My Thoughts on GitHub | Hacker News Reader

My Thoughts on GitHub

linolevan.com

3 pointsiobdas7 comments

> AI Problems: I'll mention this briefly just because I think it's unethical. (...) I think Copilot is a fun tool that you should use if you're hacking together something that exists already.

> Even though I really think Github is an unethical company... I'm sticking with them anyways.

This piece says more about the author's very flexible ethics than GitHub's. Honestly this was very cringy.

I think it's more of a matter of practicality. I don't like my ISP, but I don't really have much of a choice of sticking with them or not.

For most places in the USA, you literally don't have a choice of ISP. For Git hosting platforms, you do, and I find it weird to write an article stating all the reasons you don't want to use a service, but conclude that you'll use it anyway as long as it's convenient.

The AI paragraph is particularly weird, since it states that "it's unethical" and in the next sentence that "Copilot is a fun tool that you should use".

It feels like the author was made aware of those complaints by somebody else, does not really understand or care about them, and wrote this blog as a sort of justification to keep using it. It is really strange.

fair enough

I've been thinking about leaving Github for a while. Anyone else share a similar experience?

I never liked it for one reason: people use it to virtue signal to potential employers that they've been active in open source and have worked diligently on various side-projects. Whilst there's nothing wrong with that, it gets tricky when the person is over-involved with GitHub, since GitHub has many metrics people try to game, and GitHub does 'gamification' style tactics to keep users hooked.

It's basically social media, but for code. If people just calmed down a bit and stopped trying to earn badges and keep their contributions graph green, that would be great.

I set up Gitea [1] on a Vultr instance. It costs me $4 a month

[1] https://about.gitea.com/

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