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Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service (www.theregister.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 128 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

The original blog post is rather frank and to the point. Wish the engineering leadership I worked with communicated this well.

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  • [–] 23 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    In the end, we opted for a simple strategy, sidestepping GitHub’s aggressive vendor lock-in: leave the existing issues open and unmigrated, but start counting issues at 30000 on Codeberg so that all issue numbers remain unambiguous. Let us please consider the GitHub issues that remain open as metaphorically “copy-on-write”.

    Do you know anything about the referenced vendor lock-in?

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  • [–] 34 points 11 months ago* (3 children)

    Basically all the stuff that is build by GitHub and not part of git. Like the pull request discussion boards that is not stored in the git repository. They can’t transfer that out of GitHub to another git host.

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    • [–] 310 points 11 months ago (30 children)

    Microsoft has gone all-in on AI to the detriment of basically every other aspect of their business. They are in deep deep shit when the bubble finally pops.

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  • [–] 79 points 11 months ago* (9 children)

    dont worry govt bailouts with public money will come in. Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

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  • [+] -19 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    It’s not socialism, it’s welfare.

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  • [–] 39 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    only if you consider companies as people.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I’m not agreeing with it but if it were socialism we would at least have public ownership of the bailed out company. Any bailout would just be corporate welfare with little return

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    That's the same with socialism, though.

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Azure might keep them afloat but everything else will likely crumble and they'll have to downsize to mostly just being a cloud provider.

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  • [–] 118 points 11 months ago (11 children)

    And I am so ready for the bubble to burst.

    15% of the total United States GDP is a single company. I struggle to comprehend the scale of that, but one thing is for certain; it's going to bite us in the ass eventually.

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  • [–] 128 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    15% of the total United States GDP is a single company

    no, it is not. you struggle to comprehend it because it is not true.

    it is comparing different things. one is a valuation, the other is the value of goods and services over a year. the comparision would be with yearly revenue of a company

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  • [–] 31 points 11 months ago

    The stat that's going around at the moment is that 30% if the GDP is transactions between the "Magnificent 7". That one is fair because it's economic activity.

    The underlying economy is in recession with the AI frosting on top pushing it to break even levels.

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  • [–] 22 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Stock valuation of a company is not calculated int the GDP. Only domestic revenue is. There is no company that makes trillions in revenue.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    True, but Nvidia's market cap is still equal to 15 percent of 30.486 trillion. What's worse is that it's ALL built on speculation.

    This house of cards WILL fall.

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  • [–] 14 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Nvidia is less speculation that the other companies mixed up in this. They at least sell physical goods which they've been shipping.

    Microsoft, Google, X, Meta - Oh boy!

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  • [–] 25 points 11 months ago*

    They haven't. Part of the reason the bubble is so bad is that NVIDIA has been giving credit incentives to openai and other llm companies. Essentially giving them money so they use it to buy NVIDIA chips, so they can claim higher sales numbers. But there's no revenue. The AI bubble is 4 or 5 companies shuffling money to each other to inflate numbers so investors inject more money.

    The only ones making bank are CEOs when they take their bonuses and cash outs. The companies themselves are bleeding. OpenAI needs something like $700 billion dollars more to survive until 2030. LLMs simply don't make any money. Any savings from ai use has been from layoffs. It will all eventually crash out when it is obvious that AI use ultimately hurts revenue, no matter how much it saves in production.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    It's not one company, but the top 5 companies make up 40% of South Korea's economy, with the top 30 76.9% of their GDP. It's scary to imagine the power they wield over the peoples lives.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago*

    Power over their lives? Nonsense, the people of Samsungouth Korea are completely free to use iPhones instead of Samsung phones if they want! They can also leave their Samsung apartments to work at the Samsung office, built by the Samsung construction company using Samsung heavy machinery, any time they want! If they were to get injured on the way, they'll get treated at Samsung Medical Center and not to worry, of course their Samsung insurance will cover it.

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    • [–] 71 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Codeberg doesn't need billions of users... Just the right ones.

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    • [–] 47 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Move ZIG for great justice!

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    • [–] 43 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    ...take off every zig

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    • [–] 39 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Keep joining Codeberg!

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    • [–] 69 points 11 months ago (10 children)

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  • [–] 52 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/286/

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  • [+] 17 points 11 months ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    SWF vector animations are incredibly resilient, actually. I can still pull my saved SWF memes, and run them through Ruffle at modern resolution, or Swivel to get 60 fps 4K lossless MP4 versions, or bigger. Kind of cool.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago

    And you can still uncompile them. I even discovered some credits and commentaries written in a hidden area of "Zero Wing Rhapsody" (speaking of Aybabtu) put here by the creator. Felt like geeky archeology.

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    • [–] 98 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    GitHub, more like QuitHub, amirite?

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    • [–] 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Xbox. Lol. Microsoft has the Mierda touch.

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    • [–] 18 points 11 months ago (23 children)

    Love Codeberg. Just wish there would also be HackerHill, BytePeak and SoftwareSummit with federation!

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago* (22 children)

    I love that Codeberg exists, but there's one thing I kinda dislike.

    I'd like to use the same forge for my private projects (hey, a couple of them may make money one day! I gotta eat too) as I do for open source stuff, but Codeberg is explicitly open source only.

    It's a minor thing, really. Which I could get past by using another Forgejo instance, like Codefloe. But these smaller instances, how long will they be around?

    I suppose just running my own git server, with or without a forge attached to it, for private projects, is the only real solution. But then I have even more things to self-host lol

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  • [+] -7 points 11 months ago (21 children)

    I see this as a feature not bug, and tbh kinda resent those who hoard information and try to extract wealth from it. Extremely rude to the giants whose shoulders your work is built on. I'm the person who's going to crack and redistribute your shit as soon as you publish it, nice to meet you :)

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago* (20 children)

    I’m the person who’s going to crack and redistribute your shit as soon as you publish it, nice to meet you :)

    Out of curiosity, how do you crack and redistribute backend code as soon as a service is published?

    Client-side code is usually Javascript for everything made in the last 10 years anyway, it doesn't need a lot of cracking lol, it's usually just minimized.

    Anyway, say I'm building something that has taken me years of working in a specific industry to even be able to understand the requirements, that's only useful for companies (NOT private individuals, though some companies may only have 1-2 employees, but many will have thousands). There's literally no way it would benefit a private individual because for the 10% of it that overlaps with things private individuals also do, there's already great open source solutions. What exactly is the problem with charging money for it, given that it's ONLY going to be used by for-profit companies who are themselves charging money for their services?

    Not really a project that would benefit normal people. You and I would have no use for it.

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  • [–] -2 points 11 months ago (19 children)

    That was somewhat facetious and self-aggrandizing, "cracking" something isn't always possible or necessary. If your service was unique/useful enough, I would contribute to reverse engineering enough of that backend to replicate its functionality. More likely I'd just refuse to use it and support open alternatives

    Unsolicited advice though, giving stuff away generates a huge amount of goodwill that can be way more useful and rewarding than revenue. Contributors instead of employees, love instead of money, place and purpose instead of points in your bank account. I'm not wealthy by any means, but I'm comfortable enough and haven't had to buy a laptop since high school

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (5 children)

    Sure. But thing is, there's software out there for which FOSS doesn't even make much sense.

    I'm talking things that are so niche, the total amount of potential users (not customers - that's a much smaller number) is in the hundreds of thousands, not even millions - most of whom have no say in what software they use, nor does it affect their pay checks.

    If I was building, say, accounting software that every company can use, that'd be different, because while still business focused, there'd be a lot more grass roots interest in it. But I'm talking about software where you have to sell it to a bunch of execs, along with support contracts and uptime guarantees, because their entire business is dependent on it functioning properly. I'm also talking about software for one niche of one industry in one country.

    The project isn't useful enough to you, an engineer, to reverse engineer the backend. Nor are there any open alternatives that work. It requires keeping up with regulations, including some that change every year. It's not that the software itself is super complex magic, it's that it stops being useful if not well-maintained.

    What I have considered, though, is making parts of it open source, and keeping only the "secret sauce" proprietary. The open source parts would be stuff that could be used to build similar software for other niches of the same target industry, whereas the super specific niche stuff and all the regulation compliance stuff (much of which is just for that one niche anyway - other niches have different regulations) would be proprietary. Essentially building a set of FOSS libraries, and a niche proprietary application that uses them to service a specific market. Again, good reason for using a forge where you can have both public and private projects - but of course I could just use CodeBerg for the open source and host the rest of it privately.

    I'm only building this in my spare time and fairly slowly because I have to do work that gets me paid though. I don't know if I'll ever have an MVP I could show investors or clients.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    What I have considered, though, is making parts of it open source, and keeping only the "secret sauce" proprietary. The open source parts would be stuff that could be used to build similar software for other niches of the same target industry, whereas the super specific niche stuff and all the regulation compliance stuff (much of which is just for that one niche anyway - other niches have different regulations) would be proprietary.

    This seems perfectly reasonable and I wish you the best of luck. Just don't expect anyone to provide the infrastructure for your proprietary secret sauce for free!

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Well, github would provide it for free. Their business model is that just hosting shit is free, but costing them actual server resources means you gotta pay 'em. And that's a sensible business model IMO, but unfortunately they're also owned by Microsoft, which I didn't even like 2 decades ago, let alone now that they're pushing AI.

    Guess what I'm hoping is for Github alternatives, potentially based on Forgejo, to adopt a similar business model (free storage, paid runners beyond a very limited free tier essentially), without the whole using everyone's code for AI training part.

    I also have no problem with a small recurring donation. But the ironic part here is that I wouldn't want to use a forge that's so small that it NEEDS the donations. I don't want it to disappear after a year.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Someone might spin that up, but it feels unlikely. Github was always kinda subsidized as a power play on MS's part, and now that it's well established enough they're squeezing it for ROI. An instance that doesn't need your donations still needs resources to perpetuate itself from somewhere, I'd personally rather depend on infrastructure that was transparent about that (whether paid or donation based) than be treated as the product

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Github was always kinda subsidized as a power play on MS’s part

    Github existed for like 10 years pre-microsoft. Though they did get an investment from Shitreessen Fuckwitz after a few years. Before that, they actually earned enough money on their own to keep the lights on.

    An instance that doesn’t need your donations still needs resources to perpetuate itself from somewhere

    I meant more that I'm willing to use an instance after it already has enough recurring donations OR paid users to sustain itself. Because at that point they don't need to treat you as a product to save their own asses, nor are they likely to go bankrupt. So I meant the ironic part is that I'm willing to pay, but for an instance that's doing well enough that it doesn't desperately need my money to keep the lights on.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    I guess I'm just a little more pessimistic at this point, don't actually know the specifics of their financials but assumed github had been operating at a loss the whole time. That's pretty typical for startup stuff in general and especially so for "free" services, if it seems too good to be true it probably is type thing. I see forgejo's transparency and ideological commitment to open source as a defense against that type of behaviour cropping up in the future, hence "feature not bug". Like you said, it'd be trivial to host your private repositories elsewhere or for someone to spin up their own paid instance for commercial use. I'd be a little suspicious of what was keeping the lights on if someone directly replicated github's model because, well... look how it's going!

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (12 children)

    You:

    That was somewhat facetious and self-aggrandizing

    Also you:

    I’m the person who’s going to crack and redistribute your shit as soon as you publish it, nice to meet you :)

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (11 children)

    My brother in christ that's the exact line I was referring to, what else in the wide world of reading comprehension do you think I was talking about?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (10 children)

    Sounded to me like you were firing off at someone for having a private personal project by claiming that you would personally intervene to prevent them making any money from their code, then later you told them that they were being self aggrandizing. That's how it comes across.

    You doubled down on your threat with detail, which doesn't give readers the context to be able to deduce that you meant to be in the slightest bit self aware or apologetic, so without re-quoting yourself, it came across as hypocritical.

    Maybe "sorry, that was somewhat facetious and self-aggrandizing of me" and then not doubling down might have come across better. That's what I think, anyway.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (9 children)

    Pretty sure I was having a normal conversation with someone and you splashed in to call me out for something without a whole lot of thought. There's no "threat", none of this is that serious, I wish you peace and introspection

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (8 children)

    Well I'm petty sure you were coming across as obnoxious and the vote count seems to agree.

    If most people are interpreting the things you said earlier in the thread negatively, maybe the cause is in the writer than the reader.

    Maybe have another look and see if you mightn't have written a bit of a sourpost originally, and reconsider your tone next time if you genuinely mean no harm.

    Some of us need to earn a living from coding, and I don't like the idea that you would rather destroy the earning potential of a one-person team than compromise your politics at all even a little bit.

    Turn your hatred on the exploitative multinational corporations, not the little guy trying to earn a living from his code.

    There's principles, and there's actual people, and the people are far, far more important. Don't be so quick to condemn the little guy for wanting a bit of cash while Besos and the like screw us both over on the daily with billions in their pockets.

    People aren't corporations, and confusing those is partly how America got so extreme in its capitalism.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (7 children)

    "petty sure" is right, try another round of edits if you really can't find anything better to do. The day I start to care how many internet points I'm getting hopefully there's a friend nearby to log me off. Need to quit engaging with you before I do work up some "hatred" to turn on someone. Zero beef with the guy I was actually talking to, but you kinda suck

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

    try another round of edits

    The edits are because I mistype stuff or realise that it doesn't say what I intended when I read through it, or I left something out. Today suggests to me that you might benefit from trying that occasionally. It clearly doesn't suggest it to you, I see.

    The day I start to care how many internet points I’m getting

    Dude, the points are evidence that your comment came across badly, no more. Something you could learn from, but it's increasingly clear you would do or say anything rather than back down. I'm guessing you see apology as weak and admitting your mistakes as defeat or some other fucked up macho fake alpha fragile masculinity bullshit like that.

    before I do work up some “hatred” to turn on someone

    Oh no! I'm so scared!

    Wait, you still think you were being nice or polite or something already? Wow.

    you kinda suck

    Whereas you're all sweetness and light. Gotcha.

    Need to quit engaging with you

    Feel free. I shan't miss you a great deal.

    You could go back to interacting with those friends you were telling me about. Presumably ones that don't mind you saying you'll sabotage their income stream because they didn't live up to your principles.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (5 children)

    "all a pissing contest gets you is covered in piss"

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (4 children)

    You're right and I should stop being so rude to you. You're so wise. I respect you as the source of this viewpoint so very much because you live it out in such an exemplary fashion.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)

    "you find what you look for"

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