GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash | Hacker News Reader

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

theregister.com

614 points_____k366 comments

I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…

Because it's Microsoft. Categorically incapable of respecting their users.

What's interesting to me is how many people went like 'Oh, Satya really gets open source, this time it will be different'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225599

always noticed way too much reverence for satya because of what he did to valuations. i personally cant stand azure/365/all of it. i reserve no reverence for satya, he's playing a game in a class/world none of us can even relate to so i don't even see the point in talking about his achievements. looking back, it unequivocally sucks that microsoft acquired github.

I am not sure it is that. The job of Microsoft is to satisfy shareholders. That is the only target. They only care about users to the extend that helps the shareholders.

This is how you'll end up destroying planet earth. Shareholders have to co-exist with the rest of us, if you wreck your environment to please yourself you'll be like that guy I knew in LA that had a Ferrari that he couldn't drive on the road just outside of his mansion because the roads were so bad. But on his private grounds he had clean blacktop and zero potholes...

This is repeated ad nauseam, but do they really? Can you honestly say that Nadella's setting a hard target for conversion of local users into Microsoft ones caused their shares go up?

In other words, the world beyond the next quarter does not exist.

Exactly. Which is why we must increase the social and economic cost of these bad decisions so much that it’ll be in the shareholders’ best interest to make the platform better to get us to stop. Precisely what happened here.

Just as with politics, the only way to get them to do what’s in our best interest is to make them come to the conclusion that they’ll risk losing money (or status or power) if they don’t.

The shareholders would certainly understand, destroying a key tool for undefined gains is not good for the shareholders.

What it is, is purely incompetence. Revolving door of executives forcing shit ideas because they need to assert control.

Big Tech has become a space led by lizard brained nepo babies who have nothing to contribute to the world, but think they're entitled to it all.

Which shareholders are being satisified by the stock dropping seven percent in a month?

When Microsoft announced it was acquiring Github I submitted a comment about backing up repositiories locally. This idea got downvoted pretty quick

Did people honestly believe Microsoft is cool. I'm not so sure. The company has access to a large amount of surveillance data about computer users, it understands what it can and cannot get away with and actively manages its online reputation through whatever means necessary

Time will show the wiser

The worst part of Microsoft is whoever is running their marketing department, they just inject themselves into everything, like Windows. GitHub is different, they will 100% lose users and income if they don't learn to back the hell off of it though. Windows, well, everyone complains about Windows no matter what, so valid complaints are ignored.

With Office, well, your employer is paying for it, so you have no say in it anyway.

It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this?

This is why I say, marketing driven development is garbage.

> It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this?

Capitalism (and it's demands of the market) at its finest.

Stupid people think that because they're making a good living under capitalism (many on HN), it's a good system. All the ads on websites and shitty bosses and vendor lock-in and declining support options are "accidents" that would get better if "companies stopped being evil." No. It incentivizes evil.

Capitalism is the reason the internet sucks. If you don't agree, think about it longer and consider if it might actually be true.

Capitalism is the reason the Internet exists. Instead of just complaining, why don't you recommend an alternative. One that hasn't starved and murdered millions of people, such as communism. It's childish to denounce an entire system, with no bloody idea at all about what to do instead, except idealistic utopian dreams... like we'll all just get along and prosper, if only capitalism didn't exist.

You can be a capitalist without ruining your product.

Capitalism means ownership by investors, and it is the investors who ruin your product.

Not a very good capitalist though and there will be others without that "limitation" you have to compete against.

Not to white-knight microsoft here, but I think the problem they run into with every product is that because of their ubiquity, they rapidly reach saturation with most every specialized product they sell. You cannot grow a business if your market is saturated, even if you're the only one selling. So they have to find a way to expand their market. With specialized tools, that's done by generalizing, right? And anyone who has ever driven a screw with a swiss-army knife can tell you, generalized tools never work as well as dedicated tools. Thus, Word ultimately sucks. Windows ultimately sucks. Github ultimately sucks. They are all of them trying to be everything for everyone, because the alternative is just mumbling along, being really good at being tools, but being really bad at conveying profit to their creators.

> You cannot grow a business if your market is saturated

At some point, a business should shift from growth state to a steady state. The idea that businesses have to grow forever is a sad consequence to how we fund companies.

The only thing that grows forever unchecked is cancer.

> At some point, a business should shift from growth state to a steady state.

I was on a department-wide call; many, many years ago. The person talking was telling us how well we were doing and how we needed to grow. At the end, they asked if there were any questions (which, thinking back, seems odd given the size of the meeting, but.. it was a long time ago). I asked them "Why? Why do we need to grow? We're doing a good job at our core business. We're making money doing it. Why do we need to expand; specifically expand our offerings into something that _isn't_ our core".

My question didn't get answered. But it _is_ a valid one, imo.

Businesses do not always need to grow at all, neither do investors as a class, demand that business keeps growing. A mature business generates a stream of dividends and everyone is happy. There are many, many such businesses.

One famous example is See's Candy, which Warren Buffet famously discussed in one of his newsletters. See's is a mature company with zero mandate to grow. It turns the profits over to Berkshire and Berkshire uses that to invest in other companies.

The economy as a whole keeps growing because human desires and ingenuity are unlimited. But a specific firm reaches its natural limit, at which point it turns into a cashflow machine to generate dividends for owners.

The problem you are facing is that Management does not want to acknowledge that it's time for them to start paying out dividends and leave growth alone, because that would be an admission that the profits of the firm are best invested by some other firm, and not by them.

It is all about management ego, in not recognizing their limitations, and then destroying the core company as they invest in areas where they can't compete. Shareholders and boards need to replace management when this happens, but it is hard to do because Management keeps insisting that they can earn an above average return if they keep the money rather than returning it to shareholders. And people love to hear stories of above average returns.

Can also be a tree. Growth does not mean customers have to be disrespected. It just happens to be an easy way out for companies.

Hah, thank you, that's exactly my sentiment.

If you can't grow your business then maybe you should just be satisfied with what you have. Growth without limit has a name: cancer.

>And anyone who has ever driven a screw with a swiss-army knife can tell you, generalized tools never work as well as dedicated tools

>Windows ultimately sucks

I actually want a generalized tool for my OS, a specialized OS sounds like a pain in the ass.

Generalized in the sense of "this interface works as well on a tablet as a desktop computer", or "we can also generate ad revenue with this operating system" or "there should be constant invasive AI integration, even for users who don't want to and should not use such features, and who would pay a premium to avoid it if possible".

Not specialize in the sense of "here's your civil engineering operating system, which is different from your structural engineering operating system, and neither bear any similarity to your gaming operating system".

Growth. It's a disease. Can't just work on a good product it's got to make arbitrary growth targets.

This type of behaviour seems to be endemic within Microsoft. They're like the scorpion in the Russian tale of the scorpion and the frog, seemingly a retelling of the Persian tale of the scorpion and the tortoise:

A long time ago, a scorpion came to the edge of a great river. Not being a good swimmer, it asked a nearby frog if it might get a ride across.

The frog eyed the scorpion warily. “I’ve heard of your kind. I see the stinger you hide behind your back. I wish I could help you, but I cannot risk it.”

“Why would I sting you?” the scorpion reasoned. “If you die, we would both drown.”

The frog was convinced. It let the scorpion climb atop its back, then began to swim across the great river. But when they were halfway across, the scorpion suddenly stung the frog.

As the poison spread through his body, the frog cried out, “Why did you sting me? You have killed us both!”

The scorpion replied, “I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.”

Microsoft just can't help it that they end up destroying the goodwill they inherit when they buy a property. It is in their nature.

You have cause and effect confused. They buy the property because of the goodwill, they can't get it any other way, they know they will destroy it but goodwill doesn't necessarily show up on the balance sheet, whereas the result of burning that goodwill will show up on the balance sheet.

Well, no, in what way would I have this confused? I state they always manage to lose goodwill because it is in their nature to do things which alienate customers. I'm not saying anything about the why of it, just that they always do so.

Product managers do not care about customers. They only care about their bonus and the line moving up.

I wonder which direction their line is moving.

> why they ruined GitHub

Are we living in the same world? GitHub is not ruined at all, it still works great (as in it’s completely usable), it’s still where 99% of open source projects are hosted, and it’s still a no brainer to use it for public or private repos (having used Gitlab extensively, GitHub is just so much more user friendly). There is more competition, which is good, but GitHub is still the default option for open source by a long margin

I think maybe we're not living in the same world.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131406 "Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487584 "GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037365 "The GitHub website is slow on Safari"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 "Why is GitHub UI getting slower?"

GH notification search doesn't search the title or description of the notifications. https://docs.github.com/en/subscriptions-and-notifications/r...

GH cannot search code that exists in non-default branches. Have fun responding to the next supply chain compromise in any org that has repos with multiple supported branches.

So some people say it feels slower, there's been some incidents recently, you're missing a few features and Zig moved out, that's it? Wow, ruined, completely unusable, I have no idea how I've been working 8 hours a day using Github in these conditions.

Ruined may be a strong word but it is much less usable than it was previously. Frequent outages, lots of weird bugs.

It no longer feels like a polished product.

Based on Microsoft's past behavior, I foresee many companies outright banning developers from using GitHub. Especially now with multiple agents reading/writing against GitHub. It just takes one "bug" for Microsoft to ignore all privacy options and contracts it has signed, and instantaneously ingest every piece of code and intellectual property into its AI model.

I'll never understand why anyone thought they wouldn't ruin it. It's a miracle it even exists anymore.

it's not ruined yet. it can recover, but it will require an immediate 180 degree turn on all changes they've made since acquisition.

microsoft, you suck at aquisitions.

stop shoehorning copilot into everything. holy hell, stop it. just stop. please. no customers ask for this. none. zero open source developers ask for anything like this, ever. stop it. stop. holy moly, stop. i mean it. but you won't stop because you don't understand why we don't want it, because you suck at acquisitions.

stop usurping github culture and replacing it with microsoft culture. you know what happens when microsoft culture arrives: all of the things that people love about your company vaporize almost immediately. you dorks don't understand this, though, because you suck at acquisitions, so this'll never change.

stop letting people with MBAs make decisions. this is the big one. people with MBAs know enough to be catastrophically dangerous, and they don't know enough to know if what they're doing will drive people away. MBAs lose all respect for customers and only see things in terms of value. MBAs do not see customers as valuable, they only see product as value. MBAs are insane. Fire the fucking MBAs and get some older engineers who do not have MBAs to assemble teams to help them pick product direction and product features. This is obvious to everyone except you dummies because you dummies suck at acquisitions.

you CAN keep the "GitHub" brand, and the clout, but you must stop doing everything you started doing since you acquired them. and I do mean that. you must let GitHub culture return. GitHub will die a slow, painful death if you do not. It will live on a bit longer as the git host of choice for some enterprises, but it will not last very long in that form. This is obvious to everyone except you because you suck at acquisitions.

you look at your shiny new pet and you grab it and you dash its head against the concrete wall until you see its eyes poking out and then you cry because it's dead, not understanding that it was you who killed it. you only wanted to make it better! but you didn't make it better, did you? you killed it. as you always do.

you strip everything that customers love out of these companies and you crush everything that the employees love about the companies with extreme efficiency because you don't fucking respect these things. you don't even know that you SHOULD respect these things, because knowing that requires that the MBAs be taken away from the acquisitions steering wheel and be permanently banned from the company. you are filled with cancerous MBA decision making and those MBAs will never admit it to you, because they are the engine behind these acquisitions you fucking suck at.

Everyone is just figuring out again why Microsoft was so hated in the 90’s.

Conversely GitLab was well positioned to take the space but then went and ruined their opportunity too.

The writing was on the wall when they tried to implement invasive telemetry on users, following an investment offer. They did walk back on it due to community backlash and boycott. But if history has shown us anything, corporate retreat happens only on account of loss of good will and brand value. Once the intent is established, they'll keep looking for other ways to satisfy it. The only difference between that incident and Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub is that the latter was a much louder signal about what was to follow.

How did they do this exactly?

This is just the way MS is and always has been. It was inevitable. It's part of their longstanding EEE strategy. Anyone who thought otherwise was fooling themselves.

Embrace, Extend, Enshittify?

Big company isn't good at {thing} absorb company who is and apply all their know how to the part that does {thing} killing all the good parts in the process.

Happens almost every time.

Microsoft can't help themselves. They ruin everything that they touch.

This was inevitable once Microsoft wrote a check for $7.5 billion. You're not going to pay that much and not recoup your investment. You might say that they could've gotten it from existing income. Maybe that's true but it doesn't matter. Because you can get it faster by turning all the knobs to increase income and decrease costs.

Profit has a tendency to fall over time. A growing company can escape this for awhile by expanding their marketshare or expanding into new products. Eventually the only way to head this off is by raising prices and cutting costs.

Entshittification is fundamental to our system.

Consider this too: the people who are making decisions about Github's future have no investment in it's long term success. They're VPs, directors, managers and ICs who are simply trying to get promoted and get their bonuses by squeezing out short-term revenue. They'll be long gone before it all goes to shit.

It's almost like we have a distortion based on the workers' relationship to the means of production.

GitHub was sold because it didn't make too much money. Microsoft bought it for OpenAI only, to train Copilot on the vast amount of code.

Of course, MS every once in a while says that it makes a lot of money, but they don't really say how much is costs to keep it up. Their free tiers are still very generous, even they are buggy as hell - I can't imagine that the profit it makes even dents MS' bottom line (assuming it's not in the red). But at the end of the day the model training is done.

I guess Github doesn't have a lot of use anymore, beside having a lot of users that you can use to experiment with such shenanigans to see what can you get away with.

> Microsoft bought it for OpenAI only, to train Copilot on the vast amount of code.

I think this gets the timeline wrong. Microsoft acquired GH in 2018 and started the partnership with OpenAI in summer 2019.

I'm sure there was some strategy to extract value from it that wouldn't serve its users but I think OpenAI was not initially meant to be the beneficiary.

Maybe MS just got extremely lucky, like winning-the-lottery-lucky.

But your timeline is off, however. Their partnership started in 2016[1]. In 2019 MS started to invest publicly in OpenAI - but by then they have had some history.

To me, this is at least suspicious. Granted, I have no hard proof.

[1]: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/11/15/advancing-ambiti...

GH being bought by MSFT way precedes their OpenAI involvement IIRC. And I don’t think it was even needed to train their models given Anthropic does fine without owning GitHub.

So this logic doesn’t pass the smell test to me.

EDIT: seems there was only a year in between them buying GH (2018) and investing in OpenAI (2019). So _maybe_ they had that foresight.

Because Microslop always hires cheap labor that ends up becoming management, and then things start to break. And the cycle continues. This is what happened at Bank of America, Citi and others.

Ah, I think this is due to human nature. People came in and wanted to "do" something with GitHub. To give it their stamp, to help boost their career/ego.

the main pull of GitHub is not primarily git, which is easily done without an external provider. It's the bundle of all the little tools various other conveniences with git repositories, and how they're streamlined together into a workflow that many places are now beholden to. So they can afford to rough up the userbase a bit in the name of increased value extraction because so many paying customers are trapped in the GitHub ecosystem.

Some Product Manager who wanted his promotion of the year went with: Oh how about we squeeze more revenue from our unpaid users

And what's even more disappointing is that despite failure they probably do get promoted.

Yes! And now Microsoft says Copilot is for entertainment purposes only

nah blame goes to satya. not some rando who is acting on incentives.

can we please blaming randos.

Ultimately it's on the company culture. So yea kinda.

it's not that deep, once a company reaches a certain size it gets ridden with middle managers looking for their next promotion. middle managers are gonna middle-manage.

Their goal was to have a captured audience. Once the audience is captured, of course enshittification will happen.

Microsoft will probably try to sneak it back in later. They've done that with other intrusions.

Migrating away from Github just increased in priority.

Yes. Like they did with the githubsearch for users that are not logged in.

At first, they brought it back. Then they changed to limits so you get between zero and two searches before getting an error message that you have hit some kind of limit.

Instead of polluting PRs, Copilot will insert comments and logging and text fields and buttons with links to web sites with helpful product tips into your code and user interfaces.

I mean, this is a very obvious future step. I was imagining this too, although I stopped short at the 'ads in comments' stage, but who knows, they could easily go further.

why would they need Copilot to insert ads on GitHub?

Talking about doing it is virtue signaling.

Don't just say, do! If you have a popular repository, share news of your migration to drive others to do the same.

VOTE WITH YOUR FEET, PEOPLE!

It was a “bad judgement call” this time because people noticed and complained. Next time it will be the right judgement call. Ach.

They only turn on features that users disabled every chance they get.

I guess it's time to consider ditching GitHub. Everything that are purchased by Microsoft ware destined to be rotten.

even aside from this, their reliability has been absolutely terrible since they took it over. it's down so often we had to setup slack notifications directly to the devs to try to take some of the pressure off our ops teams.

they must be migrating it to hyper-v or something. brutal.

Even aside from that, what are we doing centralizing FOSS project hosting on a closed source Microsoft platform?

What are some good alternatives for closed source codebases that people have been using and enjoying?

I only ask because I already know of good alternatives for FOSS, but it's the private / work projects that keep me tethered to GH for now.

If it's for work, why do you need GitHub at all?

To me, GitHub only makes sense as a social media site for code. If you are publishing to GitHub with no intent to be open in your code, development process, and contributor roster, then I don't see the point of being on GitHub at all.

Because it's not like their issue tracker is particularly good. It's not like their documentation support is particularly good. It's not like their search is particularly good. It's CI/CD system is bonkers. There are so many problems with using GitHub for its own sake that the only reason I can see to be there is for the network effects.

So, with that in mind, why not just setup a cheap VPS somewhere with a bare git repo? It'll be cheaper than GitHub and you don't have to worry about the LLM mind virus taking over management of your VPS and injecting this kind of junk on you.

GitLab is quite good, the organizational features and CI is also mostly on par with GitHub. You can use gitlab.com, SaaS or self-host.

Self-hosting. If you really need to push remotely, push to bare repo on your own cloud vm or setup gogs or forgejo.

I now start with local repos first and whatever I deem OSS-useful, I mirror-push from local to Github or anywhere else with forgejo.

Github was never really needed to use git for private projects.

Sourcehut.

Uses the same email-based patch workflow as Linux. Takes an hour to learn, and they have helpful guides: https://git-send-email.io/. No JavaScript.

Azure DevOps <shudder/>

Forgejo is super easy to set up on a 1-2 core vm. Make a compose file and put caddy in front for tls. the whole thing is less than 50 lines and costs about $10-$15 a month.

self hosted Gitea is my recommendation. has everything one needs and is super lean and resource saving. you can run it easily on a 1GB VPS - I even ran it for a while on 512MB.

GitLab. We self-host ours and it's rock solid.

Codeberg seems to have legs. License is different, best read it.

Gitlab.

For personal stuff I hopped over to source hut and it's fine.

Simple, direct, and I really like the email based workflows.

Funny that people said the exact same thing back when GitHub was originally acquired [0], I wonder how many actually went through with their words and ditched it. I bet GitHub has more users today than ever before though.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286

>Why MS cares your private repositories? give a reason? Maybe using your code to train their programming robot, lol

>Whether they will abuse the trust of having complete and total access to every private repo and all of the code inside or not remains to be seen

>MS is pushing their ads within their own OS more and more, will GitHub get the same treatment[...]?

Funny.

Just speaking anecdotally, Codeberg today feels like the Gitlab of yesteryear, except that Codeberg has projects on it. Someone who is contributing to open source will eventually need to create a Codeberg account.

The top comment of the linked thread ("If Microsoft shares SSL certs with NSA they could do MITM attacks") is something that I find much more likely today than back in 2018.

They can have the new users pushing out sloppy projects.

The serious users leaving will definitely dent profitability. And GitHub being a social network, could start a death spiral.

i am surprised it took them time to destroy Github. usually they manage to make acquired companies a garbage pretty fast.

Are there any obvious successor to GitHub yet?

There are a few alternatives, but none have the critical mass of users yet.

For open source I would say Codeberg looks like the most promising. There is also SourceHut but seems like Codeberg has the mind share.

Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means.

They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people.

This really is the quote of the century:

> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads

What a waste.

> sorry about the tangent

I understand why you felt the need to do it, but it’s still sad that you have to apologise for it. It’s not like if using technology for killing is a fringe hypothesis, it’s happening right now and on the news. It’s a discussion worth having.

> This really is the quote of the century

I loathe that quote. The people thinking about how to make others click ads are only concerned with themselves and their own profit. To me that does not qualify as a “best mind”. Maybe a “smart” or “good at computers” or “good at manipulation” mind, but certainly not “best”. A “best mind” should be capable of empathy and have a broad societal view of consequences for their actions.

> I loathe that quote

I thought this quote was a direct invocation of Howl / Ginsberg, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”.

Seen in that light I think there’s another layer to it.

At a certain point, quotes (like any other part of language) get a new meaning, sometimes the opposite of what they originally stood for. Like any popular saying, whatever they were in reference to is forgotten and they stand and are interpreted on their own.

It doesn’t matter what the quote used to invoke if no one using it is thinking of the invocation.

So when is society gonna start thinking of us in return? Where are our rewards?

It's a rotten world out there. Everything is corrupt. Taking the moral high ground is an enormous sacrifice. In the best case scenario, society will just laugh at you for it. Chances are they will actually fight you since your moral stand will probably get in the way of their profitable schemes.

I find it increasingly hard to blame people for playing the game. The reality is that the honest man is punished while the corrupt man is rewarded.

Ignoring the fact that your description is far from absolute (“society” isn’t a single thing; there are—and I’ve been in—smaller scale societies which do work together for the collective good) and that shrugging off the situation only makes it worse and never better, none of what you said contradicts my point. In fact, it only reinforces it; being a “best mind” isn’t supposed to be easy. You may excuse it, but there’s nothing laudable about deciding to be corrupt in a corrupt world, the opposite is true. The one who choses to do the right, moral, good, altruistic thing despite personal consequences is the one deserving of admiration.

Admiration and respect are great and a clean conscience lets you sleep well at night. It still doesn't help to make up for the profound demoralization you experience when you realize that unscrupulous people are making millions completely unpunished, nor does it help the people who get persecuted, bankrupted or even outright killed for trying to oppose the never ending corruption.

>A “best mind” should be capable of empathy and have a broad societal view of consequences for their actions.

9 years of philosophy later: You are not a best mind. Sorry. But you think morals metaphysically exist and no best minds do.

I find it fascinating how you can read someone’s own definition of a subjective concept and immediately make wrong assertions about them and their opinions and do so by employing a No True Scotsman, a logical fallacy so basic one learns it in high school introductory class.

> A “best mind” should be capable of empathy and have a broad societal view of consequences for their actions

Empathy and introspection are so 20th century. They are a hindrance when your aim is to make as much money and put it on fire as quickly as possible. Because somehow that’s how we decided to measure success.

Another user posted this article earlier https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/introspection-andr... which was interesting

> They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads

The people who created the tech and the ones that use it for ads in this case are two different groups - the first one is from Google (initial discovery) and OpenAI (realizing the potential of discovery and developing it into a product), whereas the second is the same company that decided that building ads into an operating system is an excellent idea.

OpenAI is testing ads already: https://openai.com/index/testing-ads-in-chatgpt/

Bringing the advertising to all of humanity.

It's just the natural evolution of "They're not advertisements. They're recommendations."

These people could invent actual AGI, and the only thing they could think to do with it is push ads.

That’s almost literal. Sam Altman has admitted early on their goal was to invent AGI and then ask it how to make money.

https://www.startupbell.net/post/sam-altman-told-investors-b...

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads", Jeff Hammerbacher (2012).

> > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads

> What a waste.

If you consider "what people (un-coercedly) spend money on" as "what people actually want", the situation gets obvious:

People don't voluntarily spend money so that e.g. deep scientific questions are worked on or other things are done that are often claimed that "smart people should do".

(by the way: a lot of problems that are claimed that "we need smart people to solve" actually don't need smart people (i.e. the problem could be solved by raw intelligence), but are rather "political" problems, i.e. problems of manipulating people).

I wish it was different, but before you claim that it is a waste that "the best minds are thinking about how to make people click ads", you should better find an idea what these people should do instead.

Maybe resources shouldn't be distributed purely using a free market that can easily be manipulated, especially if the top dogs are allowed to use manipulative advertising and sales tactics.

> Maybe resources shouldn't be distributed purely using a free market that can easily be manipulated

Which kind of resource allocation do you suggest?

At least one can clearly tell that existing experiments with planned economies went really bad, so how do you want to overcome the problems that plagued existing big-scale experiments of planned economies?

It just so happens that pure unchecked capitalism isn't the only way to organize our society.

if its indistinguishable from magic please do some reading or refrain from using.

You know, I'm well aware of how an LLM works (partially. mostly anyway), but if you pulled in any layperson from the street and ask them to explain how it's possible that they can speak natural language commands into their phones and get a useful response as if they were talking to a human, you'd be hard pressed to get a more precise answer than along the lines

> It's something with to do with data, and I know it's not magic, but...

Maybe you were not familiar with the quote I was alluding to:

> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

Data is like mana, LLMs are like djinns, and prompts are like incantations

This reminds me the introduction of SICP

https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

> We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.

> A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.

That was the idea in the forefront of AI in 1984 - software can perform intellectual work. This idea is now mainstream since ChatGPT, but for many people in the decades prior, software couldn't be called intelligent - they just follow rules!

> software couldn't be called intelligent - they just follow rules!

Software from this time wasn't intended to be highly non-deterministic as LLMs - and this was seen as a feature.

> if you pulled in any layperson from the street

Then they wouldn’t be able to explain how any part of their computing life works. Not hardware, not software. LLMs are not at all special in that regard, to the layperson they are equally as magical as anything else.

a) that quote you mention is basically about unknown advanced tech. LLMs and the software around it is not unknown..

b) my comment was a bit generalized and I am sorry if that felt like a personal attack. it was not.

And nobody has ever bought anything just because of an ad.

You either already knew about shit through some other way or you were going to buy it anyway.

Only people downvoting this will be the ones who perpetuate this Emperor With No Clothes racket.

It's just a thin veil for surveillance.

People buy things because of ads all the time. Probably you've done it too.

I go out of my way not to buy products advertised to me, but I've definitely fallen to the incessant brain-washing of brand advertising. Probably regular advertising too depending what you include as adverts.

I was surprised speaking to someone the other day, just out and about. They'd purposefully gone out to buy doughnuts they'd seen advertised. Kinda shook me. They seemed happy as Larry about it all though.

The thing that really messed with me recently was when I started thinking deeply about the fact that I’ve been seeing so many Southwest ads about their switch to assigned seating…

I realized that they probably made that whole change, along with all of the ads, because they knew it would spark mild outrage and discussion from people who saw it — they’d discuss if assigned seating is actually better or worse than the previous fist-come-fist-serve system. I can understand either angle but I liked that they were different than other airlines, etc.

But really it’s because they removed the free checked bags that had been their policy forever, now you need to pay like any other airline. Which completely ruins their value prop. But by advertising the seating changes so heavily for months, they make you forget about that part that actually makes a much bigger difference in the experience

> I go out of my way not to buy products advertised to me

The most likely way to get me to not buy your product is to advertise it to me.

I'm watching March Madness right now, and the Canadian sports network re-broadcasts with their own ads. They show a terrible one featuring a mid female basketball player every. single. break. The only emotions they've raised with me are anger and frustration, but I am well informed that there's a new Google phone out. If I was thinking about buying a new device it would be impossible to not associate that with the new Google Pixel 10a - available now!

I have never once bought a product because of an ad, unless the ad was telling me about something I didn't know existed. Perhaps others are weak-minded enough to do so, but not everyone is.

Damnit, now I want a doughnut.

One of the most provably false statements of all time

I have definitely bought things I’ve seen in ads. And I know many people who have. There are brands that I know exist only because I’ve seen ads for them. What is an alternative to advertisements that you suggest??

Why do we need an alternative?

They were not ads though. The companies did not pay for those, from what I can tell. Microsoft seemed to really thought they were being helpful here.

That's a generous interpretation.

I see it as just preparation for selling the space. After a few months of "tips" they go to companies and say, "hey, you know those tips we have in our PRs? You can be in every 10th one of them for X dollars?"

I could totally see them priming the ad engine; next step would be "PR tips get viewed by X million eyeballs a month; how many do you want to buy?"

In media, we call that a House Ad.

I also get tons of helpful product recommendations and tips in my TV shows, every 20 minutes.

Advertisement, noun. A notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event or publicizing a job vacancy.

There is no way they didn’t think they could sell those spots in the future.

“Ad” doesn’t mean “paid for”. A “tip” linking to some other place, injected into a place with no permission or context, is an “ad” in every meaningful sense (and if this “tip” system were left in place it would soon enough be turned into a pay-for explicit ad system). If someone at Microsoft deludes themselves that they are just trying to be helpful, that doesn’t change the impact and result of their actions.

First hit is always free

I don’t think the quote is particularly fair. You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it.

For every microsecond level ad auction broker there’s a free Android update, cat video platform enhancement, calendar app feature, or type checked scripting language release.

HFT on the other hand — now there’s a tech black hole!

[edited to add What have the Romans ever done for us?, below]

Hard disagree.

It brought panhandling to where generosity once prevailed.

It brought us social media engagement metrics and 140-character-limited 'interaction' and cluttered, flashing, distracting, human-psyche hacking interfaces.

It brought all the c*nts who only saw dollar signs.

Agree on HFT.

(Disclaimer: I'm focusing on the negatives to make a point, there probably are some wild benefits, but I'm on the side of preferring to have taken longer to get there without all the examples I've listed - yes, I'm wishing for utopia, it's my comment I can say what I want).

Edited to add: People would share their cats whether or not internet advertising existed. The cats would demand it.

People did share their cat pics before centralized ad supported platforms and I would definitely not see that centralization as a "benefit".

> You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it.

That's a false dichotomy.

First of all, the technology is far from "free". It's easily accessible, perhaps, but users pay handsomely to use it, even if they're unaware of it, which most adtech companies go out of their way to ensure.

Secondly, advertising isn't the only business model companies can choose. Far from it. It may be the most profitable, and the easiest to deploy, simply because adtech companies have made it so. Companies can just as well choose to prioritize user experience, user privacy, and all the things they claim to care deeply about, over their revenues, which is what they actually care about.

Oh, and lastly, I would strongly argue that social media, web search, office suites, etc., are hardly "amazing" technology. There are very good alternatives to all of these that don't come with the drawbacks of ad-supported software. It's just that adtech companies are also unsurprisingly quite good at advertising themselves, and using their position and vast resources to dominate the market.

It's hardly a black and white area, and there's more to this question than just GOOG, but there's a joke here that has some relevance:

Those bastards have bled us dry with their algorithms, taken all the data we had, and not just from us, but from our children, our children's children, our children's children's children, our children's children's children's children... and what have they ever given us in return?

The search engine

...and a free phone OS

Oh yeah, the phone OS! Remember what the flip phones used to be like?

OK, but apart from the search engine and the phone OS...

Global Street View coverage!

Oh yes yes, oh that's a good one! So useful!

Chrome and Chromium

Well obviously that goes without saying: the browsers are very good

Docs and Sheets. I can't do me shopping without 'em!

Oh yes yes! -all nod-

OK, but apart from the search engine, the phone OS, the street view, the browsers, all the open source work, scholar, an office suite, an open DNS resolver, web fonts, gmail, and video calling, what has Google ever done for us?

That is an incredibly dishonest way to look at it.

1) You're conflating the "smartest people" with tech companies. The point of the quote is that people's careers are funneled towards ads. 2) The technology is not free and amazing. It may give consumers some marginal utility, but it's making them dependent on the system and recording most interactions they have with it. It's a widespread system of surveillance and control, and the tech companies are in charge.

Doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

If you don’t think that LLMs won’t result in an insurmountable volume of spam on all web foru

Oh wait, your post was written by an LLM.

It was not! I don’t think it adds much to this thread to refute the accusation though, but I would add: if you’d tried to out me by asking me to write a haiku about buttons, you’d be reading a haiku about buttons right now. It’s as reliable a signal as looking to see if I use hyphens and dashes. (I love haiku!)

A lot of amazing technology has been invented just for the purpose of killing people. It's nothing new. Humans are monkeys that like to kill other monkeys and no amount of civilization will change that.

I find it sad that while technological progress is seen almost as a given by virtually everyone, moral progress is often not even an aspiration

Our current incentives system is absolutely amoral, there's no financial/economic benefit for being moral, it's the opposite: being moral is penalised since you'd be disadvantaged competing with others who don't care about it.

I completely agree with you, moral progress should be incentivised somehow...

Just to push back a little, I think if the U.S. did now what they did to Germany and Japan in WW2 it would be unconscionable. They are getting a lot of flak for bombing a school. But I think it’s fair to say there were a lot of schools in Dresden and Hiroshima.

This isn’t to excuse anything but to say there has been progress even if it’s not as fast as we’d like.

As far as the technology angle, the precision we have now and information we have now allow much more narrow targeting, but at the same time allows us to scrutinize military actions more.

I have no control over the morality of others.

Whereas I have direct control over how I use technology.

It doesn't seem like moral progress actually exists or even can exist given human nature. In every time period and era there are people killing each other, amongother crimes. It is fallacious to think that we have a monotonically increasing meter of moral progress, that we are somehow better than our ancestors. Reality shows that we are exactly the same, as the parent says.

It certainly won't change with that kind of attitude. Don't you want to live a peaceful life and be free from your baser instincts? I believe most people do, and if they don't, the mission of those who have education and means should be to show the way in that direction, instead of shrugging off the worst things and excusing them on "monkeys", which IMO is insulting to monkeys.

Of course, we all want to live peaceful lives and be free from our baser instincts, but the entire society that allows you to live a "peaceful life" is based on exploitation and war. Just because you don't see it at home doesn't mean you don't profit/benefit from human violence and exploitation.

As for my comment on "monkeys":

1. Larger primates like chimpanzees are known predators that hunt and consume smaller monkeys, specifically targeting babies

2. In the famous Gombe Chimpanzee War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War), a once-unified community split into two factions; over four years, one group systematically hunted down and killed every male member of the other.

3. In captive or introduced settings, groups may relentlessly bully "outsiders" who do not know the social norms, preventing them from eating or resting.

4. Non-lactating females may steal an infant from its mother and refuse to give it back, holding it until the baby dies of starvation or dehydration.

"Insulting to monkeys" is only an idea when you anthromorphize monkeys from the actual animals they are to something like Rafiki from Lion King. Nothing is insulting to monkeys because they don't understand the meaning of insult or care about it. They're raw animals and so are human beings.

If you look at the world around you today and think "yes, this is the result of people wanting to live a peaceful life" then I would say you're not being realistic.

The reflex to assign our morally wrong behaviour to the animal part in us is quite ironic. I just don't see jellyfish building concentration camps.

This is where incentives strike us once again.

Unlike in any other pursuit, in war, governments have at least some incentive to be efficient, lest they be outcompeted by the other side.

In peacetime science, all they care about is crossing the is, dashing the ts, and making sure that no icky ethics violations are likely to cause a PR scandal and get somebody ousted from their post.

Monkeys don't generally like killing other monkeys though.

This is how these kinds of companies operate; push the limit until customers start complaining, then you back off a little bit. They've still advanced to that line, of course, but now the userbase can be conditioned for the next push so that "a little bit worse than before" feels normal.

> GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub

They already did! https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65245

> They already did

Yes, but they don't and won't too (at least until they do again)

> Hearing feedback from the community following Manson's post and the kerfuffle it generated, Rogers said, has helped him realize that "on reflection," letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge "was the wrong judgement call."

Thankfully, they need the community feedback to realize it was wrong. It was so hard to guess it was wrong without the feedback! It's good to know these people are in charge of building Copilot.

Would be cool if they listened to us about the top voted feedback of all time, re: when the destroyed the feed

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188

> letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge

Wait, did they really sneak this in entirely without user interaction? So people trying not to use AI would still risk being ""contaminated""? Incredible breach of trust. Similar kind of thing to lying about whether your product is vegan.

I haven’t seen it but the article makes it sound like, when you ask for it to make a change to your code, that’s the point it puts the ad in.

I think (but not 100% sure) that it also puts it directly into your codebase, without you knowing ahead of time, without your permission. If that’s correct then it’s truly heinous.

This is corporate PR speak 101, external or internal doesn't matter. None of that sentence is true and everybody knows that.

Its just a theatre since other peers are dancing the same dance and they can't stick out as too rough or honest or whatever. Of course they realized this very well from the start, weighted risk of backfiring, reward for meeting some fucked up quarterly or yearly objective set by higher ups and decided to go ahead.

You can safely ignore the words, just make a mental mark that this is/are sociopathic assholes, move on with life and leave the mark there for next 4 decades and act according to that knowledge the next time you deal with them or their products, if you have to.

I think a CEO literally saying "I fucked up" on a corporate blog could genuinely be an interesting hiring tactic these days. I'd work for that guy.

I just saw the headline fly by yesterday and thought that this was just another dumb bug in what is the slow decline of GitHub. To find out today that this was very much intentional is even worse.

Exactly same for me.

If I think about it, that was in my head accounted as „no one would be that stupid”.

Updated to add on March 31: Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations, GitHub, said in a statement: "GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward."

Wow, well that is clearly a bald-faced lie.

They're not even trying. But this time 'the hacker did it' excuse wouldn't hold so they had to come up with something new in a hurry.

Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.

I'm pro-AI adoption but the way Microsoft distastefully forces Copilot into everything is how you get people to hate AI.

I’m guessing product teams are told by upper management to AI-fy every product they own. Teams are then rushed to just get something out there whether they make sense or not.

Microsoft doesn't believe in consent, it believes in yes or every 3 days.

I am reminded of Steve Jobs's video where he says Microsoft has no taste everytime MS pushes this stuff on it's users. True in 90s, true now

Video https://youtu.be/lahX_ARGTqA?si=AnULWzRbl7cc3UWu

Well Unfortunately I can also argue, Apple has no taste anymore. At least, less of it day by day.

> Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.

Microsoft will always be a company that pushes things on people rather than building things that attract people. It's in their DNA.

There was a great quote in an article I read from here recently along the lines of: Microsoft have invested enough in OpenAI that it's not their problem -- not Sam Altman's -- if it doesn't work out.

They've only invested $13b in OpenAI. They spent $68b on Activision Blizzard.

I don't buy that quote. I think Microsoft is actually under huge threat from AI companies replacing their revenue stream.

> Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.

The worst, or just ahead of the curve? Because you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think every other AI company or company integrating AI into their products won’t be using it as an advertising delivery vehicle.

exactly - the worst, or the best?

Microslop is clearly flailing. They were first movers with the OAI investment but OAI is doing fine on its own and microslop failed to capitalize on that early momentum. Now they’re resorting to increasingly desperate measures across their product portfolio to stay relevant.

> OAI is doing fine on its own

This isn't my understanding of their current state of affairs, especially regardless their finances?

Would you like Copilot to generate ads?

[Yes] [Maybe later]

> We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward.

Why does this read as they are saying it was a mistake ? Because it absolutely wasn't, and it will absolutely happen again, maybe just less obvious next time.

How do you know better if it was a mistake than GitHub themselves? It is possible that the tip was only supposed to show up in some other place and it accidentally started getting added somewhere it shouldn't have been.

Because it was already mentioned that it was a bad call by an internal dev.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233

> We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent. The goal was to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow. But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call. We won't do something like this again.

Either way, even if it was a mistake, giving the ability to modify someone else's PR without prompt, in any scenario should have been tested, oh I don't know.. At least once.

You don't seriously believe that a company's PR release is the same as the truth or what the people inside that company believe. And no, they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt after the umpteenth time that their "mistake" caused an outrage.

Remember when they wanted to charge for self hosted runners and “backed down”, let’s see how long it lasts

It’s good they walked it back, but the fact it was implemented in the first place is a signal of their thinking and inexcusable in itself.

Trust is easier to lose than to gain, and Microdoft continues to break trust.

Microsoft has been breaking trust since the 90s. If they have any left then perhaps it's not as easy to lose as you say.

The lack of market understanding by the person that thought this “feature” was a good idea is staggering. There was never a world where developers would think this is a good idea.

The fact that they chose to publish the ad _under someone else's name_ is so tone deaf that I just can't understand what they were thinking.

This. It's so far out there that I have to wonder if it's a rogue employee who thought this a good excuse to cause reputational damage without it being too obvious. Doesn't pass several razors though (not the simplest explanation; malice involved.. is that Hanlon's and Occam's razor?), so I don't truly believe it... but it would be possible

Since it's AI and Microsoft I can believe that someone who doesn't know what they're doing would be given a mandate to promote AI under any means necessary at the cost of some other team's reputation.

But it's an insane move. If anything AI has made it more important than ever to know who authored something and then someone does this to promote AI.

Occam's razor is about the simplest solution often being the correct one.

Hanlon's razor is about not assuming malice, which makes no sense when applied to faceless mega-corporations or even random strangers where you know conflicting motives exist.

But why were they running unpaid ads for third party services? It makes no sense

So they can drop them at some point and then hold the party that has now become dependent on those ads to ransom and/or as a way to soften them up before acquisition.

It can make sense if the premise that nobody is steering the ship is accepted to be true.

"You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now."

-- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition

Oh, this is just the usual Microsoft Stockholm syndrome. I've been witnessing this for over 20 years now and have been told that it has been a thing for much longer than that.

"No, we can't switch to OpenOffice you weird Open Source hippie! I can't e-mail documents to other people anymore, nobody can open them. Besides, the UI is all different, I won't be able to find anything!"

Then Office 2007 happened, tossing out the waffle menu for the ribbon and people started receiving e-mails with strange docx/xlsx files that nobody could open. IIRC that was still an issue 3 years later.

But no, when Microsoft does it, it is different: "This is progress! Are you against progress, you weird Luddite?"

I remember by the time Windows 8 was released ("Kachelofen edition" - "hurr, your desktop is a tablet!"), I was discussing with a Unix graybeard friend in the cafeteria how long it will take until the complainers accept that "this is the way now". I think it was him who suggested that if Microsoft sent a sales rep around to shit on peoples lawns, it would take at most a year until they start defending it as the inevitable cost of technological progress.

No matter how slow and bloated the GitHub web UI gets, or how many nonsense anti-features Microsoft stuffs into it. People will accept it and find funny excuses (network effect will be the main one).

> I think it was him who suggested that if Microsoft sent a sales rep around to shit on peoples lawns, it would take at most a year until they start defending it as the inevitable cost of technological progress.

They would inevitably say that Linux was not viable because you had to buy your own fertilizer.

> ca. everyone here

Every time someone claims “everyone on HN thought X”, I go back to check and find out that it was not true and that the discussions had both people in favour and against. Every time. But this case is particularly bad, I’m checking the top voted comments and so far the feeling is of dread and wariness, the complete opposite of what you claim.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286

I really wish people would stop this silly “everyone thought X” shtick. It’s embarrassing. Verification is trivial. What do you gain from it? It’s just spreading heated reactions based on a lie.

Well, yes, that sentence definitely simplified matters a bit. The fact is though, that those who expressed concerns about Microsoft - in that particular thread, and in others - were generally ridiculed in roughly the tone I imitated in my original post.

Of course there were people raising concerns, though. I figured that was pretty obvious in my original post. If there hadn't been any people raising concerns, nobody would have had to dismiss them - condescendingly or not.

So yes, I (incorrectly) used the word "everyone" to mean "a lot of people" in a sentence where I figured it was quite obvious that that's what I was doing, and in a way I've seen it used before in English so many times that I thought it was a common and accepted pattern. Perhaps I am wrong about the last bit though. ESL speaker, so that's quite possible.

> The fact is though, that those who expressed concerns about Microsoft - in that particular thread, and in others - were generally ridiculed in roughly the tone I imitated in my original post.

The fact the top voted comments are wary of Microsoft suggests otherwise. When people agree, they upvote and seldom comment. Of course responses are contrarian (that’s mostly when you have something to add), but that doesn’t mean that view is prevalent.

> If there hadn't been any people raising concerns, nobody would have had to dismiss them - condescendingly or not.

OK, yes, fair.

> So yes, I (incorrectly) used the word "everyone" to mean "a lot of people" (…) and in a way I've seen it used before in English so many times

It’s perfectly fine to use “everyone” and “no one” to mean “the overwhelming majority”. As in, not literally everyone but enough that the outliers are a rounding error. For example: “no one wants ants biting their genitals” (I’m sure you’ll find someone who wants that, but it’s pretty safe to assume the overwhelming majority of people don’t). But I don’t think it’s OK to use “everyone” to mean “a lot of people”. A lot of people live in China, but it would be ridiculous to say “everyone is Chinese”.

So it's true that the several of the top topmost comments are anti-MS or at least worried, but there are plenty of replies to those that are defending MS. A few of them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17229625

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17229775

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227447

I don't think it's safe to say that the prevailing opinion there is one of concern.

Like I said (emphasis added):

> I go back to check and find out that (…) the discussions had both people in favour and against.

The point is that “everyone here thought” complaints have so far never been true.

> I don't think it's safe to say that the prevailing opinion there is one of concern.

Comment position matters, because it means people upvoted it. If one agrees and upvotes they are less likely to comment. But even if we were to nitpick what the prevailing opinion was, it’s still not true that HN was in agreement with the sentiment expressed by the OP.

This common trend of invoking the goomba fallacy is a thought-terminating way to excuse and justify away any popular opinion. Even if single individuals have different opinions, the common sentiment on the forum was that Microsoft of 2010s was not Ballmer’s Microsoft, and the unsavoury anticompetitive behaviours had been done away with.

> the common sentiment on the forum was that Microsoft of 2010s was not Ballmer’s Microsoft, and the unsavoury anticompetitive behaviours had been done away with.

Maybe it was a common sentiment, but clearly not the. Again, we can see from that acquisition thread that people were wary of it. The second top post even makes Microsoft seem like a domestic abuser.

Relevant thread

"Microsoft acquires Github" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286

It's funny - many of our greatest concerns back then are things we now accept.

There's that old misconception about how to boil a frog..

"Microsoft loves open source now!"

Oh, they adore it. Specially once they figure out how to plaster all open source projects with ads...

Microsoft: "We're EMBRACING open source!"

Everyone who remembered Microsoft in the 90s: "Uhhhhh... :concerned_face:"

LOL I remember that stance. A good one!

I have never owned a GitHub account post-M$. :/ Mainly because I always knew Microsoft has always been against FOSS.

I've had so many discussions with friends over the past 15 or so years where they've praised Microsoft and their embracing of open source, and have given me a hard time for continuing to distrust them. To be fair, I was a teenager in the 90s, and a huge computer nerd who followed the MS antitrust case very closely; quite a few of these friends are 5-7 years younger, rendering them a bit too young at the time to experience that going on in real-time.

But damn... I enjoy a good "I told you so" as much as the next guy, but most of the time it sucks to be right.

Thinking of megacorps as anything other than slimy, amoral, scum honestly requires superhuman levels of mental gymnastics.

And thinking that megacorps are in any meaningful way different than your last underdog startup darling is another level of copium.

Sure. But a startup could, in theory end up profitable and self-sufficient without a public offering. It's not impossible.

ahahah yes I remember those comments yes

Does it matter these days if a company or administration are "the good guys"? Does "good" even have a meaning anymore? The "good" part of the world rotates in disbelief since Trump was re-elected in a democratic vote. Everyone says Microsoft is evil, since, what, the 90s?! But still, Windows is everywhere. Is anyone still buying this moral bullshit? "Goodness" obviously has no majority.

Microsoft, how cheap minded you have to be to understand that you don't need ads? You already had everything you need to grow without slapping ads everywhere.

You had everything great. Xbox, Windows, Office,... and somehow in a short span of time you managed to enshittify everything. Focus on you core strength. Ads is not one of them. And the combination Ads+Ai it is not either. Stop ruining great things. You had - still have - great potential to have a competitive advantage over others yet you fall for these shitty practices.

I believe, if you had the chance, you would put ads on the C# compiler too.

Like npm?

So, after Windows cleanup announcement nobody at Github thought "may be we should review all our copilot integrations to avoid another embarrassment for MS" ?

That shows either it was just a Windows org announcement and not a culture change at MS or it was just an empty promise to temporarily deflect mounting criticism.

Either way it is disappointment for anyone who thought it was a genuine case of introspection and change of heart at MS.

GitLab team on other hand is unyielding, they love adding their "Closes #" in MRs and don't care about people that ask to get rid of it.

What is this referring to? Is GitLab using AI to guess which issue a merge request is meant to fix?

No, they detect issue symbol in branch name or commit title and add "Closes #123" at the end of merge request description.

How long will take GitHub to backtrack on the "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" aggressive setting?

I don’t buy that they respect that setting in the slightest

> Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations, GitHub, said in a statement: "GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward."

What a joke. It literally went in and edited the PR description 8 minutes after the user submitted it.

That's not a tip somehow ending up in the wrong context. If it were it would have happened at submission time. At least be honest. Yuck.

I moved almost everything off of GitHub when MS bought it. Go to GitLab or CodeBerg, depending...

It's great that they backed down, but they still did it in the first place. GitHub is on borrowed time now; my own repos are insignificant, but I'll definitely look to move somewhere else this year, and I'm sure many others will too.

I'm not suprised Raycast is involved in this marketing scheme. They pollute their own product with ads where they shouldn't be. Whoever is running their marketing team needs a lesson in not pissing off your userbase.

Someone, claiming to be from the Raycast team, in the original HN thread said that they were not aware of the advert or were involved with it in any manner.

Sometimes I see something nifty in Raycast and it tempts me. Then I see something weird from them, look in the Alfred manual, and realize it already supports the same feature and that I’ll stay put, thanks.

Yeah same 100%

The referenced discussion:

Copilot edited an ad into my PR

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269

I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them.

I believe there are two caveats on it:

1. Approach: to make the experience worth it, so that ads are not very intrusive , done correctly, which, over and over and over, it is proven contrarious to the interest of the user.

2. Relevance: if you are going to put ads onto your product, make sure things are done correctly, curate if possible what will be shown (I believe Microsoft's worse fear would be to see online casinos ads onto something like GitHub, as an example).

> I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them.

The endgame is not "or", it's "and": eventually come to the conclusion that, why choose between revenue streams when we could just have both?

I think we'll see companies increasingly adopting the X approach: charged tiers for 'fewer' ads. With no actual guarantee as to the absolute quantity of ads, just 'fewer, relative to the people who aren't paying as much'. We're basically on a downward slope where not seeing ads is going to get steadily more and more expensive over time.

The issue is context. GitHub is a professional workbench, not social media. Any "tip" that serves as an ad is just noise in a high-focus environment.

I wonder if the PM responsible for this will be held accountable. Who should resign?

I'm guessing the answers will be predictable and disappointing.

> Who should resign?

And achieve what?

A healthy culture where leadership is held accountable, and egregious errors in judgement are treated with the seriousness they deserve.

And what about the companies that thought that advertising (sorry, suggesting) their product through this channel was a good idea?

Don't assume they were in on it. Microsoft plays very weird games with platform access and traffic.

Microsoft github.com should restore classic web compatibility for the core functions (issue tracking, etc) and be native IPv6.

Still waiting for their next attempt at charging for self hosted runners. That's going to be a pain of a migration.

forgejo.org

I don't need ads

I wonder what was the thought process when they green lit this feature and thought it is a good idea.

It would have been less controversial to place an ad somewhere at the top of the screen. Putting it in the Markdown feels like a very deliberate and antagonistic fuck you to everyone.

That just means they'll be more subtle once the dust settles.

I would be curious what Raycast’s reaction is. They just got caught in the crossfire or they deliberately bought ads to be placed with Copilot

Doubt Raycast would have known about this, think they are smarter than that. But who knows.

They posted previously on YN that they too were caught offguard. The 'tips' weren't specific to Raycast, they've been going on for a while and Raycast was just one product it decided to feature now.

I'm sure they sold this ad space at a premium and someone over there thought it was a brilliant idea. How else would it have happened?

The problem is that Microslop is not THINKING. What is the point of inserting ads? That just increases the spam output. Sure, Microslop may think this helps boost their revenue but many people hate ad-spam. After I started to use ublock origin, there was no way back to the unsafe ads-down-the-turtles approach anymore. Ads waste people's time and money.

perhaps they forgot to set thinking mode in the LLM payload

First of all, I find it enraging that dimwitted AI companies decided to edit PR descriptions for anything at all.

Wouldn't it change the hash, making push requests conflict in many case?

GitHub was only modifying the description of the PR itself, not the commit messages for the commits included in the PR.

Push push push. When your customers are livid at you take a small step back. Wait for a moment then come back at them from another angle.

I hate this philosophy. But it’s seems to be the preferred path for Microsoft.

This was a humiliation ritual!

Microsoft Always Chickens Out

The play was to use AI as an opportunity to quietly insert adverts into a platform full of paying users.

The moment your company starts playing a pauper and enshitificating the products I already pay for, is the moment I stop giving you any money at all. Try it. I’m not paying you money so you can try to make more money from me. Either add value and convince me to pay more, or fuck off.

"Updated: Microsoft has done a 180. Following backlash from developers, GitHub has removed Copilot's ability to stick ads - what it calls "tips" - into any pull request that invokes its name."

> GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub

For another six months.

If a company backtracks on this it still has ethical issues. It didn’t just get away with it this time.

You owe it to yourself and others to stay the fuck away from them.

"OK guys, back to the drawing board. How can we market this better? How long do we wait until this WILL fly under the radar?"

Feels like you never worked at corporation it goes more like this:

"old employees who know the environment and are in tune with community are playing safe so they don't bring in immediate results, feels like progress stagnates, so they move those people to other tasks"

"new clueless manager joins, has to come up with a brilliant idea (that actually is bad across the board for someone who understands the environment) to get quarterly bonus, then convinces bunch of |out of touch suites| with power point presentation where numbers go up"

"he gets burned by community response, becomes more conservative - next quarters he is moved away or he moves away on his own - new clueless can come into his place"

This is peak entishitification and a quick way to burn a lot of goodwill and trust fast.

Microsoft had a lot of goodwill?

No, Github did.

finally they are coming to their senses

time is money, save both.try ramp.

the microsoft playbook

hello,

ah ... another clear case of AGI *) ...

*) ads generated income

just my 0.02€

But it's a perfect fit for their business strategy of forcibly inserting their software into your anus..! How could it have gone wrong??

Yet Sourceforge has been putting ads on open source projects for decades.

Yeah, that's part of why nobody wants to use Sourceforge.

Ironically, that's what probably killed Sourceforge and helped GitHub take off. It remains to be seen whether Codeberg will now repeat the process.

yeah, uh you're definitely driving home the point here. that's why no one uses sourceforge anymore.

Wow, I haven't heard that name for decades.

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