[HN Gopher] GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads af...
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GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
Author : _____k
Score : 550 points
Date : 2026-03-31 05:11 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| aurareturn wrote:
| Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down
| everyone's throats.
|
| I'm pro-AI adoption but the way Microsoft distastefully forces
| Copilot into everything is how you get people to hate AI.
|
| I'm guessing product teams are told by upper management to AI-fy
| every product they own. Teams are then rushed to just get
| something out there whether they make sense or not.
| gib444 wrote:
| > Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down
| everyone's throats.
|
| Microsoft will always be a company that pushes things on people
| rather than building things that attract people. It's in their
| DNA.
| jofzar wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't believe in consent, it believes in yes or
| every 3 days.
| jatins wrote:
| I am reminded of Steve Jobs's video where he says Microsoft
| has no taste everytime MS pushes this stuff on it's users.
| True in 90s, true now
|
| Video https://youtu.be/lahX_ARGTqA?si=AnULWzRbl7cc3UWu
| fsniper wrote:
| Well Unfortunately I can also argue, Apple has no taste
| anymore. At least, less of it day by day.
| xienze wrote:
| > Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down
| everyone's throats.
|
| The worst, or just ahead of the curve? Because you're kidding
| yourself if you don't think every other AI company or company
| integrating AI into their products won't be using it as an
| advertising delivery vehicle.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| exactly - the worst, or the best?
| petesergeant wrote:
| There was a great quote in an article I read from here recently
| along the lines of: Microsoft have invested enough in OpenAI
| that it's not their problem -- not Sam Altman's -- if it
| doesn't work out.
| aurareturn wrote:
| They've only invested $13b in OpenAI. They spent $68b on
| Activision Blizzard.
|
| I don't buy that quote. I think Microsoft is actually under
| huge threat from AI companies replacing their revenue stream.
| Animats wrote:
| Microsoft will probably try to sneak it back in later. They've
| done that with other intrusions.
|
| Migrating away from Github just increased in priority.
| zendist wrote:
| Talking about doing it is virtue signaling.
|
| Don't just say, do! If you have a popular repository, share
| news of your migration to drive others to do the same.
|
| VOTE WITH YOUR FEET, PEOPLE!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Instead of polluting PRs, Copilot will insert comments and
| logging and text fields and buttons with links to web sites
| with helpful product tips into your code and user interfaces.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I mean, this is a very obvious future step. I was imagining
| this too, although I stopped short at the 'ads in comments'
| stage, but who knows, they could easily go further.
| bvanheu wrote:
| why would they need Copilot to insert ads on GitHub?
| Tepix wrote:
| Yes. Like they did with the githubsearch for users that are not
| logged in.
|
| At first, they brought it back. Then they changed to limits so
| you get between zero and two searches before getting an error
| message that you have hit some kind of limit.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| They only turn on features that users disabled every chance
| they get.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| GitHub is sticky. 'Migrate away now' sounds nice until a
| 50-person team spends a week on CI yakshaving and remote auth,
| then self-hosting Gitea looks less like an exit than a fresh
| pile of infra work. Micorsoft knows the switching cost sits on
| your side, so they can eat a round of backlash and try the same
| stunt later unless a boring competitor shows up with fewer
| knobs and no growth agenda.
| yosamino wrote:
| Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too
| stupid to understand what that means.
|
| They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is
| indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and -
| sorry about the tangent - kill people.
|
| This really is the quote of the century:
|
| > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make
| people click ads
|
| What a waste.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| A lot of amazing technology has been invented just for the
| purpose of killing people. It's nothing new. Humans are monkeys
| that like to kill other monkeys and no amount of civilization
| will change that.
| logdu wrote:
| It certainly won't change with that kind of attitude. Don't
| you want to live a peaceful life and be free from your baser
| instincts? I believe most people do, and if they don't, the
| mission of those who have education and means should be to
| show the way in that direction, instead of shrugging off the
| worst things and excusing them on "monkeys", which IMO is
| insulting to monkeys.
| tornadofart wrote:
| The reflex to assign our morally wrong behaviour to the
| animal part in us is quite ironic. I just don't see
| jellyfish building concentration camps.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| Yeah they just use their tentacles to catch prey and
| bring it into their body cavity, where they feed on and
| defecate out of the same opening. Maybe they don't
| because they lack the intellect to do so, not because
| they have any sense of morality.
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| Well not sure where the disgust for jellyfish is coming
| from but there isn't really much of a moral argument
| here. What you are saying is akin to: look you just ate a
| burger, what's next-the holocaust?
|
| (The organisation of the functioning of bodily orifices
| of the organism isn't really at all relevant for that.
| One might also add, that in the case of the burger, there
| might actually be an argument for some structural analogy
| that depends on the origin of the meat in a process of
| captivity and killing, that is organized in an industrial
| fashion..)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Vegans actually do say that but I get your point, not
| sure what the parent is getting at either, if jellyfish
| were to have the intellect and dexterity I still wouldn't
| see why they'd build camps.
| kergonath wrote:
| It's a defense mechanism. Something we like to tell to
| convince ourselves that we are not as bad as they are.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| Of course, we all want to live peaceful lives and be free
| from our baser instincts, but the entire society that
| allows you to live a "peaceful life" is based on
| exploitation and war. Just because you don't see it at home
| doesn't mean you don't profit/benefit from human violence
| and exploitation.
|
| As for my comment on "monkeys":
|
| 1. Larger primates like chimpanzees are known predators
| that hunt and consume smaller monkeys, specifically
| targeting babies
|
| 2. In the famous Gombe Chimpanzee War
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War), a
| once-unified community split into two factions; over four
| years, one group systematically hunted down and killed
| every male member of the other.
|
| 3. In captive or introduced settings, groups may
| relentlessly bully "outsiders" who do not know the social
| norms, preventing them from eating or resting.
|
| 4. Non-lactating females may steal an infant from its
| mother and refuse to give it back, holding it until the
| baby dies of starvation or dehydration.
|
| "Insulting to monkeys" is only an idea when you
| anthromorphize monkeys from the actual animals they are to
| something like Rafiki from Lion King. Nothing is insulting
| to monkeys because they don't understand the meaning of
| insult or care about it. They're raw animals and so are
| human beings.
|
| If you look at the world around you today and think "yes,
| this is the result of people wanting to live a peaceful
| life" then I would say you're not being realistic.
| defrost wrote:
| Chimpanzee behaviour is chimpanzee behaviour.
|
| Aspects of that behaviour appear in the behaviour of
| other primates, but not all primate groups have identical
| behaviours.
|
| Chimpanzee behaviours also vary by troop and
| circumstances, just as might be expected from social
| behaviours.
|
| Such behaviours _exist_, but they may not in fact be
| optimal, inevitable, etc.
|
| Perhaps chimpanzees behave as they do 'cause the bonobo's
| didn't invite them to the cool parties.
| jhrmnn wrote:
| I find it sad that while technological progress is seen
| almost as a given by virtually everyone, moral progress is
| often not even an aspiration
| janalsncm wrote:
| Just to push back a little, I think if the U.S. did now
| what they did to Germany and Japan in WW2 it would be
| unconscionable. They are getting a lot of flak for bombing
| a school. But I think it's fair to say there were a lot of
| schools in Dresden and Hiroshima.
|
| This isn't to excuse anything but to say there has been
| progress even if it's not as fast as we'd like.
|
| As far as the technology angle, the precision we have now
| and information we have now allow much more narrow
| targeting, but at the same time allows us to scrutinize
| military actions more.
| tovej wrote:
| Small correction: there was one very publicized school
| bombing with a lot of casualties, but there's more than
| one bombed school.
|
| The US and Israel have bombed several schools, hospitals,
| and civil servants' offices, and residential buildings. I
| read HRANA's report on the war every morning. [1] It's a
| quick read, they are a reliable Iranian opposition source
| (now based in the US).
|
| Each day, there are multiple strikes on civilian
| infrastructure. No matter how precise they are, they are
| still war crimes.
|
| [1] https://www.en-hrana.org/
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Surely it's the precision that makes them war crimes? If
| the missiles weren't meter-accurate, and the intelligence
| didn't eg show the lines painted on the playground (even
| in images available to the public) then they would be
| able to pass it off as mistakes or enemy propaganda.
| kergonath wrote:
| No, what makes them war crimes is the intentional
| targeting of non-combattants. Being lousy at aiming
| weapons does not absolve of any war crime.
|
| The accuracy helps with showing intent, though, because
| when your 50% accuracy radius is a couple of meters and
| you put a couple of missiles on a target that's a hundred
| of meters of anything else, it's hard to argue they were
| sidetracked.
| pjc50 wrote:
| a) Germany and Japan started their respective wars, with
| much worse atrocity records. And with aerial bombing of
| their own. Japan was already bombing Chongqing in 1938.
| And during the counterinvasion of some of the islands did
| things like arm a school, including providing grenades to
| the children so they could avoid capture.
|
| b) The scale of WW2 is so wildly different from the
| present that people find it difficult to imagine. The
| firebombing of Tokyo caused more casualties than one of
| the nuclear weapons.
|
| (Follow on point from a: the original sin of all war
| crimes is starting a war of choice in the first place.
| Which the current war with Iran definitely is.)
| adrianN wrote:
| To be fair, Germany and Japan started the whole thing and
| were pretty determined not to lose easily.
| blitzar wrote:
| Germany and Japan were conducting pre-emptive defensive
| special military operations.
|
| If Japan had managed to secure the US uranium 250,000
| innocent civilians would not have been vaporised in the
| two greatest disturbances in the force in all humanity.
| piva00 wrote:
| Our current incentives system is absolutely amoral, there's
| no financial/economic benefit for being moral, it's the
| opposite: being moral is penalised since you'd be
| disadvantaged competing with others who don't care about
| it.
|
| I completely agree with you, moral progress should be
| incentivised somehow...
| tovej wrote:
| This has typically been done with social processes. The
| community publicly condemns or celebrates things
| according to how they fit our morals.
|
| The problem is, there is no public town square anymore
| where we can shame the people who are responsible. The
| billionaires/megacorps control the media through which
| they communicate to the public.
|
| In other words, the immoral actors have captured the
| systems meant to socially control them, and are instead
| using them to temper the moral instincts of society.
| XorNot wrote:
| I have no control over the morality of others.
|
| Whereas I have direct control over how I use technology.
| tovej wrote:
| This is a non-statement. The reverse is also true.
|
| I have no control over the technology that others use.
|
| Whereas I have direct control over my own morality.
| XorNot wrote:
| When asking for moral progress rather then technological
| progress, it's not an inverse.
|
| People can build technology, or I can build technology,
| but we generally all get it. Its distribution requires
| nothing of me or others psychologically.
|
| You can't just build and distribute morality, and
| adopting it is a massive _personal_ change.
| tovej wrote:
| You can build and distribute morality. It's called
| politics. Or religion. Or culture. Or marketing. Or
| propaganda. Or education.
|
| There's so many ways in which morality is distributed.
|
| There are also many things that stand in the way of
| adopting technology. Cost. Personal preference. Moral
| preference. Availability. Lack of awareness. Lack of
| specialized skill.
|
| The two are not very different at all in how they diffuse
| through society.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It doesn't seem like moral progress actually exists or even
| can exist given human nature. In every time period and era
| there are people killing each other, amongother crimes. It
| is fallacious to think that we have a monotonically
| increasing meter of moral progress, that we are somehow
| better than our ancestors. Reality shows that we are
| exactly the same, as the parent says.
| miki123211 wrote:
| This is where incentives strike us once again.
|
| Unlike in any other pursuit, in war, governments have at
| least some incentive to be efficient, lest they be
| outcompeted by the other side.
|
| In peacetime science, all they care about is crossing the is,
| dashing the ts, and making sure that no icky ethics
| violations are likely to cause a PR scandal and get somebody
| ousted from their post.
| croon wrote:
| Monkeys don't generally like killing other monkeys though.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| I don't think the quote is particularly fair. You could just as
| easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of
| amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it.
|
| For every microsecond level ad auction broker there's a free
| Android update, cat video platform enhancement, calendar app
| feature, or type checked scripting language release.
|
| HFT on the other hand -- now there's a tech black hole!
|
| [edited to add _What have the Romans ever done for us?_ ,
| below]
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| If you don't think that LLMs won't result in an
| insurmountable volume of spam on all web foru
|
| Oh wait, your post was written by an LLM.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| It was not! I don't think it adds much to this thread to
| refute the accusation though, but I would add: if you'd
| tried to _out_ me by asking me to write a haiku about
| buttons, you'd be reading a haiku about buttons right now.
| It's as reliable a signal as looking to see if I use
| hyphens and dashes. (I love haiku!)
| kbelder wrote:
| look at the c key
|
| so faded and worn out from wear
|
| always getting used
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Hard disagree.
|
| It brought panhandling to where generosity once prevailed.
|
| It brought us social media engagement metrics and
| 140-character-limited 'interaction' and cluttered, flashing,
| distracting, human-psyche hacking interfaces.
|
| It brought all the c*nts who only saw dollar signs.
|
| Agree on HFT.
|
| (Disclaimer: I'm focusing on the negatives to make a point,
| there probably are some wild benefits, but I'm on the side of
| preferring to have taken longer to get there without all the
| examples I've listed - yes, I'm wishing for utopia, it's my
| comment I can say what I want).
|
| Edited to add: People would share their cats whether or not
| internet advertising existed. The cats would demand it.
| imiric wrote:
| > You could just as easily see it as the best minds are
| building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a
| way to pay for it.
|
| That's a false dichotomy.
|
| First of all, the technology is far from "free". It's easily
| accessible, perhaps, but users pay handsomely to use it, even
| if they're unaware of it, which most adtech companies go out
| of their way to ensure.
|
| Secondly, advertising isn't the only business model companies
| can choose. Far from it. It may be the most profitable, and
| the easiest to deploy, simply because adtech companies have
| made it so. Companies can just as well choose to prioritize
| user experience, user privacy, and all the things they claim
| to care deeply about, over their revenues, which is what they
| actually care about.
|
| Oh, and lastly, I would strongly argue that social media, web
| search, office suites, etc., are hardly "amazing" technology.
| There are very good alternatives to all of these that don't
| come with the drawbacks of ad-supported software. It's just
| that adtech companies are also unsurprisingly quite good at
| advertising themselves, and using their position and vast
| resources to dominate the market.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| It's hardly a black and white area, and there's more to
| this question than just GOOG, but there's a joke here that
| has some relevance:
|
| _Those bastards have bled us dry with their algorithms,
| taken all the data we had, and not just from us, but from
| our children, our children 's children, our children's
| children's children, our children's children's children's
| children... and what have they ever given us in return?_
|
| _The search engine_
|
| _...and a free phone OS_
|
| _Oh yeah, the phone OS! Remember what the flip phones used
| to be like?_
|
| _OK, but apart from the search engine and the phone OS..._
|
| _Global Street View coverage!_
|
| _Oh yes yes, oh that 's a good one! So useful!_
|
| _Chrome and Chromium_
|
| _Well obviously that goes without saying: the browsers are
| very good_
|
| _Docs and Sheets. I can 't do me shopping without 'em!_
|
| _Oh yes yes! -all nod-_
|
| _OK, but apart from the search engine, the phone OS, the
| street view, the browsers, all the open source work,
| scholar, an office suite, an open DNS resolver, web fonts,
| gmail, and video calling, what has Google ever done for
| us?_
| red369 wrote:
| I like this, and I agree with the sentiment!
|
| But does anyone else feel we might need to cross the
| search engine off this list soon? Since whatever happened
| which is reducing the usefulness of Google search (Search
| Engine Optimisation?), is search better now than it was
| in the pre-Google days?
|
| Tangential question - would search engine optimisation
| have been less effective/destructive if there was more
| variety in the search engine people choose?
| nextaccountic wrote:
| I'm torn about this because I believe there's an amount
| of online services that should be truly free, for all,
| forever
|
| For example, email. I use free emails since the 90s,
| never paid for it. I went long stretches having no
| disposable income at all - if I had to pay for email, I
| would have dropped it multiple times. However email is a
| postal box in the Internet - people don't stop sending
| you emails just because you decided that this month, a
| bag of rice is more valuable than an email subscription
|
| (Nowadays email is like your online identity. _People_
| don 't send you emails, instead, it's all services you
| use that send you access codes. Losing your email is
| truly scary)
|
| On the other hand, I really loved the backup service of
| Colin Percival, tarsnap. It's an ultracapitalist, even
| libertarian, and it seemed to me very fair that you would
| pay for exactly what you use. If you stop paying he
| deletes your data, on the spot, no questions asked.
| (actually not sure if there's a grace period for
| permanent removal. but even if there is, this makes no
| difference for people that don't have money)
|
| I had to stop paying due to life circumstances, I lost a
| backup.
|
| I still have backups from around the same time in Google
| Drive, even without paying anything.
|
| So really if we live under capitalism and such essential
| services like email and backup MUST be provided by
| private entities, then we really, really need ads and ad
| supported business that gives users permanent free stuff.
|
| Fortunately capitalism can't and won't last forever. (but
| unfortunately it will surely outlast me and you)
| imiric wrote:
| That's amusing, but it's another logical fallacy (non
| sequitur). :)
|
| Was advertising necessary to produce all of this
| inarguably useful technology? Is this technology somehow
| unique in the world?
|
| There are alternatives to all of those products that are
| not monetized via advertising. You may argue that they're
| not good enough, and I may agree to some extent, but they
| certainly work well enough for many people who decide to
| not use Google and other ad supported products and
| services.
|
| Google et al don't have a monopoly on "amazing"
| technology. They just dominate the market to make it seem
| like they do.
|
| Besides, it's not like Google developed these products in
| a vacuum (except perhaps early web search). Many of them
| are based on the work of other companies and individuals,
| which they either acquired, forked, or depend on. Which
| is fine, but the point is that not all of it is built and
| maintained entirely by G.[1]
|
| [1]: The Roman analogy actually works in this sense as
| well, since accomplishments of the Roman empire were also
| largely based on work borrowed, adapted, or simply stolen
| from others. So were all the atrocities they committed
| necessary to advance technology? Perhaps. But if
| alternatives existed during their time that didn't come
| with the same downsides, I'm sure people would choose to
| use those instead, which is where your analogy falls
| flat. :)
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Oh yeah, the phone OS! Remember what the flip phones
| used to be like?
|
| Mobile phones were always tracking bugs, but
| smartphones/Android made the surveillance _much_ worse.
|
| > Global Street View coverage!
|
| At least in Germany still a quite controversial topic.
|
| > Chrome and Chromium
|
| By Google's aggressive advertising, it took an insane
| amount of market share of the much more privacy-focused
| Firefox web browser.
|
| > Docs and Sheets.
|
| Better use some offline-first office suite.
| tovej wrote:
| That is an incredibly dishonest way to look at it.
|
| 1) You're conflating the "smartest people" with tech
| companies. The point of the quote is that people's careers
| are funneled towards ads. 2) The technology is not free and
| amazing. It may give consumers some marginal utility, but
| it's making them dependent on the system and recording most
| interactions they have with it. It's a widespread system of
| surveillance and control, and the tech companies are in
| charge.
| Razengan wrote:
| And nobody has ever bought anything just because of an ad.
|
| You either already knew about shit through some other way or
| you were going to buy it anyway.
|
| Only people downvoting this will be the ones who perpetuate
| this Emperor With No Clothes racket.
|
| It's just a thin veil for surveillance.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| People buy things because of ads all the time. Probably
| you've done it too.
|
| I go out of my way not to buy products advertised to me, but
| I've definitely fallen to the incessant brain-washing of
| brand advertising. Probably regular advertising too depending
| what you include as adverts.
|
| I was surprised speaking to someone the other day, just out
| and about. They'd purposefully gone out to buy doughnuts
| they'd seen advertised. Kinda shook me. They seemed happy as
| Larry about it all though.
| esseph wrote:
| > I go out of my way not to buy products advertised to me
|
| The most likely way to get me to not buy your product is to
| advertise it to me.
| californical wrote:
| The thing that really messed with me recently was when I
| started thinking deeply about the fact that I've been
| seeing so many Southwest ads about their switch to assigned
| seating...
|
| I realized that they probably made that whole change, along
| with all of the ads, because they knew it would spark mild
| outrage and discussion from people who saw it -- they'd
| discuss if assigned seating is actually better or worse
| than the previous fist-come-fist-serve system. I can
| understand either angle but I liked that they were
| different than other airlines, etc.
|
| But really it's because they removed the free checked bags
| that had been their policy forever, now you need to pay
| like any other airline. Which completely ruins their value
| prop. But by advertising the seating changes so heavily for
| months, they make you forget about that part that actually
| makes a much bigger difference in the experience
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Wow - that's a big change, and they seem too savy for it
| to be coincidence, plus it makes it seem like they're
| adding something other airlines have taken away.
| Meanwhile they will make way more as everyone - including
| the unassigned seat penny pinchers like me - needs to
| purchase a bag these days.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I'm watching March Madness right now, and the Canadian
| sports network re-broadcasts with their own ads. They show
| a terrible one featuring a mid female basketball player
| every. single. break. The only emotions they've raised with
| me are anger and frustration, but I am well informed that
| there's a new Google phone out. If I was thinking about
| buying a new device it would be impossible to not associate
| that with the new Google Pixel 10a - available now!
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I have never once bought a product because of an ad, unless
| the ad was telling me about something I didn't know
| existed. Perhaps others are weak-minded enough to do so,
| but not everyone is.
| kbelder wrote:
| Damnit, now I want a doughnut.
| _thisdot wrote:
| I have definitely bought things I've seen in ads. And I know
| many people who have. There are brands that I know exist only
| because I've seen ads for them. What is an alternative to
| advertisements that you suggest??
| aqme28 wrote:
| One of the most provably false statements of all time
| saidnooneever wrote:
| if its indistinguishable from magic please do some reading or
| refrain from using.
| yosamino wrote:
| You know, I'm well aware of how an LLM works (partially.
| mostly anyway), but if you pulled in any layperson from the
| street and ask them to explain how it's possible that they
| can speak natural language commands into their phones and get
| a useful response as if they were talking to a human, you'd
| be hard pressed to get a more precise answer than along the
| lines
|
| > It's something with to do with data, and I know it's not
| magic, but...
|
| Maybe you were not familiar with the quote I was alluding to:
|
| > Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
| from magic
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Data is like mana, LLMs are like djinns, and prompts are
| like incantations
|
| This reminds me the introduction of SICP
|
| https://mitp-content-
| server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...
|
| > We are about to study the idea of a computational
| process. Computational processes are abstract beings that
| inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate
| other abstract things called data. The evolution of a
| process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program.
| People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we
| conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
|
| > A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's
| idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not
| composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can
| perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can
| affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by
| controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use
| to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are
| carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and
| esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we
| want our processes to perform.
|
| That was the idea in the forefront of AI in 1984 - software
| can perform intellectual work. This idea is now mainstream
| since ChatGPT, but for many people in the decades prior,
| software couldn't be called _intelligent_ - they just
| follow rules!
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > software couldn't be called _intelligent_ - they just
| follow rules!
|
| Software from this time wasn't intended to be highly non-
| deterministic as LLMs - and this was seen as a feature.
| latexr wrote:
| > if you pulled in any layperson from the street
|
| Then they wouldn't be able to explain how _any_ part of
| their computing life works. Not hardware, not software.
| LLMs are not at all special in that regard, to the
| layperson they are equally as magical as anything else.
| saidnooneever wrote:
| a) that quote you mention is basically about unknown
| advanced tech. LLMs and the software around it is not
| unknown..
|
| b) my comment was a bit generalized and I am sorry if that
| felt like a personal attack. it was not.
| bpev wrote:
| It's just the natural evolution of "They're not advertisements.
| They're recommendations."
| benterix wrote:
| > They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is
| indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads
|
| The people who created the tech and the ones that use it for
| ads in this case are two different groups - the first one is
| from Google (initial discovery) and OpenAI (realizing the
| potential of discovery and developing it into a product),
| whereas the second is the same company that decided that
| building ads into an operating system is an excellent idea.
| troupo wrote:
| OpenAI is testing ads already:
| https://openai.com/index/testing-ads-in-chatgpt/
| blitzar wrote:
| Bringing the advertising to all of humanity.
| latexr wrote:
| > sorry about the tangent
|
| I understand why you felt the need to do it, but it's still sad
| that you have to apologise for it. It's not like if using
| technology for killing is a fringe hypothesis, it's happening
| right now and on the news. It's a discussion worth having.
|
| > This really is the quote of the century
|
| I loathe that quote. The people thinking about how to make
| others click ads are only concerned with themselves and their
| own profit. To me that does not qualify as a "best mind". Maybe
| a "smart" or "good at computers" or "good at manipulation"
| mind, but certainly not "best". A "best mind" should be capable
| of empathy and have a broad societal view of consequences for
| their actions.
| kergonath wrote:
| > A "best mind" should be capable of empathy and have a broad
| societal view of consequences for their actions
|
| Empathy and introspection are so 20th century. They are a
| hindrance when your aim is to make as much money and put it
| on fire as quickly as possible. Because somehow that's how we
| decided to measure success.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Another user posted this article earlier
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/introspection-
| andr... which was interesting
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| So when is society gonna start thinking of _us_ in return?
| Where are our rewards?
|
| It's a rotten world out there. Everything is corrupt. Taking
| the moral high ground is an enormous sacrifice. In the best
| case scenario, society will just laugh at you for it. Chances
| are they will actually fight you since your moral stand will
| probably get in the way of their profitable schemes.
|
| I find it increasingly hard to blame people for playing the
| game. The reality is that the honest man is punished while
| the corrupt man is rewarded.
| latexr wrote:
| Ignoring the fact that your description is far from
| absolute ("society" isn't a single thing; there are--and
| I've been in--smaller scale societies which do work
| together for the collective good) and that shrugging off
| the situation only makes it worse and never better, none of
| what you said contradicts my point. In fact, it only
| reinforces it; being a " _best_ mind" isn't supposed to be
| easy. You may excuse it, but there's nothing laudable about
| deciding to be corrupt in a corrupt world, _the opposite is
| true_. The one who choses to do the right, moral, good,
| altruistic thing despite personal consequences is the one
| deserving of admiration.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Admiration and respect are great and a clean conscience
| lets you sleep well at night. It still doesn't help to
| make up for the profound demoralization you experience
| when you realize that unscrupulous people are making
| millions completely unpunished, nor does it help the
| people who get persecuted, bankrupted or even outright
| killed for trying to oppose the never ending corruption.
| latexr wrote:
| Again, none of that contradicts what I said. It frankly
| feels like you're trying hard to justify to yourself why
| you do things you know deep down aren't right. You do
| you, whatever helps you sleep at night and get through
| the day, I guess.
|
| Maybe _you_ get demoralised by the state of the world and
| feel like giving up. Others see the same thing you do and
| are pushed towards action. Sometimes they are able to
| improve the world, other times they aren't and may even
| get killed in the process. But only those who try, do.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > It frankly feels like you're trying hard to justify to
| yourself why you do things you know deep down aren't
| right.
|
| The opposite. Watching borderline criminal people and
| even actual criminals be much more successful than me
| honestly makes me depressed and sometimes makes me curse
| my upbringing. I could be a lot more successful than I am
| right now if I was sociopathic enough.
|
| I live in a country so corrupt the _supreme court_ is not
| only involved in but is actively covering up scandals
| literally right now. The only people who mustered enough
| balls to protest them are in jail right now for a coup
| attempt, and some of them have already died in prison.
|
| So I just don't blame people anymore when they just give
| up and start playing the game.
| latexr wrote:
| > The opposite. Watching borderline criminal people and
| even actual criminals be much more successful than me
| honestly makes me depressed and sometimes makes me curse
| my upbringing. I could be a lot more successful than I am
| right now if I was sociopathic enough.
|
| I understand what you mean. Thank you for clarifying.
|
| > So I just don't blame people anymore when they just
| give up and start playing the game.
|
| Right, but the crux of my original point wasn't so much
| to blame people who do it, but pushback at the idea those
| are "the best minds".
| bnj wrote:
| > I loathe that quote
|
| I thought this quote was a direct invocation of Howl /
| Ginsberg, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
| madness".
|
| Seen in that light I think there's another layer to it.
| latexr wrote:
| At a certain point, quotes (like any other part of
| language) get a new meaning, sometimes the opposite of what
| they originally stood for. Like any popular saying,
| whatever they were in reference to is forgotten and they
| stand and are interpreted on their own.
|
| It doesn't matter what the quote used to invoke if no one
| using it is thinking of the invocation.
| bnj wrote:
| A nice attribute of discussion is the opportunity to see
| references and quotes through the eyes of other people,
| perhaps especially if the interpretation is novel.
| latexr wrote:
| I agree. But that doesn't contradict my point at all. Two
| things can be true at once.
| 3yr-i-frew-up wrote:
| >A "best mind" should be capable of empathy and have a broad
| societal view of consequences for their actions.
|
| 9 years of philosophy later: You are not a best mind. Sorry.
| But you think morals metaphysically exist and no best minds
| do.
| karel-3d wrote:
| They were not ads though. The companies did not pay for those,
| from what I can tell. Microsoft seemed to really thought they
| were being helpful here.
| zero_bias wrote:
| First hit is always free
| TheTxT wrote:
| There is no way they didn't think they could sell those spots
| in the future.
| djeastm wrote:
| That's a generous interpretation.
|
| I see it as just preparation for selling the space. After a
| few months of "tips" they go to companies and say, "hey, you
| know those tips we have in our PRs? You can be in every 10th
| one of them for X dollars?"
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I could totally see them priming the ad engine; next step
| would be "PR tips get viewed by X million eyeballs a month;
| how many do you want to buy?"
| wzdd wrote:
| Advertisement, noun. A notice or announcement in a public
| medium promoting a product, service, or event or publicizing
| a job vacancy.
| skywhopper wrote:
| "Ad" doesn't mean "paid for". A "tip" linking to some other
| place, injected into a place with no permission or context,
| is an "ad" in every meaningful sense (and if this "tip"
| system were left in place it would soon enough be turned into
| a pay-for explicit ad system). If someone at Microsoft
| deludes themselves that they are just trying to be helpful,
| that doesn't change the impact and result of their actions.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| In media, we call that a House Ad.
| kivle wrote:
| I also get tons of helpful product recommendations and tips
| in my TV shows, every 20 minutes.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to
| make people click ads
|
| > What a waste.
|
| If you consider "what people (un-coercedly) spend money on" as
| "what people actually want", the situation gets obvious:
|
| People don't voluntarily spend money so that e.g. deep
| scientific questions are worked on or other things are done
| that are often claimed that "smart people should do".
|
| (by the way: a lot of problems that are claimed that "we need
| smart people to solve" actually don't need _smart_ people (i.e.
| the problem could be solved by raw intelligence), but are
| rather "political" problems, i.e. problems of manipulating
| people).
|
| I wish it was different, but before you claim that it is a
| waste that "the best minds are thinking about how to make
| people click ads", you should better find an idea what these
| people should do instead.
| tovej wrote:
| Maybe resources shouldn't be distributed purely using a free
| market that can easily be manipulated, especially if the top
| dogs are allowed to use manipulative advertising and sales
| tactics.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Maybe resources shouldn't be distributed purely using a
| free market that can easily be manipulated
|
| Which kind of resource allocation do you suggest?
|
| At least one can clearly tell that existing experiments
| with planned economies went really bad, so how do you want
| to overcome the problems that plagued existing big-scale
| experiments of planned economies?
| tovej wrote:
| Why does everyone on the right always read "not totally
| free economy" as "planned economy".
|
| Regulate the markets. Have the government own natural
| monopolies. Have large government sellers and buyers in
| all markets. Break up monopolies. Ban harmful products
| and services. Ban marketing to children. Ban dishonest
| marketing. Ban planned obsolescence. Increase the capital
| gains tax to companies are incentivized to invest in
| production rather than pay out dividends. Ban stock
| buybacks. Have CEOs be personally responsible for crimes
| (remove the LL from LLC).
|
| Those are good places to start.
| squibonpig wrote:
| Not arguing for planned economies exactly but we now have
| computers on a different level. Amazon, walmart, etc. are
| all incredibly massive logistics systems that function a
| lot like planned economies. These are only possible with
| modern tech.
| Gigachad wrote:
| These people could invent actual AGI, and the only thing they
| could think to do with it is push ads.
| esafak wrote:
| "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to
| make people click ads", Jeff Hammerbacher (2012).
| shevy-java wrote:
| The problem is that Microslop is not THINKING. What is the point
| of inserting ads? That just increases the spam output. Sure,
| Microslop may think this helps boost their revenue but many
| people hate ad-spam. After I started to use ublock origin, there
| was no way back to the unsafe ads-down-the-turtles approach
| anymore. Ads waste people's time and money.
| verdverm wrote:
| perhaps they forgot to set thinking mode in the LLM payload
| scbrg wrote:
| "You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters
| living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now."
|
| -- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Thinking of megacorps as anything other than slimy, amoral,
| scum honestly requires superhuman levels of mental gymnastics.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| And thinking that megacorps are in any meaningful way
| different than your last underdog startup darling is another
| level of copium.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Sure. But a startup could, in theory end up profitable and
| self-sufficient without a public offering. It's not
| impossible.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| Startups are about making money, take they capital with a
| promise of making more capital, and the logic of capital
| is uniform, no matter where it comes from. It always,
| without exception, will end up the same, with the only
| difference how much time it will take.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| That's why I said in theory. Consider that at some point
| Valve was a startup.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It really depends on what kind of investment they took.
| Venture is probably worse than going public with the
| desire to moonshot. A loan is pretty harmless, since they
| want you to repay a fixed amount with as much stability
| as possible.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Does it matter these days if a company or administration are
| "the good guys"? Does "good" even have a meaning anymore? The
| "good" part of the world rotates in disbelief since Trump was
| _re-elected_ in a democratic vote. Everyone says Microsoft is
| evil, since, what, the 90s?! But still, Windows is everywhere.
| Is anyone still buying this moral bullshit? "Goodness"
| obviously has no majority.
| saaspirant wrote:
| Relevant thread
|
| "Microsoft acquires Github"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286
| ra wrote:
| It's funny - many of our greatest concerns back then are
| things we now accept.
| yard2010 wrote:
| There's that old misconception about how to boil a frog..
| zihotki wrote:
| Misconception? That's a playbook, not a misconception.
| avdelazeri wrote:
| Afaik turning up the temperature slowly wouldn't work on
| an actual frog. But works on people without fail.
| st_goliath wrote:
| Oh, this is just the usual Microsoft Stockholm syndrome. I've
| been witnessing this for over 20 years now and have been told
| that it has been a thing for much longer than that.
|
| "No, we can't switch to OpenOffice you weird Open Source
| hippie! I can't e-mail documents to other people anymore,
| nobody can open them. Besides, the UI is all different, I won't
| be able to find anything!"
|
| Then Office 2007 happened, tossing out the waffle menu for the
| ribbon and people started receiving e-mails with strange
| docx/xlsx files that nobody could open. IIRC that was still an
| issue 3 years later.
|
| But no, when Microsoft does it, it is different: "This is
| progress! Are you against progress, you weird Luddite?"
|
| I remember by the time Windows 8 was released ("Kachelofen
| edition" - "hurr, your desktop is a tablet!"), I was discussing
| with a Unix graybeard friend in the cafeteria how long it will
| take until the complainers accept that "this is the way now". I
| think it was him who suggested that if Microsoft sent a sales
| rep around to shit on peoples lawns, it would take at most a
| year until they start defending it as the inevitable cost of
| technological progress.
|
| No matter how slow and bloated the GitHub web UI gets, or how
| many nonsense anti-features Microsoft stuffs into it. People
| will accept it and find funny excuses (network effect will be
| the main one).
| lopis wrote:
| "Microsoft loves open source now!"
|
| Oh, they adore it. Specially once they figure out how to
| plaster all open source projects with ads...
| johnisgood wrote:
| LOL I remember that stance. A good one!
|
| I have never owned a GitHub account post-M$. :/ Mainly
| because I always knew Microsoft has always been against FOSS.
| Andrex wrote:
| Microsoft: "We're EMBRACING open source!"
|
| Everyone who remembered Microsoft in the 90s: "Uhhhhh...
| :concerned_face:"
| latexr wrote:
| > ca. everyone here
|
| Every time someone claims "everyone on HN thought X", I go back
| to check and find out that it was not true and that the
| discussions had both people in favour and against. _Every
| time._ But this case is particularly bad, I'm checking the top
| voted comments and so far the feeling is of dread and wariness,
| the complete opposite of what you claim.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286
|
| I really wish people would stop this silly "everyone thought X"
| shtick. It's embarrassing. Verification is trivial. What do you
| gain from it? It's just spreading heated reactions based on a
| lie.
| sph wrote:
| This common trend of invoking the goomba fallacy is a
| thought-terminating way to excuse and justify away any
| popular opinion. Even if single individuals have different
| opinions, the common sentiment on the forum was that
| Microsoft of 2010s was not Ballmer's Microsoft, and the
| unsavoury anticompetitive behaviours had been done away with.
| latexr wrote:
| > the common sentiment on the forum was that Microsoft of
| 2010s was not Ballmer's Microsoft, and the unsavoury
| anticompetitive behaviours had been done away with.
|
| Maybe it was _a_ common sentiment, but clearly not _the_.
| Again, we can see from that acquisition thread that people
| were wary of it. The second top post even makes Microsoft
| seem like a domestic abuser.
| kelnos wrote:
| So it's true that the several of the top topmost comments are
| anti-MS or at least worried, but there are plenty of replies
| to those that are defending MS. A few of them:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17229625
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17229775
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227447
|
| I don't think it's safe to say that the prevailing opinion
| there is one of concern.
| latexr wrote:
| Like I said (emphasis added):
|
| > I go back to check and find out that (...) the
| discussions had _both people in favour and against_.
|
| The point is that "everyone here thought" complaints have
| so far never been true.
|
| > I don't think it's safe to say that the prevailing
| opinion there is one of concern.
|
| Comment position matters, because it means people upvoted
| it. If one agrees and upvotes they are less likely to
| comment. But even if we were to nitpick what the prevailing
| opinion was, it's still not true that HN was in agreement
| with the sentiment expressed by the OP.
| scbrg wrote:
| Well, yes, that sentence definitely simplified matters a bit.
| The fact is though, that those who expressed concerns about
| Microsoft - in that particular thread, and in others - were
| generally ridiculed in roughly the tone I imitated in my
| original post.
|
| Of course there _were_ people raising concerns, though. I
| figured that was pretty obvious in my original post. If there
| _hadn 't_ been any people raising concerns, nobody would have
| had to dismiss them - condescendingly or not.
|
| So yes, I (incorrectly) used the word "everyone" to mean "a
| lot of people" in a sentence where I figured it was quite
| obvious that that's what I was doing, and in a way I've seen
| it used before in English so many times that I thought it was
| a common and _accepted_ pattern. Perhaps I am wrong about the
| last bit though. ESL speaker, so that 's quite possible.
| latexr wrote:
| > The fact is though, that those who expressed concerns
| about Microsoft - in that particular thread, and in others
| - were generally ridiculed in roughly the tone I imitated
| in my original post.
|
| The fact the top voted comments are wary of Microsoft
| suggests otherwise. When people agree, they upvote and
| seldom comment. Of course responses are contrarian (that's
| mostly when you have something to add), but that doesn't
| mean that view is prevalent.
|
| > If there _hadn 't_ been any people raising concerns,
| nobody would have had to dismiss them - condescendingly or
| not.
|
| OK, yes, fair.
|
| > So yes, I (incorrectly) used the word "everyone" to mean
| "a lot of people" (...) and in a way I've seen it used
| before in English so many times
|
| It's perfectly fine to use "everyone" and "no one" to mean
| "the overwhelming majority". As in, _not literally
| everyone_ but enough that the outliers are a rounding
| error. For example: "no one wants ants biting their
| genitals" (I'm sure you'll find someone who wants that, but
| it's pretty safe to assume the overwhelming majority of
| people don't). But I don't think it's OK to use "everyone"
| to mean "a lot of people". A lot of people live in China,
| but it would be ridiculous to say "everyone is Chinese".
| scbrg wrote:
| Fair enough. Point taken :)
| kelnos wrote:
| I've had so many discussions with friends over the past 15 or
| so years where they've praised Microsoft and their embracing of
| open source, and have given me a hard time for continuing to
| distrust them. To be fair, I was a teenager in the 90s, and a
| huge computer nerd who followed the MS antitrust case very
| closely; quite a few of these friends are 5-7 years younger,
| rendering them a bit too young at the time to experience that
| going on in real-time.
|
| But damn... I enjoy a good "I told you so" as much as the next
| guy, but most of the time it sucks to be right.
| realaaa wrote:
| ahahah yes I remember those comments yes
| altmanaltman wrote:
| > Hearing feedback from the community following Manson's post and
| the kerfuffle it generated, Rogers said, has helped him realize
| that "on reflection," letting Copilot make changes to PRs written
| by a human without their knowledge "was the wrong judgement
| call."
|
| Thankfully, they need the community feedback to realize it was
| wrong. It was so hard to guess it was wrong without the feedback!
| It's good to know these people are in charge of building Copilot.
| verdverm wrote:
| Would be cool if they listened to us about the top voted
| feedback of all time, re: when the destroyed the feed
|
| https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188
| pjc50 wrote:
| > letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human
| without their knowledge
|
| Wait, did they really sneak this in entirely without user
| interaction? So people trying not to use AI would still risk
| being ""contaminated""? Incredible breach of trust. Similar
| kind of thing to lying about whether your product is vegan.
| scott_w wrote:
| I haven't seen it but the article makes it sound like, when
| you ask for it to make a change to your code, that's the
| point it puts the ad in.
|
| I think (but not 100% sure) that it also puts it directly
| into your codebase, without you knowing ahead of time,
| without your permission. If that's correct then it's truly
| heinous.
| heyethan wrote:
| That's what makes it feel off -- not the ads, but the loss of
| control.
|
| If something can change your PR without you explicitly
| asking, that's where it crosses the line.
| kakacik wrote:
| This is corporate PR speak 101, external or internal doesn't
| matter. None of that sentence is true and everybody knows that.
|
| Its just a theatre since other peers are dancing the same dance
| and they can't stick out as too rough or honest or whatever. Of
| course they realized this very well from the start, weighted
| risk of backfiring, reward for meeting some fucked up quarterly
| or yearly objective set by higher ups and decided to go ahead.
|
| You can safely ignore the words, just make a mental mark that
| this is/are sociopathic assholes, move on with life and leave
| the mark there for next 4 decades and act according to that
| knowledge the next time you deal with them or their products,
| if you have to.
| miki123211 wrote:
| I think a CEO literally saying "I fucked up" on a corporate
| blog could genuinely be an interesting hiring tactic these
| days. I'd work for that guy.
| synack wrote:
| Yet Sourceforge has been putting ads on open source projects for
| decades.
| kadoban wrote:
| Yeah, that's part of why nobody wants to use Sourceforge.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Wow, I haven't heard that name for decades.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Jeez, that makes me feel old, and I am "only" just barely in
| 30. :(
|
| Remember https://web.archive.org/web/20050204100149/http://ci
| a.navi.c... BTW?
|
| For the uninitiated: https://web.archive.org/web/200501290221
| 02/http://cia.navi.c.... :D Good times!
|
| This takes me back. It is just one of those artifacts of
| early 2000s that was associated with open source hacker
| culture. It truly felt magical at the time.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Ironically, that's what probably killed Sourceforge and helped
| GitHub take off. It remains to be seen whether Codeberg will
| now repeat the process.
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| SF required application form, where you had to explain why
| you are worthy to have your git repo hosted by SF. By the
| time they processed it I already forgot I even applied. I
| think that was actual reason for them being destroyed by
| GitHub, that had simple, fully automated signup.
| trueno wrote:
| yeah, uh you're definitely driving home the point here. that's
| why no one uses sourceforge anymore.
| aquir wrote:
| I would be curious what Raycast's reaction is. They just got
| caught in the crossfire or they deliberately bought ads to be
| placed with Copilot
| staindk wrote:
| Doubt Raycast would have known about this, think they are
| smarter than that. But who knows.
| kadoban wrote:
| I'm sure they sold this ad space at a premium and someone
| over there thought it was a brilliant idea. How else would it
| have happened?
| VadimPR wrote:
| They posted previously on YN that they too were caught
| offguard. The 'tips' weren't specific to Raycast, they've
| been going on for a while and Raycast was just one product it
| decided to feature now.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| the microsoft playbook
| plagiarist wrote:
| First of all, I find it enraging that dimwitted AI companies
| decided to edit PR descriptions for anything at all.
| etiennebausson wrote:
| Wouldn't it change the hash, making push requests conflict in
| many case?
| duskwuff wrote:
| GitHub was only modifying the description of the PR itself,
| not the commit messages for the commits included in the PR.
| heipei wrote:
| I just saw the headline fly by yesterday and thought that this
| was just another dumb bug in what is the slow decline of GitHub.
| To find out today that this was very much intentional is even
| worse.
| ozim wrote:
| Exactly same for me.
|
| If I think about it, that was in my head accounted as ,,no one
| would be that stupid".
| akmarinov wrote:
| Remember when they wanted to charge for self hosted runners and
| "backed down", let's see how long it lasts
| devsda wrote:
| So, after Windows cleanup announcement nobody at Github thought
| "may be we should review all our copilot integrations to avoid
| another embarrassment for MS" ?
|
| That shows either it was just a Windows org announcement and not
| a culture change at MS or it was just an empty promise to
| temporarily deflect mounting criticism.
|
| Either way it is disappointment for anyone who thought it was a
| genuine case of introspection and change of heart at MS.
| puppycodes wrote:
| I'm not suprised Raycast is involved in this marketing scheme.
| They pollute their own product with ads where they shouldn't be.
| Whoever is running their marketing team needs a lesson in not
| pissing off your userbase.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Sometimes I see something nifty in Raycast and it tempts me.
| Then I see something weird from them, look in the Alfred
| manual, and realize it already supports the same feature and
| that I'll stay put, thanks.
| puppycodes wrote:
| Yeah same 100%
| krtkush wrote:
| Someone, claiming to be from the Raycast team, in the original
| HN thread said that they were not aware of the advert or were
| involved with it in any manner.
| crvdgc wrote:
| > GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in
| GitHub
|
| They already did!
| https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65245
| shortercode wrote:
| Push push push. When your customers are livid at you take a small
| step back. Wait for a moment then come back at them from another
| angle.
|
| I hate this philosophy. But it's seems to be the preferred path
| for Microsoft.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| > GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in
| GitHub
|
| For another six months.
| bilekas wrote:
| > We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot
| coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull
| request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request
| comments moving forward.
|
| Why does this read as they are saying it was a mistake ? Because
| it absolutely wasn't, and it will absolutely happen again, maybe
| just less obvious next time.
| charcircuit wrote:
| How do you know better if it was a mistake than GitHub
| themselves? It is possible that the tip was only supposed to
| show up in some other place and it accidentally started getting
| added somewhere it shouldn't have been.
| bilekas wrote:
| Because it was already mentioned that it was a bad call by an
| internal dev.
|
| > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233
|
| > We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot
| coding agent. The goal was to help developers learn new ways
| to use the agent in their workflow. But hearing the feedback
| here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call.
| We won't do something like this again.
|
| Either way, even if it was a mistake, giving the ability to
| modify someone else's PR without prompt, in any scenario
| should have been tested, oh I don't know.. At least once.
| xfactorial wrote:
| I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of
| either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out
| of them.
|
| I believe there are two caveats on it:
|
| 1. Approach: to make the experience worth it, so that ads are not
| very intrusive , done correctly, which, over and over and over,
| it is proven contrarious to the interest of the user.
|
| 2. Relevance: if you are going to put ads onto your product, make
| sure things are done correctly, curate if possible what will be
| shown (I believe Microsoft's worse fear would be to see online
| casinos ads onto something like GitHub, as an example).
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _I understand "free services" eventually come to the
| conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even
| make money out of them._
|
| The endgame is not "or", it's "and": eventually come to the
| conclusion that, why choose between revenue streams when we
| could just have both?
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I think we'll see companies increasingly adopting the X
| approach: charged tiers for 'fewer' ads. With no actual
| guarantee as to the absolute quantity of ads, just 'fewer,
| relative to the people who aren't paying as much'. We're
| basically on a downward slope where not seeing ads is going
| to get steadily more and more expensive over time.
| afferi300rina wrote:
| The issue is context. GitHub is a professional workbench, not
| social media. Any "tip" that serves as an ad is just noise in a
| high-focus environment.
| dagi3d wrote:
| And what about the companies that thought that advertising
| (sorry, suggesting) their product through this channel was a good
| idea?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Don't assume they were in on it. Microsoft plays very weird
| games with platform access and traffic.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| "OK guys, back to the drawing board. How can we market this
| better? How long do we wait until this WILL fly under the radar?"
| ozim wrote:
| Feels like you never worked at corporation it goes more like
| this:
|
| "old employees who know the environment and are in tune with
| community are playing safe so they don't bring in immediate
| results, feels like progress stagnates, so they move those
| people to other tasks"
|
| "new clueless manager joins, has to come up with a brilliant
| idea (that actually is bad across the board for someone who
| understands the environment) to get quarterly bonus, then
| convinces bunch of |out of touch suites| with power point
| presentation where numbers go up"
|
| "he gets burned by community response, becomes more
| conservative - next quarters he is moved away or he moves away
| on his own - new clueless can come into his place"
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I wonder if the PM responsible for this will be held accountable.
| Who should resign?
|
| I'm guessing the answers will be predictable and disappointing.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| > Who should resign?
|
| And achieve what?
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| A healthy culture where leadership is held accountable, and
| egregious errors in judgement are treated with the
| seriousness they deserve.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| It's great that they backed down, but they still did it in the
| first place. GitHub is on borrowed time now; my own repos are
| insignificant, but I'll definitely look to move somewhere else
| this year, and I'm sure many others will too.
| insin wrote:
| Would you like Copilot to generate ads?
|
| [Yes] [Maybe later]
| joegibbs wrote:
| But why were they running unpaid ads for third party services? It
| makes no sense
| jacquesm wrote:
| So they can drop them at some point and then hold the party
| that has now become dependent on those ads to ransom and/or as
| a way to soften them up before acquisition.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| It can make sense if the premise that nobody is steering the
| ship is accepted to be true.
| fer wrote:
| That just means they'll be more subtle once the dust settles.
| cetinsert wrote:
| This was a humiliation ritual!
| lopis wrote:
| This is peak entishitification and a quick way to burn a lot of
| goodwill and trust _fast_.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Microsoft had a lot of goodwill?
| lopis wrote:
| No, Github did.
| pm90 wrote:
| Microslop is clearly flailing. They were first movers with the
| OAI investment but OAI is doing fine on its own and microslop
| failed to capitalize on that early momentum. Now they're
| resorting to increasingly desperate measures across their product
| portfolio to stay relevant.
| throwaway902984 wrote:
| > _OAI is doing fine on its own_
|
| This isn't my understanding of their current state of affairs,
| especially regardless their finances?
| latexr wrote:
| It's good they walked it back, but the fact it was implemented in
| the first place is a signal of their thinking and inexcusable in
| itself.
|
| Trust is easier to lose than to gain, and Microdoft continues to
| break trust.
| sylware wrote:
| Microsoft github.com should restore classic web compatibility for
| the core functions (issue tracking, etc) and be native IPv6.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| > Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations, GitHub, said in a
| statement: "GitHub does not and does not plan to include
| advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue
| with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong
| context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips
| from pull request comments moving forward."
|
| What a joke. It literally went in and edited the PR description 8
| minutes after the user submitted it.
|
| That's not a tip somehow ending up in the wrong context. If it
| were it would have happened at submission time. At least be
| honest. Yuck.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| I wonder what was the thought process when they green lit this
| feature and thought it is a good idea.
| ezoe wrote:
| I guess it's time to consider ditching GitHub. Everything that
| are purchased by Microsoft ware destined to be rotten.
| putna wrote:
| i am surprised it took them time to destroy Github. usually
| they manage to make acquired companies a garbage pretty fast.
| gk-- wrote:
| even aside from this, their reliability has been absolutely
| terrible since they took it over. it's down so often we had to
| setup slack notifications directly to the devs to try to take
| some of the pressure off our ops teams.
|
| they must be migrating it to hyper-v or something. brutal.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Even aside from that, what are we doing centralizing FOSS
| project hosting on a closed source Microsoft platform?
| jeltz wrote:
| It was much better than the closed source SourceForge which
| existed before it. A lot of small projects dont have the
| energy to self host. Plus for small projects the barrier of
| entry is an issue. I recently found a typo in an error
| message in Garage but since they run their own Forgejo
| instance and OpenID never really became a thing I never
| created a PR.
|
| It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible
| alternative. Of course large projects do not have this
| issue, but for small projects Github delivered a lot if
| value.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Strong agree on this. I think a lot of people who've
| entered software development in the past decade or so
| don't appreciate just how bad the available options were
| when Github launched.
|
| If you blanch at the thought of a one line in a pull
| request just wait until you see what Sourceforge looked
| like, release download pages where you had to paying keen
| attention to what you clicked on because the legit
| download button was surrounded by banner ads made to look
| like download buttons but they instead take you to a
| malware installer. They then doubled down on that by
| wrapping Windows installers people published with their
| own Windows installer that would offer to install a
| variety of things you didn't want before the thing you
| did.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Well - my perspective is the KDE project, which has a
| team of capable admins who take care of hosting. The
| project has always been more or less self-hosted (I
| remember SUSE providing servers) and even provided
| hosting for at least one barely associated project,
| Valgrind. I think Valgrind bugs are still on KDE
| Bugzilla.
|
| It's admittedly not really practical for most projects,
| but it could be for some large ones - Rust, for example.
| jeltz wrote:
| I mostly work on PostgreSQL which has always selfhosted
| but PostgreSQL is a big project, for smaller projects it
| is much less practical. Even for something decently large
| like Meson I think the barrier would have been too big.
|
| But, yes, projects like Rust could have selfhosted if
| they had wanted to.
| dude187 wrote:
| KDE uses Phabricator, or at least did the last time I
| contributed. Worked pretty well in the collaboration
| aspect for submitting a change, getting code owners to
| review and giving feedback. I was able to jump in as a
| brand new contributor and get a change merged. The kind
| of change that would have been a PR from a fork in
| GitHub.
|
| However I got the distinct feeling the whole stack would
| not fit as well into an enterprise environment, nor would
| the tooling around it work well for devs on Windows
| machines that just want to get commits out there. It's a
| perfect fit for that kind of project but I don't think it
| would be a great GitHub replacement for an enterprise
| shop that doesn't have software as it's core business
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible
| alternative.
|
| There is no credible alternative, because 3rd party
| hosting of the canonical repo is a bad idea to start
| with. By all means use 3rd party hosting for a more
| public-facing interaction, but its about time that
| developers understand that they need to host their own
| canonical repos.
| thiht wrote:
| We understand, and say no thanks. The benefits don't
| outweigh the costs
| troad wrote:
| What are some good alternatives for closed source codebases
| that people have been using and enjoying?
|
| I only ask because I already know of good alternatives for
| FOSS, but it's the private / work projects that keep me
| tethered to GH for now.
| password4321 wrote:
| Azure DevOps <shudder/>
| moron4hire wrote:
| If it's for work, why do you need GitHub at all?
|
| To me, GitHub only makes sense as a social media site for
| code. If you are publishing to GitHub with no intent to be
| open in your code, development process, and contributor
| roster, then I don't see the point of being on GitHub at all.
|
| Because it's not like their issue tracker is particularly
| good. It's not like their documentation support is
| particularly good. It's not like their search is particularly
| good. It's CI/CD system is bonkers. There are so many
| problems with using GitHub for its own sake that the only
| reason I can see to be there is for the network effects.
|
| So, with that in mind, why not just setup a cheap VPS
| somewhere with a bare git repo? It'll be cheaper than GitHub
| and you don't have to worry about the LLM mind virus taking
| over management of your VPS and injecting this kind of junk
| on you.
| sumanthvepa wrote:
| Very true. We have a private git repository running on a
| server that serves as our master. Works fine for us. We
| backup to GitHub. But it isn't used in any way in the dev
| workflow
| esafak wrote:
| What do you use for code review and CI/CD then?
| duskdozer wrote:
| You can do it with forgejo, just have to self-host the
| runners
| esafak wrote:
| I am excited about its potential integration with
| jujutsu:
| https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/325
| p2detar wrote:
| Self-hosting. If you really need to push remotely, push to
| bare repo on your own cloud vm or setup gogs or forgejo.
|
| I now start with local repos first and whatever I deem OSS-
| useful, I mirror-push from local to Github or anywhere else
| with forgejo.
|
| Github was never really needed to use git for private
| projects.
| Andrex wrote:
| I've been thinking about this. If you have any kind of home
| network with attached storage at all, setting your local
| Git to just use that seems like a logical step.
|
| And then if you're still paranoid do a daily backup to like
| Dropbox or something.
| c0balt wrote:
| GitLab is quite good, the organizational features and CI is
| also mostly on par with GitHub. You can use gitlab.com, SaaS
| or self-host.
| dewey wrote:
| But compared to GitHub it's much more complicated in terms
| of UX as it covers more enterprise use cases that GitHub
| doesn't.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I'm a bit confused what you mean. I have to use GitLab
| for work and don't see much difference. Some UI elements
| look a bit more complex than on GH but other than that
| it's working the same way. Less buggy as well.
|
| Personally I host forgejo for my private apps and have
| had no issues with that either.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Why do you think this? It really isn't.
| thiht wrote:
| It really is... I've worked with Gitlab for years and
| moving to GitHub was like a breath of fresh air,
| everything is much less cluttered. Not saying it's
| perfect, but GitHub just feels simpler
| dismalaf wrote:
| Gitlab.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Codeberg seems to have legs. License is different, best read
| it.
| hellcow wrote:
| Sourcehut.
|
| Uses the same email-based patch workflow as Linux. Takes an
| hour to learn, and they have helpful guides: https://git-
| send-email.io/. No JavaScript.
| m_mueller wrote:
| self hosted Gitea is my recommendation. has everything one
| needs and is super lean and resource saving. you can run it
| easily on a 1GB VPS - I even ran it for a while on 512MB.
| Andrex wrote:
| I really like the end-user experience when I stumble on
| Gitea repos online, too.
| frogperson wrote:
| Forgejo is super easy to set up on a 1-2 core vm. Make a
| compose file and put caddy in front for tls. the whole thing
| is less than 50 lines and costs about $10-$15 a month.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| GitLab. We self-host ours and it's rock solid.
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| Are there any obvious successor to GitHub yet?
|
| There are a few alternatives, but none have the critical mass
| of users yet.
| jeltz wrote:
| For open source I would say Codeberg looks like the most
| promising. There is also SourceHut but seems like Codeberg
| has the mind share.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Funny that people said the exact same thing back when GitHub
| was originally acquired [0], I wonder how many actually went
| through with their words and ditched it. I bet GitHub has more
| users today than ever before though.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286
| Andrex wrote:
| They can have the new users pushing out sloppy projects.
|
| The serious users leaving will definitely dent profitability.
| And GitHub being a social network, could start a death
| spiral.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| What profitability? I'm pretty sure GitHub is a loss leader
| to push people to Azure and cloud services. I also don't
| know anyone who actually uses GitHub as a social network
| even though it ostensibly has such features.
| Andrex wrote:
| The social features were GH's early secret sauce that
| contributed heavily to its stickiness and why it
| eventually dominated. IMO.
|
| I should have said "will dent _whatever_ profitability. "
| I'm not sure it exists either. From the outside, it would
| seem crazy that it _wouldn 't_ be profitable with all the
| Enterprise stuff (and it's not like you can throw 10k
| engineers at whatever GH is doing).
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Just speaking anecdotally, Codeberg today feels like the
| Gitlab of yesteryear, except that Codeberg has projects on
| it. Someone who is contributing to open source will
| eventually need to create a Codeberg account.
|
| The top comment of the linked thread ("If Microsoft shares
| SSL certs with NSA they could do MITM attacks") is something
| that I find much more likely today than back in 2018.
| windward wrote:
| >Why MS cares your private repositories? give a reason? Maybe
| using your code to train their programming robot, lol
|
| >Whether they will abuse the trust of having complete and
| total access to every private repo and all of the code inside
| or not remains to be seen
|
| >MS is pushing their ads within their own OS more and more,
| will GitHub get the same treatment[...]?
|
| Funny.
| abighamb wrote:
| For personal stuff I hopped over to source hut and it's fine.
|
| Simple, direct, and I really like the email based workflows.
| idkwhatimdoing2 wrote:
| finally they are coming to their senses
|
| time is money, save both.try ramp.
| bradley13 wrote:
| I moved almost everything off of GitHub when MS bought it. Go to
| GitLab or CodeBerg, depending...
| ares623 wrote:
| Microsoft Always Chickens Out
| mnmnmn wrote:
| Just downgraded to free. Fuck em.
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| GitLab team on other hand is unyielding, they love adding their
| "Closes #" in MRs and don't care about people that ask to get rid
| of it.
| ptx wrote:
| What is this referring to? Is GitLab using AI to guess which
| issue a merge request is meant to fix?
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| No, they detect issue symbol in branch name or commit title
| and add "Closes #123" at the end of merge request
| description.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Updated to add on March 31: Martin Woodward, VP of Developer
| Relations, GitHub, said in a statement: "GitHub does not and does
| not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a
| programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip
| that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment.
| We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving
| forward."
|
| Wow, well that is clearly a bald-faced lie.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They're not even trying. But this time 'the hacker did it'
| excuse wouldn't hold so they had to come up with something new
| in a hurry.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| It would have been less controversial to place an ad somewhere at
| the top of the screen. Putting it in the Markdown feels like a
| very deliberate and antagonistic fuck you to everyone.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| The lack of market understanding by the person that thought this
| "feature" was a good idea is staggering. There was never a world
| where developers would think this is a good idea.
| contravariant wrote:
| The fact that they chose to publish the ad _under someone
| else's name_ is so tone deaf that I just can't understand what
| they were thinking.
| Aachen wrote:
| This. It's so far out there that I have to wonder if it's a
| rogue employee who thought this a good excuse to cause
| reputational damage without it being too obvious. Doesn't
| pass several razors though (not the simplest explanation;
| malice involved.. is that Hanlon's and Occam's razor?), so I
| don't truly believe it... but it would be possible
| contravariant wrote:
| Since it's AI and Microsoft I _can_ believe that someone
| who doesn 't know what they're doing would be given a
| mandate to promote AI under any means necessary at the cost
| of some other team's reputation.
|
| But it's an insane move. If anything AI has made it more
| important than ever to know who authored something and then
| someone does this _to promote AI_.
| vasco wrote:
| Still waiting for their next attempt at charging for self hosted
| runners. That's going to be a pain of a migration.
| gmerc wrote:
| forgejo.org
| _pdp_ wrote:
| How long will take GitHub to backtrack on the "Allow GitHub to
| use my data for AI model training" aggressive setting?
| moi2388 wrote:
| I don't buy that they respect that setting in the slightest
| t312227 wrote:
| hello,
|
| ah ... another clear case of AGI *) ...
|
| *) ads generated income
|
| just my 0.02EUR
| beaker52 wrote:
| The play was to use AI as an opportunity to quietly insert
| adverts into a platform full of paying users.
|
| The moment your company starts playing a pauper and
| enshitificating the products I already pay for, is the moment I
| stop giving you any money at all. Try it. I'm not paying you
| money so you can try to make more money from me. Either add value
| and convince me to pay more, or fuck off.
| conartist6 wrote:
| But it's a perfect fit for their business strategy of forcibly
| inserting their software into your anus..! How could it have gone
| wrong??
| rrgok wrote:
| Microsoft, how cheap minded you have to be to understand that you
| don't need ads? You already had everything you need to grow
| without slapping ads everywhere.
|
| You had everything great. Xbox, Windows, Office,... and somehow
| in a short span of time you managed to enshittify everything.
| Focus on you core strength. Ads is not one of them. And the
| combination Ads+Ai it is not either. Stop ruining great things.
| You had - still have - great potential to have a competitive
| advantage over others yet you fall for these shitty practices.
|
| I believe, if you had the chance, you would put ads on the C#
| compiler too.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Like npm?
| arnvald wrote:
| I'll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything
| they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source
| projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A
| product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when
| it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and
| give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste...
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The worst part of Microsoft is whoever is running their
| marketing department, they just inject themselves into
| everything, like Windows. GitHub is different, they will 100%
| lose users and income if they don't learn to back the hell off
| of it though. Windows, well, everyone complains about Windows
| no matter what, so valid complaints are ignored.
|
| With Office, well, your employer is paying for it, so you have
| no say in it anyway.
|
| It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and
| poisons all their software, who else would be doing this?
|
| This is why I say, marketing driven development is garbage.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and
| poisons all their software, who else would be doing this?
|
| Capitalism (and it's demands of the market) at its finest.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| You can be a capitalist without ruining your product.
| philipov wrote:
| Capitalism means ownership by investors, and it is the
| _investors_ who ruin your product.
| recursive wrote:
| From my naive point of view, it's not clear from first
| principles why they _must_.
| philipov wrote:
| It's a version of the principal-agent problem, with the
| added wrinkle that principals have low barriers to exit.
| Both the management and investors share the incentive
| structure of a con artist.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Capitalism - in principle - doesn't even require that
| investors as such _exist_ , much less that they own
| everything. That our current system has evolved into a
| pseudo-capitalist system which introduces all sorts of
| State created constructs (like corporations), and borrows
| elements from fascism, socialism, etc., doesn't mean that
| it must be this way.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Investors don't run the company, they don't make product
| decisions on a day to day basis. They may demand growth
| and they may be able to fire the CEO if enough of them
| band together but that requires them to convince the
| board first (and if they can't then they may be able to
| fire some or even all of the board). Anyway, as long as
| none of that has happened I think this is an academic
| position at best.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Microsoft can't help themselves. They ruin everything that they
| touch.
| Already__Taken wrote:
| Growth. It's a disease. Can't just work on a good product it's
| got to make arbitrary growth targets.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Because it's Microsoft. Categorically incapable of respecting
| their users.
|
| What's interesting to me is how many people went like 'Oh,
| Satya _really_ gets open source, this time it will be different
| '.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225599
| sega_sai wrote:
| I am not sure it is that. The job of Microsoft is to satisfy
| shareholders. That is the only target. They only care about
| users to the extend that helps the shareholders.
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| In other words, the world beyond the next quarter does not
| exist.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| This is repeated ad nauseam, but do they really? Can you
| honestly say that Nadella's setting a hard target for
| conversion of local users into Microsoft ones caused their
| shares go up?
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is how you'll end up destroying planet earth.
| Shareholders have to co-exist with the rest of us, if you
| wreck your environment to please yourself you'll be like
| that guy I knew in LA that had a Ferrari that he couldn't
| drive on the road just outside of his mansion because the
| roads were so bad. But on his private grounds he had clean
| blacktop and zero potholes...
| timacles wrote:
| The shareholders would certainly understand, destroying a
| key tool for undefined gains is not good for the
| shareholders.
|
| What it is, is purely incompetence. Revolving door of
| executives forcing shit ideas because they need to assert
| control.
|
| Big Tech has become a space led by lizard brained nepo
| babies who have nothing to contribute to the world, but
| think they're entitled to it all.
| trueno wrote:
| always noticed way too much reverence for satya because of
| what he did to valuations. i personally cant stand
| azure/365/all of it. i reserve no reverence for satya, he's
| playing a game in a class/world none of us can even relate to
| so i don't even see the point in talking about his
| achievements. looking back, it unequivocally sucks that
| microsoft acquired github.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| When Microsoft announced it was acquiring Github I submitted
| a comment about backing up repositiories locally. This idea
| got downvoted pretty quick
|
| Did people honestly believe Microsoft is cool. I'm not so
| sure. The company has access to a large amount of
| surveillance data about computer users, it understands what
| it can and cannot get away with and actively manages its
| online reputation through whatever means necessary
|
| Time will show the wiser
| hagbard_c wrote:
| This type of behaviour seems to be endemic within Microsoft.
| They're like the scorpion in the Russian tale of the scorpion
| and the frog, seemingly a retelling of the Persian tale of the
| scorpion and the tortoise:
|
| _A long time ago, a scorpion came to the edge of a great
| river. Not being a good swimmer, it asked a nearby frog if it
| might get a ride across.
|
| The frog eyed the scorpion warily. "I've heard of your kind. I
| see the stinger you hide behind your back. I wish I could help
| you, but I cannot risk it."
|
| "Why would I sting you?" the scorpion reasoned. "If you die, we
| would both drown."
|
| The frog was convinced. It let the scorpion climb atop its
| back, then began to swim across the great river. But when they
| were halfway across, the scorpion suddenly stung the frog.
|
| As the poison spread through his body, the frog cried out, "Why
| did you sting me? You have killed us both!"
|
| The scorpion replied, "I couldn't help it. It's my nature."_
|
| Microsoft just can't help it that they end up destroying the
| goodwill they inherit when they buy a property. It is in their
| nature.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You have cause and effect confused. They buy the property
| _because_ of the goodwill, they can 't get it any other way,
| they know they will destroy it but goodwill doesn't
| necessarily show up on the balance sheet, whereas the result
| of burning that goodwill _will_ show up on the balance sheet.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Well, no, in what way would I have this confused? I state
| they always manage to lose goodwill because it is in their
| nature to do things which alienate customers. I'm not
| saying anything about the _why_ of it, just that they
| always do so.
| thewhitetulip wrote:
| Some Product Manager who wanted his promotion of the year went
| with: Oh how about we squeeze more revenue from our unpaid
| users
| tartoran wrote:
| And what's even more disappointing is that despite failure
| they probably do get promoted.
| thewhitetulip wrote:
| Yes! And now Microsoft says Copilot is for entertainment
| purposes only
| dominotw wrote:
| nah blame goes to satya. not some rando who is acting on
| incentives.
|
| can we please blaming randos.
| thewhitetulip wrote:
| Ultimately it's on the company culture. So yea kinda.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Because Microslop always hires cheap labor that ends up
| becoming management, and then things start to break. And the
| cycle continues. This is what happened at Bank of America, Citi
| and others.
| dismalaf wrote:
| This is just the way MS is and always has been. It was
| inevitable. It's part of their longstanding EEE strategy.
| Anyone who thought otherwise was fooling themselves.
| Andrex wrote:
| Embrace, Extend, Enshittify?
| frogperson wrote:
| Product managers do not care about customers. They only care
| about their bonus and the line moving up.
| willis936 wrote:
| I wonder which direction their line is moving.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I'll never understand why anyone thought they wouldn't ruin it.
| It's a miracle it even exists anymore.
| naikrovek wrote:
| it's not ruined _yet_. it can recover, but it will require an
| immediate 180 degree turn on all changes they 've made since
| acquisition.
|
| microsoft, you suck at aquisitions.
|
| stop shoehorning copilot into everything. holy hell, stop it.
| just stop. please. no customers ask for this. none. zero open
| source developers ask for anything like this, ever. stop it.
| stop. holy moly, stop. i mean it. but you won't stop because
| you don't understand why we don't want it, because you suck
| at acquisitions.
|
| stop usurping github culture and replacing it with microsoft
| culture. you know what happens when microsoft culture
| arrives: all of the things that people love about your
| company vaporize almost immediately. you dorks don't
| understand this, though, because you suck at acquisitions, so
| this'll never change.
|
| stop letting people with MBAs make decisions. this is the big
| one. people with MBAs know enough to be catastrophically
| dangerous, and they don't know enough to know if what they're
| doing will drive people away. MBAs lose all respect for
| customers and only see things in terms of value. MBAs do not
| see customers as valuable, they only see product as value.
| MBAs are insane. Fire the fucking MBAs and get some older
| engineers who do not have MBAs to assemble teams to help them
| pick product direction and product features. This is obvious
| to everyone except you dummies because you dummies suck at
| acquisitions.
|
| you CAN keep the "GitHub" brand, and the clout, but you must
| stop doing everything you started doing since you acquired
| them. and I do mean that. you must let GitHub culture return.
| GitHub will die a slow, painful death if you do not. It will
| live on a bit longer as the git host of choice for some
| enterprises, but it will not last very long in that form.
| This is obvious to everyone except you because you suck at
| acquisitions.
|
| you look at your shiny new pet and you grab it and you dash
| its head against the concrete wall until you see its eyes
| poking out and then you cry because it's dead, not
| understanding that it was you who killed it. you only wanted
| to make it better! but you didn't make it better, did you?
| you killed it. as you always do.
|
| you strip everything that customers love out of these
| companies and you crush everything that the employees love
| about the companies with extreme efficiency because you don't
| fucking respect these things. you don't even know that you
| SHOULD respect these things, because knowing that requires
| that the MBAs be taken away from the acquisitions steering
| wheel and be permanently banned from the company. you are
| filled with cancerous MBA decision making and those MBAs will
| never admit it to you, because they are the engine behind
| these acquisitions you fucking suck at.
| shmerl wrote:
| Their goal was to have a captured audience. Once the audience
| is captured, of course enshittification will happen.
| petsfed wrote:
| Not to white-knight microsoft here, but I think the problem
| they run into with _every_ product is that because of their
| ubiquity, they rapidly reach saturation with most every
| specialized product they sell. You cannot grow a business if
| your market is saturated, even if you 're the only one selling.
| So they have to find a way to expand their market. With
| specialized tools, that's done by generalizing, right? And
| anyone who has ever driven a screw with a swiss-army knife can
| tell you, generalized tools never work as well as dedicated
| tools. Thus, Word ultimately sucks. Windows ultimately sucks.
| Github ultimately sucks. They are all of them trying to be
| everything for everyone, because the alternative is just
| mumbling along, being really good at being tools, but being
| really bad at conveying profit to their creators.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > You cannot grow a business if your market is saturated
|
| At some point, a business should shift from growth state to a
| steady state. The idea that businesses have to grow forever
| is a sad consequence to how we fund companies.
|
| The only thing that grows forever unchecked is cancer.
| ivell wrote:
| Can also be a tree. Growth does not mean customers have to
| be disrespected. It just happens to be an easy way out for
| companies.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > At some point, a business should shift from growth state
| to a steady state.
|
| I was on a department-wide call; many, many years ago. The
| person talking was telling us how well we were doing and
| how we needed to grow. At the end, they asked if there were
| any questions (which, thinking back, seems odd given the
| size of the meeting, but.. it was a long time ago). I asked
| them "Why? Why do we need to grow? We're doing a good job
| at our core business. We're making money doing it. Why do
| we need to expand; specifically expand our offerings into
| something that _isn't_ our core".
|
| My question didn't get answered. But it _is_ a valid one,
| imo.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| Businesses do not always need to grow at all, neither do
| investors as a class, demand that business keeps growing.
| A mature business generates a stream of dividends and
| everyone is happy. There are many, many such businesses.
|
| One famous example is See's Candy, which Warren Buffet
| famously discussed in one of his newsletters. See's is a
| mature company with zero mandate to grow. It turns the
| profits over to Berkshire and Berkshire uses that to
| invest in other companies.
|
| The economy as a whole keeps growing because human
| desires and ingenuity are unlimited. But a specific firm
| reaches its natural limit, at which point it turns into a
| cashflow machine to generate dividends for owners.
|
| The problem you are facing is that Management does not
| want to acknowledge that it's time for them to start
| paying out dividends and leave growth alone, because that
| would be an admission that the profits of the firm are
| best invested by some other firm, and not by them.
|
| It is all about management ego, in not recognizing their
| limitations, and then destroying the core company as they
| invest in areas where they can't compete. Shareholders
| and boards need to replace management when this happens,
| but it is hard to do because Management keeps insisting
| that they can earn an above average return if they keep
| the money rather than returning it to shareholders. And
| people love to hear stories of above average returns.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hah, thank you, that's exactly my sentiment.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| >And anyone who has ever driven a screw with a swiss-army
| knife can tell you, generalized tools never work as well as
| dedicated tools
|
| >Windows ultimately sucks
|
| I actually want a generalized tool for my OS, a specialized
| OS sounds like a pain in the ass.
| petsfed wrote:
| Generalized in the sense of "this interface works as well
| on a tablet as a desktop computer", or "we can also
| generate ad revenue with this operating system" or "there
| should be constant invasive AI integration, even for users
| who don't want to and should not use such features, and who
| would pay a premium to avoid it if possible".
|
| Not specialize in the sense of "here's your civil
| engineering operating system, which is different from your
| structural engineering operating system, and neither bear
| any similarity to your gaming operating system".
| jacquesm wrote:
| If you can't grow your business then maybe you should just be
| satisfied with what you have. Growth without limit has a
| name: cancer.
| lab14 wrote:
| it's not that deep, once a company reaches a certain size it
| gets ridden with middle managers looking for their next
| promotion. middle managers are gonna middle-manage.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Big company isn't good at {thing} absorb company who is and
| apply all their know how to the part that does {thing} killing
| all the good parts in the process.
|
| Happens almost every time.
| jmyeet wrote:
| This was inevitable once Microsoft wrote a check for $7.5
| billion. You're not going to pay that much and not recoup your
| investment. You might say that they could've gotten it from
| existing income. Maybe that's true but it doesn't matter.
| Because you can get it _faster_ by turning all the knobs to
| increase income and decrease costs.
|
| Profit has a tendency to fall over time. A growing company can
| escape this for awhile by expanding their marketshare or
| expanding into new products. Eventually the only way to head
| this off is by raising prices and cutting costs.
|
| Entshittification is fundamental to our system.
|
| Consider this too: the people who are making decisions about
| Github's future have no investment in it's long term success.
| They're VPs, directors, managers and ICs who are simply trying
| to get promoted and get their bonuses by squeezing out short-
| term revenue. They'll be long gone before it all goes to shit.
|
| It's almost like we have a distortion based on the workers'
| relationship to the means of production.
| lazide wrote:
| Everyone is just figuring out again why Microsoft was so hated
| in the 90's.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| GitHub was sold because it didn't make too much money.
| Microsoft bought it for OpenAI only, to train Copilot on the
| vast amount of code.
|
| Of course, MS every once in a while says that it makes a lot of
| money, but they don't really say how much is costs to keep it
| up. Their free tiers are still very generous, even they are
| buggy as hell - I can't imagine that the profit it makes even
| dents MS' bottom line (assuming it's not in the red). But at
| the end of the day the model training is done.
|
| I guess Github doesn't have a lot of use anymore, beside having
| a lot of users that you can use to experiment with such
| shenanigans to see what can you get away with.
| Insanity wrote:
| GH being bought by MSFT way precedes their OpenAI involvement
| IIRC. And I don't think it was even needed to train their
| models given Anthropic does fine without owning GitHub.
|
| So this logic doesn't pass the smell test to me.
|
| EDIT: seems there was only a year in between them buying GH
| (2018) and investing in OpenAI (2019). So _maybe_ they had
| that foresight.
| abeppu wrote:
| > Microsoft bought it for OpenAI only, to train Copilot on
| the vast amount of code.
|
| I think this gets the timeline wrong. Microsoft acquired GH
| in 2018 and started the partnership with OpenAI in summer
| 2019.
|
| I'm sure there was some strategy to extract value from it
| that wouldn't serve its users but I think OpenAI was not
| initially meant to be the beneficiary.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Maybe MS just got extremely lucky, like winning-the-
| lottery-lucky.
|
| But your timeline is off, however. Their partnership
| started in 2016[1]. In 2019 MS started to invest publicly
| in OpenAI - but by then they have had some history.
|
| To me, this is at least suspicious. Granted, I have no hard
| proof.
|
| [1]: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/11/15/advancing-
| ambiti...
| apple4ever wrote:
| Conversely GitLab was well positioned to take the space but
| then went and ruined their opportunity too.
| goku12 wrote:
| The writing was on the wall when they tried to implement
| invasive telemetry on users, following an investment offer.
| They did walk back on it due to community backlash and
| boycott. But if history has shown us anything, corporate
| retreat happens only on account of loss of good will and
| brand value. Once the intent is established, they'll keep
| looking for other ways to satisfy it. The only difference
| between that incident and Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub
| is that the latter was a much louder signal about what was to
| follow.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| the main pull of GitHub is not primarily git, which is easily
| done without an external provider. It's the bundle of all the
| little tools various other conveniences with git repositories,
| and how they're streamlined together into a workflow that many
| places are now beholden to. So they can afford to rough up the
| userbase a bit in the name of increased value extraction
| because so many paying customers are trapped in the GitHub
| ecosystem.
| thiht wrote:
| > why they ruined GitHub
|
| Are we living in the same world? GitHub is not ruined at all,
| it still works great (as in it's completely usable), it's still
| where 99% of open source projects are hosted, and it's still a
| no brainer to use it for public or private repos (having used
| Gitlab extensively, GitHub is just so much more user friendly).
| There is more competition, which is good, but GitHub is still
| the default option for open source by a long margin
| hoherd wrote:
| I think maybe we're not living in the same world.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131406 "Zig quits
| GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487584 "GitHub appears
| to be struggling with measly three nines availability"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037365 "The GitHub
| website is slow on Safari"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 "Why is GitHub
| UI getting slower?"
|
| GH notification search doesn't search the title or
| description of the notifications.
| https://docs.github.com/en/subscriptions-and-
| notifications/r...
|
| GH cannot search code that exists in non-default branches.
| Have fun responding to the next supply chain compromise in
| any org that has repos with multiple supported branches.
| thiht wrote:
| So some people say it feels slower, there's been some
| incidents recently, you're missing a few features and Zig
| moved out, that's it? Wow, ruined, completely unusable, I
| have no idea how I've been working 8 hours a day using
| Github in these conditions.
| paulhebert wrote:
| Ruined may be a strong word but it is much less usable
| than it was previously. Frequent outages, lots of weird
| bugs.
|
| It no longer feels like a polished product.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Based on Microsoft's past behavior, I foresee many companies
| outright banning developers from using GitHub. Especially now
| with multiple agents reading/writing against GitHub. It just
| takes one "bug" for Microsoft to ignore all privacy options
| and contracts it has signed, and instantaneously ingest every
| piece of code and intellectual property into its AI model.
| andruby wrote:
| Ah, I think this is due to human nature. People came in and
| wanted to "do" something with GitHub. To give it their stamp,
| to help boost their career/ego.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| This is how these kinds of companies operate; push the limit
| until customers start complaining, then you back off a little
| bit. They've still advanced to that line, of course, but now the
| userbase can be conditioned for the next push so that "a little
| bit worse than before" feels normal.
| dgxyz wrote:
| If a company backtracks on this it still has ethical issues. It
| didn't just get away with it this time.
|
| You owe it to yourself and others to stay the fuck away from
| them.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| The referenced discussion:
|
| _Copilot edited an ad into my PR_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269
| spixy wrote:
| "Updated: Microsoft has done a 180. Following backlash from
| developers, GitHub has removed Copilot's ability to stick ads -
| what it calls "tips" - into any pull request that invokes its
| name."
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