could possibly affect you isn't clear in
| the slightest.
| otikik wrote:
| > I got places to be
|
| Like, reading and posting on Hacker News?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Don't judge: we're here too.
| otikik wrote:
| I very openly don't have places to be
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I remember getting ad in a podcast for an AI tool that is
| designed to combat scams using AI tools.
|
| We really got to the point where AI is both a problem and
| solution to the problem it causes.
| mkornaukhov wrote:
| 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, you
| don't have to search for external donation platforms and post
| weird links in your profile/repository.
|
| All in one, that's why developers like it so much. The obsession
| with AI makes me nervous, but the advantages still outweigh, as
| for me, the average developer. For now.
| baq wrote:
| > a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system
|
| having used gerrit 10 years ago there's nothing about github's
| PRs that I like more, today.
|
| > code navigation simply in a web browser
|
| this is nice indeed, true.
|
| > You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly.
|
| if only. GHA are a hot mess because somehow we've landed in a
| local minimum of pretend-YAML-but-actually-shell-js-jinja-
| python and they have a smaller or bigger outage every other
| week, for years now.
|
| > why developers like it so much
|
| most everything else is _much_ worse in at least one area and
| the most important thing it 's what everyone uses. no one got
| fired for using github.
| delusional wrote:
| > having used gerrit 10 years ago there's nothing about
| github's PRs that I like more, today.
|
| I love patch stack review systems. I understand why they're
| not more popular, they can be a bit harder to understand and
| more work to craft, but it's just a wonderful experience once
| you get them. Making my reviews work in phabricator made my
| patchsets in general so much better, and making my patchsets
| better have improved my communication skills.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| The main thing I like about Github's PRs is that it's a
| system I'm already familiar with and have a login/account
| for. It's tedious going to contribute to a project to find I
| have to sign up for and learn another system.
|
| I've used Gerrit years ago, so wasn't totally unfamiliar, but
| it was still awkward to use when Go were using it for PRs.
| Notably that project ended up giving up on it because of the
| friction for users - and they were probably one of the most
| likely cases to stick to their guns and use something
| unusual.
| TheDong wrote:
| > Notably [go] ended up giving up on [gerrit]
|
| That's not accurate. They more or less only use Gerrit
| still. They started accepting Github PRs, but not really,
| see https://go.dev/doc/contribute#sending_a_change_github
|
| > You will need a Gerrit account to respond to your
| reviewers, including to mark feedback as 'Done' if
| implemented as suggested
|
| The comments are still gerrit, you really shouldn't use
| Github.
|
| The Go reviewers are also more likely than usual to assume
| you're incompetent if your PR comes from Github, and the
| review will accordingly be slower and more likely to be
| rejected, and none of the go core contributors use the
| weird github PR flow.
| ncruces wrote:
| > The Go reviewers are also more likely than usual to
| assume you're incompetent if your PR comes from Github
|
| I've _always_ done it that way, and _never_ got that
| feeling.
| arccy wrote:
| there's certainly a higher rejection rate for github PRs
| foldr wrote:
| That seems unsurprising given that it's the easiest way
| for most people to do it. Almost any kind of obstacle
| will filter out the bottom X% of low effort sludge.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| correlation, not causation.
|
| Lowest common denominator way will always get worst
| quality
| arccy wrote:
| sure it's correlation, but the signal-to-noise ratio is
| low enough that if you send it in via github PR, there's
| a solid chance of it being ignored for months / years
| before someone decides to take a look.
| miroljub wrote:
| Many people confuse competence and dedication.
|
| A competent developer would be more likely to send a PR
| using the tool with zero friction than to dedicate a few
| additional hours of his life to create an account and
| figure out how to use some obscure.
| baq wrote:
| A competent developer wouldn't call gerrit an obscure
| tool.
| foldr wrote:
| This attitude sucks and is pretty close to just being
| flame bait. There are all kinds of developer who would
| have no reason to ever have come across it.
| baq wrote:
| A competent developer should be aware of the tools of the
| trade.
|
| I'm not saying a competent developer should be proficient
| in using gerrit, but they should know that it isn't an
| obscure tool - it's a google-sponsored project handling
| millions of lines of code internally in google and
| externally. It's like calling golang an obscure language
| when all you ever did is java or typescript.
| foldr wrote:
| It's silly to assume that someone isn't competent just
| because you know about a tool that they don't know about.
| The inverse is almost certainly also true.
|
| Is there some kind of Google-centrism at work here? Most
| devs don't work at Google or contribute to Google
| projects, so there is no reason for them to know anything
| about Gerrit.
| TheDong wrote:
| > Most devs don't work at Google or contribute to Google
| projects, so there is no reason for them to know anything
| about Gerrit.
|
| Most devs have never worked on Solaris, but if I ask you
| about solaris and you don't even know what it is, that's
| a bad sign for how competent a developer you are.
|
| Most devs have never used prolog or haskell or smalltalk
| seriously, but if they don't know what they are, that
| means they don't have curiosity about programming
| language paradigms, and that's a bad sign.
|
| Most competent professional developers do code review and
| will run into issues with their code review tooling, and
| so they'll have some curiosity and look into what's out
| there.
|
| There's no reason for most developers to know random
| trivia outside of their area of expertise "what
| compression format does png use by default", but text
| editors and code review software are fundamental
| developer tools, so fundamental that every competent
| developer I know has enough curiosity to know what's out
| there. Same for programming languages, shells, and
| operating systems.
| foldr wrote:
| These are all ridiculous shibboleths. I know what Solaris
| is because I'm an old fart. I've never used it nor needed
| to know anything about it. I'd be just as (in)competent
| if I'd never heard of it.
| dxdm wrote:
| You are making the same mistake of conflating competence
| and (lack of) dedication.
|
| Most likely, dedication says little about competence, and
| vice versa. If you do not want to use the tools available
| to get something done and rather not do the task instead,
| what does that say about your competence?
|
| I'm not in a position to know or judge this, but I could
| see how dedication could be a useful proxy for the
| expected quality a PR and the interaction that will go
| with it, which could be useful for popular open source
| projects. Not saying that's necessarily true, just that
| it's worth considering some maintainers might have
| anecdotal experiences along that line.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| Oh right. Thanks for the correction - I thought they had
| moved more to GitHub. Guess not as much as I thought!
| blibble wrote:
| > The main thing I like about Github's PRs is that it's a
| system I'm already familiar with and have a login/account
| for. It's tedious going to contribute to a project to find
| I have to sign up for and learn another system.
|
| codeberg supports logging in with GitHub accounts, and the
| PR interface is exactly the same
|
| you have nothing new to learn!
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah and this slavish devotion to keeping the existing
| (broken imho) PR structure from GH is the one thing I
| most dislike about Forgejo, but oh well. I still moved my
| project over to Codeberg.
|
| GH's PR system is semi-tolerable for open source
| projects. It's downright broken for commercial software
| teams of any scale.
|
| Like the other commenter: I miss Gerrit and proper
| comment<->change tracking.
| blibble wrote:
| agreed, the github "innovation", i.e. the pull request
| interface is terrible for anything other than small
| changes
|
| hopefully codeberg can build on it, and have an
| "advanced" option
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I used gerrit a bit at work but any time I want to contribute
| to OSS project requiring to use it I just send a message with
| bugfix patch applied and leave, it's so much extra effort for
| drive by contributions that I don't care.
|
| It's fine for code review in a team, not really good in GH-
| like "a user found a bug, fixed it, and want to send it"
| contribution scheme
| CafeRacer wrote:
| I'd rather solve advent of code in brainfuck than have to debug
| their CI workflows ever again.
| sunnyday_002 wrote:
| Surely you just need the workflow to not have embedded logic
| but call out to a task manager so you can do the same
| locally?
| CafeRacer wrote:
| Well then why 99% of GH Actions functionality even exists.
| esafak wrote:
| To lock you in.
| CafeRacer wrote:
| Ergo, I'd rather use brainfuck to program CI.
| sunnyday_002 wrote:
| It is fairly common pratice almost engineering best
| pratice to not put logic in CI. Just have it call out to
| a task runner, so you can run the same command locally
| for debugging etc. Think of CI more as a shell as a
| service, your just paying someone to enter some shell
| commands for you, you should be able to do exactly the
| same locally.
|
| You can take this a setup furthur and use an environment
| manager to removing the installing of tools from CI as
| well for local/remote consistency and more benefits.
| officialchicken wrote:
| Embrace, extend, extinguish.
|
| That's not a Victorinox you're looking at, it's a cheap poorly
| made enshittified clone using a decades old playbook (e-e-e).
|
| The focus on "Sponsorship buttons" and feature instead of
| fixing is just a waste of my time.
| matrss wrote:
| > a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system
|
| Having used Forgejo with AGit now, IMO the PR experience on
| GitHub is not great when trying to contribute to a new project.
| It's just unnecessarily convoluted.
| esafak wrote:
| What do you like most about agit?
| matrss wrote:
| It's just how straightforward it is. With GitHub's fork-
| then-PR approach I would have to clone, fork, add a remote
| to my local fork, push to said remote, and open the PR.
|
| With agit flow I just have to clone the repository I want
| to contribute to, make my changes, and push (to a special
| ref, but still just push to the target repo).
|
| I have been making some small contributions to Guix when
| they were still using email for patches, and that (i.e.
| send patches directly to upstream) already felt more
| natural than what GitHub propagates. And agit feels like
| the git-native interpretation of this email workflow.
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| Would you say Github has any significant advantages over Gitlab
| in this regard? I always found them to be on par, with
| incremental advantages on either side.
| sunnyday_002 wrote:
| One of my favourite GitHub features is the ability to do a
| code search over the whole of GitHub, not sure GitLab has the
| same when I use to use it?
| ssivark wrote:
| Code search over all of Gitlab (even if available) wouldn't
| help much when many of the interesting repos might be on
| Github. To be truly useful, it would need to index repos
| across many different forges. But there's a tension in
| presenting that to users if you're afraid that they might
| exit your ecosystem to go to another forge.
| jcmfernandes wrote:
| > a well-formed CI system
|
| Man :| no. I genuinely understand the convenience of using
| Actions, but it's a horrible product.
| sunnyday_002 wrote:
| In what way? I've never had an issue other than outages.
| akmittal wrote:
| Curious what are some better options. I feel it is completing
| with Jenkins and CircleCI and its not that bad.
| kakwa_ wrote:
| Maybe I have low standards given I've never touched what
| gitlab or CircleCi have to offer, but compared to my past
| experiences with Buildbot, Jenkins and Travis, it's miles
| ahead of these in my opinion.
|
| Am I missing a truly better alternative or CI systems simply
| are all kind of a pita?
| vbezhenar wrote:
| My issue with Github CI is that it doesn't run your code in
| a container. You just have github-runner-1 user and you
| need to manually check out repository, do your build and
| clean up after you're done with it. Very dirty and
| unpredictable. That's for self-hosted runner.
| sunnyday_002 wrote:
| > My issue with Github CI is that it doesn't run your
| code in a container.
|
| Is this not what you want?
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/write-
| workflows/c...
|
| > You just have github-runner-1 user and you need to
| manually check out repository, do your build and clean up
| after you're done with it. Very dirty and unpredictable.
| That's for self-hosted runner.
|
| Yeah checking out everytime is a slight papercut I guess,
| but I guess it gives you control as sometimes you don't
| need to checkout anything or want a shallow/full clone. I
| guess if it checked out for you then their would be other
| papercuts.
|
| I use their runners so never need to do any cleanup and
| get a fresh slate everytime.
| philwelch wrote:
| Gitlab is much better
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I don't enough experience w/ Buildbot or Travis to comment
| on those, but Jenkins?
|
| I get that it got the job done and was standard at one
| point, but every single Jenkins instance I've seen in the
| wild is a steaming pile of ... unpatched, unloved,
| liability. I've come to understand that it isn't
| necessarily Jenkins at fault, it's teams 'running' their
| own infrastructure as an afterthought, coupled with the
| risk of borking the setup at the 'wrong time', which is
| always. From my experience this pattern seems nearly
| universal.
|
| Github actions definitely has its warts and missing
| features, but I'll take managed build services over Jenkins
| every time.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Jenkins was just build in pre-container way so a lot of
| stuff (unless you specifically make your jobs use
| containers) is dependent on setup of machine running
| jenkins. But that does make _some_ things easier, just
| harder to make repeatable as you pretty much
| configuration management solution to keep the jenkins
| machine config repeatable.
|
| And yes "we can't be arsed to patch it till it's problem"
| is pretty much standard for any on-site infrastructure
| that doesn't have ops people yelling at devs to keep it
| up to date, but that's more SaaS vs onsite benefit than
| Jenkins failing.
| antonvs wrote:
| What do you consider a good product in this space?
| rprend wrote:
| > it's horrible, i use it every day > the alternatives are
| great, i never use them
|
| Every time.
| bit1993 wrote:
| I don't agree with this at all. I think the reason Github is so
| prominent is the social network aspects it has built around
| Git, which created strong network effects that most developers
| are unwilling to part with. Maintainers don't want to loose
| their stars and the users don't want to loose the collective
| "audit" by the github users.
|
| Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks,
| number of issues answered, number of followers for an account.
| All these things are powerful indicators of quality, and like
| it or not are now part of modern software engineering.
| Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more stars
| than its alternatives.
|
| I know that the code should speak for itself and one should
| audit their dependencies and not depend on Github stars, but in
| practice this is not what happens, we rely on the community.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You don't need to develop on Github to get this, just mirror
| your repo.
| em-bee wrote:
| that's not enough, i still have to engage with contributors
| on github. on issues and pull requests at a minimum.
| mkornaukhov wrote:
| I would say that your comment is an addition to mine, and I
| think so too. This is another reason for the popularity of
| github.
|
| As for me, this does not negate the convenient things that I
| originally wrote about.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > Maintainers don't want to loose their stars
|
| ??? Seriously?
|
| > All these things are powerful indicators of quality
|
| Not in my experience....
| eXpl0it3r wrote:
| Why are you as surprised?
|
| People don't just share their stargazing plots "for fun",
| but because it has meaning for them.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > People don't just share their stargazing plots "for
| fun", but because it has meaning for them.
|
| What's the difference?
| robin_reala wrote:
| In my 17 years of having a GitHub account I don't think
| I've ever seen a "stargazing plot". Have you got an
| example of one?
| justin66 wrote:
| > Things like number of stars on a repository, number of
| forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an
| account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality
|
| Hahahahahahahahahahahaha...
| esafak wrote:
| OK, indicators of interest. Would you bet on a project
| nobody cares about?
| justin66 wrote:
| I guess if I viewed software engineering merely as a
| placing of bets, I would not, but that's the center of
| the disagreement here. I'm not trying to be a dick (okay
| maybe a little sue me), the grandparent comment mentioned
| "software engineering."
|
| I can refer you to some github repositories with a low
| number of stars that are of extraordinarily high quality,
| and similarly, some shitty software with lots of stars.
| But I'm sure you get the point.
| esafak wrote:
| You are placing a bet that the project will continue to
| be maintained; you do not know what the future holds. If
| the project is of any complexity, and you presumably have
| other responsibilities, you can't do everything yourself;
| you need the community.
| Tor3 wrote:
| There are projects, or repositories, with a very narrow
| target audience, sometimes you can count them on one
| hand. Important repositories for those few who need them,
| and there aren't any alternatives. Things like decoders
| for obscure and undocumented backup formats and the like.
| rikroots wrote:
| > Things like number of stars on a repository, number of
| forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an
| account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality,
| and like it or not are now part of modern software
| engineering.
|
| I hate that this is perceived as generally true. Stars can be
| farmed and gamed; and the value of a star does not decay over
| time. Issues can be automatically closed, or answered with a
| non-response and closed. Numbers of followers is a
| networking/platform thing (flag your significance by
| following people with significant follower numbers).
|
| > Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more
| stars than its alternatives.
|
| If anything, star numbers reflect first mover advantage
| rather than code quality. People choosing which one of a
| number of competing packages to use in their product should
| consider a lot more than just the star number. Sadly, time
| pressures on decision makers (and their assumptions) means
| that detailed consideration rarely happens and star count
| remains the major factor in choosing whether to include a
| repo in a project.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Stars, issues closed, PRs, commits, all are pointless
| metrics.
|
| The metrics you want are mostly ones they don't and can't
| have. Number of dependent projects for instance.
|
| The metrics they keep are just what people have said, a way
| to gameify and keep people interested.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| So number of daily/weekly downloads on PyPI/npm/etc?
|
| All these things are a proxy for popularity and that is a
| valuable metric. I have seen projects with amazing code
| quality but if they are not maintained eventually they
| stop working due to updates to dependencies, external
| APIs, runtime environment, etc. And I have see projects
| with meh code quality but so popular that every quirk and
| weird issue had a known workaround. Take ffmpeg for
| example: its code is.. arcane. But would you choose a
| random video transcoder written in JavaScript just due to
| the beautiful code that was last updated in 2012?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Github became successful long before those 'social media
| features' were added, simply because it provided free hosting
| for open source projects (and free hosting services were
| still a rare thing back in the noughties).
|
| The previous popular free code hoster was Sourceforge, which
| eventually entered its what's now called "enshittifcation
| phase". Github was simply in the right place at the right
| time to replace Sourceforge and the rest is history.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Technically so was BitBucket but it chose mercurial over
| git initially. If you are old enough you will remember
| articles comparing the two with mercurial getting slightly
| more favorable reviews.
|
| And for those who don't remember SourceForge, it had two
| major problems in DevEx: first you couldn't just get your
| open source project published. It had to be approved. And
| once it did, you had an ugly URL. GitHub had pretty URLs.
|
| I remember putting up my very first open source project
| back before GitHub and going through this huge checklist of
| what a good open source project must have. Then seeing that
| people just tossed code onto GitHub as is: no man pages, no
| or little documentation, build instructions that resulted
| in errors, no curated changelog, and realizing that things
| are changing.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Mercurial was/is nice and imho smooths off a lot of the
| unnecessarily rough git edges.
|
| But VCS has always been a standard-preferring space,
| because its primary point is collaboration, so using
| something different creates a lot of pain.
|
| And the good ship SS Linux Kernel was a lot of mass for
| any non-git solution to compete with.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Github was faster than BitBucket and it worked well
| whether or not JavaScript was enabled. This does seem to
| be regressing as of late. I have tried a variety of
| alternatives; they have all been slower, but Github does
| seem to be regressing.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > Technically so was BitBucket
|
| The big reason I recall was that GitHub provided free
| public repos and limited private, while BitBucket was the
| opposite.
|
| So if you primarily worked with open-source, GitHub was
| the better choice in that regard.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| And GitHub got free hosting and support from Engine Yard
| when they were starting out. I remember it being a big deal
| when we had to move them from shared hosting to something
| like 3 dedicated supermicro servers.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| There's definitely a few phases of Github, feature and
| popularity wise. 1. Free hosting with
| decent UX 2. Social features 3. Lifecycle
| automation features
|
| In this vein, it doing new stuff with AI isn't out of
| keeping with its development path, but I do think they need
| to pick a lane and decide if they want to boost
| professional developer productivity or be a platform for
| vibe coding.
|
| And probably, if the latter, fork that off into a different
| platform with a new name. (Microsoft loves naming things!
| Call it 'Codespaces 365 Live!')
| ryukoposting wrote:
| These are the only reasons I use GitHub. The familiarity to
| students and non-developers is also a plus.
|
| I have no idea what the parent comment is talking about a
| "well-formed CI system." GitHub Actions is easily the worst
| CI tool I've ever used. There are no core features of GitHub
| that haven't been replicated by GitLab at this point, and in
| my estimation GitLab did all of it better. But, if I put
| something on GitLab, nobody sees it.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| And this is the core problem with the modern platform
| internet. One victor (or a handful) take the lead in a
| given niche, and it becomes impossible to get away from
| them without great personal cost, literal, moral, or labor,
| and usually a combo of all three. And then that company has
| absolutely no motivation at all to prioritize the quality
| of the product, merely to extract all the value from the
| user-base as possible.
|
| Facebook has been on that path for well over a decade, and
| it shows. The service itself is absolute garbage. Users
| stay because everyone they know is already there and the
| groups they love are there, and they just tolerate being
| force-fed AI slop and being monitored. But Facebook is not
| GROWING as a result, it's slowly dying, much like it's
| aging userbase. But Facebook doesn't care because no one in
| charge of any company these days can see further than next
| quarter's earnings call.
| bit1993 wrote:
| This is a socio-economic problem, it can happen with non
| internet platforms too. Its why people end up living in
| cities for example. Any system that has addresses,
| accounts or any form of identity has the potential for
| strong network effects.
| martin-t wrote:
| I am surprised by the comments about GH CI. I first started
| using CI on GL, then moved to GH and found GH's to let me
| get things done more easily.
|
| It's been years through and the ease of doing simple things
| is not always indicative of difficult things. Often quite
| the contrary...
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Most people would be fine with Forgejo on Codeberg (or self
| hosted).
| behnamoh wrote:
| > Things like number of stars on a repository, number of
| forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an
| account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality
|
| They're NOT! Lots of trashy AI projects have +50k stars.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| > In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a
| web browser.
|
| IMHO the vanilla Github UI sucks for code browsing since it's
| incredibly slow, and the search is also useless (the integrated
| web-vscode works much better - e.g. press '.' inside a Github
| project).
|
| > as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed
| actions and free runners
|
| The only good thing about the Github CI system are the free
| runners (including free Mac runners), for everything else it's
| objectively worse than the alternatives (like Gitlab CI).
| kunley wrote:
| The big issue with Github is that they never denied feeding ai
| with private repositories. (Gitlab for example did that when
| asked). This fact alone makes many users bitter, even for
| organizations not using private repos per se.
| curcbit wrote:
| Github'PR and CI are some of the worst.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| Underrated feature is the code search. Everyone starts out
| thinking they'll just slap elastic search or similar in front
| of the code but it's more nuanced than that. GitHub built a
| bespoke code search engine and published a detailed blog post
| about it afterwards.
| vthriller wrote:
| > In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a
| web browser
|
| How do you define "code navigation"? It might've got a bit
| easier with automatic highlighting of selected symbols, but in
| return source code viewer got way too laggy and, for a couple
| of years now, it has this weird bug with misplaced cursors if
| code is scrolled horizontally. I actually find myself using the
| "raw" button more and more often, or cloning repo even for some
| quick ad-hoc lookups.
|
| Edit: not to mention the blame view that actively fights with
| browser's built in search functionality.
| jappgar wrote:
| Hint: Type the '.' key on any code page or PR.
| vthriller wrote:
| And now it opens... some VSCode-esque editor in the browser
| that asks me to sign-in? Why would I want something even
| more resource-hungry and convoluted just to look up a
| random thing once in a while?
| jappgar wrote:
| If you're familiar with VSCode it's quite handy. If you
| hate VSCode for some reason then just don't use it.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Having a sponsorship system is also great
|
| They have zero fees for individuals too which is amazing.
| Thanks to it I gained my first sponsor when one of my projects
| was posted here. Made me wish sponsorships could pay the bills.
| zahlman wrote:
| >a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free
| runners.
|
| It feels to me like people have become way too reliant on this
| (in particular, forcing things into CI that could easily be
| done locally) and too trusting of those runners (ISTR some
| reports of malware).
|
| >In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web
| browser.
|
| I've always found their navigation quite clunky and glitchy.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Well, I guess. It's not a surprise LinkedIn and GitHub are
| owned by the same entity. Both are degrading down to the same
| Zuckernet-style engagement hacking, and pseudo-resume self-
| boosting portfolio-ware. If the value of open source has become
| _" it gets me hired"_, then ... fine. But that's not why many
| of us do free software development.
|
| GitHub's evolution as a good open source hosting platform
| stalled many years ago. Its advantages are its social network
| effects, not as technical infrastructure.
|
| But from a technology and UX POV it's got growing issues
| because of this emphasis, and that's why the Zig people have
| moved, from what I can see.
|
| I moved my projects (https://codeberg.org/timbran/) recently
| and have been so far impressed enough. Beyond ideological
| alignment (free software, distaste for Microsoft, want to get
| my stuff off US infrastructure [elbows up], etc.) the two
| _chief_ advantages are that I could create my own
| "organization" without shelling over cash, and run my own
| actions with my own machines.
|
| And since moving I haven't noticed any drop in engagement or
| new people noticing the project since moving. GitHub "stars"
| are a shite way of measuring project success.
|
| Forgejo that's behind Codeberg is similar enough to GitHub that
| most people will barely notice anyways.
|
| I'm personally not a fan of the code review tools in any of
| them (GitLab, Foregejo, or GitHub) because they don't support
| proper tracking of review commits like e.g. Gerritt does but oh
| well. At least Foregejo / Codeberg are open to community
| contribution.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| 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?
| asim wrote:
| The article is very hard to read, with ads on one side, links in
| every other sentence. I could not even figure out where Zig has
| gone... TLDR anyone?
|
| Edit: Scrolling comments I see something called Codeberg but why
| am I getting connection refused?
|
| Another edit: Oh because Codeberg is down. I had to look at
| another thread on the frontpage to find that out...
| tacker2000 wrote:
| To be fair this has more to do with Github Actions than Github,
| which from the beginning was never really going to rival any
| professional solution.
|
| The people at Zig should use proper CI tools and not something
| that a big service provider is offering as an afterthought.
| sunnyday_002 wrote:
| What is wrong with GitHub Actions other than the outages? I've
| never hit a issue myself.
| deathanatos wrote:
| 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
| interacting with artifacts, and the latter uses undocumented
| APIs, presumably b/c the documented APIs are buggy AF.
|
| * needs.... will just return junk data, if you typo.
|
| * 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.
|
| * The pricing is _high_ , compared to other offerings.
|
| * 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.
|
| * Jobs, steps, actions are conceptual mud. There's a few
| ideas, like "execute this thing" in there, but its all
| jumbled up/duplicated. 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.
|
| * Secrets are hard to manage, and even harder to not leak.
|
| * The expression language has all sorts of corners, like
| coerced types and functions with _parse-time side-effects!_.
|
| That's just a few of the bugs I've encountered.
| pestkranker wrote:
| Which professional solution do you prefer?
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Im using Jenkins, which i know is controversial here, but it
| has been rock solid since years for me.
|
| And there exist a lot of specialized solutions out there,
| where the business model is purely CI.
| ghthor wrote:
| Buildkite is next level
| alexrp wrote:
| Our CI workflow literally just invokes a plain old shell script
| (which is runnable outside CI). We really don't need an
| overcomplicated professional CI/CD solution.
|
| One of the nice things about switching to Forgejo Actions is
| that the runner is lightweight, fast, and reliable - none of
| which I can say for the GitHub Actions runner. But even then,
| it's still more bloated than we'd ideally like; we don't need
| all the complexity of the YAML workflow syntax and Node.js-
| based actions. It'd also be cool for the CI system to integrate
| with https://codeberg.org/mlugg/robust-jobserver which the Zig
| compiler and build system will soon start speaking.
|
| So if anything, we're likely to just roll our own runner in the
| future and making it talk to the Forgejo Actions endpoints.
| reppap wrote:
| One thing that's really nice about codeberg is how fast the pages
| load. Browsing GitHub often feels very sluggish. Obviously
| there's a difference in scale there, but I hope codeberg can keep
| being fast.
| nromiun wrote:
| That is surprising. It is the opposite for me.
| $ time curl -L 'https://codeberg.org/' real 0m3.063s
| user 0m0.060s sys 0m0.044s $ time curl
| -L 'https://github.com/' real 0m1.357s user
| 0m0.077s sys 0m0.096s
| Left5250 wrote:
| That depends on location and GitHub pages generally take a
| while to execute all the javascript for a usable page even
| after the html is fetched while pages on Codeberg require
| much less javascript to be usable and are quite usable even
| without javascript.
|
| Here are my results for what it's worth $
| time curl -o /dev/null -s -L 'https://codeberg.org'
| real 0m0.907s user 0m0.027s sys
| 0m0.009s $ time curl -o /dev/null -s -L
| 'https://github.com/' real 0m0.514s user
| 0m0.028s sys 0m0.016s
| nromiun wrote:
| Sure, it depends on your internet connection. But for
| Codeberg I see a blank page for 3-4 seconds until it shows
| something. On a big repo like Zig the delay is even worse.
|
| On Github any page loads gradually and you don't see a
| blank page even initially.
| skydhash wrote:
| A better benchmark is done through the web browser inspector
| (network tab or performance tab). In the network tab I got
| (cache disabled) Github 158 requests
| 15.56 MB (11.28 MB transferred) Finish in 8.39s
| Dom loaded in 2.46s Load 6.95s Codeberg
| 9 requests 1.94 MB (533.85 KB transferred) Finish
| in 3.58s Dom loaded in 3.21s Load 3.31s
| nromiun wrote:
| I guess Github uses a lot of cache vs Codeberg.
| kragen wrote:
| I think you read that backwards. In skydhash's test,
| Codeberg's data was 72% cached, and GitHub's data was 28%
| cached. Maybe you meant that GitHub's cached 4.28MB was,
| in absolute terms, more than Codeberg's cached 1.41MB?
| nromiun wrote:
| Yeah, that is what I meant. It looks like Github's
| strategy is to push all the initial data they need to
| cache, to optimize subsequent requests.
| skydhash wrote:
| Some parts of Github are SPA island, which is why the DOM
| load fast, but then it has to wait for the JavaScript
| files and the request made by those files. Codeberg can
| be used with JavaScript disabled and you don't have that
| much extra requests (almost everything is rendered
| serverside).
|
| The transferred part is for the gzipped transfer. That
| makes sense if the bulk of the data is HTML (I have not
| checked).
|
| I've disabled the cache for the network requests.
| kragen wrote:
| Oh, thank you for the correction. That was a dumb mistake
| on my part.
| reppap wrote:
| GitHub frontpage is very quick indeed, but browsing repos can
| sometimes have load times over a full second for me.
| Especially when it's less popular repos less likely to be in
| a cache.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| Try changing tabs when reviewing a PR. 5-10 seconds on basic
| PRs often
| tomwphillips wrote:
| Indeed. Github is a nightmare when I'm working on an unreliable
| 4G connection too (e.g. on a train in the UK). Half the page
| will load.
|
| Night and day compared to something like Linear.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Zig is distributed under the MIT License. MS is completely with
| in their rights to clone the git repository from Codeberg and do
| whatever with the source code. Including feeding it to their AI
| algorithms. Moving it to Codeberg doesn't really fix that. I get
| that some people want to restrict what people can do with source
| code (including using it for capitalist purposes or indeed
| ai/machine learning). But the whole point of many open source
| licenses (and especially the MIT license) is actually the
| opposite: allowing people to do whatever they want with the
| source code.
|
| The Zig attitude towards AI usage is a bit odd in my view. I
| don't think it's that widely shared. But good for them if they
| feel strongly about that.
|
| I'm kind of intrigued by Codeberg. I had never heard of it until
| a few days ago and it seems like that's happening in Berlin where
| I live. I don't think I would want to use it for commercial
| projects but it looks fine for open source things. Though I do
| have questions about the funding model. Running all this on
| donations seems like it could have some issues long term for more
| serious projects. Moving OSS communities around can be kind of
| disruptive. And it probably rules out commercial usage.
|
| This whole Github is evil anti-capitalist stance is IMHO a bit
| out of place. I'm fine with diversity and having more players in
| the market though; that's a good thing. But many of the
| replacements are also for profit companies; which is probably why
| many people are a bit disillusioned with e.g. Gitlab. Codeberg
| seems structured to be more resilient against that.
|
| Otherwise, Github remains good value and I'm getting a lot of
| value out of for profit AI companies providing me with stuff that
| was clearly trained on the body of work stored inside of it. I'm
| even paying for that. I think it's cool that this is now
| possible.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| > Zig is distributed under the MIT License. MS is completely
| with in their rights to clone the git repository from Codeberg
| and do whatever with the source code. Including feeding it to
| their AI algorithms. Moving it to Codeberg doesn't really fix
| that. I get that some people want to restrict what people can
| do with source code (including using it for capitalist purposes
| or indeed ai/machine learning). But the whole point of many
| open source licenses (and especially the MIT license) is
| actually the opposite: allowing people to do whatever they want
| with the source code.
|
| MS training AIs on Zig isn't their complaint here. They're
| saying that Github has become a worse service because MS aren't
| working on the fundamentals any more and just chasing the AI
| dream, and trying to get AI to write code for it is having bad
| results.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > Zig is distributed under the MIT License. MS is completely
| with in their rights to clone the git repository from Codeberg
| and do whatever with the source code. Including feeding it to
| their AI algorithms.
|
| MIT license requires attribution, which AI algorithms don't
| provide AFAIK. So either (a) it's fair use and MS can do that
| regardless of the license or (b) MS can't do that. In any case,
| yeah, that's not the issue Zig folks have with GitHub.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Google workspace will have me do the same. No, I don't want to
| 'generate an image' I just want to use my own, thank you. They
| give their AI prime billing _everywhere_ to the detriment of the
| products and the users.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Maintain on codeberg, mirror to GH. Tell everyone to contribute
| on CB
|
| done.
| Sammi wrote:
| This seems workable to me. Github rose to prominence on the
| back of oss. What oss giveth oss can take away.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| One problem is that GH gives you no way to disable PRs. And
| even if you write in BIG BOLD LETTERS that PRs should be on
| Codeberg not GH, people get upset and make a fuss over their
| "ignored" PRs and it ends up making unnecessary headaches for
| you over and over.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Can do it the @torvalds/linux way and have a bot auto-
| answer/close PRs. And, to be honest, probably is better to
| ignore people making a fuss over PRs.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| You can ignore them yourself, but people will get annoyed,
| take to social media, post "this project ignores PRs" "dead
| project" "they're not inclusive" etc. without context, and
| those things can gain momentum out of nowhere and have real
| consequences. And there will goalpost-shifting again, from
| "just mirror to GH" to "just accept PRs on GH too, why are
| they being so obstinate" and then further along.
|
| The Linux kernel is unlikely to get those and can survive
| that even if it does, but your average FOSS project can be
| severely damaged in terms of reputation, contribution,
| usage, etc., by this kind of stuff, even if you want to
| dismiss it as just "social media fluttering". Easier and
| safer just to keep things clean and clearly at one place.
| closingreunion wrote:
| Glad to see codebrg getting recognition. The age of relying on
| for profit corps for our digital commons needs to end.
| sepisoad wrote:
| I totally agree, Microsoft is ruining everything with AI, like
| all Microsoft product have been on decline for years even before
| the LLM era, and now they are on an even steeper decline.
|
| it makes me sad to see that github is now going through the same
| shit, and people are using other random half-ass alternatives,
| it's not easy to keep track of your favourite open-source
| projects across many source forgeries. we need someone to buy
| github from Microsoft and remove all the crap they have added to
| it.
| skydhash wrote:
| > it's not easy to keep track of your favourite open-source
| projects across many source forgeries.
|
| Most public forge instances and web presence for open source
| projects have RSS feeds.
| aembleton wrote:
| Or create an overview that keeps track of projects across
| multiple source control providers, using a consistent
| interface.
| psychoslave wrote:
| See, AI accelerate productivity, with it Microsoft is ruining
| its products and brand even faster!
| liampulles wrote:
| The main function of GitHub is really just advertising or at
| least broadcasting your work. I would use GitHub issues, stars,
| etc as an (imperfect gauge) of the quality of a library. This is
| not because of GitHub's features, just that it's the biggest and
| most well known. And yes I know buying stars is a thing, which is
| why it's part of the evaluation and not the whole ballgame.
|
| Now that zig is fairly well known and trusted, it makes sense
| that this is less of a concern for them when migrating away.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| This resonates with me. Last week I got stuck on a bug where
| GitHub actions was pulling ARMv7 docker images when I
| specifically requested ARMv8. Absolutely impossible to reproduce
| locally either.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Wait I thought they left because Github software engineers are
| "monkeys".
| mittermayr wrote:
| I hate these constant drama posts, but I am all for seeing
| competition. I think it's good to have a couple of top-tier
| companies offering the same service, and especially with git,
| it's been... lacklustre outside of Github, I'd say. Bitbucket was
| totally nice, but Atlassian and Jira and meh... Github has
| (mostly) steered clear of cross-product promotions until the
| CoPilot era washed all over us, and I wonder for how long they
| can continue to thrive off the power of brand-awareness.
|
| Same effect at play watching all the top-tier AI corps under
| heavy competitive fire still, trying hard to keep the audience
| attached while battling to stay on top of (or keep up with) the
| competition. This mainly (for now) benefits the user. If OpenAI
| were to trailblaze on their own, we'd all be paying through the
| roof for even the most basic GPT by now.
| blibble wrote:
| > I think it's good to have a couple of top-tier companies
| offering the same service
|
| "top-tier" is not a term I would use to describe Microsoft
| aperture147 wrote:
| I don't get it, why did they allow GitHub bot to modify and merge
| pull request automatically? Yeah I agree that MS is ruining
| everything with AI, but this problem is avoidable, if they turn
| off the bot's auto merge feature, or turn it off completely. The
| reason they move to a lesser known Git provider sounds more like
| a marketing stunt.
| literallyroy wrote:
| What are you referring to? I may be missing a line from the
| article but it seems mostly focused around a lingering GitHub
| Actions bug and the direction of GitHub.
| karel-3d wrote:
| > I don't get it, why did they allow GitHub bot to modify and
| merge pull request automatically
|
| They didn't, poor wording on Register part. The pull request
| was closed for inactivity by the bot.
| simonask wrote:
| Again, perfectly avoidable.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Uhh we're talking about the pull request to safe_sleep,
| right? Not sure why you take that condescending tone when
| anecdata goes AGAINST your position.
| alexrp wrote:
| > The reason they move to a lesser known Git provider sounds
| more like a marketing stunt.
|
| We had technical problems that GitHub had no interest in
| solving, and lots of small frustrations with the platform built
| up over years.
|
| Jumping from one enshittified profit-driven platform to another
| profit-driven platform would just mean we'd set ourselves up
| for another enshittification -> migration cycle later down the
| line.
|
| No stunt here.
| keiferski wrote:
| LLMs are useful, but AI is itself a marketing term that has begun
| to lose its luster. It's rapidly becoming an annoying or trendy
| label, not a cutting edge one.
|
| I guarantee that in ~24 months, most AI features will still
| remain in some form or another on most apps, but the marketing
| language of AI-first will have evaporated entirely.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| > AI is itself a marketing term that has begun to lose its
| luster. It's rapidly becoming an annoying or trendy label, not
| a cutting edge one.
|
| Where have you been the last 15 years? However, I agree with
| your prediction. Coke making AI advertisements may have had
| cache a couple years ago, but now would be a doofus move.
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't remember AI being used as a widespread marketing term
| until 2-3 years ago. Before that it was just more of a vague
| tech thing you'd sometimes see, but now every single app
| seems to have reframed their business to be about AI agents.
| brabel wrote:
| There have been at least 3 waves of AI before the LLM
| generation. 70s , 80s and late 90s.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
|
| Early 2010s had a lot of neural networks AI stuff going on
| and it certainly became a minor hype cycle as well though
| that kind of resulted in the current LLM wave.
| rsynnott wrote:
| There was also a small chatbot bubble around 2014-2016
| (Microsoft Tay kinda blew it out of the water, and it
| never recovered), though companies did seem a bit
| skittish about using the term 'AI' at that point.
| keiferski wrote:
| Yes I know that, but those were all largely confined to
| technology companies and academia. This recent wave seems
| to affect everything.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Have you watched broadcast TV lately? Every single advert is
| AI generated. Pay attention and you'll see the telltale
| signs: stitched together 3 second clips with continuity
| problems, every showdown from a fixed set of compositions,
| etc. it's just less noticeable to the average viewer than
| that coke ad.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Yup. "Big data" "data mining" "machine learning"
|
| On the other hand "personalized ads" is still going strong
| despite the entire concept being offensive.
| mittermayr wrote:
| Additional note on Codeberg, which I think is great as a project,
| but I got curious on what infrastructure they are running on and
| how reliable this would be for larger corporate repos.
|
| Nov 22, 2025 https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-
| onwards-and-u...
|
| Quotes from their website:
|
| Infrastructure status [...] We are running on 3 servers, one
| Gigabyte and 2 Dell servers (R730 and R740).
|
| Here's their current hardware: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-
| Infrastructure/meta/src/branch...
|
| [...] Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency)
| is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could
| afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from
| hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more
| sustainable path.
|
| [...] We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be
| repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't
| depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using
| a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery,
| etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does,
| and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would
| be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try!
|
| [...] While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in
| performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a
| simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries.
|
| Gives both early-Google as well as hackerspace vibes, which can
| or can not be a good thing.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| oh wow I had a larger cluster than that since I was 20 more
| than half a decade ago, considering that the costs appear to be
| so low maybe I should also pop out few free services since at
| the moment I pay $600+ just on power costs alone for idle
| hardware on my personal cluster. If anyone has any ideas feel
| free to email me at:
| news.ycombinator.com.reassure132@passmail.net
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Maybe you could reach out to the codeberg folks and loan them
| a server? Sounds like they could use all the help they can
| get.
| culi wrote:
| Codeberg is a non-profit btw
|
| You can donate here: https://donate.codeberg.org/
|
| Setup recurring donations on liberapay:
| https://liberapay.com/codeberg/donate
|
| Or join as a member here: https://join.codeberg.org/
| dlisboa wrote:
| https://status.codeberg.eu/status/codeberg
|
| Their reliability is not great unfortunately. Currently their
| 24h uptime is 89% for the main site. They are partially
| degraded right now.
|
| The 14 day uptime is 98% but I think that's actually because
| some of their auxiliary systems have great uptime, the main
| site is never that great it seems.
| bramhaag wrote:
| This isn't a great time for them:
| https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg/115652289949965925
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131693
| dlisboa wrote:
| Yeah, they were down last week too. It's hard to run an
| open git forge on a small volunteer team, the workload is
| read and write heavy with endless "customers" (or bots).
| layer8 wrote:
| To be fair, Codeberg isn't for corporate repos, it's for FLOSS
| projects. Take a look at their Terms of Use. They don't aim to
| be a commercial provider, rather the opposite.
| woile wrote:
| I think once Codeberg becomes federated, it will likely attract a
| lot of people.
|
| Right now github is great for discovering and tracking projects,
| reflecting growth via the star and fork system (although a bit
| broken in the last few years).
|
| If a federated layer is applied to these github alternatives, you
| could have an account in Codeberg, and be able to track lots of
| projects wherever people want to host them. Right now, I see a
| lot of forgejo servers, but I don't want to register in all of
| them.
| miningape wrote:
| +1 - I also see a huge opportunity for forgejo to become a new
| stackoverflow if they add federation
|
| The primary issue with SO was that it was disconnected from the
| actual communities maintaining the project. A federated
| solution would be able to have the same network effects while
| handing ownership to the original community (rather than a
| separate SO branch of the community)
| brushfoot wrote:
| 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 product have moved on to bigger and
| better things, with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some
| kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of
| progress [2]
|
| > [2025-11-28T09:21:12Z] it's abundantly clear that the
| engineering excellence that created GitHub's success is no longer
| driving it [3]
|
| ---
|
| 1:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251127021007/https://ziglang.o...
|
| 2:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251127140447/https://ziglang.o...
|
| 3:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251128092112/https://ziglang.o...
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| At least he edited it to something more palatable. I vastly
| prefer someone who can admit to making a mistake and amending
| what they said to someone who doubles down. The latter attitude
| has become far too normalised in the last few years.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| that attitude has and continues to approach a entire
| bloodless coup of the largest economy on the planet.
|
| The normalization, in fact, has been quite successful. The
| entire silicon valley has tacitly approved of it.
|
| You act like people arn't being rewarded for this type of
| behavior.
| montroser wrote:
| They didn't make any comment on effectiveness.
| jack_pp wrote:
| Is political correctness necessary to have a thriving
| community / open source project?
|
| Linux seems to be doing fine.
|
| I wouldn't personally care either way but it is non-obvious
| to me that the first version would actually hurt the
| community.
| whatevaa wrote:
| Linus famously was quite strict and cursed quite a bit when
| somebody pissed him off with stupidity.
| cinntaile wrote:
| He's not exactly a role model when it comes to
| communication.
| antonvs wrote:
| Perhaps he should be. This idea that we should tolerate
| terrible things and only respond to them politely seems
| to produce bad outcomes, for some mysterious reason.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The problem with that is always people.
|
| Because one person is judging that "terribleness" before
| being entitled to flame, changes to that person influence
| their ability to objectively make that assessment.
|
| Say, when their project becomes popular, they gain more
| power and fame, and suddenly their self-image is
| different.
|
| Hence it usually being a more community-encouraging
| approach to keep discussions technical without vitriol.
|
| Flaming is unnecessarily disruptive, not least because it
| gives other (probably not as talented) folks a license to
| also put their worst impulses to text.
| csoups14 wrote:
| Any analysis of Github's functionality that begins and
| ends with blaming individuals and their competency is
| deeply mistaken while being insulting. Anyone who has
| ever worked at a large company knows exactly how hard it
| is for top performers to make changes and it's not
| difficult because the other people are stupid. At least
| in my experience, almost everyone holding this "they must
| be stupid" opinion knows very little about how large
| organizations make decisions and knows very little about
| how incentives at different levels of an org chart leads
| to suboptimal decisions and results. I would agree with
| you that being overly polite helps no one, but being
| correct does, and what they initially wrote isn't even
| right and it's also insulting. There's no value in that.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| IDK being able to produce a good product in a corpo
| environment sure sounds like a competency issue.
|
| > how hard it is for top performers to make change
|
| then you're not a top performer anymore?
|
| seems pretty straightforward
|
| > they must be stupid
|
| one can be not stupid and still not competent
| nottorp wrote:
| But should you care about MS's internals?
|
| Product is useless, you move along. Save your compassion
| for those actually needing it.
| esafak wrote:
| Because people would rather Microsoft fixed it than move.
| nottorp wrote:
| Moving is painful but I'm sure they didn't move without
| asking/waiting for MS to fix it.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I am not convinced of this. Being rude and insulting
| someone's intelligence is rarely a good trait. Linus got
| away with it due to the unique circumstances: leader of
| an incredibly popular open source project and a
| gatekeeper to a lot of access to it.
|
| My argument against how he handles things has always been
| that while it may seem effective, we do not know how much
| more effective he would be if he did not curse people out
| for being dumb fucks.
|
| And it doesn't seem like this is a requirement for the
| job: lots of other project leaders treat others with
| courtesy and respect and it doesn't seem to cause issues.
|
| The reality is that it is easy to wish more people were
| verbally abusive to others when it isn't directed at you.
| But soon as you are on the receiving end of it,
| especially as a volunteer, there is a greater than not
| chance that you will be less likely to want to continue
| contributing.
| infecto wrote:
| I think this is a good way to put it and I agree with it.
| Linus is a jerk and I would never want to work with him.
| Doubly so with zig maintainers who call other groups of
| people losers or monkeys. Shows a clear lack of maturity
| and ability to think.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Eh. Linus has a long history of abusive behavior towards
| other Linux contributors but also apparently apologized
| for it and started amending his ways. The Zig person I do
| not know by reputation, let alone in person. One post
| that he later chose to amend based on feedback is not
| enough for me to pass that kind of judgement. If
| anything, the fact that he updated it shows the opposite
| of lack of maturity. Adults can get frustrated. What they
| do with it is what matters.
| infecto wrote:
| Adults don't call people losers or monkeys in social
| media. I am not passing judgement, it is simply not
| acceptable.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Really? You can't think of any circumstances when it
| would be appropriate?
|
| More to the point, if someone does it once and then
| stops, should we exclude this person from society
| forever?
|
| Remember that only the Siths deal in absolutes.
| infecto wrote:
| Zero clue what your point is so please help me
| understand.
|
| I was agreeing with your stance and adding my own
| anecdote that it's a turnoff with the way those posts
| were originally formatted. Not people I would want to
| work with. If you do that's fine. This is not star wars
| and simply my own choice as it's everyone else.
|
| 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.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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 person
| who decides to flash kids at a playground, or beats his
| wife and children.
|
| I think the Zig guy was a little over-dramatic with his
| initial post. He did change his mind, so in my book
| that's better than not. Linus did too, just after many
| years of bad behavior. My point is that your replies were
| painting the world with only black and white and there is
| a lot of gray area in between. Sometimes public shame is
| a valid way to do discourse. Often times it isn't. But
| it's not a "always" or "never" thing.
| infecto wrote:
| 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.
| tryauuum wrote:
| GitHub can suck my ass, I think this is the most suitable
| feedback to them
|
| I've spent more than a month trying to delete my account
| on GitHub, still couldn't do it
| Levitz wrote:
| >Is political correctness necessary to have a thriving
| community / open source project?
|
| Not at all, but this reads like childishness rather than
| political correctness.
| madwolf wrote:
| Not calling other software engineers 'losers' is not about
| political correctness. They're "losers" because they take
| their product on a path you don't like? Come on. Linus can
| be emotional in his posts because Linux is his "child".
| gortok wrote:
| How you treat others says everything about you and nothing
| about the other person.
|
| In this case, the unnecessary insults detract from the
| otherwise important message, and reflect poorly on Zig.
| They were right to edit it.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| On the other hand some notable open source leaders seem
| to be abrasive assholes. Linus, Theo, DHH, just three
| examples who come to mind. I think if you have a clear
| vision of what you want your project to be then being
| agressively dismissive of ideas that don't further that
| vision is necessary just to keep the noise to a low roar.
| oaiey wrote:
| Yeah, bad behaviors of others does not excuse yours.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| People who are unhappy with Zig are free to use something
| else and not engage with the community.
| veverkap wrote:
| If he kept his comments within the Zig community and
| didn't go all over social media denigrating GH employees,
| you'd be right.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| You're allowed to have negative opinions of GitHub
| employees on social media.
| veverkap wrote:
| Cool.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| Even Linus doesn't act that way anymore. Here's him a few
| years ago:
|
| > This week people in our community confronted me about my
| lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks
| in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.
|
| > Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest
| for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this
| was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a
| long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal
| admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior,
| and I want to apologize to the people that my personal
| behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel
| development entirely.
|
| > I am going to take time off and get some assistance on
| how to understand people's emotions and respond
| appropriately.
|
| He took time off and he's better now. What you call
| "political correctness" is what I and others call "basic
| professionalism". It took Linus 25 years to understand
| that. I can only hope that the people who hero worshipped
| him and adopted a similar attitude can also mature.
| philwelch wrote:
| Yeah, that didn't last.
|
| https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wjLCqUUWd8DzG+xsOn-
| yVL0Q=...
| yupyupyups wrote:
| But you got to give it to him, he does seem to be really
| good at catching deficiensies early that may accumulate
| to become serious bugs or security vulnerabilities in the
| future. Sure, being an asshole is not ok, but being
| assertive is a must for a person in his position.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| If you'll notice, he called the code garbage, not the
| author. Judging by how bad the code was, I think this
| interaction was fine. This actually shows the progress
| Linus made in improving himself.
| jjmarr wrote:
| > And sending a big pull request the day before the merge
| window closes in the hope that I'm too busy to care is
| not a winning strategy.
|
| I wish I could say this.
|
| But unfortunately delaying your big PR until it's
| affecting schedule is a good way to dodge review.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| there's a big gulf between being politically correct and
| not being a jerk. In this case the community reps can
| present their concern, motivation and decision without
| insulting people. It's also not a smart or valid comment;
| give me any organization over 100 people and I can find
| something deeply flawed that it hase produced or a very bad
| decision. Do I then tag everybody who currently works for
| that organization as "a brain-dead idiot" or similar?
| Copenjin wrote:
| > "eager to inflict"
|
| Eager to do what? If it sucks it sucks, but that's a very
| childish way to frame it, no one did anything on purpose or
| out of spite. That kind of silliness hurts the image of the
| project. But bad translation I suppose.
| infecto wrote:
| Hmm I don't think any of the revisions are about being PC
| but rather not making juvenile comments. Linus has
| definitely made a lot of harsh inflammatory comments to
| others, I don't think it's the right thing to do and shows
| his character but at the same time for me at least it comes
| across as a smart pompous jerk who says things in the wrong
| way but at least usually has some kernel of a point.
|
| The Zig comments come off has highly immature, maybe
| because they are comments made to unknown people, calling
| folks losers or monkeys just crosses some line to me.
| Telling someone to stfu is not great but calling groups of
| people monkeys feels worse.
| watwut wrote:
| One can avoid being asshole even if it is not strictly
| speaking necessary. In fact, if you are an asshole when it
| is not necessary, then you are an asshole.
| jmull wrote:
| What does any of this have to do with political
| correctness?
|
| Not being a dick is quite a different thing than political
| correctness.
|
| Makes me wonder how much to the mass strife and confusion
| of the internet is simply down to people not knowing what
| the words they use mean?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Makes me wonder how much to the mass strife and
| confusion of the internet is simply down to people not
| knowing what the words they use mean?
|
| Or being intentionally misled about them. People who
| enjoy being awful in various ways have a vested interest
| in reframing the opposition as "political correctness" in
| order to make it easier to dismiss or ridicule. The vast
| majority of usage of the term "political correctness" is
| in dismissing or ridiculing it.
| lenkite wrote:
| It has _everything_ to do with political correctness.
| Honest, blunt language is now de-valued in favor of
| passive, sanitized, AI-slop language that no longer
| conveys important information. The revised post forgot to
| mention the critical point of the bloated, buggy
| Javascript framework because it would _offend_ someone
| here.
|
| Prefer a blunt, honest dick over a passive, polite liar
| anyday.
| oaiey wrote:
| It is politeness, not political correctness.
|
| He represented his community with insulting words to the
| world. In higher ranks of IT it is all about communication.
| With his lack of proper words he showed these leaders, who
| decide about the adoption of Zig, that they do not want to
| communicate with him/the Zig community.
|
| As a project/tech leader he is in the business of
| communications. He recognized this. See link in the
| article.
| beAbU wrote:
| Calling the devs of Actions "monkeys" has nothing to do
| about being un-PC or not. It's just plain rude and deeply
| insulting. It has no place in an a public announcement such
| as this.
|
| Also, Torvalds was rightfully called out on his public
| behaviour and he's corrected himself.
| Handy-Man wrote:
| That's only here, he has been doubling down on Mastodon
|
| https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk
| styanax wrote:
| On the previous HN article, I recall many a comment talking
| about how they should change this, leave the politics/negative
| juju out because it was a bad look for the Zig community.
|
| It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their
| ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with
| these edits. I commend them for their actions in doing what's
| best for the community at the cost of some personal mea culpa
| edits.
| dannersy wrote:
| I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting
| their failures and changing their mind. For some reason I see
| the opposite: people respecting those who "stick to their
| guns" or double down when something is clearly wrong. As you
| say, the context matters and these edits seem to be learning
| from the feedback rather than saving face since the sentiment
| stands, just in a less needlessly targeted way.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Never understood that either. If someone was wrong and bad,
| and now they're trying to do right and good, we need to
| celebrate that. Not just because that's awesome in itself,
| but also to give the opportunity and incentives for others
| in the future to do better.
|
| If everyone is always bad regardless if they're trying to
| change, what incentives would they have from changing at
| all? It doesn't make any sense.
| ljm wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment (people changing their minds),
| but the flipside to that is people pleasing. Someone who
| capitulates under even the slightest pressure is not much
| better than the person who is set in their ways.
|
| The trouble there, of course, is that the motivation for
| changing (or not changing) one's mind is not always
| clear, and it's easy to score points from spinning it one
| way or another.
| soganess wrote:
| Engineers are not exactly famous for people-pleasing.
| Maybe management, but engineering? Maybe some fresh
| junior?
|
| I'm not convinced that the existence of a low-probability
| event justifies normalizing the regular occurrence of a
| much more likely (and negative) event, like a belligerent
| engineer throwing a fit in a design meeting. I'd go as
| far as to say I'm open to more people-pleasers in
| engineering.
|
| Also, fwiw, if you want to know why someone changed their
| mind, you can just ask them and see how you feel about
| the answer. If someone changes their mind at the drop of
| a hat, my guess is that their original position was not a
| strongly held one.
| ljm wrote:
| You and I obviously have different experiences because I
| encounter belligerent engineers much less frequently than
| ones who are enthusiastic to do what they can, and those
| who don't want to rock the boat when challenged.
|
| I thought I made a fairly innocuous point, I don't even
| think I was talking about engineers specifically.
| serial_dev wrote:
| You can't read people's mind, so when in doubt, assume
| good intention.
|
| It's not particularly relevant (to me as a random non-zig
| affiliated HN reader) why they right their wrongs, as
| long as they did it, I find it positive (at least better
| than if they had left the monkey comments in the post).
| immibis wrote:
| The other part of the equation is not letting bad people
| get away with doing bad stuff if they do good stuff after
| that. The return on doing bad stuff, then good stuff has
| to be greater than the return on only doing bad stuff,
| but less than the return on only doing good stuff. It
| should increase over time the more you don't do bad stuff
| again.
| snerbles wrote:
| The incentive is less about morals and very much about
| self-preservation.
|
| With online mobs, when the target shows any sort of
| regret there is blood in the water and the sharks feast.
| It sometimes turns into a very public form of struggle
| session for the person under scrutiny. Besides avoiding
| the faux pas in the first place, one well-tested
| mitigation is to be absolutely unapologetic and wait for
| the storm to blow over.
| serial_dev wrote:
| For what it's worth, I found the original announcement
| childish and unnecessarily negative towards people
| working on the product (against their CoC which I found
| hilarious and hypocritical), and I find it refreshing
| that they updated the post to phrase their criticism much
| more professional.
| acessoproibido wrote:
| Its a thing with (online) culture - no matter what you do
| you're going to ruffle some feathers.
|
| If no one hates what you are doing chances are you're not
| doing anything really
| oaiey wrote:
| Well, it was comparing people with monkeys and calling
| them losers. It was a straightforward personal insult.
| Writing something online in a blog is like making a
| public announcement on a market with 100s listening. No
| one except someone who wants to inflame would use such
| words in the real world. People just forget that they are
| speaking in the public. And in that case not only for
| himself but also for others.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Well, it's not like it's a simple black and white
| situation, universally applicable to every debate in human
| history. Sometimes it is relatively better to be open-
| minded and able to change own opinion. Sometimes it is
| relatively better to keep pushing a point if it is rational
| and/or morally correct.
|
| The reason why the latter stance is often popularized and
| cheered is because it is often harder to do, especially in
| the adverse conditions, when not changing your opinion has
| a direct cost of money or time or sanity or in rare cases
| even freedom. Usually it involves small human group or
| individual against a faceless corporation, making it even
| harder. Of course we should respect people standing against
| corporation.
|
| PS: this is not applicable if they are "clearly wrong" of
| course.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Consider the plight of a policy-maker who changes their
| stance on some issue. They may have changed their mind in
| light of new information, or evolved their position as a
| result of deeper reflection, personal experience, or
| maturation. Opponents will accuse them of "waffling" or
| "flip-flopping", indicating a lack of reliability or
| principles (if not straight-up bribery). Elected
| officials are responsible for expressing the will of the
| people they represent, so if they're elected largely by
| proponents of issue X, it is arguably a betrayal of sorts
| for them to be as dynamic as private citizens.
|
| This is tangential to the original topic of insider
| trading, where the corruption is structural / systemic --
| akin to how "conflict of interest" objectively describes
| a scenario, not an individual's behavior.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The demonization of "flip-flopping" is so stupid. Bro, I
| _want_ my politicians to change their minds when new
| facts arise or when public sentiment changes. The last
| thing we need is more dogmatic my-way-or-the-highway
| politicians that refuse to change their minds about
| anything.
| TheBicPen wrote:
| While I agree with you, I find it hard to argue against
| the view that politicians are elected for the views they
| held during their campaign. They may change their mind
| after being elected, but their constituents that voted
| for them will not all change their mind simultaneously.
| To the ones that don't change their mind, it does appear
| to be a betrayal of their principles. A rational
| politician would not want to gain that kind of reputation
| out of pure self-interest.
| jcheng wrote:
| Reminds me of Stephen Colbert's roast of George W. Bush
| at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner:
|
| > The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You
| know where he stands. He believes the same thing
| Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what
| happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs
| never will.
| martin-t wrote:
| The underlying issues are:
|
| 1) People don't really vote based on logic and sound
| reasoning. They vote based on what sounds right to them.
| If they're unhappy with something, they vote for somebody
| who also claims to be unhappy about it, regardless if he
| has any actual solutions.
|
| 2) Even for the minority who wants to vote based on sound
| principles, it's very hard to push information back to
| them. If the politician changes his mind, he has to
| explain it to his voters. Are there really platforms
| which allow in-depth conversations in political debates?
|
| Every university classroom has a whiteboard and a
| projector. Because you need to draw graphs, diagrams,
| etc. You need to explain the general structure and then
| focus on the details without losing track of the whole.
|
| Is there a single country where politicians use either
| when talking to each other or voters?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| For me it depends heavily on context.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting
| their failures and changing their mind.
|
| Because this plays into a weird flaw in cognition that
| people have. When people become leaders because they are
| assholes and they are wrong, then after the wind blows the
| other way they see the light and do a mea culpa, there is
| always a certain segment that says that they're _even more_
| worthy to be a leader because they have the ability to
| change. They yell at the people who were always right that
| they are dogmatic and ask "why should people change their
| minds if they will be treated like this?"
|
| If one can't see what's wrong with this toy scenario that
| I've strawmanned here, that's a problem. The only reason we
| ever cared about this person is because they were loud and
| wrong about everything. Now, we are expected to be proud of
| them because they are right, and make sure that they don't
| lose any status or position for admitting that. This
| becomes a new reason for the people who were previously
| attacking the people who were right to continue to attack
| the people who were right, who are also now officially
| dogmatic puritans whose problem is that _they weren 't
| being right correctly._
|
| This is a social phenomenon, not a personality flaw in
| these leaders. People can be wrong and then right. People
| can not care either way and latch onto a trend for
| attention or profit, and follow it where it goes. I don't
| think either of these things are in and of themselves
| morally problematic. The problem is that there are people
| who are simply following individual personalities and
| repeating what they say, change their minds when that
| personality changes their mind, and whose primary aim is to
| attack anyone who is criticizing that personality. They
| don't really care about the issue in question (and usually
| don't know much about it), they're simply protecting that
| personality like a family member.
|
| This, again, doesn't matter when the subject is stupid,
| like some aesthetic or consumer thing _He used to hate the
| new Batman movies but now he says that he misunderstood
| them_ ; who cares. But when the subject is a real life or
| death thing, or involves serious damage to people's lives
| and careers, it's poisonous when a vocal minority becomes
| dedicated to this personality worship.
|
| It's so common that there now seems to be a pipeline of
| born-agains in front of everything, giving their opinion.
| _Sir, you were a satanist until three years ago._
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > The only reason we ever cared about this person is
| because they were loud and wrong about everything
|
| Except we cared about Andrew Kelley because he was right
| about quite a lot of things (eg the zig design).
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I think it's because when people do a 180 due to public
| pressure, it's hard to know to what degree they changed
| their mind and to what degree they are just lying about
| what is on their mind.
| a2800276 wrote:
| Toning down aggressive phrasing is not "doing a 180",
| calling the change from "only losers left at GitHub" to
| "the engineering excellence has left" lying seems
| disingenuous.
| oaiey wrote:
| Came here to write that. Let us recognize that he accepted
| our feedback and improved. This is good.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Some would say if you always stick to your guns and double
| down, you might wind up President.
| kragen wrote:
| As I see it, someone who "listened to that feedback,
| swallowed their ego/pride" would include a note at the end of
| the post about the edits. _Admitting_ you were wrong requires
| not erasing the evidence of what you said.
|
| (He did post a kind of vague apology in
| https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-
| zig-p..., but it's ambiguous enough that anyone who was
| offended is free to read it as either retracting the
| offending accusation, or not. This is plausibly the best
| available alternative for survival in the current social-
| media landscape, because it's at best useless to apologize to
| a mob that's performatively offended on behalf of people they
| don't personally know, and usually counterproductive because
| it marks you as a vulnerable victim, but the best available
| alternative might still tend to weaken the kind of integrity
| we're talking about rather than strengthen it.)
| watwut wrote:
| No evidence was erased as the evidence exists.
| kragen wrote:
| You mean, on a third-party website that currently happens
| to have a capture of the page outside of the Zig team's
| control, one which can go down at any time?
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| The site is open source and the commits are still there.
| No need to be so dramatic.
|
| https://github.com/ziglang/www.ziglang.org/commit/c8d046b
| 288...
| kragen wrote:
| Oh, thanks, I thought watwut meant archive.org. Is this
| diff also linkable on codeberg?
| bccdee wrote:
| > Admitting you were wrong requires not erasing the
| evidence of what you said.
|
| I don't think there's really an obligation to announce to
| newcomers, "hey, an earlier version of this post was overly
| inflammatory." But you should be forthright about your
| mistake to people who confront you about it, which is
| what's happening in the forum thread you linked. I think
| this is all fine.
| kragen wrote:
| If those newcomers are following a link from someone who
| was commenting on the earlier version, I think there is.
| voxl wrote:
| The reality is he wasn't wrong, he just didn't care to deal
| with the tone policing concern trolls of HN and elsewhere.
| kragen wrote:
| That is absolutely a viable reading of what he wrote,
| yes.
| latexr wrote:
| > It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed
| their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community
| with these edits.
|
| Indeed. The article even links to it.
|
| https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-
| zig-p...
| lawn wrote:
| Eh, it looks like they want to hide that they call people
| _monkeys_ and _losers_.
|
| If they would own up to it and say sorry, then your point
| stands. But that's not what happened here.
| styanax wrote:
| > I completely agree with this. I performed really poorly
| on this axis. I'm sorry to the Zig community for that. I'll
| take my L and get back to working on std.Io and the rest of
| the roadmap. [1]
|
| [1] https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-
| zig-p...
| veverkap wrote:
| > I do feel bad for hurting your feelings but I also
| strongly believe that you should not be proud of working
| for Microsoft, and particularly on GitHub for the last 5
| years. I truly am sorry but you need to be called out.
|
| Crocodile tears.
|
| https://hachyderm.io/@andrewrk@mastodon.social/1156234452
| 984...
| dugidugout wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this. :(
| chongli wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out! I looked at the edit history
| and without looking at the timestamps assumed it was in
| reverse chronological order. Seeing that I was wrong brought
| a smile to my face.
|
| I appreciate that Andrew and the other Zig team members are
| really passionate about their project, their goals, and the
| ideals behind those goals. I was dismayed by the recent news
| of outbursts which do a lot to undermine their goals. That
| they're listening to feedback and trying to take the high
| road (despite feeling a lot of frustration with the direction
| industry is taking) should be commended.
| rzwitserloot wrote:
| There is utility in indicating how surprised / concerned you
| are at a certain process or event. We can flatten out all
| communication and boil everything down to an extremely
| neutral "up", "down", and "nailed it to exacting precision".
|
| I find the fact that this painting has been hung crooked by
| 0.00001o: down
|
| I find torture and mass murder: down
|
| Clearly this is a ridiculous state of affairs. There's more
| gradations available than this.
|
| Possibly coloured by my dutch culture: I think this rewrite
| is terrible. The original sentence was vastly superior,
| though I think the first rewrite (newbies to rookies) was an
| improvement.
|
| The zig team is alarmed, and finds this state of affairs
| highly noteworthy and would like to communicate this more
| emotional, gut instincty sense in their words.
|
| There's a reason humans invent colourful language and
| epithets. _They always do, in all languages_. Because it 's
| useful!
|
| And this rewrite takes it out. That's not actually a good
| thing. The fact that evidently the internet is so culturally
| USA-ised that any slightly colourful language is instantly
| taken as a personal affront and that in turn completely
| derails the entire debate into a pointless fight over
| etiquitte and whether something is 'appropriate' is fucking
| childish. I wish it wasn't so.
|
| In human communication, the US is somewhat notorious in how
| flattened its emotional range is of interaction amongst
| friendly folk. One can bring anthropology into it if one
| must: Loads of folks from vastly different backgrounds all
| moving to a vast expanse of land? Given that cultural
| misunderstanding is _extremely likely_ and the cost of such a
| misunderstanding is disastrously high, best plaster a massive
| smile on your face and be as diplomatic as you can be!
|
| Consider as a practical example: Linus Torvalds' many famed
| communications. "NVidia? Fuck you!" was _good_. It made
| clear, in a very, _very_ pithy way, that Linus wasn 't just
| holding a negative opinion about the quality and behaviour of
| the nvidia gfx driver team at the time, but that this
| negative opinion was universal across a broad range of
| concerns and extremely so. It caused a shakeup where one was
| needed. All in 3 little words.
|
| (Possibly the fact that the internet in general is even more
| incapable of dealing with colourful language is not
| necessarily the fault of USification of the internet: The
| internet is a lot like early US, at least in the sense that
| the risk of cultural misunderstanding is far higher than in
| face to face communications on most places on the planet).
| ethin wrote:
| If I could upvote you, I would. I have never liked the mob
| of people that think we should all be super diplomatic
| corpospeakers who hedge everything and who think that not
| doing so is "offensive" or "unprofessional". I definitely
| didn't think anything was wrong with the original sentences
| or word usage, because it wasn't aimed at any specific
| individual with the deliberate intent of being offensive,
| but was aimed at Microsoft itself. And even if the intent
| was to be offensive, well, on the internet your always
| going to offend someone. You could be super nice and say
| all the right words and someone would still find a way to
| be offended by it. And were these circumstances ordinary, I
| would call out the word usage as well, because it would be
| uncalled for. But given all the evidence that the original
| points at, it's rather hard to say that GitHub didn't
| deserve it. And it is also rather difficult for me to see
| how this wasn't the time or place for such language.
| Sometimes the only way to get your point across is to be
| "unprofessional" (whatever that means these days).
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| There's a reason humans invent colourful language and
| epithets. They always do, in all languages. Because
| it's useful! I have never liked the mob of
| people that think we should all be super diplomatic
| corpospeakers who hedge everything and who think that not
| doing so is "offensive" or "unprofessional".
|
| Agreed with you and OP. More to the point, the final
| rewrite leaves out any meaningful why. Perhaps they
| could/should be more diplomatic about their distaste, but
| leaving it out all together leaves quite the elephant in
| the room.
|
| Then again the front end rewrite (which GitHub was
| crowing about for quite a while) and doubling down on AI
| nonsense got me to stop using GH for personal projects
| and to stop contributing to projects hosted on GH.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Zig is the language that was intentionally made to fail and
| error out on windows carriage returns instead of parsing them
| like every language ever made. They made a version for
| windows and then made it not work with every windows text
| editor. Their answer was to 'get better text editors' or
| 'make a preprocessing program to strip out carriage returns'
| or 'don't use windows' (they had a windows executable).
|
| This is not a group with community or pragmatism from the
| start.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| In all seriousness, this comment really makes me want to
| try out Zig!
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| 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?
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| 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.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _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 Studio Code and Notepad++
| can both make line endings configurable._
|
| Last time I checked it was totally unnecessary because no
| other language releases for a platform and tries to
| punish their users. Options like that are to make files
| match while being worked on for different platforms, not
| so that a compiler doesn't try to punish and troll its
| users for using it.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > 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.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _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._
|
| No one is confused about how a compiler works. Those
| people people intentionally trolled are called your users
| when you make a language.
|
| _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._m
|
| Then why did they make a windows version? Any normal
| person just sees that they shouldn't invest time in a
| language intentionally annoying it's own users for trying
| it out.
|
| You still haven't come up with any explanation, your
| whole tangent about internet explorer has no relevance.
| There isn't one part of your comment that makes sense.
| Why would you even care about other people's OS and text
| editors? What kind of fanaticism would lead to wanting to
| use a language because they intentionally annoy users of
| something you aren't even involved in?
|
| The whole thing is basically a case of "this things
| doesn't stand on any merits, I've just decided that I
| don't like certain people and they did something to upset
| them even though they are really just shooting themselves
| in the foot".
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| 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?
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| I like a language that aggressively discourages writing
| code in Notepad on Windows.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| 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?
| blibble wrote:
| that's amateur level anti-windows user
|
| much better to put a colon in a filename, or call part of
| your toolchain "aux.exe"
|
| https://help.interfaceware.com/v6/windows-reserved-file-
| name...
|
| works like a treat
| integralid wrote:
| Related: aux.c in the kennel source
| https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68981
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Well, no, they still acted based on the original ego/pride,
| they just changed blogpost to look different.
|
| I mean, reason of "we don't want to be tied with direction MS
| takes" is good enough, not sure why they felt need to invent
| reasons and nitpick some near irrelevant things just to
| excuse their actions
| shevy-java wrote:
| Yep, agreed. I think this would have been the better reason
| too, but anyway - I also don't think it is so important
| either way.
|
| The big problem still remains: corporations control WAY too
| much in general.
| lenkite wrote:
| I did prefer that _honest_ line about bloated, buggy
| Javascript framework. Otherwise might as well ask an LLM to
| spit out a sanitized apology text for your change in
| provider. Just like ten thousand identical others copied from
| a playbook. Allow your eyes to comfortably glaze over with
| zero retention.
|
| Have people already forgotten that the ReactJS port made
| github slow ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861
|
| The revised, politically-correct, sanitized re-framing that
| you apparently insist on does not convey this very important
| point of information.
|
| We have freedom of speech for a reason - blunt honesty
| conveys important information. Passive language does not.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Perhaps the final edit should have included the complaint
| about 'buggy bloated Javascript' as that's a very substantive
| issue - and now I don't know if they changed that as 'tone'
| or because they decided that technical criticism wasn't
| correct, and there are other issues?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Did they though? I'm not signing up to use codeberg anytime
| soon. It's practically a ghost town, couple that with zig
| already being the second most popular project after their own
| project forgejo. They didn't even migrate their issues. It
| just seems like someone got upset about something they can't
| articulate and then performed a half ass migration
| (remote/push) while claiming victory.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| 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.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| 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.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| 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".
| ricardobeat wrote:
| That's kind of what they are doing - the move is
| 'updating their CI' to Codeberg Actions which is
| presumably more reliable. All the git workflows stay the
| same.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Reads like an official White House statement[0].
|
| [0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-
| spent-...
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| this seems unfair; I didn't see any terrible (both concept
| and execution) AI generated art accompanying their statement
| here.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The Pavlovian conditioning in some US right-wing folks of
| 'see word transgender' -> 'brain off' is sad.
|
| Especially since it was created just by hammering people with
| repeated exposure to biased media over ~5 years.
|
| If someone would take a beat, even from that biased copy,
| they might think that studying the effects of hormone
| treatment in animal models would be scientifically
| productive, regardless of how one feels about human
| transgender rights.
| egeozcan wrote:
| Also
|
| > More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys ...
|
| vs
|
| > Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs ...
|
| I commend the author for correcting their mistakes. However,
| IMHO, an acknowledgement instead of just a silent edit would
| have been better.
|
| Anyway, each to their own, and I'm happy for the Zig community.
| oaiey wrote:
| He acknowledged. Linked in the article.
| veverkap wrote:
| He hid the comments he made and apologized to the Zig
| community for his behavior. He never apologized to the
| people he harmed (the 'losers' at GitHub in this context).
| venturecruelty wrote:
| People aren't harmed because you insult them.
| veverkap wrote:
| You must be fun at parties.
|
| Harm is damage to health. He damaged their health.
|
| Thanks
| venturecruelty wrote:
| That was insulting and I am thus harmed.
|
| Edit: I upvoted you because I love parties.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| to quote something I said a day ago about AI spotting in the
| posts of other people:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114083
|
| "I think that writing style is more LinkedIn than LLM, the
| style of people who might get slapped down if they wrote
| something individual.
|
| Much of the world has agreed to sound like machines."
| acessoproibido wrote:
| This has always been the case in the "corporate/professional"
| world imo.
|
| It's just much easier now for "laypeople" to also adjust
| their style to this. My prediction is people will get quickly
| tired of it (as evidenced by your comment)
| oaiey wrote:
| Question: would you go to a public place and call a person
| who is listening to you a loser or a monkey with the risk
| of getting your face smashed in?
|
| Companies do public announcement with the risk of getting
| sued left and right. Normal people chose careful words in
| public. In the Internet it seems different rules apply in
| public. Laypeople are not adjusting to corporate talk,
| laypeople are more and more aware of the public of the
| Internet and behave accordingly (most are, like in real
| life, mute)
| snickerbockers wrote:
| AI witch-hunts are definitely a problem. The only tell you
| can actually rely on is when the AI says something so
| incredibly stupid that it not only fails to understand what
| it is talking about but the very meaning of words themselves.
|
| Eg,metaphors that make no sense or fail to contribute any
| meaningful insight or extrenely cliched phrases ("it was a
| dark and stormy night...") used seriously rather than for
| self-deprecating humor.
|
| My favorite example of an AI tell was a youtube video about
| serial killers i was listening to for background noise which
| started one of its sentences with "but what at first seemed
| to be an innocent night of harmless serial murder quickly
| turned to something sinister."
| fragmede wrote:
| which is unfortunate, because pre-AI, "but what at first
| seemed to be an innocent night of harmless serial murder
| quickly turned to something sinister." would just be a
| funny bit of writing.
| boothby wrote:
| Straight from a noir detective pulp, even.
| Copenjin wrote:
| They should know that crap software is rarely intentional as
| they make it out to be in the initial version of the text, what
| you get is what they are able to build in the environment they
| are in (that matters too). Capability and environment.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I think the Reddit mobile website team might be the exception
| to that. What they make is a particular brand of unusable and
| from what I remember there is evidence of them talking about
| how that was intentional.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Reddit is trying to steer everyone into using their mobile
| app, which schlorps up as much personal data as it possibly
| can. I normally don't go in for the whole mustache twirling
| thing, but given their previous actions in shutting down
| all third party apps, I'm fine in this case with accusing
| them of outright malice.
| immibis wrote:
| I think they recently banned people from creating their
| own API keys, which is a thing that people were doing to
| enter into their third party apps to bypass the ban -
| every copy of the app was registered as a single-user
| app. Now if you want to make any app or bot, you either
| screen-scrape, steal an API key, or get the approval of
| Reddit management.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| I was already turned off by the constant Zig spam approach to
| marketing. But now that we're getting pitchfork mobs and ranty
| anti-AI diatribes it just seems like a community sustaining
| itself on negative energy. I think they can possibly still turn
| it around but it might involve cleaning house or instituting
| better rules for contributors.
| zero0529 wrote:
| I agree partially.
|
| I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so
| much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward whether
| you like it or not. And honestly who cares, either it is a
| good ressource for learning or it's not. You have to decide
| that for yourself and not based on whether AI helped writing
| it.
|
| However I think some of the critique was because he stole the
| code for the interactive editor and claimed he made it
| himself, which of course you shouldn't do.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual
| claim was that Zigbook had not complied with the MIT
| license's attribution clause for code someone believed was
| copied. MIT only requires attribution for copies of
| "substantial portions" of code, and the code copied was 22
| lines.
|
| Does that count as substantial? I'm not sure because I'm
| not a lawyer, but this was really an issue about
| definitions in an attribution clause over less code than
| people regularly copy from stack overflow without a second
| thought. By the time this accusation was made, the Zigbook
| author was already under attack from the community which
| put them in a defensive posture.
|
| Now, just to be clear, I think the book author behaved
| poorly in response. But the internet is full of young
| software engineers who would behave poorly if they wrote a
| book for a community and the community turned around and
| vilified them for it. I try not to judge individuals by the
| way they behave on their worst days. But I do think
| something like a community has a behavior and culture of
| its own and that does need to be guided with intention.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> You can correct me if I 'm wrong, but I believe the
| actual claim was that Zigbook had not complied with the
| MIT license's attribution clause for code someone
| believed was copied. MIT only requires attribution for
| copies of "substantial portions" of code, and the code
| copied was 22 lines._
|
| Without including proper credit, it is classic
| infringement. I wouldn't personally call copyright
| infringement "theft", though.
|
| Imagine for a moment, the generosity of the MIT license:
| _' you can pretty much do anything you want with this
| code, I gift it to the world, all you have to do is give
| proper credit'_. And so you read that, and take and take
| and take, and can't even give credit.
|
| _> Now, just to be clear, I think the book author
| behaved poorly in response_
|
| Precisely: maybe it was just a mistake? So, the author
| politely and professionally asks, not for the infringer
| to stop using the author's code, but just to give proper
| credit. And hey, here's a PR, so doing the right thing
| just requires an approval!
|
| The infringer's response to the offer of help seemed to
| confirm that this was not a mistake, but rather someone
| acting in bad faith. IMO, people should learn early on in
| their life to say _" I was wrong, I'm sorry, I'll make it
| right, it won't happen again"_. Say that when you're
| wrong, and the respect floods in.
|
| _> By the time this accusation was made, the Zigbook
| author was already under attack_
|
| This is not quite accurate, from my recollection of
| events (which could be mistaken!): the community didn't
| even know about it until _after_ the author respectfully,
| directly contacted the infringer with an offer to help,
| and the infringer responded with hostility and what
| looked like a case of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
| latexr wrote:
| > I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so
| much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward
| whether you like it or not.
|
| The bigger issue is that _they claimed no AI was used_.
| That's an outright lie which makes you think if you should
| trust anything else about it.
|
| > And honestly who cares, either it is a good ressource for
| learning or it's not. You have to decide that for yourself
| and not based on whether AI helped writing it.
|
| You have no way of knowing if something is a good resource
| for learning until you invest your time into it. If it
| turns out it's not a good resource, your time was wasted.
| Worse, you may have learned wrong ideas you now have to
| unlearn. If something was generated with an LLM, you have
| zero idea which parts are wrong or right.
| zero0529 wrote:
| I agree with you. It is shitty behavior to say it is not
| AI written when it clearly is.
|
| But I also think we at this point should just assume that
| everything is partially written using AI.
|
| For your last point, I think this was also a problem
| before LLMs. It has of course become easier to fake some
| kind of ethos in your writing, but it is also becoming
| easier to spot AI slop when you know what to look after
| right?
| grayhatter wrote:
| > I agree with you. It is shitty behavior to say it is
| not AI written when it clearly is.
|
| > But I also think we at this point should just assume
| that everything is partially written using AI.
|
| Using "but" here implies your 2nd line is a partial
| refutation to the first. No one would have been angry if
| he'd posted it without clearly lying. Using AI isn't what
| pissed anyone off, being directly lied to (presumably to
| get around the strict "made by humans" rules across all
| the various Zig communities). Then there was the abusive
| PR edits attacking someone that seems to have gotten him
| banned. And his history of typosquatting, both various
| crypto surfaces, and cursor, and the typosquatting
| account for zigglang. People are mad because the guy is a
| selfish asshole, not because he dared to use AI.
|
| Nothing I've written has been assisted by AI in any way,
| and I know a number of people who do and demand the same.
| I don't think it's a reasonable default assumption.
| lvass wrote:
| Disservice? Rust is taking over the world while they still
| have nothing to show basically (Servo, the project Rust was
| created for, is behind ladybird of all things). Every
| clueless developer and their dog thinks Rust is like super
| safe and great, with very little empirical evidence still
| after 19 years of the language's existence.
|
| Zig people want Zig to "win". They are appearing on Hacker
| News almost every day now, and for that purpose this kind of
| things matters more than the language's merits themselves. I
| believe the language has a good share of merits though, far
| more than Rust, but it's too early and not battle tested to
| get so much attention.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > very little empirical evidence
|
| Evidence is easy to turn up and cite:
|
| https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-
| move...
|
| https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/urgent-need-memory-
| saf...
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/msrc/blog/2019/07/a-proactiv...
|
| https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-
| safet...
|
| https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/02/rewriting-a-browser-
| compon...
| lvass wrote:
| FWIW, all of those links compare Rust to languages
| created before 1980, and are all projects largely and
| unusually independent of the crates ecosystem and where
| dynamic linking does not matter. If you're going to use a
| modern language anyway, you should do due diligence and
| compare it with something like Swift as the ladybird team
| is doing right now, or even a research language like
| Koka. There is a huge lack of evidence for Rust vs other
| modern languages and we should investigate that before we
| lock ourselves into yet another language that eventually
| becomes widely believed to suck.
| alternatex wrote:
| Here's what Microsoft decided after a comparison to C#: h
| ttps://www.theregister.com/2024/01/31/microsoft_seeks_rus
| t_...
| mrsmrtss wrote:
| Microsoft isn't going to abandon C#, it's just using the
| right tool for the right job. While there are certainly
| cases where it is justified to go lower level and closer
| to the metal, writing everything in Rust would be just as
| dumb as writing everything in C# or god forbid, JS.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| You're assuming they are a teenager but you don't know. They
| used code without attribution and when asked to do so, they
| edited the comment and mocked the requestor. And you're
| calling the zig community the bully? They lied about not
| using AI. This kind of dishonesty does not need to be
| tolerated.
| latexr wrote:
| > 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 when a PR for that was made,
| tried to claim a namespace on open-vsx...
|
| At a certain point, that starts to look outright malicious.
| It's one thing to not know "the rules" but be willing to fix
| your mistakes when they are pointed out. It's an entirely
| different thing to lie, obfuscate, and double down on bad
| attitude.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I just want to point out that even if you are correct, as a
| Zig outsider, none of this is obvious. The situation just
| looks bad.
| latexr wrote:
| I'm a Zig outsider. I gathered the context from reading
| the conversation around it, most of it posted to HN.
| Which is why I also pointed out I may have incomplete
| information.
|
| If one looks past the immediate surface, which is a
| prerequisite to form an informed opinion, Zigbook is the
| one who clearly looks bad. The website is no longer up,
| even, now showing a DMCA notice.
| LexiMax wrote:
| The way these sorts of things look to outsiders depends
| on the set of facts that are presented to those
| outsiders.
|
| Choosing to focus on the existence of drama and bullying
| without delving into the underlying reason why there was
| such a negative reaction in the first place is kind of
| part and parcel to that.
|
| At best it's the removal of context necessary to
| understand the dynamics at play, at worst it's a lie of
| omission.
| npn wrote:
| > turned off by the constant Zig spam approach to marketing
|
| ? what? from my experience zig marketing is pretty mid. it is
| nowhere at the level of rust.
|
| heck, rust evangelism strikeforce made me hate rust and all
| the people promote it, even for now.
| grayhatter wrote:
| > 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.
| arccy wrote:
| this Corporate Americanism is of only positivity and fake
| smiles is exactly how we end up with enshittified products,
| because no one is ever called out for it. If the feedback is
| too soft, it just gets swept under the rug.
|
| we need less self censorship, not more.
| soiltype wrote:
| No, the edits are better. The original message made
| unwarranted assumptions, and used intentionally inaccurate
| language. That's objectively bad communication.
|
| It's not a binary choice between insults (escalates conflict,
| destabilizes rational decision making) vs hiding your
| opinions. That's what the word _tact_ is _for_. It 's simply,
| quite literally, a skill issue if someone can't find a middle
| ground between those two failure modes.
| ethin wrote:
| Fully agreed. I can't upvote yet (nto enough Karma) but
| corpospeak is IMO never the solution unless your in court or
| something.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| This, I was shocked when I read the first version. I get it if
| you're an influencer, but as a programming language people need
| to expect you can manage your emotions and be objective
| throwA29B wrote:
| What is the point of this post? To shame the author?
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| More and more people should call out bloated buggy JS
| frameworks lol
| krashidov wrote:
| Isn't github a rails app that heavily uses server side
| rendering?
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I'll be honest, I don't use github often. So if they're
| wrong, well, they fucked up in their complaint that could
| be redirected to one of many other websites instead.
| krashidov wrote:
| fair enough! To be clear - a rails app and a bloated js
| app are not mutually exclusive. From my observations
| though, github feels slow because it feels slow, not
| because of js shittiness
| lenkite wrote:
| Not any longer. The rewrite which destroyed performance
| uses ReactJS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861
|
| What is terrible is that new developers think that this has
| been the usual poor state of things...this is why Zig &
| others moving to alternate platforms is good.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Anger is a mind killer. Build software out of love. Love for
| engineering, innovation, creation, and love of working with
| people who feel the same way.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| A righteous, passionate anger can be indistinguishable from
| love. Having and committing to something worth fighting over,
| however bloody the battles may be, can make a life just a
| meaningful as one that practices disciplined quiescence,
| reflection, acceptance, etc. Love is what it is because it
| must paradoxically accept its opposites; love can be anger,
| anger can be love. The real mind killer is a pat moralism!
|
| Thus spake zarathustra etc etc..
| dxdm wrote:
| > A righteous, passionate anger can be indistinguishable
| from love. ... love can be anger, anger can be love.
|
| These are just word games. Blurring and mixing what we mean
| with different words. To say what? Passion takes different
| forms and can be a hell of a motivator? Nobody disputes
| that.
|
| There's clearly a difference between anger and love. GP was
| addressing that difference and recommended to focus on the
| healthier of the two. That's good advice.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Is there? I am not playing games!
|
| What is the anger that arises from you when one you care
| for is hurt because of some violence or injustice? Is
| that not an expression of love?
|
| What is that particular anger you can feel towards a
| romantic life partner of many years? One that can only be
| based in an already profound intimacy, in some deep
| fidelity? Don't you feel that same love you have always
| felt for them, but in a different color?
|
| What is the anger you feel when you see grand injustices?
| Hate crimes, genocides, crimes against freedom.. Isn't
| that something like a humanistic love?
|
| To make love simply the "healthier" option is to totally
| destroy it! It makes it, like, at best a pragmatic maxim
| and at worst a weird kind of imperative (we _should_ be
| healthy after all..). But love is not an imperative, it
| 's a (beautiful, amazing, natural) condition. And it is
| not always "healthy," not always without anger, but
| always "good" in that you can't go wrong following it.
| dxdm wrote:
| Of course there is a difference between anger and love.
| Either one can be present without the other, and that
| they can sometimes mix and play off each other does not
| change that they are different.
|
| You are playing around with words to pretend they are the
| same. That's very poetic and dramatic, but I hope you
| realize that love is not the same as anger, and that
| neither truly requires the other.
|
| If done right, love can eat anger. If done wrong, anger
| will eat love, and much more. These outcomes are not the
| same. That's were the game gets serious, and that's why
| I'm being such an ass about what you wrote.
| subsection1h wrote:
| Anger contributed directly to the start of the free software
| movement:
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
| intalentive wrote:
| Kelly's indignant attitude and commitment to "engineering
| excellence" suggest a bright future for Zig. It's good to see
| the leader of a technical project get angry about mediocrity.
| oaiey wrote:
| [..] in a product not people. Insulting people is never a
| solution.
| xanthor wrote:
| Sometimes people need to be shocked awake. Reality is
| harsh, and gentle language doesn't change that.
| subw00f wrote:
| You're not mining coal, get real. Either use efficient
| techniques to make people do the intellectual work
| necessary to achieve whatever goal you have in mind, or
| you're just deluding yourself thinking you're some kind
| of "reality expert" while being an asshole, meaning they
| might still do it, but it would be despite your
| leadership, not because of it.
| xanthor wrote:
| Why does intellectual work imply that people doing poor
| work need to be treated like fragile little birds?
| grayhatter wrote:
| 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 more. Every
| human deserves to be treated with dignity, and a base
| level of respect.
|
| Suggesting that someone is fragile and weak, because they
| object to being insulted, or object to the careless and
| needless stripping of dignity and humanity from people is
| a wild take.
| briantakita wrote:
| 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.
| grayhatter wrote:
| 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.
| subw00f wrote:
| Can you only provide clear and direct feedback on poor
| work by insulting people?
| xanthor wrote:
| No but I won't rule it out for the incorrigible
| subw00f wrote:
| Ok, but that's still not effective as a leadership course
| of action. Calling people names might make you feel like
| a big man inside, but that's it, it won't accomplish
| anything, that's only for your personal benefit, not the
| project, not the product and definitely not the team.
| xanthor wrote:
| Actually if you completely rule out the possibility of
| harshness then you are giving license to let yourself be
| walked over and for standards to drop to zero. It might
| make you feel like a big enlightened man inside to do so,
| but the proper application of firmness and pressure is
| absolutely effective in leadership.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I've spent time in restaurant kitchens around chefs that
| believed "some people need to be shocked awake".
|
| The people that got yelled at didn't do markedly better
| after getting yelled at, but they sure had a worse
| attitude towards their peers and chefs.
|
| None of the chefs I talked to about it had anything
| better than "that's how it was when I started in
| kitchens" as actual justification.
| xanthor wrote:
| The methods for influencing results within an
| organization exist on a spectrum, and failing to
| adequately utilize the breadth of that spectrum is always
| counter-productive.
| grayhatter wrote:
| If you want to measure the language used by the
| productivity of the desired outcome. I'd encourage you to
| survey the ratio of comments talking about the problems
| with github's very broken CI and UX, with how many people
| expressed an objection to the language and words used in
| the announcement. Failure to convey ideas with tact and
| respect, is demonstrably more counter productive.
|
| I assume you'll choose to dismiss those who object as
| fragile birds... but then you don't really care about the
| productivity towards the goal then do you? You just want
| to be ok with being mean because it doesn't bother _you_.
| xanthor wrote:
| Why do you consider that a useful metric? Hit dogs
| holler, after all.
| grayhatter wrote:
| > Why do you consider that a useful metric? Hit dogs
| holler, after all.
|
| you do...
|
| > The methods for influencing results within an
| organization exist on a spectrum, and failing to
| adequately utilize the breadth of that spectrum is always
| counter-productive.
|
| Or did you have a different expectation for result in
| mind? The one you thought would be counter-productive
| without insults.
|
| My assumption was that ark wanted to put support behind
| codeberg, and encourage others to take a critical look at
| how bad github has become, and to consider other options.
| Not rally additional support and defense of github's
| actions.
| xanthor wrote:
| I do about what?
|
| I haven't actually used harsh language with anyone so I'm
| not sure what your point is. I have been on HN long
| enough to know that expressions of strong negative
| emotion are punished here. That says absolutely nothing
| about the effectiveness of different methods of influence
| within an organization.
|
| I think if people are rallying to defend GitHub due to
| some language that ruffled their feathers and not
| objective technical merit then they have completely lost
| the plot as engineers.
|
| As far as Andrew's goals, I think he has been pretty
| successful within the framework of the attention economy.
| grayhatter wrote:
| I'm talking about the ideas, threads and conversations
| that are occupying the head space of others.
|
| > then they have completely lost the plot as engineers.
|
| I think most people who would call themselves software
| engineers have lost the plot of engineering.
|
| That applies equally to those who are blind to the fact
| that engineering only exists to create stuff for humans.
| Most engineers are ignorant to the ability to consider
| the humans they're supposedly build for.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >Insulting people is never a solution.
|
| That can not be absolutely true.
| oaiey wrote:
| Nothing is absolutely true, but in this case definitely
| w0m wrote:
| was github ever ~not kinda buggy?
| venturecruelty wrote:
| That's crazy! He should've left the original.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "bloated, buggy Javascript framework"
|
| Companies with heaps of cash are (over)paying "software
| engineers" to create and maintain it
|
| Millions of people, unable to disable it, are "active users"
|
| When I use Github servers I only use them to download source
| code, as zipballs or tarballs. I don't run any JS
|
| The local forward proxy skips the redirects when downloading
| http-request set-path %[path,regsub(/blob/,/raw/,g)] if {
| hdr(host) github.com } http-request set-path
| %[path,regsub(/releases/tag/,/releases/expanded_assets/,g)] if
| { hdr(host) github.com }
|
| Works for me
| Rochus wrote:
| The fact that three revisions were needed to tone down
| inflammatory language could raise questions about impulse
| control in leadership decisions (regularly prioritizing
| ideological positions over pragmatic stability). This is
| notable given that Zig has been in development since 2015 and
| remains at version 0.15.1 as of August 2025.
| marcelr wrote:
| blaming framework on low quality software is a skill issue
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Whatever the wording, what they are writing truly shows on
| Github. There are many things wrong with its code display ...
| All of which used to work fine or were not added in this buggy
| state in the first place.
|
| Code folding is buggy. Have some functions that have inner
| functions or other foldable stuff like classes with methods and
| inside the method maybe some inner function? It will only show
| folding buttons sporadically, seemingly without pattern.
|
| Also standard text editing stuff like "double click and drag"
| no longer properly works without issues/has weird effects and
| behavior. The inspection of identifiers interferes with being
| able to properly select text.
|
| The issue search is stupid too, often doesn't find the things
| one searches for.
|
| You must be logged in to search properly too.
|
| Most of the functionality is tied to running that JavaScript.
|
| In short, it shows typical signs of a platform that is more and
| more JavaScriptianized with bloated frameworks making things
| work half-assed and not properly tested for sane standard
| behavior.
|
| But there is more. Their silly AI bots closing issues. "State
| bot". "Dependabot". All trash or half thought out annoying
| (mis-)features. Then recently I read here on HN, that
| apparently a project maintainer can edit another person's post!
| This reeks of typical Microsoft issues with permissions to do
| things and not properly thinking such a thing through. Someone
| internally must be pushing for all this crap.
| martin-t wrote:
| Honestly, why do so many people, especially in the western
| hemisphere, act so shocked when somebody speaks their mind
| openly?
|
| To me this kind of communication says it comes from a real
| person who has real experiences, not the marketing department,
| and is understandably angry at the people who make his life
| worse. And it's natural to insult those people. Insults are a
| signal, not noise. They signal something is wrong and people
| should pay attention to it.
|
| I hear criticisms about being unprofessional and the like. So
| what? I don't wanna live in a world where everything everyone
| says is supposed to be filtered to match some arbitrary
| restrictions made up be people who more often than not can't do
| the work themselves.
|
| Almost all of the actually competent people I personally know
| speak like this.
|
| They can't stand those dragging us down through incompetence.
| They get angry when something that should work doesn't. They
| are driven by quality and will not be silent when it's lacking.
| If somebody fucked up, they will tell them they fucked up and
| have to fix it.
|
| And I much prefer that approach.
| coopykins wrote:
| Maybe this is a nice chance to ask, would you move from Gitlab to
| Github? I would say no, but some people in my org are proposing
| it, it seems to me simply because the integration it has with AI
| tools, but my experience has been worse in Github than with
| Gitlab.
| miningape wrote:
| For me they're both about equally shitty, but with Github you
| get a nice commit calendar to show off to recruiters - so
| Github wins IMO.
| davidee wrote:
| I believe the exact same exists in Gitlab under each user
| profile.
| layer8 wrote:
| We are self-hosting GitLab, which you can't with GitHub.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| We self-host GitLab and I would fight a migration to GitHub
| with every fiber of my being. GitLab is just better in pretty
| much every way. Especially CI/CD.
| 7222aafdcf68cfe wrote:
| A lot of these forced "AI" integrations are essentially Clippy on
| steroids. A more careful approach focusing on use cases the
| technology can really support would be much preferred.
| jbaiter wrote:
| Am I in the minority when I actually _like_ those AI features on
| GitHub? The ability to interrogate any open source codebase is
| __amazing__, this feature alone has saved me days of work
| /research. The AI code reviews are nothing to write home about,
| but occasionally catch stuff that I would've missed, a net
| benefit for me. I don't really get all the outrage... Sure,
| having an "Ask AI" Clippy-like thing in your face everywhere gets
| old quick, but at least on GitHub I find it non-obtrusive and
| often actually useful.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| ...you can just clone the repository and do that interrogation
| locally with the AI tool of your choice.
|
| Every single application or webpage having its own AI
| integration is seriously one of the dumbest ideas in computing
| history (instead of separating applications and AI tools and
| let them work together via standardized interfaces).
| ramoz wrote:
| Github Copilot review is such a simple - optional - ux, it
| makes sense as a feature. I enjoy it.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Look, how is number to go up without constant AI bullshit? Won't
| somebody think of the shareholders!
|
| MS in particular _really_ seems to be sacrificing itself on the
| altar of Roko's Basilisk; they appear totally incapable of doing
| _anything_ that isn't AI-branded anymore.
| johnjames87 wrote:
| Haven't noticed any AI problems or annoyances on GH.
| jappgar wrote:
| Why does ever HN thread read like a churlish blogger review of
| the latest installment of <popular-scifi-franchise>?
|
| Github is great. It barely changes at all and yet it's still too
| much for this originalist crowd.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I like AI changes. Can change files from UI, will fill commit
| message for me. That's awesome.
| Animats wrote:
| Is anything broken on the pure Git side of Github? From this,
| it's clear that actions and runners are becoming unusable. But
| are repositories still safe?
| miningape wrote:
| Luckily it's harder to enshittify something you don't own
| 8organicbits wrote:
| The outages break `git push`. I'm not a fan of the AI adoption
| within the UI, and the side bars when browsing code usually get
| in the way. Using GitHub as a dumb git backend isn't a great
| option either, look at the Linux kernels PRs, it's almost all
| spam. Why on earth can't PRs be disabled?
|
| https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclose...
| asmor wrote:
| Seeing the decline of GitHub in Actions is technically correct,
| but Actions was always broken. We tried getting self-hosted
| runners to work super early before there was a proper ephemeral
| mode (just an officially unsupported race-condition-y --once
| flag). It sucked. That code can't produce a consistent status
| code, constantly failed to connect to its scheduler with obscure
| Azure error codes and had so many races with accepting and timing
| out jobs. Runners wouldn't get new jobs, jobs would sit there for
| an hour and then time out, runners would just die and need to be
| re-provisioned (we used ephemeral VMs in a GCP instance group).
| This is all because Actions is actually Azure DevOps Pipelines
| rebranded.
|
| Compared to then this product is downright mature now. And also,
| there always were people at GitHub who delivered crappy products
| outside the core that most people working on FOSS got to see.
| Enterprise Cloud has a ton of sharp edges and things that make
| you ask "WHY" out loud. Notifications with SAML enabled are
| broken in countless ways (I have 0 out of 12 notifications right
| now), newly onboarded users are encouraged to click a "request
| copilot" button that sends emails to admins you can't disable,
| policy toggles that used to do one thing get split up and not
| defaulted properly. The last two in particular are just dark
| pattern hacks to get people to use Copilot. In an enterprise
| product.
|
| I haven't used GHES, but I imagine it's worse.
| codr7 wrote:
| Yep, all my new stuff is on Gitlab.
| deadbabe wrote:
| maybe I'm out of the loop, but what is the "obsession" with AI
| that's ruining it? GitHub still works for me like it always has.
| How are other people using GitHub?
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| niche language does something, cool story
| theultdev wrote:
| It's a little more than a niche language now.
|
| Bun is made with Zig, and they just got acquired by Anthropic.
|
| Ghostty is another notable piece of software made with Zig.
|
| I assume the Bun acquisition is fueling most of this Zig news.
| There's about 4 articles on the frontpage about Zig.
| Havoc wrote:
| See also people switching from windows to Linux.
|
| MS need a stint of focusing on what users want rather than
| ramming stuff down their throat unasked hoping they'll swallow
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| MS need someone that will slap people doing the second the
| moment some of the first happen.
|
| Securing base, easy to use and reliable OS should be no.1
| priority.
|
| Forcing down the throat services the users largely do not want
| just breeds resentment, and not only in people treated that way
| but also anyone that hears about it.
|
| If W11 was "hey, we did some optimising, fixed some bugs and
| HEY, if you have TPM2.0, we can do that little step to make
| your machine more secure!" there would be far less resentment.
|
| Similarly with every other feature, ask user, present the
| benefits, fuck off if they don't want to. NOT "turn it on by
| default then let them try to figure out how to turn it off".
| And then ask them again every few days with only option being
| "remind me later" as current copilot feature for teams does.
| jackfranklyn wrote:
| The interesting thing about Zig's move isn't really the drama -
| it's watching a project work through platform migration in real
| time.
|
| Most open source projects talk about reducing GitHub dependency
| but never actually do it because the switching costs are brutal.
| Issues, PRs, CI integrations, contributor muscle memory - it all
| adds up. Codeberg is solid but the network effects aren't there
| yet.
|
| Curious whether this pushes other projects to at least have
| contingency plans. The AI training concerns are real, but I
| suspect the bigger long-term risk is just platform
| enshittification in general - feature bloat, performance
| degradation, mandatory upsells.
| rmoriz wrote:
| Well, diversity is great but I think many people underestimate
| the quality and service of GitHub, especially the free services.
| Even commercial vendors have failed to provide such a free
| service over time (Docker Hub, Bintray, Sourceforge). They all
| have/had the power to earn money though commercial offerings and
| ads, but in the end had to cut down their free services. I still
| wonder, how codeberg plans to cover the exploding costs.
| zerofor_conduct wrote:
| I feel that training copilot on Github repos without maintainer
| consent was a betrayal - this pushed many projects over to
| Gitlab.
| snarfy wrote:
| You could say the same for any content used for training.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| You could and you should.
| throw7 wrote:
| "Either you have to embrace the AI, or you get out of your
| career," Dohmke. Dohmke left CEO position of GitHub in November.
| Pseudocrat wrote:
| He left to found an AI startup
| nish__ wrote:
| Who's the CEO now?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| CEO following their own advice is rare
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] Discussion on source:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46064571
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| 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.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| Fossil is great. I'd encourage anyone to try it out on their
| next personal project.
| q3k wrote:
| There's no code review system for Fossil, because the SQLite
| guy doesn't believe in formalized code review. It also doesn't
| have any good flow for accepting external contributions other
| than .patch/bundle files, because the SQLite guy doesn't
| believe anyone but him is good enough to regularly contribute
| code.
|
| It might be great for single person projects, which I guess is
| fine for hobby stuff, but unless you luck out like Richard Hipp
| and manage to become a well-paid hermit working in a
| effectively-one-person cathedral model, then it's not really
| going to work for most projects.
| phplovesong wrote:
| And now a huge Zig user is purchased by an AI company. The tale
| as old as time.
| vzaliva wrote:
| Let me be blunt: this looks like a tantrum. Bugs exist, and
| they're sometimes fixed more slowly than we'd like, but given the
| size of the GitHub ecosystem this is probably just one of many
| outstanding bugs. Blaming AI is baseless - not that it couldn't
| be true, but the conclusion seems to be drawn from a single
| issue.
|
| What does this mean for the Zig project? I haven't heard of
| Codeberg, they may be great, but for a popular open-source
| project I'd expect a proper discussion before deciding to move or
| weighing the pros and cons of different hosting options. From
| what I'm hearing, Zig is technically excellent but seems to lack
| level-headed, mature leadership. That's not unique: many open-
| source projects started by brilliant engineers struggle as they
| grow and need a new leadership structure. That transition can be
| painful and could even harm adoption.
| LtWorf wrote:
| > I haven't heard of Codeberg
|
| That's more of a you problem really.
|
| > I'd expect a proper discussion before deciding to move
|
| And you know the discussion did not happen?
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _Bugs exist, and they 're sometimes fixed more slowly than
| we'd like_
|
| Then I think the larger point I'd make is that it's impossible
| to get anyone to care. We've let tech giants like MS become so
| large they can essentially just ignore problems with their
| service, and as a customer, it does not matter that you are
| paying for it, or how much you pay, you're essentially nothing
| to MS. You pay not only in the direct cost of the product, but
| in the indirect costs of any problem with the product will hit
| _you_ ; e.g., here, with VMs just spinning due to really basic
| bugs. But you're right, nobody ever got fired for using Github.
|
| The big "pro" of moving to a smaller platform to me, I hope, is
| that they're at least incentivized to help you succeed.
|
| One reason I think most CI scripts should just be -- as much as
| possible -- _scripts_ , in the literal sense, is that not only
| promotes running them locally, it also promotes moving to other
| CI platforms.
| zeroq wrote:
| Pretty immature to be honest. I won't stop taking the bus because
| I don't agree with its drivers political views.
| shevy-java wrote:
| The reason is a bit strange. To me it seems as if Zig is just
| very opinionated. Personally I think the decision to move to
| Codeberg was made independently of Microsoft being a problem. I
| don't dispute that Microsoft is a problem; I just don't see many
| great alternatives to github either. Gitlab consistently is worse
| for me as a user.
|
| I think the bigger problem is that these big megacorporations
| control so much. I find Google even more problematic than
| Microsoft these days in that regard. AI worsens this problem, but
| even without AI it already was a problem.
| AdamN wrote:
| How is Bitbucket these days in comparison? Is it no longer even
| a player?
| RagnarD wrote:
| I used to use it, but left as it became apparent that
| Atlassian was increasingly incompetent in both software and
| business aspects to the point of both being badly broken.
| athorax wrote:
| Lets put it this way, no engineer is choosing to use
| bitbucket. You use it because some SVP made the mistake of
| choosing atlassian software a decade ago and refuses to
| change.
| a-dub wrote:
| github actions is pretty terrible.
|
| the self hosted runner host is some horrific dotnet csharp mono
| monstrosity and "language" is some javascript wrapper nonsense
| that needlessly creates a half baked dsl around running basic
| shell commands.
|
| it has a pretty ui, but that's about it.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I'm loving all the seething comments because a smart man who runs
| a good project is doing something a bunch of stealth GitHub
| employees don't like, even though it doesn't affect them. You
| don't have to use Zig, y'all. You don't have to agree with
| Andrew's opinions, y'all.
| sharyphil wrote:
| Move 'ZIG'. For great justice.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I heard tell that everyone at github is now tasked with either AI
| or getting github running fully on azure.
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