I think that just like it happened with Apple after they made it out of bankruptcy, Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
Xamarin is no more, after the whole MAUI rewrite without backwards compatibility to Xamarin.Forms, killing VS4Mac, shortly after having rewriten the underlying Xamarin based IDE into Mac, what survives is a subset of Xamarin tech for mobile and WebAssembly workloads.
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
A proper cross platform IDE experience requires getting Rider.
Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Github even with the previous CEO was already a delivery mechanism for Azure and AI efforts, now it will be full steam ahead, as per new org chart.
VC++ after betting other compilers in C++20 support, seems to have lost its resources struggling to deliver C++23, and also probably affected by the Secure Future Initiative, and decisions for safer languages.
But hey 4 trillion valuation, so from shareholders point of view, everything is going great.
meindnoch · 2h ago
Microsoft being the cool guys? The cool guys? Mwuhahahhaa.
This gave me the good belly laugh I needed.
For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
- being the no. 1 enemy of free software
- shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share
- making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite
- creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)
- making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The last time they might have been considered the "cool guys" was sometime in the 90s.
gmueckl · 2h ago
This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.
Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
rustystump · 2h ago
Idk i can think of a long list of awful stuff coming out of ms that is modern. They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.
I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
The only side of ms that i have any love for is xbox but that is also waning with all the studio acquisitions.
kokanee · 11m ago
Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind the scenes, presenting to consumers a tiny little sliver of this massive digital beast lurking under the hood. They're always 15 years ahead of policy, so they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more, on a scale that I don't think we even fully understand.
My ranking from most evil to least would be:
1. Google
2. Meta
3. Microsoft
4. Amazon
5. Apple
6. Netflix
johannes1234321 · 4m ago
Ranking evil is hard, but I'd rank Amazon's control of global supply chains as more evil than at least Meta. While Meta got WhatsApp, which is big. (Escaping Facebook, Instagram etc is a lot simpler)
wahnfrieden · 8m ago
Don't forget their military and surveillance contributions
xnyan · 1h ago
Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
pjerem · 1h ago
Apple barely does it and only for their products. I agree with you that that’s already too much and too annoying but that’s an order of magnitude less than Microsoft who advertise their products pretty aggressively AND ALSO are advertising for whoever gave them money too.
Ubuntu I didn’t use it for years, there are tons of other distributions that I prefer now but last time I checked, there was a removable default shortcut to amazon. That’s an awful symbol, if you ask me, to associate Ubuntu and its meaning to Amazon but it’s nothing when compared to Apple or Microsoft (dare I say Google) behaviors.
Wololooo · 1h ago
I have yet to see a single ad on either the menus on Ubuntu or in OSX. Care to elaborate on what you mean by that?
petepete · 1h ago
A few times over the years Ubuntu included Amazon ads in the OS. Each time, afaik, the community reacted angrily and it didn't last.
tw04 · 1h ago
> They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.
As did Ubuntu.
>I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
Huh? The same google caught tracking your every move even if you opted out? The Google that seems to serve ads based on your conversations if anyone in the room has an Android phone? The Google that actively tries to kill any and all ad blockers?
They aren’t even close…
rikafurude21 · 1h ago
Windows normalized having ads in the OS.
pseudosavant · 1h ago
Ads in the OS? That isn’t Microsoft’s idea, or even Apple’s (they have places they do it too). No, that was popularized by the mobile OS made by an ad company, Android.
free652 · 1h ago
Weirdly that I don't get any ads in Android.... My phone was made by the same ad company.
LtWorf · 58m ago
No? Try installing 1 app without seeing ads for 10 other useless apps.
free652 · 27m ago
Haven't installed an app in ages, but seeing an ad in a store isn't as bad as seeing an ad in my app launcher. And yes, windows puts ads in the start menu.
> Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
They are a business. You seem to misunderstand that businesses cannot behave like charities.
Being a business implies being for-profit.
Nobody said open source had to be free as in free beer, it just had to be free as in freedom.
It's their prerogative to make the plugins marketplace to alternative editors or not. Servers cost money. It's a business.
Does Matt Mullenweg has to let WPEngine sap server resources? Arguably not; and this opinion comes from a guy (me) that strongly dislikes WordPress (and by extension: Matt and Automattic).
yencabulator · 1h ago
I am responding to this:
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
yesbabyyes · 53m ago
Matt Mullenweg did nothing wrong
thiht · 22m ago
These are extensions. No one is preventing OSS communities from developing their own remote dev, Python, and C++ extensions. The VSCode extension API allows it. There are actually some efforts being made to do it.
sdenton4 · 17m ago
Ah, but coming hot on their heels are the embracions and extingushions!
yencabulator · 19m ago
You're moving the goalposts! I am responding to
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
rahkiin · 1h ago
VsCode is in a weird licensing limbo, or some of its microsoft plugins are anyway
thiht · 20m ago
No, it’s pretty clear. Some extensions are NOT open source. It’s not ambiguous, and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as these extensions don’t have superpowers (ie. access to unexposed VSCode APIs)
ivanmontillam · 2h ago
These are the kind of claims that make some Linux users tiresome to talk to. (Full disclosure: I am also a Linux user).
I'm not defending Microsoft, they are not necessarily my cup of tea, but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
Feel free to express your opinions, but don't be hateful!
dingnuts · 2h ago
The grandparent was also wryly highlighting the crevasse between post-Nadella Microsoft's PR, which you seem to believe, and their actions.
Despite "MS <3s Open Source" they never changed, you're just referencing a very successful era of marketing.
And poor Linux users are out here catching strays. Very "don't you say that about the $1T company!!!" of you to defend them, "fellow Linux user" (also very hi fellow kids..)
gmueckl · 2h ago
Then you surely have a laundry list of examples from the last 10 years where MS showed the same anticompetitive nature that they had in the 90s.
yencabulator · 1h ago
Yes, people keep bringing up VSCode all the time, but fanboys are gonna fanboy.
ivanmontillam · 2h ago
I try not to drink the Kool-Aid either on Microsoft's side (again, they are not necessarily my cup of tea), but the prevalence of the people with the "Hey! Remember that Steve Ballmer called Linux a cancer? Micro$$$hit!!" attitude sucks my energy dry.
well, gosh, I feel sorry for those American Linux developers of that time. I guess they were unAmerican, according to Allchin. if they were of this time, i guess they would have been deported by ICE.
Linus Torvalds might be a U.S. citizen today, but during the first years of Linux he was certainly not thinking U.S. values and that someday his biggest userbase would be there.
> Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-American:
Yeah, typical Ballmer-era.
Arch-TK · 2h ago
Microsoft continues to produce absolute garbage (except now it's also adware) and continues to utilise aggressive tactics to gain market share.
They deserve plenty of hate.
ivanmontillam · 1h ago
I can agree anti-consumer behaviour is still ingrained in parts of Microsoft, as a dormant beast waiting to be Ballmer-ized for a new round.
But again, why the baseless argument based on hate?
You can (for example) de-bloat Windows 11 out from the telemetry and annoying widgets nobody uses, including the invasive Copilot.
After de-bloating, it's a decent OS on its own.
I should have the right to have a clean Windows out-of-the-box, but de-bloating is still a viable path.
prinny_ · 1h ago
The thought that I would have to go through the trouble of reading some git repo to run a script that will debloat my OS, no matter how easy or straightforward might be, makes me feel tired. I don't want to fight my OS, I want it to work with me. Between searching and learning stuff for my job and searching and learning stuff for my personal development or hobbies, investing time in tinkering windows of all things doesn't exactly feel me with excitement. I would rather switch to Mac or invest time tinkering a linux distribution that actually respects me.
pjerem · 1h ago
> You can (for example) de-bloat Windows 11 out from the telemetry and annoying widgets nobody uses, including the invasive Copilot.
> After de-bloating, it's a decent OS on its own.
Sure you can. I, as a tech savvy person, can debloat Windows 11. If I dare to do it. If I know I can do it. If I search for information on the internet on how to do it. If I know how to search and follow those instructions. If I follow all the steps (and hope my tutorial covers everything). If Microsoft doesn’t push an update to bloat it again.
And with that, well I still don’t know how to install it without a Microsoft account. It’s so incredibly user hostile that even the insufferable Apple Walled Garden don’t force you into all of this shit.
pxc · 42m ago
Not really. You can't fully remove large parts of the bloat without breaking Windows Update, and true removal of some features is invasive enough that it has to be done offline.
When you actually look at those de-bloating scripts or techniques in detail, it's clear that they only barely address the issues with Windows, and they're always chasing a moving target of anti-user bullshit.
Also, I am not a VSCode user or would-be VSCodium user.
I am happily married to JetBrains IDEs. Thanks.
I don't need Electron nor WebView2 bloat on my nice, beautiful ThinkPad.
yencabulator · 1h ago
You literally said
> these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
in response to parent's
> - creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)
and VSCode is a perfect example of that happening right now.
jedberg · 2h ago
> making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased
Their keyboards were arguably the best ones around. I'm literally typing this on a 20 year old MS keyboard right now.
pyrale · 5m ago
I'll disagree loudly with my IBM keyboards (my old model M as well as the thinkpads I've used).
p1necone · 1h ago
Likewise the Intellimouse Pro is my favourite mouse. Sadly they seem to have discontinued it in favor of the Surface mouse which has atrocious ergonomics.
jedberg · 1h ago
They also discontinued the ergo keyboard that I am using to type this. I'm very worried that when this keyboard goes out I won't have another option.
There is a clone on the market, which I use at home, that so far has been pretty promising, but we'll see if it has they lasting power that this one does.
ndiddy · 1h ago
Kinesis makes a keyboard that's basically the Microsoft ergo layout but mechanical and you can remap the keys. I have one and like it. https://kinesis-ergo.com/keyboards/mwave/
wahnfrieden · 7m ago
Glove80 is a lot nicer in several ways if you're ok with the Chocs
Melatonic · 2h ago
Zune was actually kinda nice - although I agree nobody bought it!
rideontime · 2h ago
The same was reportedly true of Windows Phone 7. "Cringe hardware" seems to simply mean hardware that was good, but couldn't gain market share.
jameshart · 1h ago
> making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The 25 year window you picked actually coincides almost exactly with the time since the original X-Box was launched. Seems an odd omission from the list of hardware MS released in that time period.
Also the IntelliMouse Explorer was released in late 1999, which nobody who has ever had to clean the gunk off a mouseball roller would describe as ‘cringe’.
hinkley · 2h ago
30 years, not 25. A lot of early contributions to Linux basically came with a "PS: Fuck Microsoft" at the bottom.
mv4 · 2h ago
While I mostly agree with your assessment, I feel like the Xbox is pretty cool.
meindnoch · 2h ago
At this point it's an open secret that there won't be another Xbox. So yeah, they made something cool, and managed to fumble it.
djhn · 1h ago
How come? Any TL;DR? Not a gamer, so I’m not up to date on consoles.
jorvi · 1h ago
Nothing of the sort has been leaked or said by Microsoft.
However, their strategy seems to be going all-in on Gamepass. And if you subscribe to Gamepass, Microsoft does not care if you play on your Steam Deck, iPad or Xbox.
This is also why they mentioned they might open up the Xbox to other stores (Steam), and why they have been releasing first party titles onto the PS5[0].
If you couple that info with them axing their own handheld and instead licensing out the Xbox name to Asus with the ROG Ally Xbox, it isn't a huge leap to assume they'll just license out the Xbox name to whichever OEM feels like making a console. The Xbox One and Series X / S already run the Windows Core kernel which would make going more wide on the hardware support quite easy, and the current hardware is semi off-the-shelf stuff from AMD anyway.
Basically, PS5 sales recently reached 80 million. Xbox Series X/S is estimated about 30 million. They lost the generation where digital libraries were built and can't gain the market back.
There's been a lot of rumor lately that Xbox becomes a shell on top of Windows and just runs regular Windows games. The announcement of the Xbox ROG Ally using this same approach gives it a lot of weight.
rideontime · 2h ago
ActiveX plugins? MSJVM? Last 25 years? You might need to update your script.
high_na_euv · 1h ago
>For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
That was 10 years ago
Tyce3312 · 55m ago
Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
dylan604 · 1h ago
> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The Surface looks cool to me, but since it runs Windows, I will never use it. Does it only look cool, or is actually a cool device?
deaddodo · 1h ago
Linux runs perfectly fine on most of the Surfaces:
There's the usual asterisk here or there, as with most laptops; but, outside of some golden devices, it's about on par with most.
dylan604 · 1h ago
Great, but I'm not looking to run Linux either.
You've completely answered by not answering the actual question though. Is it actually a cool device?
deaddodo · 1h ago
You specifically stated "since it runs Windows, I will never use it" and I addressed that point. If your qualifier is "runs MacOS/iOS", then your following question is moot for every non-Apple device.
Either way, no one can answer your subjective opinion-based query. Go test it out at the dozens of kiosks in any city in a Western nation (or, barring that, watch a youtube video) and judge for yourself.
dylan604 · 1h ago
Clearly, you are not someone that can provide their opinion on the device otherwise you would have. Thanks for playing.
I don't care what OS the device is using for someone else to use. I just want to know if the device is a decent device made by Microsoft, or if the original claim that they make crap devices also applies to the Surface. I provided the explanation why I don't have personal knowledge on if it is cool or not while asking others to provide feedback.
eastbound · 2h ago
Microsoft is also LinkedIn, GitHub, Typescript, NPM (NPM! Where do you host your dependencies?), games and OpenAI.
I love how each sector they’re invested in is a practical monopoly.
meindnoch · 2h ago
>LinkedIn, [...] NPM [...] and OpenAI
Your honor, I rest my case!
Tyce3312 · 56m ago
I agree with you
sixothree · 2h ago
I don't know where you've been the last decade, but it's clear they have been perceived this way. Him describing that perception only to be ridiculed by you is a pretty low blow.
jrepinc · 2h ago
And today they are even complicit in genocide and avid supporters of fascist USA dictator Trump, can hardly get less cool then that
scarface_74 · 1h ago
As is half the US who voted for him…
hdgvhicv · 12m ago
And every large company, whether they want to or not, because if they don’t bend the knee…
bee_rider · 4h ago
Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies. Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made noises that seemed not awful.
In terms of coolness, Microsoft peaked right around the time they were hiring the cast of Friends to promote their OS.
sho_hn · 4h ago
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Wait, do they?
I mostly remember:
- A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
- Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch everyone described it as
- Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc.
- Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on Liquid Glass
It's the laptop to get for compute/battery, which definitely is not nothing, but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
eadmund · 3h ago
You forgot things like shipping decades-old free software with their OS because Apple are so implacably opposed to their users having freedom to use, examine, modify and share that software.
junon · 2h ago
SIP is the obvious contra, though.
nobleach · 2h ago
If that's what you "mostly" remember, your memory is awfully selective. It's totally fine for you to have a bias, but you're overlooking decades of massively successful products and services.
Having owned plenty of Thinkpads (Linux), Dells(Windows and Linux) and plenty of Macbook Pros, I can say, Apple's superiority of hardware is so far beyond the rest. Having an OS with a BSD-ish experience is really nice as well. I've spent 27 years in engineering and during most of that time I get the random "Linux is far superior", "I like Windows better" folks... but by and large, yes, Apple's tech has a ton of good will.
bananalychee · 1h ago
Of course it does in the US tech bubble, if you talk to people who haven't been using Macs for 30 years you might hear a different story. While Apple makes good hardware they also have plenty of blunders, especially in recent years, much like Microsoft in its domain really. Both are coasting on their past successes and familiarity. I get it, many of my coworkers watch their announcement streams like they're video game announcements. From my standpoint they haven't put out anything exciting since the iPhone/iPod Touch, but I don't have the money for toys that cost thousands of dollars apiece like the Mac Studios or their VR headset, so maybe I'm missing out.
fkyoureadthedoc · 4h ago
> but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform
And probably fewer still consider switching to the alternatives. Apple is, for better or worse, usually the least bad option.
yndoendo · 4h ago
You have to pay me to use Apple, Microsoft, and Google products. None of those organizations are good.
Apple and Google both use immutable locked down OSes on their main products that prevents improving device security, such as IP & DNS filtering / blocking.
Microsoft user experience keeps getting worse. Latest version of Teams, as of today, says I'm at the "Calendar" screen and the navigation and content screen both show "Chat". "Calendar" was unpinned because I find Teams to be at interacting with content. No reason it should be a PDF viewer when the desktop application is actually usable allows for viewing chat and content at the same time.
I understand developing for those platforms makes money or is needed for other products. Unless I have to develop products that support those companies, I will never pay with my personal income to support those organizations.
herval · 3h ago
So you don't use a smartphone?
powgpu · 2h ago
Me and many people don't.
Just laptop is good enough. Although currently switched back to apple silicon ATM for LLM, price and convince reasons, and as soonest linux on Apple Silicon reach some maturity, will switch over completely.
However not using a smartphone is probably good for one's mental and physical healthy now days. It is understandable if your work require you to have one, but if I'm not getting paid, why would I even get a smartphone?
Back in the 80's there are investment people managing billions dollars and deals over pen paper and a land line!
fkyoureadthedoc · 1h ago
I'm the opposite, I didn't own a personal computer from like 2015 until last year when I built a new gaming PC. I had a MacBook Pro from work of course, but I just got by on my phone / iPad for my personal life.
herval · 2h ago
back in the 1880s, people didn't even need refrigerators!
echelon · 2h ago
Because antitrust enforcement has been so lax, we only have two options.
The DOJ/FTC/EU/ASEAN/etc. need to force a breakup of first party app stores, first party payment, first party web browser, and first party messaging. They also really need to require web installs without hidden menus and scare walls.
We'll see a proliferation of offerings if that happens.
worik · 2h ago
No.
Linux is better.
That worm has turned, at least five years ago
fkyoureadthedoc · 1h ago
When someone makes a SteamOS level "just works" distro for desktop / gaming I'll probably happily switch
powgpu · 2h ago
for X_86 family for sure, but the experience on other chip set such as Apple Silicon (maybe the arms) for desktop usage are quite rough around the edges.
deaddodo · 1h ago
Linux works fine on ARM devices. The problem is lack of good (non-Apple) ARM devices, not Linux.
trelane · 1h ago
"Apple silicon?" Man, how well does OSX run on a raspberry pi? Clearly it's the inferior OS. /s
rockemsockem · 4h ago
For hardware only
tonypapousek · 3h ago
Eh, macOS is still the UNIX with the most commercial software available. 26 feels like a misstep*, of course, but I’ll take it over a Windows environment any day.
* Xcode 26 is kinda neat, though
criddell · 1h ago
A mac can (legally) run more software than any other computer. Obviously, macOS apps work, but you can also run most Windows and Linux applications (in a VM). There's also a bunch of iOS/iPadOS apps that can work and some Android apps can run through BlueStacks.
Sebb767 · 21m ago
> but you can also run most Windows and Linux applications (in a VM).
This is really just a cheap rhetorical trick. Linux [0] can run just as much software, if you include VMs, but you can't legally virtualize MacOS, therefore buying a Mac is the only way to legally run their software, in addition to everything else. Now, you are technically correct, but the casual interpretation of
> Eh, macOS is still the UNIX with the most commercial software available.
isn't really that you can simply run everything unavailable on MacOS in a VM (or several layers of VMs). It's the same as arguing that Powerpoint is all you ever need, as it is Turing complete.
[0] And so can Windows, if you run said VMs in a Linux VM.
herval · 3h ago
Apple is certainly fumbling in recent years, and it's clearly behind in some games (Siri, AI in general, iPhones turning into a yearly snooze-fest). But of all the FAANG, I'd say it's the only one I trust, simply because they're not trying to sell my data and have a consistent stance on security.
QuercusMax · 3h ago
Tim Cook giving Trump a gold-plated statue in exchange for tariff preferences seems like a very bad sign.
pklausler · 2h ago
Why? It was a relatively cheap way to dodge the capricious whims of a madman who is fortunately easy to distract with shiny objects.
JohnKemeny · 2h ago
He didn't give him a statue, he gave him a gold bar. A literal gold bar. With a plaque.
herval · 3h ago
It certainly is. It's not exclusive to Apple, however - _all_ the big tech (and non-tech) companies offered tribute, in one form or another. Despite it being illegal, it seems to be the new government practice.
Whether that'll lead to the government requiring Apple to break their encryption, it remains to be seen. I imagine Apple has a bit of an edge here anyway, since iCloud is allegedly e2e encrypted?
elictronic · 3h ago
It seems like they got the memo. Pay Trump personally or have your business destroyed.
Im not really sure how that benefits me as a US citizen but that is who the majority of the population seems to want and once the rules are set you follow or face made up tariffs that rip you apart. Right.
kriops · 2h ago
Why? Regardless of your view of Trump, would you not expect mr. Cook to play the game? His only job is literally and figuratively to navigate hell or high waters to deliver value to the shareholders.
worik · 2h ago
> because they're not trying to sell my data
Are you sure?
echelon · 2h ago
They use it internally for marketing and sales.
They also use it for their growing ad platform.
Can't let people find your app for free. You need to pay to defend your trademark and lead in a given app category.
Plus they've severed the customer relationship and inserted themselves as Mafia middlemen. They'll sell that to companies too.
hilux · 2h ago
Apple is behind in AI because they've prioritized keeping private data on your device, rather than in the cloud, but today's best (or even good) inference models still require cloud-scale compute, i.e. they don't fit on a phone.
I think we basically agree - just clarifying here.
brownriceowl · 2h ago
We have different ideas of what qualifies as tech people if we're talking about Liquid Glass, Siri, and Vision Pro
In my business (partly home studio support), it's hard to support MacOS for new-ish users.
If the OS is old, things like FFMPEG will not work with things like Audacity. And to use an old version of FFMPEG, you have to guess which one, then install a variety of dev tools to compile it, waay beyond the capability of the average "I just want to record my podcast user". Audacity itself has an extensive help article devoted to this issue for Mac.
If you have a new Mac, you'll find companies have given up going through the cost and time of certifying for each new Mac OS, like Evoluent (early vertical mouse maker), who gave up several versions ago and won't support using all the extra mouse buttons their product has on Mac.
If you want to use many audio plugins, you'll have to deal with special permissions if it didn't come from the app store. If you want to use zoom to let a remote tech control your screen, you have to find and set two security permisssions.
For all four of these issue on Windows, it just works.
UPDATE: As commenter below pointed out, experienced users have a different experience than new users, which doesn't invalidate the specific issues I've mentioned, and which I encounter every month, and sometimes weekly.
nativeit · 2h ago
I’m a producer since Cool Edit Pro and Fruity Loops. I’ve used Windows and Macs for audio and video production extensively over the last two decades. I have no idea what you’re on about.
QuantumGood · 2h ago
I gave four specific examples that frequently slow me down when helping people who are new to studio stuff. You ignored my examples, and pointed out you have decades of experience. Why do you start by pointing out you're not the user I'm talking about and ignore the examples?
asveikau · 3h ago
> A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.
Philadelphia · 2h ago
Mac OS 8 was new in 1997 and was pretty innovative for user-facing features, if not the underlying operating system. It blew Windows 98 out of the water as far as that went.
asveikau · 2h ago
I was around at the time.
Mac OS 8 had no preemptive multitasking or meaningful address space protections. A single bad pointer dereference in user mode took down the entire system, and a single busy loop without a yield locked up the entire system.
Both of these were universally admitted to be bad and outdated by technically minded people.
By 1997 they had looked at replacing it with BeOS or NEXTSTEP, and purchased the latter with the goal of replacing Mac OS. The Rhapsody OS, an OS8 style UI with NeXT underneath, had already been started. Before that, they had also attempted and failed to write a next gen classic Mac OS (Copland).
Windows 9x had a lot of problems, but had preemptive multitasking and much better address space isolation. Windows NT 4 Workstation was also a thing at the time and much better. It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
deaddodo · 1h ago
If all you did was look at it, sure. OS 8 was a mess internally with an archaic and badly designed kernel. Windows 98 was much better at multitasking, system recovery, process isolation, etc. And that's saying a lot for the BSOD-ridden mess that that was. Then you had NT, which made both look like children's toys.
And that's just in the Microsoft vs Apple camp. If you left that then Unix, BSD, BeOS, etc also blew it out of the water.
MacOS 8 looked pretty, but it was far from a "good" OS.
JustExAWS · 58m ago
MacOS 8 was not innovative by 1997 standards. I had it running on my PowerMac 6100/60. It was crash prone and Netscape could easily crash the entire OS, cooperative multitasking, you as an end user still had to manually allocate how much memory an app could have.
None of these were issues on Windows 98.
bee_rider · 3h ago
They aren’t doing a great job exactly, but what is there to recommend to somebody who doesn’t want to use the command line? SteamOS, maybe, haha.
__loam · 3h ago
The rocky start for apple intelligence is what excites me
worik · 2h ago
....and their tools are very flash, bright colours and buttons...and they mostly work
"Mostly" is not good enough. The user experience of Apple is still good, the developer experience is woeful
catigula · 3h ago
It's also amazing that they convinced developers that running a non-standard CPU instruction set through a laundered Rosetta layer was somehow battery or compute friendly lb for lb when an AMD processor (or even Intel) is plenty efficient and cool.
Are any applications on your Mac touching Rosetta right now? You'd better hope not because those single percentage gains from ARM evaporate fast.
n8cpdx · 3h ago
Delusional take. Rosetta is for maintaining compatibility during the transition. Efficiency is fine with Rosetta. But it doesn’t matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done. Not true, unfortunately, for Windows.
Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
hinkley · 1h ago
Pile onto that the fact that a lot of us are in the cloud, and the cloud has ARM processors, and they're generally priced as competetive, especially with m7i and m7a. So it's not the worst thing in the world to be using arm64 architecture on your dev machine.
JustExAWS · 56m ago
Which matters very little in my experience whether the cloud is ARM or not. I still need to build my code in a Docker container with Amazon Linux even on my ARM based Mac when targeting an ARM based AWS runtime environment.
catigula · 2h ago
What is the efficiency loss specifically? Do you even know, or are you just asserting it?
>it doesn't matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done
'Essentially' is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here, but, putting that aside, A. you're wrong, I've recently ran into Rosetta throttling and B. it's not a good reason to begin the project at all, it's only a good reason when it's already done. You're essentially ceding "Yes, I've been wrong and this has been a fool's errand for the past x years until right this moment as the project is done". It's not done and it'd a weak argument.
>Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
Specifically what are the numbers? Because I have performance/tdp numbers and the M-series performs well but it isn't a categorical difference. In fact, that's no difference, it performs okay but AMD is at the top of the heap currently. Sad.
singhrac · 2h ago
I switched from a 2019 MBP to a new M4 Pro a few weeks ago and I didn’t even know Rosetta wasn’t installed (I assumed on and installed by default) until I had to run a Go binary that hadn’t been updated since 2020.
I use a lot of nonstandard software (not just a browser), not a single piece needed Rosetta.
I agree recent AMD chips are power efficient like the M series (though I don’t have one to compare with) but I thought everyone agreed the comparable chips in 2020 weren’t?
catigula · 2h ago
Apple's marketing on this was a very impressive effort on this, evidenced by:
>...I thought everyone agreed the comparable chips in 2020 weren’t?
Possibly, but it was likely far, far closer (see maybe the AMD Ryzen 7 4800U) than justified defense of the project.
Anyways, with the addition of the Rosetta translation layer there's no way the Apple M1 was as efficient as the Ryzen.
hundchenkatze · 2h ago
then post the numbers? You're just here doing the same thing, asserting that the efficiency is bad, only using more words.
Performance and efficiency has been great for me. I've never run into rosetta throttling. I've got the numbers - trust me bro.
catigula · 2h ago
The null hypothesis is that Apple chips aren't better. You simply assumed they were into evidence. It's up to you to provide the figures that they are.
Of course, they really aren't, which is pretty obvious. It doesn't make sense that Apple would randomly invent some categorically new CPU technology when they don't even own an instruction set or foundry and that they would simply be concocting some vendor lock-in supply chain scheme.
hundchenkatze · 22m ago
> Because I have performance/tdp numbers
It sounds like you've already done the work... why not just share the numbers. I'm just asking to see what you claim to have. Unless... you don't have them and you're just making stuff up.
JohnFen · 3h ago
> Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies.
They are very different companies in very different businesses. Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company. That affects everything (and is why the two are not fundamentally competitors).
I don't think one has ever been better behaved than the other at all, though. The main difference is that for most of their time, Microsoft was just in a position where it could do more harm than Apple.
leptons · 2h ago
Apple does plenty of harm every day when they force Safari as the only web browser engine allowed on iOS.
acdha · 40m ago
That’s more complicated because the alleged harms are quite limited (it’s not like Android or desktop users are using PWAs much) and the biggest direct impact is the unalloyed good of “the web” not being synonymous with the Google Chrome roadmap. Everyone has benefited from proposed specs with significant negative privacy and security impacts not being adopted, so we have to ask how much the negatives outweigh the positives here.
bee_rider · 21m ago
Right? They are really limiting Google’s development of their platform, the internet, by making some websites pander to a non-Chrome browser engine.
JohnFen · 48m ago
Yes, but with that sort of thing, the harm is at least limited to Apple customers.
JustExAWS · 54m ago
That’s why there are so many great PWAs for Android and most companies avoid writing Android apps and just tell Android users to use the web apps.
Oh wait, that’s totally not the case.
p1necone · 1h ago
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Do they? I feel like this is a bimodal thing from what I've seen of other peoples opinions - they're either amazing and all you ever use, or they're the worst company ever.
As a developer I've always seen Macs as a necessary evil - they were the only polished "working out of the box" unix-like system you could buy for a long time but you had to put up with locked down software, comically bad pricing and cooling issues.
Now with the Mx stuff the hardware is amazing, and pretty fantastic value for money if you avoid the weird points in the price scale where they massively overcharge for RAM. But you still have to use their locked down software stack and ecosystem.
nobleach · 2h ago
But I've yet to meet a person that said, "Oh, Rachel and Chandler from Friends... maybe Windows IS cool!". It wasn't cool, it wasn't anything. Apple was trendy with the designers and creative types, and Windows was what you probably used at your doldrums day job. The only place where MS has ever been "cool" is with gamers. I think your "Walmart" analogy is a perfect one.
bee_rider · 2h ago
The joke was supposed to be that the “coolness peak” was incredibly lame. Haha.
cyberax · 3h ago
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Only among people who don't have to develop for the Apple ecosystem.
cyanydeez · 3h ago
Apple is bribing the fascists and Microsoft hasn't yet. Cool is not a word I'd use.
dijit · 3h ago
Microsoft is so in bed with the government that bribes are far from necessary.
leoc · 2h ago
In this case it's more that hardware isn't a critical business for MS, I think.
yieldcrv · 2h ago
I used to think that way, and I’m not rushing to apply to Microsoft, but I do notice the various divisions, studios, stock price growth and comparable RSU packages that all make me totally forget about its antiquated branding and association
mvdtnz · 3h ago
> Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will
Good grief. Sometimes it's good to get a reminder that there are still people who think this way.
pjmlp · 3h ago
On my office, only folks like myself that also do Windows development, have Thinkpads with Windows.
Everyone else carries Apple devices.
GNU/Linux only exists on local VMs for containers, or servers on cloud instances.
xp84 · 2h ago
Since when does carrying Apple device(s) mean we have goodwill for Apple?
I dev on a Mac all day and own 2 macs at home. Why?
* not going to try to convince the whole family to change and I want the various family & imessage features that everyone uses to all work
* all the developers at my company use macs and I don't want to have to set up my own unique configurations for everything using WSL and stuff.
* In the US, often the Android versions of "apps" you're forced to use by random businesses (instead of the Web which usually would work fine), are pawned off on an offshore team, and no execs use Android so there's no accountability when those apps suck.
* Windows also has many recent disappointments (ads in the start menu, increasingly dumber and worse settings screens), so they're doing a bad job of winning over people like me, dampening my enthusiasm to switch.
* Linux is cool but I'm too busy to want a project as my daily driver PC.
I have nothing but scorn for Tim Cook's Apple and have zero goodwill for them. They haven't shipped an actual smart idea for any of their platforms besides maybe Shortcuts (which they bought), and even then it took them 3 years to let me run automations unattended.
asveikau · 2h ago
> In the US, often the Android versions of "apps" you're forced to use by random businesses (instead of the Web which usually would work fine), are pawned off on an offshore team
I haven't seen this.
Also I would imagine those businesses would do the same for their iOS development? It's odd that you would assume they don't.
deaddodo · 1h ago
While rarely offshored, a decade and a half of experience in the tech sphere shows that Android is almost universally treated as a second class citizen. Some companies won't bother supporting it at all, the majority will have an Android team 1/5-1/3 the size of the iOS team.
No comments yet
leptons · 2h ago
I, like many developers was handed a Macbook Pro upon starting my first day at the company. I gave MacOS a shot (again, I used to be a mac sysadmin at a design company), but was happier when I could install Windows on it. Finder is a joke, and so many other things about MacOS are just stupid. Sure, Windows has some crap too, but it lacks the pretentiousness and ridiculous things I dislike about Apple products. I also covered the white lit-up Apple logo on the laptop screen with red-circle-strikeout sticker, because I really disliked Apple after being a sysadmin getting all too familiar with their products and OS.
JohnFen · 3h ago
There's a huge regional variation on this. In some parts of the US, Apple is everywhere. In others, it's rare enough to be worthy of comment when it gets spotted in the wild.
mvdtnz · 58m ago
Ah yes, what could be more stylish and cool than a company assigned work device.
raincole · 3h ago
Yeah, I laughed audibly when I read that sentence...
fHr · 3h ago
lol
ezoe · 3h ago
You forgot to mention the gaming section.
Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
I guess generating hype by acquisition and increase valuation cause more profit than developing a real product.
I'm beginning to think that using Microsoft services(yes, GitHub included) is morally questionable behaviour right now. I can't support the current Microsoft behaviour of laying off many employees so casually.
pjmlp · 3h ago
Yes, the whole XBox division has been a mess, especially after ABK.
However XBox plus Microsoft Gaming Studios, is still one of the biggest group of AAA publishers, they have a big enough slice of the market.
Hence why now they're dominating PlayStation charts with cross-platform games.
Many Microsoft haters don't have an good enough idea of how big they have become on games industry, regardless of layoffs and such.
SteamOS keeps being around until they feel like doing a netbooks like move, taking all their games out of Steam, or whatever else Microsoft might think of.
Hence why I regularly complain Valve should keep trying to bring developers to target GNU/Linux natively instead of translating Windows games.
grepfru_it · 2h ago
I would not be surprised if Steam came to Xbox
sleepybrett · 2h ago
The only way microsoft would allow that is if they got a cut of every sale.
ivape · 3h ago
Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
Sounds like they just bought the IP.
tough · 3h ago
which begs the question is it just good old EEE?
brightball · 5h ago
I’m glad Gitlab is still an option, just sitting there waiting to absorb the market pivot if Microsoft takes it the wrong way.
ikidd · 5h ago
I see more people jump for Codeberg these days.
mindcrash · 5h ago
Or even better, claim full sovereignty (again) and install Forgejo (https://forgejo.org/) on your own hardware.
You'll get the same experience as Codeberg, because Codeberg is in fact running on Forgejo
beeb · 4h ago
People aren't on these hosted platforms only for the git experience, they are for the social aspects and discoverability too.
This is what people forget about GitHub. Its popularity isn't because it has the best tools on the market. It is popular because of the network effect. It's the social network of developer tooling.
I don't really want to be using a Microsoft product but I use github for the same reason I use Linkedin: because it benefits my career to be visible on these social networks.
yencabulator · 1h ago
Yes, that's why everyone is still on Sourceforge. I too check Freshmeat regularly for updates.
It's time to move on from Github, LinkedIn, and hell ideally NPM too. Microsoft is polluting the ground water.
hnlmorg · 7m ago
> Yes, that's why everyone is still on Sourceforge. I too check Freshmeat regularly for updates.
Sourceforge and Freshmeat weren't social networks. Plus its not like other social networks haven't collapsed despite being popular, like MySpace.
> It's time to move on from Github, LinkedIn, and hell ideally NPM too. Microsoft is polluting the ground water.
As I said, I don't want to be using Microsoft products but it benefits my career to be visible on these social networks.
BlueTemplar · 1h ago
And this is a big part of the reason why it's pretty much a violation of professional deontology to use LinkedIn, GitHub (and Discord).
hnlmorg · 1m ago
That kind of ideology is great in principle, but if you struggle to get a job because you have limited presence in an employer's market, then you're practising deontology without a profession.
I'm an opinionated MS-hater, like most of my peers who lived through 90s Microsoft, like I had. But I also have a family to feed and bills to pay. Sometimes pragmatism trumps ideology.
hinkley · 1h ago
I have PRs open on five different OSS projects at the moment. My throughput is being limited by trying to remember all the details of PRs I filed 3-6 weeks ago.
I thinK I have to admit to myself that as little as I like github having all the projects, I'd be less effective having to track inboxes across half a dozen different hosting platforms.
If you made something like Mastodon, where alerts propagate across instances, I could probably deal. But without that? No, I'll pass.
taxborn · 5h ago
It’s a great piece of software. I set it up in a Docker container, and have a few of their CI runners on a couple machines I own. Great experience so far.
Hosting costs for self-hosting a popular git repo are prohibitive for many people.
lordofgibbons · 4h ago
The UI looks very similar to Gitea. Are they related? And how do they compare?
ionelaipatioaei · 4h ago
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea.
jzb · 5h ago
I love Codeberg, but they're struggling with growth/scaling -- if folks want to see Codeberg succeed, they need to open their wallets.
michaelcampbell · 3h ago
Big limitation on private repos there.
ghc · 5h ago
Among enterprises I work with, I'm seeing way more migration to self-hosted Gitlab than I was a few years ago. Even among Azure-dependent orgs.
rpep · 4h ago
I think there’s some risk with this though too - more and more is behind the enterprise tier. People try to work around this in various ways but its an unsatisfying experience. For e.g. trying to enforce merge request approval with pipeline stages.
Aeolun · 4h ago
Gitlab is not really an option for me. Their pricing is absolutely out of this world.
taxborn · 5h ago
Additionally there is Codeburg/Forgejo, and for the atproto-enjoyers, tangled.sh is a new face that feels like it could be good.
dboreham · 4h ago
And gitea (originally a Forgejo fork).
overfeed · 3h ago
Did you mean to say gitea was originally a Gogs fork?
The lineage of those projects is Gogs => Gitea => Forgejo
I love C# and .NET is amazing for some specific use cases like REST APIs but there's so much stuff that just doesn't work or needs a lot more effort to get somewhere.
MAUI is a mess.
Blazor will never work as a general solution for full stack web apps. Even if a small app didn't have to download like 10MB of WASM code the DX is terrible and performance just as bad. Elixir Phoenix developed with a fraction of the budget is just so far ahead.
C# hot reload has been broken for years. I doubt it will ever be as good as what you get in JS with Vite.
Minimal APIs are a great idea but 4 years later and still fundamental features like validation are missing (it's coming in .NET 10).
They've been investing a ton of effort into Aspire. It's cool but is it more important than core features?
And now with AI, Microsoft is more distracted than ever and I'm starting to regret getting into .NET at all.
sixothree · 1h ago
Is MAUI now just a simple wrapper for Blazor projects?
NullCascade · 46m ago
It's funny. Nobody complains that there is a lack of free multi-platform desktop GUI profiling tools for Go, Python, Ruby, Elixir etc. Somehow we just accept those languages are only for web services, web apps, and command-line utilities.
What is the problem with Microsoft keeping "nice to have" desktop GUI stuff for their own proprietary ecosystem when everything else has open sourced? Including the primitives needed for the community to build their own GUI and developer tooling stuff, just like JetBrains did with Rider.
ackfoobar · 3h ago
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
On HN I keep hearing that associating .NET with Windows is outdated perception.
Writing JVM languages I feel that the developer experience is pretty much the same on any OS. It seems this cannot be said for .NET?
jayd16 · 1h ago
If you're writing a server or a web app then its good and runs well.
Visual Studio is still not ported to Linux or Mac, you need to use Rider or VSCode. If you use JetBrains for Java, using Rider will feel good no matter where you are.
The GUI library situation is a tough one. In many ways its far more advanced than other languages but their newest attempt is not as good as the older Windows only API. But what other language is graded for its great native GUI library?
I'm not calling MS cool but at the same time I think the goalposts are different.
ezst · 1h ago
Re: GUI library situation, are you implying that they finally came up with something that's cross platform? What is it?
jayd16 · 37m ago
MAUI apparently has Windows, Mac and Mobile support but no distro Linux support (unless Wine counts). You could use the web stack to be truly cross platform.
rahkiin · 1h ago
I do not understand the hungup on visual studio.
We dont do the same for java, rust, or c… there are good IDEs for each of them and none are made by the maintainers of the language.
jayd16 · 1h ago
I do get the sentiment to some degree. Part of it is that Microsoft does have a conflict of interest as an OS vender. They do need to show that they aren't/won't be abusing that. That does put them in a position where they're asked to go above and beyond as a form of litmus test.
marcosdumay · 3h ago
Pretty much no, it can't be said for .Net.
It currently supports Linux as a running target for servers. It supports both running desktop software and development very badly.
alternatex · 2h ago
It supports Linux as a running target for console apps, which can be servers, background apps, systemd apps, etc. So everything except UI apps.
The development experience with Rider is also great on Linux. I think you need to be more specific with the complaints because I have many beefs with Microsoft's approach to many things, but I could not pick up on what you meant.
rahkiin · 1h ago
Can run SDL on linux and macos just fine, rendering visuals to the screen in X or Wayland.
tetha · 3h ago
Mh, I'm not the most experienced guy with .NET.
We have a few .NET applications running on the infrastructure on Linux hosts and it's just like every other thing.
But in some contexts, e.g. PowerBI, it pulls in a dependency and BOOM it's Windows Only to the point that not even Wine or Proton can help you. For something, that should be, mind you, a dumb SQL proxy like the PowerBI Embedded Gateway.
SideburnsOfDoom · 3h ago
The server deploy experience for .NET is pretty much the same on Windows or Linux. The developer tooling experience has more options on Windows.
ozim · 57m ago
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales - I think MSFT doesn't care just as they don't care about GUI workloads, because only thing they care now is having developers run their stuff on Azure. You don't need VS for those cloud .NET apps and you don't need front end frameworks like Forms, Xamarin or MAUI. Seems like C++ is also something they would not be interested investing into when they can get people into cloud easier with C#.
yread · 4h ago
Why do people need to create anthropomorphising narratives around companies? Don't be any company's cheerleader, use the stuff that's best for you (and the environment)
ozim · 15m ago
I built my career on MSFT stack I am going to be their cheerleader, don't want them to go down or stagnate as I would have to switch stack.
I don't understand people who are just consumers and have no actual business to root for MSFT or AAPL or any other company.
pjmlp · 3h ago
Agreed, but apparently company cheerleadering never goes away.
mirekrusin · 1h ago
The same way cheerleading USA presidents doesn't go away, but if you look around you see things like Switzerland with direct democracy that just works without it.
sixothree · 2h ago
Is he creating or is he relating what people think? I don't see this is him arguing so much as reporting.
justin66 · 3h ago
> Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
That happened three decades ago.
pjmlp · 3h ago
There was a new wind after Satya took over, but apparently it is slowly gone now.
jacquesm · 2h ago
To me it never made a difference. There was a concerted effort to put lipstick on the pig but it was still a pig.
hinkley · 1h ago
More like put lipstick on the scorpion.
It is in their nature. It takes a lot of work to excise bad practices from an organization and removing the guilty parties is only step one. Everything continues to work the way the bad actors wanted them to work for a long, long time.
Gates was bad. Balmer was worse. He was still in charge 11 years ago, in a company he helped build 40 years ago. Their personalities are the bones of that organization.
lepicz · 2h ago
to put lipstick on the wrong end of a pig :)
this is a mystery to me: ms has all the money in the world to make it right.. yet they can't. windows ecosystem is like one of those eastern european barnyards, where animals live and die between old halves tractors and rusty Lada(s).
pferde · 2h ago
That was a mask the corporation put on in a bid to lure in the younger crowd who doesn't remember all the underhanded stuff Microsoft did in the past. But they haven't really changed at all.
hinkley · 1h ago
The thing that surprises me the most about Satya is how he managed to survive in MS so long if he really is different from the previous administration.
segphault · 4h ago
Microsoft not being terrible was a zero interest rate phenomenon. The news today is a lot worse than just Github not being independent anymore. It sounds like literally the entire development division is being rolled into this "Core AI" business unit.
When Nadella announced plans to double the company's revenue by 2030, it was pretty clear that the enshitifiction was going to ramp up significantly, but it doesn't seem like it will ever relent now that they have to squeeze out more free cash flow to cover all of this AI capex. Windows is practically malware at this point, they've made extremely deep cuts to .NET engineering headcount, and it's just going to get worse.
hinkley · 1h ago
fifteen years ago I predicted that if we ever have a bloody AI revolution, the most likely case would be that it would be Microsoft's fault because they are the kings of unintended consequences.
The second most likely case being some AI figuring out how to hack AWS to steal compute time, probably by getting access to billing information.
Microsoft seems to be slowly pulling ahead at the moment.
maxrmk · 1h ago
Do you work in devdiv at Microsoft? I can see the org chart in this comment haha
martin-t · 2h ago
I couldn't believe the number of people who were saying that "Microsoft are the good guys now" or "Microsoft loves open source now".
Microsoft stopped openly attacking open source at a time when open source was clearly winning:
- most servers were running linux
- most phones and tablets were running android
- people were buying tablets instead of desktops
- Google was openly promoting open source through GSOC
- large corporations were regularly releasing their tools as open source
Most importantly, developers openly hated Microsoft for holding the industry back (remember IE6?).
So they did what any good corporations does - they went along with the winning side.
And now they they have positive emotional connotations in devs' minds, or at least organizational buy-in again, they can do what corporations do best - making money by abusing their position with barely any competition.
---
The lesson here are:
- Corporations should simply not have this amount of power.
- Corporations are amoral, they don't have values, views or beliefs. They are systems designed for optimizing goals. You can never _trust_ a corporation - not because they are untrustworthy but because trust is a human-to-human level concept, it does not have any meaning in human-to-system interaction.
pyuser583 · 1h ago
How is Rider v. VS?
This is the sort of question I don't trust AI with yet.
pathartl · 30s ago
I have been a .NET dev for the past 8 years and have switched fully to Rider. The only thing I miss from VS is the quick nav to see all the properties and methods in a file on the top bar. Everything else is vastly better:
- Auto complete is a bit smarter (even the free AI suggestions are better)
- Refactoring across files is often faster
- Package management is undoubtedly the latest performance difference. I would go from taking 1-2 minutes from using VS's "Manage packages for solution" to under 10 seconds in Rider.
- In VS there's always a noticeable delay when the debugger hits a breakpoint / exception and the IDE takes a few seconds to actually display. This is about halved in Rider.
- The built in terminal is vastly better than VS's, though not as good as Windows Terminal
CharlieDigital · 20m ago
VS - great if you are Windows only shop for dev and want all the bells and whistles
Rider - has all of the the nice things JetBrains does and the best option on Mac if you need advanced refactoring; UI feels a bit cluttered at time (though they improved this).
VSC - for whatever reason, I always end up back to VSC for .NET for backends. Good enough, fast, and lightweight enough. Plays nicely with Node and full-stack monorepos.
I would commit to VSC and try to make it work. If you find you need advanced refactoring support, then try out Rider.
sixothree · 1h ago
Rider is very nice and a perfectly competent development environment. It gets first class support and often has the ability to test preview features from dotnet upcoming language and runtimes.
It's biggest problem is that it's not Visual Studio, so it is very hard for people who have lived in VS for a decade to move over.
It does away with some bloat and also provides some features of Resharper natively instead of as an extension.
You can quite literally use this as your primary development environment.
throwaway290 · 4h ago
Wait Microsoft was cool at some point?
NickC25 · 3h ago
Yeah. Xbox, GitHub, Sataya's early days embracing open source, Zune (admittedly not cool but i loved the product).
pjmlp · 4h ago
Did you missed the whole Microsoft <3 FOSS, right after Satya took over?
mightysashiman · 4h ago
did anyone believe it?!
ragnese · 27m ago
It was AstroTurfed to hell and back here and on Reddit. I know that much.
All those people who use Linux on their Windows machine instead of just installing a proper Linux distro.
jacquesm · 2h ago
No way anybody really believed that. Or did they?
BizarroLand · 4h ago
Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable despite its many many flaws.
wirrbel · 4h ago
I always wonder at these attributions. Like all windows versions gave you bluescreen and ran Microsoft excel. To me not one stood out particularly bad or good compared to the others maybe after Windows 98 service pack something
geon · 3h ago
Win98 was terrible. I used to reinstall it every month or so, as routine maintenance.
Win2k was so much better it's not even comparable.
XP had a bit of a rough start, but by sp3 it was a lot better than 2k.
I skipped the other windows-es until 10. It has been solid.
AgentME · 3h ago
Windows Vista got saner permissions support and made the OS survive certain kinds of driver crashes, but on launch a lot of existing software and drivers weren't updated to support those changes so it got a bad reputation. Nobody gave Windows proper credit for these advancements until Windows 7 which had a cleaner launch since most software and drivers were already updated for Vista's changes.
BizarroLand · 3h ago
Windows 98 was so bad when it came to drivers, lol.
It had the plug and play standard but that only worked half of the time, and if you messed up by doing something like connecting the peripherals before installing the driver you could BSOD while trying to install the drivers and have to rescue the whole OS. Happened to me enough for me to remember it.
And my sister demonstrated how you could delete the recycle bin if you were bad enough at computers, which was fun.
I've also had nearly as many kernel panics on OSX or hangs on Linux as I have had BSODs on Windows (when graphed as a ratio of use over time).
All OSes have flaws and issues, there would never be a perfect operating system with our current understanding of computers, and that's ok.
That being said, my critique does not include OSes that spy on you (for what will be considered a several trillion dollar crime syndicate when this era is written down in history), which is its own entire rant.
brabel · 3h ago
I was on Windows 95 until a few years ago :D. That for me was the cooler one, given the improvements (in visuals at least) over Windows 3.11.
worik · 2h ago
> Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable
That is very puzzling... Did you compare them to anything else?
newspaper1 · 4h ago
This is an odd comment. Xamarin has never been relevant. GitHub is historically OSS focused. Xamarin was some weird niche product for Windows devs. Hardly any overlap with GitHub’s core audience. I don’t know what will happen next, but hodgepodge of weird MS tech isn’t the lens to view this through.
everfrustrated · 3h ago
Didn't the Xamarin guy became the CEO of GitHub at one point?
pjmlp · 3h ago
One of them, yes.
Miguel never did, and is now focused on Swift and Apple.
newspaper1 · 1h ago
Yes, and that was an incredibly odd decision.
the_real_cher · 1h ago
They're releasing a feature on Windows which literally records your screen every few seconds!
These guys are extremely bad guys.
scarface_74 · 1h ago
I’ve been in the industry for 30 years professionally and 10 years as hobbyist who paid as much attention to the industry as one could before the internet in the 80s early 90s including lying as a 9th grader pretending to be a big spender to get a free subscription to MacWeek and PCWeek.
At no point in time was Microsoft one of the cool guys.
motorest · 4h ago
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Can you elaborate on why you believe that? I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework. I mean, their Win32 API is still alive and well, as well as MFC, ATL, etc. WPF still gets some minor updates too here and there.
I have no idea what you mean by web, too. ASP.NET is perhaps one of the better maintained web frameworks around. What exactly do you interptet as a concern?
Blazor is also Microsoft's alternative to JavaScript and it's main value proposition is being able to write webassembly apps using Microsoft technology exclusively. What do you think is replacing this?
Pointing out Aspire is even weirder. It's a containerization framework to help with observability and manage distributed applications. What exactly is the overlap?
I sense a great deal of confusion in your comments. What exactly are you trying to say?
Lich · 4h ago
> I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework.
WinUI3 is dead, lol. I tried to migrate from UWP to WinUI3, but it is literally dead. There doesn’t seem to be any team at MS actively working on it, the community calls have died, and the last build conf didn’t have any WinUI3 talks, all AI stuff. Yes, you can build apps with WinUI3, but development and support for it has stalled and I couldn’t justify moving the companies product over to WinUI3.
pathartl · 4h ago
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
... what?
They could do a better job with the native frameworks, but the rest of these are completely unrelated. For web, MVC is pretty much dead and you might want to use Blazor SSR instead. Web API via controllers is still supported, but minimal API endpoints are the hot thing. Blazor is being treated as a first class product. Aspire is there to assist in local orchestration of distributed applications... and is built on Blazor.
pjmlp · 3h ago
Exactly that, now try to pick the best one of all of those on enterprise projects, depending on the version they are using, and there is no budget for updates.
mightysashiman · 4h ago
first time I've ever read "Microsoft" and "cool" in the same sentence.
pferde · 2h ago
Technically not true. We were muttering "Not cool, Microsoft, not cool!" quite regularly back in the 90s and early 00s. :)
hilux · 2h ago
Microsoft hasn't been the cool guys since at least 1995, and probably long before that.
pbiggar · 4h ago
Not just that, but Microsoft's reputation is in the process of taking a nose dive over its human rights record
That's true of most of tech in general, these days. You have to pick your poison now.
BlueTemplar · 49m ago
You really don't have to.
And as a developer you have the option to go for otherwise trickier alternatives, like not using iOS nor Android.
But of course someone that uses the word 'tech' for a tiny subset of it might not see that...
specproc · 4h ago
Like IBM in the forties.
pfisch · 4h ago
Nobody even knows about this, no one thinks "Microsoft, hell no, they are a key player in the gaza conflict."
No one really associates human rights with Microsoft's reputation. That is the domain of Palantir, Meta, etc.
mperham · 4h ago
I guess you speak for everyone?
I very much do look very negatively on Microsoft as a collaborator with modern fascist regimes, along with Meta, Palantir, X, etc.
BlueTemplar · 47m ago
Yet. How do you think Meta acquired that reputation ?
pbhjpbhj · 2h ago
What about Apple there? Bringing golden offerings to their god-king and so supporting the further corruption of the regime. One of the few with the power/money to stand against them instead kneeling before Trump like a teen beauty pageant hopeful.
1attice · 4h ago
as a former MSFT employee (who quit for reasons, well before the layoffs) I am not permitted to disparage or portray my former employer in a negative light.
I'm just mentioning this for no reason whatsoever. It popped into my head, for some reason.
mikestew · 3h ago
As a former MSFT employee who disparages Microsoft on a regular basis, I ask: ‘dafuq did you get that idea?
jjani · 4h ago
For life? How can you be bound by this? Unless you sold yourself out for an extra month pay.
unethical_ban · 4h ago
That seems literally illegal, unless the disparagement would reference specific, classified programs.
meta_ai_x · 4h ago
nothingburger
EGreg · 5h ago
What about Wine? Is that still a thing?
Visual Studio Code seems to be their big open source push, besides GitHub. Everyone uses it, and most development environments and UX are based on it. Used to be Atom, I remember.
johnmaguire · 3h ago
Pedantic, but VS Code does not share a lineage with Atom, besides the fact that it is built on Electron (which was, admittedly, originally built for Atom.)
EGreg · 1h ago
I meant Atom used to be the base, and now it's VSCode
johnmaguire · 1h ago
VS Code was not based on Atom's code base.
EGreg · 33m ago
I didn't say it was!
madeofpalk · 4h ago
I don't understand how VS Code is an "open source push". It's technically open source, but open source doesn't seem to be strategically important to it.
beached_whale · 4h ago
Not all of it is OSS. The core language servers are closed, I think.
jajuuka · 2h ago
Heard of Apple Game Porting Toolkit? That's built on the back of Wine.
Microsoft has been open sourcing a bunch of their programs for a while now too. Majority are inconsequential but they are still nice to see. People on Linux OS's are excited about Microsoft calculator being open source but these open source projects still show that some people there have interest in the push.
They meant VS Code (which is at least partially open source).
vkazanov · 3h ago
Valve's steam deck runs on Linux/Wine. Wine is more popular than ever.
tannhaeuser · 2h ago
Wine, as part of Proton/SteamOS is a huge success.
kaladin-jasnah · 4h ago
Wine is still active, but I think mostly with Valve's proton, if that's the Wine you're talking about.
righthand · 2h ago
No need to extinguish what you can infinitely embrace with capital and extend into a puzzle.
SideburnsOfDoom · 3h ago
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only,
The monetisation of .NET is less about selling Windows licences, and more about selling Azure compute etc. The OS used on Azure is less relevant, you pay MS either way.
TrueSlacker0 · 34m ago
You can run .net without azure very easily. I personally have 4x web apps written in .net 8, razor. They used to be on a aws windows instance years ago but it was overly expensive for what I needed. Then I switched them to a small digital ocean server running ubuntu. When I started these apps I wrote them on windows 7 for windows server. I switched the server probably 2 years ago. I recently made the switch off of windows to ubuntu as my daily driver, instead of going to 11. Everything still works great. I do miss visual studio, but I am getting used to linux and its tools now. Point is, server is running and there is zero azure involved.
crinkly · 4h ago
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
This is Microsoft's primary strategy. There are a lot of victims out there.
... he says after spending several months porting a win32 app to Silverlight as part of a Gold Partner/MS case study with much fanfare, only to have to spent the next few years backporting everything into the win32 app it never replaced, and then it was shit canned and only the win32 version remains.
We're planning to rewrite it in Qt at some point as some of our customers use RHEL.
jongjong · 1h ago
I once worked for a company which outsourced the development of a Silverlight app for $1 million and then canned the whole thing one year later. It's just crazy how these life-changing amounts of money are thrown around like garbage in this industry.
waihtis · 5h ago
You really think Microsoft has been ”cool” for the past decade or so?
First the rampant spyware, then they gradually wreck every single piece of software into unusable buggy AI-slop-mess just to play the trashy MBA valuation games.
I still hold nostalgic value for the old OSes (say up to XP/7) but everything after has been nothing but maximal profit extraction.
Dont get me started on Azure
riffraff · 5h ago
Not OP, but I do.
The '90s/00s era of people hating on M$ and picturing them as the Borg had left room to the 10s/20s of MS being "friendly" and releasing open source and free things (typescript, vs code, core.net, wsl, work on python etc) and not completely screwing up acquisitions like GitHub or Mojang.
Windows became adware, and office became some crappy online thing, but _microsoft_ had became nicer and gained goodwill.
This seems to have started evaporating in the last year or so.
coliveira · 4h ago
Only people without any sense of reality believed this. Being exploitative is a core feature of MS, since its foundation. It's like believing a serpent won't bite you. They're in the middle of the embrace, extend and extinguish cycle for open source technologies.
pjmlp · 4h ago
Yep, that is more of less the point I was making.
owebmaster · 4h ago
They didn't become cool, some people just let themselves get fooled by what they were offering for free.
anthk · 4h ago
Windows was already adware with WIndows 98. Active Desktop anyone?
crinkly · 4h ago
Yeah that.
HN has a short memory. About 10 years ago everyone was all over Satya like he was Jesus' second coming.
Look where we are now.
827a · 4h ago
My deepest concern at this time isn't that AI eventually gets written down to nothing; because I don't think it will. Its that these companies are so scared of being out-competed by an AI-first competitor that they're willing to make deep sacrifices to their core businesses just to effectively virtue signal that they're AI first and unable to be out-competed.
It is deeply concerning because all things point to reality shaking out with irony. None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it. Apple has nothing, Microsoft wants to put spyware on every Windows computer and builds the worst coding agent on the market despite having privileged access to every line of source code ever written, Meta put a chatbot in Whatsapp then decided paying researchers ten mil would solve their problems, Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
Their fear is going to lose them everything. Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed. Everyone learned that lesson and decided "we'll never be unwilling to innovate ever again"; but now their core product stable undergoes constant churn that is pissing off customers and driving competition to eat their lunch.
There is long-term, durable beauty in investing majority effort into making Github the single best place to host and organize code. That need is never going away. There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world, no one doubts that, but its a matter of proportion and humility. Microsoft/Github will never build AI products that lead the market. Its not a technology problem; its an organizational and political one. But that's ok, because they could dominate the market with the world's best code hosting platform, an average AI strategy, and a library of integrations with the rest of the frontier world.
theptip · 3h ago
> Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product.
YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.
I think folks sleep on Google around here. They are slow but they have so many compelling iterative AI usecases that even a BigTech org can manage it eventually.
Apple and Microsoft are rightly getting panned, Apple in particular is inexcusable (but I think they will have a unique offering when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for).
armchairhacker · 2h ago
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
I remember when I was trying to find a YouTube video, I remembered the contents but not the name. I tried google search and existing LLMs including Gemini, and none could find it.
It would also be useful for security: give the AI a recording and ask when the suspicious person shows up, the item is stolen, the event happens, etc. But unfortunately also useful for tyranny…
alecco · 3h ago
The best and latest Gemini Pro model is not SOTA. The only good things it has are the huge context and the low API price. But I had to stop using it because it kept contradicting itself in the walls of text it produces. (My paid account was forced to pay for AI with a price hike so I tried for a couple of months to see if I could make it work with prompt engineering, no luck).
Google researchers are great, but Engineering is dropping like a stone, and management is a complete disaster. Starting with their Indian McKinsey CEO moving core engineering teams to India.
It was the best model according to almost every benchmark until recently. It’s definitely SOTA.
qnleigh · 2h ago
> when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for
What's that? It's not obvious to me, anyway.
mattnewton · 57m ago
inference hardware, especially starting with on device ai for the mac. I think they should go as far as making a server chip, but that's less obvious today.
newswasboring · 2h ago
My guess would be local AI. Apple Silicon is uniquely suitable with its shared memory.
theptip · 1h ago
Yeah exactly. The MacBook Pro is by far the most capable consumer device for local LLM.
A beefed up NPU could provide a big edge here.
More speculatively, Apple is also one of the few companies positioned to market an ASIC for a specific transformer architecture which they could use for their Siri replacement.
(Google has on-device inference too but their business model depends on them not being privacy-focused and their GTM with Android precludes the tight coordination between OS and hardware that would be required to push SOTA models into hardware. )
mrbombastic · 1h ago
They are well positioned but have a history of screwing up their AI plays, I hope they can get it right.
GLdRH · 2h ago
Embrace the vibe, man
827a · 2h ago
Yeah to be clear, I think Google is the strongest in AI product development of the FAANG companies. I included them in the list because the most complaints I see about AI product integration among FANNG comes from Google products; the incessant bundling of Gemini chatboxes in every Workspace product.
krior · 2h ago
The biggest counterexample would be that dead-ai-autotranslate-voice sucking every gram of joy out of watching your favourite creators, with no ability to turn it off.
giancarlostoro · 1h ago
I mean Microsoft hosts key AI models in their AI Foundry, I don't think they're hurting.
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
> Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.
These are great examples of insulting and invasive introductions of LLMs into already functional workflows. These are anti-features.
theptip · 1h ago
I guess I’m using the product wrong if I find them useful?
somenameforme · 4h ago
What you're describing would seem to be a borderline miraculously positive thing. Every single generation of tech companies starts off absolutely amazing. Then they get big, and in surprisingly rapid order enter into the abyss from which they never return
But in modern times the particularly level level of big, scaling back of anti-competitive law enforcement, and a government increasingly obsessed with making [economic] number go up, regardless of the cost, have all created a situation where the current batch is dying a lot slower than they probably otherwise would.
If 'AI' is the pandora's box of self destruction that can move the show along to the next batch of companies, then it'll have been worth the trillions of dollars in investment after all!
827a · 3h ago
I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle. When Standard Oil held a monopoly on the oil world, it was mostly possible because they were monopolizing a discrete set of natural resources. Tech isn't that: Especially with AI lowering the barrier of entry to learning and generating code, tech is extremely resource-unconstrained. The main resource we fight over is just humans who have the ability and desire to spend money.
I also don't feel it will happen in "rapid order". These companies are too big. Its happening business-unit by business-unit. In the far future, these companies will still exist, just heavily optimized into the much smaller handful of units that still generate profit.
mzajc · 3h ago
intel.com's <title> says "Simplify Your AI Journey - Intel". Their description meta tag says "Deliver AI at scale across cloud, data center, edge, and client with comprehensive hardware and software solutions." Their frontpage mentions "AI" 9 times, but has only 3 mentions of "processor" and zero of "CPU".
I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem that way.
siva7 · 2h ago
They realized they can't compete on processors, so they're moving on to greener pastures. Like kodak back then.
gtirloni · 2h ago
Intel has traditionally been behind in software quality and discrete GPUs, I wonder if they are making this move out of desperation because nobody thinks "yay, Intel!" when both topics are mentioned.
coliveira · 4h ago
Yes, I find it greatly satisfying that these mega companies are turning away their most important asset: super qualified people capable of creating new products. They're basically betting on their own extinction.
wvenable · 2h ago
> Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed.
Is it though? There's a reason why Microsoft's JVM competitor is called ".NET". They were planning Windows .NET Server 2003, Office.NET, etc.
I don't think an inversion of the hype cycle, it's just another hype cycle exactly. I think, in fact, it's extremely comparable. I remember people joking about Pets.com -- just imagine buying your pet food online?!? Crazy stuff. AI is the same. It's hyped up massively, there will eventually be some kind of correction, and then it'll become the new normal.
armchairhacker · 1h ago
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective.
Not true. Ironically, the first exception I can think of is Github Copilot.
It is true these companies haven’t recouped anywhere near the $trillion they’ve invested in AI.
827a · 1h ago
Only a sentence later do I explicitly reference Github Copilot; yet they belong on the list because despite having every advantage a company could have, the resources of a megacorporation, all the source code in the world, the semi-independence of a smaller team; they still managed to produce a mediocre and uninteresting product.
But, again: I think that state for Copilot is totally fine for Github. That product state of "its there, its builtin, and its fine" is a fantastic and extremely efficient market to service.
zemo · 3h ago
> Apple has nothing
I always hear this but people use Siri all the time, and I think outside of talking to programmers, a lot of consumers probably consider that the level of AI they care about using. "is Siri really AI" seems like a real "is a hotdog a sandwich" question. Who cares? People eat hot dogs and talk to Siri.
It seems what Apple has less of is LLM products that cost enormous sums of money to make that people don't like using. Sure, they have a little of it, they fell flat on their faces with their news summaries thing last year and AppleVision was a nothingburger, but when it comes to "sinking huge amounts of money into deeply unpopular ventures", it seems to me that Apple's reluctance to deploy its largess here might be prudent. It seems like they're less exposed on the hype.
hnlmorg · 3h ago
I do wish Siri was a little more intelligent to be honest.
I use Siri when I need a fast, distraction-free, action. Which makes it perfect when driving or performing other tasks where my hands a busy and/or I cannot put my attention on my phones LCD screen.
The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction.
I'd love it if Siri was smart enough to differentiate between:
- an automation request. eg setting an alarm or ringing a contact. The kind of interaction what you wouldn't want to offload to a 3rd party but is the kind of interaction where you don't need vast datastores of training.
- and an open-ended question. eg What time are Oasis playing in London tonight? Who was the 23rd President of Germany? What are the rules of Dodgeball? these sort of things are less confidential and don't require handing control of your phone to a 3rd party.
And I'd love it if Siri automatically offloaded from their local AI to ChatGPT (or whatever) when the latter was identified. That should be opt in, but when opted in, it should be automatic. I shouldn't have to consent each time after I've opted in.
No comments yet
vouwfietsman · 2h ago
I'm not sure if you're in a country that has already received some upgrade, but over here in Europe Siri is seen as a funny tamagochi that sometimes misunderstands and thinks its needed and is then quickly told to shut up.
I think the last time I talked to anyone about siri we were wondering why it was still so bad, now that we have LLMs.
siva7 · 2h ago
I've never seen people in europe regularly using siri except to bash how bad it is. I would be really interested taking a look at the secret usage stats of siri in europe compared to other regions.
hbn · 1h ago
Do I have any fellow Duolingo users here?
I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you fluent, etc etc
But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good starting point and something to keep you consistent every day. As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish.
That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely overhauled their curriculum with AI slop. The stories are bland at best and confusing at first, the questions are brain-dead simple, it'll have sentences and questions that I've confirmed with native speakers are confusing/incorrect, it's riddled with mistakes, and somehow they even broke the TTS so it'll pronounce things wrong. One of the character voices consistently can't say a couple of letters, like it pronounces all the 'd's with 'v's or something. I can't believe they actually shipped it in this state, they completely broke it overnight. At this rate if it's not fixed by the time my annual subscription is up to renew, I will be cancelling.
It's absolutely the worst AI slopification of any product I use, and the CEO and everyone who pushed to ship it needs to be fired.
camel_Snake · 1h ago
going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me.
Clozemaster is much more rudimentary but I do like how they use AI - there's a single button that gives you an AI grammatical summary of the translation and calls out any idioms or grammatical conventions in the target language compared to your native one.
Bought the lifetime license but it's free to use, you just get a limited amount of flash cards a day. If you wait until christmas there's generally a big discount on the lifetime license.
insane_dreamer · 2h ago
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective
The coding agents, CC, Cursor, etc. are quite good and useful.
827a · 1h ago
I explicitly said "big tech companies"; that's FAANG, which does not include OpenAI, Anthropic, Anysphere, or their kin.
insane_dreamer · 58m ago
with a $500B valuation, I'd say that OpenAI is now "BigTech"
827a · 18m ago
Not by any traditionally-recognized definition, but I'll certainly admit them into the club once they go public.
bongodongobob · 4h ago
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it.
Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and workflows blah blah."
Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify the choices.
Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't even needed.
I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.
coliveira · 4h ago
It's very funny that for pretty much any use case of LLMs, they're either too expensive or too incapable or both! There may be a few uses that make sense, but it seems to be incredibly hard to find the balance.
bbor · 2h ago
It blows my mind how many computing professionals truly think this is the case. It doesn't take a tech blogger to draw a trend line through the advancements of the past 2.5 years and see where we're headed. The fact that grifters abound on the edges of the industry is a sign of the radical importance of this unexpected breakthrough, not an indication that it's all a grift.
To engage in some armchair psychology, I think this is in large part due to a natural human tendency for stability (which is all the stronger for those in relatively powerful positions like us SWEs). Knowing that believing A would imply that your mortgage is in jeopardy, your retirement plan up-ended, and your entire career completely obscured beyond a figurative singularity point makes believing ~A a very appealing option...
gtirloni · 2h ago
Where's your evidence though? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
moi2388 · 3h ago
The difference is that I can’t sell elasticsearch in my company, but I can sell an LLM.
Yeah, don’t ask..
827a · 3h ago
I think there's a lot of really interesting (and profitable) AI products out there. And: there's so many more that can be built. We're only scratching the surface of what the industry has already invented can do. Not in an "AGI Inevitable" capacity; what we have, today, with more context engineering, better user interfaces, better products with deeper AI-first thinking, etc.
My point was more-so that FAANG isn't even scratching the surface; they're punching it bloody with their fists while yelling "look at all this AI we have, see dad we can't be disrupted we're the disrupters we're the disrupters".
It reminds me a lot of Xbox over the past six years, so much so that I think Xbox is a canary for how many business units in these companies will look in five more years.
pornel · 10m ago
There's a lot of "promising" and "interesting" stuff, but I'm not seeing anything yet that actually works reliably.
Sooner or later (mostly sooner) it becomes apparent that it's all just a chatbot hastily slapped on top of an existing API, and the integration barely works.
A tech demo shows your AI coding agent can write a whole web app in one prompt. In reality, a file with 7 tab characters in a row completely breaks it.
codingdave · 4h ago
I've been in a three different scenarios where I worked for independent companies under the umbrella of a large parent organization. In all 3, the leadership left or was fired, and the remainder of the company was merged into a division of the parent company.
The product quality went to shit in all 3 scenarios. There were different reasons and nuances to them all, but all 3 boiled down to one common factor. Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
They all turned into political battles at the leadership level, low morale at the product level, and decent jobs for the engineers as long as they were happy just doing what they were told. For the customers, everything just stagnated. It took years before all the politics sorted themselves out, people chose whether to stay or go, and you got product leadership running who could balance it all out without the baggage of the merger.
So as a Github customer, this does not have me running for the hills. We won't lose functionality. But we won't gain anything we truly desire either - we'll see new features come out that relate to Microsoft's dreams, not our own. At a strategic level, I'd start telling my teams to be sure not to get vendor-locked to any Github features, and always have a migration plan at least conceptualized so that once we see where it all really goes, we are well prepared to either stay or go depending on exactly what Microsoft does in the next couple years.
bsimpson · 4h ago
From a product POV, GitHub seems like a solved problem. It's been working well-enough with the current feature set for over a decade, with many companies building themselves on top of its stack. If they stagnate in MS bureaucracy but keep the lights on for push/pull/PRs, that's probably good enough for most people until something completely changes how software is made.
cnst · 2h ago
The problem is that someone still has to polish their resume when working for GitHub (aka resume-driven development), so, they're actually making GitHub worse now:
> Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0 in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here.
I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)
mynameisvlad · 2h ago
ADO is just the rebranded Visual Studio Team Services which is just the rebranded Team Foundation Service (which itself is the cloud version of ADO/VST/TF Server). It isn't really integrated in Azure aside from the naming, and it is intended to be more of a Jira/Bitbucket/etc replacement than GitHub.
drysart · 2h ago
Azure DevOps is.... okay. It's functional, and it's not really anything unique or innovative; but it never really strived to be anything like that. It started out as the online, service-based version of Team Foundation Server and was very clearly being cultivated into turning into "Github, but integrated into the Azure ecosystem" and that particular strategic need evaporated for Microsoft when they acquired the actual Github.
Azure DevOps went into zombie mode basically the same day the acquisition closed; I don't think it's received any new features since 2018.
martin-t · 2h ago
I've heard this story so many times.
1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.).
2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work.
3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed.
How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.
rjbwork · 1h ago
>How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Funny you should ask this. A co-worker was unironically glazing monarchies and suggested some books to me when we were drinking at dinner Friday. I was disgusted, tbh. But do not underestimate the desire of people to be ruled and told how to think and act.
martin-t · 1h ago
When I encounter this, it's usually a belief that a strong and implicitly good leader is needed so that he can somehow remove/punish all the bad people.
What the people don't get is that:
- Truly good people are incredibly rare.
- Those who are prone to abusing power will only show their true colors when actually given power.
- Power corrupts, everyone has head this. But it also attracts people who are corrupt in the first place. And of course, they will lie and pretend to be good to get that power.
- What about succession? Even if their fav leader was actually good and was so "pure" he fathered (most such promoters of this assume a man) only good children, each generation the amount of his "good genes" they'd have would halve (assuming no Habsburgcest).
---
IMO the cause is people knowing they are largely powerless in the grand scheme of things (barring self-sacrifice and violence which they are increasingly indoctrinated against) but this learned helplessness is so internalized they can't conceive of a better solution than giving even more of their power away.
JohnTHaller · 6h ago
GitHub will now fall under Microsoft's CoreAI team, which give some indication of GitHub's purpose and direction going forward.
layer8 · 5h ago
Some more indication:
> “Just like how Bill [Gates] had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory,” said Parikh [the CoreAI team lead].
That Bill Gates analogy seems rather far-fetched, though.
jatins · 4h ago
Had to read that sentence a couple of times -- what does it even mean? It's possible Verge may have butchered it
layer8 · 4h ago
The quote actually appears to be recited from an earlier Verge article [0]:
> Parikh, who transformed Facebook engineering teams, now leads a transformation that he describes as building an AI “agent factory” for Microsoft’s customers.
> ”I described this agent factory idea to Bill [Gates], not knowing that he and Paul [Allen] described Microsoft 50 years ago as the software factory,” Parikh says. “Just like how Bill had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory.”
Someone who expect to make a lot of money selling said Agents.
radicalbyte · 4h ago
It sounds like the kind of plan which would come from the Xbox division.
bgwalter · 5h ago
And the prompt engineers running the agents will be sitting in Bangalore. Or perhaps outsourced to Infosys.
Microsoft under Gates at least produced real things. I wonder when Apple gets an Indian CEO to facilitate outsourcing.
fragmede · 4h ago
It was the American CEO Tim Cook which spent some $250 billion investing in training in China, which is more than the Marshall plan (inflation adjusted) or the CHIPS act, for outsourcing the factories to China in which their products get produced.
coliveira · 4h ago
But that $250 billion gave them $3T in market cap, so it was a fantastic investment.
jcgrillo · 4h ago
evidence of severely advanced brain rot
IshKebab · 5h ago
You mean all of Microsoft's direction? Look at how VSCode changelogs have morphed from editing features to 90% AI.
rs186 · 2h ago
Thank you, this does not get discussed enough on HN. I used to look forward to monthly releases of VSCode and actually read the changelog carefully to see what new features/enhancements I could make use of. These days I just glance and ignore it completely -- almost everything is Copilot, MCP blahblah. Such a disappointment.
You would think with all the AI magic, they would deliver more "core editor" features/enhancement. No, just more Copilot.
jhallenworld · 1h ago
Awesome, this is creating an opportunity for a new text editor. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
moomin · 5h ago
I can confidently predict that the breakout dev tool in the next few years will have LLM features, but won’t have forgotten stuff like editing features. As Claude Code has already demonstrated, you do t even need an editor for good LLM integration.
No comments yet
dathinab · 5h ago
right ... wtf
We could barely convince the reviewers on the last review that using GitHub is okay as long as we take some extra steps, I guess we should prepare to switch to a different platform with the next review.
whimsicalism · 5h ago
reviewers?
layer8 · 5h ago
Auditors?
dathinab · 5h ago
yes auditors from a security audit
whimsicalism · 4h ago
you could barely convince your auditors that using github was okay? well, my opinion of security audits is reaffirmed
dathinab · 1h ago
we are EU based and have besides other attorney customers.
Cloud Act and more then just one or two cases of the US engaging in industry espionage against their allies(1) makes it a high legal liability to use more or less any service from a US company even if it's in the EU and a EU daughter company
On GitHub we only have some code, which always anyway goes through additional testing and analysis before hitting production, this is why it's barely okay. No code from GitHub directly goes to production.
The only reason we ever where on GitHub is because we didn't always had sensitive customers and switching CI over is always a pain.
So I don't know if imply them being incompetent for allowing GitHub or for wanting to not allow it, but both point have very good reasons.
(1): And I mean cases before Trump, the US (as in top government, not people) was always a highly egoistic, egocentric ally which never hesitated to screw over their allays when it came to economical benefits. The main difference is that in the past the US cared (quite a bit) about upholding a image of "traditional" values like honesty, integrity and reliability. Especially when it would affect their trade routes.
anileated · 4h ago
Security audits are just theater. If they were not, you could not ever convince them that using a platform feeding unlicensed source (including apparently from private repositories) to their commercial LLM is ever a pass.
dathinab · 34m ago
> Security audits are just theater.
It really depends on you auditor, audit approach and goals.
There are many audit companies which have a "under the hand" reputation of not properly looking and being easy to convince that you are secure, naturally at a above average audit cost (same but worse btw. for certificates showing compatibility with industry standards).
So if the audit was paid for by the company themself you can't trust it at all (which doesn't mean the company wanted to hide anything, this "bad" audit companies also tend finish the audit fast. So sometimes companies go for it, even if they don't have anything to hide).
Similar sometimes audit companies ask if they can audit you, this is for boosting their publicity using your name. This can easily turn into a "one hand washes the other" situation where they won't overlook massive issues, but still judge issues leniently.
Lastly there are some automated partial audit services which scan you public APIs/websites etc. Realistically they tend to be kinda dump, and might tell you they find a medium issue because (no joke) your REST API allows PUT and DELETE (1). Still I now take them a bit more serious after they pointed out, that there was a configuration error of a web gateway leading to some missing security headers.
(1: There is some history behind that, it's still dump for 90% of REST APIs)
Anyway, the situations so far are security audits which are at least 50% theater. BUT if a huge customers fully pays a audit company with a good/strict reputation then it often really isn't a security theater and can be quite a bad surprise if you company isn't prepared (because you have to fix so much). Like such reviews tend to not only be focused at your deployment or code but the whole software live cycle, including fun questions like "what measurements have you taken in case one of your developers tries to inject a supply chain attack" (which to be clear don't need to have perfect answers, just good enough, and most importantly clear and well documented).
marcosdumay · 3h ago
From a company with a long history of leaking private data... That AFAIK never even claimed to have fixed their side of the Solar Winds issue...
whimsicalism · 3h ago
from private repos? they explicitly say they do not
Absolute theater. They do nothing to validate that you are compliant with whatever ISO cert you're pursuing. They make you install a root cert on your macbook and they say that's good enough to ensure compliance. You just attest that you don't do stupid shit like committing directly to master or testing in production and they believe you
dathinab · 27m ago
> compliant with whatever ISO cert you're pursuing
ISO cert compatibility audits are very different from a proper security audit.
And weather they do anything to check if depends on which you high, many of the slightly more expensive ones have the reputation to be "fast" and "overlook most issues".
But that doesn't apply to all security audits (but most audits for ISO compatibility, like really it's bad).
Anyway see my way to long answer about the on a sibling comment.
UK-AL · 48m ago
People test in production in all the time via Canary releases.
6thbit · 4h ago
They were already under CoreAI team. The verge has amended the article with a footnote correction to note that.
cnst · 2h ago
This is kinda pretty ridiculous.
Isn't GitHub's entire visibility and pervasiveness is entirely due to the OSS?
So, now they're basically saying to OSS, "so long, and thanks for all the fish"?
chrisco255 · 2h ago
Github as a platform itself though, isn't open source.
paxys · 5h ago
The industry has collectively decided that AI is the future of all of software development, so this move shouldn't be a surprise.
the8472 · 3h ago
Commoditize your complement.
martin-t · 2h ago
When all public code including GPL and AGPL has been stolen and plagiarized already and the fabled artificial intelligence is nowhere to be seen, stealing all the private and proprietary code will surely make all the difference.
It probably won't but reselling the code to its owners is still good business. Convince people that statistical models of copyrighted work (which can reproduce said copyrighted work both verbatim or disguised) are A"I" and sadly, somehow, most people seem OK with it.
shortrounddev2 · 3h ago
I just switched from Github to Gitlab. For anyone who is interested in doing the same, but doubtful because of the effort required: Gitlab has a pretty good migration tool. You authenticate against your github account and gitlab will import all your repos for you. We've been using gitlab at work for a bit and the CI/CD took a little getting used to but I'm overall happy with Gitlab.
Some people think a github presence is important for their personal portfolios/careers, but I've personally never seen any evidence that a recruiter or anyone has ever actually looked at my github profile. Plus I can just put gitlab on there instead now
CharlieDigital · 9m ago
It's not that simple; their CI workflow architectures are completely different. The way projects and permissions work are completely different. The entire way GitLab organizes the taxonomy is different.
davepeck · 5h ago
Am I the only one who found Dohmke’s communication style to be… buzzword forward? For a company whose roots were in pragmatic engineering, I always felt that there was a too-heavy component of hype, particularly around AI, in pretty much every recent public announcement. Yet, despite all the rhetoric and GitHub’s superior position in the industry, they failed to capture the current AI editor market.
Structurally, it seems to make sense for GitHub to be part of Microsoft proper.
Perhaps this is a change for the better.
(PS: despite their “failure” to win hearts and minds, I do recommend giving Copilot in VSCode another look these days. Its agentic mode is very good and rapidly improving; I find it comparable to Claude Code at this point, particularly when paired with a strong model. Related to structure: I never quite understood the line between what parts of this GitHub made, and what parts of this the vscode and related Microsoft teams made.)
jatins · 4h ago
Not disregarding all the success MS has had under Nadella but his comms style is also extremely buzzword forward, so there was probably a _synergy_ there
justonceokay · 3h ago
CEOs of large companies are incapable of talking frankly. It is their purpose not to and how they reached their position.
paxys · 5h ago
Not too surprising considering how big a lead Github had in the generative coding space and how it managed to give it all up to a half dozen different companies over the last few years. An executive shakeup was long overdue.
smsm42 · 2h ago
For Microsoft it probably makes a lot of sense. For me as a Github user, I don't need "generative coding space" from github at all. That's not what I have been using it for for many years, and that's not what I want to use it for. I mean, Copilot is nice and useful but has preciously little to do with Github per se - if it didn't mention "Github" in the name, I'd see no relationship between the two at all. Code generation belongs in the IDE, Github is not an IDE - Github is what happens before and after the IDE, and keeping it separate works just fine. I'm afraid though Microsoft would try to push them together, and the result would be much worse than the starting point.
stogot · 5h ago
Heres the thing: it was a dev company with a side-AI business, but now Microsoft has signaled it wants an AI-GitHub with a dev-side business.
The features that will be prioritized will be AI not Git improvement
Eric_WVGG · 5h ago
Are there any improvements to be done to Git? It seems like kind of a solved problem, like word processors or spreadsheets… most “improvements” to those are diminishing returns.
I don't mean to sounds like an MS apologist, btw. I fully predicted and hoped for an exodus from Github to GitLab or something back when it got acquired — I'm from the Microsux generation.
hardwaregeek · 5h ago
They could add stacked diffs, large monorepo features (allow user to view a slice of a repo), better submodule support (why can’t I PR multiple repos at once?). A good desktop app that is faster than the slow web client.
bhl · 3h ago
Stacked diffs is a huge one, and also where improving git would also improve LLM workflows. The bottleneck after code generation is PR reviews, and stacked diffs help break down large PRs into more digest-able pieces.
If you help humans collaborate better, you help LLMs collaborate better.
siva7 · 2h ago
Well, how about rethinking your workflow instead of stacking branch after branch?
dmoy · 4h ago
> large monorepo features (allow user to view a slice of a repo)
I am reminded of this discussion between fb devs and git devs from 13 yrs ago:
but it could still be better for the truly gargantuan of code bases. Might not be worth it? Idk. Maybe with llm generated code churn, suddenly it becomes worth it? haha.
tedivm · 4h ago
The current desktop client is missing support for a bunch of important things too, like signing commits.
soulofmischief · 5h ago
Just to think of a few, I want improved project management tools, better code review UI/UX, and cost-competitive integrated serverless hosting a la Vercel. GitHub could be a true one-stop shop with a bit more polish.
tonyhart7 · 4h ago
they have azure and they have github, being an cloudflare or vercel competitor is should be default and easy to achieve
idk why they didn't do that tbh, all ingredients are already there
coke12 · 4h ago
This is arguably why it makes more sense to bring GH under the umbrella. Azure integrations need to happen yesterday. The future is full-stack batteries-included low-codeish platforms that are easy to launch with and then boom you're one click from the Azure product suite. Tighter integration is the only way to do this because of the inherent distribution advantages.
tonyhart7 · 1h ago
Yeah, MS just too focused on desktop office and Azure enterprise customers
they should have launched an "firebase like" and full web framework "next.js like" to convert that into long term azure customer like its no brainer they didn't want to create that and recycling Teams forever
this is also issue with game development, like I know MS is big at desktop dev but they don't have presence in game dev other than xbox game studios which is fine but they could create their own game engine with all resources they have. they could save both for their usage in their massive studio while also strengthening their development pipeline from code,game engine to azure
fleventynine · 5h ago
> Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
Github's workflow for stacked PRs is still terrible. There's plenty of room for improvement.
j1elo · 5h ago
Fix cross-organisation "Allow edits from maintainers" #5634
so if you create an Organization to host your project(s), now you cannot enable that maintainers make changes on incoming Pull Requests; something that is very useful and perfectly available for projects that live under a normal username.
bhandziuk · 5h ago
GitHub personal access tokens could be a lot better. It'd be nice if you could assign tokens at the team level or you have more fine grained control over token permissions.
And yes, I know "Fine Grained Tokens" exist but they don't seem to be usable almost anywhere and the fine grain level of control isn't actually very fine grained so they kind of suck.
taormina · 4h ago
Github Pages STILL don't have any sort of built-in analytics available. I shouldn't need GA or something else to track the basic website metrics when you absolutely know that MS and GH have been tracking these things the whole time. People have had issues up asking for this for literal years.
Github should have the product sophistication/complexity of Atlassian with the distribution advantage of Microsoft. Anything less is an execution failure IMO.
Not even mentioning AI, which is a huge opportunity also.
rawling · 3h ago
I've just been shunted from TFS Git (Azure DevOps?) to GitHub.
The PR UI is taking some getting used to.
Dev changes code near a comment I made? Comment is marked "Outdated" and hidden. If I open it, can I see what change they made next to the comment? Nope, I have to go find it manually!
It sorts X.Y below X.Y.A, X.Y.B etc. in the file listing.
When I select a file in the listing I'd like to just have that file open, not scroll to it in a list of all the changes.
The first PR I did showed a ton of changes that had already been merged from common history. I can see the merge commit you made, GitHub, I know you know none of these changes are actually being made.
Not caring if a required action hasn't run automatically. No "run" option, not even a "this isn't ever going to run", just "waiting for result".
Weirdly, showing the result of an action on the source branch, when it needs to pass on the merge commit.
I've not yet figured out how to require different approvers for different branches, although that one might be on my org settings. It's either the people in the codeowners file or any contributor?
No way to allow a ruleset to be bypassable while making the approvers still manually bypass it themselves. I want to know if I'm getting it wrong as much as I want to stop my junior devs messing up.
jennyholzer · 4h ago
Microsoft would create billions of dollars in productivity if they were willing to port Magit features to Github.
uticus · 5h ago
> Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
Of course there are - lots of room for improving data collection and advertising revenue streams!
shash · 5h ago
Maybe not too many improvements are needed anymore? And maybe it’s a viable business without being a “growth” space?
Nah…
trenchpilgrim · 5h ago
there's a lot that could be improved with conflict resolution and merge trains/stacked merges. see https://pijul.org for what's possible but not available in git
bee_rider · 4h ago
Git is already fine.
One idea though, they could make a nice site like SourceHut so you can host repos and browse through them.
I mean, Microsoft has this GitHub social media site with stickers and AI, but something serious for programmers could be nice too.
madeofpalk · 4h ago
Not to "git", but to repo/project management there's huge opportunities. They've been building a lot of this over the past few years.
esafak · 5h ago
Incorporate jujitsu, and code-based CI. YAML sucks %^#0
delusional · 5h ago
> Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
That's absolutely the right question to ask. If MS just left GitHub alone, it would be fine for open source projects for years to come. The enterprise side is a little different, there they still have a lot of work to do to round out some of their more advanced features.
What worries me isn't that they stop investing. What worries me is that they actively destroy the current project while turning it into AI garbage.
ElijahLynn · 5h ago
Do you mean git or GitHub?
x0x0 · 4h ago
Their CI / script runner tool is still total garbage. Starting with the rampant security holes (oh, make sure you pin everything you use by hash, which essentially nobody does; what was that about secure by default rather than secure by extra effort again?) and following with the only way to test it is to deploy over and over.
timeon · 2h ago
Git? Maybe not. Faster front-end would be decent improvement.
Ar-Curunir · 5h ago
While git itself can be improved upon, the GitHub is not git; there are many improvements to GitHub that people have been requesting for many years now.Also, they could even just not make it worse and that would be a welcome change from their recent strategy
packetlost · 5h ago
GitHub Actions is hot fucking garbage basically everywhere. Coming from GitLab I hate every single minute of dealing with GH Actions.
smcin · 4h ago
It's murky what Github's priorities going forward as part of CoreAI will be, and whether it will become even more of a subliminal marketing machine/ content source for AI codegen...
GitHub has (only) $2bn direct revenues (2024; subscriptions + presumably per-usage billing of features like GitHub Actions) but also generates revenue via Copilot, Marketplace (selling tools and integrations).
What are Microsoft CoreAI's revenues? surely >> GH's direct revenues. Hence, GH is likely to become a platform for pushing all sorts of AI revenue streams on its users. I wonder how Microsoft sees that, by segment.
leoc · 4h ago
I've seen enough: as the recognised authority and designated responsible person ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525256 I'm officially recognising this as the final end of 2010s Cool Microsoft.
> 74 points by leoc on April 3, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler
> Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).
Historical debate may now begin.
pm90 · 4h ago
Unsurprising but its a terrible move.
Github at its core is a software lifecycle management product. To keep it running requires skillsets that are much much different from that of Gen AI/ML/whatever. Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra corporate political play and not something thats in the best interests of the users or the community. I expect to see a lot of the “legacy Github” folks slowly leave and be replaced by MS/Azure folks (gross). In the short to medium term this is probably gonna affect the stability of the system (its already pretty bad with several outages every month, including silent outages).
jennyholzer · 4h ago
> Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra corporate political play and not something thats in the best interests of the users or the community.
It's hard for me to see anything Microsoft does as something other than an intra-corporate political play.
reversengineer · 6h ago
GitLab is like, really good. No need to put your codebase in the "cloud."
Catbert59 · 5h ago
GitLab is great - but super fat. The performance will suffer heavily if you don't give it the resources it wants (all RAM you can find, lol).
If you only need Git plus project tracking Gitea is super mature. It runs happily on small VPS.
kstrauser · 5h ago
I prefer Forgejo, but both it and Gitea support actions like GitHub's. You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100% in-house, for free. I adore it for personal projects.
mdaniel · 5h ago
> Gitea support actions like GitHub's
Citation needed. nektos/act is for sure not "like GitHub's"
Sure, it's not identical, and no one claims it is. I think it's defensibly like them, though.
milliams · 5h ago
Yes it is. It's not identical, but it is "like" it.
cowmix · 4h ago
Most of my build config run on either platform (Gitea and Github) interchangeably.
dboreham · 4h ago
We've run Gitea actions (and contributed here and there) for a couple of years, since-by-side with Github. We host in containers on the Gitea side so there are some marginal differences as to what can be run in a job, but our experience has been very positive.
I want to signal boost the following quote from the URL above:
> Forgejo was created in October 2022 after a for profit company took over the Gitea project. It exists under the umbrella of a non-profit organization, Codeberg e.V. and is developed in the interest of the general public. In the year that followed, this difference in governance led to choices that made Forgejo significantly and durably different from Gitea.
If you take it at face value (at your peril), Gitea is about to start enshittification, while Forgejo will not at any point. My personal opinion, is that this is credible.
tonyhart7 · 4h ago
isn't that gitlab also for profit company???
notpushkin · 4h ago
They are, and always were. I think we’re more accustomized to it though, and know they won’t try to pull some shenanigans with the CE at least. I guess Codeberg didn’t trust Gitea in the same way when they decided to fork, but I think as a result Forgejo would be more sustainable, them being a nonprofit and all.
kriops · 2h ago
Gitlab didn’t arguably and allegedly hijack an established oss brand for their core product.
Catbert59 · 5h ago
Thank you for the recommendation.
Will move to that fork in one of my future private infrastructure reconstructions.
maxloh · 4h ago
Gitea's UI is ugly.
While GitHub and GitLab have dedicated design and front-end teams to improve their UI/UX, Gitea and Forgejo aren't large enough to reach that scale, even after Gitea became a company.
For example, look at the number of issues triaged with "UX" [0] or "UX Paper Cut" [1] on GitLab. It is an order of magnitude larger than you would find in any other FOSS option.
I bounced away from Gitea because they don't (last time I checked) have OIDC. I started[0] trying to revive-and-drive a previous PR[1] to add it, but the test failures are beyond my motivation to investigate and resolve.
OIDC = OpenID Connect, an open authentication protocol
mdaniel · 5h ago
In my experience, the "really good" is that it comes batteries included:
- completely docker based CI/CD which makes reasoning about what it's going to do easier than "read through some minified .js from some rando"
- they do have composable CI/CD akin to the GitHub Actions marketplace, but I haven't used it as much in anger to speak to how valuable it is versus "competitive checkbox feature"
- built-in Terraform State, so no more S3 + Dynamo
- highly configurable JWT claim curation for ease of OIDC based access from the pipelines
- good integration between the platform and multiple Kubernetes clusters
- related to that, a strong "review environment" setup
- they were also hinting at being a Sentry replacement, but regrettably I had to switch back to GitHub before that came out of preview so I don't this second know where it stands
dusanh · 4h ago
I can map most of the list but I can't recall what would be the "review environment setup" What did you mean by that?
mdaniel · 1h ago
Pedantically I think GLCI treats every environment the same, but by review environments I meant "disposable copies of the app such that one could interact with it during merge request review" e.g. https://mr-8675.example.com corresponding to /example/-/merge_request/8675 that would be provisioned when the MR was opened and torn down when the MR was merged or closed
I believe it aligns with this behavior in GitHub: <https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/deploy/configure-...> with the distinction that it appears from the GH docs that they think of that as "needs administrative approval" whereas GLCI thinks of it as "if the pipeline has permissions to run provisioning, off to the races, because names are free"
GitLab introduced the "deployment tier" I think as a means of communication to other users about the importance of the environment, but control over what credentials were made available to CI/CD was always controlled via <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/environments/#limit-the-environme...> which partially explains why the only reason to involve a repository administrator would be to install or update a secret needed to deploy successfully
“Really good” under which metric? Because it is slow, even more confusing after the terrible sidebar redesign and, to quote a famous author, its usage does not spark any joy.
Codeberg and gitea, on the other hand, feel great, like early Github. Fast and simple, instead of a product that’s adding feature on top of half-baked feature to capture the sweet corporate $$$.
oefrha · 5h ago
Really good if you go by a feature checklist, probably. A bloated clutter of more or less working features, checking enterprise boxes.
darkwater · 5h ago
I have to agree. I recently joined a company using Gitlab, coming from years of GitHub only. I have a soft spot for underdogs but I already found many features with bugs (especially related to hierarchy and inheritance) that makes you feel "meh".
IshKebab · 5h ago
It's... ok. But many of the really useful features are paid. E.g. merge trains or mandatory reviews.
I also don't think "it's open source!" is a huge differentiator because it's enormous, difficult to deploy from source and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero.
I think Forgejo is probably a way better option at this point even if it is less mature. It's written in Go so way easier to deploy and edit. And none of the features are paid.
I do like Gitlab but... it's not amazing. I liked Phabricator more (except for its lack of integrated CI).
quesera · 3h ago
> written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero
That's a silly thing to say.
IshKebab · 3h ago
It isn't. Ruby lacks static typing, and Rails heavily uses generated identifiers, which means navigating a huge codebase like Gitlab is basically impossible unless it's your full time job (or you get lucky). I've tried. I kept finding methods that - based on a grep - were never called from anywhere, and there's no IDE support for something like Find All References.
I'm sure if it was your full time job you'd eventually learn the codebase, but there's no way you can just dip in and add a feature unless you really persevere.
But I did manage to add a few features to the gitlab-runner (used for CI) - because it's written in Go, and Go has static types and pretty great IDE support these days. Night and day.
I've also added a few features to VSCode which is a similarly huge codebase. Again it's written in Typescript which has static types and good IDE support. It would have been effectively impossible if that wasn't the case.
quesera · 2h ago
This does not match my experience at all, and I think your "near zero" claim is silly.
> difficult to deploy from source
I won't argue with you here. There are a lot of moving pieces in a Rails deployment. This isn't different from most web app frameworks, but it is difficult.
That said, I've never worked on a Rails app where deployment was any more difficult than a variation on `bin/deploy v123 production`, because I wrote that script and it works 100% of the time.
> and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero
But this is still silly. You just don't know Rails or Ruby well, and don't want to learn them. Fine, but if you hadn't already made that decision, you would find the solution simple enough. No judgement intended -- different framework/language paradigms fit different people differently.
Rails has great IDE support also. Static typing can be a useful language feature, but a lack of same has not ever, in my experience, made it more difficult to understand real-world code.
There is a lot to love about Go too, don't get me wrong. But I would guess that the number of random developers who could drop in and be immediately productive in a Ruby/Rails app, vs a Go webapp, is basically equivalent. The overlap of projects where both would be highly appropriate choices is a bit thin.
[I hire into Ruby/Rails jobs regularly. I often hire senior developers with no Ruby/Rails background, but I do not hire people into these positions who are not open to learning. It takes a senior dev (from the C/Algol family) one day to learn Ruby, and (from a web dev background) a week or less to learn Rails. I have never seen a failure.
I also hire into Go jobs almost as frequently. The hiring criteria is a bit different (less emphasis on web awareness), but I do find it easier to teach Go to a Ruby dev, than Ruby to a Go dev. Make of that what you will.]
mdaniel · 1h ago
I am not trying to start trouble, or a heated debate, but I did want to say that my experience was the same as OPs and I am also coming from a static typing background so that likely explains my having a similar experience and expectations. I did for sure use RubyMine for attempting a change, so not "vim and yolo" but rather world class tooling and trying to discern where any random symbol came from was oppressively hard
But I was responding specifically to "in Ruby, so the chance of being able to actually modify it ... is near zero", which does not address the real issue.
It's perfectly possible to write simple, clear code in Ruby (and Rails!), but I'll concede that GitLab is not the best example of that.
If OP had said ~"... and the GitLab codebase is large and can be difficult to navigate and make drop-in contributions to ... also I have an aversion to dynamically-typed languages" :) ... then I wouldn't have bothered commenting.
yoran · 5h ago
I feel like all new AI tools only integrate with GitHub though, like Claude Code. We're actually thinking of moving from GitLab to GitHub, just for this reason.
mbonnet · 4h ago
In some industries, all the tools you actually need (say, MISRA checking) all work with GitLab out of the box.
tonyhart7 · 4h ago
same reason why we didn't leave github yet
most SaaS tools only have github integration which is sucks
felixgallo · 5h ago
Claude works great with forgejo/gitea. It's all just git, after all.
ectospheno · 2h ago
Every place I write code I use whatever GitHub like thing the admin installed. They all work well enough.
At home I prefer fossil. It isn’t without rough edges but for the small developer headcount stuff I do it is quite lovely.
shayief · 3h ago
I'll plug another option Gitpatch, however it's pretty early beta and not open-source yet, but most likely will be under AGPL at some point. It has built-in patch stacks (aka stacked PRs) and probably faster than any other Git host out there.
disclosure: I'm the author.
ElijahLynn · 5h ago
GitLab has a ton of options, And I find myself a bit overwhelmed by the user interface. It really needs a UX lead to simplify and create a better information architecture.
maxloh · 4h ago
It is rumored that Gitlab is about to be aquired. It may not still be open-source after that.
mbesto · 5h ago
For a couple grand a year, not having to worry about upgrades, backups, hosting cost, etc. is 100% worth it.
jmclnx · 5h ago
I went there last year due to Microsoft's destruction of github.
mdaniel · 5h ago
And, if you don't like something there's a very good chance you could be the change you want to see - they have a pretty welcoming contribution culture. Even if you don't want to change something, being able to read the source for it goes a long way toward aligning your understanding of the behavior, and that's not a diss on their usually pretty good documentation
CSMastermind · 5h ago
GitLab is wonderful but none of the AI tooling supports it and it's expensive.
em-bee · 5h ago
none of the AI tooling supports it
i consider that a feature
dcchambers · 5h ago
> No need to put your codebase in the "cloud."
Yes and no. If all you want is a remote git server then no, there's not. But there's plenty of legitimate reasons to use a SaaS tool like GitHub.
moffkalast · 5h ago
Gitlab is like the SAP of git, something for bloated big corporations. I've never seen a single FOSS repo there.
It seems somewhat popular for developers who want to avoid github. Gnome and KiCAD also use it.
elAhmo · 6h ago
This was inevitable and going towards the direction, but it is sad to see this part of CoreAI division. Copilot and other AI initiatives should not be the primary driver of GitHub's vision.
__turbobrew__ · 5h ago
Github may have more value as the largest software training corpus in the world than as a paid VCS, and Microsoft gets to uniquely utilize that as they will have non rate limited internal APIs and/or dumps to train on.
AlexandrB · 5h ago
I assume they already had those APIs - Github was already owned by Microsoft. By prioritizing AI feature over the core experience it's possible that Github stops being the largest software training corpus in the future.
tonyhart7 · 4h ago
I assume they would make other major company to have an github integration out of the box
so it would be feeding off itself from "vibe coder" an have an singularity generated corpus around AI tooling
tremon · 4h ago
This -- Github's future is as a training source for Microsoft's AI products, and as a honeypot for collecting more training data.
martin-t · 2h ago
You're looking at it from a developer's POV. Your goals are a quality product that helps you with your work.
Microsoft's goal is to make money by making software or ~~selling~~ renting services. You are a cost center.
And what do managers do to cost centers? They outsource them, either to artificial "intelligence" or actual Indians.
By plagiarizing stolen code, disregarding its original license, they hope to make the former actually work.
DevDiv was arguably the place where GitHub would have ended up had it become integrated earlier, so it makes sense that it would end up there.
iamdamian · 4h ago
Forgejo is a really great self-hosted alternative to GitHub.
If you've wondered about hosting your own version of GitHub but have worried it's too hard to set up, I'd encourage you to spend even a few minutes spinning an instance up with Docker Compose and poking around.
It's not hard to imagine an alternative universe where Github is a steward of innovation for both git and the code review process; alas, this is not the world we live in.
rickette · 5h ago
Lots of comments here remind me of the time GitHub was purchased by Microsoft. It would be the dead of GitHub. While in fact it got better: GitHub Actions (pretty neat CI system) happend under Microsoft. Free private repos happend under Microsoft.
Now this time it could be different. But last time wasn't that bad imho.
benterix · 5h ago
Gitlab had their CI/CD a few years earlier, Github had no other option. As to which one feels more productive, that's up to personal tastes, for me Gitlab's option seems far more polished.
krainboltgreene · 2h ago
Github Actions was announced in OCT 2018, the acquisition deal close was announced a few days later.
nicce · 4h ago
Has there been any reports whether GitHub actually makes any money?
mcrk · 4h ago
I feel like it doesn't matter at this point as long as MS valuation goes up it's all worth the costs. We're living in the VC economy :D
28304283409234 · 3h ago
Github is the trainingmaterial for AI. It's a resource, not a product to make money with.
nicce · 3h ago
Is there evidence that GitHub has successfully prevented other AI companies from cloning open-source projects?
everfrustrated · 3h ago
Microsoft doesn't disclose much but there were headlines in 2022 saying they were now at $1B annual recurring revenue.
Now with copilot I'd be surprised if they weren't profitable
tikhonj · 5h ago
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, etc, etc.
zzo38computer · 3h ago
It did not entirely get better; some things may have improved and some things may have been made worse.
Private repositories is not a feature I use (if I want the files to be private, I will not send them to Microsoft or to someone else, unless they are the intended recipient).
I use GitHub Actions to automatically assign issues to myself,
I think they have changed the HTML in many worse ways; some functions require JavaScripts, etc. They also made mandatory 2FA, and setting it up does not work properly. (I can use the API to get around both issues, for now.)
I moved to GitLab a year or so ago. It’s been great, I actually prefer GitLab ci
LeifCarrotson · 5h ago
I did as well! No issues any worse than people using habitually using "github" to mean "the remote git repository in the cloud".
I expect this will continue indefinitely until the product becomes little more than an AI training corpus and genericized trademark, similar to how our Xerox machines at work are actually made by Brother, while Xerox the actual brand has faded into obsolescence.
I will note that we don't use many of the CI/CD/issue tracking/wiki/etc. features, though both Github and Gitlab offer them. I'm sure they have their own particular quirks that may be a hassle to migrate between and have people relearn. I prefer to keep those tools separate, allowing the git repository be almost exclusively a git repository and spinning up other tools as needed.
yoyohello13 · 2h ago
We use GitLab ci, issue tracking, dep scanning, everything at work and I can report it is amazing. All self hosted and never had any issues. I’ve got our entire deployment process setup through GitLab ci and it’s been rock solid. It’s $150/month per seat for the ultimate tier, but it’s 100% been worth it for us.
alabhyajindal · 2h ago
Doesn't GitLab suffer from the same problem of pushing AI? They have many AI features, and position themselves as "The most-comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform".
Xiol32 · 2h ago
As the kids would say, Gitlab CI is the GOAT.
moderation · 3h ago
Interested to see what East River Source Control [0] are going to build on jujutsu. Not affiliated in anyway but keen to see a GitHub competitor break out to scale, adoption.
I made the decision a few months back to go all in on self-hosting, and my own infrastructure. At least once a week I run into something that makes me realize I made the right decision. It's that time of the week again.
hanklazard · 5h ago
What are you using for git repos?
icepat · 4h ago
Forgejo
apexalpha · 3h ago
>Microsoft’s CoreAI team is a new engineering group led by former Meta executive Jay Parikh. It includes Microsoft’s platform and tools division and Dev Div teams, with a focus on building an AI platform and tools for both Microsoft and its customers.
This is so confusing. The "CoreAI" team is apparently doing everything except the core of AI, which is LLMs.
mixdup · 6h ago
Surprised it took this long. I am working with Github sales team on straightening out our Github organization at my new job and it was weird to get a Zoom meeting invite from a company that has been part of Microsoft for nearly 10 years
nashashmi · 5h ago
Seven years. And that is because they didn’t want to mess with it like all the other acquisitions.
delfinom · 4h ago
Would probably help if Teams wasn't such a clusterfuck. God help you if your other user is in a sovereign microsoft cloud on their desktop client.
I do not think of Github as primarily an AI product or service. That Microsoft does is certainly alarming.
I still feel that there's no competitor I like as much. But that may not matter.
JCM9 · 5h ago
Not surprising. The OpenAI partnership is fading. The GenAI as a product space overall is looking a bit frothy and house of cards-ish. GitHub is a strong product that is ripe for GenAI features that make it more interesting.
Like it or not this makes sense as a business move. Microsoft is positioning itself for the next phase of the current AI hype cycle where standalone AI products will struggle and the “it’s a feature not a product” phase will take hold.
bionhoward · 5h ago
Can’t GitHub just stick to its core business instead of rushing into AI slop? The growth of vibe coding absolutely already benefits GitHub if they maintain the core business.
If they fuck up the core business rushing into AI, then aren’t they likely to get replaced by something else that does the core thing better?
Not to mention all the earnest worries about them reading private codebases to train AI nobody asked for.
You’d think being a trusted source of truth for many critical codebases would be “enough”
joduplessis · 4h ago
I'm starting to really detest the AI-everywhere thing. You're starting to feel it absolutely everywhere - good products turning shit just to capitalize on the hype.
nlawalker · 6h ago
I think many of the concerns are valid, but I'm not sure I'd read too much into the name of the absorbing org. Org names at Microsoft end up being misaligned and unintuitive all the time.
MerrimanInd · 6h ago
While that may be true, I don't think the specific name of the team at Microsoft absorbing GitHub is what's concerning users. I can't think of a team up there that wouldn't be a red flag in this case.
odo1242 · 5h ago
I’m pretty sure the fact that it’s the AI team is a pretty big factor. It would at least make sense if it was, for example, the Azure team.
pronik · 4h ago
Moving stuff to AI teams reminds me of Google stuffing Google+ in everything back in the day. Didn't go well.
egberts1 · 2m ago
Embrace, (check)
Engulf, (check)
...
Extinguish?
6thbit · 4h ago
> Correction, August 11th: GitHub was already part of CoreAI, but its leadership will no longer be under a single CEO.
So there is no real org change, just the CEO left and they didn't immediately replace him with a new one.
Vipitis · 5h ago
The GitHub website experience is already messed up with forcing Copilot into everything. But then asking for user feedback about new setting options for issues but denying any request for a user default.
This surely isn't going in any good direction. What's next ads in commits?
threetonesun · 4h ago
Not commits, but view your repo and see ads for all the paid tier services of the packages you use.
AtNightWeCode · 3h ago
I can't even use the Github site without hitting rate limits all the time.
And the hot take is that Azure devops, including git and the pipelines, is actually better. That Github yaml trash is just a pain.
maelito · 5h ago
Migrated to Codeberg a few months ago. Everything's good.
smsm42 · 2h ago
I wonder how long before Microsoft starts pushing people using Github into MS ecosystem - MS logins, showing MS AI down user's throats, pushing actions towards "works on Azure, don't care about the rest", etc. ?
yencabulator · 55m ago
Github logins are MS logins already, and being pushed to use all over the place.
Microsoft’s software quality is poor. Azure is extremely bloated and difficult to use, and I suspect only gained market traction due to bundling/anti-competitive tactics. Microsoft inserts tabloids news into its operating system.
GitHub is their most trusted “tech” brand by far, and it has their only successful AI product, Co-Pilot.
It’s almost inevitable that GitHub and all its products will be consumed with Microsoft bloat in the next 5 years as more and more products coast off the GitHub brand.
Expect tabloid news in GitHub products soon.
icy · 6h ago
Yeah, GitHub is cooked. Now's a good time to consider migrating to alternative forges like Tangled (https://tangled.sh; bit of a shameless plug, I'll admit. I'm the co-founder). We've got a more advanced PR flow, jujutsu change-id support and we just launched our in-house CI! https://blog.tangled.sh/ci
Long-term, we aim to be the new social coding platform, collectively built in the open.
dijit · 5h ago
Tangled is a pretty cool idea, but I'm sorry to say that I'm hoping Gerrit gets a resurgence.
It fits my "do one thing, do it well" philosophy as it doesn't have opinions about CI, Issue trackers or even how you view the code online.
I'll admit that it's a nasty bastard to set up properly though, and the options for viewing repositories are universally terrible when not bundled with a code-review system (like Gitea, Github and Gitlab). Alas.
zdw · 4h ago
There are .rpm/.deb packages for Gerrit that make installation/upgrades pretty simple.
The fact that it stores everything in files on disk (no databases except for caches that can be regenerated) makes backup/restore and replication a breeze compared to many other more complicated systems.
icy · 4h ago
Yeah, fair enough. Gerrit is solid software but it’s really just a review tool: not an alternative code forge — which we’re aiming to be.
smcin · 4h ago
You say "forge" and stuff like "collectively built in the open"?
Do you consider the repos "public", "private" or what?
You have a very short privacy policy [https://tangled.sh/privacy], but no guarantees of AI-bot-scraping protection. What if anything is your users' expectation of privacy of their repos against third parties, including malicious ones? Really you need to set that out clearly in your privacy policy.
icy · 4h ago
Not sure I understand your first comment. Repositories are currently public only since we’re built on the AT Protocol, which doesn’t yet have private data (in the works!).
Thanks for the feedback re: the privacy policy. It’s still actively being improved and we
take a lot of effort to protect against AI scrapers. I’ll update the policy verbiage to include that.
smcin · 4h ago
You were suggesting GitHub users migrate to your forge, and historically, one of GitHub's big features was private repos. And at least historically, Github private repos claimed to provide protections against unauthorized access/scrapers.
But AT Protocol can't.
So currently, you're only suitable for non-commercial users. (Can you name any commercial org using Tangled.sh on source code?)
Does AT Protocol have any rough milestone (date?) for private data?
> we take a lot of effort to protect against AI scrapers.
Sorry that's not stating a guarantee of anything, it's an unquantifiable aspiration. I asked what you guarantee your users. IP access logs? Alerts? Response times? Blocks? IP whitelisting?
ctenb · 5h ago
Plug or not, this is relevant and on-topic. +1 to offset this unnecessary voting behavior.
akomtu · 6h ago
Github Pages is a must too.
icy · 4h ago
We’re working on it!
NetOpWibby · 5h ago
Damn, why all the downvotes?
advisedwang · 5h ago
Probably "bit of a shameless plug, I'll admit. I'm the co-founder". Lots of HN users don't like feeling advertised to.
icy · 5h ago
Figured it would be better to be up front about it -- and people know they can ask questions.
dr_kiszonka · 4h ago
(I didn't downvote you.) I think being upfront about it is always good. What is even better is stating it in the first sentence and making sure your whole comment is not an ad, except for maybe the "what are you working on" type of threads. This is just my opinion and not something codified in the guidelines, etc.
throitallaway · 4h ago
Besides the plug, calling a company with $2B+ revenue "cooked" is annoying.
Animats · 4h ago
We'll know it's over when Github requires a Microsoft login.
bitbasher · 2h ago
GitHub has been a growing disappointment for quite a while.
1. GitHub itself isn't opensource despite being the opensource forge.
2. Microsoft (of all companies) acquired it.
3. Microsoft pushes VSCode and kills GitHub's Atom.
4. GitHub employees are quite political (master branch rename, ICE protest resignations, etc).
5. GitHub striking down repositories and user accounts (the Russian developer, yt-dlp, etc).
6. LLMs trained on public and private code without consent or opting in.
7. GitHub forcing AI agents in pull requests and in various pages on GitHub.
8. GitHub's CEO resigning and now in more of Microsoft's AI control.
I left back when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft. I wondered if it was a mistake for me to leave, but.. I haven't regretted it yet.
sschueller · 4h ago
Time to move to forgio[1]. Sadly I am stuck with gitlab for now until forgio ads projects/folders to the URI.
Well, that's my stage left... I had already brought my github usage to bare minimum... For any of my clients through my business, I'm suggesting they host their own gtt repo's and only using Github and Gitlab for the visibility, not as an actual service to house their shit
Just more proof that the merger/acquisition should never have been allowed in the first place.
golddust-gecko · 3h ago
Perhaps it's nothing, but:
> “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon,” says Dohmke in a memo to GitHub employees today. “I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.”
Is interesting to me. There is quite a number of rumors that MSFT will be Returning to Office next year. The prominence of 'remote first' in this quote may indicate that such concerns are playing a role here...
KyleBerezin · 4h ago
Let the skypification begin! I can't wait to see how they integrate internet explorer, or require a microsoft account.
net01 · 3h ago
I am part of a rocketry group I wonder if training on sensitive data such as ITAR restricted code would make this an issue? any ideas?
jeffwask · 4h ago
So Github has entered Phase 3 of the Microsoft Acquisition lifecycle
Havoc · 3h ago
Was it ever "independent"? The github monoculture seemed alarming from the get go
ath3nd · 5h ago
Wait, isn't that the guy that two weeks ago said that we should be embracing AI or existing the industry?
You can't make this stuff up :) Maybe he didn't embrace AI hard enough, and that's why he is exiting the industry?
ants_everywhere · 2h ago
IMO this was predictable and I recall walking a few people in the industry through the argument and suggesting they maintain a path to migrate off GitHub for when it finally gets re-orged.
Whenever someone makes a promise that a subsidiary or product will remain unchanged (typically because that's how customers/users prefer it), it's useful to ask whether that promise has any legal force that will prevent the company from reneging on the promise if organizational or market circumstances change.
There is almost never a barrier to having the organization change their mind, which means that the promise is at best a soft promise that in the near term they don't intend to change too much too quickly.
bn-l · 6h ago
Damn. I remember being heavily downvoted and flamed when I said this would be the inevitable outcome on Reddit when they were bought.
Always assume anyone carrying water for a mega corp is a shill or a bot or some combo.
thewebguyd · 5h ago
Same. Everyone now is like surprise pikachu face and all I can do is say "I told you so"
Never make a deal with the devil.
shmerl · 5h ago
Looks like the goal is to turn Github into an "agent factory". And they still can't even support IPv6.
layer8 · 5h ago
That’s par for the course, since OpenAI’s API endpoints don’t either. ;)
dcchambers · 6h ago
> GitHub moving into Core AI team
On the one hand, this probably means it gets the funding it needs to keep going strong.
On the other hand, I'm worried that this means that GitHub is going to focus exclusively on building AI features while the core product becomes stale/abandoned.
brownriceowl · 5h ago
Did GitHub have a funding problem? They doubled revenue last year, with 40% of that coming from GitHub Copilot. I imagine that for 2025, the increase will be much higher than even that.
I expect that the problem that Microsoft aims to fix is that people can use GitHub effortlessly without locking into Azure and Power Platform
dcchambers · 5h ago
> Did GitHub have a funding problem?
I don't believe so, and I didn't mean to imply that. Rather just that if they are part of the "Core AI" org then they will likely remain a priority area of investment for Microsoft...right now anyway.
klabb3 · 4h ago
> while the core product becomes stale/abandoned
Im more concerned about random breakages. When you have org pressure to add features rapidly shit breaks. Stale would be best case scenario.
netsharc · 5h ago
Will it be Bob or Clippy?
$ git commit
The git command has been changed to bob, please type 'bob commit' to commit.
JaKXz · 6h ago
Yikes
xyst · 3h ago
Maintaining "independence" after selling the company to MSFT has always been a facade. Even from the perspective of the users, there was this palpable difference between before and after MSFT acquisition
dizlexic · 5h ago
I am shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
I still remember Atom.
crawsome · 3h ago
Sucks they trained on our data and hard work when all we wanted was a place to put our code and have others look at it.
Microsoft ruins everything they touch. They will find a way to ruin Github shortly.
Anyone posting a step-by-step to do a full migration from Github to another provider would get a lot of traffic to their blog in short time.
betteryourweb · 1h ago
You really didn't see that coming at the moment they bought Github? That was their entire intent, to have full access to all of the greatest minds in software... Everyone should have bailed immediately after acquisition... If you don't control the servers that your code is on, it's no longer your code, at the very least, you're sharing with your hosting provider. But, everyone needs to hurry up and jump to market, instead of taking the time to build their own servers, custom development environment, etc. So, because everyone followed the herd, now everyone is lead slaughter... This was a collective choice made out of laziness, convenience, false sense of necessity, greed, etc... We have no to blame but ourselves, because it wouldn't have happen if we didn't choose it...
One tried-and-true classic is to delete old stuff, and GitHub has a lot of old stuff... in a couple years someone will calculate an amount they can save.
bn-l · 6h ago
It’s Microsoft. Look how much they’ve mismanaged their current assets.
dceddia · 5h ago
Today we can still anonymously clone repos.
ksherlock · 5h ago
They could spam you with low-quality AI (but I repeat myself) PRs. Maybe add some vaguely plausible but utterly incorrect bug reports as well.
> What more damage can they do besides train AI on all code
That's GitHub code -> AI.
The damage will be AI code -> GitHub
CoPilot already gives (bad) code reviews on GitHub PRs.
Guthur · 4h ago
Sorry, is anyone even remotely surprised? This has and will always be Microsoft's modus operandi.
The bit most of us seem to completely misunderstand is that the name of the capitalist game is not competition it's monopoly rent. All major corporations time and again look to capture a monopoly, it's the winning play.
OldGreenYodaGPT · 5h ago
two years ago, I opened a PR asking for an LLM commit feature, and they flat-out said they weren’t doing it. Meanwhile, Cursor was eating their lunch and lapping them twice. I couldn’t believe how complacent and out-of-touch they were—it was pure laziness dressed up as “product focus.” And let’s not forget the ancient bugs rotting in their backlog that they refuse to fix. It’s like they actively don’t care about their users.
ninetyninenine · 5h ago
Makes sense how it's part of core AI. All code in the future will be written by AI so it's relevant categorically.
zzo38computer · 3h ago
If you want to make a better version control service, then you might consider:
- Free public repositories and free API access.
- Mutual TLS authentication. Use X.509 extensions for partial delegation of authorization, so that someone can issue a certificate to themself or others with a limited set of permissions.
- Mirroring on multiple independent services.
- Allow SHA-1 (for compatibility with a lot of existing repositories that use it, and anyone using software that does not support other hashing algorithms) but also allow other more secure hashing algorithms to be used in case you do not want to use SHA-1.
- Make the HTML to work without CSS and JavaScripts (even if they can provide enhancements, do not make them required).
- Support some parts of the GitHub API, in order that existing software which uses GitHub API will be able to work with it.
- If you are making a new API as well, then it might use DER, that can use binary data, non-Unicode text data, etc better.
- Do not require TLS for read-only access to public data (but still allow using TLS even in this case).
Xamarin is no more, after the whole MAUI rewrite without backwards compatibility to Xamarin.Forms, killing VS4Mac, shortly after having rewriten the underlying Xamarin based IDE into Mac, what survives is a subset of Xamarin tech for mobile and WebAssembly workloads.
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
A proper cross platform IDE experience requires getting Rider.
Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Github even with the previous CEO was already a delivery mechanism for Azure and AI efforts, now it will be full steam ahead, as per new org chart.
VC++ after betting other compilers in C++20 support, seems to have lost its resources struggling to deliver C++23, and also probably affected by the Secure Future Initiative, and decisions for safer languages.
But hey 4 trillion valuation, so from shareholders point of view, everything is going great.
This gave me the good belly laugh I needed.
For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
- being the no. 1 enemy of free software
- shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share
- making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite
- creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)
- making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The last time they might have been considered the "cool guys" was sometime in the 90s.
IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.
Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
The only side of ms that i have any love for is xbox but that is also waning with all the studio acquisitions.
My ranking from most evil to least would be:
1. Google
2. Meta
3. Microsoft
4. Amazon
5. Apple
6. Netflix
Ubuntu I didn’t use it for years, there are tons of other distributions that I prefer now but last time I checked, there was a removable default shortcut to amazon. That’s an awful symbol, if you ask me, to associate Ubuntu and its meaning to Amazon but it’s nothing when compared to Apple or Microsoft (dare I say Google) behaviors.
As did Ubuntu.
>I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
Huh? The same google caught tracking your every move even if you opted out? The Google that seems to serve ads based on your conversations if anyone in the room has an Android phone? The Google that actively tries to kill any and all ad blockers?
They aren’t even close…
Unless you're going to call letting users know they have access to onedrive for free an "ad", Microsoft didn't do anything until Windows 11 in 2024.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-pushes-start-menu-ads-t...
2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20121004004109/http://community....
2015: https://web.archive.org/web/20151015182852/http://betanews.c...
2015: https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-10-solitaire-requires-a-subs...
2016: https://www.howtogeek.com/243263/how-to-disable-ads-on-your-...
2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160602204008/http://iskandar.m...
2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20250721092516/https://www.theve...
2018: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/192251/microsoft...
2020: https://winaero.com/wordpad-is-gettings-ads-in-windows-10/
Try using VSCodium legally with the same functionality as VSCode; remote development, Python language server, C++ debugging, and so on.
People who think Microsoft is doing open source work for the good of their hearts are still in for a lesson in EEE.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
> Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
They are a business. You seem to misunderstand that businesses cannot behave like charities.
Being a business implies being for-profit.
Nobody said open source had to be free as in free beer, it just had to be free as in freedom.
It's their prerogative to make the plugins marketplace to alternative editors or not. Servers cost money. It's a business.
Does Matt Mullenweg has to let WPEngine sap server resources? Arguably not; and this opinion comes from a guy (me) that strongly dislikes WordPress (and by extension: Matt and Automattic).
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
I'm not defending Microsoft, they are not necessarily my cup of tea, but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
Feel free to express your opinions, but don't be hateful!
Despite "MS <3s Open Source" they never changed, you're just referencing a very successful era of marketing.
And poor Linux users are out here catching strays. Very "don't you say that about the $1T company!!!" of you to defend them, "fellow Linux user" (also very hi fellow kids..)
https://www.google.com/search?q=who+at+microsoft+said+open+s...
one of the results:
Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-American:
https://www.linux.com/news/weekly-news-wrapup-microsoft-clai...
from 2001.
well, gosh, I feel sorry for those American Linux developers of that time. I guess they were unAmerican, according to Allchin. if they were of this time, i guess they would have been deported by ICE.
sorry for the victim now ...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-48lNCrmqxA
Linus Torvalds might be a U.S. citizen today, but during the first years of Linux he was certainly not thinking U.S. values and that someday his biggest userbase would be there.
> Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-American:
Yeah, typical Ballmer-era.
They deserve plenty of hate.
But again, why the baseless argument based on hate?
You can (for example) de-bloat Windows 11 out from the telemetry and annoying widgets nobody uses, including the invasive Copilot.
After de-bloating, it's a decent OS on its own.
I should have the right to have a clean Windows out-of-the-box, but de-bloating is still a viable path.
Sure you can. I, as a tech savvy person, can debloat Windows 11. If I dare to do it. If I know I can do it. If I search for information on the internet on how to do it. If I know how to search and follow those instructions. If I follow all the steps (and hope my tutorial covers everything). If Microsoft doesn’t push an update to bloat it again.
And with that, well I still don’t know how to install it without a Microsoft account. It’s so incredibly user hostile that even the insufferable Apple Walled Garden don’t force you into all of this shit.
When you actually look at those de-bloating scripts or techniques in detail, it's clear that they only barely address the issues with Windows, and they're always chasing a moving target of anti-user bullshit.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...
Also, I am not a VSCode user or would-be VSCodium user.
I am happily married to JetBrains IDEs. Thanks.
I don't need Electron nor WebView2 bloat on my nice, beautiful ThinkPad.
> these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
in response to parent's
> - creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)
and VSCode is a perfect example of that happening right now.
Their keyboards were arguably the best ones around. I'm literally typing this on a 20 year old MS keyboard right now.
There is a clone on the market, which I use at home, that so far has been pretty promising, but we'll see if it has they lasting power that this one does.
The 25 year window you picked actually coincides almost exactly with the time since the original X-Box was launched. Seems an odd omission from the list of hardware MS released in that time period.
Also the IntelliMouse Explorer was released in late 1999, which nobody who has ever had to clean the gunk off a mouseball roller would describe as ‘cringe’.
However, their strategy seems to be going all-in on Gamepass. And if you subscribe to Gamepass, Microsoft does not care if you play on your Steam Deck, iPad or Xbox.
This is also why they mentioned they might open up the Xbox to other stores (Steam), and why they have been releasing first party titles onto the PS5[0].
If you couple that info with them axing their own handheld and instead licensing out the Xbox name to Asus with the ROG Ally Xbox, it isn't a huge leap to assume they'll just license out the Xbox name to whichever OEM feels like making a console. The Xbox One and Series X / S already run the Windows Core kernel which would make going more wide on the hardware support quite easy, and the current hardware is semi off-the-shelf stuff from AMD anyway.
[0] this led to some memery: https://images3.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED187/67a6bce7291...
There's been a lot of rumor lately that Xbox becomes a shell on top of Windows and just runs regular Windows games. The announcement of the Xbox ROG Ally using this same approach gives it a lot of weight.
That was 10 years ago
The Surface looks cool to me, but since it runs Windows, I will never use it. Does it only look cool, or is actually a cool device?
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supporte...
There's the usual asterisk here or there, as with most laptops; but, outside of some golden devices, it's about on par with most.
You've completely answered by not answering the actual question though. Is it actually a cool device?
Either way, no one can answer your subjective opinion-based query. Go test it out at the dozens of kiosks in any city in a Western nation (or, barring that, watch a youtube video) and judge for yourself.
I don't care what OS the device is using for someone else to use. I just want to know if the device is a decent device made by Microsoft, or if the original claim that they make crap devices also applies to the Surface. I provided the explanation why I don't have personal knowledge on if it is cool or not while asking others to provide feedback.
I love how each sector they’re invested in is a practical monopoly.
Your honor, I rest my case!
Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made noises that seemed not awful.
In terms of coolness, Microsoft peaked right around the time they were hiring the cast of Friends to promote their OS.
Wait, do they?
I mostly remember:
- A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
- Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch everyone described it as
- Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc.
- Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on Liquid Glass
It's the laptop to get for compute/battery, which definitely is not nothing, but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
Having owned plenty of Thinkpads (Linux), Dells(Windows and Linux) and plenty of Macbook Pros, I can say, Apple's superiority of hardware is so far beyond the rest. Having an OS with a BSD-ish experience is really nice as well. I've spent 27 years in engineering and during most of that time I get the random "Linux is far superior", "I like Windows better" folks... but by and large, yes, Apple's tech has a ton of good will.
And probably fewer still consider switching to the alternatives. Apple is, for better or worse, usually the least bad option.
Apple and Google both use immutable locked down OSes on their main products that prevents improving device security, such as IP & DNS filtering / blocking.
Microsoft user experience keeps getting worse. Latest version of Teams, as of today, says I'm at the "Calendar" screen and the navigation and content screen both show "Chat". "Calendar" was unpinned because I find Teams to be at interacting with content. No reason it should be a PDF viewer when the desktop application is actually usable allows for viewing chat and content at the same time.
I understand developing for those platforms makes money or is needed for other products. Unless I have to develop products that support those companies, I will never pay with my personal income to support those organizations.
Just laptop is good enough. Although currently switched back to apple silicon ATM for LLM, price and convince reasons, and as soonest linux on Apple Silicon reach some maturity, will switch over completely.
However not using a smartphone is probably good for one's mental and physical healthy now days. It is understandable if your work require you to have one, but if I'm not getting paid, why would I even get a smartphone?
Back in the 80's there are investment people managing billions dollars and deals over pen paper and a land line!
The DOJ/FTC/EU/ASEAN/etc. need to force a breakup of first party app stores, first party payment, first party web browser, and first party messaging. They also really need to require web installs without hidden menus and scare walls.
We'll see a proliferation of offerings if that happens.
Linux is better.
That worm has turned, at least five years ago
* Xcode 26 is kinda neat, though
This is really just a cheap rhetorical trick. Linux [0] can run just as much software, if you include VMs, but you can't legally virtualize MacOS, therefore buying a Mac is the only way to legally run their software, in addition to everything else. Now, you are technically correct, but the casual interpretation of
> Eh, macOS is still the UNIX with the most commercial software available.
isn't really that you can simply run everything unavailable on MacOS in a VM (or several layers of VMs). It's the same as arguing that Powerpoint is all you ever need, as it is Turing complete.
[0] And so can Windows, if you run said VMs in a Linux VM.
Whether that'll lead to the government requiring Apple to break their encryption, it remains to be seen. I imagine Apple has a bit of an edge here anyway, since iCloud is allegedly e2e encrypted?
Im not really sure how that benefits me as a US citizen but that is who the majority of the population seems to want and once the rules are set you follow or face made up tariffs that rip you apart. Right.
Are you sure?
They also use it for their growing ad platform.
Can't let people find your app for free. You need to pay to defend your trademark and lead in a given app category.
Plus they've severed the customer relationship and inserted themselves as Mafia middlemen. They'll sell that to companies too.
I think we basically agree - just clarifying here.
IMO, "consumer electronics enthusiasts" != "tech people"
If the OS is old, things like FFMPEG will not work with things like Audacity. And to use an old version of FFMPEG, you have to guess which one, then install a variety of dev tools to compile it, waay beyond the capability of the average "I just want to record my podcast user". Audacity itself has an extensive help article devoted to this issue for Mac.
If you have a new Mac, you'll find companies have given up going through the cost and time of certifying for each new Mac OS, like Evoluent (early vertical mouse maker), who gave up several versions ago and won't support using all the extra mouse buttons their product has on Mac.
If you want to use many audio plugins, you'll have to deal with special permissions if it didn't come from the app store. If you want to use zoom to let a remote tech control your screen, you have to find and set two security permisssions.
For all four of these issue on Windows, it just works.
UPDATE: As commenter below pointed out, experienced users have a different experience than new users, which doesn't invalidate the specific issues I've mentioned, and which I encounter every month, and sometimes weekly.
It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.
Mac OS 8 had no preemptive multitasking or meaningful address space protections. A single bad pointer dereference in user mode took down the entire system, and a single busy loop without a yield locked up the entire system.
Both of these were universally admitted to be bad and outdated by technically minded people.
By 1997 they had looked at replacing it with BeOS or NEXTSTEP, and purchased the latter with the goal of replacing Mac OS. The Rhapsody OS, an OS8 style UI with NeXT underneath, had already been started. Before that, they had also attempted and failed to write a next gen classic Mac OS (Copland).
Windows 9x had a lot of problems, but had preemptive multitasking and much better address space isolation. Windows NT 4 Workstation was also a thing at the time and much better. It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
And that's just in the Microsoft vs Apple camp. If you left that then Unix, BSD, BeOS, etc also blew it out of the water.
MacOS 8 looked pretty, but it was far from a "good" OS.
None of these were issues on Windows 98.
"Mostly" is not good enough. The user experience of Apple is still good, the developer experience is woeful
Are any applications on your Mac touching Rosetta right now? You'd better hope not because those single percentage gains from ARM evaporate fast.
Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
>it doesn't matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done
'Essentially' is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here, but, putting that aside, A. you're wrong, I've recently ran into Rosetta throttling and B. it's not a good reason to begin the project at all, it's only a good reason when it's already done. You're essentially ceding "Yes, I've been wrong and this has been a fool's errand for the past x years until right this moment as the project is done". It's not done and it'd a weak argument.
>Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
Specifically what are the numbers? Because I have performance/tdp numbers and the M-series performs well but it isn't a categorical difference. In fact, that's no difference, it performs okay but AMD is at the top of the heap currently. Sad.
I use a lot of nonstandard software (not just a browser), not a single piece needed Rosetta.
I agree recent AMD chips are power efficient like the M series (though I don’t have one to compare with) but I thought everyone agreed the comparable chips in 2020 weren’t?
>...I thought everyone agreed the comparable chips in 2020 weren’t?
Possibly, but it was likely far, far closer (see maybe the AMD Ryzen 7 4800U) than justified defense of the project.
Anyways, with the addition of the Rosetta translation layer there's no way the Apple M1 was as efficient as the Ryzen.
Performance and efficiency has been great for me. I've never run into rosetta throttling. I've got the numbers - trust me bro.
Of course, they really aren't, which is pretty obvious. It doesn't make sense that Apple would randomly invent some categorically new CPU technology when they don't even own an instruction set or foundry and that they would simply be concocting some vendor lock-in supply chain scheme.
It sounds like you've already done the work... why not just share the numbers. I'm just asking to see what you claim to have. Unless... you don't have them and you're just making stuff up.
They are very different companies in very different businesses. Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company. That affects everything (and is why the two are not fundamentally competitors).
I don't think one has ever been better behaved than the other at all, though. The main difference is that for most of their time, Microsoft was just in a position where it could do more harm than Apple.
Oh wait, that’s totally not the case.
Do they? I feel like this is a bimodal thing from what I've seen of other peoples opinions - they're either amazing and all you ever use, or they're the worst company ever.
As a developer I've always seen Macs as a necessary evil - they were the only polished "working out of the box" unix-like system you could buy for a long time but you had to put up with locked down software, comically bad pricing and cooling issues.
Now with the Mx stuff the hardware is amazing, and pretty fantastic value for money if you avoid the weird points in the price scale where they massively overcharge for RAM. But you still have to use their locked down software stack and ecosystem.
Only among people who don't have to develop for the Apple ecosystem.
Good grief. Sometimes it's good to get a reminder that there are still people who think this way.
Everyone else carries Apple devices.
GNU/Linux only exists on local VMs for containers, or servers on cloud instances.
I dev on a Mac all day and own 2 macs at home. Why?
* not going to try to convince the whole family to change and I want the various family & imessage features that everyone uses to all work
* all the developers at my company use macs and I don't want to have to set up my own unique configurations for everything using WSL and stuff.
* In the US, often the Android versions of "apps" you're forced to use by random businesses (instead of the Web which usually would work fine), are pawned off on an offshore team, and no execs use Android so there's no accountability when those apps suck.
* Windows also has many recent disappointments (ads in the start menu, increasingly dumber and worse settings screens), so they're doing a bad job of winning over people like me, dampening my enthusiasm to switch.
* Linux is cool but I'm too busy to want a project as my daily driver PC.
I have nothing but scorn for Tim Cook's Apple and have zero goodwill for them. They haven't shipped an actual smart idea for any of their platforms besides maybe Shortcuts (which they bought), and even then it took them 3 years to let me run automations unattended.
I haven't seen this.
Also I would imagine those businesses would do the same for their iOS development? It's odd that you would assume they don't.
No comments yet
Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
I guess generating hype by acquisition and increase valuation cause more profit than developing a real product.
I'm beginning to think that using Microsoft services(yes, GitHub included) is morally questionable behaviour right now. I can't support the current Microsoft behaviour of laying off many employees so casually.
However XBox plus Microsoft Gaming Studios, is still one of the biggest group of AAA publishers, they have a big enough slice of the market.
Hence why now they're dominating PlayStation charts with cross-platform games.
Many Microsoft haters don't have an good enough idea of how big they have become on games industry, regardless of layoffs and such.
SteamOS keeps being around until they feel like doing a netbooks like move, taking all their games out of Steam, or whatever else Microsoft might think of.
Hence why I regularly complain Valve should keep trying to bring developers to target GNU/Linux natively instead of translating Windows games.
Sounds like they just bought the IP.
You'll get the same experience as Codeberg, because Codeberg is in fact running on Forgejo
But the power of Github is more the social platform and collaboration at global scale.
In that sense the only mature alternative I know is Radicle
- https://radicle.xyz/
I don't really want to be using a Microsoft product but I use github for the same reason I use Linkedin: because it benefits my career to be visible on these social networks.
It's time to move on from Github, LinkedIn, and hell ideally NPM too. Microsoft is polluting the ground water.
Sourceforge and Freshmeat weren't social networks. Plus its not like other social networks haven't collapsed despite being popular, like MySpace.
> It's time to move on from Github, LinkedIn, and hell ideally NPM too. Microsoft is polluting the ground water.
As I said, I don't want to be using Microsoft products but it benefits my career to be visible on these social networks.
I'm an opinionated MS-hater, like most of my peers who lived through 90s Microsoft, like I had. But I also have a family to feed and bills to pay. Sometimes pragmatism trumps ideology.
I thinK I have to admit to myself that as little as I like github having all the projects, I'd be less effective having to track inboxes across half a dozen different hosting platforms.
If you made something like Mastodon, where alerts propagate across instances, I could probably deal. But without that? No, I'll pass.
The lineage of those projects is Gogs => Gitea => Forgejo
I don't think this is right. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea#Forgejo_fork.
MAUI is a mess.
Blazor will never work as a general solution for full stack web apps. Even if a small app didn't have to download like 10MB of WASM code the DX is terrible and performance just as bad. Elixir Phoenix developed with a fraction of the budget is just so far ahead.
C# hot reload has been broken for years. I doubt it will ever be as good as what you get in JS with Vite.
Minimal APIs are a great idea but 4 years later and still fundamental features like validation are missing (it's coming in .NET 10).
They've been investing a ton of effort into Aspire. It's cool but is it more important than core features?
And now with AI, Microsoft is more distracted than ever and I'm starting to regret getting into .NET at all.
What is the problem with Microsoft keeping "nice to have" desktop GUI stuff for their own proprietary ecosystem when everything else has open sourced? Including the primitives needed for the community to build their own GUI and developer tooling stuff, just like JetBrains did with Rider.
On HN I keep hearing that associating .NET with Windows is outdated perception.
Writing JVM languages I feel that the developer experience is pretty much the same on any OS. It seems this cannot be said for .NET?
Visual Studio is still not ported to Linux or Mac, you need to use Rider or VSCode. If you use JetBrains for Java, using Rider will feel good no matter where you are.
The GUI library situation is a tough one. In many ways its far more advanced than other languages but their newest attempt is not as good as the older Windows only API. But what other language is graded for its great native GUI library?
I'm not calling MS cool but at the same time I think the goalposts are different.
We dont do the same for java, rust, or c… there are good IDEs for each of them and none are made by the maintainers of the language.
It currently supports Linux as a running target for servers. It supports both running desktop software and development very badly.
The development experience with Rider is also great on Linux. I think you need to be more specific with the complaints because I have many beefs with Microsoft's approach to many things, but I could not pick up on what you meant.
We have a few .NET applications running on the infrastructure on Linux hosts and it's just like every other thing.
But in some contexts, e.g. PowerBI, it pulls in a dependency and BOOM it's Windows Only to the point that not even Wine or Proton can help you. For something, that should be, mind you, a dumb SQL proxy like the PowerBI Embedded Gateway.
I don't understand people who are just consumers and have no actual business to root for MSFT or AAPL or any other company.
That happened three decades ago.
It is in their nature. It takes a lot of work to excise bad practices from an organization and removing the guilty parties is only step one. Everything continues to work the way the bad actors wanted them to work for a long, long time.
Gates was bad. Balmer was worse. He was still in charge 11 years ago, in a company he helped build 40 years ago. Their personalities are the bones of that organization.
this is a mystery to me: ms has all the money in the world to make it right.. yet they can't. windows ecosystem is like one of those eastern european barnyards, where animals live and die between old halves tractors and rusty Lada(s).
When Nadella announced plans to double the company's revenue by 2030, it was pretty clear that the enshitifiction was going to ramp up significantly, but it doesn't seem like it will ever relent now that they have to squeeze out more free cash flow to cover all of this AI capex. Windows is practically malware at this point, they've made extremely deep cuts to .NET engineering headcount, and it's just going to get worse.
The second most likely case being some AI figuring out how to hack AWS to steal compute time, probably by getting access to billing information.
Microsoft seems to be slowly pulling ahead at the moment.
Microsoft stopped openly attacking open source at a time when open source was clearly winning:
- most servers were running linux
- most phones and tablets were running android
- people were buying tablets instead of desktops
- Google was openly promoting open source through GSOC
- large corporations were regularly releasing their tools as open source
Most importantly, developers openly hated Microsoft for holding the industry back (remember IE6?).
So they did what any good corporations does - they went along with the winning side.
And now they they have positive emotional connotations in devs' minds, or at least organizational buy-in again, they can do what corporations do best - making money by abusing their position with barely any competition.
---
The lesson here are: - Corporations should simply not have this amount of power. - Corporations are amoral, they don't have values, views or beliefs. They are systems designed for optimizing goals. You can never _trust_ a corporation - not because they are untrustworthy but because trust is a human-to-human level concept, it does not have any meaning in human-to-system interaction.
This is the sort of question I don't trust AI with yet.
- Auto complete is a bit smarter (even the free AI suggestions are better) - Refactoring across files is often faster - Package management is undoubtedly the latest performance difference. I would go from taking 1-2 minutes from using VS's "Manage packages for solution" to under 10 seconds in Rider. - In VS there's always a noticeable delay when the debugger hits a breakpoint / exception and the IDE takes a few seconds to actually display. This is about halved in Rider. - The built in terminal is vastly better than VS's, though not as good as Windows Terminal
Rider - has all of the the nice things JetBrains does and the best option on Mac if you need advanced refactoring; UI feels a bit cluttered at time (though they improved this).
VSC - for whatever reason, I always end up back to VSC for .NET for backends. Good enough, fast, and lightweight enough. Plays nicely with Node and full-stack monorepos.
I would commit to VSC and try to make it work. If you find you need advanced refactoring support, then try out Rider.
It's biggest problem is that it's not Visual Studio, so it is very hard for people who have lived in VS for a decade to move over.
It does away with some bloat and also provides some features of Resharper natively instead of as an extension.
You can quite literally use this as your primary development environment.
Win2k was so much better it's not even comparable.
XP had a bit of a rough start, but by sp3 it was a lot better than 2k.
I skipped the other windows-es until 10. It has been solid.
It had the plug and play standard but that only worked half of the time, and if you messed up by doing something like connecting the peripherals before installing the driver you could BSOD while trying to install the drivers and have to rescue the whole OS. Happened to me enough for me to remember it.
And my sister demonstrated how you could delete the recycle bin if you were bad enough at computers, which was fun.
I've also had nearly as many kernel panics on OSX or hangs on Linux as I have had BSODs on Windows (when graphed as a ratio of use over time).
All OSes have flaws and issues, there would never be a perfect operating system with our current understanding of computers, and that's ok.
That being said, my critique does not include OSes that spy on you (for what will be considered a several trillion dollar crime syndicate when this era is written down in history), which is its own entire rant.
That is very puzzling... Did you compare them to anything else?
Miguel never did, and is now focused on Swift and Apple.
These guys are extremely bad guys.
At no point in time was Microsoft one of the cool guys.
Can you elaborate on why you believe that? I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework. I mean, their Win32 API is still alive and well, as well as MFC, ATL, etc. WPF still gets some minor updates too here and there.
I have no idea what you mean by web, too. ASP.NET is perhaps one of the better maintained web frameworks around. What exactly do you interptet as a concern?
Blazor is also Microsoft's alternative to JavaScript and it's main value proposition is being able to write webassembly apps using Microsoft technology exclusively. What do you think is replacing this?
Pointing out Aspire is even weirder. It's a containerization framework to help with observability and manage distributed applications. What exactly is the overlap?
I sense a great deal of confusion in your comments. What exactly are you trying to say?
WinUI3 is dead, lol. I tried to migrate from UWP to WinUI3, but it is literally dead. There doesn’t seem to be any team at MS actively working on it, the community calls have died, and the last build conf didn’t have any WinUI3 talks, all AI stuff. Yes, you can build apps with WinUI3, but development and support for it has stalled and I couldn’t justify moving the companies product over to WinUI3.
... what?
They could do a better job with the native frameworks, but the rest of these are completely unrelated. For web, MVC is pretty much dead and you might want to use Blazor SSR instead. Web API via controllers is still supported, but minimal API endpoints are the hot thing. Blazor is being treated as a first class product. Aspire is there to assist in local orchestration of distributed applications... and is built on Blazor.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
And as a developer you have the option to go for otherwise trickier alternatives, like not using iOS nor Android.
But of course someone that uses the word 'tech' for a tiny subset of it might not see that...
No one really associates human rights with Microsoft's reputation. That is the domain of Palantir, Meta, etc.
I very much do look very negatively on Microsoft as a collaborator with modern fascist regimes, along with Meta, Palantir, X, etc.
I'm just mentioning this for no reason whatsoever. It popped into my head, for some reason.
Visual Studio Code seems to be their big open source push, besides GitHub. Everyone uses it, and most development environments and UX are based on it. Used to be Atom, I remember.
Microsoft has been open sourcing a bunch of their programs for a while now too. Majority are inconsequential but they are still nice to see. People on Linux OS's are excited about Microsoft calculator being open source but these open source projects still show that some people there have interest in the push.
Pick one.
The monetisation of .NET is less about selling Windows licences, and more about selling Azure compute etc. The OS used on Azure is less relevant, you pay MS either way.
This is Microsoft's primary strategy. There are a lot of victims out there.
... he says after spending several months porting a win32 app to Silverlight as part of a Gold Partner/MS case study with much fanfare, only to have to spent the next few years backporting everything into the win32 app it never replaced, and then it was shit canned and only the win32 version remains.
We're planning to rewrite it in Qt at some point as some of our customers use RHEL.
First the rampant spyware, then they gradually wreck every single piece of software into unusable buggy AI-slop-mess just to play the trashy MBA valuation games.
I still hold nostalgic value for the old OSes (say up to XP/7) but everything after has been nothing but maximal profit extraction.
Dont get me started on Azure
The '90s/00s era of people hating on M$ and picturing them as the Borg had left room to the 10s/20s of MS being "friendly" and releasing open source and free things (typescript, vs code, core.net, wsl, work on python etc) and not completely screwing up acquisitions like GitHub or Mojang.
Windows became adware, and office became some crappy online thing, but _microsoft_ had became nicer and gained goodwill.
This seems to have started evaporating in the last year or so.
HN has a short memory. About 10 years ago everyone was all over Satya like he was Jesus' second coming.
Look where we are now.
It is deeply concerning because all things point to reality shaking out with irony. None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it. Apple has nothing, Microsoft wants to put spyware on every Windows computer and builds the worst coding agent on the market despite having privileged access to every line of source code ever written, Meta put a chatbot in Whatsapp then decided paying researchers ten mil would solve their problems, Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
Their fear is going to lose them everything. Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed. Everyone learned that lesson and decided "we'll never be unwilling to innovate ever again"; but now their core product stable undergoes constant churn that is pissing off customers and driving competition to eat their lunch.
There is long-term, durable beauty in investing majority effort into making Github the single best place to host and organize code. That need is never going away. There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world, no one doubts that, but its a matter of proportion and humility. Microsoft/Github will never build AI products that lead the market. Its not a technology problem; its an organizational and political one. But that's ok, because they could dominate the market with the world's best code hosting platform, an average AI strategy, and a library of integrations with the rest of the frontier world.
NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product.
YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.
I think folks sleep on Google around here. They are slow but they have so many compelling iterative AI usecases that even a BigTech org can manage it eventually.
Apple and Microsoft are rightly getting panned, Apple in particular is inexcusable (but I think they will have a unique offering when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for).
I remember when I was trying to find a YouTube video, I remembered the contents but not the name. I tried google search and existing LLMs including Gemini, and none could find it.
It would also be useful for security: give the AI a recording and ask when the suspicious person shows up, the item is stolen, the event happens, etc. But unfortunately also useful for tyranny…
Google researchers are great, but Engineering is dropping like a stone, and management is a complete disaster. Starting with their Indian McKinsey CEO moving core engineering teams to India.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core...
What's that? It's not obvious to me, anyway.
A beefed up NPU could provide a big edge here.
More speculatively, Apple is also one of the few companies positioned to market an ASIC for a specific transformer architecture which they could use for their Siri replacement.
(Google has on-device inference too but their business model depends on them not being privacy-focused and their GTM with Android precludes the tight coordination between OS and hardware that would be required to push SOTA models into hardware. )
https://ai.azure.com/catalog
> Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.
These are great examples of insulting and invasive introductions of LLMs into already functional workflows. These are anti-features.
But in modern times the particularly level level of big, scaling back of anti-competitive law enforcement, and a government increasingly obsessed with making [economic] number go up, regardless of the cost, have all created a situation where the current batch is dying a lot slower than they probably otherwise would.
If 'AI' is the pandora's box of self destruction that can move the show along to the next batch of companies, then it'll have been worth the trillions of dollars in investment after all!
I also don't feel it will happen in "rapid order". These companies are too big. Its happening business-unit by business-unit. In the far future, these companies will still exist, just heavily optimized into the much smaller handful of units that still generate profit.
I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem that way.
Is it though? There's a reason why Microsoft's JVM competitor is called ".NET". They were planning Windows .NET Server 2003, Office.NET, etc.
I don't think an inversion of the hype cycle, it's just another hype cycle exactly. I think, in fact, it's extremely comparable. I remember people joking about Pets.com -- just imagine buying your pet food online?!? Crazy stuff. AI is the same. It's hyped up massively, there will eventually be some kind of correction, and then it'll become the new normal.
Not true. Ironically, the first exception I can think of is Github Copilot.
It is true these companies haven’t recouped anywhere near the $trillion they’ve invested in AI.
But, again: I think that state for Copilot is totally fine for Github. That product state of "its there, its builtin, and its fine" is a fantastic and extremely efficient market to service.
I always hear this but people use Siri all the time, and I think outside of talking to programmers, a lot of consumers probably consider that the level of AI they care about using. "is Siri really AI" seems like a real "is a hotdog a sandwich" question. Who cares? People eat hot dogs and talk to Siri.
It seems what Apple has less of is LLM products that cost enormous sums of money to make that people don't like using. Sure, they have a little of it, they fell flat on their faces with their news summaries thing last year and AppleVision was a nothingburger, but when it comes to "sinking huge amounts of money into deeply unpopular ventures", it seems to me that Apple's reluctance to deploy its largess here might be prudent. It seems like they're less exposed on the hype.
I use Siri when I need a fast, distraction-free, action. Which makes it perfect when driving or performing other tasks where my hands a busy and/or I cannot put my attention on my phones LCD screen.
The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction.
I'd love it if Siri was smart enough to differentiate between:
- an automation request. eg setting an alarm or ringing a contact. The kind of interaction what you wouldn't want to offload to a 3rd party but is the kind of interaction where you don't need vast datastores of training.
- and an open-ended question. eg What time are Oasis playing in London tonight? Who was the 23rd President of Germany? What are the rules of Dodgeball? these sort of things are less confidential and don't require handing control of your phone to a 3rd party.
And I'd love it if Siri automatically offloaded from their local AI to ChatGPT (or whatever) when the latter was identified. That should be opt in, but when opted in, it should be automatic. I shouldn't have to consent each time after I've opted in.
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I think the last time I talked to anyone about siri we were wondering why it was still so bad, now that we have LLMs.
I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you fluent, etc etc
But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good starting point and something to keep you consistent every day. As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish.
That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely overhauled their curriculum with AI slop. The stories are bland at best and confusing at first, the questions are brain-dead simple, it'll have sentences and questions that I've confirmed with native speakers are confusing/incorrect, it's riddled with mistakes, and somehow they even broke the TTS so it'll pronounce things wrong. One of the character voices consistently can't say a couple of letters, like it pronounces all the 'd's with 'v's or something. I can't believe they actually shipped it in this state, they completely broke it overnight. At this rate if it's not fixed by the time my annual subscription is up to renew, I will be cancelling.
It's absolutely the worst AI slopification of any product I use, and the CEO and everyone who pushed to ship it needs to be fired.
Clozemaster is much more rudimentary but I do like how they use AI - there's a single button that gives you an AI grammatical summary of the translation and calls out any idioms or grammatical conventions in the target language compared to your native one.
Bought the lifetime license but it's free to use, you just get a limited amount of flash cards a day. If you wait until christmas there's generally a big discount on the lifetime license.
The coding agents, CC, Cursor, etc. are quite good and useful.
Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and workflows blah blah."
Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify the choices.
Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't even needed.
I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.
To engage in some armchair psychology, I think this is in large part due to a natural human tendency for stability (which is all the stronger for those in relatively powerful positions like us SWEs). Knowing that believing A would imply that your mortgage is in jeopardy, your retirement plan up-ended, and your entire career completely obscured beyond a figurative singularity point makes believing ~A a very appealing option...
Yeah, don’t ask..
My point was more-so that FAANG isn't even scratching the surface; they're punching it bloody with their fists while yelling "look at all this AI we have, see dad we can't be disrupted we're the disrupters we're the disrupters".
It reminds me a lot of Xbox over the past six years, so much so that I think Xbox is a canary for how many business units in these companies will look in five more years.
Sooner or later (mostly sooner) it becomes apparent that it's all just a chatbot hastily slapped on top of an existing API, and the integration barely works.
A tech demo shows your AI coding agent can write a whole web app in one prompt. In reality, a file with 7 tab characters in a row completely breaks it.
The product quality went to shit in all 3 scenarios. There were different reasons and nuances to them all, but all 3 boiled down to one common factor. Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
They all turned into political battles at the leadership level, low morale at the product level, and decent jobs for the engineers as long as they were happy just doing what they were told. For the customers, everything just stagnated. It took years before all the politics sorted themselves out, people chose whether to stay or go, and you got product leadership running who could balance it all out without the baggage of the merger.
So as a Github customer, this does not have me running for the hills. We won't lose functionality. But we won't gain anything we truly desire either - we'll see new features come out that relate to Microsoft's dreams, not our own. At a strategic level, I'd start telling my teams to be sure not to get vendor-locked to any Github features, and always have a migration plan at least conceptualized so that once we see where it all really goes, we are well prepared to either stay or go depending on exactly what Microsoft does in the next couple years.
Why is GitHub UI getting slower? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 - Aug 2025 (113 comments)
GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0 in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here.
[0] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ipv6-essentials/0596001...
I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)
Azure DevOps went into zombie mode basically the same day the acquisition closed; I don't think it's received any new features since 2018.
1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.). 2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work. 3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed.
How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.
Funny you should ask this. A co-worker was unironically glazing monarchies and suggested some books to me when we were drinking at dinner Friday. I was disgusted, tbh. But do not underestimate the desire of people to be ruled and told how to think and act.
What the people don't get is that:
- Truly good people are incredibly rare. - Those who are prone to abusing power will only show their true colors when actually given power. - Power corrupts, everyone has head this. But it also attracts people who are corrupt in the first place. And of course, they will lie and pretend to be good to get that power. - What about succession? Even if their fav leader was actually good and was so "pure" he fathered (most such promoters of this assume a man) only good children, each generation the amount of his "good genes" they'd have would halve (assuming no Habsburgcest).
---
IMO the cause is people knowing they are largely powerless in the grand scheme of things (barring self-sacrifice and violence which they are increasingly indoctrinated against) but this learned helplessness is so internalized they can't conceive of a better solution than giving even more of their power away.
> “Just like how Bill [Gates] had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory,” said Parikh [the CoreAI team lead].
That Bill Gates analogy seems rather far-fetched, though.
> Parikh, who transformed Facebook engineering teams, now leads a transformation that he describes as building an AI “agent factory” for Microsoft’s customers.
> ”I described this agent factory idea to Bill [Gates], not knowing that he and Paul [Allen] described Microsoft 50 years ago as the software factory,” Parikh says. “Just like how Bill had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory.”
[0] https://www.theverge.com/notepad-microsoft-newsletter/672598...
Microsoft under Gates at least produced real things. I wonder when Apple gets an Indian CEO to facilitate outsourcing.
You would think with all the AI magic, they would deliver more "core editor" features/enhancement. No, just more Copilot.
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We could barely convince the reviewers on the last review that using GitHub is okay as long as we take some extra steps, I guess we should prepare to switch to a different platform with the next review.
Cloud Act and more then just one or two cases of the US engaging in industry espionage against their allies(1) makes it a high legal liability to use more or less any service from a US company even if it's in the EU and a EU daughter company
On GitHub we only have some code, which always anyway goes through additional testing and analysis before hitting production, this is why it's barely okay. No code from GitHub directly goes to production.
The only reason we ever where on GitHub is because we didn't always had sensitive customers and switching CI over is always a pain.
So I don't know if imply them being incompetent for allowing GitHub or for wanting to not allow it, but both point have very good reasons.
(1): And I mean cases before Trump, the US (as in top government, not people) was always a highly egoistic, egocentric ally which never hesitated to screw over their allays when it came to economical benefits. The main difference is that in the past the US cared (quite a bit) about upholding a image of "traditional" values like honesty, integrity and reliability. Especially when it would affect their trade routes.
It really depends on you auditor, audit approach and goals.
There are many audit companies which have a "under the hand" reputation of not properly looking and being easy to convince that you are secure, naturally at a above average audit cost (same but worse btw. for certificates showing compatibility with industry standards).
So if the audit was paid for by the company themself you can't trust it at all (which doesn't mean the company wanted to hide anything, this "bad" audit companies also tend finish the audit fast. So sometimes companies go for it, even if they don't have anything to hide).
Similar sometimes audit companies ask if they can audit you, this is for boosting their publicity using your name. This can easily turn into a "one hand washes the other" situation where they won't overlook massive issues, but still judge issues leniently.
Lastly there are some automated partial audit services which scan you public APIs/websites etc. Realistically they tend to be kinda dump, and might tell you they find a medium issue because (no joke) your REST API allows PUT and DELETE (1). Still I now take them a bit more serious after they pointed out, that there was a configuration error of a web gateway leading to some missing security headers.
(1: There is some history behind that, it's still dump for 90% of REST APIs)
Anyway, the situations so far are security audits which are at least 50% theater. BUT if a huge customers fully pays a audit company with a good/strict reputation then it often really isn't a security theater and can be quite a bad surprise if you company isn't prepared (because you have to fix so much). Like such reviews tend to not only be focused at your deployment or code but the whole software live cycle, including fun questions like "what measurements have you taken in case one of your developers tries to inject a supply chain attack" (which to be clear don't need to have perfect answers, just good enough, and most importantly clear and well documented).
https://www.copilot.live/blog/does-github-copilot-use-your-c...
ISO cert compatibility audits are very different from a proper security audit.
And weather they do anything to check if depends on which you high, many of the slightly more expensive ones have the reputation to be "fast" and "overlook most issues".
But that doesn't apply to all security audits (but most audits for ISO compatibility, like really it's bad).
Anyway see my way to long answer about the on a sibling comment.
Isn't GitHub's entire visibility and pervasiveness is entirely due to the OSS?
So, now they're basically saying to OSS, "so long, and thanks for all the fish"?
It probably won't but reselling the code to its owners is still good business. Convince people that statistical models of copyrighted work (which can reproduce said copyrighted work both verbatim or disguised) are A"I" and sadly, somehow, most people seem OK with it.
Some people think a github presence is important for their personal portfolios/careers, but I've personally never seen any evidence that a recruiter or anyone has ever actually looked at my github profile. Plus I can just put gitlab on there instead now
Structurally, it seems to make sense for GitHub to be part of Microsoft proper.
Perhaps this is a change for the better.
(PS: despite their “failure” to win hearts and minds, I do recommend giving Copilot in VSCode another look these days. Its agentic mode is very good and rapidly improving; I find it comparable to Claude Code at this point, particularly when paired with a strong model. Related to structure: I never quite understood the line between what parts of this GitHub made, and what parts of this the vscode and related Microsoft teams made.)
The features that will be prioritized will be AI not Git improvement
I don't mean to sounds like an MS apologist, btw. I fully predicted and hoped for an exodus from Github to GitLab or something back when it got acquired — I'm from the Microsux generation.
If you help humans collaborate better, you help LLMs collaborate better.
I am reminded of this discussion between fb devs and git devs from 13 yrs ago:
https://public-inbox.org/git/CB5074CF.3AD7A%25joshua.redston...
git has definitely made improvements since that thread, e.g.:
https://graphite.dev/guides/git-monorepo#tools-and-strategie...
but it could still be better for the truly gargantuan of code bases. Might not be worth it? Idk. Maybe with llm generated code churn, suddenly it becomes worth it? haha.
idk why they didn't do that tbh, all ingredients are already there
they should have launched an "firebase like" and full web framework "next.js like" to convert that into long term azure customer like its no brainer they didn't want to create that and recycling Teams forever
this is also issue with game development, like I know MS is big at desktop dev but they don't have presence in game dev other than xbox game studios which is fine but they could create their own game engine with all resources they have. they could save both for their usage in their massive studio while also strengthening their development pipeline from code,game engine to azure
Github's workflow for stacked PRs is still terrible. There's plenty of room for improvement.
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/5634
4 years and counting...
so if you create an Organization to host your project(s), now you cannot enable that maintainers make changes on incoming Pull Requests; something that is very useful and perfectly available for projects that live under a normal username.
And yes, I know "Fine Grained Tokens" exist but they don't seem to be usable almost anywhere and the fine grain level of control isn't actually very fine grained so they kind of suck.
Not even mentioning AI, which is a huge opportunity also.
The PR UI is taking some getting used to.
Dev changes code near a comment I made? Comment is marked "Outdated" and hidden. If I open it, can I see what change they made next to the comment? Nope, I have to go find it manually!
It sorts X.Y below X.Y.A, X.Y.B etc. in the file listing.
When I select a file in the listing I'd like to just have that file open, not scroll to it in a list of all the changes.
The first PR I did showed a ton of changes that had already been merged from common history. I can see the merge commit you made, GitHub, I know you know none of these changes are actually being made.
Not caring if a required action hasn't run automatically. No "run" option, not even a "this isn't ever going to run", just "waiting for result".
Weirdly, showing the result of an action on the source branch, when it needs to pass on the merge commit.
I've not yet figured out how to require different approvers for different branches, although that one might be on my org settings. It's either the people in the codeowners file or any contributor?
No way to allow a ruleset to be bypassable while making the approvers still manually bypass it themselves. I want to know if I'm getting it wrong as much as I want to stop my junior devs messing up.
Of course there are - lots of room for improving data collection and advertising revenue streams!
Nah…
One idea though, they could make a nice site like SourceHut so you can host repos and browse through them.
I mean, Microsoft has this GitHub social media site with stickers and AI, but something serious for programmers could be nice too.
That's absolutely the right question to ask. If MS just left GitHub alone, it would be fine for open source projects for years to come. The enterprise side is a little different, there they still have a lot of work to do to round out some of their more advanced features.
What worries me isn't that they stop investing. What worries me is that they actively destroy the current project while turning it into AI garbage.
GitHub has (only) $2bn direct revenues (2024; subscriptions + presumably per-usage billing of features like GitHub Actions) but also generates revenue via Copilot, Marketplace (selling tools and integrations).
What are Microsoft CoreAI's revenues? surely >> GH's direct revenues. Hence, GH is likely to become a platform for pushing all sorts of AI revenue streams on its users. I wonder how Microsoft sees that, by segment.
> 74 points by leoc on April 3, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler
> Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).
Historical debate may now begin.
Github at its core is a software lifecycle management product. To keep it running requires skillsets that are much much different from that of Gen AI/ML/whatever. Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra corporate political play and not something thats in the best interests of the users or the community. I expect to see a lot of the “legacy Github” folks slowly leave and be replaced by MS/Azure folks (gross). In the short to medium term this is probably gonna affect the stability of the system (its already pretty bad with several outages every month, including silent outages).
It's hard for me to see anything Microsoft does as something other than an intra-corporate political play.
If you only need Git plus project tracking Gitea is super mature. It runs happily on small VPS.
Citation needed. nektos/act is for sure not "like GitHub's"
Sure, it's not identical, and no one claims it is. I think it's defensibly like them, though.
> Forgejo was created in October 2022 after a for profit company took over the Gitea project. It exists under the umbrella of a non-profit organization, Codeberg e.V. and is developed in the interest of the general public. In the year that followed, this difference in governance led to choices that made Forgejo significantly and durably different from Gitea.
If you take it at face value (at your peril), Gitea is about to start enshittification, while Forgejo will not at any point. My personal opinion, is that this is credible.
Will move to that fork in one of my future private infrastructure reconstructions.
While GitHub and GitLab have dedicated design and front-end teams to improve their UI/UX, Gitea and Forgejo aren't large enough to reach that scale, even after Gitea became a company.
For example, look at the number of issues triaged with "UX" [0] or "UX Paper Cut" [1] on GitLab. It is an order of magnitude larger than you would find in any other FOSS option.
[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B...
[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B...
[0] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/33945
[1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/25664
- completely docker based CI/CD which makes reasoning about what it's going to do easier than "read through some minified .js from some rando"
- they do have composable CI/CD akin to the GitHub Actions marketplace, but I haven't used it as much in anger to speak to how valuable it is versus "competitive checkbox feature"
- built-in Terraform State, so no more S3 + Dynamo
- highly configurable JWT claim curation for ease of OIDC based access from the pipelines
- good integration between the platform and multiple Kubernetes clusters
- related to that, a strong "review environment" setup
- they were also hinting at being a Sentry replacement, but regrettably I had to switch back to GitHub before that came out of preview so I don't this second know where it stands
<https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/#environment> plus <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/#dynamic-environments> et al
I believe it aligns with this behavior in GitHub: <https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/deploy/configure-...> with the distinction that it appears from the GH docs that they think of that as "needs administrative approval" whereas GLCI thinks of it as "if the pipeline has permissions to run provisioning, off to the races, because names are free"
GitLab introduced the "deployment tier" I think as a means of communication to other users about the importance of the environment, but control over what credentials were made available to CI/CD was always controlled via <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/environments/#limit-the-environme...> which partially explains why the only reason to involve a repository administrator would be to install or update a secret needed to deploy successfully
---
it the spirit of "they really, really drink their own champagne," one can see the environments for GitLab itself https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/environments
Codeberg and gitea, on the other hand, feel great, like early Github. Fast and simple, instead of a product that’s adding feature on top of half-baked feature to capture the sweet corporate $$$.
I also don't think "it's open source!" is a huge differentiator because it's enormous, difficult to deploy from source and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero.
I think Forgejo is probably a way better option at this point even if it is less mature. It's written in Go so way easier to deploy and edit. And none of the features are paid.
I do like Gitlab but... it's not amazing. I liked Phabricator more (except for its lack of integrated CI).
That's a silly thing to say.
I'm sure if it was your full time job you'd eventually learn the codebase, but there's no way you can just dip in and add a feature unless you really persevere.
But I did manage to add a few features to the gitlab-runner (used for CI) - because it's written in Go, and Go has static types and pretty great IDE support these days. Night and day.
I've also added a few features to VSCode which is a similarly huge codebase. Again it's written in Typescript which has static types and good IDE support. It would have been effectively impossible if that wasn't the case.
> difficult to deploy from source
I won't argue with you here. There are a lot of moving pieces in a Rails deployment. This isn't different from most web app frameworks, but it is difficult.
That said, I've never worked on a Rails app where deployment was any more difficult than a variation on `bin/deploy v123 production`, because I wrote that script and it works 100% of the time.
> and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero
But this is still silly. You just don't know Rails or Ruby well, and don't want to learn them. Fine, but if you hadn't already made that decision, you would find the solution simple enough. No judgement intended -- different framework/language paradigms fit different people differently.
Rails has great IDE support also. Static typing can be a useful language feature, but a lack of same has not ever, in my experience, made it more difficult to understand real-world code.
There is a lot to love about Go too, don't get me wrong. But I would guess that the number of random developers who could drop in and be immediately productive in a Ruby/Rails app, vs a Go webapp, is basically equivalent. The overlap of projects where both would be highly appropriate choices is a bit thin.
[I hire into Ruby/Rails jobs regularly. I often hire senior developers with no Ruby/Rails background, but I do not hire people into these positions who are not open to learning. It takes a senior dev (from the C/Algol family) one day to learn Ruby, and (from a web dev background) a week or less to learn Rails. I have never seen a failure.
I also hire into Go jobs almost as frequently. The hiring criteria is a bit different (less emphasis on web awareness), but I do find it easier to teach Go to a Ruby dev, than Ruby to a Go dev. Make of that what you will.]
That's not even getting into attempting to use their "happy path" <https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v18.2.1-ee/.gitp...> -> https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit#local which I found just incredibly challenging getting it to use my copies of the repos. But, just like in every one of these conversations, it's been a number of years since I tried it so maybe it's much better now
But I was responding specifically to "in Ruby, so the chance of being able to actually modify it ... is near zero", which does not address the real issue.
It's perfectly possible to write simple, clear code in Ruby (and Rails!), but I'll concede that GitLab is not the best example of that.
If OP had said ~"... and the GitLab codebase is large and can be difficult to navigate and make drop-in contributions to ... also I have an aversion to dynamically-typed languages" :) ... then I wouldn't have bothered commenting.
most SaaS tools only have github integration which is sucks
At home I prefer fossil. It isn’t without rough edges but for the small developer headcount stuff I do it is quite lovely.
i consider that a feature
Yes and no. If all you want is a remote git server then no, there's not. But there's plenty of legitimate reasons to use a SaaS tool like GitHub.
https://community.kde.org/Infrastructure/GitLab
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
Knot DNS[1] good enough for you ? GPL licensed.
[1] https://gitlab.nic.cz/knot/knot-dns
https://gitlab.gnome.org/ - GNOME uses Gitlab
https://gitlab.com/kicad/ - KiCad uses Gitlab
so it would be feeding off itself from "vibe coder" an have an singularity generated corpus around AI tooling
Microsoft's goal is to make money by making software or ~~selling~~ renting services. You are a cost center.
And what do managers do to cost centers? They outsource them, either to artificial "intelligence" or actual Indians.
By plagiarizing stolen code, disregarding its original license, they hope to make the former actually work.
DevDiv was arguably the place where GitHub would have ended up had it become integrated earlier, so it makes sense that it would end up there.
If you've wondered about hosting your own version of GitHub but have worried it's too hard to set up, I'd encourage you to spend even a few minutes spinning an instance up with Docker Compose and poking around.
https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/admin/installation/docker/
Now this time it could be different. But last time wasn't that bad imho.
Now with copilot I'd be surprised if they weren't profitable
Private repositories is not a feature I use (if I want the files to be private, I will not send them to Microsoft or to someone else, unless they are the intended recipient).
I use GitHub Actions to automatically assign issues to myself,
I think they have changed the HTML in many worse ways; some functions require JavaScripts, etc. They also made mandatory 2FA, and setting it up does not work properly. (I can use the API to get around both issues, for now.)
Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864929 - Aug 2025 (66 comments)
I expect this will continue indefinitely until the product becomes little more than an AI training corpus and genericized trademark, similar to how our Xerox machines at work are actually made by Brother, while Xerox the actual brand has faded into obsolescence.
I will note that we don't use many of the CI/CD/issue tracking/wiki/etc. features, though both Github and Gitlab offer them. I'm sure they have their own particular quirks that may be a hassle to migrate between and have people relearn. I prefer to keep those tools separate, allowing the git repository be almost exclusively a git repository and spinning up other tools as needed.
0. https://ersc.io/
This is so confusing. The "CoreAI" team is apparently doing everything except the core of AI, which is LLMs.
I still feel that there's no competitor I like as much. But that may not matter.
Like it or not this makes sense as a business move. Microsoft is positioning itself for the next phase of the current AI hype cycle where standalone AI products will struggle and the “it’s a feature not a product” phase will take hold.
If they fuck up the core business rushing into AI, then aren’t they likely to get replaced by something else that does the core thing better?
Not to mention all the earnest worries about them reading private codebases to train AI nobody asked for.
You’d think being a trusted source of truth for many critical codebases would be “enough”
... Extinguish?
So there is no real org change, just the CEO left and they didn't immediately replace him with a new one.
This surely isn't going in any good direction. What's next ads in commits?
And the hot take is that Azure devops, including git and the pipelines, is actually better. That Github yaml trash is just a pain.
Github documentation is already pushing primarily Azure, for example https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/deploy/deploy-to-... has 8 Azure links up front, then 1 link for AWS, 1 for Google, and 1 about Apple.
And don't forget that NPM is Microsoft property too, https://docs.github.com/en/actions/tutorials/publish-package... has no equivalent document for e.g. JSR.
* Actions are more finicky, both private (paid) and public, they crash and hang more.
* Publishing changes without testing them: https://github.com/actions/toolkit/pull/2106
* 5+ second loads on the GitHub mobile app
* AI buttons everywhere (Your administrator can pay for CoPilot)
* Releasing Node24, completely skipping Node22 in their actions: https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/tag/v2.327.1
One of the most disgusting features that they did build is the ability for administrators to check how often a user accepts the CoPilot suggestions.
I was about to complain that they still don't have YAML anchors, but it seems that that was merged in 7 days ago: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182#issuecomment-3...
GitHub is their most trusted “tech” brand by far, and it has their only successful AI product, Co-Pilot.
It’s almost inevitable that GitHub and all its products will be consumed with Microsoft bloat in the next 5 years as more and more products coast off the GitHub brand.
Expect tabloid news in GitHub products soon.
Long-term, we aim to be the new social coding platform, collectively built in the open.
It fits my "do one thing, do it well" philosophy as it doesn't have opinions about CI, Issue trackers or even how you view the code online.
I'll admit that it's a nasty bastard to set up properly though, and the options for viewing repositories are universally terrible when not bundled with a code-review system (like Gitea, Github and Gitlab). Alas.
The fact that it stores everything in files on disk (no databases except for caches that can be regenerated) makes backup/restore and replication a breeze compared to many other more complicated systems.
You have a very short privacy policy [https://tangled.sh/privacy], but no guarantees of AI-bot-scraping protection. What if anything is your users' expectation of privacy of their repos against third parties, including malicious ones? Really you need to set that out clearly in your privacy policy.
Thanks for the feedback re: the privacy policy. It’s still actively being improved and we take a lot of effort to protect against AI scrapers. I’ll update the policy verbiage to include that.
But AT Protocol can't.
So currently, you're only suitable for non-commercial users. (Can you name any commercial org using Tangled.sh on source code?)
Does AT Protocol have any rough milestone (date?) for private data?
> we take a lot of effort to protect against AI scrapers.
Sorry that's not stating a guarantee of anything, it's an unquantifiable aspiration. I asked what you guarantee your users. IP access logs? Alerts? Response times? Blocks? IP whitelisting?
1. GitHub itself isn't opensource despite being the opensource forge.
2. Microsoft (of all companies) acquired it.
3. Microsoft pushes VSCode and kills GitHub's Atom.
4. GitHub employees are quite political (master branch rename, ICE protest resignations, etc).
5. GitHub striking down repositories and user accounts (the Russian developer, yt-dlp, etc).
6. LLMs trained on public and private code without consent or opting in.
7. GitHub forcing AI agents in pull requests and in various pages on GitHub.
8. GitHub's CEO resigning and now in more of Microsoft's AI control.
I left back when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft. I wondered if it was a mistake for me to leave, but.. I haven't regretted it yet.
[1] https://forgejo.org/
> “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon,” says Dohmke in a memo to GitHub employees today. “I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.”
Is interesting to me. There is quite a number of rumors that MSFT will be Returning to Office next year. The prominence of 'remote first' in this quote may indicate that such concerns are playing a role here...
- 2-nd of Aug 2025 Github CEO delivers stark message to developers: "Embrace AI or get out of the industry" https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...
- 11-th of Aug 2025 Github CEO resigns https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...
You can't make this stuff up :) Maybe he didn't embrace AI hard enough, and that's why he is exiting the industry?
Whenever someone makes a promise that a subsidiary or product will remain unchanged (typically because that's how customers/users prefer it), it's useful to ask whether that promise has any legal force that will prevent the company from reneging on the promise if organizational or market circumstances change.
There is almost never a barrier to having the organization change their mind, which means that the promise is at best a soft promise that in the near term they don't intend to change too much too quickly.
Always assume anyone carrying water for a mega corp is a shill or a bot or some combo.
Never make a deal with the devil.
On the one hand, this probably means it gets the funding it needs to keep going strong.
On the other hand, I'm worried that this means that GitHub is going to focus exclusively on building AI features while the core product becomes stale/abandoned.
I expect that the problem that Microsoft aims to fix is that people can use GitHub effortlessly without locking into Azure and Power Platform
I don't believe so, and I didn't mean to imply that. Rather just that if they are part of the "Core AI" org then they will likely remain a priority area of investment for Microsoft...right now anyway.
Im more concerned about random breakages. When you have org pressure to add features rapidly shit breaks. Stale would be best case scenario.
$ git commit
The git command has been changed to bob, please type 'bob commit' to commit.
I still remember Atom.
Microsoft ruins everything they touch. They will find a way to ruin Github shortly.
Anyone posting a step-by-step to do a full migration from Github to another provider would get a lot of traffic to their blog in short time.
https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...
>GitHub has operated as a separate company ever since Microsoft acquired it.
Yeah, right.
And Santa Claus exists, Virginia.
Oxymoron of the decade ...
https://www.google.com/search?q=oxymoron+meaning
All your code are belong to MSCodeLLMTrainer.exe now
The lack of tech literacy among tech bloggers is incredibly disappointing. I wish I could say it was shocking, but that’s not true.
But yeah, github has been largely unaffected.
Looks like I made the right move
https://robinhood.com/stocks/GTLB
Does this mean source code might get synthesized and anonymized so Ai coding agents can train on it?
Look at the some of the AI slop curl deals with -- https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s... -- and imagine your issues list filled with that.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/copilot-a...
That's GitHub code -> AI.
The damage will be AI code -> GitHub
CoPilot already gives (bad) code reviews on GitHub PRs.
The bit most of us seem to completely misunderstand is that the name of the capitalist game is not competition it's monopoly rent. All major corporations time and again look to capture a monopoly, it's the winning play.
- Free public repositories and free API access.
- Mutual TLS authentication. Use X.509 extensions for partial delegation of authorization, so that someone can issue a certificate to themself or others with a limited set of permissions.
- Mirroring on multiple independent services.
- Allow SHA-1 (for compatibility with a lot of existing repositories that use it, and anyone using software that does not support other hashing algorithms) but also allow other more secure hashing algorithms to be used in case you do not want to use SHA-1.
- Make the HTML to work without CSS and JavaScripts (even if they can provide enhancements, do not make them required).
- Support some parts of the GitHub API, in order that existing software which uses GitHub API will be able to work with it.
- If you are making a new API as well, then it might use DER, that can use binary data, non-Unicode text data, etc better.
- Do not require TLS for read-only access to public data (but still allow using TLS even in this case).