JohnTHaller3 days ago
GitHub will now fall under Microsoft's CoreAI team, which give some indication of GitHub's purpose and direction going forward.
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.
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.
https://www.copilot.live/blog/does-github-copilot-use-your-code#githubs-privacy-policy
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us
(The link I posted is also not the proper ToS, it is more of an abridged version. They made the actual ToS somewhat hard to find and I cannot be bothered.)
> Short version: We treat the content of private repositories as confidential, and we only access it as described in our Privacy Statement—for security purposes, to assist the repository owner with a support matter, to maintain the integrity of the Service, to comply with our legal obligations, if we have reason to believe the contents are in violation of the law, or with your consent.
> You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time.
> parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers
This is an “AI” platform now. “Improving the service” means that. “With your consent” means you have accepted the ToS (which by the way can be changed at any point and your continued use of the service means you consent to it).
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).
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.
> “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.
Microsoft under Gates at least produced real things. I wonder when Apple gets an Indian CEO to facilitate outsourcing.
> 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.”
Of course, none of this has anything to do with GitHub. Will they ~~agentify~~ enshittify Visual Source Safe as well?
You would think with all the AI magic, they would deliver more "core editor" features/enhancement. No, just more Copilot.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc
One that I am interested in is tree sitter syntax highlighting support: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/50140
There are a ton of things that could be done. The fact that you haven't personally needed more features doesn't mean it's "feature complete". Not even close. You just haven't hit those pain points in your workflow.
Also, look at what May 2024 changelog looks like https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_90
vs most recent one https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_103
Also shocked to learn VS Code is using textmate instead of treesitter.
I feel like we almost need government intervention to keep GitHub an open commons, but I am a Libertarian and I distrust the government perhaps even more than the tech industry - still an open question for me.
Lock in and control by huge corporations is almost always uniformly bad. I have accepted the message of great books like Privacy is Power, The Tech Coup, and Surveillance Capitalism, and I feel pretty good about just using Google’s Gemini APIs when I need them, and lean as hard as possible on open models running on Ollama and LM Studio. There are also little things you can do like not installing apps and using web apps.
Back to test editors: the Lem Emacs-like editor written in Common Lisp is an interesting project https://github.com/lem-project/lem
Further, git is made to be decentralized. Having the government take over a business to maintain a centralized source is the peak of absurdity.
The problem are the extensions, I bash Electron all the time, yet I use VSCode almost daily because of certain extensions.
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
EDIT: just looked, GitLab seems caught up in AI agent hype also, and have their prices gone up?
Forgejo/Codeberg seems interesting
Plus github has also been trying to be a social media sites for a while, too, which I never really apprecisted. The only reason I ever used github in the first place, as a personal user, was because its what everyone else uses on their resume. But I no longer put personal projects on my resume so I dont see the point in using github anymore. We use gitlab at work and it works great.
Though the other providers look good, too. Im not trying to denigrate them. Codeberg, however, looks like it requires a subscription fee, and im just not using enough features of my git provider to justify paying for it
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.
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.
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.
$ git commit
The git command has been changed to bob, please type 'bob commit' to commit.
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.
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.
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.
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?
most SaaS tools only have github integration which is sucks
If you only need Git plus project tracking Gitea is super mature. It runs happily on small VPS.
Will move to that fork in one of my future private infrastructure reconstructions.
> 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.
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.
Interested! Some detail on how you achieve this for free would be great.
If you want to run a process after each push to a branch or merge into main or whatever, you describe it in a YAML file in that repo. Configure some workers to run those actions and off you go! I use it for things like running tests and applying Terraform changes.
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%5D=UX
[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B%5D=UX%20Paper%20Cuts
Knot DNS[1] good enough for you ? GPL licensed.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/ - GNOME uses Gitlab
https://gitlab.com/kicad/ - KiCad uses Gitlab
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.
- 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-and-manage-deployments/manage-environments> 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-environment-scope-of-a-cicd-variable> 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
GitHub Actions can share runtime environment, which makes them cheap to compose. GitLab components are separately launched Docker containers, which makes them heavyweight and unsuitable for small things (e.g. a CI component can't install a dependency or set configuration for your build, because your build won't be running there).
The components aren't even actual components. They're just YAML templates concatenated with other YAML that appends lines to a bash script. This means you can't write smart integrations that refer to things like "the output path of the Build component", because there's no such entity. It's just some bash with some env var.
i consider that a feature
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/.gitpod.yml?ref_type=tags#L4> -> 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.
> You don't want to learn Ruby or Rails
Learning Ruby or Rails wasn't the problem. The Ruby language itself is fairly trivial. The issue is the lack of static types, and the fact that you can't even fall back to grep.
I know Python very well but it is almost as difficult to edit large Python codebases with no type hints. (It's not quite as bad because most Python code is greppable.)
I grep through Rails code bases all the time. It is my first-choice method of discovery. In the very rare cases where it does not work immediately, I set a breakpoint and run from the REPL. This never does not work, even in the GitLab code base.
I have my criticisms of Ruby, and Rails, too. But your "near zero" comment is a shallow dismissal that captures your biases and presents them as some kind of informed truth. It is not.
At home I prefer fossil. It isn’t without rough edges but for the small developer headcount stuff I do it is quite lovely.
Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864929 - Aug 2025 (66 comments)
Looks like I made the right move
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.
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.
I am reminded of this discussion between fb devs and git devs from 13 yrs ago:
https://public-inbox.org/git/CB5074CF.3AD7A%25joshua.redstone@fb.com/t/#u
git has definitely made improvements since that thread, e.g.:
https://graphite.dev/guides/git-monorepo#tools-and-strategies-for-efficient-monorepo-management
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.
If you help humans collaborate better, you help LLMs collaborate better.
Github's workflow for stacked PRs is still terrible. There's plenty of room for improvement.
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.
Nah…
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
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.
Of course there are - lots of room for improving data collection and advertising revenue streams!
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.
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.
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.
Not letting you resolve conflicts in the UI if the source branch is protected, even though the UI gives you the option to commit the resolution to a new branch if you do it for an unprotected source branch.
Updating the source branch in the PR if you choose to do the above - something you can't do yourself!
Not showing branches in a hierarchy (as if they were directory paths)
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.
* 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-3150797791
But yeah, github has been largely unaffected.
I still remember Atom.
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.
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.
You'll get the same experience as Codeberg, because Codeberg is in fact running on Forgejo
[0] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/main/FederationRoadmap.md
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
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.
I don't think this is right. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea#Forgejo_fork.
The lineage of those projects is Gogs => Gitea => Forgejo
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.
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.
Pick one.
EGreg didn't mean to say that VS Code used to be Atom, or is based on Atom, though I agree his wording was a bit ambiguous and it could be interpreted that way.
During that time, Atom was released (2014). But I don't recall it ever being especially popular - at least outside of the JS ecosystem. For one thing, it was kind of slow on release (people still complain about Electron!) and while it offered a lot of customization, these customization often seemed to worsen its performance. It was VS Code that really seemed to draw a wider audience from my perspective.
That said, I switched to vim around the time Atom came out, so I may be out of touch. I doubt there are any solid stats anywhere...
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.
No one really associates human rights with Microsoft's reputation. That is the domain of Palantir, Meta, etc.
I'm just mentioning this for no reason whatsoever. It popped into my head, for some reason.
In what country are you bound by clauses like that? I've never heard Microsoft doing something like that before.
I very much do look very negatively on Microsoft as a collaborator with modern fascist regimes, along with Meta, Palantir, X, etc.
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...
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.
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.
I actively invest my personal income to organizations / businesses that are working to provide viable alternative. All are fruitful in reducing the barrier to a viable product. From improving hard-ware design to getting software in a stable state. Currently waiting on a phone from EU from a company on their attempt.
Went with a Farirphone 4 running /e/OS/. Yes, /e/OS/ is based on AOSP. This phone has a high chance of full postmarketos support. It is the closet from being disconnected from Google that I find to be stable. Postmarketos would allow for a quick jump.
In the mean time, still investing in companies and organizations that don't want to help Google in the smartphone market. It is a long-term investment.
* 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.
Linux is better.
That worm has turned, at least five years ago
Oh, and if you have problems running Linux on Macs... That isn't Linux's fault.
Hopefully either Asahi support improves in the near future or Snapdragon X Elite support in Linux becomes a bit better.
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.
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.
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.
The real difference maker is efficiency. MacBook owners simply do not need to worry about whether they are plugged in or not; the performance does not change and the battery lasts many hours, even on demanding tasks. Occasionally you can cherry pick a benchmark where AMD appears to be competitive, but always at much higher power draw.
AMD and Intel users don’t really appreciate how much of a qualitative difference that is. Being even close in performance, while offering far superior reliability and battery life, puts apple silicon in a league of its own.
Share your numbers please. I’m having trouble finding reliable sources that aren’t YouTube videos or forum posts, but nothing I’ve been able to find contradicts my claims.
Can you please define and explain the meaning «Rosetta throttling»? Rosetta 2 is static binary translation + JIT optimisations at the run time. Is Rosetta injecting delays slots or delay loops into the translated code? Or, is it injecting branch instructions that consistently fail the branch predictor? Something else? Since you seem to have analysed specific code paths, the esteemed congregation on here is eager to pick the disassembled code apart.
Without the direct evidence, such claims are as credible as that of a vegetable vendor at the local farmer market claiming that spinach they sell cures cancer.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Rather: It took them two more releases until they offered a version that had a price tag (setting the price was a conscious decision by Microsoft) that made a Windows NT derivate also affordable to non-professional users.
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.
98 just crashed, or showed something DOSish white on black before rebooting.
edit: Hrrm. According to Wikipedia it did. Still can't remember that, though.
Aye repent! Aye repent!
Your reasoning also isn’t sufficient. The classic Microsoft Kernel was able to support a much wider variety of hardware because it was modular (internally, not architecturally). The classic Macintosh Kernel had a far smaller ecosystem to support and couldn’t even add support for hardware that existed on many of their own devices that would make the kernel on-par with the 9x kernel and be transparent (except for improved usability) for users.
So to recap, OP claimed that OS 8 (not A/UX) was superior to 9x. And that’s simply false. Many consider the 98 kernel garbage, even for its time; and yet it’s objectively better to OS 8’s.
If we’re simply arguing Apple hardware OSes versus Intel options (as you seem to be conflating this to), then the latter still wins with Xenix, any number of Unices, BSD, Linux, etc; all more stable and better supported than A/UX as well as better UI-centered OSes (NT, OS/2, BeOS, XFree86, etc).
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
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.
If you asked me 2 years ago I would say something different about Linux than I would said today, because I’m running a different distribution with a different desktop environment and that changed my experience completely, even though I’m running on basically the same hardware.
I run Linux in Apple hardware too, how does that rank in your comparison?
Hardware: Apple announced an ARM based CPU and started shipping. It was _mostly_ a seemless experience thanks to Rosetta2. The performance on these well-built machines was outstanding. Even the Intel-based machines previously had really strong performance. The machines themselves (on average) were among some of the most well-built. Yes, there were outliers with the butterfly keyboards. Yes there were outliers with silly features like the touchbar. We're talking on average.
Software: Apple's OS is just a boring Unix that works. Yes I realize that Unix is in name only - but on top of that XNU microkernel really is a lot of BSD. Having the GNU tools available AND Sound/Fingerprint Reader/HiRes Display that actually scales... that is still not the reality in Linux. (I still love Linux btw - I keep multiple machines around the house running it) So not having to spend a great deal of time fiddling with config files when I plug in an external monitor actually is a big deal. Most folks don't want the hassles of messing with pavucontrol just because they switched to their external audio setup. Most folks will appreciate when they drag a window to that exterinal monitor that the HiDPI didn't cause text to go wonky.
So those are the areas where Apple is just massively superior. They nailed it in the "it just works" department. They've nailed it in the "quality hardware" department.
Windows also does fairly well in a lot of these areas.
As far as running Linux on Apple hardware? I had a buddy come into a meeting running Gnome+Ubuntu on his MacBook Pro back around 2017... as soon as he plugged into the projector, it was a mess. I'm sure it's gotten better since then.
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.
The echo chamber is still reverberating. People say that MacOS is good because other people have told them so. The people claiming that is better don't have an earnest effort outside of the ecosystem to support their claims. I was forced to use MacOS at work up until a little over 1.5 years ago, I have perspective on both, and it is categorically incompetent. It doesn't hold a candle to dev on Linux.
As for Windows? Windows 7/11 are probably still better than MacOS (as you implied with your comment about neglect), but it's probably as bad or slightly better than Win 11.
They’re all perfectly viable options with strengths and weaknesses. None of them are especially great. I’m partial to MacOS, personally.
It’s willful ignorance to think that the many millions of people that like MacOS are just parroting what they’ve been told.
This is so entirely true.
I've installed so many different Linux distributions (and multiple Windows versions) on my personal laptop. Currently noodling around with NixOS.
I've never been tempted by a non-macOS laptop for work.
Whatever faults macOS has, it is very good at staying out of my way for getting work done, and all the small ancillary bits (eg webcam and audio support for chatting) have worked flawlessly for me for two decades. I cannot say the same about either Windows or Linux.
Maybe you're speaking for yourself? I absolutely love my Macbook and the M-series are the best devices I've ever owned.
> - A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
Really? I haven't noticed.
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.
The point is that regardless of whether one or both are offshored, the VP or CEO will get on your ass immediately if the iOS app has a crash or even a layout bug because they all use iOS personally. Whereas the most influential person in the company who even owns an Android device tends to be some IT manager.
YMMV but this is precisely how it worked in my last two jobs. For instance, in one company, we outsourced both, but the Android app was developed entirely in India, whereas the iOS team was supervised and led by a US-based contractor that we could (and did frequently) talk to.
Of course, only a tiny number of such "commercial" apps are native, 90% are some cross-platform framework. But the iOS versions tend to get far more attention when sloppy habits and lack of skill result in lag, race conditions, bugs, etc.
PS: I belive completely that this dynamic either does not exist, or is actually in REVERSE, in countries where Android is more dominant. In the US, iOS users dominate the top 80% of the orgchart in basically every company besides Google.
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.
I refuse to pay Apple and buy their hardware to be able to develop a native app for their walled-garden platform, where they can then further extort me for any money my users spend through the app I create.
And the DOJ agrees with me, which is why they are suing Apple for abusive business practices.
Well, one reason is that most Android phones being sold are so underpowered that you have to make a native app to get decent performance. Facebook for one found out early on that it couldn’t get away with just having an app that was a web wrapper because of low end Android devices.
So where are all of the great groundbreaking popular web apps?
And saying the current US government is in agreement with you about anything isn’t the positive thing you seem to be implying it is…
So you think I'm the only person who ever had this problem? The DOJ apparently disagrees with you.
>Well, one reason is that most Android phones being sold are so underpowered that you have to make a native app to get decent performance.
Bullshit. It has nothing to do with performance, it has everything to do with Apple's abusive business practices not allowing any other web view on their platform, and purposely hobbling their browser for anti-competitive greedy business reasons.
>So where are all of the great groundbreaking popular web apps?
So where are your goalposts moving next?
>And saying the current US government is in agreement with you about anything isn’t the positive thing you seem to be implying it is…
I didn't say the current US government, the DOJ under the previous administration is the one that filed the charges against Apple. But I know you aren't arguing in good faith, so maybe we should just agree to disagree.
If the only reason web apps aren’t on iPhones is because of Safari and if there are other browser engines available for Android and Chrome is so much better, wouldn’t you expect to see great PWAs on Android? Especially with it being 70% of the world wide market?
> Bullshit. It has nothing to do with performance, it has everything to do with Apple's abusive business practices not allowing any other web view on their platform, and purposely hobbling their browser for anti-competitive greedy business reasons.
It doesn’t have anything to do with performance of iOS devices that’s true - because Apple doesn’t make any devices with substandard hardware with bad browser performance. But there are plenty of crappy Android device (most of them by sales volume) that do have subpar hardware performance.
But native apps are more performant than web based apps and web wrappers. Are you denying that?
> I didn't say the current US government, the DOJ under the previous administration is the one that filed the charges against Apple. But I know you aren't arguing in good faith, so maybe we should just agree to disagree.
One of us haven’t checked to see what the DOJ’s complaints are about - none of which are alternate browser engines…
Wow, that's quite the reach. Again, bad faith.
>wouldn’t you expect to see great PWAs on Android?
I do, YMMV. I even created one myself. But again, bad faith from you.
>because Apple doesn’t make any devices with substandard hardware
"You're holding it wrong" proves you wrong.
>that do have subpar hardware performance.
None of this is about a hardware dick-measuring contest, but you sure are trying to move the goalposts that way. Again, bad faith from you.
>But native apps are more performant than web based apps and web wrappers. Are you denying that?
This is another logical fallacy. I'm done with you, you're comments are not grounded in anything except your hatred of anything not Apple.
>One of us haven’t checked to see what the DOJ’s complaints are about - none of which are alternate browser engines…
Again, just more bullshit from you.
"The complaint also alleges that Apple’s conduct extends beyond these examples, affecting web browsers, video communication, news subscriptions, entertainment, automotive services, advertising, location services, and more. Apple has every incentive to extend and expand its course of conduct to acquire and maintain power over next-frontier devices and technologies."
The "affecting web browsers" part is exactly the thing I described.
Apple already lost that exact thing in Europe, because Europe sued them for it too, and now you can use alternative browser engines on iOS in Europe. Apple's going to lose that one in the US too.
You really don't need to reply. I'm just going to give you canned response from here on out because I'm not wasting any more of my time with an Apple shill.
You should be working for Facebook or Google, they both came to the conclusion that their apps should use native frameworks for performance reasons…
It very much is about hardware. Most Android phones suck statistically (yes I know there are some performant ones. But that’s not what most of the world is buying) and your web app is not going to perform well on them.
By the way, what’s the ARR on your web app? Monthly active users? Have you tested it on one of the low end free phones?
And it’s not me being an Apple shill, your web app probably sucks like every other web app that has ever existed on mobile. I wouldn’t say the same about a native Android app.
You really don't need to reply. I'm just going to give you canned response from here on out because I'm not wasting any more of my time with an Apple shill.
Apple is essentially responsible for the shit show that is react native, flutter and all the other cross platform crap. Just let us build for the web with basic support for a native like experience. Works fine on every platform but iOS and iPadOS.
I as a small business don't want to write three separate fucking apps. I don't want to charge customers more to cover that. It's a waste of everyone's time and money.
You really don't need to reply. I'm just going to give you canned response from here on out because I'm not wasting any more of my time with an Apple shill.
So Apple is now responsible for the shit show of current web development and at the same time isn’t keeping up or doesn’t care about the web? Which is it?
I could swear that the two most popular web frameworks over the years either came from Google or Facebook.
How praytell is Apple responsible for Google’s Flutter - that they also have basically abandoned.
And run once run anywhere has never worked in the history of the industry.
I do not want to pay Apple for the privilege to develop a native app, as well as being forced to buy not just their mobile devices, but a full computer just to develop that native app on, when it could just be done as a web application. It's hurting me, a non-Apple user.
The DOJ noticed and is suing Apple for doing this.
That's likely why the DOJ is _not_ “suing Apple for doing this”. Browsers are conspicuously not on the list of charges and I think it's because in the subsequent 3 decades, we've had some key changes: all of the major browser engines are open source, very few people question the demand for standard libraries for rendering web content even in desktop apps, statistically nobody pays for web browsers. A large part of the Microsoft trial was discussing how they colluded to prevent PC vendors from bundling other companies' software but in this case Apple isn't trying to restrict another vendor's decision about what software they ship on their hardware and users don't show much sign of being bothered by the lack of PWAs, which have negligible usage on any platform. If someone was making a lot of money with a PWA on Android but having to pay Apple's in-app fees on iOS, that'd be a much stronger argument for market distortion.
The actual lawsuits are focused where Apple's behavior is more clearly like 90s Microsofts: restricting access to the NFC APIs, restricting game streaming platforms, and restricting the ability of WearOS watches to work with iOS phones or Apple Watches working with Android phones. Unlike PWAs, there are other mobile payment companies who'd love to ship tighter integration, customers who want more gaming options, or who want to have something like a Garmin device as tightly integrated as an Apple Watch. I don't know how likely the DOJ's case is to succeed but at least in those cases it's easy to show that there's a real market being affected whereas it's much harder to argue that a PWA market would suddenly spring into being or that Google is somehow being deprived of Chrome revenue by having to use WebKit on iOS. I'm aware of the technical arguments but it seems fairly challenging as a legal argument to make the case that the DOJ should respond to Apple abusing a monopoly position with a fifth of the market by allowing Google to push their share over 90%. The only way the web is better off out of this is if there's some coordinated simultaneous action.
Wrong.
"60. For years, Apple denied its users access to super apps because it viewed them as “fundamentally disruptive” to “existing app distribution and development paradigms” and ultimately Apple’s monopoly power. Apple feared super apps because it recognized that as they become popular, “demand for iPhone is reduced.” So, Apple used its control over app distribution and app creation to effectively prohibit developers from offering super apps instead of competing on the merits.
61. A super app is an app that can serve as a platform for smaller “mini” programs developed using programming languages such as HTML5 and JavaScript. By using programming languages standard in most web pages, mini programs are cross platform, meaning they work the same on any web browser and on any device. Developers can therefore write a single mini program that works whether users have an iPhone or another smartphone."
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl
A browser engine made by a company other than Apple is considered a "super app". It's the same thing Apple got sued for in Europe and lost, and now iOS in Europe has to allow other browser engines.
>A large part of the Microsoft trial was discussing how they colluded to prevent PC vendors from bundling other companies' software
That is pretty much what Apple is doing.
You can try to deny it all you want but Apple is being sued by the DOJ for many things, and one of this things is them forcing Safari on every web browser running on iOS.
I really don't care what Apple does to hobble Safari, so long as they let other more modern and capable browser engines on the platform.
You say that, but consider that they might not have used the word “browser” because super apps are not the same (your attempted redefinition is not how that term is normally used). That's going back to the App Store control of code distribution, there's certainly no technical reason why someone can't use HTML5 or JavaScript in an iOS app given how many do that every day.
Again, I'm not saying that what Apple is doing is blameless but it's important to read the actual DOJ cases so you can understand why these aren't the same. For example, you baldly assert “That is pretty much what Apple is doing” completely missing that Apple is only controlling what you can do with their hardware and is making no effort to prevent, say, Google or Samsung from doing something different on their own hardware. That's significantly different from Microsoft preventing Dell, IBM, Gateway, etc. from shipping alternate operating systems and those kind of legal distinctions matter a lot in court.
You're trying to weasel around the fact that "Super App" is definitely what a native browser app not using Safari is considered to be. The DOJ is explicitly mentioning HTML and Javascript, and you're just handwaving that away.
Good luck to you sir or madame, I don't care to continue this pointless back and forth.
Now I am what you would consider a "Full Stallman" free software guy, but you can imagine my mixed feelings when I ended up being interviewed by Business Insider on why Microsoft shouldn't be giving up with web engine for a Chromium based browser. Yes, things like Safari are proprietary junk but they still keep things like Chrome dominance at bay. Alas I feel we are better having a few proprietary systems than a singular monolithic one. Once Apple lets that one go, it is only a matter of time until Google almost single handled controls the framework of the internet.
Save us Ladybird, you are our only hope!
The problem is Apple is intentionally hobbling their web browser and forcing every other browser maker to use it, which prevents web applications that use any kind of hardware API from functioning on iOS - the only alternative being making a native app for iOS where Apple can charge a significant amount for any purchases made through the native app. Web applications threaten Apple's greed, so they forbid any other browser maker from using anything but Safari on their platform.
Microsoft got sued in an antitrust and lost just because they bundled IE with Windows - not for forbidding any other browser on the platform like Apple has been doing, which is way worse IMHO. And that's one of many reasons the DOJ is suing Apple for abusive business practices.
I'll start with the most eggregious one to save time so you can just click away but: Microsoft wasn't sued for bundling a browser, it was sued because it used one monopoly position to aid another. Apple mobile devices are 57% of the market in the US (which is the highest percentage globally from what I can tell at a glance) and a far cry from 1997 Windows which was a staggering 96%+ of all desktop operating systems in the US. That is a monopoly which is not explicitly forbidden in the US unless you use it to further domination in some other field: Web browsers were considered another field.
That said, while I agree with you in principle, in practice I really don't like the idea of a browser monoculture. We already see the effects of it with WebUSB (for real) and Manifestv3 which nobody really wants but is essentially foisted on us.
There are two types of people: those who think the web is an application delivery platform, and those who think it's a window into information.
The more leaky the sandbox the worse security will get over time (even if we put a lot of eggs into the basket) and the more bloated things will get. But the people in the first camp cannot see passed their next meal for want of a "better" application delivery system. Anything that keeps them at bay is welcome to me, even if it's something I also don't agree with.
The lesser devil.
"The central issue was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its IE web browser software with its Windows operating system. Bundling the two products was allegedly a key factor in Microsoft's victory in the browser wars of the late 1990s, as every Windows user had a copy of IE. It was further alleged that this restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera), since it typically took extra time to buy and install the competing browsers."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
Yeah, Windows has a larger market share than Apple ever will, but that doesn't change the abusive business tactics Apple is using to satiate their greed.
When someone installs Chrome on iOS, they aren't getting Chrome, they are getting Safari with a wrapper. It's way worse than what Microsoft did with IE by simply bundling a browser with Windows - was it really so inconvenient to download and install a different browser when downloading and installing software is the de facto means of obtaining and running any software? I think the case against Microsoft was a bit absurd, honestly. And I don't care if Apple's market share is smaller, that isn't the point. They are preventing competition so that they can pocket even more money from developers.
>There are two types of people: those who think the web is an application delivery platform, and those who think it's a window into information.
And yet the web is both of those things. I think it's both, so am I a third type of person? What else are you getting wrong about this?
you don’t mention what a third type of person would look like, i only can see that you’re the first type from your comments. They’re fundamentally incompatible with each other (or, will cause major issues for each other) so being a blend of both is to be a walking contradiction.
What else are you wrong about!?
Only among people who don't have to develop for the Apple ecosystem.
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.
They're both the polar opposite of "tech friendly".
This love for Apple seems to be a very US-American thing.
I would thus rather say many European countries are more Microsoft-centered, even though at least in Germany I would say that people deeply hate and distrust the more and more spying functionalities that Microsoft introduces into its software. So I would claim this current dominance of the Microsoft ecosystem is fragile.
Surprisingly, at least in Germany I observe that Microsoft plans to stop providing updates to Windows 10 (and forces the users to buy new computers) has made quite a lot of mainstream users to at least consider switching to the GNU/Linux ecosystem:
It is perhaps difficult to understand to people who are used to the US mentality, but the fact that Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will be the last Windows, and after that broke this promise (and particular importantly: cease to provide further updates for Windows 10 despite this promise) is considered to be near "high treason" by many PC users - a nigh-unforgivable sin. In particular US-American companies should really learn to understand that (in the eyes of German users, who consider such promises to be sacred) if you give a promise, and break it, this is (I am only slightly exaggerating) something that the CEO (or even the board) of the respective company should better commit suicide for because of the shame that he brought to the company.
> Apple computers are typically rather mostly used by people from media and audio production (+ some hipsters).
For what it’s worth, this is the sort of stuff I meant by “stylish and cool,” these are the fashionable people, right? That doesn’t make their decisions good, at all (I intentionally picked the description “stylish and cool,” not “good and technically solid.”)
The difference is: outside of these bubbles (somewhat excluding the audio production people: these are in my opinion rather pragmatic about their computers; it's just that Apple historically had the best support for their requirements) Apple is not considered stylish and cool, but rather ridiculed, and fun is made of this Apple-fanboi-ism.
So, it's rather some "Apple bubble" where the people inside it (in particular the hipsters and some media people inside this bubble) praise each other (and themselves :-) ) for being stylish, cool and having a refined taste, but outside of this bubble this judgment is not shared.
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.
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.
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.
That is very puzzling... Did you compare them to anything else?
Miguel never did, and is now focused on Swift and Apple.
I don't understand people who are just consumers and have no actual business to root for MSFT or AAPL or any other company.
They're not just consumers, they're actual engineers. People who simp for companies like MS are just acolytes in developer's clothing.
If you only know one stack from one company, then you built your career on esoteric, arbitrary knowledge. Not on engineering things.
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.
WPF got taken out of legacy mode at BUILD 2024, exactly because hardly anyone outside Redmond cares about WinUI 3.
Anyone that has been long enough around, has seen ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Core MVC (not compatible with MVC 5 predecessor), Razor Pages, Minimal APIs, Blazor,...
So it is a mess doing consulting and depending on what .NET version the customer team is allowed to use, and existing code, what gets to be used by that portfolio.
Minimal APIs have been designed to bring in Python and JavaScript developers into .NET, which many of us see as not working at all, while having created the need now everyone creates their own controllers infractruture, as means to tame having minimal APIs all over the place, there are even MVVM like frameworks now for that purpose.
Blazor is really only usable as path forward for those still stuck in WebForms, due to the similar approach to do Web UIs, and to .NET shops without frontend teams.
In the age of distributed computing with microservices and frontend teams, it is a hard sell to make them adopt Blazor and learn C#, instead of React, Angular, Vue.
At least they have adopted TypeScript, the next language that Anders Hejlsberg decided to focus on.
Aspire is something that has been pivoted, now they try to sell it as Microsoft's Pulumi, but everyone has to write the orchestration code in C#, thus only relevant to .NET shops.
Maddy Montaquila has said in a few .NET podcast interviews that they are trying to use Aspire as means to sell .NET to UNIX shops, given the low adoption numbers outside the traditional Microsoft shops, even after almost a decade being open source.
Not it isn't, based on the paltry resources and team size they have working on it, the pace of bug fixes (non existent), the fact that in 2024 they stated WPF is on par with WinUI 3 as a recommended GUI framework. I'm not sure what signals to you they are "all in" on it.
Look at the size of this thread [0], and how many people tried to give WinUI 3 a chance but have been burned by lack of support. This is not the sentiment that surrounds a platform that has a lot of chips betting on it.
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/discussions/9417
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.
... 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.
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?
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.
GUI stuff from Windows depends deeply on Win32 and how Windows's core APIs work. So expecting Microsoft to port stuff like .Net Windows Forms is meaningless. They are open source though. Maybe with some completion effort Wine can run them.
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.
Games are quite standalone programs they don't depend deeply integrated Win32 stuff. They don't even use standard UI stuff from Win32. With Vulkan, porting DirectX became very viable and that was the grunt work. There are no DCOM servers or OLE stuff in games which is where Windows API actually becomes huge and sometimes nastier. Business apps however deeply depend on those.
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.
Netbeans was a product acquired by Sun, Sun Forte was its "Professional" variant in Solaris, and Oracle still takes care of it in the context of Solaris and Oracle Linux.
Eclipse was a rewrite from Visual Age products, originall written in Smalltalk, by IBM, and IBM keeps being a Java vendor with their own implementations.
Avalonia is the go-to library for cross-platform UI in .NET right now. But Microsoft's own apps have been switching to web stacks, in a clear case of "Do as I say, not as I do."
Language and std lib wise, C# sits in the sweet spot.
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.
Sounds like they just bought the IP.
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.
Its not a stretch to think that they will add Steam to the next gen Xbox. They are dead last in the console wars and have been for basically 2 generations. I don't think they will do it out of benevolence but I think they are the "throw shit against the wall and see if anything sticks" phase before just giving up and exiting the market.
FTFY, Microsoft is even killing studio with successful games, like Tango.
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.
That's true, and we're all well aware of it. I've done that for a job too.
Nevertheless, the point stands. MS gives away a lot of the .NET tools for free. It is a "Loss leader", "to draw customers into a store where they are likely to buy other goods." (1).
"You can't run .NET without Azure" is not what I said, what I said is that .NET is free, but MS believes that continuing to invest in it, drives Azure sales. Ask yourself why MS spends money developing tools such as Aspire or YARP.
The fact that you specifically didn't buy some Azure today means little: this is still the plan, and it still seems to be broadly working. I have heard MS people say as much, and also say that the side-effect of some people running .NET on AWS etc is fine too.
That happened three decades ago.
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).
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.
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.
I don't think ascribing morality to a system is useful when it's comprised of many people who can be replaced at any time.
But, I also think that top down hierarchical power structures are fundamentally harmful, abusive and exploitative so you do have a point. Cooperatives are much healthier structures.
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.
Years back they were gloating about how their AI systems (pre-LLM stuff) could allow for great oil production while at the same time talking projecting the image of a clean green future.
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+source+is+unamerican
one of the results:
Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-American:
https://www.linux.com/news/weekly-news-wrapup-microsoft-claims-linux-un-american/
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 ...
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.
Damn. I wasn't sure if you were trolling above and now it's clear that you were.
jfc.
what a pompous, fake hipster mentality he has.
I looked him up, via his HN profile:
here is his About me section, at the bottom of his blog's main page - https://www.ivanmontilla.com/ :
I found it so funny and hypocritical that I highlighted some of the sillier phrases below - in italics :
------------------------- About me
Ivan Montilla
I self-define as a challenger of the status quo.
Usually, I question trends. Normalcy is to be avoided. Some of the greatest opportunities lie where no one else is looking. I’m more of a niche markets guy.
My interests are ever-changing, but I’m currently interested in financial markets technology. I’m also passionate for software performance.
I do develop some software, but not professionally. I’m more of a power user of programming languages. I see it as a craft, both engineering and some form of art. ---------------------------
Kool-Aid and tea can do that to you :)
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.
(Sorry for the ça sarcasm, I know you wanted to be helpful, I already knew that but maybe someone will read your comment and discover it so thank you)
No, but they will lock you out of your account if you have a long gone debit card on there that you don't remember the numbers for or access to that school email your uni yanked back.
I wonder how many college kids got locked out of their iTunes account permanently after they graduated.
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.
You can just skip it and use everything with the distro defaults. it many even be less work than Windows as a lot more software is installed by default on installation.
LoD is _fine_ but not great.
(Slackware 4.0 was great)
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.
Why does this matter? How does that invalidate anything? Are global companies only accountable for their actions so long as they maintain the same CEO?
>but don't be hateful!
Won't someone please think of the poor global technology conglomerate!
I love how each sector they’re invested in is a practical monopoly.
Your honor, I rest my case!
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.
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…
Also as it happens I don't even see those because I exclusively use FDroid at this point. So ironically I see no ads when using a device designed and sold by an advertising company and haven't for years.
The apps I install from F-Droid often help me block ads in my browser, so I see very few ads as I use my phone day to day.
Meanwhile, my understanding is that Apple's App Store has ads in it, but that's the only app store allowed. So it seems like maybe iOS is the one that "has ads in the operating system".
I haven't used a phone in 10 years and surprisingly I haven't seen any ads on phones for years!
Samsung doesn't build the OS, but they control it on your device.
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-to-windows-11-users
2015: https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-10-solitaire-requires-a-subscription-to-remove-ads/
2016: https://www.howtogeek.com/243263/how-to-disable-ads-on-your-windows-10-lock-screen/
2020: https://winaero.com/wordpad-is-gettings-ads-in-windows-10/
This was obviously not ok and it never happened again this was if I recall correctly around 2012.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/mark-shuttleworth-explains-ubuntus-new-amazon-adware-feature
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.
With the recent notable exception of the F1 movie advertisement that arrived as a notification from the Wallet app. https://daringfireball.net/2025/06/more_on_apples_trust-eroding_f1_the_movie_wallet_ad
I disabled Wallet notifications immediately :-(
They nag too much about their services, though. I don’t fucking want Fitness whatever or News thing, I would like the OS to stop putting a red dot in my settings. But anyway that’s not as brain dead as what I’ve seen on Windows.
Not getting stuff pitched to you constantly by everyone is such an unending exercise of updating preferences, "unsubscribing", rejecting permissions requests, etc. It feels almost futile.
Not to mention the "ask again later..." option having replaced the flat out "no" option.
Even the people you'd imagine might be more sensible (eg Proton) email the crap out of you by default.
So when even the OS starts doing it, it's somewhat infuriating.
So you have notifications that you can only get rid of by engaging with the Apple ads.
Its an OS setting app. Its the most fundamental bundled application in an operating system, second only to maybe the file manager or package manager. Is nothing sacred?
It's gotten to the point where I resist looking at my iPhone because I'm going to have to take up my brain space with the unwanted notifications. I'm not sure what it is but on Android it's less pushy and I can clear all notifications with a single click. So most of the time my new iPhone sits in a drawer and I use my old Android as I go about my day.
I have most notifications disabled at this point.
And U2
I looks like Ubuntu was created just in order to be able to dismiss Linux as "also advertise products". It's just a single distribution out of a hundred, and far from the best, so it's completely wrong of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300531.
My ranking from most evil to least would be:
1. Google
2. Meta
3. Microsoft
4. Amazon
5. Apple
6. Netflix
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal
Arguably they're all atrocious due to effects on environment and labour rights.
I never worked there and have no inside knowledge of what happened. Did they get taken over by MBAs who gained control of the company? Was it always evil and we were just misled the whole time? Something else?
And so on.
You can argue that maybe a highly competitive browser market would lead to more innovation, but I'm not sure that's the case. Could a highly fragmented market build something that is as good as Chrome? IDK, but my (moderate confidence) bet is no. Browsers are a pretty mature product at this point and I don't think that competition would produce enough competitive pressure to outweigh the massive resources of a dominant near monopoly.
And now Google is slowly but surely moving to shut down ad blocking.
Some of us just saw it coming a mile away.
It's almost like they were good at marketing.
They use Cassandra and make cool series ever now and then, like Love Death Robots. :-)
I don't think so. Collecting data is a baseline for all those companies, you have to rank the evil they do with that data.
Google then aggregate all that data in the cloud, whereas even if Apple do collect data it’s almost never sent to the cloud for cross-analysis, it’s almost always on-device and therefore private.
Citation needed. Did you forget that Google owns YouTube among other things? They don't need to torrent training data when people voluntarily upload an endless stream of it to their platform.
Yes, Excel is probably a lot better if you use English setup and advanced functions.
For me,
- not having to use Norwegian for formulas (my work machine has Norwegian setup and Excel insists on using Norwegian formulas)
and
- not having it trying to find something it can misinterpret as a date, preferably some random place in a list of thousands of items
makes it worth it.
Will write a user story for that if you share the link /s
Also, why shouldn’t I be able to choose which language I use in Excel when they’re clearly all available?
Why do software companies these days insist on treating me as though I can’t look after myself?
It's perhaps the single worst database in the world; with no type control, no relationship management, no data safety whatsoever to speak of (it even actively mangles your data), its interface is utter madness, and yet - it's the most used database in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst development and runtime environment in the world, obscuring code, making reasoning about code and relations between code almost impossible, using a very obscure macro language that even morphs between different computers, and yet - it's the most used development and runtime environment in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst protocol/data exchange format in the world, with dozens of intentionally obscure, undocumented versions, insane format with surprising limitation (did I mention it actively mangles your data? - it's worth repeating anyway), supremely inefficient, and yet - it's the most used protocol/data exchange format in the world.
I can't really think of anything in the computing world that has done as much damage as Excel.
My starting point would be that in their absence, a lot of problems wouldn't have been solved with computers, for want of programmers.
It's the lowest-barrier programmable logic, a coordinate-system where arithmetic can be applied to contents of any given coordinates.
And it likely would have grown into the same exact mess as Excel, with continuous expansion of the arithmetic part, as people kept reaching the limits of it but wouldn't go back and recreate everything in a DB...
IBM buying Lotus and not Word Perfect was probably a mistake, had they really wanted to take it seriously... but they seemed more interested in Lotus Notes (think Outlook+Access in a self-hosted cloud environment), it was imho nasty af.
What frustrates me the most about this is I've seen some insane excel wizardry from the accounting department at various jobs over the years that is effectively programming, and that if these people had put just as much effort into learning Python & using a database, they'd be better off and might actually make good developers. In my view, Excel ends up becoming sort of an artificial barrier to departments outside of IT being able to make business software.
Nonetheless i hear your argument. I feel that python is the same abomination of the programming world. Yet it flourishes and is even loved.
Haveth we stockholm syndrome to our own garbage tools?
Excel allows norm(al users)ies to scale Mt Impossible from the bottom where they don't care about types, or relationships, and don't want to (because it's too abstract). They want to solve a problem. So they start with simple data given meaning by physical space, and work up from there.
It's genius. It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.
That's a bingo, although I'd phrase it even more glowingly as "It allows people to solve many common problems with computing, without knowing about pointers."
Doing something as "simple" as a LEFT JOIN of data requires having two separate documents (or one, but saved on your system), open them in the Power Query editor (if it's the same document you do it twice, once per table) which creates two "queries", and then you can either use one to join against the other, or create a third one "joining" them. In the end, you get three new sheets on your docs: the original tables and the merged one.
Then there's the annoyances: if you use Excel in English (US at least), apparently you get a CSV separated by actual commas "," (ASCII 0x2C) but using it in Spanish (Spain) you get it separated by semicolons ";" because commas actually separate number decimals. Meaning whenever I build a program that parses/writes CSV, I need to consider the chance it's using semicolons and commas instead of commas and dots. Not that it's non-standard: CSV doesn't specify a delimiter, but you could stick to the same format everywhere, or give an option to customise, or create "Tab-Separated Values" (essentially CSV with tabs separating values).
Another one is formulae, that also change based on language, and their arguments separator also changes. In en_US you'd use `=SUBTOTAL(109,B2:B7)` while in Spanish it's `=SUBTOTALES(109;B2:B97` (plural instead of singular, and semicolon instead of comma). Meaning any guide, documentation or tutorial in English requires me having to "guess" how the function is translated, and manually changing commas to semicolons.
With all this, I mean to say: Excel isn't even that great for the "normal" user. Or perhaps I'm too "power user" for this and just lazy enough to bother with it instead of using "proper" tools like Python or R.
UTF-8 is now pretty much the defacto standard for the files, where as historically you'd have a number of different code pages, and/or UTF-16 (BE/LE with or without BOM) and a lot of other variances that were much harder to deal with.
Pretty much any software library for CSV handles these things for you. As for localization of input/language parameters, can't really speak to that aspect of things. And I'm not generally using multiple spreadsheets, etc... at most I'll have a database source connected to work against queried data.
I'd argue the opposite: Powerpoint makes literacy decline.
"PowerPoint makes us stupid." – General James N. Mattis, USMC [source: https://paulgraham.com/quo.html ]
Cognitive Style of Powerpoint - Edward Tufte
http://makingdatatalk.com/Lecture01/Reading/Tufte-TheCognitive%20StyleOfPowerPoint.pdf
It is the single biggest blocked against open computing.
If Microsoft were serious about open source like another poster claimed, they would let us run it on all platforms.
Excel at this point is specialist software, like adobe photoshop. Everything else is 'good enough'.
Seems to me Microsoft office is still the dominant player.
That being said, excel itself is still more powerful than google sheets, but the collaborative nature of Gsuite beats the pants off of MS Office, online or native.
My last decade has been a mix, some o365, some GDocs. I do wish there was something opened that was nearly as good as Visio myself, rather than renting it as an add-on. diagrams.net/draw.io is pretty good for some things, but Visio has a lot of features that aren't even close. I haven't tried the web version of Visio lately, last I had it was only halfway decent for read-only, but apparently most features now work. So next time I need it in mac/linux it should be an option.
FWIW Docs isn't bad, and slides is... useable, but sheets is a poor excel alternative.
- if you have GMail, people(esp engineering) use docs and 1-n people have Excel on top
- if you are all in on MS, then of course no one will use GDocs
Some wounds are self-inflicted, and open source has a well-known last-20%-polish problem that's especially painful in mass-user scenarios like office software.
OOo wasting the 00s with a circa-90s UI (and Oracle being assholes) is equally responsible for MS Office's continued popularity in enterprise.
Personally I prefer 90s software design over the bloated crap of today.
Debatable. Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard. But loads of people don't do this. They see a file on their desktop and double click it. Why can't double clicking a CSV file just open the import wizard!? (Because they want people to share xlsx files as a data format.)
To make matters worse, randomly, employees will have their OS using US or GB locales so that if you distribute a CSV, it will work for some employees, but not for others.
1.01, "hi", CSV has problems, "1.01"
1,01, "hi", Yes it really does, "1,01"
Your operating system cannot solve this problem.
It's not about people, it's about the Windows locale setting and how MS Excel interprets a CSV-file when you doubleclick it
Open control-panel for regional settings, select "Advanced settings" button on the bottom control.exe intl.cpl
If you don't know any of these problems, then all the people and systems you work with have a "." as decimal and "," as separator, and you are spared from the hell of MS Office being unable to overrule these OS-settings when treating a CSV
Thing is, it is not about what you used, you are not able to control this from happening when your CSV should work for people in other countries. Whatever configuration you used which never got a complain, if your recipients also used Excel to work with those documents, they probably have the same regional setting on Windows for list/thousands/decimal separator.
If you use ";" as separator, i.e. Excel in UK, US, Japan, China, Korea will not be able to correctly open your CSV.
But even better: If you created this CSV on a France or Sweden regional setting, the thousands separator will be a whitespace ("1 000" instead "1,000" or "1.000"), so Excel in e.g. Italy will not detect those properly.
> I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.
It is a (intentional) weakness of MS Office for those who work in an international environment, because Excel links itself to .csv files to hinder the experience, as it is neither able to properly detect them nor guide their users through a process to properly handle them.
For Project Online, the most reliable way I found to fix it was to manually edit the URL to replace en-US with en-AU, then bookmark that.
Ofc you do. In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.
> In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.
Ofc it is. Now try to edit that CSV with Excel and save it again in that format.
Also, CSVs seem to open just fine on my Excel. If it's not formatted with a standard delimiter or isn't handing quoted strings the proper way, sure maybe the data wizard is needed.
Excel is terrible in a lot of aspects, but CSVs seem to be something it handles as well as anything else in my experience.
The victors truly get to write history, don't they?
MS fired thousands of gamedevs in the last few weeks, cancelled a lot of games, including games the execs liked to play the prototypes, cancelled publishing deals, and even closed entire studios, some of them literally successful that had just released profitable products.
There's no point to keep the IP of games that are shuttered.
Maybe the offer was made and a bunch didn't take it?
Saving corporate face
Any movie studio that rebooted a franchise after a decade or two of dormancy would beg to differ
For the last decade they acquire studios/IP’s, let them languish, then without warning strip them for parts. Make a successful game? Doesn’t matter, you’re all fired. Y’all want to make a game? Sure! We can even promote it! 12-18mo of no news after an announcement ah dang guys we were so hyped but we’re pulling the plug.
It is baffling how many studios they own and yet they have almost no exclusives/big cross platform hits developed for the Xbox this generation.
Seemly what happened is that MS high-level decision makers, concluded that MS need a lot of cash for AI research, and decided to mass-close studios and cancel games with little verification, just go firing people until the cash liberated for AI is enough, doesn't matter if those people gave even greater revenue recently.
Imagine Google blocking Edge from using Chrome extensions.
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/extensions.md#visual-studio-marketplace
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extensions-compatibility.md
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
> 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.
But I do think it qualifies.
Bit like the example of Martin Luther King being a criminal.
You can't use the MS extensions with VS Codium, you are forced to use VS Code.
VS Code?
https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-are-proprietary.html
> they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now
Windows has been going out of its way to be hostile to users for over a decade now.
Because we remember the evil Microsoft. Many young people still follow advice from the elders.
I get the point you're making, but it really seems like we haven't remembered. We've worked ourselves back into one juggernaut owning most of the web browser space and then collectively acted surprised when they started flexing their muscles. I encounter sites that only run in Chrome the same way I had sites that only ran in IE 6. It seems to me we're doomed to repeat history as long as that path is easier or more profitable.
you mean shit software like Teams that crash the whole time?
Simply releasing corporate projects under a permissive license is not what many people understand to be the fundament of "open source."
> to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open
What do you think their entire operating system is?
They aren't better people just bad people operating in an environment where better behavior is beneficial.
A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.
And just for reciprocity, here's Indian Defense Review (5/2025) "These People Never Moved On: They’re Stuck 24 Years in the Past and Have to Use Windows XP" : "Thousands of workers across the US and Europe still depend on a system from 2001. From hospitals to railways, entire operations run on technology long considered obsolete."
That's hardly Microsoft's fault, isn't it?
Regardless of who we each might consider to be responsible (and in what proportion), that fact is a fact. Agreed?
(and I've seen lots of end-of-life cycles in software and hardware, and gone through them as both user, customer and vendor)
On the one hand, longevity of a platform is nice and MS screwed up IE in so many ways.
On the other hand, at some time the business has to manage their software lifecycle - including the death of old systems - and you can't blame MS for that.
The only thing that helped was MS taking responsibility and killing IE. The problem I had was that IE was becoming an support burden on our tools, no customers were using IE but the internal staff was forced to.
They're lucky, I have to use Win11.
Except that their macOS software still is non-parity with Windows for really no good reason other than anti-competitive. They’ve also had the opportunity to open-source Windows, but won’t go that far willingly, with the exception of those that did it without approval.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
The open-source stuff is whatever, only a tiny part of the picture.
That should be a good clue that it's not worth much to them anymore, and tjat they'd rather rely on random free labour from the "community" than their own developers.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
Which is a horribly bloated pig that only helps forced obsolescence of hardware. It should be a very disturbing sign that Microsoft itself doesn't seem to know how to do native code anymore, as they invented Win32 and Windows.
As for open sourcing software. Is it even possible for them to do something that you would view favorably here? To me it seems like remain closed and they'll get criticized but open up at least some of it and ... they get criticized?
As far as I'm concerned, regardless of other factors the more source code that's out in the open the better off everyone is.
That's not a cool guy thing
two things can be true at the same time. MS doing some open sourcing and being truly evil too in many other ways. why do you need to settle on one or the other?
That is some damnably faint praise re: Windows 11, and any experienced m$ users know exactly what’s meant by that.
Only if you have no soul or morals
You can make a product that pleases its users, or just cater to the interests of the ones with the buying decision, for enterprise users they are almost never the same. Microsoft, like Oracle, leans heavily on the second strategy. Their developer tools are often (not always) an exception to this principle. I think this is the true reason Microsoft is so disliked as a brand.
They have no respect for the agency of their users. We're no different than cattle to them, an asset to be squeezed until no more money comes out of it.
It's so sad that this is all it takes for some of you lol. A collection of public relations code bases.
.Net and a lot of other tooling and projects are on Github under BSD licensing, and that's pretty cool... almost everything they do outside Windows/Office works in Linux these days. I do think they should at LEAST get a version of office (offline) that works in Linux... even if it's a bastardized web version that runs in Electron.
Aside: I couldn't say how much I appreciate the work Valve has done to improve gaming on Linux, and have no expectations of ever moving back to Windows. MS seems to want to extract literally every cent of value out of every Windows user, and it sickens me.
What do you mean by this? I've traced code into the Windows OS to debug a problem by downloading the source.
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.
But in reality my favorite keyboard before I switched to the MS keyboards was the one that came with my original IBM PC with the clicky keys. The biggest downside was that my mom and dad always knew when I was on the computer!
but definitely not the best ones around
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/UPLOADED187/67a6bce72916a.jpeg
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.
Essentially, the business model of the 3DO has finally been proven correct 30 years later. Do keep in mind a lot of the 3DO team did end up at Microsoft... maybe they played the long game...
Not the Xbox itself, if it was just the standalone device, but the way they had chosen to modify Windows to have Xbox compatible APIs, which are worse than the previous Windows APIs.
The enshittification of Windows gaming started with the removal, or sometimes deprecation, of the Windows gaming APIs.
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/Supported-Devices-and-Features#feature-matrix
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.
Are we reading the same tables? The last several models are full of question marks and crosses in the support matrix, and many models old and new seemingly require the linux-surface kernel fork for key features like touchscreens and even some touchpads, you can't just install your distro of choice.
Even compared to my disappointing experience running Linux at home, I'd say that's more of an asterisk minefield, except for a few Surface Laptop models.
Or the other tables of other hardware models where all versions work?
If so then yes, it seems like we’re not seeing the same data.
The 5G version of the Surface Pro 10 (second to last) is completely unusable, the SP8-10 need a kernel fork just for keyboard and touchpad (!), SP4-10 need it for the touchscreen (SP4 is 2015), and the cameras won't work at all since SP7 (2019).
Don't get me wrong, I still run Linux on my devices and would be willing to tinker with custom kernels if certain hardware were worth it. I just can't consider this "runs perfectly fine".
Sadly, Windows 10 removed all the good parts of Windows tablet mode, but its ideas were so good that Apple is still slowly copying bits of its interface for the iPad to this day.
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’.
That was 10 years ago
It was THE device to have, people were going crazy for them; there was enough pent up demand that people were breaking windows and sliding into cars to get them.
I still miss that thing.
I don't personally get too attached to devices I purchase or begrudge others for what they buy so, I'm curious what made them "cringe hardware" in your opinion. Adoption aside, they looked like pretty compelling devices to me. Is this a case of buying anything that isn't Apple isn't cool? Or is there something deeper there?
It's like pretending people must choose from Russia, North Korea, South Sudan or the Central African Republic
Who are the good guys
None of these companies are "good guys"
These "Leave Microsoft alone" HN comments will undoubtedly persist
Perhaps there are MS employees who comment on HN and they are sensitive about criticism
The idea Microsoft is somehow benign is truly hilarious
It is not difficult to argue the damage this company causes today without retribution is far worse than what they did in the past
IME, Microsoft is very cult-like; the employees believe that Microsoft has a solution for any problem, and there is never, ever any contemplation that the company creates problems ;this does not stop with the employees, it can extend to others who are "bought in" to the Redmond ecosystem
Well, yes, that's called generational change. A lot of people have never experienced the bad old Microsoft, only the pretty cool guy Microsoft.
Commercial success hasn’t been an argument for technical supremacy since Betamax.
For comparison, I think Mac OS in 2008 was also at a bit of a golden age:
- You had native file support for .iso, .zip without needing to install crapware like Winzip.
- You even could preview *.psd files out the box.
- You had first-party apps like Image Capture to scan documents without needing to install extra software.
- There was an amazing third-party app ecosystem with things like Yojimbo, OnyX, Little Snitch, Quicksilver, Handbrake, Coda, Adium.
This was around the time of the "I'm a Mac" campaign when Apple was _hungry_ to win business away from Windows. All of these small, polished advantages made me fall in love with the experience.
OSX today is still good but there definitely isn't that same level of "underdog hunger" showing up in the products as of late.
Anyway I'm just trying to say companies being hungry for business shows up in its products and that's better for consumers.
That's true, but there is a catch in your wording. For the last 15 year, Microsoft has:
- Adopted open source/free software and gave contributions to various project (e.g. Linux in 2012 https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTEwNzE)
- Abandoned the worst web browser in existence. That they created :)
- Abandoned ActiveX (29 years ago), Silverlight (4 years ago)
+ Opened .NET to more platform than just Windows. It can now run very well on Linux, Mac, etc.
+ Made many of its locked down stuff open source - .NET, Z3, hell there was that few weeks ago open sourcing of the WinUI framework, etc.
+ Pivoted towards the cloud where OSS software synergizes with their cloud offerings.
Do they do corrupt deals with governments? Well yes, but so does every other big corp. And making cringe hardware isn't a crime in itself.
Do they still do a lot of shady shit? You bet, but they only started getting worse a few years ago. You are thinking it doesn't come in waves and it was all evil, all the time.
With dotnet core 1-3 - open source cross platform .net, that was modern, fresh and clearly a project done by developers for developers. add vscode to this and it seems nice.
but as soon as 5 hit, if you look into details, they went to their usual bullshit, starting with stapling together winforms and wpf to it. the feel of the project shifted from 'developers for developers' to usual top down management.
vscode is also a weird case - it looks open source, but isn't at all(the builds you get aren't just from the same codebase + no access to extensions legally if you build your own, or fork it)
Which? IE6? IE6 is the best web browser in existence though. You confuse standard with good.
- Creating a language (typescript) that took the front-end web community by storm.
- Becoming one of the real adopters of "progressive web apps". Apple is actively hostile to them, because they would eat into the 30% cut they are making from the apps distributed via the app store; Google, once a champion, has grown kinda tepid, because it also gets a cut from apps distributed via Google Play; but Microsoft now behave as if they are a believer.
- Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
Which feels sluggish compared to how it used to be. They keep tacking on too much cruft to it. I used to call it a lightweight IDE, but now its just a bloated editor.
Anything Microsoft + web is a nightmare. Their login system is a redirect and re-auth hell and I loath anytime I need to log into anything Microsoft related.
The Zune was 100% uncool, but man did I like the hardware and software sooo much better than the iPod / ITunes. I was just sad that I never found anyone to "squirt" at.
Add the most recent lineup of Xbox consoles to this
Original non-Chromium Edge was damn good btw. It had the best butter-smooth and elegant epub reader implementation I have even seen in any software.
This is the sort of question I don't trust AI with yet.
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.
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.
- 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
If you do web work it's night and day compared to VS, it pretty much includes all WebStorm features in it as well.
Rider is far better than VS for everything apart from Desktop UI Apps and perhaps Blazor WASM hot reloading, which is itself far behind the UX of JS/Vite hot reloading, so I avoid it and just use Blazor static rendering. Otherwise VS tooling is far behind Intellij/Rider for authoring Web dev assets, inc. TypeScript.
I switched to Rider/VS Code long before moving to Linux, which I'm happy to find works just as well in Linux. Not a fan of JetBrains built-in AI Integration (which IMO they've fumbled for years), but happy with Augment Code's Intellij Plugin which I use in both Rider and VS Code.
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.
These guys are extremely bad guys.
At no point in time was Microsoft one of the cool guys.
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.
What could be the difference? Oh dear, I just can't think of anything.
We shouldn't ignore the influence of trend, it's like the facebook in mobile era.
I seem to remember a lot more .NET IDEs before .NET Core... This frustrates me.
I'd say Microsoft buying GitHub was part of a strategy to not lose relevance in the world that moves slowly towards Open Source Software. Or put another way, the world moves in a direction away from Microsoft, and by capturing GitHub they can manipulate the outcomes that would otherwise have been adversarial to Microsoft interests. It's just like when Microsoft forked Java back in the 1990s, and later created .NET. The whole VSCode or Visual Studio thing... it's just Microsoft Word for software engineers, and the whole point is to create an ecosystem that locks people into the ecosystem.
To think in terms of what Microsoft does, you have to step back and look into economic theory, at least a little bit. There is this idea in economics about isolated economies, and integrated economies. For example, Europe or North America relies on cheap manufactured goods from China, and so China's economy is intrinsically linked (integrated) into the economies of Europe or North America. THAT is the idea of what Microsoft does. They start by adding value, a soft-dependency you might say, and then make moves to becoming a hard dependency... to put into terms of a dependency graph. Then they link to dependency graphs together GitHub into VSCode, OpenAI into VSCode, One Drive into GitHub or One Drive into Hotmail...
I'll say for sure, at least Microsoft has a strategy, unlike Google where they seem to have a lot of failed projects.
I'm going to re-post something that I wrote in 2022:
I'm a bit surprised at how many of my friends have jumped ship to Visual Studio Code, including those who are very much for free software. They have always been in the business of embrace, extend, extinguish[0]. People tend to forget how evil M$ used to be because recently they have seemed like a beacon for Open Source, but I think they are just still evil[1].
I think we're still dealing with the same Microsoft that we've dealt with through the 90s. They are not a champion of open source, and they are still up to their old tricks.[2]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31966414
[1] https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
[2] https://social.platypush.tech/@blacklight/108719097530863121
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”
I still feel that there's no competitor I like as much. But that may not matter.
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.)
- 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-embrace-ai-or-get-out-2025-8
- 11-th of Aug 2025 Github CEO resigns https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas-dohmke-resignation-coreai-team-transition
You can't make this stuff up :) Maybe he didn't embrace AI hard enough, and that's why he is exiting the industry?
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.)
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.
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...
People did this with airplanes in the 60s, and based on that trajectory we should be exploring the outer edges of our solar system by now. Turns out the market for supersonic jets was unsustainably small and the cost/risk of space exploration is still very high.
Every sigmoidal curve looks exponential as it starts to enter the linear regime. But eventually the curve turns over, either due to limits in the technology, the marginal cost of the technology, or no clear way to further commercialize it.
I don't know that we've reached that point with AI, but a do know that extrapolating from a trend line is fraught with peril.
Yeah, don’t ask..
Is it because you're trying to pitch it with CTO arguments on capabilities, not COO/CFO arguments like "will permanently replace N humans"?
But AI is sexy, so LLMs doing document search? Yes please, let’s have some teams dedicate their time and effort to develop it ourselves.
It’s because AGI is going to come, you know, so if we invest now they can replace everybody with AI
Are you laughing as hard as I was when they told me this?
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.
I like how all the demos just show these crazy simple, single page "web apps" that are effectively just coding tutorial material, and people eat it up. There's no talk of auth, persistence, security, deployment, performance, etc.
Cool...it vibe coded a janky snake game with no collision, now what?
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.
Depends if you agree with somenameforme's theory that tech companies start off amazing, get big, then become awful.
You may have noticed, in recent decades, we haven't bothered with enforcing anti-trust law. If Facebook wants to buy Instagram and Whatsapp, they can. If Microsoft wants to buy Github and Activision they can. If Google wants to buy Youtube, Doubleclick and Nest they can.
If we accept the premise that FAANG is where innovation goes to die, going 25 years without any antitrust enforcement might not have been the smartest move.
I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem that way.
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).
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-workers-moves-jobs-to-india-mexico.html
For whatever reason there are tasks that work better on one model compared to another, which can be quite perplexing.
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. )
Privacy is already a key differentiating feature for iPhone which is why I think they will continue to try to make this option viable. (They already do ChatGPT fallback which is a pragmatic concession to the reality that you highlight here.)
> 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.
What's the existing functional workflow for that? Downloading the captions and querying with a local LLM or a very fuzzy keyword search?
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…
When considering the above, the amount of non-force-fed "modern AI" use they've been able to drive is supposed to be shown by things to the level of a question button on YouTube and some incremental overlaying of Gemini to Docs? What does that leave the companies without the decade head start, custom AI hardware, and trillions to spend to look to actually do worth a damn in their products with the tech?
I'm (cautiously) optimistic AI will have another round or two of fast gains again in the next 5 years. Without it I don't think it leaves the realm of niche/limited uses in products in that time frame. At least certainly not enough that building AI into your product is expected to make sense most of the time yet.
lol if this is the perfect example, "AI" in general is in a sad place. I've tried to use it a handful of times and each time it confidently produced wrong results in a way that derailed my quest for an answer. In my experience it's an anti-feature in that it seems to make things worse.
This isn't me defending apple, but, let me play out a little scenario:
"hey siri, book me tickets to see tonight's game"
"sure thing, champ"
<<time passes>>
"I have booked the tickets, they are now in your apple wallet"
<<opens up wallet, sees that there is 1x £350 ticket to see "the game", a interactive lesson in pickup artistry>>
You buy apple because "it works" (yes, most of that is hype, but the vertical integration is actually good, not great for devs/tinkerers though.) AI just adds in a 10-30% chance of breaking what seems to be a simple workflow.
You don't notice with chatGPT, because you expect it to be the dipshit in your pocket. You don't expect apple to be shit. (although if you've tried to ask for a specific track whilst driving, you know how shit that is. )
So many people don't realize this for some reason, but I think it's precisely why we haven't seen anything shown at WWDC '24. Apple tried and quickly realized the tech wasn't ready, and letting it run wild on their platforms would do irreparable brand damage.
This tech (LLMs) have barely been available to the public for ~3-4 years. That's no time at all, anyone using AI regularly now is very much an early adopter, something Apple historically isn't and Apple's users generally appreciate that aspect of them.
I get wanting to stay ahead of the curve and be competitive, but I don't understand this seemingly deep seated fear of these big tech companies that is making them go 100% all in on AI at the cost of all other areas of their business.
They will be swept away if they sit and wait a couple years for some uppity startup to build the AI disruptor and eat their lunch.
I'm not sure that assertion is entirely correct, but I'm aware that I'm making tech predictions that I am very bad at.
The long term future is AR glasses. But the problem is, physics and battery chemistry means thats not going to happen for ~10 years at the very minimum.
Until then its still tablet/phones. The problem for openAI is that for them to provide useful results, they need access to all your "context" (messages, photos, location, spending, conversations, videos everything) Apple isn't going to allow that, which means that openAI isn't going to be all that useful on ios.
Android however is much more loosey goosey. The issue is, will google allow a competitor to steal all that context and muscle them out of their own platform?
I'm not sure openAI is going to win this, mainly because they need their own platform, and they only thing they have is brand loyalty, rather than a network effect. chatGPT is fungible with any of the other providers. The only thing that makes them stand out is the tools that are bundled with chatgpt. that and weird personification/pack bonding.
However, I think it was a strategic blunder to go announce a full guns-blazing release that solves all of these problems, before taking the easier iteration of just making Siri not suck.
If you had the conversational fluency of ChatGPT with a very locked down set of tool calls (maybe no write actions, or maybe it can only propose simple intents that you must manually confirm, and definitely no purchases) I think they would not be perceived to be as far behind.
Nobody has solved the AI personal assistant product. It’s an insanely massive market segment just for consumers. Going after this as your V1 seems like a bad choice to me.
I think for most people, if NotebookLM were to disappear overnight it'd be a shame but something you can live with. There'll be a few who do heavily rely on it, but then I wouldn't be surprised to hear that at least one person heavily relies on the "I'm feeling lucky" button, or in other words, xkcd 1172
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.
My hunch tells me this is a temporary stopgap until Apple figures out their "private cloud compute" or whatever where they can run their own model, after that it'll be seamless. Try to do as much on device as possible, and if that fails/is not possible, offload to the model running on Apple's servers rather than a 3rd party service.
Maybe they're "behind" (although, this tech is still so early I don't think anyone is truly behind), but I appreciate their approach to try and do as much on device as possible. They are the only ones around that aren't just defaulting to "harvest as much data as possible and ship it to our servers."
I can be patient - Siri works fine for what I want it for anyway - it can set reminders, timers, alarms, dictate messages, and create notes. That's about all I use it for and would use it for. Anything else I'm not going to ask my phone, I'm going to take it out and head to Google.
But my while point was there’s a plethora of different reasons why “heading to Google” isn’t always practical. Like when you’re driving. When you’re cooking. Even when you’re just playing with the kids, a question gets asked, and you don’t want to spoil the momentum of the play by staining at an LCD screen for 2 minutes.
Siri really damn convenient for those occasions when you want an action performed but don’t want the distraction of performing that action.
In fact, I’d go further and say that’s the biggest selling point for current gen consumer AI.
> Maybe they're "behind" (although, this tech is still so early I don't think anyone is truly behind)
The tech is still early but Siri are most definitely behind.
It’s not even remotely close to the capabilities of even open source models, let alone the commercial ones.
And the fact that they had to bolt on ChatGPT in such an ad hoc way speaks volumes about how Apple realise themselves just how far behind Siri has gotten.
I think you’re right that it’s not their long term plan. But that doesn’t change that it presently feels like a very ugly kludge.
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.
The coding agents, CC, Cursor, etc. are quite good and useful.
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 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.
Duolingo was always aiming at the casual app user (not serious language learners, think getting casual 14-30yo users to switch 10 min a day from playing casual games instead or consuming SM), and openly admitted they crafted the product and their metrics around gamification and socially acquiring new (paying, non-freemium) users. So judge their behavior by that. Also, you can turn off some but not all of the default gamification + social features.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44165464
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44165398
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102081
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456
I find it necessary to ask AI what that sentence even means.
Exactly, but this is just the nature of this technology. It can sort of fake human intelligence but not really. You can't count on it to do human work without supervising it so what's the point?
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.
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.
I’m trying to think of what a bare minimum SSH remote experience would look like. Could you do code reviews with a terminal instead.
I love the git SSH experience for speed, but I find myself using GitHub for the PRs & code review. It would be nice to have a self hosted , terminal-based solution
I need to track changes in binary files of very reasonable size. Total repo size is <1GB. But even at these small memory requirements it makes much more sense to self host with LFS. I have written this up too many times on the internet to go into great detail about how LFS isn't perfect and how I wish there was something better, but in practice it has worked extremely well for tracking a small amount of binary files. Kudos to the devs.
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.
The lack of tech literacy among tech bloggers is incredibly disappointing. I wish I could say it was shocking, but that’s not true.
So there is no real org change, just the CEO left and they didn't immediately replace him with a new one.
> 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.
Also Microsoft lost a big opportunity with Unity (not helping them updating .NET) and killing off XNA, two major ways how kids get into .NET.
That coupled with Unity's mismanagement, means indies are more likely to keep using C++ based engines like Godot or Defold, and losing yet another adoption vector. Yes Godot does support C#, but GDscript is winning the heart of indie devs.
Also it was the only company that cared to buy Sun.
People love to hate it, everyone praises Sun, yet in the end no one felt it was worth rescuing, not even Google, that could have taken advantage to finally control Java.
I guess most would rather have seen Java die in version 6, and Maxime VM ideas never becoming mainstream, or the first UNIX with hardware memory tagging for taming C never coming out.
And since I am not a fan boy I am also quite aware that what doesn't produce profit, is immediately killed by Oracle, and they are quite found of enforcing their licenses, hence why people have to actually read those licenses.
And no one else did, I also bet HNers would appreciate IBM being the new owner just as they appreciate Oracle.
Regardless of the tiny detail that when Java came to be, the two companies that joined Sun's efforts right away, with Java support on their OSes, databases and thin client efforts, were exactly Oracle and IBM.
Starting to? 30-50% of the HN front page has been consisting of articles about LLMs for months now, to the point that a user script to hide all AI articles vastly improves the experience.
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)
My point is more that if Microsoft did dig their heels in and make the product worse, it would be very easy for people to switch. Some people would stay because it is the de facto standard, but I think a lot more people than you think would switch, because the switching costs are so low.
My hope is that this acts as a strong enough incentive for them to maintain the quality of GitHub, so we don't have to switch.
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.
The best answer I can give myself to your (perhaps rhetorical) question is twofold: - tech companies, for whatever reason, seem to need millions and millions of funding upfront to get started. Despite a tech company not needing essentially any asset (besides a few workstations and internet connections?). The VC era inherently created a huge distortion so that it's virtually impossible to start something without selling your soul to those who want you to be exactly like the others. You will be laughed out of the door from banks if you try to get some credit. Since the tech economy has been essentially a proxy for financial speculation, building a sustainable business that doesn't aim solely to IPO and "growth" is an idea that won't get any money to anybody. All of this to say, if workers today want to fund a co-op, as I want to, they need to wait until they have enough money saved to bootstrap it themselves. - until now, and for maybe a while longer, the job market for tech workers has been fairly comfortable, with perks and high wages. Things are clearly changing, as the streak of layoffs post-2021 shows. For a sector with low unionization and with the extreme pressure from companies to reduce workers power, I think in the next 5-10 years tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs. Once that will be the case, the incentive to do effectively a bullshit job in a big(ger) org - which many of us do, building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value - will not be there anymore, and I want to hope more people will choose alternative paths like co-ops and to develop products with different goals.
One answer is obvious - every organization's primary goal is its own survival. So a democratic state will indoctrinate ("educate") children into believing democracy is the right way. But no school teaches about corporate power structures and cooperatives are so rare that they have little influence on the curriculum.
What I absolutely hated was for example when Microsoft opened an extra curricular program for students to teach them some tech skills and some soft skills and (in exchange?) they were allowed to hang posters promoting their products at school. Linux does not have the money or organizational capacity to do this kind of thing so the entrenched players have a massive advantage.
> The VC era
As a gamedev, this reminds me of how the metagame shifts as the collective playerbase learns the rules of a game - what works and what doesn't. Step 1) IRL you need to build something valuable and you get paid according to how much value you produced. 2) Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work. 3) And now people realized when you have enough money you can just buy those power structures from step 2 wholesale. Oh and you can buy up housing and take a third of someone's salary too.
A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce. This would completely invert those power structures. Need marketing? You as a positive-sum worker hire those zero-sum workers.
But we're heading in the opposite direction instead. All intellectual work has now been stolen and it being resold to people who produced it in the first place.
And then you straight up have people who wanna replace even physical workers with robots. And they sell it to people by claiming they will no longer need to work, which sounds great. Until you realize that up until that point the rich zero-summers at least still needed positive-sum workers. Even governments needed humans to oppress other humans...
> tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs
Yep. "We" (technically long before I entered the workforce) had all the power and slowly gave it away because we were interested in the cool tech we were making and not the power struggle that the people who only extract value from us are so good at.
> building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value
I'd like to see a graph of the percentage of people whose work is positive-, zero- and negative-sum over time. Because I suspect the latter two are growing rapidly.
This is just a classic mistake: failing to account for risk as a significant input. Any business that needs money to start needs people to risk their reputation or their money to get it going, possibly long before any profit is made.
> A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce.
If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?
Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.
Money? Sure. There's two kinds of people here:
a) Rich but not obscenely so - you can save up enough from normal work to get enough runway to start a small company which grows organically - you get a few really good people (who might even accept a lower salary than they could command it a corporation just because they want to work on something meaningful for once) and/or you do a lot of the work yourself. Then you keep building until you get income or run out of money. Factorio is a great example of this approach succeeding - but even they needed to use Indiegogo at one point and were close to not making it.
b) Those obscenely rich - those who have more money than a single person could make from positive-sum work, no matter how skilled. (Art/sport/showbusiness are interesting exceptions but are they really positive sum?) These people have so much money they don't care if they lose it sometimes, as long as they multiply it sometimes. If you fund 10 companies, each with 10% chance of success, only 1 needs to make it and give you >10x return on investment. If you own an apartment complex with 30 people and take a third of each person's salary, you can afford to fund a company of 10 people indefinitely.
As a result, the obscenely rich get a much higher chance to succeed, in turn owning more companies, in turn getting more rich.
> If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?
Ownership does not have to be exclusive. In fact, it almost never should. It should be distributed based on the amount of work, skill required, competence, etc.
It can get complex but let's not pretend it's worse than the current salary negotiations where one side is basically blind and pair per unit of work and the other has all the information and takes a cut from everyone's output.
Of course they are; if someone's going to get money from VCs they risk their reputation in asking for it.
> Money? Sure. There's two kinds of people here: (Rich/obscenely rich)
No - lots of VCs represent large pools of money including pension funds that service giant numbers of people. Your "rich" company example, Factio, is about the silliest example I can imagine of a capital-intensive business. Your "obscenely rich" example isn't really about money any more, but so few people are like this it doesn't really affect anything.
> It can get complex but let's not pretend it's worse than the current salary negotiations where one side is basically blind and pair per unit of work and the other has all the information and takes a cut from everyone's output.
It's impossible to tell if it's worse, as you haven't described it yet. It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.
You are unintentionally proving me right. There 2 kinds of people starting businesses which need an investment - those risking their own money (and not reputation) and those risking other people's money (and even then, if a VC wants to judge their reputation, they should look at the details, not binary failed/succeeded).
As a result, you have rich people risking nothing of relevance to them, just playing a game where they statistically win. All the risk if borne by the people doing actual work who are not obscenely rich.
> No - lots of VCs represent large pools of money including pension funds that service giant numbers of people
And there's still some rich asshole at the top who takes a cut which represents more money (sometimes by orders of magnitude) than a person doing positive-sum work can make. So he's not even risking his own money, great, a real improvement.
> Your "rich" company example, Factio, is about the silliest example I can imagine of a capital-intensive business.
I gave it as an example of people saving up in order to quit their day jobs and start a company. How is that silly? Would people saving up to open a small store also be silly? Would a person saving up to buy equipment to open a motorcycle repair shop be silly? Because those are all things people who want to do positive-sum work do.
> Your "obscenely rich" example isn't really about money any more, but so few people are like this it doesn't really affect anything.
Funny how much noise those "few" make. Not so long ago one of them pretty much bought himself a president in a very rich country. Though I have a feeling that is one investment which didn't go as well as he planned.
I also directly know a person who owns so many houses, office spaces and companies he never has to work again and can keep buying more. And he's still several orders of magnitude less rich than the first narcissistic asshole.
Both live a parasitic lifestyle.
Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM - to quote "1% of of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth". Does that fall under your "doesn't really affect anything"?
> It's impossible to tell if it's worse, as you haven't described it yet.
In the case of 1 designer, 1 producer, they distribute compensation according to how much work each did. Assuming design took a few orders of magnitude than producing a single item, the designer gets most in the beginning. As more items are produced, the designer gets less and producer more.
- If the producer would earn too little at first, they might agree on recalculating after a batch instead of single item,
- or the producer would go into debt owed to the designer (optionally there could be a condition that the debt is to be repaid only if the item makes enough to repay it),
- or they would both agree on a scheme which is mutually agreeable to both (licensing the design for a fixed price for a fixed number of items at first).
Point 1 is the designer as a person owns his design, there is no company which takes it because he did it "on company time".
Point 2 is all transactions and agreements are made with consent of those doing the real work.
Note that if you're unwilling to engage constructively, I am unwilling to write thousands of words in a HN comment you're just gonna passively aggressively dismiss.
> It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.
1) People do it, just rarely - those working in cooperatives almost always recommend the experience. Can't say the same for people in hierarchical organizations.
2) People do it rarely because most have never even heard about it. (And because there's a direct way to remove a dictatorship - those successful gain the top level of power and become the judges or right and wrong; there's no direct way to remove the C-suite - if you employ the same methods people historically used to remove dictators, even democratic governments will attack them in turn while calling it punishment.)
3) For most of history, with rare exceptions, governments were dictatorships. If we lived 200 years ago, would you say democracy is likely worse as people don't do it? This whole last sentence is fallacious.
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BTW, if you're gonna insult me, I don't see any point in continuing this. It does not matter how covert your insults are, the intent matters.
Just responding to this as it seems the simplest: a capital-intensive business is something that will need millions of dollars over many years before it turns the first inkling of a product. Excluding this incredibly important type of business, and only thinking about tiny businesses when you're thinking of the phrase "capital-intensive business" is the problem.
There are plenty of businesses, not just "tiny" ones as you say, which can be built up gradually without large investments.
As for capital-intensive:
There are 2 currencies - money and human time. You can call them resourced but it's the same thing. What I object to is that two people can invest roughly the same amount of time into something and one can get several orders of magnitude more money out of it.
That goes directly against the party line that "everybody is equal".
Anyway, there is clearly a conversion rate between human time and money - hourly rate. So in a system where people own the product of their work according to the amount of work, we can factor invested capital as additional work performed by the investor and reward them accordingly.
We could use for example the median wage but it would be interesting to consider using the investor's past hourly wages (the more they got pair per hour, the less their investment would gain them now).
There aren't any insults in their posts. You're conflating someone dismantling your claims with insulting you. Which is obviously, clearly, laughably false.
You claimed something that's just wrong:
> Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.
Then they proceeded to show how you're wrong, and you deflected with
> You are unintentionally proving me right.
Then you throw in emotionally manipulative statements like
> but let's not pretend
> Both live a parasitic lifestyle.
> Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like
Then link to a random YouTube video that says that the richest people in America have a much larger fraction of the wealth than they would if it was evenly distributed (which is extremely obvious), with zero actual elaboration of any sort of negative effects, then say
> Does that fall under your "doesn't really affect anything"?
And make arbitrary moral claims like
> Ownership does not have to be exclusive. In fact, it almost never should.
There's no coherent arguments here. Just angry opinions and envy and greed invoked by those that have more than you. The only person being "unwilling to engage constructively" here is the one being outraged and thinking that their outrage is a substitute for an argument, and who is unable to parse actually coherent arguments and so thinks that they're "passive aggressive dismissal".
Intellectual dishonesty is a form of insult. As is, for example, "laughably false". If you think I am wrong, you can explain why. But you choose to insult me because you enjoy it.
> manipulative statements
"But let's not pretend" is not manipulative, it's a figure of speech.
Parasitism is a fairly well defined term in biology which can be extended to sociology/economy.
"Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like" - you're right, I lost patience with someone defending rich people and being dismissive without any reason.
> the richest people in America have a much larger fraction of the wealth than they would if it was evenly distributed
That's not what the video says. I suggest rewatching with a less dismissive attitude.
> And make arbitrary moral claims like
It's called an opinion. Now, entertain me, which part do you have an issue with? Do you think ownership or a product made by multiple people should usually be exclusive?
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The rest can be summed up as you defending inequality and trying to provoke me into insulting you. I have no problem with people who work harder or more skillfully than me having more (proportionally). I have a problem with people getting themselves into positions of power which allow them to take a cut from other people's work without contributing much or anything at all.
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/0596001258/ch11s03.html
We were indeed left as our own division (other than the fact that Lync got merged into us in 2012) for quite some time, but the Microsoft culture seeped in via middle management anyway.
Skypers would leave on the ~2 year cycle that is common in tech and would get replaced by life-long Microsofters. They saw opportunities to have a bigger remit in a less mature division and applied internally. And they brought the company culture along with them much more than any decisions made by Satya.
All your code are belong to MSCodeLLMTrainer.exe now
This is so confusing. The "CoreAI" team is apparently doing everything except the core of AI, which is LLMs.
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.
> “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...
- 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).
Today I watched the WHY2025 talk about what happened to XS4ALL (a Dutch hacker-ethic ISP). Here's the summary: "we sold our profitable smallish independent startup with anti-corporate culture to a big corporation for lots of money, because we thought they'd continue it being awesomely anti-corporate, but all they did was squeeze our customers for more money, lay off all our staff and then move the customers to the corporation's own brand. We fought them in the courts, but the courts decisively ruled they were allowed to do all that because they own us, and it turns out they'd got expensive lawyers who did all the paperwork and pulled the right strings to make us look like the bad guys." Like, no shit? What were you expecting to happen? Does this story sound familiar to you?
Everyone needs to realize "the scorpion and the frog" is about corporations. Anyway, there's nothing illegal about selling your soul for money. It's almost mandatory in fact.
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.
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.
Github documentation is already pushing primarily Azure, for example https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/deploy/deploy-to-third-party-platforms 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-packages/publish-nodejs-packages has no equivalent document for e.g. JSR.
Does this mean source code might get synthesized and anonymized so Ai coding agents can train on it?
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.
ah ok so the politics of power aren't of interest to you
> LLMs trained on public and private code without consent or opting in.
ah ok so the politics of power ARE of interest to you
what's goin on here man
Zed was born as a result, which is drastically better. Zed tried to go into the AI thing, then made it possible to use it without any AI stuff, which is good.
Yes-- Zed allows you to disable the AI now. However, you still can't remove the GitHub login button on the editor. What's up with that?
>GitHub has operated as a separate company ever since Microsoft acquired it.
Yeah, right.
And Santa Claus exists, Virginia.
Oxymoron of the decade ...
... Extinguish?
-- Satya Nadella, 2018
in the acquisition announcement https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github-empowering-developers/
So I expect everything about the GitHub experience to degrade to (awful, slow, poorly designed) Teams/Outlook quality, since Microsoft doesn't really care about your experience as long as you're locked in and you can eventually accomplish what your job requires of you.
Besides, M&A means the acquirer OWNS the sold entity the independent. No independent whatsoever can take place when a company is owned by others.
they sacrifice their few areas of credibility just to make bad ai models that no one uses
In general, git itself has become a bloated product. There's like 2-3 ways to do everything now and devs now argue about which is the purest, "right" way and it's annoying to deal with opinions of egotistical people when you're just trying to get work done.
can you elaborate?
After a decade of use I've seem some more cutesy porcelain popping up, but the commit-tree basic concepts have never changed.
The company I work at is using the same exact branching strategy I introduced when we moved to git, with essentially no discussion in the meantime.
Sourcehut aka sr.ht is a free email-driven GitHub alternative. If you like email patches flows instead, check that out.
SSH unleashes the true distributed nature of git. With confidence you can move commits across instances , pushing to various repos. You can build some very flexible publishing and archiving patterns with git alone.
That's GitHub code -> AI.
The damage will be AI code -> GitHub
CoPilot already gives (bad) code reviews on GitHub PRs.
Look at the some of the AI slop curl deals with -- https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/ -- and imagine your issues list filled with that.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/copilot-agent-mode