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

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

I think you will find 'enshitification' is the term you are looking for.

Just watch interview with Bill Gates about Epstein. That's sort of vibe is in the Microsoft's veins.

Re: “Fight the system!”

I leave my stuff up too - it is still free hosting. I do not use the web UI - I do all my stuff locally and push over SSH. I would be entertained to see any of my code "appropriated", as it is so tightly welded to the problem domain it would be ludicrous in any other context. I do not believe it is possible for even a skilled programmer to reverse engineer the intent of the code without intimate problem domain knowledge, but I bet a1 would have a go anyway ;)

Re: So walk away

> If your restaurant insists on serving you food you do not want, why keep eating there? Go elsewhere.

Because it's the company cafeteria and they won't let you leave the grounds of the plant for lunch?

Re: So walk away

I am in the process of migrating our company to GitHub as we speak. Developers ask for it. It is not because of CoPilot, it is because of the massive amount of tools (desktop and SaaS) that have a deep integration with GitHub. Bitbucket does not event get close.

Re: So walk away

Flawed analogy; as others have mentioned elsewhere, services like GitHub benefit from the inertia associated with the network effect in a way that doesn't really apply to restaurants.

Re: vscodium

... user control over "telemetry" (not "notifications")

Re: vscodium

Thanks for the heads up on VSCodium. It seems that even on Linux VSCode sends telemetry, so VSCodium is the way forward.

Re: vscodium

VSCodium is quite nice on Linux (apart from the crash caused in an Electon apps, when dragging tabs in Wayland)

Gitlab is also a fantastic alternative to Github. You can self host too.

Re: vscodium

Bad luck if you are in a .NET shop - using the .NET plugin outside of the official VS Code is in violation of the license agreement.

Re: I'm not in any way a developer...

I did the rights thing as well when they crammed the AI thing down my pc. Updates found a way around it.

Then I put junk in the DLL and then removes all rights including system. Next update borked the system.

I guess if you don’t play by their rules, you don’t play.

Re: I'm not in any way a developer...

In the context of Github - there's nothing local to block, it's basically running as SaaS within Github itself.

You _could_ perhaps get somewhere with custom tampermonkey scripts and adblock rules, but it'd quickly become a game of whack-a-mole.

The best solution, really is to move elsewhere - the challenge is finding somewhere to go:

* Gitlab have their own AI aspirations

* Codeberg is great, but still very small and not really scaled to take a huge chunk of Github's business

* Self hosted is fine, as long as you don't want outside contributions

The thing that made Github great (and will likely keep it going for a while) was the network effect - most developers have a Github account and so can contribute fixes on a whim. Gitlab's SaaS service _could_ achieve that, assuming they don't screw their own product (and I wouldn't bet on it - they *do* annoy users from time to time with weird UI changes)

Re: Digital democracy - a different take.

Capitalist enterprises are not democratic.

We are a long way from AGI and prices are already going up, future gains require magnitude increases, good on Elon with going for the "biggest" data centre in the world idea, this big picture plan is easy for investors to understand and what is needed next.

But that process needs to be repeated a few times to see if AGI is possible, we need to see abundant cheap energy first. At the moment it seems like humans will expend the energy (and plannetry resources) on trying to get to AGI in the hope it will provide the "answer" (on how to achieve abundant energy to keep it going).

I hope it turns around and says, that is not possible Dave.

Because if it turns around and says it is possible, humans might be the logs on the fire to keep the AGI alive.

Why can't we all sit back and work with the natural population reduction that is occuring.

Ah yes, greed by the few that has become a religion of the many

Re: Digital democracy - a different take.

How is it democratic for a few people in a few companies to act against the wishes of the majority (as in over 50%) of their customers and users ?

In a free market, those disaffected customers can go elsewhere. MS know this, so they have a softly, softly, boil the frog approach to things.

Back in the day (and I'm thinking 3 or 4 decades ago, MS did some good stuff - and they progressed largely through building better mousetraps at decent prices. One they had a foothold, they started down the dirty tricks road. Windows as a server was a so-so server and had competition, but Windows on the desktop was popular because it was better than what it replaced (from the user perspective - back in the day we used to joke that Windows was some 32 bit extensions to a 16 bit GUI, running on an 8 bit operating system, running on a 4 bit processor, and written by a 2 bit company.) Because they managed to get a fairly commanding position on the desktop, they started tweaking it so it deliberately didn't work well with anything but Windows as a server - and customers went with the short term convenience of abandoning the alternatives until only MS offered practical server options. Having cemented this position, they then did the reverse and made Windows as a server lot work well with anything but Windows on the desktop, thus "persuading" holdouts to switch to Windows for their desktops. And they did tricks like offering their own office software (Word, Excel, and so on - which started out being adopted because they were better than the alternatives) private APIs which competing software couldn't use. They've been found guilty multiple times in courts of dirty tricks but no court ever imposed any meaningful measures. And so they've got to where they are today effectively owning the whole stack because for years they were able to offer users short term convenience and take the long term to gently nudge them down the lock-in route.

From what I read, it looks like they've done the same thing with GitHub - offered short term convenience (and I assume, financially "free") to enticed people in, and nudge by nudge made it slightly more work to use something else. Each little nudge may be barely noticeable, just like the frog not noticing that the water is getting hotter. And then suddenly, someone looks up and finds the gate has closed behind them and they now have to scale a wall to escape the walled garden - it seems this enforced use of CoPilot has been the trigger for people to look up and realise they now have more work to do if they want to escape, probably more work than if they hadn't let themselves be nudged into the garden in the first place.

Re: Considering abandoning it.

Just wait until they put Copilot in Systems... I'm only half joking.

Re: Gitlab...

I worked for several years with GitLab. Heavy, expensive, very little integration with as many SaaS tools as GitHub does.

Re: If you still use Github then...

Vote Doctor Doom!

(yes, that is an incredibly obscure reference. you had me at "you know it makes sense".)