I'm looking out in the street. I see a lack of torches, pitchforks, or any pressure on corporate interests.

Copilot is shit.

Exactly, my company provides license for copilot and I use it, and while it has some highlights most of the time it actually is more a nuisance than help.

It especially annoys me because it hijacks autocomplete based on types with is own that frequently has subtle bugs, so now if I have it enabled I need to be on guard all the time. With the traditional autocomplete I could just trust it to be correct.

Copilot is shit

Yes and no. I find its terrible at solving more complex problems but its great at writing out tests for a function/view that covers every flow. My team went from having like 40% (shit) coverage to every PR having every case tested (inb4 they're not good tests, they are good)

With that being said, fuck CEOs and fuck AI. At least you could (mostly) escape the blockchain hype

Codeberg is so nice.

But who else is going to micromanage and bully the employees and strut around self-importantly doing jack shit? /s

Codeberg rules

They think they can hire less SWE because of it. Though from my experience all benefits it gives are neutralized by mistakes or does. I have to pay more attention to what it produces to find bugs (and they are subtle, and even then successfully sneak them).

I also frequently notice that I actually can produce more concise code for my user case.

And it is plagiarizing (Microsoft apparently provides some legal protection against a lawsuit, but I don’t know if that is for everyone).

A while ago I found a bit less popular code and it came with library. I didn’t like their implementation so I started writing my own and copilot basically was suggesting the code from the library I tried to rewrite.

Broke: selfhost Forgejo (what Codeberg runs on, for those who don’t know) because nobody looks at my code anyway
Woke: access my Git repo directly through SSH because I don’t need any other feature anyway

bubble boys

I love that. Gonna steal it.

This is genuinely such a good analogy

Let me microwave your steak with a fork in it. Please watch closely as it operates.

chef’s kiss

A CEO’s main job is to spout bullshit, which is also AI’s particular talent.

I am convinced AI could replace CEO’s very easily. Making decisions based on trends and lots of data is an easy use case. And if it’s the wrong decision who cares? CEO’s also don’t take and responsibility at all. AI is also a very good lair too.

I just wrote elsewhere in this thread but to repeat myself: I think the real job of a CEO is to schmooze with other CEOs and rich idiots. They get funding. Everything else is pretty much a liability, and would be better handled by someone with relevant expertise.

A magic 8 ball would be a better CEO. LLMs could probably pull it off fine.

Don’t get me wrong, AI has its uses, but their whole “solution for everything” mentality

They are trying to somehow undo or redo personal computers.

To create a non-transparent tool that replaces the need (and thus social possibility) to have a universal machine.

The difference between thinking robots and computers as we have them is that thinking robots take some place in the social hierarchy, and computers help everyone who has a computer and uses it.

Science fiction usually portrayed artificial humans, not computers, before actually, ahem, seeing the world as it turned out.

It’s sort of a social power revolt against intellectual power (well, some kind of it).

Like a tantrum. People who don’t like how it really happened still want their deus ex machina, an obedient slave at that, that can take responsibility at that. Their 50 years long shock has receded and they now think they are about to turn this defeat into victory.

only making it bigger and last longer which will only make it worse when it does actually pop

I think that’s deliberate. There are a few companies which will feel very well when the bubble pops, having the actual audience as their main capital, while their capitalization and technologies are secondary. The rest are just blindly led by short-term profits.

Also note that it’s for open source projects only.

I agree with you 100% but theres also a small strange humour in the wordage of paying for freedom.

Same, i need to find a new place as I use it as basically a free HTML blog and tracker for my table top games.

Codeberg apparently

gitlab

You missed ‘secure’ out of that list. Vibe coding is tantamount to communism, the way that everyone who uses it ends up publicly owned.

They literally don’t do anything other than have meetings and injest executive level reports.

CEOs are unironically the prime candidates for replacing employees with AI, from a direct cost to employ the employee perspective.

I don’t give LLM AIs much credit, but they are more intelligent than the average CEO.

Also, LLM AIs, when well-manicured… are generally better at corpospeak and not having massive ego trips than most CEOs.

Probably less likely to intentionally commit crimes as well.

The problem is the inter-connection to see everything a single person does and their stats. There should be the possibility for a new (decentralized) system in which you can authenticate all your known repositories, no matter whether they’re on GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, self-hosted Gitea or something entirely different. And there you could have links to all your activity and a graph without being bound to any single service.

Github Copilot is so god awful. you’d think having access to millions of repos the thing could actually learn something.

The future is now. The future is also ten, twenty and thirty years ago! According to GitHub’s Chief Executive Idiot himself:

the skills that will matter most include system design, AI fluency, delegation, and quality assurance

Except for “AI fluency”, this has been true for fucking ever. No serious work environment evaluates their developers on how quickly they can vomit code (or so I hope): the job is indeed about design, quality and working as a team in general.
Which means a tool that does not help with any of these is already not a revolution. When the tool actively makes quality worse and collaboration more complicated, I get the impression it is actually detrimental.

Mind you, I might be dead wrong. I am personally not impressed so far. It seems to be a better autocomplete, but I don’t want to throw a glass of water out the window every time I press tab.

Honestly,I just picked the 10 most used ones, mirrored them for a while, and called it a day. I believe there is processes out there but you may run into Github API restrictions if you do it all at the same time (and/or without a specific token).

www.rahuljuliato.com/posts/github_to_codeberg has some instructions on how to do a bulk migration using LionyxML’s script. codeberg.org/LionyxML/migrate-github-to-codeberg

i urge people do do this but also donate to them too <3

Some CEO: gasp GUYS I found a new blacklisted word! Quick add non-profit to the Ai-Moderation. How dare they not pay me infinitely!

Yes. Microsoft owns them and tells them what their goals are, but the CEO has sole flexibility.

Studies show AI coding tools make the task slower. It only makes people feel they’re faster, but reality is different. So it’s the snake oil pitch. Nobody can know it doesn’t really work and they keep throwing money at it in an increasingly more desperate “fake it till you make it”. Because, if this thing implodes, it’ll take a large part of the market and economy with it to do a rerun of the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s because we’re expensive. That’s the long and short of it.

10 developers in Silicon Valley can run you $1-$2m in salary alone (it’s more expensive with benefits added).

The industry constantly conspires to keep the salary of software engineers down. It does it cyclically too. In 2008 I was told I would have no problem getting a 6 figure job when I graduated by 2013. Of course the economy had other ideas. Same thing with the dot Com bubble.

I currently make double what I did 10 years ago. It doesn’t actually matter much as inflation and a divorce has had my costs balloon just as much, but it’s still loads more than any other job out there.

They’ll get what they want, one way or another. Then when none of their shit works they inevitably come back begging us and we request better pay and benefits again, because we know they do this. They don’t learn, much like those reliant on AI.

Dear intelligent people:

Fuck you

- DJT and the entirety of the Republican party

Ban AI. Completely.

That is really short sighted. We all know it is not AI. The marketing is such bullshit.

But we also know that predictive algorithms can be useful. For instance: digitizing a property line, or identifying features in a lidar cloud, or discovering anomalies in blood cells. Then there are prediction tests and what if scenarios.

Seems like this is the same argument people had about computers in general. Ban all computers they said. Who knows maybe this guy in 1968 was right all along. and computers are the problem.

Learn how to code. It’s pretty rewarding.

Only 0.43% of the population can write code.

Which doesn’t include you.

I will never lose the ability and my services will always be needed.

You are a highly, highly specialized, but also simultaneously low skilled worker who can only work with a very specific set of services, which are all paygated by vendors, who will immediately jack the fuck up out of their pricing as soon as they are able.

You are delusional.

Even in some hyper dystopia where all coding is outsourced to an AI, all you are is a prompt generator.

Do you think an AI that can write inefficient code… cannot write prompts?

You are a loon.

I’ve tried Copilot for a while and played around with Cursor for a bit. I was better and faster without Copilot due to sometimes not paying enough attention of the lines it would generate. This would cause subtle bugs that took a long time to debug. Cursor just produced unmaintainable code-bases that I had no knowledge of, and to make major changes, would be faster for me to just rewrite it from scratch. The act of typing gives me time to think more about what I’m doing or am going to do, while Copilot generations are distracting and break my thought processes. I work best with good LSP tooling and sometimes AI chatbots (mostly just for customized example snippets for libraries or frameworks I’m unfamiliar with; though that has its own problems because the LLMs knowledge is out of date a lot) that don’t directly modify my code.

And the vibe coder is also blissfully unaware of all the zero days he/she has also deployed along with his prompted autocomplete output of a program.

Great work! Very efficient!

I’m totally sure said program doesn’t also needlessly pull in a gigantic mess of additional libraries, just to use one or two functions from it, I’m sure this is a very compute and memory efficient program.

And I am totally sure this will all work great and be easily reconfigured to keep up with any changing requirements, because we all know software devs always get very concrete, stable, and well defined requirements to work with.

At some previous jobs, the newer devs would sometimes confuse the two. Its a real thing.

Me I lived through svn, mercerial, and file vault. So glad we ended up with git as the protocol.

Hell you can set up a git + file server and just use it without any Hub (Hob/lab/berg) if your bare metal enough. It works.

Sadly a lot of us are stuck with GitHub. Enterprise loves it because it has “Metrics”, and most companies aren’t about to jump ship over something like AI — especially when so many of them are already doubling down on AI in other areas.

I refuse to use, or touch, C#, as a matter of principle at this point.

Use Codium instead of VS Code. VS Code is fauxpen source.

Don’t forget they are committed to assisting Israel commit genocide in Gaza.

Is it, though? AI has been around to stay for 20 years. The difference really is that a bunch of tech bros are worshiping it while trade rags talk it up.

Same, but I still don’t find it particularly useful. It does help in the research phase and maybe bootstrapping, but not as much for regular development.

I use it where it makes sense, but it’s certainly over-hyped.

I’ll agree that it’s here to stay, but not so sure it’s going to obviously improve. I have had access to various LLMs and while they are useful, they are very obviously limited and have kind of been at that level for a while now. Feel like they’ve largely gotten as “capable” as the strategy is going to get, and now the game is on to make some things friendlier for LLM consumption to get that capability more usefully available.

At least in the context of coding.

If your job involves any analysis, you’re next. Once they work out the remaining robotic kinks, labor intensive jobs are cooked. You will not escape.

Selfhost what? Git? Git is version control software that you can use entirely locally. The only reason Github/Gitlab/etc exists is because people wanted a central repo to work from.

people are so apathetic these days that ceo’s feel comfortable publically saying this shit. They know there will be no major user loss.

Yes, this isn’t just about profits for these companies.

It’s about control. They want to prove that they own us, and they’re right more often than not because of useful idiots.

It’s almost exactly the same sales strategy as crypto and nft.

Which is how you know they have a good product that they have full faith in.

when they have to blackmail, threaten, coerce, and force people to accept their product.

“The Sky Is Falling! Buy My Magic Umbrella!” is a classic hypeman’s trick.

The code reviews will continue until morale improves.

For some odd reason, this calls to mind an emotionally immature parent trying to get their toddler to eat vegetables… no reason at all…

Threats work well for scams. People who couldn’t be bothered to move by promises of something new and better can be motivated by fear of losing what they already have.

It’s really unfortunate psychology is looked down upon and psychologists are viewed as some “soft” profession. Zuck is a psychology major. It’s been 2 decades, most of the radical changes in which were not radical in anything other than approach to human psychology.

BTW, I’ve learned recently that in their few initial years Khmer Rouge were not known as communist organization to even many of their members. Just an “organization”. Their rhetoric was agrarian (of course peasants are hard-working virtuous people, and from peasantry working the earth comes all the wisdom, and those corrupt and immoral people in the cities should be made work to eat), Buddhist (of course the monk-feudal system of obedience, work and ascese is the virtuous way to live, though of course we are having a rebirth now so we are even wiser), monarchist (they referred to Sihanouk’s authority almost to the end), anti-Vietnamese (that’s like Jewish for German Nazis, Vietnamese are the evil). And after them taking power for some time they still didn’t communicate anything communist. They didn’t even introduce their leadership. Nobody knew who makes the decisions in that “organization” or how it was structured. It didn’t have a face. They only officially made themselves visible as Democratic Kampuchea with communism and actual leaders when the Chinese pressured them. They didn’t need to, because they were obeyed via threat (and lots of fulfillment) of violence anyway.

This is important in the sense that when you have the power, you don’t need to officially tell the people over which you have it that you rule them.

So - in these 2 decades it has also came into fashion to deliberately stubbornly ignore the fact that psychology works over masses. And everybody acts as if when there’s no technical means to make people do something, then it’s not likely or possible.

Agreed. And he is very humble about it in interviews.

The Github CEO didn’t even “make” the big business. He was appointed by Microsoft after they purchased it and their first pick for CEO of Github resigned after 2 years.

Also remember that Torvalds invented Git and gave it away for free. The Corps are stealing the free software and leveraging it to force everyone to give them money instead.

Everyone is much more prosperous now than 50 years ago?

This makes me want it to fail harder.

Considering he’s a Microsoft employee and Microsoft is leaning hard into the AI craze? His stock options are all dependent on this lol

It’s the ultimate yes man.

It will be their undoing. AIs are primed to replace the most expensive jobs first. I guess, in a way, they are training their replacement.

My honest take, it’s a bubble. Everyone sees the (seemingly) impressive things people do with AI and ask “why can’t you do that?”

My guess?

anthropomorphism.

People are assigning thought and specifically intent to the replies that they get from ML and LLMs. They don’t realize that the model is essentially just an unchecked auto correct that uses the entirety of everything posted on the public Internet as it’s basis for what to reply to a prompt, the same way your phone tries to predict what word you want to say next based on what you’ve typed so far.

It’s just a lot bigger and more complex than the auto correct and word prediction that your phone has.

But that’s it. That’s all it does. It’s not thinking. It’s not intelligent. It has no intent. It cannot cognitively understand what it’s saying or doing.

Taking to “AI” is basically having the average of all Internet content as a basis for the reply. That means it’s going to make shit up, tell you to eat glue, and generally fuck around.

But most people seem to assign it human-like traits of reasoning and intent, when there isn’t any. CEOs included.

Especially when Microsoft said for employees AI is no longer optional.

AI also needs a lot of other shit to run even at a basic level. Networks, and systems… A dedicated nuclear power facility on three Mile Island.

AI can’t run without so many people plugging in the servers, and power, and installing the operating systems… The list of supporting characters is long.

What if we… Just… Stopped supporting the companies that were pushing AI?

I like the idea of it; yet you can’t host private repos. I don’t want to be locked in to GitHub but as someone starting their career it’s important to show that you’re working on stuff. Hence I worry that moving away from GitHub will negatively impact my interviewing prospects.

Part of the joke is who even constitutes “value investors”. As the MAG7 bloat the S&P, it’s increasingly just a handful of companies passing the same dollar back and forth as fast as possible, with the expectation that they’ll get bailed out by the Feds when the game is up.

Sad thing is, they’re probably right. Trump’s trying to get the Fed to loosen rates on the heels of an inflationary wave in order to guarantee enough exit liquidity before the market crashes.

Then we’ll get another brutal privatization wave, with conservatives preaching deficit hawkery in order to justify abolishing Medicare, SS, national parks, public education, anything that can be liquidated for a quick buck.

Doors that go like this | | not like this / \

But you forget how stupid venture capitalists have become.

Yeah but where ? What’s the ideal replacement for Github ?

it’s also sort of a description of his own role, innit?

No, they’re all super special and have an “instinct” that a robot could never have. Of course the same does not go for artists or anyone who does the actual work for these “titans of industry”.

*by “instinct” we, of course, mean survivorship bias based on what is essentially gambling, exploitation, and being too big to fail.

Error: Buffer overflow.

same as how it goes on the stock market? they don’t care about the long term, but only the short term. what happens on the long term is somebody else’s problem, you just have to squeeze out everything, and know when to exit.

they are gambling with our lives. but not with theirs. that’s (one of) the problem: they are not fearing their lives.

It’s like all those companies who fast tracked their way into profits by ignoring the catastrophic effects they were having on the environment… Down the road.

Later is someone else’s problem. Now is when AI-pushers want to make money.

I hate where things have been heading.

Yep, autotune rappers have been pushed for years, and I always suspected it’s to make the transition to AI music easier.

Ahh down votes in lieu of a substantive argument. Love it. If there wasn’t a thread to pull on in all that word salad that would unravel the tapestry do you think maybe there’s something to my take on this matter?

Anyway, don’t care, this isn’t Reddit so a downvote doesn’t mean shit, and you at least read some of my post. To quote a somewhat famous Doctor “Don’t you think she looks tired?”

Tell me you’ve never written a song without telling me you’ve never written a song…

Your point about music is a great analogy. Basically:

1. People play music and people enjoy listening to music.
2. Businessman inserts himself between the musician and the audience to “deliver the music”.
3. Businessman charges listeners huge money to deliver music, gives no money to musicians.
4. Businessman the decides to replace the musician with a robot (e.g. “AI”)
5. Businessman explodes market. Listeners leave. Businessman gets bailout from government.

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft is forcing AI on all the employees

They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.

Accurate description of most managers i’ve encountered.

They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.

AI make money line go up. It’s not clueless, he’s trying to sell a kind of snake oil (ok, not “snake oil”, I don’t think AI is entirely bad).

Because they make money selling you the AI. It’s that simple.

It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care

Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done?

Not just that… why do they have to threat and push for people to use a tool that allegedly is fantastic and makes everything better and faster?.. the answer is that it does not work but they need to pump the numbers to keep the bubble going

I think part of it is because they think they can train models off developers, then replace them with models. The other is that the company is heavily invested in coding LLMs and the tooling for them, so they are trying to hype them up.

Because unlike with the other tools you use the CEO of your company is investing millions of dollars into AI and they want a big return on their investment.

Because like AI, your CEO is a tool.

I’m finding AI effectively automates entry level jobs and interns. The long term implications is very few will be able to enter the field. What do we do when all the experienced engineers retire? How will we shift our economy to work for everyone under this model?

I keep hearing stuff like this, but I haven’t found a good use or workflow for AI (other than occasional chatbot sessions). Regular autocomplete is more accurate (no hallucinations) and faster than AI suggestions (especially accounting for needing to constantly review the suggestions for correctness). I guess stuff like Cursor is OK at making one-off tools on very small code-bases, but hits a brick-wall when the code base gets too big. Then you’re left with a bunch of unmaintainable code you’re not very familiar with and you would to spend a lot of time trying to fix yourself. Dunno if I’m doing something wrong or what.

I guess what I’m saying is that using AI can speed you up to a point while the project accumulates massive amounts of technical debt, and when you take into account all the refactoring and debugging time, it results in taking longer to produce a buggier project. At least, in my experience.

Unit testing and TDD are awesome; but if you can avoid it: Don’t write things in PHP (unless it’s for work).

i’m also looking forward for sourcehut.org