I read this article after it was shared on social media by the Codeberg.org account so I though it was a PR piece, as it doesn't mention self hosting at all, just moving to another hosted platform.

The article is by theregister.com. Basically The Onion of tech media

It depends where your contributors are coming from. For example for Rust, the crates index is the discovery mechanism. Contributors will come to your repo by whatever link you put in your package's metadata. I've split my Rust packages between GitHub and GitLab and don't see a difference in participation.

It's the way I want it to be honest. Keeps the low effort garbage away for the moment.

> a much stronger signal in how many issues are being tracked and closed

This is a strong signal, but what it signals is confused. How much of it is the nature of the user base in actually reporting issues? Suppose the project receives regular fixes and issues are promptly closed on average — how much of that is because the project has to constantly respond to external factors, and how much is due to developers doing constant fire-fighting on an intrinsically poor design and not getting around to new functionality? Suppose there are lots of outstanding issues — how many of them are effectively duplicates that nobody's bothered to close yet?

Yeah, this is the first thing I check, and also I verify a few closed ones to understand how they were handled.

GitHub Support tickets are private and not publically sharable.

I did mention it in this Discussions thread a while back (which the support agent at one point in July hilariously linked me to asking if I had read, making it clear they hadn't done so themselves).

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/147437#discuss...

Initial support response mentioned here:

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/147437#discuss...

Not near an account right now but literally just "View Source" when signed in and search for "copilot" and it's there along some other feature-flags for the user in a JSON blob inside a script tag.

My prefernce is Forgejo

https://forgejo.org/

I've been using Codeberg.org recently and really enjoying it, I just wish the CI situation was better, but I'll probably just host my own instead

Ahh, the reason we lost the Vietnam war.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

I lived through that but it wasn’t like this. Hype isn’t the same thing as having something rammed down your throat with constant nag pop ups and dark patterns.

All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince. But "AI" promises increased productivity as an individual, in the here and now. It should not be a hard sell if people found it to work as advertised.

It's an excellent point - but a lot of the pressure to use AI in orgs is top-down and I've never seen that with useful tech tools before; they always percolated outward from the more adventurous developers. This makes me wary of the AI enthusiasm, even though I acknowledge that there is some genuine value here.

Surprisingly enough, and pretty ironic given this discussion is about GitHub, the company Dan Luu is talking about there is Microsoft (specifically the SmartNIC team), based on his Linked description of his 2015-2016 job.

Version control has quickly won. It was so popular that people kept writing new systems all the time. CI was popular. Most major open source projects had their own CI systems before GitHub.

"AI" on the other hand is shoved down people's throats by management and by those who profit from in in some way. There is nothing organic about it.

Sounds like a company full of seriously-terrible developers, from which no valid general conclusions can be drawn.

I use AI a lot myself, but being forced to incorporate it into my workflow is a nonstarter. I'd actively fight against that. It's not even remotely the same thing as fighting source control adoption in general, or refusing to test code before checking it in.

They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going.

Honestly I think the same thing happened with self-driving cars ~10 years ago.

Larry Page and Google's "submarine" marketing convinced investors and CEOs of automakers and tech companies [1] that they were going to become obsolete, and that Google would be taking all that profit.

In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It seems like the whole thing was cancelled in 2023, written off, and the CEO was let go

How much profit is Waymo making now? I'm pretty sure it's $0. And they've probably gone through hundreds of billions in funding

How's Tesla Autopilot doing? Larry also "negatively inspired" Elon to start OpenAI with other people

I think if investors/CEOs/automakers had known how it was going to turn out, and how much money they were going to lose 10 years later, they might not have jumped on the FOMO train

But it turns out that AI is a plausible "magic box" that you extrapolate all sorts of economic consequences from

(on the other hand, hype cycles aren't necessarily bad; they're probably necessary to get things done. But I also think this one is masking the fact that software is getting worse and more user hostile at the same time. Probably one of the best ways to increase AI adoption is to make the underlying software more user hostile.)

[1] I think even Apple did some kind of self-driving car thing at one point.

I would say the same of the following:

1) crypto: raise funding, buy crypto as collateral, raise more funding with said collateral, rinse and repeat.

2) gpu datacenters: raise funding, buy gpus as collateral, raise more funding, buy more gpus, rinse and repeat.

3) zero day options: average folks want a daily lottery thrill. rinse and repeat.

All of the above are fed by fomo and to some extent hype, and ripe for a reckoning.

FWIW when I lived in Japan in 1968-69 it was 360 JPY to the dollar. I felt like a millionaire!

You bet wrong. Computers were pricey enough that if you want one, you have to really need it to justify the price. It was not forced on any business.

Yes, they've legitimately good at a few things (e.g. very fuzzy search), but that doesn't justify the amount of investment.

This is the correct way. Use the LLM dont let it become the only way you work.

that's not mostly what car enthusiasts care about, especially somebody buying a 150k porsche; they care about handling and road feel and a fat pig of an EV will never match a lighter car (well set up) on that; you can't beat physics when you're slinging that much weight; even set up as well as can be, a 5000lb taycan doesn't come close to the handling feel of a 3250lb 911.

LLMs are very different. All of the other things you mentioned found wide, eager adoption among the broader public within two years.

I generally agree, but I think there is a real disconnect. Middle and upper management often do not understand how developers and engineers are actually supposed to use these tools.

For example, I work in operations, so most of what I touch is bash, Ansible, Terraform, GitHub workflows and actions, and some Python. Recently, our development team demonstrated a proposed strategy to use GitHub Copilot: assign it a JIRA ticket, let it generate code within our repos, and then have it automatically come back with a pull request.

That approach makes sense if you are building web or client-side applications. My team, however, focuses on infrastructure configuration code. It is software in the sense that we are managing discrete components that interact, but not in a way where you can simply hand off a task, run tests, and expect a PR to appear.

Large language models are more like asking a genie. Even if you give perfectly clear instructions, the result is often not exactly what you wanted. That is why I use Copilot and Gemini Code Assist in VS Code as assistive tools. I guide them step by step, and when they go off track, I can nudge them back in the right direction.

To me, that highlights the gap between management’s expectations and the reality of how these tools actually work in practice.

I think investors like to see an adoption. So companies force users to say it - and then brag that their users love their AI so much they're all using it.

It's a rather perverse cycle.

Firefox also shipped their battery draining ai feature and they don’t have identical motives.

I don't think that this is an effective strategy to achieve that. At some point, the same customer base is going to feel the AI fatigue and yearn for something cleaner.

There are places around the world where shopping carts were introduced successfully without the accompanying actors to convince the customers to use it. The actual criteria must be whether the new addition boosts or hampers the customers' productivity, at least in the long run.

When I first heard about git, I knew that it would be very useful in the future, even if I had to spend some time and effort in mastering it. Same with CI, project planners, release engineering, etc. Nobody had to convince me to use them. But AI just doesn't belong to that category, at least in my experience. It misses results that a simple web/site search reveals. And it makes mistakes or outright hallucinates in ways even junior developers don't. It's in an uncanny valley between the classic non-AI services and plain old manual effort with disadvantages of both and advantages of neither. Again, others may not agree with this experience. But it's definitely not unique to me. The net gain/loss that AI brings to this field is not clear. At least not yet.

When Microsoft bought GH it was already the most popular forge by far, which is why it was bought in the first place.

> But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.

That's blaming the victim. The vast majority of the opensource projects were hosted on GH since before Microsoft's acquisition. I remember back in 2018 when my team made the decision to move from bitbucket to GitHub, the main consideration was the platform quality but also the community we were getting access to.

Not me.

If outages make headlines and stop whole companies in their tracks worldwide, that’s critical infrastructure, not just network effects.

They used Emojis and printed "Microsoft <3 Open Source" on posters for conferences, so clearly they really had changed...

How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time?

There's a whole generation on HN who came up after Microsoft's worst phase, and have spent the last five years defending MS on this very forum.

They're convinced that any bad thing Microsoft does is a "boomer" grudge, and will defend MS to the end.

I hope I'm never so weak-minded that I tie my identity and allegiance to a trillion-dollar company. Or any company that I haven't founded, for that matter.

Even though Git is decentralised, people like having a simple client-server model for version control. So with Github being the most funded free Git hosting service it grew to being the biggest. They also built out the extra services on top of git hosting, the issue tracker, CI/CD, discussion board, integrated wiki, github-pages, etc.

I would say all of those things were present before the acquisition, enough that Microsoft itself started to use the site for its own open source code hosting.

If you travel back to 2018 and ask random software engineers "are git and github developed and owned by the same company", a fair number of them would say yes, just like today.

> Was GitHub really critical at time of purchase?

Do you think they would have bought it otherwise? Same for NPM, they got bought for huge sums of money because they were "critical" already.

It was the leading git storage at the time of acquisition, for many people synonymous with git itself

> There is no law against that

Regulators can (and do) stop purchases which can be considered harmful to consumers. Just look at the Adobe/Figma deal.

Critical piece of tech infrastructure. Which is absolutely is.

When GitHub goes down, the company I work at is pretty much kneecapped for the duration of the outage. If you’re in the middle of a PR, waiting for GitHub actions, doing work in a codespace, or just need to pull/fetch/push changes before you can work, you’re just stuck!

Among other things, a CDN. If it were to take a sustained outage, lots of important online systems would stop working shortly thereafter. And I’m not talking about developer tools; bigger sites/apps than you think are reliant on GH being up. Stupid to do that, sure, but widespread.

Ah, one of my all-time favorite Shakespeare quotes. Another is:

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!“

My father used it frequently when we were kids. I found out decades later it was a quote from King Lear.

Probably their situation is similar to mine.

It's mandatory, on the orders of a senior manager who has no background in software development, for all developers in my department to have a Copilot subscription. I've never used it for anything, and I imagine it's the same for most of my colleagues(we do highly specialised embedded development with in-house custom everything - compiler, standard library, operating system, hardware), and it seems no-one is interested in whether it's used or not.

Consequently Microsoft is being paid $240 a year per person to do nothing whatsoever, which is surely a great business for them.

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

For the sake of correctness, the concept of pull requests was not introduced by Github. It already existed in git in the form of the 'request-pull' subcommand. The fundamental workflow is the same. You send the project maintainer a message requesting a pull of your changes from your own online clone repo. The difference is that the message was in the form of an email. Code reviews could be conducted using mails/mailing lists too.

This is not the same as sending patches by email. But considering how people hate emails, I can see why it didn't catch on. However, Torvalds considered this implementation to be superior to Github's and once complained about the latter on Github itself [1].

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

Personally, I remember the initial selling point of GitHub being that it was more "social" than any other forges at the time, since we were all wrapped up in the Web 2.0 hype and what not. I think they pushed that on their landing page back in the day too.

It was basically Twitter but redone specifically for developers, and focus on code rather than random thoughts.

> If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else

When I started using it, public repositories were free, and private repositories needed a paid account.

The ToS did not require public repos to be open source, only permission for basic operations like fork (the button which clones, not creating derivative works) and download was required.

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

I'm pretty sure the term "pull request" existed before GitHub. (Meaning writing an email saying "I have changes in my copy of repo that I want you to merge into the main repo".) But GitHub put an UI around it, and they may've been the first to do that.

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

Negative. The only thing GitHub added to the parlance is "forks" which are essentially like namespaced branches in the same repo.

Yep. Sourceforge started injecting ads and malware into (at least) installers that devs made available on the site.

SorgeForge started injecting adware into binaries distributed via their platform. They had been on a downward trajectory for a while, but after they started doing that they fell of a cliff.

I worked for a company that used the on-prem version of their forge back in the 00s, I remember liking it alot. It felt novel, cool and useful to have fully interlinked bug tracking, version control, documentation, project management and release management.

They started shipping installers with de-facto-malware, but at a time when they were already on a downward slope. It was many years after "sourceforge was the default place to host FOSS".

Yes, there was a couple of years we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS, but then they took on VC investments after some years and the dream went into hiding again.

I'm not being flippant or contrary. What does "bootstrapped" mean in this context? I feel like I've never really understood it as a metaphor.

Private repositories have been free for… 10 years?

While Microsoft is certainly to blame, GP is also right that the problem wouldn’t exist if people hadn’t continued en masse to have their code hosted on a centralized proprietary and (since 2012) VC-funded platform in the first place.

As an aside, I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It’s a go-to place with network effects, but network effects doesn’t by itself imply “community”.

> It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process just for the sake of profit.

Counterpoint is that is what companies are supposed to do. They are made to make money, the end. The only hope against this for humans is regulation, and that has fallen off the face of the earth. It’s like humans are doomed to repeat the late 19th and early 20th century era over and over.

Me too, but they host my stuff.

> training

Not what this is about.

> How do you asess whether some PR was made by an AI(like the user did)?

Searched for PRs authored by copilot or mentioning copilot.

Just wait until people realize how little value Bitcoin has when people rush to the exits. Limited number of transactions, limited utility for the average person. We haven't had runs on banks in a long time in the US because of regulation. Crypto is a wild west. There will eventually be a Bitcoin exit trigger event and it will be brutal.