I think that just like it happened with Apple after they made it out of bankruptcy, Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
Xamarin is no more, after the whole MAUI rewrite without backwards compatibility to Xamarin.Forms, killing VS4Mac, shortly after having rewriten the underlying Xamarin based IDE into Mac, what survives is a subset of Xamarin tech for mobile and WebAssembly workloads.
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
A proper cross platform IDE experience requires getting Rider.
Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Github even with the previous CEO was already a delivery mechanism for Azure and AI efforts, now it will be full steam ahead, as per new org chart.
VC++ after betting other compilers in C++20 support, seems to have lost its resources struggling to deliver C++23, and also probably affected by the Secure Future Initiative, and decisions for safer languages.
But hey 4 trillion valuation, so from shareholders point of view, everything is going great.
This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.
Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
The fact you still only got bothered by studio acquisitions show you don't even noticed the studio closures...
MS fired thousands of gamedevs in the last few weeks, cancelled a lot of games, including games the execs liked to play the prototypes, cancelled publishing deals, and even closed entire studios, some of them literally successful that had just released profitable products.
For the last decade they acquire studios/IP’s, let them languish, then without warning strip them for parts. Make a successful game? Doesn’t matter, you’re all fired. Y’all want to make a game? Sure! We can even promote it! 12-18mo of no news after an announcement ah dang guys we were so hyped but we’re pulling the plug.
It is baffling how many studios they own and yet they have almost no exclusives/big cross platform hits developed for the Xbox this generation.
I don't think MS considered any of this. For example there were situations were they had a meeting giving green light one day, and cancelled the next.
Seemly what happened is that MS high-level decision makers, concluded that MS need a lot of cash for AI research, and decided to mass-close studios and cancel games with little verification, just go firing people until the cash liberated for AI is enough, doesn't matter if those people gave even greater revenue recently.
Amen. Also, forcing us to tie our local OS into their cloud nonsense is a travesty. Hearing that they will soon disallow updates to those of us that don't capitulate to their cloud-account ransom has kick-started my efforts in formally moving away from Windows. I'd rather lose most games than get a cloud account.
Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence, but I can’t see what the point of the company is beyond that. Enterprise something something maybe. And declining literacy makes Powerpoint unfortunately indispensable.
> Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence
Debatable. Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard. But loads of people don't do this. They see a file on their desktop and double click it. Why can't double clicking a CSV file just open the import wizard!? (Because they want people to share xlsx files as a data format.)
I assume most Americans don't run into the CSV hell that other countries do. In my current country, whether CSVs open as a comma-separated or semi-colon seperated document depends on whether the OS is set to use a , or a . for decimal numbers. It's absolutely annoying.
Right but the import wizard can fix things. They just don't make the double-click go through the import wizard - and people use 'open' or double-click their files. LibreOffice Calc opens the import wizard when you open a csv and it's fine.
For the life of me I cannot comprehend why they cannot let us choose the decimal separator independently from the locale. Or for fuck’s sake, just be smart about it. My desktop is for boring administrative tasks, of course I want it in my language. No, I don’t want to manually change settings in Word for every fucking document I create because ~none of them will be in English. But then why do I have to search-and-replace . with , or click 12 times through an inane bullshit wizard just to paste some data in Excel?
Respecting regional settings is so inconsistent among Office applications. The desktop ones usually get it, but online is a crapshoot. Whenever there's a date like 3/4/25 I get the play the fun guessing game of whether that's March or April.
For Project Online, the most reliable way I found to fix it was to manually edit the URL to replace en-US with en-AU, then bookmark that.
Depending on whether your OS uses a , or a . for decimal numbers changes how excel will parse a CSV file. Americans use a . for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a CSV. Other countries use a , for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a SSV (semi-colon separated) and everything will be in a single column.
To make matters worse, randomly, employees will have their OS using US or GB locales so that if you distribute a CSV, it will work for some employees, but not for others.
No. Excel changes the SEPERATOR when parsing depending on the locale settings. This means a CSV generated or saved with a decimal of . will not be able to be opened by one with a , and vice-versa. This is an Excel issue, as it doesn’t even try to determine or ask which separator to use. Hence why the comment above said you need to use the import wizard and not double click.
The syntax that MS Office uses to read/write a CSV is defined by the Regional Settings of your PC.
Open control-panel for regional settings, select "Advanced settings" button on the bottom
control.exe intl.cpl
If you don't know any of these problems, then all the people and systems you work with have a "." as decimal and "," as separator, and you are spared from the hell of MS Office being unable to overrule these OS-settings when treating a CSV
Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain. Obviously both . And , are used way to often not only for numbers. I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.
> Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain.
Thing is, it is not about what you used, you are not able to control this from happening when your CSV should work for people in other countries. Whatever configuration you used which never got a complain, if your recipients also used Excel to work with those documents, they probably have the same regional setting on Windows for list/thousands/decimal separator.
If you use ";" as separator, i.e. Excel in UK, US, Japan, China, Korea will not be able to correctly open your CSV.
But even better: If you created this CSV on a France or Sweden regional setting, the thousands separator will be a whitespace ("1 000" instead "1,000" or "1.000"), so Excel in e.g. Italy will not detect those properly.
> I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.
It is a (intentional) weakness of MS Office for those who work in an international environment, because Excel links itself to .csv files to hinder the experience, as it is neither able to properly detect them nor guide their users through a process to properly handle them.
CSV already solved this problem with quotes. Maybe not the most convenient solution for some users but that's no excuse for the Excel behavior of making up a different format depending on the locale.
Excel really doesn't care what users think. I mean, in biology, we've already had to change the names of genes to accommodate Excel's auto-date conversion routines. So, why would it care to have globally consistent CSV formats?
OMG--we had a worfklow where less-techy folks were supposed to edit a csv, then check it in to github, which would kick off a whole process automatically for them. I kid you not--anyone who edited the csv in Excel would eff the whole file up every single time! They just needed a text editor, which we told them to use, and the changes were literally simple, either editing an existing entry or adding a new entry. Nope, these college educated "IT" workers could not handle it! We ended up having to scrap the entire automation workflow because the employees were simply too dumb to use a text editor and github.
Maybe I’m just not understanding the nuances of what you were working on, but is it possible that there was something wrong with the solution if literally every person was screwing it up?
CSV is data only. Excel handles way more than that. XLSX is the preferred file format because it's compressed XML that can hold all kinds of things.
Also, CSVs seem to open just fine on my Excel. If it's not formatted with a standard delimiter or isn't handing quoted strings the proper way, sure maybe the data wizard is needed.
Excel is terrible in a lot of aspects, but CSVs seem to be something it handles as well as anything else in my experience.
Much like iOS/Android & the Web killed MSFTs stranglehold on OSes, google docs & markdown killed MSFT office's stranglehold on office. So many businesses are google doc shops, vast majority of schools are google docs, vast majority of casual document usage is google docs and google docs is open-enough with it's export formats.
Excel at this point is specialist software, like adobe photoshop. Everything else is 'good enough'.
Microsoft Office is probably still the largest player but a former large company I worked for absolutely used Google for 95% of purposes. I didn't even have a Microsoft Office license. It's very common. If we had to exchange docs with someone that didn't use Google, we'd export formats in some way including, often, to PDF.
Anecdata, 10k+ Eng department, it’s all GSuite. Office365 exists as well for external interop but I’ve never seen anyone reach for it due to preference since it existed.
Gsuite (including docs) is the norm at most companies I’ve worked at that have been founded since 2010, though the finance depts usually also had their own excel licenses.
That being said, excel itself is still more powerful than google sheets, but the collaborative nature of Gsuite beats the pants off of MS Office, online or native.
I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs. I don't know that most people need it. I will say that interactive mode in gdocs is slightly better. I also like Outlook slightly better, though I do wish they'd slim it down a bit, it feels bloated.
My last decade has been a mix, some o365, some GDocs. I do wish there was something opened that was nearly as good as Visio myself, rather than renting it as an add-on. diagrams.net/draw.io is pretty good for some things, but Visio has a lot of features that aren't even close. I haven't tried the web version of Visio lately, last I had it was only halfway decent for read-only, but apparently most features now work. So next time I need it in mac/linux it should be an option.
> I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs.
I reinstalled Wordpad. Wordpad is sufficient for most things (including opening and editing most simple word documents--though that may be because I created them myself with office 2007) and if I really need a word processor (styles, page layout, etc) then I also have LibreOffice. I didn't even consider an Office license when I rebuilt last.
It basically comes down to whether your sales arm demands native Teams and subsequent MSFT stack. Anyone deploying major production in GCP/GKE tends to go full Technical Partner with GOOG, google docs included.
FWIW Docs isn't bad, and slides is... useable, but sheets is a poor excel alternative.
I find Docs and Slides are fine and really preferable because they do a good job with 95%+ of the functionality you probably want without word art and stuff like that. Sheets is more stripped down relative to Excel but absent pivot tables and the like, most people don't need that.
That's being charitable to OSS office packages' UX.
Some wounds are self-inflicted, and open source has a well-known last-20%-polish problem that's especially painful in mass-user scenarios like office software.
OOo wasting the 00s with a circa-90s UI (and Oracle being assholes) is equally responsible for MS Office's continued popularity in enterprise.
Should I also change it on my mother's computer who doesn't speak English? We can also start distributing .bat files that change the system language along with our spreadsheets, for anyone who wants to open them. Maybe automate it with VBS, so it changes automatically when you open the spreadsheet. That's the solution.
The VBS should then also lock the spreadsheet to foreground while it's opened, because the global change may affect other apps, like Windows Calculator may swap the comma/thousand separator.
Will write a user story for that if you share the link /s
Interesting. I consider Excel the worst of Microsoft's misdeeds. Not that there's not an abundance to pick from, but Excel may very well top the list.
It's perhaps the single worst database in the world; with no type control, no relationship management, no data safety whatsoever to speak of (it even actively mangles your data), its interface is utter madness, and yet - it's the most used database in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst development and runtime environment in the world, obscuring code, making reasoning about code and relations between code almost impossible, using a very obscure macro language that even morphs between different computers, and yet - it's the most used development and runtime environment in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst protocol/data exchange format in the world, with dozens of intentionally obscure, undocumented versions, insane format with surprising limitation (did I mention it actively mangles your data? - it's worth repeating anyway), supremely inefficient, and yet - it's the most used protocol/data exchange format in the world.
I can't really think of anything in the computing world that has done as much damage as Excel.
What you fail to realize is that (nearly) everything you think of as a flaw here is a key feature.
Excel allows norm(al users)ies to scale Mt Impossible from the bottom where they don't care about types, or relationships, and don't want to (because it's too abstract). They want to solve a problem. So they start with simple data given meaning by physical space, and work up from there.
It's genius. It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.
> It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.
That's a bingo, although I'd phrase it even more glowingly as "It allows people to solve many common problems with computing, without knowing about pointers."
Everything you say is not wrong. But despite being so horrible, the business world still runs on excel. Finance, underwriting, accounting, engineering tools, fantasy football leagues… Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs. It’s timeless and hated by many for valid reasons, but its impact is vast.
But that's just path dependency. If Excel didn't exist, everything would run on something or somethings else. And it's not clear whether this timeline is better or worse than the average timeline in that respect.
Without a doubt, if Excel didn't exist, someone would have created it.
It's the lowest-barrier programmable logic, a coordinate-system where arithmetic can be applied to contents of any given coordinates.
And it likely would have grown into the same exact mess as Excel, with continuous expansion of the arithmetic part, as people kept reaching the limits of it but wouldn't go back and recreate everything in a DB...
> Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs.
What frustrates me the most about this is I've seen some insane excel wizardry from the accounting department at various jobs over the years that is effectively programming, and that if these people had put just as much effort into learning Python & using a database, they'd be better off and might actually make good developers. In my view, Excel ends up becoming sort of an artificial barrier to departments outside of IT being able to make business software.
Also a good point- but there is no python runtime on accounting and PMs computers. And it’s also a huge mess to try and support. Imagine some python code from 10 years ago, then juggling the versions, then god forbid any module dependencies. It’s simply not portable. Meanwhile the VBA written in 2000 is still working all contained in an excel Workbook.
I'm told there were better spreadsheet software back in the day, but that Excel basically won accounting/finance by allowing itself to be shareware (i.e. effectively free), in a similar way to how Microsoft has at times turned a blind eye to piracy of its other produce (e.g. Windows).
Not so much.. I mean if Word Perfect and Lotus 123 had a merger, then they would still be competitive as neither was really better than the MS Office counterparts, but as a combo they would have had more entrenchment to work from.
IBM buying Lotus and not Word Perfect was probably a mistake, had they really wanted to take it seriously... but they seemed more interested in Lotus Notes (think Outlook+Access in a self-hosted cloud environment), it was imho nasty af.
Not really. Once Windows came in, Excel was pretty much the best game in town. Lotus didn't really do a great job on Windows. There were some attempts at more integrated office suites but they didn't really take off. There were also some attempts at different spreadsheet models but people were probably too used to essentially the original Visicalc model. Not sure that Excel was anymore effectively shareware than any of its competitors.
I would dare to say that all business apps start as an Excel sheet (or Google Sheet) and after the usefulness of data collection and data arrangement/presentation is validated (often long after the usefulness is validated) they eventually become a full-fledged business web app.
And as a casual Excel user (to get data from CSV, remove some rows, move few things around, etc.) it isn't even great. You can't open two files with the same name because Excel seems to have some "global state" between windows; to the point where you might be hitting Control+Z to undo some changes, and it's undoing stuff on the other spreadsheet without you noticing.
Doing something as "simple" as a LEFT JOIN of data requires having two separate documents (or one, but saved on your system), open them in the Power Query editor (if it's the same document you do it twice, once per table) which creates two "queries", and then you can either use one to join against the other, or create a third one "joining" them. In the end, you get three new sheets on your docs: the original tables and the merged one.
Then there's the annoyances: if you use Excel in English (US at least), apparently you get a CSV separated by actual commas "," (ASCII 0x2C) but using it in Spanish (Spain) you get it separated by semicolons ";" because commas actually separate number decimals. Meaning whenever I build a program that parses/writes CSV, I need to consider the chance it's using semicolons and commas instead of commas and dots. Not that it's non-standard: CSV doesn't specify a delimiter, but you could stick to the same format everywhere, or give an option to customise, or create "Tab-Separated Values" (essentially CSV with tabs separating values).
Another one is formulae, that also change based on language, and their arguments separator also changes. In en_US you'd use `=SUBTOTAL(109,B2:B7)` while in Spanish it's `=SUBTOTALES(109;B2:B97` (plural instead of singular, and semicolon instead of comma). Meaning any guide, documentation or tutorial in English requires me having to "guess" how the function is translated, and manually changing commas to semicolons.
With all this, I mean to say: Excel isn't even that great for the "normal" user. Or perhaps I'm too "power user" for this and just lazy enough to bother with it instead of using "proper" tools like Python or R.
CSV literally stands for Comma Separated Values, so I don't know what you expect. For the most part, you should have (double)quotes around your values that contain commas and double the double-quotes for literal instances.
UTF-8 is now pretty much the defacto standard for the files, where as historically you'd have a number of different code pages, and/or UTF-16 (BE/LE with or without BOM) and a lot of other variances that were much harder to deal with.
Pretty much any software library for CSV handles these things for you. As for localization of input/language parameters, can't really speak to that aspect of things. And I'm not generally using multiple spreadsheets, etc... at most I'll have a database source connected to work against queried data.
Apple barely does it and only for their products. I agree with you that that’s already too much and too annoying but that’s an order of magnitude less than Microsoft who advertise their products pretty aggressively AND ALSO are advertising for whoever gave them money too.
Ubuntu I didn’t use it for years, there are tons of other distributions that I prefer now but last time I checked, there was a removable default shortcut to amazon. That’s an awful symbol, if you ask me, to associate Ubuntu and its meaning to Amazon but it’s nothing when compared to Apple or Microsoft (dare I say Google) behaviors.
Yes. And the debacle was so loud because it does not happen generally (I’d have to go back to the U2 album thing to find something comparable).
They nag too much about their services, though. I don’t fucking want Fitness whatever or News thing, I would like the OS to stop putting a red dot in my settings. But anyway that’s not as brain dead as what I’ve seen on Windows.
Not getting stuff pitched to you constantly by everyone is such an unending exercise of updating preferences, "unsubscribing", rejecting permissions requests, etc. It feels almost futile.
Not to mention the "ask again later..." option having replaced the flat out "no" option.
Even the people you'd imagine might be more sensible (eg Proton) email the crap out of you by default.
So when even the OS starts doing it, it's somewhat infuriating.
Yes, the most egregious of which being the setting app.
Its an OS setting app. Its the most fundamental bundled application in an operating system, second only to maybe the file manager or package manager. Is nothing sacred?
lol I was actually thinking of the setting app in my comment. I agree, it bugs me every time I pick up my phone.
It's gotten to the point where I resist looking at my iPhone because I'm going to have to take up my brain space with the unwanted notifications. I'm not sure what it is but on Android it's less pushy and I can clear all notifications with a single click. So most of the time my new iPhone sits in a drawer and I use my old Android as I go about my day.
Hmm, what notifications do you get from the Settings app? I don't recall ever getting any. And you can clear all notifications with a single tap on iOS.
When you open the app, the top half of the screen is dedicated to selling you their subscriptions. If you're already subscribed, you won't see it. It looks like a settings app. If you're not subscribed, you enter an ad hell and you can't make those notifications disappear until you at least view the ads.
I definitely appreciate the android interaction for notifications, in that I can long-press a notification and jump straight into settings to disable if I like.
News app is part of the OS image and littered with ads. I just got an ad in Settings for the month to month Applecare because mine is expiring. Took a few tries of declining to get the badge on Settings to go away.
There's also a couple places where Ubuntu advertises their commercial services in the OS, including in apt ("Get more security updates through Ubuntu Pro...") and in the default login message (promotions for Ubuntu Landscape, as well as various other products and services through motd-news).
Once ever. The default search returned results from Amazon and local files potentially leaking your search intended to find local files to Ubuntu who in turn claimed that it was ok because potentially intensely personal info that could be inferred from queries weren't personally attributable to you.
This was obviously not ok and it never happened again this was if I recall correctly around 2012.
Ah thanks. I did a quick search before posting and this article was listed as from 2019, but that was when it was last updated - it did just happen once in 2012.
> Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
I looks like Ubuntu was created just in order to be able to dismiss Linux as "also advertise products". It's just a single distribution out of a hundred, and far from the best, so it's completely wrong of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300531.
Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind the scenes, presenting to consumers a tiny little sliver of this massive digital beast lurking under the hood. They're always 15 years ahead of policy, so they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more, on a scale that I don't think we even fully understand.
Ranking evil is hard, but I'd rank Amazon's control of global supply chains as more evil than at least Meta. While Meta got WhatsApp, which is big. (Escaping Facebook, Instagram etc is a lot simpler)
Enabling Cambridge Analytica[0] alone ranks Meta far worse than Amazon. Amazon has done nothing remotely close to necessitating abandoning their own brand AFAIK.
Project Nimbus is Amazon and Google together. Meta was early on the genocidal train, in e.g. Myanmar and Ethiopia, as well as adjacent to the 'regime change' obsession of usian elites.
Arguably they're all atrocious due to effects on environment and labour rights.
I think what's almost shocking about this is that Google seemed so great in the beginning. "Don't Be Evil" was even like an internal code of conduct slogan or something.
I never worked there and have no inside knowledge of what happened. Did they get taken over by MBAs who gained control of the company? Was it always evil and we were just misled the whole time? Something else?
They merged with DoubleClick¹, an advertising company. The combined company was about twice the size of the old google so it severely diluted their ranks with a huge cohort of the worst kinds of MBAs: Advertising & Marketing executives.
Nothing fundamentally changed. The only real difference is they hit that inevitable point for any business that they had to start making money. They weren't evil then and they aren't now. They're a business, and they are responding to market demand for free to consumer products paid for by advertisement. What nobody on HN wants to admit is that the vast majority of people would rather have that than pay for their software in dollars. People love to complain about the Google panopticon but aren't willing to grapple with the fact that it has tremendous benefits too.
They single-handedly dismantled a thriving browser ecosystem.
They pushed Real Name policies, used Google+ to stifle innovation, and then finished the job by shutting Google+ down.
You are making exactly the mistake I am pointing out in my comment. Outside of the HN bubble nobody cares at all about a "thriving browser ecosystem." They want a browser that works so well they don't have to think about it and Chrome has provided that. And this is where Google's dominance has a tangible benefit. The amount of resources that Google can apply to Chrome development is massive compared to what could be done in the highly competitive market that existed before it.
You can argue that maybe a highly competitive browser market would lead to more innovation, but I'm not sure that's the case. Could a highly fragmented market build something that is as good as Chrome? IDK, but my (moderate confidence) bet is no. Browsers are a pretty mature product at this point and I don't think that competition would produce enough competitive pressure to outweigh the massive resources of a dominant near monopoly.
Adobe would be far more evil if they weren't so bad at making software. I think their intentions and business practices are clearly equal to or more evil than Apple, they just don't have nearly the scale and market reach that Apple has.
Yes. Yes they do. Collecting data is most of the point of Google apps/services/devices.
Google then aggregate all that data in the cloud, whereas even if Apple do collect data it’s almost never sent to the cloud for cross-analysis, it’s almost always on-device and therefore private.
> they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more
Citation needed. Did you forget that Google owns YouTube among other things? They don't need to torrent training data when people voluntarily upload an endless stream of it to their platform.
> They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.
As did Ubuntu.
>I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
Huh? The same google caught tracking your every move even if you opted out? The Google that seems to serve ads based on your conversations if anyone in the room has an Android phone? The Google that actively tries to kill any and all ad blockers?
Ads in the OS? That isn’t Microsoft’s idea, or even Apple’s (they have places they do it too). No, that was popularized by the mobile OS made by an ad company, Android.
Haven't installed an app in ages, but seeing an ad in a store isn't as bad as seeing an ad in my app launcher. And yes, windows puts ads in the start menu.
I was an insider user of Windows for close to a decade... the first time I saw an ad in the start menu search results, that's when I changed my default drive to Linux and have not looked back. I booted to windows on that system twice since (firmware updater). I don't have a Windows drive on my current desktop at all, and my personal laptop is a Macbook. My work laptop is Windows though, the down side is the environment is so locked down, I can't even run WSL or Docker.
I install apps all the time without seeing an ad, because 90% of the apps I use are installed from F-Droid.
The apps I install from F-Droid often help me block ads in my browser, so I see very few ads as I use my phone day to day.
Meanwhile, my understanding is that Apple's App Store has ads in it, but that's the only app store allowed. So it seems like maybe iOS is the one that "has ads in the operating system".
Look, there are lots of us using Android and not seeing any ads. So we want to speak up when folks blab on about ads on Android. In reality, iOS and Windows and Android all have ads in their marketplace.
So if you want to have a substantive discussion, it should be centered around the places in the OS where ads are present, whether competing products have ads in similar locations in their OS, and whether those ads can be avoided, both on Android and on other platforms.
My contention is that Android ads are overblown, and generally Android has ads in all the same ways iOS does, and not any more than that. There are of customized versions of Android that add various anti-features, but that's not what I'm focusing on here: I'm focusing on a user's ability to avoid advertising.
But I'm arguing in good faith, and putting in effort to focus on the substantive user experience. I get the feeling you're in this to win some semantic battle with low-effort replies, so I'm going to disengage.
I mean yes, technically, but really no that's clearly not what was being objected to. Finding adds in arbitrary interfaces seems dystopian to me. Whereas having a discreet "suggested" or "promoted" tab or bracket for software in the app store - the place I go to get software - doesn't bother me. There are certainly ways they could screw it up but they don't seem to have done so yet.
Also as it happens I don't even see those because I exclusively use FDroid at this point. So ironically I see no ads when using a device designed and sold by an advertising company and haven't for years.
Ubuntu lost the spot as the default recommendation to newbies since then. Ads weren't the only reason for that but they are hardly a good excuse for Microsoft's behavior.
Having gotten tired of subjecting windows users to a phishing campaign to trick them to use edge under the auspices of it being chrome, they're now moving on to obsoleting all windows machines without a TPM so they can cryptographically secure their right to use their users' need to authenticate as an opportunity to sell data about that user to the third party.
They have no respect for the agency of their users. We're no different than cattle to them, an asset to be squeezed until no more money comes out of it.
and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
That should be a good clue that it's not worth much to them anymore, and tjat they'd rather rely on random free labour from the "community" than their own developers.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
Which is a horribly bloated pig that only helps forced obsolescence of hardware. It should be a very disturbing sign that Microsoft itself doesn't seem to know how to do native code anymore, as they invented Win32 and Windows.
As for open sourcing software. Is it even possible for them to do something that you would view favorably here? To me it seems like remain closed and they'll get criticized but open up at least some of it and ... they get criticized?
As far as I'm concerned, regardless of other factors the more source code that's out in the open the better off everyone is.
No, IE has not been dead and buried for ages. Not everyone's a US corporation.
A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.
And just for reciprocity, here's Indian Defense Review (5/2025) "These People Never Moved On: They’re Stuck 24 Years in the Past and Have to Use Windows XP"
: "Thousands of workers across the US and Europe still depend on a system from 2001. From hospitals to railways, entire operations run on technology long considered obsolete."
> A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.
Yeah, if you've done support in large MS corporate environments with MEM etc then you've come across crappy business apps that have crappy requirements stuck in the past.
On the one hand, longevity of a platform is nice and MS screwed up IE in so many ways.
On the other hand, at some time the business has to manage their software lifecycle - including the death of old systems - and you can't blame MS for that.
The problem was the Microsoft zealotry of technical people they invent non existent problems often repeated like a cargocult by MS consultants/partners. They loved IE as a default browser. This has nothing todo with the apps being hard to fix, because that turned out to be an actual easy technical problem and I did 10 internal apps.
The only thing that helped was MS taking responsibility and killing IE. The problem I had was that IE was becoming an support burden on our tools, no customers were using IE but the internal staff was forced to.
> Because we remember the evil Microsoft. Many young people still follow advice from the elders.
I get the point you're making, but it really seems like we haven't remembered. We've worked ourselves back into one juggernaut owning most of the web browser space and then collectively acted surprised when they started flexing their muscles. I encounter sites that only run in Chrome the same way I had sites that only ran in IE 6. It seems to me we're doomed to repeat history as long as that path is easier or more profitable.
The Chrome situation is non-ideal but still nowhere as bad. True IE was Windows-only (Mac one doesn't really count), closed-source so no other browsers could act like it, also it sucked per se.
These are extensions. No one is preventing OSS communities from developing their own remote dev, Python, and C++ extensions. The VSCode extension API allows it. There are actually some efforts being made to do it.
But ... they literally did that here? I don't think it's malicious in this case. In fact I think they're giving away genuinely useful tools here with no obvious downsides to their use.
But I do think it qualifies.
Bit like the example of Martin Luther King being a criminal.
> Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
They are a business. You seem to misunderstand that businesses cannot behave like charities.
Being a business implies being for-profit.
Nobody said open source had to be free as in free beer, it just had to be free as in freedom.
It's their prerogative to make the plugins marketplace to alternative editors or not. Servers cost money. It's a business.
Does Matt Mullenweg has to let WPEngine sap server resources? Arguably not; and this opinion comes from a guy (me) that strongly dislikes WordPress (and by extension: Matt and Automattic).
Businesses don't and shouldn't operate as charities, but Microsoft is the only big tech company that manages to be a negative in every way. The only thing they've ever innovated on is lock-in. Now exploring the frontier of how bad Windows can be without people leaving.
The open-source stuff is whatever, only a tiny part of the picture.
You should be aware that Microsoft's idea of open source is very much at odds with everything open source before Microsoft boldly slapped a "Microsft <3 open source" right and left.
They may have progressed beyond Ms-PL, but they have tried to coup and steal open source projects several times.
But, altho understandable, the simple fact that their primary products, Visual Studio, Office, Windows, and even worse: former versions of any of these, are simply not open source in any way precisely contradicts the expression of loving open source.
While I mostly agree, I will say they're leaps and bounds better than a couple decades ago. Windows now accounts for less than 10% of MS revenue, and definitely lacks in attention by all indications. Linux on Azure outweighs their Windows use by an increasingly wider margine, and a significant amount of the progress that has occurred on Windows has been to make Linux development easier.
.Net and a lot of other tooling and projects are on Github under BSD licensing, and that's pretty cool... almost everything they do outside Windows/Office works in Linux these days. I do think they should at LEAST get a version of office (offline) that works in Linux... even if it's a bastardized web version that runs in Electron.
Aside: I couldn't say how much I appreciate the work Valve has done to improve gaming on Linux, and have no expectations of ever moving back to Windows. MS seems to want to extract literally every cent of value out of every Windows user, and it sickens me.
No, it’s pretty clear. Some extensions are NOT open source. It’s not ambiguous, and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as these extensions don’t have superpowers (ie. access to unexposed VSCode APIs)
But they do. Microsoft extensions are the only ones whitelisted in the VS Code marketplace to request experimental ("proposed") APIs in their manifest. Remoting, notebooks and now Copilot have all been using experimental APIs, verboten to anyone else in the marketplace until they become stable a long time later.
They've "always" made decent hardware, as far as I recall. The original XBox is 23 years old, and in the 90s they made great joysticks and other controllers for PCs. And their mice and keyboards have always been good.
> And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
Except that their macOS software still is non-parity with Windows for really no good reason other than anti-competitive. They’ve also had the opportunity to open-source Windows, but won’t go that far willingly, with the exception of those that did it without approval.
> Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
two things can be true at the same time. MS doing some open sourcing and being truly evil too in many other ways. why do you need to settle on one or the other?
Holy shite what I just read. It's like telling people: mafioso people are not so bad, they keep the streets clean and there is discipline around the city. They only pickpocket the foreigners...
I intended that line to be ambiguous. My real point is that whatever their true motives, they have managed to shed a lot of the Evil Empire appearance and younger people weren't even around when the really bad behavior was at its peak. So it's understandable that there's a wide gulf in the perception of MS between older and younger IT guys.
Not really. They still have the same sales tactic as they always have: make an inferior product that barely ticks the boxes, then manipulate everyone to ditch their competitors in all kinds of ways except for making a better product. These manipulative tactics are sometimes fair game, most are quite unethical and some even illegal.
You can make a product that pleases its users, or just cater to the interests of the ones with the buying decision, for enterprise users they are almost never the same. Microsoft, like Oracle, leans heavily on the second strategy. Their developer tools are often (not always) an exception to this principle. I think this is the true reason Microsoft is so disliked as a brand.
These are the kind of claims that make some Linux users tiresome to talk to. (Full disclosure: I am also a Linux user).
I'm not defending Microsoft, they are not necessarily my cup of tea, but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
Feel free to express your opinions, but don't be hateful!
The grandparent was also wryly highlighting the crevasse between post-Nadella Microsoft's PR, which you seem to believe, and their actions.
Despite "MS <3s Open Source" they never changed, you're just referencing a very successful era of marketing.
And poor Linux users are out here catching strays. Very "don't you say that about the $1T company!!!" of you to defend them, "fellow Linux user" (also very hi fellow kids..)
I try not to drink the Kool-Aid either on Microsoft's side (again, they are not necessarily my cup of tea), but the prevalence of the people with the "Hey! Remember that Steve Ballmer called Linux a cancer? Micro$$$hit!!" attitude sucks my energy dry.
well, gosh, I feel sorry for those American Linux developers of that time. I guess they were unAmerican, according to Allchin. if they were of this time, i guess they would have been deported by ICE.
Linus Torvalds might be a U.S. citizen today, but during the first years of Linux he was certainly not thinking U.S. values and that someday his biggest userbase would be there.
> Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-American:
I found it so funny and hypocritical that I highlighted some of the sillier phrases below - in italics :
-------------------------
About me
Ivan Montilla
I self-define as a challenger of the status quo.
Usually, I question trends. Normalcy is to be avoided. Some of the greatest opportunities lie where no one else is looking. I’m more of a niche markets guy.
My interests are ever-changing, but I’m currently interested in financial markets technology. I’m also passionate for software performance.
I do develop some software, but not professionally. I’m more of a power user of programming languages. I see it as a craft, both engineering and some form of art. ---------------------------
The thought that I would have to go through the trouble of reading some git repo to run a script that will debloat my OS, no matter how easy or straightforward might be, makes me feel tired. I don't want to fight my OS, I want it to work with me. Between searching and learning stuff for my job and searching and learning stuff for my personal development or hobbies, investing time in tinkering windows of all things doesn't exactly feel me with excitement. I would rather switch to Mac or invest time tinkering a linux distribution that actually respects me.
You really don't. It just requires messing with some group policy and settings. I did this 5-10 years ago and haven't had to really mess with it much since. I've never used an OS that did not require some effort to get in a state I like.
Spending time to configure your OS to your liking is one thing. Having to actively fight all the crap that the OS vendor has jammed into it is quite a bit different.
I don't think the two are equivalent, since one has a much more adversarial flavor to it.
> You can (for example) de-bloat Windows 11 out from the telemetry and annoying widgets nobody uses, including the invasive Copilot.
> After de-bloating, it's a decent OS on its own.
Sure you can. I, as a tech savvy person, can debloat Windows 11. If I dare to do it. If I know I can do it. If I search for information on the internet on how to do it. If I know how to search and follow those instructions. If I follow all the steps (and hope my tutorial covers everything). If Microsoft doesn’t push an update to bloat it again.
And with that, well I still don’t know how to install it without a Microsoft account. It’s so incredibly user hostile that even the insufferable Apple Walled Garden don’t force you into all of this shit.
Didn't know you knew, cool. I doubt this is a method that will become unavailable as enterprises still use it. Never say never, of course, but as long as Active Directory is still around there will need to be some way to suppress the MSFT Account option.
> insufferable Apple Walled Garden don’t force you into all of this shit
No, but they will lock you out of your account if you have a long gone debit card on there that you don't remember the numbers for or access to that school email your uni yanked back.
I wonder how many college kids got locked out of their iTunes account permanently after they graduated.
Not really. You can't fully remove large parts of the bloat without breaking Windows Update, and true removal of some features is invasive enough that it has to be done offline.
When you actually look at those de-bloating scripts or techniques in detail, it's clear that they only barely address the issues with Windows, and they're always chasing a moving target of anti-user bullshit.
Linux tends to tempt people to spend time configuring it, but most of that is customisation to taste that Windows users very rarely do.
You can just skip it and use everything with the distro defaults. it many even be less work than Windows as a lot more software is installed by default on installation.
I used to configure Windows, now I don't bother. But with Linux, I do because I must. Many OOTB defaults just aren't great, or some part of it requires configuration.
> but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era
Why does this matter? How does that invalidate anything? Are global companies only accountable for their actions so long as they maintain the same CEO?
>but don't be hateful!
Won't someone please think of the poor global technology conglomerate!
- Creating a language (typescript) that took the front-end web community by storm.
- Becoming one of the real adopters of "progressive web apps". Apple is actively hostile to them, because they would eat into the 30% cut they are making from the apps distributed via the app store; Google, once a champion, has grown kinda tepid, because it also gets a cut from apps distributed via Google Play; but Microsoft now behave as if they are a believer.
- Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
> - Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
Which feels sluggish compared to how it used to be. They keep tacking on too much cruft to it. I used to call it a lightweight IDE, but now its just a bloated editor.
Sorry, but even with typescript, the frontend web community a shit-storm.
Anything Microsoft + web is a nightmare. Their login system is a redirect and re-auth hell and I loath anytime I need to log into anything Microsoft related.
But in reality my favorite keyboard before I switched to the MS keyboards was the one that came with my original IBM PC with the clicky keys. The biggest downside was that my mom and dad always knew when I was on the computer!
Likewise the Intellimouse Pro is my favourite mouse. Sadly they seem to have discontinued it in favor of the Surface mouse which has atrocious ergonomics.
They also discontinued the ergo keyboard that I am using to type this. I'm very worried that when this keyboard goes out I won't have another option.
There is a clone on the market, which I use at home, that so far has been pretty promising, but we'll see if it has they lasting power that this one does.
Kinesis makes a keyboard that's basically the Microsoft ergo layout but mechanical and you can remap the keys. I have one and like it. https://kinesis-ergo.com/keyboards/mwave/
> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
I don't personally get too attached to devices I purchase or begrudge others for what they buy so, I'm curious what made them "cringe hardware" in your opinion. Adoption aside, they looked like pretty compelling devices to me. Is this a case of buying anything that isn't Apple isn't cool? Or is there something deeper there?
> making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The 25 year window you picked actually coincides almost exactly with the time since the original X-Box was launched. Seems an odd omission from the list of hardware MS released in that time period.
Also the IntelliMouse Explorer was released in late 1999, which nobody who has ever had to clean the gunk off a mouseball roller would describe as ‘cringe’.
This "Microsoft are good guys" is a bizarre recurring comment that has appeared on HN for quite a while now
It's like pretending people must choose from Russia, North Korea, South Sudan or the Central African Republic
Who are the good guys
None of these companies are "good guys"
These "Leave Microsoft alone" HN comments will undoubtedly persist
Perhaps there are MS employees who comment on HN and they are sensitive about criticism
The idea Microsoft is somehow benign is truly hilarious
It is not difficult to argue the damage this company causes today without retribution is far worse than what they did in the past
IME, Microsoft is very cult-like; the employees believe that Microsoft has a solution for any problem, and there is never, ever any contemplation that the company creates problems ;this does not stop with the employees, it can extend to others who are "bought in" to the Redmond ecosystem
Are pretty cool guys in command and firmly desiring to keep up with their ethos, or mere disposable shiny pawns that are one giant layoff away whatever good the profit are?
- Abandoned the worst web browser in existence. That they created :)
- Abandoned ActiveX (29 years ago), Silverlight (4 years ago)
+ Opened .NET to more platform than just Windows. It can now run very well on Linux, Mac, etc.
+ Made many of its locked down stuff open source - .NET, Z3, hell there was that few weeks ago open sourcing of the WinUI framework, etc.
+ Pivoted towards the cloud where OSS software synergizes with their cloud offerings.
Do they do corrupt deals with governments? Well yes, but so does every other big corp. And making cringe hardware isn't a crime in itself.
Do they still do a lot of shady shit? You bet, but they only started getting worse a few years ago. You are thinking it doesn't come in waves and it was all evil, all the time.
It's always better when companies are hungry for business. I thought that in 2016ish it was super cool for Microsoft to get into Linux, build VS Code, and make bets like the Surface Studio.
For comparison, I think Mac OS in 2008 was also at a bit of a golden age:
- You had native file support for .iso, .zip without needing to install crapware like Winzip.
- You even could preview *.psd files out the box.
- You had first-party apps like Image Capture to scan documents without needing to install extra software.
- There was an amazing third-party app ecosystem with things like Yojimbo, OnyX, Little Snitch, Quicksilver, Handbrake, Coda, Adium.
This was around the time of the "I'm a Mac" campaign when Apple was _hungry_ to win business away from Windows. All of these small, polished advantages made me fall in love with the experience.
OSX today is still good but there definitely isn't that same level of "underdog hunger" showing up in the products as of late.
Anyway I'm just trying to say companies being hungry for business shows up in its products and that's better for consumers.
Unfortunately for their timing, the Zune HD was them finally getting their idea of a music player spot on. It just happened to be 2 years after the release of iPhone.
Talk to some developers with 3-5yoe, they do see Microsoft as a cool company. For them it’s a company that created TypeScript, supports open source, runs NPM, created VSCode etc. None of them thinks of Internet Explorer, Zune, or anti competitive behavior. You will always associate MS with these failures, the generation after you won’t
I don't think this is the last generation of Xbox hardware but they definitely are not going to push the next iteration hard. I suspect they will start to license out the OS and have a broad set of hardware specs to follow. Treat it like the Surface, it will co-exist with other machines.
Essentially, the business model of the 3DO has finally been proven correct 30 years later. Do keep in mind a lot of the 3DO team did end up at Microsoft... maybe they played the long game...
Basically, PS5 sales recently reached 80 million. Xbox Series X/S is estimated about 30 million. They lost the generation where digital libraries were built and can't gain the market back.
There's been a lot of rumor lately that Xbox becomes a shell on top of Windows and just runs regular Windows games. The announcement of the Xbox ROG Ally using this same approach gives it a lot of weight.
It is crazy how they managed the bungle the Xbox One launch at just the right time to cause this cascade of issues over a decade later. It doesn't help that MS haven't had a huge AAA exclusive title in a very long time. Now that they have started cutting in hard on their game dev teams, they may end up more like the Microsoft Studios before Xbox was a thing.
Nothing of the sort has been leaked or said by Microsoft.
However, their strategy seems to be going all-in on Gamepass. And if you subscribe to Gamepass, Microsoft does not care if you play on your Steam Deck, iPad or Xbox.
This is also why they mentioned they might open up the Xbox to other stores (Steam), and why they have been releasing first party titles onto the PS5[0].
If you couple that info with them axing their own handheld and instead licensing out the Xbox name to Asus with the ROG Ally Xbox, it isn't a huge leap to assume they'll just license out the Xbox name to whichever OEM feels like making a console. The Xbox One and Series X / S already run the Windows Core kernel which would make going more wide on the hardware support quite easy, and the current hardware is semi off-the-shelf stuff from AMD anyway.
Not the Xbox itself, if it was just the standalone device, but the way they had chosen to modify Windows to have Xbox compatible APIs, which are worse than the previous Windows APIs.
The enshittification of Windows gaming started with the removal, or sometimes deprecation, of the Windows gaming APIs.
Far more than that, so tell me, are my association of Russia and United-States to imperialist behaviors actually outdated, or are some cultural traits unfortunately still persisting through time?
I don't know where you've been the last decade, but it's clear they have been perceived this way. Him describing that perception only to be ridiculed by you is a pretty low blow.
This is bullshit, the Zune was great and was doing incredibly well, at least around here.
It was THE device to have, people were going crazy for them; there was enough pent up demand that people were breaking windows and sliding into cars to get them.
At least in Germany at the time of the release of the various Zune generations, Zune was both hated by hipsters for not being "fashionable" (these users strongly preferred iPods), and by free software advocates (who were very vocal at the time, and also had at that time much more influence on the sentiment and feelings of "average users" than today) for its in-built DRM system.
The Zune was 100% uncool, but man did I like the hardware and software sooo much better than the iPod / ITunes. I was just sad that I never found anyone to "squirt" at.
In addition to being able to run any regular Windows application, it had the best and most intuitive feeling UX of any tablet in history. Amongst many other features, window management was gesture controlled and Internet Explorer had an alternate UI that moved the tabs to the bottom of the screen to make them easier to reach.
Sadly, Windows 10 removed all the good parts of Windows tablet mode, but its ideas were so good that Apple is still slowly copying bits of its interface for the iPad to this day.
This feels more like the OS is what you liked. Nothing really about the hardware which this thread is about regarding Microsoft making crap hardware products. Is the hardware so mediocre that the best thing about it was the OS where nothing about the hardware deserves comments? If that's the case, maybe that points to validating Microsoft makes crap hardware being a true comment.
The hardware was good but nothing that an iPad doesn’t have nowadays. It was revolutionary for the time with the detachable keyboard and trackpad and Wacom-like pen. The software was what made it an amazing device though.
You specifically stated "since it runs Windows, I will never use it" and I addressed that point. If your qualifier is "runs MacOS/iOS", then your following question is moot for every non-Apple device.
Either way, no one can answer your subjective opinion-based query. Go test it out at the dozens of kiosks in any city in a Western nation (or, barring that, watch a youtube video) and judge for yourself.
> Linux runs perfectly fine on most of the Surfaces [...] There's the usual asterisk here or there,
Are we reading the same tables? The last several models are full of question marks and crosses in the support matrix, and many models old and new seemingly require the linux-surface kernel fork for key features like touchscreens and even some touchpads, you can't just install your distro of choice.
Even compared to my disappointing experience running Linux at home, I'd say that's more of an asterisk minefield, except for a few Surface Laptop models.
I'll give you that the laptops models fare better, I said as much already I think, but I feel you're overselling the support for the form factor most people associate with the Surface brand:
The 5G version of the Surface Pro 10 (second to last) is completely unusable, the SP8-10 need a kernel fork just for keyboard and touchpad (!), SP4-10 need it for the touchscreen (SP4 is 2015), and the cameras won't work at all since SP7 (2019).
Don't get me wrong, I still run Linux on my devices and would be willing to tinker with custom kernels if certain hardware were worth it. I just can't consider this "runs perfectly fine".
eh, they had short blip in the relatively recent history, especially with developers, in mid 2010s.
With dotnet core 1-3 - open source cross platform .net, that was modern, fresh and clearly a project done by developers for developers. add vscode to this and it seems nice.
but as soon as 5 hit, if you look into details, they went to their usual bullshit, starting with stapling together winforms and wpf to it. the feel of the project shifted from 'developers for developers' to usual top down management.
vscode is also a weird case - it looks open source, but isn't at all(the builds you get aren't just from the same codebase + no access to extensions legally if you build your own, or fork it)
Microsoft has for the longest time been about business only. Any virtue signaling was just marketing.
Years back they were gloating about how their AI systems (pre-LLM stuff) could allow for great oil production while at the same time talking projecting the image of a clean green future.
Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies. Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made noises that seemed not awful.
In terms of coolness, Microsoft peaked right around the time they were hiring the cast of Friends to promote their OS.
- A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
- Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch everyone described it as
- Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc.
- Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on Liquid Glass
It's the laptop to get for compute/battery, which definitely is not nothing, but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
You forgot things like shipping decades-old free software with their OS because Apple are so implacably opposed to their users having freedom to use, examine, modify and share that software.
If that's what you "mostly" remember, your memory is awfully selective. It's totally fine for you to have a bias, but you're overlooking decades of massively successful products and services.
Having owned plenty of Thinkpads (Linux), Dells(Windows and Linux) and plenty of Macbook Pros, I can say, Apple's superiority of hardware is so far beyond the rest. Having an OS with a BSD-ish experience is really nice as well. I've spent 27 years in engineering and during most of that time I get the random "Linux is far superior", "I like Windows better" folks... but by and large, yes, Apple's tech has a ton of good will.
I don’t get your comment, do you mean superiority in what? Are you comparing operating systems or hardware? The combined experience?
If you asked me 2 years ago I would say something different about Linux than I would said today, because I’m running a different distribution with a different desktop environment and that changed my experience completely, even though I’m running on basically the same hardware.
I run Linux in Apple hardware too, how does that rank in your comparison?
Hardware: Apple announced an ARM based CPU and started shipping. It was _mostly_ a seemless experience thanks to Rosetta2. The performance on these well-built machines was outstanding. Even the Intel-based machines previously had really strong performance. The machines themselves (on average) were among some of the most well-built. Yes, there were outliers with the butterfly keyboards. Yes there were outliers with silly features like the touchbar. We're talking on average.
Software: Apple's OS is just a boring Unix that works. Yes I realize that Unix is in name only - but on top of that XNU microkernel really is a lot of BSD. Having the GNU tools available AND Sound/Fingerprint Reader/HiRes Display that actually scales... that is still not the reality in Linux. (I still love Linux btw - I keep multiple machines around the house running it) So not having to spend a great deal of time fiddling with config files when I plug in an external monitor actually is a big deal. Most folks don't want the hassles of messing with pavucontrol just because they switched to their external audio setup. Most folks will appreciate when they drag a window to that exterinal monitor that the HiDPI didn't cause text to go wonky.
So those are the areas where Apple is just massively superior. They nailed it in the "it just works" department. They've nailed it in the "quality hardware" department.
Windows also does fairly well in a lot of these areas.
As far as running Linux on Apple hardware? I had a buddy come into a meeting running Gnome+Ubuntu on his MacBook Pro back around 2017... as soon as he plugged into the projector, it was a mess. I'm sure it's gotten better since then.
Of course it does in the US tech bubble, if you talk to people who haven't been using Macs for 30 years you might hear a different story. While Apple makes good hardware they also have plenty of blunders, especially in recent years, much like Microsoft in its domain really. Both are coasting on their past successes and familiarity. I get it, many of my coworkers watch their announcement streams like they're video game announcements. From my standpoint they haven't put out anything exciting since the iPhone/iPod Touch, but I don't have the money for toys that cost thousands of dollars apiece like the Mac Studios or their VR headset, so maybe I'm missing out.
The VR headset was such a flop that I think it might paradoxically have not hurt their reputation. Like nobody is saying “wow, this Apple vision thing really sucks,” because nobody has seen one.
Also no one cares about it positive or negative because it’s such a nothing burger. No one even thinks apple thought it would be big, it was an experiment that’s all.
You have to pay me to use Apple, Microsoft, and Google products. None of those organizations are good.
Apple and Google both use immutable locked down OSes on their main products that prevents improving device security, such as IP & DNS filtering / blocking.
Microsoft user experience keeps getting worse. Latest version of Teams, as of today, says I'm at the "Calendar" screen and the navigation and content screen both show "Chat". "Calendar" was unpinned because I find Teams to be at interacting with content. No reason it should be a PDF viewer when the desktop application is actually usable allows for viewing chat and content at the same time.
I understand developing for those platforms makes money or is needed for other products. Unless I have to develop products that support those companies, I will never pay with my personal income to support those organizations.
I actively invest my personal income to organizations / businesses that are working to provide viable alternative. All are fruitful in reducing the barrier to a viable product. From improving hard-ware design to getting software in a stable state. Currently waiting on a phone from EU from a company on their attempt.
Went with a Farirphone 4 running /e/OS/. Yes, /e/OS/ is based on AOSP. This phone has a high chance of full postmarketos support. It is the closet from being disconnected from Google that I find to be stable. Postmarketos would allow for a quick jump.
In the mean time, still investing in companies and organizations that don't want to help Google in the smartphone market. It is a long-term investment.
Just laptop is good enough. Although currently switched back to apple silicon ATM for LLM, price and convince reasons, and as soonest linux on Apple Silicon reach some maturity, will switch over completely.
However not using a smartphone is probably good for one's mental and physical healthy now days. It is understandable if your work require you to have one, but if I'm not getting paid, why would I even get a smartphone?
Back in the 80's there are investment people managing billions dollars and deals over pen paper and a land line!
Laptops are way heavier and more bulky than phones, and phones can do 90% of what a laptop can do across a cross section of most people’s daily tasks. You don’t have to be a genius to see the value in one. The mental health stuff is about social media apps and things, which aren’t mandatory.
If you don’t want one because of some principled stance that’s fine, but don’t pretend there’s no value in them.
I'm the opposite, I didn't own a personal computer from like 2015 until last year when I built a new gaming PC. I had a MacBook Pro from work of course, but I just got by on my phone / iPad for my personal life.
Because antitrust enforcement has been so lax, we only have two options.
The DOJ/FTC/EU/ASEAN/etc. need to force a breakup of first party app stores, first party payment, first party web browser, and first party messaging. They also really need to require web installs without hidden menus and scare walls.
We'll see a proliferation of offerings if that happens.
And WebOS, and Symbian, and Blackberry, and Tizen. Making an OS that people want to use is hard. Maybe impossible at this point if you want to compete against such large established ecosystems.
for X_86 family for sure, but the experience on other chip set such as Apple Silicon (maybe the arms) for desktop usage are quite rough around the edges.
But Apple ARM chips currently represent most of the laptop and desktop computer market share for ARM processors. Sure, Linux in embedded and semi-embedded capacity works perfectly well with almost all ARM (and even RISC-V) processors, but I doubt most of the people here will be switching to raspberry pi as the daily driver anytime soon.
Hopefully either Asahi support improves in the near future or Snapdragon X Elite support in Linux becomes a bit better.
Eh, macOS is still the UNIX with the most commercial software available. 26 feels like a misstep*, of course, but I’ll take it over a Windows environment any day.
A mac can (legally) run more software than any other computer. Obviously, macOS apps work, but you can also run most Windows and Linux applications (in a VM). There's also a bunch of iOS/iPadOS apps that can work and some Android apps can run through BlueStacks.
> but you can also run most Windows and Linux applications (in a VM).
This is really just a cheap rhetorical trick. Linux [0] can run just as much software, if you include VMs, but you can't legally virtualize MacOS, therefore buying a Mac is the only way to legally run their software, in addition to everything else. Now, you are technically correct, but the casual interpretation of
> Eh, macOS is still the UNIX with the most commercial software available.
isn't really that you can simply run everything unavailable on MacOS in a VM (or several layers of VMs). It's the same as arguing that Powerpoint is all you ever need, as it is Turing complete.
[0] And so can Windows, if you run said VMs in a Linux VM.
In my business (partly home studio support), it's hard to support MacOS for new-ish users.
If the OS is old, things like FFMPEG will not work with things like Audacity. And to use an old version of FFMPEG, you have to guess which one, then install a variety of dev tools to compile it, waay beyond the capability of the average "I just want to record my podcast user". Audacity itself has an extensive help article devoted to this issue for Mac.
If you have a new Mac, you'll find companies have given up going through the cost and time of certifying for each new Mac OS, like Evoluent (early vertical mouse maker), who gave up several versions ago and won't support using all the extra mouse buttons their product has on Mac.
If you want to use many audio plugins, you'll have to deal with special permissions if it didn't come from the app store. If you want to use zoom to let a remote tech control your screen, you have to find and set two security permisssions.
For all four of these issue on Windows, it just works.
UPDATE: As commenter below pointed out, experienced users have a different experience than new users, which doesn't invalidate the specific issues I've mentioned, and which I encounter every month, and sometimes weekly.
I’m a producer since Cool Edit Pro and Fruity Loops. I’ve used Windows and Macs for audio and video production extensively over the last two decades. I have no idea what you’re on about.
I gave four specific examples that frequently slow me down when helping people who are new to studio stuff. You ignored my examples, and pointed out you have decades of experience. Why do you start by pointing out you're not the user I'm talking about and ignore the examples?
Apple is certainly fumbling in recent years, and it's clearly behind in some games (Siri, AI in general, iPhones turning into a yearly snooze-fest). But of all the FAANG, I'd say it's the only one I trust, simply because they're not trying to sell my data and have a consistent stance on security.
It certainly is. It's not exclusive to Apple, however - _all_ the big tech (and non-tech) companies offered tribute, in one form or another. Despite it being illegal, it seems to be the new government practice.
Whether that'll lead to the government requiring Apple to break their encryption, it remains to be seen. I imagine Apple has a bit of an edge here anyway, since iCloud is allegedly e2e encrypted?
Unless Cook starts letting ICE have free roam of Apple's campus, I have trouble faulting him or any business owner for trying to avert the mad king's gaze.
It seems like they got the memo. Pay Trump personally or have your business destroyed.
Im not really sure how that benefits me as a US citizen but that is who the majority of the population seems to want and once the rules are set you follow or face made up tariffs that rip you apart. Right.
Why? Regardless of your view of Trump, would you not expect mr. Cook to play the game? His only job is literally and figuratively to navigate hell or high waters to deliver value to the shareholders.
Apple is behind in AI because they've prioritized keeping private data on your device, rather than in the cloud, but today's best (or even good) inference models still require cloud-scale compute, i.e. they don't fit on a phone.
I think we basically agree - just clarifying here.
The echo chamber is still reverberating. People say that MacOS is good because other people have told them so. The people claiming that is better don't have an earnest effort outside of the ecosystem to support their claims. I was forced to use MacOS at work up until a little over 1.5 years ago, I have perspective on both, and it is categorically incompetent. It doesn't hold a candle to dev on Linux.
As for Windows? Windows 7/11 are probably still better than MacOS (as you implied with your comment about neglect), but it's probably as bad or slightly better than Win 11.
> It’s willful ignorance to think that the many millions of people that like MacOS are just parroting what they’ve been told.
This is so entirely true.
I've installed so many different Linux distributions (and multiple Windows versions) on my personal laptop. Currently noodling around with NixOS.
I've never been tempted by a non-macOS laptop for work.
Whatever faults macOS has, it is very good at staying out of my way for getting work done, and all the small ancillary bits (eg webcam and audio support for chatting) have worked flawlessly for me for two decades. I cannot say the same about either Windows or Linux.
Mac OS 8 was new in 1997 and was pretty innovative for user-facing features, if not the underlying operating system. It blew Windows 98 out of the water as far as that went.
Mac OS 8 had no preemptive multitasking or meaningful address space protections. A single bad pointer dereference in user mode took down the entire system, and a single busy loop without a yield locked up the entire system.
Both of these were universally admitted to be bad and outdated by technically minded people.
By 1997 they had looked at replacing it with BeOS or NEXTSTEP, and purchased the latter with the goal of replacing Mac OS. The Rhapsody OS, an OS8 style UI with NeXT underneath, had already been started. Before that, they had also attempted and failed to write a next gen classic Mac OS (Copland).
Windows 9x had a lot of problems, but had preemptive multitasking and much better address space isolation. Windows NT 4 Workstation was also a thing at the time and much better. It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
> It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
Rather: It took them two more releases until they offered a version that had a price tag (setting the price was a conscious decision by Microsoft) that made a Windows NT derivate also affordable to non-professional users.
I don't think it was that simple. Hardware support wasn't good on NT, and it had poor compatibility with a lot of 9x software. These were two things that MS considered obstacles at the time.
If all you did was look at it, sure. OS 8 was a mess internally with an archaic and badly designed kernel. Windows 98 was much better at multitasking, system recovery, process isolation, etc. And that's saying a lot for the BSOD-ridden mess that that was. Then you had NT, which made both look like children's toys.
And that's just in the Microsoft vs Apple camp. If you left that then Unix, BSD, BeOS, etc also blew it out of the water.
MacOS 8 looked pretty, but it was far from a "good" OS.
OS 8 was designed to run on 68020 without the mmu so you could run on the Mac II and LC. Likewise, MS was trying to keep backwards compatibility with windows 3.11 era software which led to 98 being a compromise, where NT was a much better os. Incidentally, you could pop in an MMU and install A/UX for a os 8 style ui running Unix underneath on those older Macs.
Your reasoning also isn’t sufficient. The classic Microsoft Kernel was able to support a much wider variety of hardware because it was modular (internally, not architecturally). The classic Macintosh Kernel had a far smaller ecosystem to support and couldn’t even add support for hardware that existed on many of their own devices that would make the kernel on-par with the 9x kernel and be transparent (except for improved usability) for users.
So to recap, OP claimed that OS 8 (not A/UX) was superior to 9x. And that’s simply false. Many consider the 98 kernel garbage, even for its time; and yet it’s objectively better to OS 8’s.
If we’re simply arguing Apple hardware OSes versus Intel options (as you seem to be conflating this to), then the latter still wins with Xenix, any number of Unices, BSD, Linux, etc; all more stable and better supported than A/UX as well as better UI-centered OSes (NT, OS/2, BeOS, XFree86, etc).
> The context is that MS had much more capable hardware to run 95 on than the 68020 based Macs.
MacOS 8's initial release was after PowerPC-based hardware was already released. The OS had a separate kernel for that hardware. MacOS 9 never ran on 68k hardware (with an MMU or not).
It was perfectly capable of having that functionality, yet didn't.
You're just retroactively applying rationale to a bad design and making bad faith arguments (or "explanations"). Even Apple knew it was bad, that's why they threw it out.
MacOS 8 was not innovative by 1997 standards. I had it running on my PowerMac 6100/60. It was crash prone and Netscape could easily crash the entire OS, cooperative multitasking, you as an end user still had to manually allocate how much memory an app could have.
It's also amazing that they convinced developers that running a non-standard CPU instruction set through a laundered Rosetta layer was somehow battery or compute friendly lb for lb when an AMD processor (or even Intel) is plenty efficient and cool.
Are any applications on your Mac touching Rosetta right now? You'd better hope not because those single percentage gains from ARM evaporate fast.
Delusional take. Rosetta is for maintaining compatibility during the transition. Efficiency is fine with Rosetta. But it doesn’t matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done. Not true, unfortunately, for Windows.
Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
Pile onto that the fact that a lot of us are in the cloud, and the cloud has ARM processors, and they're generally priced as competetive, especially with m7i and m7a. So it's not the worst thing in the world to be using arm64 architecture on your dev machine.
Which matters very little in my experience whether the cloud is ARM or not. I still need to build my code in a Docker container with Amazon Linux even on my ARM based Mac when targeting an ARM based AWS runtime environment.
What is the efficiency loss specifically? Do you even know, or are you just asserting it?
>it doesn't matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done
'Essentially' is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here, but, putting that aside, A. you're wrong, I've recently ran into Rosetta throttling and B. it's not a good reason to begin the project at all, it's only a good reason when it's already done. You're essentially ceding "Yes, I've been wrong and this has been a fool's errand for the past x years until right this moment as the project is done". It's not done and it'd a weak argument.
>Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
Specifically what are the numbers? Because I have performance/tdp numbers and the M-series performs well but it isn't a categorical difference. In fact, that's no difference, it performs okay but AMD is at the top of the heap currently. Sad.
I switched from a 2019 MBP to a new M4 Pro a few weeks ago and I didn’t even know Rosetta wasn’t installed (I assumed on and installed by default) until I had to run a Go binary that hadn’t been updated since 2020.
I use a lot of nonstandard software (not just a browser), not a single piece needed Rosetta.
I agree recent AMD chips are power efficient like the M series (though I don’t have one to compare with) but I thought everyone agreed the comparable chips in 2020 weren’t?
> A. you're wrong, I've recently ran into Rosetta throttling […]
Can you please define and explain the meaning «Rosetta throttling»? Rosetta 2 is static binary translation + JIT optimisations at the run time. Is Rosetta injecting delays slots or delay loops into the translated code? Or, is it injecting branch instructions that consistently fail the branch predictor? Something else? Since you seem to have analysed specific code paths, the esteemed congregation on here is eager to pick the disassembled code apart.
Without the direct evidence, such claims are as credible as that of a vegetable vendor at the local farmer market claiming that spinach they sell cures cancer.
When the M1 transition started, Intel and AMD devices simply were not competitive, even after factoring Rosetta losses (https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1-chip-emulating-x86-b...). That was the relevant comparison to Rosetta; it has been 5 years since the transition started, and nowadays as others have stated, it is common to not have Rosetta at all. MacOS is dropping support soon.
The real difference maker is efficiency. MacBook owners simply do not need to worry about whether they are plugged in or not; the performance does not change and the battery lasts many hours, even on demanding tasks. Occasionally you can cherry pick a benchmark where AMD appears to be competitive, but always at much higher power draw.
AMD and Intel users don’t really appreciate how much of a qualitative difference that is. Being even close in performance, while offering far superior reliability and battery life, puts apple silicon in a league of its own.
Share your numbers please. I’m having trouble finding reliable sources that aren’t YouTube videos or forum posts, but nothing I’ve been able to find contradicts my claims.
The null hypothesis is that Apple chips aren't better. You simply assumed they were into evidence. It's up to you to provide the figures that they are.
Of course, they really aren't, which is pretty obvious. It doesn't make sense that Apple would randomly invent some categorically new CPU technology when they don't even own an instruction set or foundry and that they would simply be concocting some vendor lock-in supply chain scheme.
It sounds like you've already done the work... why not just share the numbers. I'm just asking to see what you claim to have. Unless... you don't have them and you're just making stuff up.
Do they? I feel like this is a bimodal thing from what I've seen of other peoples opinions - they're either amazing and all you ever use, or they're the worst company ever.
As a developer I've always seen Macs as a necessary evil - they were the only polished "working out of the box" unix-like system you could buy for a long time but you had to put up with locked down software, comically bad pricing and cooling issues.
Now with the Mx stuff the hardware is amazing, and pretty fantastic value for money if you avoid the weird points in the price scale where they massively overcharge for RAM. But you still have to use their locked down software stack and ecosystem.
> Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies.
They are very different companies in very different businesses. Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company. That affects everything (and is why the two are not fundamentally competitors).
I don't think one has ever been better behaved than the other at all, though. The main difference is that for most of their time, Microsoft was just in a position where it could do more harm than Apple.
Now I am what you would consider a "Full Stallman" free software guy, but you can imagine my mixed feelings when I ended up being interviewed by Business Insider on why Microsoft shouldn't be giving up with web engine for a Chromium based browser. Yes, things like Safari are proprietary junk but they still keep things like Chrome dominance at bay. Alas I feel we are better having a few proprietary systems than a singular monolithic one. Once Apple lets that one go, it is only a matter of time until Google almost single handled controls the framework of the internet.
"Chrome dominance" isn't my concern, and it isn't the problem with Apple.
The problem is Apple is intentionally hobbling their web browser and forcing every other browser maker to use it, which prevents web applications that use any kind of hardware API from functioning on iOS - the only alternative being making a native app for iOS where Apple can charge a significant amount for any purchases made through the native app. Web applications threaten Apple's greed, so they forbid any other browser maker from using anything but Safari on their platform.
Microsoft got sued in an antitrust and lost just because they bundled IE with Windows - not for forbidding any other browser on the platform like Apple has been doing, which is way worse IMHO. And that's one of many reasons the DOJ is suing Apple for abusive business practices.
Eh, this is annoying because I agree with you in principle except there's a handful of things you're simply wrong about.
I'll start with the most eggregious one to save time so you can just click away but: Microsoft wasn't sued for bundling a browser, it was sued because it used one monopoly position to aid another. Apple mobile devices are 57% of the market in the US (which is the highest percentage globally from what I can tell at a glance) and a far cry from 1997 Windows which was a staggering 96%+ of all desktop operating systems in the US. That is a monopoly which is not explicitly forbidden in the US unless you use it to further domination in some other field: Web browsers were considered another field.
That said, while I agree with you in principle, in practice I really don't like the idea of a browser monoculture. We already see the effects of it with WebUSB (for real) and Manifestv3 which nobody really wants but is essentially foisted on us.
There are two types of people: those who think the web is an application delivery platform, and those who think it's a window into information.
The more leaky the sandbox the worse security will get over time (even if we put a lot of eggs into the basket) and the more bloated things will get. But the people in the first camp cannot see passed their next meal for want of a "better" application delivery system. Anything that keeps them at bay is welcome to me, even if it's something I also don't agree with.
"The central issue was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its IE web browser software with its Windows operating system. Bundling the two products was allegedly a key factor in Microsoft's victory in the browser wars of the late 1990s, as every Windows user had a copy of IE. It was further alleged that this restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera), since it typically took extra time to buy and install the competing browsers."
Yeah, Windows has a larger market share than Apple ever will, but that doesn't change the abusive business tactics Apple is using to satiate their greed.
When someone installs Chrome on iOS, they aren't getting Chrome, they are getting Safari with a wrapper. It's way worse than what Microsoft did with IE by simply bundling a browser with Windows - was it really so inconvenient to download and install a different browser when downloading and installing software is the de facto means of obtaining and running any software? I think the case against Microsoft was a bit absurd, honestly. And I don't care if Apple's market share is smaller, that isn't the point. They are preventing competition so that they can pocket even more money from developers.
>There are two types of people: those who think the web is an application delivery platform, and those who think it's a window into information.
And yet the web is both of those things. I think it's both, so am I a third type of person? What else are you getting wrong about this?
I’m don’t seem to be getting anything wrong as you haven’t disproved anything I said; in fact it reinforces it.
you don’t mention what a third type of person would look like, i only can see that you’re the first type from your comments. They’re fundamentally incompatible with each other (or, will cause major issues for each other) so being a blend of both is to be a walking contradiction.
That’s more complicated because the alleged harms are quite limited (it’s not like Android or desktop users are using PWAs much) and the biggest direct impact is the unalloyed good of “the web” not being synonymous with the Google Chrome roadmap. Everyone has benefited from proposed specs with significant negative privacy and security impacts not being adopted, so we have to ask how much the negatives outweigh the positives here.
Remember when Microsoft got sued in a class action because they simply bundled IE with Windows? Well Apple is doing far worse than that. The DOJ finally noticed and was suing Apple for it as well now, and rightfully so.
No, they are making it impossible to implement some kinds of web applications on the entire iOS platform so they can push developers to make a native app, where they can collect a significant percentage of any money made through the app.
The DOJ noticed and is suing Apple for doing this.
That comparison is somewhat more complicated because it was much more broadly tied into Microsoft's control of the by-far dominant PC operating system and was in the era where browsers were commercial products which cost money and significantly predated the rise of open source software.
That's likely why the DOJ is _not_ “suing Apple for doing this”. Browsers are conspicuously not on the list of charges and I think it's because in the subsequent 3 decades, we've had some key changes: all of the major browser engines are open source, very few people question the demand for standard libraries for rendering web content even in desktop apps, statistically nobody pays for web browsers. A large part of the Microsoft trial was discussing how they colluded to prevent PC vendors from bundling other companies' software but in this case Apple isn't trying to restrict another vendor's decision about what software they ship on their hardware and users don't show much sign of being bothered by the lack of PWAs, which have negligible usage on any platform. If someone was making a lot of money with a PWA on Android but having to pay Apple's in-app fees on iOS, that'd be a much stronger argument for market distortion.
The actual lawsuits are focused where Apple's behavior is more clearly like 90s Microsofts: restricting access to the NFC APIs, restricting game streaming platforms, and restricting the ability of WearOS watches to work with iOS phones or Apple Watches working with Android phones. Unlike PWAs, there are other mobile payment companies who'd love to ship tighter integration, customers who want more gaming options, or who want to have something like a Garmin device as tightly integrated as an Apple Watch. I don't know how likely the DOJ's case is to succeed but at least in those cases it's easy to show that there's a real market being affected whereas it's much harder to argue that a PWA market would suddenly spring into being or that Google is somehow being deprived of Chrome revenue by having to use WebKit on iOS. I'm aware of the technical arguments but it seems fairly challenging as a legal argument to make the case that the DOJ should respond to Apple abusing a monopoly position with a fifth of the market by allowing Google to push their share over 90%. The only way the web is better off out of this is if there's some coordinated simultaneous action.
>Browsers are conspicuously not on the list of charges
Wrong.
"60. For years, Apple denied its users access to super apps because it viewed them as
“fundamentally disruptive” to “existing app distribution and development paradigms” and
ultimately Apple’s monopoly power. Apple feared super apps because it recognized that as they
become popular, “demand for iPhone is reduced.” So, Apple used its control over app
distribution and app creation to effectively prohibit developers from offering super apps instead of competing on the merits.
61. A super app is an app that can serve as a platform for smaller “mini” programs
developed using programming languages such as HTML5 and JavaScript. By using
programming languages standard in most web pages, mini programs are cross platform, meaning
they work the same on any web browser and on any device. Developers can therefore write a
single mini program that works whether users have an iPhone or another smartphone."
A browser engine made by a company other than Apple is considered a "super app". It's the same thing Apple got sued for in Europe and lost, and now iOS in Europe has to allow other browser engines.
>A large part of the Microsoft trial was discussing how they colluded to prevent PC vendors from bundling other companies' software
That is pretty much what Apple is doing.
You can try to deny it all you want but Apple is being sued by the DOJ for many things, and one of this things is them forcing Safari on every web browser running on iOS.
I really don't care what Apple does to hobble Safari, so long as they let other more modern and capable browser engines on the platform.
You say that, but consider that they might not have used the word “browser” because super apps are not the same (your attempted redefinition is not how that term is normally used). That's going back to the App Store control of code distribution, there's certainly no technical reason why someone can't use HTML5 or JavaScript in an iOS app given how many do that every day.
Again, I'm not saying that what Apple is doing is blameless but it's important to read the actual DOJ cases so you can understand why these aren't the same. For example, you baldly assert “That is pretty much what Apple is doing” completely missing that Apple is only controlling what you can do with their hardware and is making no effort to prevent, say, Google or Samsung from doing something different on their own hardware. That's significantly different from Microsoft preventing Dell, IBM, Gateway, etc. from shipping alternate operating systems and those kind of legal distinctions matter a lot in court.
Apple already lost this exact fight in the EU where they are now forced to let Chrome use its own browser engine. The US lawsuit is definitely about this, as well as many other abusive practices. It's one of many reasons the DOJ is rightly suing them.
You're trying to weasel around the fact that "Super App" is definitely what a native browser app not using Safari is considered to be. The DOJ is explicitly mentioning HTML and Javascript, and you're just handwaving that away.
Good luck to you sir or madame, I don't care to continue this pointless back and forth.
No, it isn't. It's forcing developers to write native apps instead of web applications, which then lets Apple collect a significant percentage of any sales made through the app. This is why Apple is being sued for this by the DOJ, among many other abusive business practices.
I do not want to pay Apple for the privilege to develop a native app, as well as being forced to buy not just their mobile devices, but a full computer just to develop that native app on, when it could just be done as a web application. It's hurting me, a non-Apple user.
My web app works great on Android, but will never work on iOS because they refuse to implement APIs I need, and they won't let anyone else implement a browser with the APIs either.
I refuse to pay Apple and buy their hardware to be able to develop a native app for their walled-garden platform, where they can then further extort me for any money my users spend through the app I create.
And the DOJ agrees with me, which is why they are suing Apple for abusive business practices.
Your web app is statistically irrelevant. If PWAs were so much better on Android, then why do companies still make Android apps and web apps?
Well, one reason is that most Android phones being sold are so underpowered that you have to make a native app to get decent performance. Facebook for one found out early on that it couldn’t get away with just having an app that was a web wrapper because of low end Android devices.
So where are all of the great groundbreaking popular web apps?
And saying the current US government is in agreement with you about anything isn’t the positive thing you seem to be implying it is…
The vast majority of what people use a phone for works perfectly fine as a PWA on cheap hardware.
Apple is essentially responsible for the shit show that is react native, flutter and all the other cross platform crap. Just let us build for the web with basic support for a native like experience. Works fine on every platform but iOS and iPadOS.
I as a small business don't want to write three separate fucking apps. I don't want to charge customers more to cover that. It's a waste of everyone's time and money.
If it’s just Apple, then why are most companies still releasing Android apps.
So Apple is now responsible for the shit show of current web development and at the same time isn’t keeping up or doesn’t care about the web? Which is it?
I could swear that the two most popular web frameworks over the years either came from Google or Facebook.
How praytell is Apple responsible for Google’s Flutter - that they also have basically abandoned.
And run once run anywhere has never worked in the history of the industry.
> So Apple is now responsible for the shit show of current web development and at the same time isn’t keeping up or doesn’t care about the web? Which is it?
Yes. Apple, who once promoted the web as a distribution model, changed course once they realized that doing so would lead to less revenue. They have been actively hostile to open web standards and PWAs as a distribution model.
You get it. It's expensive to develop for iOS (or multiple native apps), and on top of that, once you do get into their app store, you pay Apple a significant percentage of any purchases made through the app, as well as the possibility that Apple will steal your idea and add it to their OS as they have done in the past. Fuck all that noise, when web apps are perfectly capable, secure, and the only thing stopping them is Apple's greed.
You really don't need to reply. I'm just going to give you canned response from here on out because I'm not wasting any more of my time with an Apple shill.
So you think I'm the only person who ever had this problem? The DOJ apparently disagrees with you.
>Well, one reason is that most Android phones being sold are so underpowered that you have to make a native app to get decent performance.
Bullshit. It has nothing to do with performance, it has everything to do with Apple's abusive business practices not allowing any other web view on their platform, and purposely hobbling their browser for anti-competitive greedy business reasons.
>So where are all of the great groundbreaking popular web apps?
So where are your goalposts moving next?
>And saying the current US government is in agreement with you about anything isn’t the positive thing you seem to be implying it is…
I didn't say the current US government, the DOJ under the previous administration is the one that filed the charges against Apple. But I know you aren't arguing in good faith, so maybe we should just agree to disagree.
Those were always my goalposts - web apps sucked when Microsoft tried to do it with Windows CE, RIM tried to do it, Palm and even Apple. They suck on mobile, electron apps sucked, etc
If the only reason web apps aren’t on iPhones is because of Safari and if there are other browser engines available for Android and Chrome is so much better, wouldn’t you expect to see great PWAs on Android? Especially with it being 70% of the world wide market?
> Bullshit. It has nothing to do with performance, it has everything to do with Apple's abusive business practices not allowing any other web view on their platform, and purposely hobbling their browser for anti-competitive greedy business reasons.
It doesn’t have anything to do with performance of iOS devices that’s true - because Apple doesn’t make any devices with substandard hardware with bad browser performance. But there are plenty of crappy Android device (most of them by sales volume) that do have subpar hardware performance.
But native apps are more performant than web based apps and web wrappers. Are you denying that?
> I didn't say the current US government, the DOJ under the previous administration is the one that filed the charges against Apple. But I know you aren't arguing in good faith, so maybe we should just agree to disagree.
One of us haven’t checked to see what the DOJ’s complaints are about - none of which are alternate browser engines…
>web apps sucked when Microsoft tried to do it with Windows CE, RIM tried to do it, Palm
Wow, that's quite the reach. Again, bad faith.
>wouldn’t you expect to see great PWAs on Android?
I do, YMMV. I even created one myself. But again, bad faith from you.
>because Apple doesn’t make any devices with substandard hardware
"You're holding it wrong" proves you wrong.
>that do have subpar hardware performance.
None of this is about a hardware dick-measuring contest, but you sure are trying to move the goalposts that way. Again, bad faith from you.
>But native apps are more performant than web based apps and web wrappers. Are you denying that?
This is another logical fallacy. I'm done with you, you're comments are not grounded in anything except your hatred of anything not Apple.
>One of us haven’t checked to see what the DOJ’s complaints are about - none of which are alternate browser engines…
Again, just more bullshit from you.
"The complaint also alleges that Apple’s conduct extends beyond these examples, affecting web browsers, video communication, news subscriptions, entertainment, automotive services, advertising, location services, and more. Apple has every incentive to extend and expand its course of conduct to acquire and maintain power over next-frontier devices and technologies."
The "affecting web browsers" part is exactly the thing I described.
Apple already lost that exact thing in Europe, because Europe sued them for it too, and now you can use alternative browser engines on iOS in Europe. Apple's going to lose that one in the US too.
You really don't need to reply. I'm just going to give you canned response from here on out because I'm not wasting any more of my time with an Apple shill.
So you have magically become the first person in history who has created a web app that is just as performant as a native app with local assets, written in a language that is compiled down to assembly and delivered as such (iOS) or even close enough in the case of Android native apps these days (yes I know Java has come a long way, that’s just the point)?
You should be working for Facebook or Google, they both came to the conclusion that their apps should use native frameworks for
performance reasons…
It very much is about hardware. Most Android phones suck statistically (yes I know there are some performant ones. But that’s not what most of the world is buying) and your web app is not going to perform well on them.
By the way, what’s the ARR on your web app? Monthly active users? Have you tested it on one of the low end free phones?
And it’s not me being an Apple shill, your web app probably sucks like every other web app that has ever existed on mobile. I wouldn’t say the same about a native Android app.
You really don't need to reply. I'm just going to give you canned response from here on out because I'm not wasting any more of my time with an Apple shill.
> Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
This love for Apple seems to be a very US-American thing.
Apple computers are typically rather mostly used by people from media and audio production (+ some hipsters). GNU/Linux has its very vocal users, but as a matter of fact, it is rather a niche outside of nerd circles.
I would thus rather say many European countries are more Microsoft-centered, even though at least in Germany I would say that people deeply hate and distrust the more and more spying functionalities that Microsoft introduces into its software. So I would claim this current dominance of the Microsoft ecosystem is fragile.
Surprisingly, at least in Germany I observe that Microsoft plans to stop providing updates to Windows 10 (and forces the users to buy new computers) has made quite a lot of mainstream users to at least consider switching to the GNU/Linux ecosystem:
It is perhaps difficult to understand to people who are used to the US mentality, but the fact that Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will be the last Windows, and after that broke this promise (and particular importantly: cease to provide further updates for Windows 10 despite this promise) is considered to be near "high treason" by many PC users - a nigh-unforgivable sin. In particular US-American companies should really learn to understand that (in the eyes of German users, who consider such promises to be sacred) if you give a promise, and break it, this is (I am only slightly exaggerating) something that the CEO (or even the board) of the respective company should better commit suicide for because of the shame that he brought to the company.
A lot of people are annoyed with Microsoft in the US as well, although I guess we’ll see if that translates into switching.
> Apple computers are typically rather mostly used by people from media and audio production (+ some hipsters).
For what it’s worth, this is the sort of stuff I meant by “stylish and cool,” these are the fashionable people, right? That doesn’t make their decisions good, at all (I intentionally picked the description “stylish and cool,” not “good and technically solid.”)
>
For what it’s worth, this is the sort of stuff I meant by “stylish and cool,” these are the fashionable people, right?
The difference is: outside of these bubbles (somewhat excluding the audio production people: these are in my opinion rather pragmatic about their computers; it's just that Apple historically had the best support for their requirements) Apple is not considered stylish and cool, but rather ridiculed, and fun is made of this Apple-fanboi-ism.
So, it's rather some "Apple bubble" where the people inside it (in particular the hipsters and some media people inside this bubble) praise each other (and themselves :-) ) for being stylish, cool and having a refined taste, but outside of this bubble this judgment is not shared.
Since when does carrying Apple device(s) mean we have goodwill for Apple?
I dev on a Mac all day and own 2 macs at home. Why?
* not going to try to convince the whole family to change and I want the various family & imessage features that everyone uses to all work
* all the developers at my company use macs and I don't want to have to set up my own unique configurations for everything using WSL and stuff.
* In the US, often the Android versions of "apps" you're forced to use by random businesses (instead of the Web which usually would work fine), are pawned off on an offshore team, and no execs use Android so there's no accountability when those apps suck.
* Windows also has many recent disappointments (ads in the start menu, increasingly dumber and worse settings screens), so they're doing a bad job of winning over people like me, dampening my enthusiasm to switch.
* Linux is cool but I'm too busy to want a project as my daily driver PC.
I have nothing but scorn for Tim Cook's Apple and have zero goodwill for them. They haven't shipped an actual smart idea for any of their platforms besides maybe Shortcuts (which they bought), and even then it took them 3 years to let me run automations unattended.
I, like many developers was handed a Macbook Pro upon starting my first day at the company. I gave MacOS a shot (again, I used to be a mac sysadmin at a design company), but was happier when I could install Windows on it. Finder is a joke, and so many other things about MacOS are just stupid. Sure, Windows has some crap too, but it lacks the pretentiousness and ridiculous things I dislike about Apple products. I also covered the white lit-up Apple logo on the laptop screen with red-circle-strikeout sticker, because I really disliked Apple after being a sysadmin getting all too familiar with their products and OS.
> In the US, often the Android versions of "apps" you're forced to use by random businesses (instead of the Web which usually would work fine), are pawned off on an offshore team
I haven't seen this.
Also I would imagine those businesses would do the same for their iOS development? It's odd that you would assume they don't.
The point is that regardless of whether one or both are offshored, the VP or CEO will get on your ass immediately if the iOS app has a crash or even a layout bug because they all use iOS personally. Whereas the most influential person in the company who even owns an Android device tends to be some IT manager.
YMMV but this is precisely how it worked in my last two jobs. For instance, in one company, we outsourced both, but the Android app was developed entirely in India, whereas the iOS team was supervised and led by a US-based contractor that we could (and did frequently) talk to.
Of course, only a tiny number of such "commercial" apps are native, 90% are some cross-platform framework. But the iOS versions tend to get far more attention when sloppy habits and lack of skill result in lag, race conditions, bugs, etc.
PS: I belive completely that this dynamic either does not exist, or is actually in REVERSE, in countries where Android is more dominant. In the US, iOS users dominate the top 80% of the orgchart in basically every company besides Google.
While rarely offshored, a decade and a half of experience in the tech sphere shows that Android is almost universally treated as a second class citizen. Some companies won't bother supporting it at all, the majority will have an Android team 1/5-1/3 the size of the iOS team.
There's a huge regional variation on this. In some parts of the US, Apple is everywhere. In others, it's rare enough to be worthy of comment when it gets spotted in the wild.
But I've yet to meet a person that said, "Oh, Rachel and Chandler from Friends... maybe Windows IS cool!". It wasn't cool, it wasn't anything. Apple was trendy with the designers and creative types, and Windows was what you probably used at your doldrums day job. The only place where MS has ever been "cool" is with gamers. I think your "Walmart" analogy is a perfect one.
I used to think that way, and I’m not rushing to apply to Microsoft, but I do notice the various divisions, studios, stock price growth and comparable RSU packages that all make me totally forget about its antiquated branding and association
Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
I guess generating hype by acquisition and increase valuation cause more profit than developing a real product.
I'm beginning to think that using Microsoft services(yes, GitHub included) is morally questionable behaviour right now. I can't support the current Microsoft behaviour of laying off many employees so casually.
Yes, the whole XBox division has been a mess, especially after ABK.
However XBox plus Microsoft Gaming Studios, is still one of the biggest group of AAA publishers, they have a big enough slice of the market.
Hence why now they're dominating PlayStation charts with cross-platform games.
Many Microsoft haters don't have an good enough idea of how big they have become on games industry, regardless of layoffs and such.
SteamOS keeps being around until they feel like doing a netbooks like move, taking all their games out of Steam, or whatever else Microsoft might think of.
Hence why I regularly complain Valve should keep trying to bring developers to target GNU/Linux natively instead of translating Windows games.
Its not a stretch to think that they will add Steam to the next gen Xbox. They are dead last in the console wars and have been for basically 2 generations. I don't think they will do it out of benevolence but I think they are the "throw shit against the wall and see if anything sticks" phase before just giving up and exiting the market.
I couldn't believe the number of people who were saying that "Microsoft are the good guys now" or "Microsoft loves open source now".
Microsoft stopped openly attacking open source at a time when open source was clearly winning:
- most servers were running linux
- most phones and tablets were running android
- people were buying tablets instead of desktops
- Google was openly promoting open source through GSOC
- large corporations were regularly releasing their tools as open source
Most importantly, developers openly hated Microsoft for holding the industry back (remember IE6?).
So they did what any good corporations does - they went along with the winning side.
And now they they have positive emotional connotations in devs' minds, or at least organizational buy-in again, they can do what corporations do best - making money by abusing their position with barely any competition.
---
The lesson here are:
- Corporations should simply not have this amount of power.
- Corporations are amoral, they don't have values, views or beliefs. They are systems designed for optimizing goals. You can never _trust_ a corporation - not because they are untrustworthy but because trust is a human-to-human level concept, it does not have any meaning in human-to-system interaction.
I think big corporations are not amoral, they are immoral. There is no wealth that has been built obeying morality or showing emphaty. Once them two become obstacles for profits, they will be thrown out.
The people in charge or corporations certainly are very often immoral.
I don't think ascribing morality to a system is useful when it's comprised of many people who can be replaced at any time.
But, I also think that top down hierarchical power structures are fundamentally harmful, abusive and exploitative so you do have a point. Cooperatives are much healthier structures.
Also check the ActivityPub protocol extension for forge federation at https://forgefed.org which may be on the roadmap [0] of the Forgejo federation support, after they have implemented basic ActivityPub protocol support. Right now ForgeFed needs to mature a lot further, but also needs the help of the developer community to achieve that.
This is what people forget about GitHub. Its popularity isn't because it has the best tools on the market. It is popular because of the network effect. It's the social network of developer tooling.
I don't really want to be using a Microsoft product but I use github for the same reason I use Linkedin: because it benefits my career to be visible on these social networks.
That kind of ideology is great in principle, but if you struggle to get a job because you have limited presence in an employer's market, then you're practising deontology without a profession.
I'm an opinionated MS-hater, like most of my peers who lived through 90s Microsoft, like I had. But I also have a family to feed and bills to pay. Sometimes pragmatism trumps ideology.
I have PRs open on five different OSS projects at the moment. My throughput is being limited by trying to remember all the details of PRs I filed 3-6 weeks ago.
I thinK I have to admit to myself that as little as I like github having all the projects, I'd be less effective having to track inboxes across half a dozen different hosting platforms.
If you made something like Mastodon, where alerts propagate across instances, I could probably deal. But without that? No, I'll pass.
The problem with a federation system like mastodon/activitypub is that relying on propagation hurts usability and discoverability. [tangled.sh](https://tangled.sh/) is to federated forgejo what bluesky is to mastodon, where it relies on atproto to have decentralization without sacrificing ux
There is an ActivityPub protocol extension that is specific to federation of code forges, called ForgeFed. It is an NLnet funded project, that receives funding through EU Next Generation Internet programs. But the project is struggling, because of a lack of community help and implementers giving feedback to help steer and mature the specs.
It’s a great piece of software. I set it up in a Docker container, and have a few of their CI runners on a couple machines I own. Great experience so far.
I think there’s some risk with this though too - more and more is behind the enterprise tier. People try to work around this in various ways but its an unsatisfying experience. For e.g. trying to enforce merge request approval with pipeline stages.
It's funny. Nobody complains that there is a lack of free multi-platform desktop GUI profiling tools for Go, Python, Ruby, Elixir etc. Somehow we just accept those languages are only for web services, web apps, and command-line utilities.
What is the problem with Microsoft keeping "nice to have" desktop GUI stuff for their own proprietary ecosystem when everything else has open sourced? Including the primitives needed for the community to build their own GUI and developer tooling stuff, just like JetBrains did with Rider.
Yeah guys, what's the difference between organic projects that have been open source since the start and a global technology conglomerate open sourcing things later that compete for mind share against those projects.
What could be the difference? Oh dear, I just can't think of anything.
This is an odd comment. Xamarin has never been relevant. GitHub is historically OSS focused. Xamarin was some weird niche product for Windows devs. Hardly any overlap with GitHub’s core audience. I don’t know what will happen next, but hodgepodge of weird MS tech isn’t the lens to view this through.
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
On HN I keep hearing that associating .NET with Windows is outdated perception.
Writing JVM languages I feel that the developer experience is pretty much the same on any OS. It seems this cannot be said for .NET?
If you're writing a server or a web app then its good and runs well.
Visual Studio is still not ported to Linux or Mac, you need to use Rider or VSCode. If you use JetBrains for Java, using Rider will feel good no matter where you are.
The GUI library situation is a tough one. In many ways its far more advanced than other languages but their newest attempt is not as good as the older Windows only API. But what other language is graded for its great native GUI library?
I'm not calling MS cool but at the same time I think the goalposts are different.
Java IDEs have historically been made by maintainers of the language.
Netbeans was a product acquired by Sun, Sun Forte was its "Professional" variant in Solaris, and Oracle still takes care of it in the context of Solaris and Oracle Linux.
Eclipse was a rewrite from Visual Age products, originall written in Smalltalk, by IBM, and IBM keeps being a Java vendor with their own implementations.
I do get the sentiment to some degree. Part of it is that Microsoft does have a conflict of interest as an OS vender. They do need to show that they aren't/won't be abusing that. That does put them in a position where they're asked to go above and beyond as a form of litmus test.
They tried, by forking Xamarin Forms into MAUI, and even then they ignored Linux. It's really rough though, to the point many projects use it as just a glorified webview for Blazor. I expect it to eventually go into a silent maintenance mode along with WinUI 3.
Avalonia is the go-to library for cross-platform UI in .NET right now. But Microsoft's own apps have been switching to web stacks, in a clear case of "Do as I say, not as I do."
There is actually a much better but less well-known open source library in .NET: Avalonia. Look it up their gallery of apps. Avalonia is the cross platform version of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) libs. It is quite good for desktop apps and many commercial pieces of software uses it.
MAUI apparently has Windows, Mac and Mobile support but no distro Linux support (unless Wine counts). You could use the web stack to be truly cross platform.
It can. DX is pretty much the same for backend and CLI stuff using VS Code on Mac, Linux and Windows. I'm working daily on C# backend and CLI stuff on a Mac (those are the dev machines at my employer). DX is on par with Go and Rust (at least dotnet CLI, LSP, Debugger, I can't speak for the profiler as I've never used it). I like the Rust tooling most, but dotnet CLI is not far behind.
Language and std lib wise, C# sits in the sweet spot.
We have a few .NET applications running on the infrastructure on Linux hosts and it's just like every other thing.
But in some contexts, e.g. PowerBI, it pulls in a dependency and BOOM it's Windows Only to the point that not even Wine or Proton can help you. For something, that should be, mind you, a dumb SQL proxy like the PowerBI Embedded Gateway.
I think the success of Proton and Wine in games clouds the vision of Linux community. The contributors did great work on them. However the gaming API of Windows is a very limited slice of the vast API.
Games are quite standalone programs they don't depend deeply integrated Win32 stuff. They don't even use standard UI stuff from Win32. With Vulkan, porting DirectX became very viable and that was the grunt work. There are no DCOM servers or OLE stuff in games which is where Windows API actually becomes huge and sometimes nastier. Business apps however deeply depend on those.
It supports Linux as a running target for console apps, which can be servers, background apps, systemd apps, etc. So everything except UI apps.
The development experience with Rider is also great on Linux. I think you need to be more specific with the complaints because I have many beefs with Microsoft's approach to many things, but I could not pick up on what you meant.
You can use Avalonia to develop cross-platform apps with .NET.
GUI stuff from Windows depends deeply on Win32 and how Windows's core APIs work. So expecting Microsoft to port stuff like .Net Windows Forms is meaningless. They are open source though. Maybe with some completion effort Wine can run them.
I'm an Avalonia UI user myself, but didn't want to mention it since Microsoft themselves have done nothing to contribute to its existence. The UI rendering for Avalonia on Linux is not a Microsoft technology so I think that praise should go to the Avalonia team and whoever is developing Skia (Google?).
I love C# and .NET is amazing for some specific use cases like REST APIs but there's so much stuff that just doesn't work or needs a lot more effort to get somewhere.
MAUI is a mess.
Blazor will never work as a general solution for full stack web apps. Even if a small app didn't have to download like 10MB of WASM code the DX is terrible and performance just as bad. Elixir Phoenix developed with a fraction of the budget is just so far ahead.
C# hot reload has been broken for years. I doubt it will ever be as good as what you get in JS with Vite.
Minimal APIs are a great idea but 4 years later and still fundamental features like validation are missing (it's coming in .NET 10).
They've been investing a ton of effort into Aspire. It's cool but is it more important than core features?
And now with AI, Microsoft is more distracted than ever and I'm starting to regret getting into .NET at all.
I'm not sure what you mean by some of the things you write, but the part about Microsoft being "cool guy phase" was hilarious.
I'd say Microsoft buying GitHub was part of a strategy to not lose relevance in the world that moves slowly towards Open Source Software. Or put another way, the world moves in a direction away from Microsoft, and by capturing GitHub they can manipulate the outcomes that would otherwise have been adversarial to Microsoft interests. It's just like when Microsoft forked Java back in the 1990s, and later created .NET. The whole VSCode or Visual Studio thing... it's just Microsoft Word for software engineers, and the whole point is to create an ecosystem that locks people into the ecosystem.
To think in terms of what Microsoft does, you have to step back and look into economic theory, at least a little bit. There is this idea in economics about isolated economies, and integrated economies. For example, Europe or North America relies on cheap manufactured goods from China, and so China's economy is intrinsically linked (integrated) into the economies of Europe or North America. THAT is the idea of what Microsoft does. They start by adding value, a soft-dependency you might say, and then make moves to becoming a hard dependency... to put into terms of a dependency graph. Then they link to dependency graphs together GitHub into VSCode, OpenAI into VSCode, One Drive into GitHub or One Drive into Hotmail...
I'll say for sure, at least Microsoft has a strategy, unlike Google where they seem to have a lot of failed projects.
I’ve been in the industry for 30 years professionally and 10 years as hobbyist who paid as much attention to the industry as one could before the internet in the 80s early 90s including lying as a 9th grader pretending to be a big spender to get a free subscription to MacWeek and PCWeek.
At no point in time was Microsoft one of the cool guys.
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales - I think MSFT doesn't care just as they don't care about GUI workloads, because only thing they care now is having developers run their stuff on Azure. You don't need VS for those cloud .NET apps and you don't need front end frameworks like Forms, Xamarin or MAUI. Seems like C++ is also something they would not be interested investing into when they can get people into cloud easier with C#.
Why do people need to create anthropomorphising narratives around companies? Don't be any company's cheerleader, use the stuff that's best for you (and the environment)
The same way cheerleading USA presidents doesn't go away, but if you look around you see things like Switzerland with direct democracy that just works without it.
Microsoft not being terrible was a zero interest rate phenomenon. The news today is a lot worse than just Github not being independent anymore. It sounds like literally the entire development division is being rolled into this "Core AI" business unit.
When Nadella announced plans to double the company's revenue by 2030, it was pretty clear that the enshitifiction was going to ramp up significantly, but it doesn't seem like it will ever relent now that they have to squeeze out more free cash flow to cover all of this AI capex. Windows is practically malware at this point, they've made extremely deep cuts to .NET engineering headcount, and it's just going to get worse.
fifteen years ago I predicted that if we ever have a bloody AI revolution, the most likely case would be that it would be Microsoft's fault because they are the kings of unintended consequences.
The second most likely case being some AI figuring out how to hack AWS to steal compute time, probably by getting access to billing information.
Microsoft seems to be slowly pulling ahead at the moment.
It is in their nature. It takes a lot of work to excise bad practices from an organization and removing the guilty parties is only step one. Everything continues to work the way the bad actors wanted them to work for a long, long time.
Gates was bad. Balmer was worse. He was still in charge 11 years ago, in a company he helped build 40 years ago. Their personalities are the bones of that organization.
this is a mystery to me: ms has all the money in the world to make it right.. yet they can't. windows ecosystem is like one of those eastern european barnyards, where animals live and die between old halves tractors and rusty Lada(s).
That was a mask the corporation put on in a bid to lure in the younger crowd who doesn't remember all the underhanded stuff Microsoft did in the past. But they haven't really changed at all.
The thing that surprises me the most about Satya is how he managed to survive in MS so long if he really is different from the previous administration.
> Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over
I'm going to re-post something that I wrote in 2022:
I'm a bit surprised at how many of my friends have jumped ship to Visual Studio Code, including those who are very much for free software. They have always been in the business of embrace, extend, extinguish[0]. People tend to forget how evil M$ used to be because recently they have seemed like a beacon for Open Source, but I think they are just still evil[1].
I think we're still dealing with the same Microsoft that we've dealt with through the 90s. They are not a champion of open source, and they are still up to their old tricks.[2]
I always wonder at these attributions. Like all windows versions gave you bluescreen and ran Microsoft excel. To me not one stood out particularly bad or good compared to the others maybe after Windows 98 service pack something
Windows 98 was so bad when it came to drivers, lol.
It had the plug and play standard but that only worked half of the time, and if you messed up by doing something like connecting the peripherals before installing the driver you could BSOD while trying to install the drivers and have to rescue the whole OS. Happened to me enough for me to remember it.
And my sister demonstrated how you could delete the recycle bin if you were bad enough at computers, which was fun.
I've also had nearly as many kernel panics on OSX or hangs on Linux as I have had BSODs on Windows (when graphed as a ratio of use over time).
All OSes have flaws and issues, there would never be a perfect operating system with our current understanding of computers, and that's ok.
That being said, my critique does not include OSes that spy on you (for what will be considered a several trillion dollar crime syndicate when this era is written down in history), which is its own entire rant.
Windows Vista got saner permissions support and made the OS survive certain kinds of driver crashes, but on launch a lot of existing software and drivers weren't updated to support those changes so it got a bad reputation. Nobody gave Windows proper credit for these advancements until Windows 7 which had a cleaner launch since most software and drivers were already updated for Vista's changes.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
This is Microsoft's primary strategy. There are a lot of victims out there.
... he says after spending several months porting a win32 app to Silverlight as part of a Gold Partner/MS case study with much fanfare, only to have to spent the next few years backporting everything into the win32 app it never replaced, and then it was shit canned and only the win32 version remains.
We're planning to rewrite it in Qt at some point as some of our customers use RHEL.
I once worked for a company which outsourced the development of a Silverlight app for $1 million and then canned the whole thing one year later. It's just crazy how these life-changing amounts of money are thrown around like garbage in this industry.
Visual Studio Code seems to be their big open source push, besides GitHub. Everyone uses it, and most development environments and UX are based on it. Used to be Atom, I remember.
Pedantic, but VS Code does not share a lineage with Atom, besides the fact that it is built on Electron (which was, admittedly, originally built for Atom.)
What EGreg is saying is that most development environments and UX used to be based on Atom, while they are now based on VS Code.
EGreg didn't mean to say that VS Code used to be Atom, or is based on Atom, though I agree his wording was a bit ambiguous and it could be interpreted that way.
Oh interesting. This claim makes more sense, but I'm actually surprised by it too - my memory of things is that Sublime Text 2 (released 2012) was one of the most popular editors for scripting languages (JS, PHP, Python, etc.) However, there was a long period of inactivity before Sublime Text 3 was released (2017) with support for Python 3 plugins, and ST was getting stale as Python 2 was slowly phased out.
During that time, Atom was released (2014). But I don't recall it ever being especially popular - at least outside of the JS ecosystem. For one thing, it was kind of slow on release (people still complain about Electron!) and while it offered a lot of customization, these customization often seemed to worsen its performance. It was VS Code that really seemed to draw a wider audience from my perspective.
That said, I switched to vim around the time Atom came out, so I may be out of touch. I doubt there are any solid stats anywhere...
I took the claim ("Atom used to be the base, now VS Code is") to mean that custom DE toolchains used to be predominantly built on Atom but are now built on VS Code, not that VS Code was built on Atom. (The statement is pretty clearly saying VS Code replaced Atom as the base for something else, not that Atom was VS Code's base.)
I don't understand how VS Code is an "open source push". It's technically open source, but open source doesn't seem to be strategically important to it.
Heard of Apple Game Porting Toolkit? That's built on the back of Wine.
Microsoft has been open sourcing a bunch of their programs for a while now too. Majority are inconsequential but they are still nice to see. People on Linux OS's are excited about Microsoft calculator being open source but these open source projects still show that some people there have interest in the push.
I remember all the PR about Satya Nadella making the company cool, modern, user-friendly, and open source friendly. Thought wow, he must also be a hypnotist.
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only,
The monetisation of .NET is less about selling Windows licences, and more about selling Azure compute etc. The OS used on Azure is less relevant, you pay MS either way.
You can run .net without azure very easily. I personally have 4x web apps written in .net 8, razor. They used to be on a aws windows instance years ago but it was overly expensive for what I needed. Then I switched them to a small digital ocean server running ubuntu. When I started these apps I wrote them on windows 7 for windows server. I switched the server probably 2 years ago. I recently made the switch off of windows to ubuntu as my daily driver, instead of going to 11. Everything still works great. I do miss visual studio, but I am getting used to linux and its tools now. Point is, server is running and there is zero azure involved.
That's true, and we're all well aware of it. I've done that for a job too.
Nevertheless, the point stands. MS gives away a lot of the .NET tools for free. It is a "Loss leader", "to draw customers into a store where they are likely to buy other goods." (1).
"You can't run .NET without Azure" is not what I said, what I said is that .NET is free, but MS believes that continuing to invest in it, drives Azure sales. Ask yourself why MS spends money developing tools such as Aspire or YARP.
The fact that you specifically didn't buy some Azure today means little: this is still the plan, and it still seems to be broadly working. I have heard MS people say as much, and also say that the side-effect of some people running .NET on AWS etc is fine too.
No, but I code for Microsoft platforms since MS-DOS 3.3, so one gets to know how it all works, when having read so many docs, MSJ articles, MSDN, PDC and BUILD sessions, podcats and what not.
I have been a .NET dev for the past 8 years and have switched fully to Rider. The only thing I miss from VS is the quick nav to see all the properties and methods in a file on the top bar. Everything else is vastly better:
- Auto complete is a bit smarter (even the free AI suggestions are better)
- Refactoring across files is often faster
- Package management is undoubtedly the latest performance difference. I would go from taking 1-2 minutes from using VS's "Manage packages for solution" to under 10 seconds in Rider.
- In VS there's always a noticeable delay when the debugger hits a breakpoint / exception and the IDE takes a few seconds to actually display. This is about halved in Rider.
- The built in terminal is vastly better than VS's, though not as good as Windows Terminal
Rider is very nice and a perfectly competent development environment. It gets first class support and often has the ability to test preview features from dotnet upcoming language and runtimes.
It's biggest problem is that it's not Visual Studio, so it is very hard for people who have lived in VS for a decade to move over.
It does away with some bloat and also provides some features of Resharper natively instead of as an extension.
You can quite literally use this as your primary development environment.
Rider is far better than VS for everything apart from Desktop UI Apps and perhaps Blazor WASM hot reloading, which is itself far behind the UX of JS/Vite hot reloading, so I avoid it and just use Blazor static rendering. Otherwise VS tooling is far behind Intellij/Rider for authoring Web dev assets, inc. TypeScript.
I switched to Rider/VS Code long before moving to Linux, which I'm happy to find works just as well in Linux. Not a fan of JetBrains built-in AI Integration (which IMO they've fumbled for years), but happy with Augment Code's Intellij Plugin which I use in both Rider and VS Code.
VS - great if you are Windows only shop for dev and want all the bells and whistles
Rider - has all of the the nice things JetBrains does and the best option on Mac if you need advanced refactoring; UI feels a bit cluttered at time (though they improved this).
VSC - for whatever reason, I always end up back to VSC for .NET for backends. Good enough, fast, and lightweight enough. Plays nicely with Node and full-stack monorepos.
I would commit to VSC and try to make it work. If you find you need advanced refactoring support, then try out Rider.
You really think Microsoft has been ”cool” for the past decade or so?
First the rampant spyware, then they gradually wreck every single piece of software into unusable buggy AI-slop-mess just to play the trashy MBA valuation games.
I still hold nostalgic value for the old OSes (say up to XP/7) but everything after has been nothing but maximal profit extraction.
The '90s/00s era of people hating on M$ and picturing them as the Borg had left room to the 10s/20s of MS being "friendly" and releasing open source and free things (typescript, vs code, core.net, wsl, work on python etc) and not completely screwing up acquisitions like GitHub or Mojang.
Windows became adware, and office became some crappy online thing, but _microsoft_ had became nicer and gained goodwill.
This seems to have started evaporating in the last year or so.
Only people without any sense of reality believed this. Being exploitative is a core feature of MS, since its foundation. It's like believing a serpent won't bite you. They're in the middle of the embrace, extend and extinguish cycle for open source technologies.
What about Apple there? Bringing golden offerings to their god-king and so supporting the further corruption of the regime. One of the few with the power/money to stand against them instead kneeling before Trump like a teen beauty pageant hopeful.
as a former MSFT employee (who quit for reasons, well before the layoffs) I am not permitted to disparage or portray my former employer in a negative light.
I'm just mentioning this for no reason whatsoever. It popped into my head, for some reason.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Can you elaborate on why you believe that? I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework. I mean, their Win32 API is still alive and well, as well as MFC, ATL, etc. WPF still gets some minor updates too here and there.
I have no idea what you mean by web, too. ASP.NET is perhaps one of the better maintained web frameworks around. What exactly do you interptet as a concern?
Blazor is also Microsoft's alternative to JavaScript and it's main value proposition is being able to write webassembly apps using Microsoft technology exclusively. What do you think is replacing this?
Pointing out Aspire is even weirder. It's a containerization framework to help with observability and manage distributed applications. What exactly is the overlap?
I sense a great deal of confusion in your comments. What exactly are you trying to say?
> I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework.
WinUI3 is dead, lol. I tried to migrate from UWP to WinUI3, but it is literally dead. There doesn’t seem to be any team at MS actively working on it, the community calls have died, and the last build conf didn’t have any WinUI3 talks, all AI stuff. Yes, you can build apps with WinUI3, but development and support for it has stalled and I couldn’t justify moving the companies product over to WinUI3.
No they aren't placing all their chips on WinUI3, only those that never went through all reboots since Windows 8, believe that.
WPF got taken out of legacy mode at BUILD 2024, exactly because hardly anyone outside Redmond cares about WinUI 3.
Anyone that has been long enough around, has seen ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Core MVC (not compatible with MVC 5 predecessor), Razor Pages, Minimal APIs, Blazor,...
So it is a mess doing consulting and depending on what .NET version the customer team is allowed to use, and existing code, what gets to be used by that portfolio.
Minimal APIs have been designed to bring in Python and JavaScript developers into .NET, which many of us see as not working at all, while having created the need now everyone creates their own controllers infractruture, as means to tame having minimal APIs all over the place, there are even MVVM like frameworks now for that purpose.
Blazor is really only usable as path forward for those still stuck in WebForms, due to the similar approach to do Web UIs, and to .NET shops without frontend teams.
In the age of distributed computing with microservices and frontend teams, it is a hard sell to make them adopt Blazor and learn C#, instead of React, Angular, Vue.
At least they have adopted TypeScript, the next language that Anders Hejlsberg decided to focus on.
Aspire is something that has been pivoted, now they try to sell it as Microsoft's Pulumi, but everyone has to write the orchestration code in C#, thus only relevant to .NET shops.
Maddy Montaquila has said in a few .NET podcast interviews that they are trying to use Aspire as means to sell .NET to UNIX shops, given the low adoption numbers outside the traditional Microsoft shops, even after almost a decade being open source.
> it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3
Not it isn't, based on the paltry resources and team size they have working on it, the pace of bug fixes (non existent), the fact that in 2024 they stated WPF is on par with WinUI 3 as a recommended GUI framework. I'm not sure what signals to you they are "all in" on it.
Look at the size of this thread [0], and how many people tried to give WinUI 3 a chance but have been burned by lack of support. This is not the sentiment that surrounds a platform that has a lot of chips betting on it.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
... what?
They could do a better job with the native frameworks, but the rest of these are completely unrelated. For web, MVC is pretty much dead and you might want to use Blazor SSR instead. Web API via controllers is still supported, but minimal API endpoints are the hot thing. Blazor is being treated as a first class product. Aspire is there to assist in local orchestration of distributed applications... and is built on Blazor.
Exactly that, now try to pick the best one of all of those on enterprise projects, depending on the version they are using, and there is no budget for updates.
My deepest concern at this time isn't that AI eventually gets written down to nothing; because I don't think it will. Its that these companies are so scared of being out-competed by an AI-first competitor that they're willing to make deep sacrifices to their core businesses just to effectively virtue signal that they're AI first and unable to be out-competed.
It is deeply concerning because all things point to reality shaking out with irony. None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it. Apple has nothing, Microsoft wants to put spyware on every Windows computer and builds the worst coding agent on the market despite having privileged access to every line of source code ever written, Meta put a chatbot in Whatsapp then decided paying researchers ten mil would solve their problems, Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
Their fear is going to lose them everything. Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed. Everyone learned that lesson and decided "we'll never be unwilling to innovate ever again"; but now their core product stable undergoes constant churn that is pissing off customers and driving competition to eat their lunch.
There is long-term, durable beauty in investing majority effort into making Github the single best place to host and organize code. That need is never going away. There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world, no one doubts that, but its a matter of proportion and humility. Microsoft/Github will never build AI products that lead the market. Its not a technology problem; its an organizational and political one. But that's ok, because they could dominate the market with the world's best code hosting platform, an average AI strategy, and a library of integrations with the rest of the frontier world.
> Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product.
YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.
I think folks sleep on Google around here. They are slow but they have so many compelling iterative AI usecases that even a BigTech org can manage it eventually.
Apple and Microsoft are rightly getting panned, Apple in particular is inexcusable (but I think they will have a unique offering when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for).
Google was the absolute king of AI (previously "ML") for at least 10 years of the last 20. They are also an absolute behemoth of tech and have consistently ranked among the most valuable companies in the world for multiple years, valued at trillions of dollars today. Hell, they're on version 7 and production year 10 of their custom AI ASIC family.
When considering the above, the amount of non-force-fed "modern AI" use they've been able to drive is supposed to be shown by things to the level of a question button on YouTube and some incremental overlaying of Gemini to Docs? What does that leave the companies without the decade head start, custom AI hardware, and trillions to spend to look to actually do worth a damn in their products with the tech?
I'm (cautiously) optimistic AI will have another round or two of fast gains again in the next 5 years. Without it I don't think it leaves the realm of niche/limited uses in products in that time frame. At least certainly not enough that building AI into your product is expected to make sense most of the time yet.
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
lol if this is the perfect example, "AI" in general is in a sad place. I've tried to use it a handful of times and each time it confidently produced wrong results in a way that derailed my quest for an answer. In my experience it's an anti-feature in that it seems to make things worse.
The best and latest Gemini Pro model is not SOTA. The only good things it has are the huge context and the low API price. But I had to stop using it because it kept contradicting itself in the walls of text it produces. (My paid account was forced to pay for AI with a price hike so I tried for a couple of months to see if I could make it work with prompt engineering, no luck).
Google researchers are great, but Engineering is dropping like a stone, and management is a complete disaster. Starting with their Indian McKinsey CEO moving core engineering teams to India.
There are problems with every model, none of them are perfect. I've found Gemini to be very good but occasionally gets stuck in loops: it does, however, seem to detect the loop and stop. It's more cost effective than the Claude models, and Gemini has regular preview releases. I would rate it between sonnet and opus except it's cheaper and faster than both.
For whatever reason there are tasks that work better on one model compared to another, which can be quite perplexing.
No amount of big context window can stop the model from context poisoning. So in a sense, it's a gimmick when you start having the feel of how bad the output is.
Yeah exactly. The MacBook Pro is by far the most capable consumer device for local LLM.
A beefed up NPU could provide a big edge here.
More speculatively, Apple is also one of the few companies positioned to market an ASIC for a specific transformer architecture which they could use for their Siri replacement.
(Google has on-device inference too but their business model depends on them not being privacy-focused and their GTM with Android precludes the tight coordination between OS and hardware that would be required to push SOTA models into hardware. )
I see. It'll be interesting to see how much on-device models take off for consumers, when off-device models will be so much more capable. In the past, the average consumer has typically been happy to trade privacy for better products, but maybe it will be different for llms.
Agreed. I think the latency wins could be meaningful for many of the obvious phone-centric usecases (Siri, app-/browser-enrichment, etc.) but the capability gap is definitely a hindrance.
Privacy is already a key differentiating feature for iPhone which is why I think they will continue to try to make this option viable. (They already do ChatGPT fallback which is a pragmatic concession to the reality that you highlight here.)
This is only true if you consider AI to be LLMs and chatbots. The non-LLM AI built into just the iPhone camera is almost certainly the largest scale consumer deployment of any AI but largely goes unnoticed because it works so well.
inference hardware, especially starting with on device ai for the mac. I think they should go as far as making a server chip, but that's less obvious today.
The biggest counterexample would be that dead-ai-autotranslate-voice sucking every gram of joy out of watching your favourite creators, with no ability to turn it off.
Yeah to be clear, I think Google is the strongest in AI product development of the FAANG companies. I included them in the list because the most complaints I see about AI product integration among FANNG comes from Google products; the incessant bundling of Gemini chatboxes in every Workspace product.
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
I remember when I was trying to find a YouTube video, I remembered the contents but not the name. I tried google search and existing LLMs including Gemini, and none could find it.
It would also be useful for security: give the AI a recording and ask when the suspicious person shows up, the item is stolen, the event happens, etc. But unfortunately also useful for tyranny…
This isn't me defending apple, but, let me play out a little scenario:
"hey siri, book me tickets to see tonight's game"
"sure thing, champ"
<<time passes>>
"I have booked the tickets, they are now in your apple wallet"
<<opens up wallet, sees that there is 1x £350 ticket to see "the game", a interactive lesson in pickup artistry>>
You buy apple because "it works" (yes, most of that is hype, but the vertical integration is actually good, not great for devs/tinkerers though.) AI just adds in a 10-30% chance of breaking what seems to be a simple workflow.
You don't notice with chatGPT, because you expect it to be the dipshit in your pocket. You don't expect apple to be shit. (although if you've tried to ask for a specific track whilst driving, you know how shit that is. )
I agree with this as one reason Apple hasn’t rolled out Apple Intelligence. It’s a fair point.
However, I think it was a strategic blunder to go announce a full guns-blazing release that solves all of these problems, before taking the easier iteration of just making Siri not suck.
If you had the conversational fluency of ChatGPT with a very locked down set of tool calls (maybe no write actions, or maybe it can only propose simple intents that you must manually confirm, and definitely no purchases) I think they would not be perceived to be as far behind.
Nobody has solved the AI personal assistant product. It’s an insanely massive market segment just for consumers. Going after this as your V1 seems like a bad choice to me.
> You don't notice with chatGPT, because you expect it to be the dipshit in your pocket. You don't expect apple to be shit.
So many people don't realize this for some reason, but I think it's precisely why we haven't seen anything shown at WWDC '24. Apple tried and quickly realized the tech wasn't ready, and letting it run wild on their platforms would do irreparable brand damage.
This tech (LLMs) have barely been available to the public for ~3-4 years. That's no time at all, anyone using AI regularly now is very much an early adopter, something Apple historically isn't and Apple's users generally appreciate that aspect of them.
I get wanting to stay ahead of the curve and be competitive, but I don't understand this seemingly deep seated fear of these big tech companies that is making them go 100% all in on AI at the cost of all other areas of their business.
OpenAI is the fastest growing consumer tech company of all time. The big guys have to move at what for them is breakneck speed, just to have a chance at retaining their market share.
They will be swept away if they sit and wait a couple years for some uppity startup to build the AI disruptor and eat their lunch.
> They will be swept away if they sit and wait a couple years
I'm not sure that assertion is entirely correct, but I'm aware that I'm making tech predictions that I am very bad at.
The long term future is AR glasses. But the problem is, physics and battery chemistry means thats not going to happen for ~10 years at the very minimum.
Until then its still tablet/phones. The problem for openAI is that for them to provide useful results, they need access to all your "context" (messages, photos, location, spending, conversations, videos everything) Apple isn't going to allow that, which means that openAI isn't going to be all that useful on ios.
Android however is much more loosey goosey. The issue is, will google allow a competitor to steal all that context and muscle them out of their own platform?
I'm not sure openAI is going to win this, mainly because they need their own platform, and they only thing they have is brand loyalty, rather than a network effect. chatGPT is fungible with any of the other providers. The only thing that makes them stand out is the tools that are bundled with chatgpt. that and weird personification/pack bonding.
Perhaps this is a difference in terminology, but in no way do you need a LLM for fuzzy search. Semantic search, fuzzy keyword search, and text to speech have existed for years and predate the technology for an LLM. In your use-case, do you really need a chatbot to "ask the video" about this, wouldn't a "search in video" function that does the same thing be better?
Yeah, I was using the term "fuzzy" a bit loosely/incorrectly. I want to be able to say "where's the joke about British people?" even if the transcript only uses related but distinct terms like "Scotsman". I know you can get close to that with Transformers sans LLM, but LLMs are kinda like regex where they're often a non optimal but adequate way to solve a problem quickly.
Those examples are interesting and novel, but don't anywhere near live up to the promise of the next great technological revolution, greater than even the internet. I'm fairly sure if an all-knowing genie were to tell Google that this is the best AI gets, their interest in it would drop pretty quickly.
I think for most people, if NotebookLM were to disappear overnight it'd be a shame but something you can live with. There'll be a few who do heavily rely on it, but then I wouldn't be surprised to hear that at least one person heavily relies on the "I'm feeling lucky" button, or in other words, xkcd 1172
What you're describing would seem to be a borderline miraculously positive thing. Every single generation of tech companies starts off absolutely amazing. Then they get big, and in surprisingly rapid order enter into the abyss from which they never return
But in modern times the particularly level level of big, scaling back of anti-competitive law enforcement, and a government increasingly obsessed with making [economic] number go up, regardless of the cost, have all created a situation where the current batch is dying a lot slower than they probably otherwise would.
If 'AI' is the pandora's box of self destruction that can move the show along to the next batch of companies, then it'll have been worth the trillions of dollars in investment after all!
I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle. When Standard Oil held a monopoly on the oil world, it was mostly possible because they were monopolizing a discrete set of natural resources. Tech isn't that: Especially with AI lowering the barrier of entry to learning and generating code, tech is extremely resource-unconstrained. The main resource we fight over is just humans who have the ability and desire to spend money.
I also don't feel it will happen in "rapid order". These companies are too big. Its happening business-unit by business-unit. In the far future, these companies will still exist, just heavily optimized into the much smaller handful of units that still generate profit.
> I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle.
Depends if you agree with somenameforme's theory that tech companies start off amazing, get big, then become awful.
You may have noticed, in recent decades, we haven't bothered with enforcing anti-trust law. If Facebook wants to buy Instagram and Whatsapp, they can. If Microsoft wants to buy Github and Activision they can. If Google wants to buy Youtube, Doubleclick and Nest they can.
If we accept the premise that FAANG is where innovation goes to die, going 25 years without any antitrust enforcement might not have been the smartest move.
intel.com's <title> says "Simplify Your AI Journey - Intel". Their description meta tag says "Deliver AI at scale across cloud, data center, edge, and client with comprehensive hardware and software solutions." Their frontpage mentions "AI" 9 times, but has only 3 mentions of "processor" and zero of "CPU".
I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem that way.
Intel has traditionally been behind in software quality and discrete GPUs, I wonder if they are making this move out of desperation because nobody thinks "yay, Intel!" when both topics are mentioned.
Yes, I find it greatly satisfying that these mega companies are turning away their most important asset: super qualified people capable of creating new products. They're basically betting on their own extinction.
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it.
Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and workflows blah blah."
Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify the choices.
Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't even needed.
I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.
It's very funny that for pretty much any use case of LLMs, they're either too expensive or too incapable or both! There may be a few uses that make sense, but it seems to be incredibly hard to find the balance.
It blows my mind how many computing professionals truly think this is the case. It doesn't take a tech blogger to draw a trend line through the advancements of the past 2.5 years and see where we're headed. The fact that grifters abound on the edges of the industry is a sign of the radical importance of this unexpected breakthrough, not an indication that it's all a grift.
To engage in some armchair psychology, I think this is in large part due to a natural human tendency for stability (which is all the stronger for those in relatively powerful positions like us SWEs). Knowing that believing A would imply that your mortgage is in jeopardy, your retirement plan up-ended, and your entire career completely obscured beyond a figurative singularity point makes believing ~A a very appealing option...
> It doesn't take a tech blogger to draw a trend line through the advancements of the past 2.5 years and see where we're headed.
People did this with airplanes in the 60s, and based on that trajectory we should be exploring the outer edges of our solar system by now. Turns out the market for supersonic jets was unsustainably small and the cost/risk of space exploration is still very high.
Every sigmoidal curve looks exponential as it starts to enter the linear regime. But eventually the curve turns over, either due to limits in the technology, the marginal cost of the technology, or no clear way to further commercialize it.
I don't know that we've reached that point with AI, but a do know that extrapolating from a trend line is fraught with peril.
Yes, that's something that makes me very angry. The media and most people talk about this as if its a natural phenomenon that cannot be stopped, when in fact governments and investors are giving billions of dollars to make it happen; and at the same time they're doing nothing to prevent the job losses that have already started.
If your mgmt is so technically illiterate, why not just pitch them you're investigating using LLMs, then do the ElasticSearch work and sprinkle on some magic LLM pixie dust so it looks good on their mgmt slides? Should keep you all happy. That's generally what I've seen happen under such types.
We just recently implemented a doc search "agent". It's no better than just using the built in search in Teams/M365. Complete waste of time. One of our dev teams spent an entire quarter on it and no one is going to use it because it is slower and outside of everyone's normal workflow.
Yep. We do the same. We also do copilot agents. Just don’t tell anybody that behind the scenes it’s the same 10 year old power automate flows running..
I think there's a lot of really interesting (and profitable) AI products out there. And: there's so many more that can be built. We're only scratching the surface of what the industry has already invented can do. Not in an "AGI Inevitable" capacity; what we have, today, with more context engineering, better user interfaces, better products with deeper AI-first thinking, etc.
My point was more-so that FAANG isn't even scratching the surface; they're punching it bloody with their fists while yelling "look at all this AI we have, see dad we can't be disrupted we're the disrupters we're the disrupters".
It reminds me a lot of Xbox over the past six years, so much so that I think Xbox is a canary for how many business units in these companies will look in five more years.
There's a lot of "promising" and "interesting" stuff, but I'm not seeing anything yet that actually works reliably.
Sooner or later (mostly sooner) it becomes apparent that it's all just a chatbot hastily slapped on top of an existing API, and the integration barely works.
A tech demo shows your AI coding agent can write a whole web app in one prompt. In reality, a file with 7 tab characters in a row completely breaks it.
> A tech demo shows your AI coding agent can write a whole web app in one prompt. In reality, a file with 7 tab characters in a row completely breaks it.
I like how all the demos just show these crazy simple, single page "web apps" that are effectively just coding tutorial material, and people eat it up. There's no talk of auth, persistence, security, deployment, performance, etc.
Cool...it vibe coded a janky snake game with no collision, now what?
> Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed.
Is it though? There's a reason why Microsoft's JVM competitor is called ".NET". They were planning Windows .NET Server 2003, Office.NET, etc.
I don't think an inversion of the hype cycle, it's just another hype cycle exactly. I think, in fact, it's extremely comparable. I remember people joking about Pets.com -- just imagine buying your pet food online?!? Crazy stuff. AI is the same. It's hyped up massively, there will eventually be some kind of correction, and then it'll become the new normal.
Only a sentence later do I explicitly reference Github Copilot; yet they belong on the list because despite having every advantage a company could have, the resources of a megacorporation, all the source code in the world, the semi-independence of a smaller team; they still managed to produce a mediocre and uninteresting product.
But, again: I think that state for Copilot is totally fine for Github. That product state of "its there, its builtin, and its fine" is a fantastic and extremely efficient market to service.
I always hear this but people use Siri all the time, and I think outside of talking to programmers, a lot of consumers probably consider that the level of AI they care about using. "is Siri really AI" seems like a real "is a hotdog a sandwich" question. Who cares? People eat hot dogs and talk to Siri.
It seems what Apple has less of is LLM products that cost enormous sums of money to make that people don't like using. Sure, they have a little of it, they fell flat on their faces with their news summaries thing last year and AppleVision was a nothingburger, but when it comes to "sinking huge amounts of money into deeply unpopular ventures", it seems to me that Apple's reluctance to deploy its largess here might be prudent. It seems like they're less exposed on the hype.
I do wish Siri was a little more intelligent to be honest.
I use Siri when I need a fast, distraction-free, action. Which makes it perfect when driving or performing other tasks where my hands a busy and/or I cannot put my attention on my phones LCD screen.
The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction.
I'd love it if Siri was smart enough to differentiate between:
- an automation request. eg setting an alarm or ringing a contact. The kind of interaction what you wouldn't want to offload to a 3rd party but is the kind of interaction where you don't need vast datastores of training.
- and an open-ended question. eg What time are Oasis playing in London tonight? Who was the 23rd President of Germany? What are the rules of Dodgeball? these sort of things are less confidential and don't require handing control of your phone to a 3rd party.
And I'd love it if Siri automatically offloaded from their local AI to ChatGPT (or whatever) when the latter was identified. That should be opt in, but when opted in, it should be automatic. I shouldn't have to consent each time after I've opted in.
> The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction.
My hunch tells me this is a temporary stopgap until Apple figures out their "private cloud compute" or whatever where they can run their own model, after that it'll be seamless. Try to do as much on device as possible, and if that fails/is not possible, offload to the model running on Apple's servers rather than a 3rd party service.
Maybe they're "behind" (although, this tech is still so early I don't think anyone is truly behind), but I appreciate their approach to try and do as much on device as possible. They are the only ones around that aren't just defaulting to "harvest as much data as possible and ship it to our servers."
I can be patient - Siri works fine for what I want it for anyway - it can set reminders, timers, alarms, dictate messages, and create notes. That's about all I use it for and would use it for. Anything else I'm not going to ask my phone, I'm going to take it out and head to Google.
> Anything else I'm not going to ask my phone, I'm going to take it out and head to Google.
But my while point was there’s a plethora of different reasons why “heading to Google” isn’t always practical. Like when you’re driving. When you’re cooking. Even when you’re just playing with the kids, a question gets asked, and you don’t want to spoil the momentum of the play by staining at an LCD screen for 2 minutes.
Siri really damn convenient for those occasions when you want an action performed but don’t want the distraction of performing that action.
In fact, I’d go further and say that’s the biggest selling point for current gen consumer AI.
> Maybe they're "behind" (although, this tech is still so early I don't think anyone is truly behind)
The tech is still early but Siri are most definitely behind.
It’s not even remotely close to the capabilities of even open source models, let alone the commercial ones.
And the fact that they had to bolt on ChatGPT in such an ad hoc way speaks volumes about how Apple realise themselves just how far behind Siri has gotten.
I think you’re right that it’s not their long term plan. But that doesn’t change that it presently feels like a very ugly kludge.
I'm not sure if you're in a country that has already received some upgrade, but over here in Europe Siri is seen as a funny tamagochi that sometimes misunderstands and thinks its needed and is then quickly told to shut up.
I think the last time I talked to anyone about siri we were wondering why it was still so bad, now that we have LLMs.
I've never seen people in europe regularly using siri except to bash how bad it is. I would be really interested taking a look at the secret usage stats of siri in europe compared to other regions.
I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you fluent, etc etc
But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good starting point and something to keep you consistent every day. As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish.
That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely overhauled their curriculum with AI slop. The stories are bland at best and confusing at first, the questions are brain-dead simple, it'll have sentences and questions that I've confirmed with native speakers are confusing/incorrect, it's riddled with mistakes, and somehow they even broke the TTS so it'll pronounce things wrong. One of the character voices consistently can't say a couple of letters, like it pronounces all the 'd's with 'v's or something. I can't believe they actually shipped it in this state, they completely broke it overnight. At this rate if it's not fixed by the time my annual subscription is up to renew, I will be cancelling.
It's absolutely the worst AI slopification of any product I use, and the CEO and everyone who pushed to ship it needs to be fired.
Yes I've been chronicling the enshittification of Duolingo here for several years (below). But unlike Github/CoreAI, DuoLingo is tied to a single (and imperilled) revenue-stream from a single product, plus they had a 7/2021 IPO in the heady days of Covid, so they started out in a subscriber market awash with cash. Also like other sites with a formerly vibrant community and forums, they rug-pulled the way they extracted value from the user community's posts then copyright-washed it through AI, then turned around and tried to remarket it back to said users ('Duolingo Max = Super Duolingo + features like AI-powered "Explain My Answer" and "Roleplay" options for more advanced practice'). While laying off thousands of their contractors and translators.
going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me.
Clozemaster is much more rudimentary but I do like how they use AI - there's a single button that gives you an AI grammatical summary of the translation and calls out any idioms or grammatical conventions in the target language compared to your native one.
Bought the lifetime license but it's free to use, you just get a limited amount of flash cards a day. If you wait until christmas there's generally a big discount on the lifetime license.
> going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me.
Duolingo was always aiming at the casual app user (not serious language learners, think getting casual 14-30yo users to switch 10 min a day from playing casual games instead or consuming SM), and openly admitted they crafted the product and their metrics around gamification and socially acquiring new (paying, non-freemium) users. So judge their behavior by that. Also, you can turn off some but not all of the default gamification + social features.
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective.
Exactly, but this is just the nature of this technology. It can sort of fake human intelligence but not really. You can't count on it to do human work without supervising it so what's the point?
I've been in a three different scenarios where I worked for independent companies under the umbrella of a large parent organization. In all 3, the leadership left or was fired, and the remainder of the company was merged into a division of the parent company.
The product quality went to shit in all 3 scenarios. There were different reasons and nuances to them all, but all 3 boiled down to one common factor. Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
They all turned into political battles at the leadership level, low morale at the product level, and decent jobs for the engineers as long as they were happy just doing what they were told. For the customers, everything just stagnated. It took years before all the politics sorted themselves out, people chose whether to stay or go, and you got product leadership running who could balance it all out without the baggage of the merger.
So as a Github customer, this does not have me running for the hills. We won't lose functionality. But we won't gain anything we truly desire either - we'll see new features come out that relate to Microsoft's dreams, not our own. At a strategic level, I'd start telling my teams to be sure not to get vendor-locked to any Github features, and always have a migration plan at least conceptualized so that once we see where it all really goes, we are well prepared to either stay or go depending on exactly what Microsoft does in the next couple years.
1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.).
2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work.
3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed.
How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.
The best answer I can give myself to your (perhaps rhetorical) question is twofold:
- tech companies, for whatever reason, seem to need millions and millions of funding upfront to get started. Despite a tech company not needing essentially any asset (besides a few workstations and internet connections?). The VC era inherently created a huge distortion so that it's virtually impossible to start something without selling your soul to those who want you to be exactly like the others. You will be laughed out of the door from banks if you try to get some credit. Since the tech economy has been essentially a proxy for financial speculation, building a sustainable business that doesn't aim solely to IPO and "growth" is an idea that won't get any money to anybody. All of this to say, if workers today want to fund a co-op, as I want to, they need to wait until they have enough money saved to bootstrap it themselves.
- until now, and for maybe a while longer, the job market for tech workers has been fairly comfortable, with perks and high wages. Things are clearly changing, as the streak of layoffs post-2021 shows. For a sector with low unionization and with the extreme pressure from companies to reduce workers power, I think in the next 5-10 years tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs. Once that will be the case, the incentive to do effectively a bullshit job in a big(ger) org - which many of us do, building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value - will not be there anymore, and I want to hope more people will choose alternative paths like co-ops and to develop products with different goals.
It's actually not rhetorical - I really wanna know what leads to this to-me-obvious contradiction.
One answer is obvious - every organization's primary goal is its own survival. So a democratic state will indoctrinate ("educate") children into believing democracy is the right way. But no school teaches about corporate power structures and cooperatives are so rare that they have little influence on the curriculum.
What I absolutely hated was for example when Microsoft opened an extra curricular program for students to teach them some tech skills and some soft skills and (in exchange?) they were allowed to hang posters promoting their products at school. Linux does not have the money or organizational capacity to do this kind of thing so the entrenched players have a massive advantage.
> The VC era
As a gamedev, this reminds me of how the metagame shifts as the collective playerbase learns the rules of a game - what works and what doesn't. Step 1) IRL you need to build something valuable and you get paid according to how much value you produced. 2) Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work. 3) And now people realized when you have enough money you can just buy those power structures from step 2 wholesale. Oh and you can buy up housing and take a third of someone's salary too.
A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce. This would completely invert those power structures. Need marketing? You as a positive-sum worker hire those zero-sum workers.
But we're heading in the opposite direction instead. All intellectual work has now been stolen and it being resold to people who produced it in the first place.
And then you straight up have people who wanna replace even physical workers with robots. And they sell it to people by claiming they will no longer need to work, which sounds great. Until you realize that up until that point the rich zero-summers at least still needed positive-sum workers. Even governments needed humans to oppress other humans...
> tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs
Yep. "We" (technically long before I entered the workforce) had all the power and slowly gave it away because we were interested in the cool tech we were making and not the power struggle that the people who only extract value from us are so good at.
> building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value
I'd like to see a graph of the percentage of people whose work is positive-, zero- and negative-sum over time. Because I suspect the latter two are growing rapidly.
> Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work
This is just a classic mistake: failing to account for risk as a significant input. Any business that needs money to start needs people to risk their reputation or their money to get it going, possibly long before any profit is made.
> A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce.
If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?
> Any business that needs money to start needs people to risk their reputation or their money to get it going
Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.
Money? Sure. There's two kinds of people here:
a) Rich but not obscenely so - you can save up enough from normal work to get enough runway to start a small company which grows organically - you get a few really good people (who might even accept a lower salary than they could command it a corporation just because they want to work on something meaningful for once) and/or you do a lot of the work yourself. Then you keep building until you get income or run out of money. Factorio is a great example of this approach succeeding - but even they needed to use Indiegogo at one point and were close to not making it.
b) Those obscenely rich - those who have more money than a single person could make from positive-sum work, no matter how skilled. (Art/sport/showbusiness are interesting exceptions but are they really positive sum?) These people have so much money they don't care if they lose it sometimes, as long as they multiply it sometimes. If you fund 10 companies, each with 10% chance of success, only 1 needs to make it and give you >10x return on investment. If you own an apartment complex with 30 people and take a third of each person's salary, you can afford to fund a company of 10 people indefinitely.
As a result, the obscenely rich get a much higher chance to succeed, in turn owning more companies, in turn getting more rich.
> If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?
Ownership does not have to be exclusive. In fact, it almost never should. It should be distributed based on the amount of work, skill required, competence, etc.
It can get complex but let's not pretend it's worse than the current salary negotiations where one side is basically blind and pair per unit of work and the other has all the information and takes a cut from everyone's output.
> Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.
Of course they are; if someone's going to get money from VCs they risk their reputation in asking for it.
> Money? Sure. There's two kinds of people here: (Rich/obscenely rich)
No - lots of VCs represent large pools of money including pension funds that service giant numbers of people. Your "rich" company example, Factio, is about the silliest example I can imagine of a capital-intensive business. Your "obscenely rich" example isn't really about money any more, but so few people are like this it doesn't really affect anything.
> It can get complex but let's not pretend it's worse than the current salary negotiations where one side is basically blind and pair per unit of work and the other has all the information and takes a cut from everyone's output.
It's impossible to tell if it's worse, as you haven't described it yet. It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.
> Of course they are; if someone's going to get money from VCs they risk their reputation in asking for it.
You are unintentionally proving me right. There 2 kinds of people starting businesses which need an investment - those risking their own money (and not reputation) and those risking other people's money (and even then, if a VC wants to judge their reputation, they should look at the details, not binary failed/succeeded).
As a result, you have rich people risking nothing of relevance to them, just playing a game where they statistically win. All the risk if borne by the people doing actual work who are not obscenely rich.
> No - lots of VCs represent large pools of money including pension funds that service giant numbers of people
And there's still some rich asshole at the top who takes a cut which represents more money (sometimes by orders of magnitude) than a person doing positive-sum work can make. So he's not even risking his own money, great, a real improvement.
> Your "rich" company example, Factio, is about the silliest example I can imagine of a capital-intensive business.
I gave it as an example of people saving up in order to quit their day jobs and start a company. How is that silly? Would people saving up to open a small store also be silly? Would a person saving up to buy equipment to open a motorcycle repair shop be silly? Because those are all things people who want to do positive-sum work do.
> Your "obscenely rich" example isn't really about money any more, but so few people are like this it doesn't really affect anything.
Funny how much noise those "few" make. Not so long ago one of them pretty much bought himself a president in a very rich country. Though I have a feeling that is one investment which didn't go as well as he planned.
I also directly know a person who owns so many houses, office spaces and companies he never has to work again and can keep buying more. And he's still several orders of magnitude less rich than the first narcissistic asshole.
Both live a parasitic lifestyle.
Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM - to quote "1% of of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth". Does that fall under your "doesn't really affect anything"?
> It's impossible to tell if it's worse, as you haven't described it yet.
In the case of 1 designer, 1 producer, they distribute compensation according to how much work each did. Assuming design took a few orders of magnitude than producing a single item, the designer gets most in the beginning. As more items are produced, the designer gets less and producer more.
- If the producer would earn too little at first, they might agree on recalculating after a batch instead of single item,
- or the producer would go into debt owed to the designer (optionally there could be a condition that the debt is to be repaid only if the item makes enough to repay it),
- or they would both agree on a scheme which is mutually agreeable to both (licensing the design for a fixed price for a fixed number of items at first).
Point 1 is the designer as a person owns his design, there is no company which takes it because he did it "on company time".
Point 2 is all transactions and agreements are made with consent of those doing the real work.
Note that if you're unwilling to engage constructively, I am unwilling to write thousands of words in a HN comment you're just gonna passively aggressively dismiss.
> It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.
1) People do it, just rarely - those working in cooperatives almost always recommend the experience. Can't say the same for people in hierarchical organizations.
2) People do it rarely because most have never even heard about it. (And because there's a direct way to remove a dictatorship - those successful gain the top level of power and become the judges or right and wrong; there's no direct way to remove the C-suite - if you employ the same methods people historically used to remove dictators, even democratic governments will attack them in turn while calling it punishment.)
3) For most of history, with rare exceptions, governments were dictatorships. If we lived 200 years ago, would you say democracy is likely worse as people don't do it? This whole last sentence is fallacious.
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BTW, if you're gonna insult me, I don't see any point in continuing this. It does not matter how covert your insults are, the intent matters.
> I gave it as an example of people saving up in order to quit their day jobs and start a company. How is that silly? Would people saving up to open a small store also be silly? Would a person saving up to buy equipment to open a motorcycle repair shop be silly? Because those are all things people who want to do positive-sum work do.
Just responding to this as it seems the simplest: a capital-intensive business is something that will need millions of dollars over many years before it turns the first inkling of a product. Excluding this incredibly important type of business, and only thinking about tiny businesses when you're thinking of the phrase "capital-intensive business" is the problem.
You brought capital-intensive business into it and it's a fair example which needs more elaboration but now you're acting like that's the only example that matters.
There are plenty of businesses, not just "tiny" ones as you say, which can be built up gradually without large investments.
As for capital-intensive:
There are 2 currencies - money and human time. You can call them resourced but it's the same thing. What I object to is that two people can invest roughly the same amount of time into something and one can get several orders of magnitude more money out of it.
That goes directly against the party line that "everybody is equal".
Anyway, there is clearly a conversion rate between human time and money - hourly rate. So in a system where people own the product of their work according to the amount of work, we can factor invested capital as additional work performed by the investor and reward them accordingly.
We could use for example the median wage but it would be interesting to consider using the investor's past hourly wages (the more they got pair per hour, the less their investment would gain them now).
> BTW, if you're gonna insult me, I don't see any point in continuing this. It does not matter how covert your insults are, the intent matters.
There aren't any insults in their posts. You're conflating someone dismantling your claims with insulting you. Which is obviously, clearly, laughably false.
You claimed something that's just wrong:
> Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.
Then they proceeded to show how you're wrong, and you deflected with
> You are unintentionally proving me right.
Then you throw in emotionally manipulative statements like
> but let's not pretend
> Both live a parasitic lifestyle.
> Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like
Then link to a random YouTube video that says that the richest people in America have a much larger fraction of the wealth than they would if it was evenly distributed (which is extremely obvious), with zero actual elaboration of any sort of negative effects, then say
> Does that fall under your "doesn't really affect anything"?
And make arbitrary moral claims like
> Ownership does not have to be exclusive. In fact, it almost never should.
There's no coherent arguments here. Just angry opinions and envy and greed invoked by those that have more than you. The only person being "unwilling to engage constructively" here is the one being outraged and thinking that their outrage is a substitute for an argument, and who is unable to parse actually coherent arguments and so thinks that they're "passive aggressive dismissal".
Intellectual dishonesty is a form of insult. As is, for example, "laughably false". If you think I am wrong, you can explain why. But you choose to insult me because you enjoy it.
> manipulative statements
"But let's not pretend" is not manipulative, it's a figure of speech.
Parasitism is a fairly well defined term in biology which can be extended to sociology/economy.
"Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like" - you're right, I lost patience with someone defending rich people and being dismissive without any reason.
> the richest people in America have a much larger fraction of the wealth than they would if it was evenly distributed
That's not what the video says. I suggest rewatching with a less dismissive attitude.
> And make arbitrary moral claims like
It's called an opinion. Now, entertain me, which part do you have an issue with? Do you think ownership or a product made by multiple people should usually be exclusive?
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The rest can be summed up as you defending inequality and trying to provoke me into insulting you. I have no problem with people who work harder or more skillfully than me having more (proportionally). I have a problem with people getting themselves into positions of power which allow them to take a cut from other people's work without contributing much or anything at all.
That's manipulative rhetoric that isn't even relevant here - not only did you not point out a single instance of their alleged intellectual dishonesty, but it's not even something you can prove in the first place because you have to know what's going on inside the other person's head. And, that's not how anyone would take the your usage of "insult" as you initially wrote it. Dishonest redefinition of your existing words.
> As is, for example, "laughably false". If you think I am wrong, you can explain why.
Because only people who have massive, fragile egos believe that they are never wrong, and so refuting their ideas amounts to attacking them personally. The vast majority of people can understand the difference between those things if you ask them about it.
> But you choose to insult me because you enjoy it.
Factually false. I did not insult you, I pointed out that one of your statements was false. It seems like you're incapable of even understanding the difference between refuting your points and attacking you personally.
> "But let's not pretend" is not manipulative,
Again, false - it's an emotionally-charged, manipulative figure of speech. I usually don't like doing this, but let's ask an LLM what it thinks, because you won't concede points (even if they're obviously true to the vast majority of humans) unless there's a citation for them, and because LLMs carry a large amount of encoded information on human speech (and because dictionaries don't carry information like this):
The phrase “let’s not pretend that…” usually carries a skeptical or confrontational tone. It implies:
- Dismissal of false optimism or denial – signaling the speaker believes a certain idea is unrealistic or insincere.
- Challenge to the listener – pushing them to acknowledge what the speaker sees as an obvious truth.
- Impatience or frustration – suggesting the topic is already settled in the speaker’s mind.
- Assertiveness – positioning the speaker as cutting through pretense or spin.
It can sound blunt, accusatory, or even cynical, depending on context and delivery.
<LLM content ends here>
So, it is factually true that that's a manipulative phrase. It's obviously not neutral. Are you not a native English speaker? Because this is something that virtually no English speaker past the high-school level or so would fail to understand (and I'm trying to be charitable by not assuming that you're a native speaker intentionally lying about the emotional connotation of that phrase).
> Parasitism is a fairly well defined term in biology which can be extended to sociology/economy.
...which, again, is not how English speakers use this phrase in a non-biological context (which we're obviously not in). You didn't provide any definition of how it might be extended, so this is another false statement. Again - the vast majority of English speakers know that this is always used as a pejorative term unless it's specifically defined in a biological context (which you did not).
> I lost patience with someone defending rich people
Ah, so there's your agenda: you're just emotionally upset with rich people and trying to attack them through any means possible - whether it's outrage, misinterpretations of common English words and phrases, or logical fallacies.
> and being dismissive without any reason
They made concrete logical points that you were unable to respond to. Again - reduction of logic to "dismissiveness", which is a logical fallacy.
> That's not what the video says.
That's what you said, literally in the same line as the link:
> to quote "1% of of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth"
I'm just repeating your own description of the video back to you.
> It's called an opinion.
Yes, you can have an opinion that's also an arbitrary moral claim. That's not the same as an actual argument for your position.
> Now, entertain me, which part do you have an issue with?
No, I don't think I need to. I don't need to present an opinion to point out all of your logical fallacies, and in general it's useless to even try to present an opinion to someone who makes these kinds of factually false statements, logical fallacies, and emotional attacks, because if they were capable of making arguments without resorting to those things, they would have.
> The rest can be summed up as you defending inequality
Yet again, factually false. Refuting your statements is factually not the same as arguing for some perceived opposite position of whatever you hold.
> and trying to provoke me into insulting you
...what? This is not only wrong, it's just...so completely off the rails that there's no coherent response to it.
It massively undermines your positions that you can't defend them without rhetoric, emotional manipulation, falsehoods, and fallacies. Someone who can actually defend their arguments doesn't have to do those things.
You know that the point of Hacker News is intellectual curiosity, which means rational discussion, and not just emotional outbursts and fallacies, right? The entire point of this platform is to challenge each others' ideas.
If you can't take someone else challenging your ideas without thinking that they're personally attacking you (which, as previously stated, is false), or you immediately assume that someone is arguing the negative (which is also false), then you should take a break, instead of degrading the quality of the site.
> not only did you not point out a single instance of their alleged intellectual dishonesty
>> It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.
> This whole last sentence is fallacious.
I did point it out, quite explicitly so.
> but let's ask an LLM what it thinks
> So, it is factually true
LLM don't operate on facts, LLM generated output is irrelevant to your assertion. (I could do the same for your and robertlagrant's replies and get the same results but I won't bother. Do it yourself if you disagree with me.)
> intentionally lying about the emotional connotation of that phrase
I don't care that it's emotionally charged. I challenge you[0] to come up with a better way to say people are getting exploited without being emotionally charged.
[0]: Oh, I guess this is also manipulative. Might be just the way people talk to each other.
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For the record, the video compares 3 distributions - what people think it should be, what people think it is, and what it actually is. Neither me nor the video mentioned "evenly distributed" like you claim.
> That's what you said, literally in the same line as the link:
And now you inexplicably claim something else:
>> to quote "1% of of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth"
Are you arguing 1% owning 40% and even distribution are the only 2 options?
> Just angry opinions and envy and greed
> outraged and thinking that their outrage is a substitute for an argument
> unable to parse actually coherent arguments
> "passive aggressive dismissal"
> the point of Hacker News is intellectual curiosity, which means rational discussion, and not just emotional outbursts and fallacies
Please take your own advice here.
Note that ad hominems are still ad hominems even if you speak about me in third person. You claim you only attack my arguments and then conclude with this??? ;)
I am happy for people to challenge me and improve the way I can argue. I am also open to being proven wrong but then there has to be another explanation for inequality. Yes, you have no obligation to find it and I could be arguing wrong for the right position. However then refuting arguments against inequality without offering a solution is effectively supporting it - if people get the message that all arguments against it are wrong, then they will get the impression inequality is right.
---
Look, you might have had some good points in your first response and I might have assumed bad faith from robertlagrant too early because several things in his first post ticked me off. But your first reply already concluded with strongly emotionally manipulative language. Your second reply reads like you grasping for straws, any straws, to discredit me, throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. It does not further the solution to inequality in any way.
No, you factually, objectively, did not, because fallacious arguing is not the same as intellectual dishonesty (as can easily be learned from looking up the definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_honesty). So, this is the first factually incorrect thing you have stated in this post.
> LLM don't operate on facts, LLM generated output is irrelevant to your assertion.
This is the second factually incorrect thing. LLMs are trained on vast corpus of human writing and so have an extremely large amount of latent understanding of tone of language. Factually, the output of an LLM is relevant to my assertion.
> I don't care that it's emotionally charged.
> I am happy for people to challenge me and improve the way I can argue.
So now you're being a hypocrite and a liar - if you don't care that it's emotionally charged, then you're definitely not happy to have people improve the way you can argue, because emotionally charged statements are not arguments.
> However then refuting arguments against inequality without offering a solution is effectively supporting it
Third factually incorrect statement. I don't have to tell the cook how he made my soup wrong if it tastes bad. I just have to say that it's not good, and that's that.
That's three falsehoods and one lie in just those parts of this comment, let alone the many others in your other comments. You have no intention to actually engage in debate or seek truth.
> because emotionally charged statements are not arguments.
Arguments can be emotionally charged or neutral. Those things are orthogonal.
> I don't have to tell the cook how he made my soup wrong if it tastes bad.
Bad analogy. Systematically refusing arguments of one side while not doing the same to the other gives onlookers a biased impression (conscious or not).
---
You can be angry all you want and try to be pedantic to "prove it", it's not gonna change anything. This conversation is over.
>How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Funny you should ask this. A co-worker was unironically glazing monarchies and suggested some books to me when we were drinking at dinner Friday. I was disgusted, tbh. But do not underestimate the desire of people to be ruled and told how to think and act.
When I encounter this, it's usually a belief that a strong and implicitly good leader is needed so that he can somehow remove/punish all the bad people.
What the people don't get is that:
- Truly good people are incredibly rare.
- Those who are prone to abusing power will only show their true colors when actually given power.
- Power corrupts, everyone has head this. But it also attracts people who are corrupt in the first place. And of course, they will lie and pretend to be good to get that power.
- What about succession? Even if their fav leader was actually good and was so "pure" he fathered (most such promoters of this assume a man) only good children, each generation the amount of his "good genes" they'd have would halve (assuming no Habsburgcest).
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IMO the cause is people knowing they are largely powerless in the grand scheme of things (barring self-sacrifice and violence which they are increasingly indoctrinated against) but this learned helplessness is so internalized they can't conceive of a better solution than giving even more of their power away.
> Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0 in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here.
From a product POV, GitHub seems like a solved problem. It's been working well-enough with the current feature set for over a decade, with many companies building themselves on top of its stack. If they stagnate in MS bureaucracy but keep the lights on for push/pull/PRs, that's probably good enough for most people until something completely changes how software is made.
The problem is that someone still has to polish their resume when working for GitHub (aka resume-driven development), so, they're actually making GitHub worse now:
I think GitHub also doesn't have the same vendor lock-in that other companies do. I am very happy with their service, and I wouldn't want to move off of it. But at the same time there are numerous alternatives and it wouldn't be that hard to switch. Because, as you say, it is pretty much a solved problem, and because of that there are several competitors with feature parity at this point.
At this point you are fighting, "Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft." There are viable alternatives on the market, but GitHub is the known quantity for which conversations are required to use something different.
Right now there just isn't any incentive to move off of GitHub. GitHub is cheap, and it provides a very familiar, extensible, and reliable service.
My point is more that if Microsoft did dig their heels in and make the product worse, it would be very easy for people to switch. Some people would stay because it is the de facto standard, but I think a lot more people than you think would switch, because the switching costs are so low.
My hope is that this acts as a strong enough incentive for them to maintain the quality of GitHub, so we don't have to switch.
I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)
ADO is just the rebranded Visual Studio Team Services which is just the rebranded Team Foundation Service (which itself is the cloud version of ADO/VST/TF Server). It isn't really integrated in Azure aside from the naming, and it is intended to be more of a Jira/Bitbucket/etc replacement than GitHub.
Azure DevOps is.... okay. It's functional, and it's not really anything unique or innovative; but it never really strived to be anything like that. It started out as the online, service-based version of Team Foundation Server and was very clearly being cultivated into turning into "Github, but integrated into the Azure ecosystem" and that particular strategic need evaporated for Microsoft when they acquired the actual Github.
Azure DevOps went into zombie mode basically the same day the acquisition closed; I don't think it's received any new features since 2018.
I went through an acquisition by Microsoft (the Skype one) and I feel that independent leadership isn't all it's cracked up to be in such scenarios.
We were indeed left as our own division (other than the fact that Lync got merged into us in 2012) for quite some time, but the Microsoft culture seeped in via middle management anyway.
Skypers would leave on the ~2 year cycle that is common in tech and would get replaced by life-long Microsofters. They saw opportunities to have a bigger remit in a less mature division and applied internally. And they brought the company culture along with them much more than any decisions made by Satya.
A software dev simply cannot afford to say "I just do technical" which I've heard numerous times. The sad reality is --- apart from small companies and ms/phd research which likely comes with more insulation --- organizational and political culture will weigh mightily on your tech work and freedom to do the right thing. So I definitely agree with parent.
That is an universal truth in acquisitions, it has also been my experience, in all my career I also have been through multiple of them, and after three years on average, the original culture is gone, and everything starts going bad and slowly it is time to leave or hold on until there is a good opportunity to jump ship.
I've seen enough: as the recognised authority and designated responsible person ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525256 I'm officially recognising this as the final end of 2010s Cool Microsoft.
> 74 points by leoc on April 3, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler
> Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).
I kind of agree, I was there when Apple was showing up at CERN IT trying to sell OS X a great UNIX workstation, and also though .NET was going to be fully open source, and to this day we have to thank the community efforts from Avalonia and Uno, for the actual GUI frameworks that support all major consumer OSes.
Also Microsoft lost a big opportunity with Unity (not helping them updating .NET) and killing off XNA, two major ways how kids get into .NET.
That coupled with Unity's mismanagement, means indies are more likely to keep using C++ based engines like Godot or Defold, and losing yet another adoption vector. Yes Godot does support C#, but GDscript is winning the heart of indie devs.
Contrary to HN folks, I habe no issues with Oracle, it is my favourite database engine.
Also it was the only company that cared to buy Sun.
People love to hate it, everyone praises Sun, yet in the end no one felt it was worth rescuing, not even Google, that could have taken advantage to finally control Java.
I guess most would rather have seen Java die in version 6, and Maxime VM ideas never becoming mainstream, or the first UNIX with hardware memory tagging for taming C never coming out.
And since I am not a fan boy I am also quite aware that what doesn't produce profit, is immediately killed by Oracle, and they are quite found of enforcing their licenses, hence why people have to actually read those licenses.
IBM did bid, but Oracle jumped in with a higher offer. Supposedly (IIRC) the Sun leadership had wanted and expected IBM to buy Sun but didn't feel it could refuse the higher bid. Aside from Java Google would surely have been a very awkward fit with Sun, as Google was basically the poster child for never buying anything from Sun.
Yes, and they decided to widthraw almost as quick as they did the offer.
And no one else did, I also bet HNers would appreciate IBM being the new owner just as they appreciate Oracle.
Regardless of the tiny detail that when Java came to be, the two companies that joined Sun's efforts right away, with Java support on their OSes, databases and thin client efforts, were exactly Oracle and IBM.
Thank you, this does not get discussed enough on HN. I used to look forward to monthly releases of VSCode and actually read the changelog carefully to see what new features/enhancements I could make use of. These days I just glance and ignore it completely -- almost everything is Copilot, MCP blahblah. Such a disappointment.
You would think with all the AI magic, they would deliver more "core editor" features/enhancement. No, just more Copilot.
Man this reminds me of the early days of Edge where MS actually made a good browser for a few months and then stuffed it full of bloatware, ads, a crypto wallet (!) and now AI (not even GOOD AI features).
Do you really miss stuff in VS Code's core editor? I mean, coming to think about it, VS Code feels "feature complete", I haven't found in other editors features that I thought "wish I had this in VS Code". Not to justify the whole changelog being about Copilot (isn't it supposed to be a separate extension anyway?), but I guess it's either that or going for a while without updates, or really small changes you'd probably not notice
There are a ton of things that could be done. The fact that you haven't personally needed more features doesn't mean it's "feature complete". Not even close. You just haven't hit those pain points in your workflow.
May I ask how you feel about editors like vim/neovim or emacs or helix? I find that the best editing experience is one you can easily customize to support your needs, for me that is neovim but for you it could be something outside of VS Code?
Also shocked to learn VS Code is using textmate instead of treesitter.
When I get fed up with VSCode, I run Emacs and I feel happy until I start working on something else that can be done a little faster on VSCode because of the available extensions.
I feel like we almost need government intervention to keep GitHub an open commons, but I am a Libertarian and I distrust the government perhaps even more than the tech industry - still an open question for me.
Lock in and control by huge corporations is almost always uniformly bad. I have accepted the message of great books like Privacy is Power, The Tech Coup, and Surveillance Capitalism, and I feel pretty good about just using Google’s Gemini APIs when I need them, and lean as hard as possible on open models running on Ollama and LM Studio. There are also little things you can do like not installing apps and using web apps.
GitHub is not, and never has been, an open commons. There has always been a terms of service, and GitHub has been able to remove accounts and repositories at will.
Further, git is made to be decentralized. Having the government take over a business to maintain a centralized source is the peak of absurdity.
I don't object to AI features. I just don't want them to only work on AI features. There are plenty of editor related things that they should still be doing. E.g. the ability to show images in the editor. How neat would that be?
Speaking as an Emacs user: embedded images are cool, but their usefulness is debatable. Makes perfect sense for Emacs given org-mode, Auctex, and because due to Emacs' design it's the only way to include icons and whatnot for non-document purposes, but I doubt it's a useful feature for most code editors outside little error indicator icons and the like.
I can confidently predict that the breakout dev tool in the next few years will have LLM features, but won’t have forgotten stuff like editing features. As Claude Code has already demonstrated, you do t even need an editor for good LLM integration.
> “Just like how Bill [Gates] had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory,” said Parikh [the CoreAI team lead].
That Bill Gates analogy seems rather far-fetched, though.
The quote actually appears to be recited from an earlier Verge article [0]:
> Parikh, who transformed Facebook engineering teams, now leads a transformation that he describes as building an AI “agent factory” for Microsoft’s customers.
> ”I described this agent factory idea to Bill [Gates], not knowing that he and Paul [Allen] described Microsoft 50 years ago as the software factory,” Parikh says. “Just like how Bill had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory.”
It means that Microsoft used to be a software company and it is now supposed to become a software factory company, meaning that it produces factories (=agents) that produce software. That seems like a good goal to have for them.
It was the American CEO Tim Cook which spent some $250 billion investing in training in China, which is more than the Marshall plan (inflation adjusted) or the CHIPS act, for outsourcing the factories to China in which their products get produced.
Let's think about MicroSoft back in the 90s. There are no agent factories, whatever they are, but non-programmers are using Visual Basic, Excel, and Access to write their own software. Maybe throw in some ASP as well. (What if ClippyGPT had been available back in the day?) So thinking about that, if you ignore the buzzwords and squint, it kind of looks familiar.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with GitHub. Will they ~~agentify~~ enshittify Visual Source Safe as well?
I just switched from Github to Gitlab. For anyone who is interested in doing the same, but doubtful because of the effort required: Gitlab has a pretty good migration tool. You authenticate against your github account and gitlab will import all your repos for you. We've been using gitlab at work for a bit and the CI/CD took a little getting used to but I'm overall happy with Gitlab.
Some people think a github presence is important for their personal portfolios/careers, but I've personally never seen any evidence that a recruiter or anyone has ever actually looked at my github profile. Plus I can just put gitlab on there instead now
It's not that simple; their CI workflow architectures are completely different. The way projects and permissions work are completely different. The entire way GitLab organizes the taxonomy is different.
Oh sure for an organization with lots of ci/cd its a big deal. But for individuals who mostly just use github as a code repository for personal projects and dont have a ton of deployments, its real easy
I have worked for companies using GitLab and I really liked it. I need to have just about a dozen of my repos that kind of have to be on GitHub because of integrations with third parties, but most would live fine on GitLab.
EDIT: just looked, GitLab seems caught up in AI agent hype also, and have their prices gone up?
How do you mean? I dont hold it against a company just for having an AI offering. The thing with github/Microsoft is theyre really forcing it down your throat. Github copilot is now a default UI element in Visual Studio and every time I open it up they say "use github copilot, its free!". Every update to visual studio is all about their AI crap now and legit IDE features are always listed at the end
Plus github has also been trying to be a social media sites for a while, too, which I never really apprecisted. The only reason I ever used github in the first place, as a personal user, was because its what everyone else uses on their resume. But I no longer put personal projects on my resume so I dont see the point in using github anymore. We use gitlab at work and it works great.
Though the other providers look good, too. Im not trying to denigrate them. Codeberg, however, looks like it requires a subscription fee, and im just not using enough features of my git provider to justify paying for it
We could barely convince the reviewers on the last review that using GitHub is okay as long as we take some extra steps, I guess we should prepare to switch to a different platform with the next review.
Security audits are just theater. If they were not, you could not ever convince them that using a platform feeding unlicensed source (including apparently from private repositories) to their commercial LLM is ever a pass.
Absolute theater. They do nothing to validate that you are compliant with whatever ISO cert you're pursuing. They make you install a root cert on your macbook and they say that's good enough to ensure compliance. You just attest that you don't do stupid shit like committing directly to master or testing in production and they believe you
> compliant with whatever ISO cert you're pursuing
ISO cert compatibility audits are very different from a proper security audit.
And weather they do anything to check if depends on which you high, many of the slightly more expensive ones have the reputation to be "fast" and "overlook most issues".
But that doesn't apply to all security audits (but most audits for ISO compatibility, like really it's bad).
Anyway see my way to long answer about the on a sibling comment.
I'm certain there are good firms out there which will actually give you a legit audit and make recommendations. But if the client is not actually interested in security, there will always be unscrupulous firms who will essentially sell you an ISO cert for no effort required. In my experience, most medium to small sized companies place little value in security
It really depends on you auditor, audit approach and goals.
There are many audit companies which have a "under the hand" reputation of not properly looking and being easy to convince that you are secure, naturally at a above average audit cost (same but worse btw. for certificates showing compatibility with industry standards).
So if the audit was paid for by the company themself you can't trust it at all (which doesn't mean the company wanted to hide anything, this "bad" audit companies also tend finish the audit fast. So sometimes companies go for it, even if they don't have anything to hide).
Similar sometimes audit companies ask if they can audit you, this is for boosting their publicity using your name. This can easily turn into a "one hand washes the other" situation where they won't overlook massive issues, but still judge issues leniently.
Lastly there are some automated partial audit services which scan you public APIs/websites etc. Realistically they tend to be kinda dump, and might tell you they find a medium issue because (no joke) your REST API allows PUT and DELETE (1). Still I now take them a bit more serious after they pointed out, that there was a configuration error of a web gateway leading to some missing security headers.
(1: There is some history behind that, it's still dump for 90% of REST APIs)
Anyway, the situations so far are security audits which are at least 50% theater. BUT if a huge customers fully pays a audit company with a good/strict reputation then it often really isn't a security theater and can be quite a bad surprise if you company isn't prepared (because you have to fix so much). Like such reviews tend to not only be focused at your deployment or code but the whole software live cycle, including fun questions like "what measurements have you taken in case one of your developers tries to inject a supply chain attack" (which to be clear don't need to have perfect answers, just good enough, and most importantly clear and well documented).
(The link I posted is also not the proper ToS, it is more of an abridged version. They made the actual ToS somewhat hard to find and I cannot be bothered.)
the terms of service links to the privacy policy to explain how private repos are treated, the privacy policy is equally binding. from your link:
> Short version: We treat the content of private repositories as confidential, and we only access it as described in our Privacy Statement—for security purposes, to assist the repository owner with a support matter, to maintain the integrity of the Service, to comply with our legal obligations, if we have reason to believe the contents are in violation of the law, or with your consent.
I think it is safe to assume that more generous (for them) interpretation is the one that will be used by any big company. My link:
> You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time.
> parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers
This is an “AI” platform now. “Improving the service” means that. “With your consent” means you have accepted the ToS (which by the way can be changed at any point and your continued use of the service means you consent to it).
we are EU based and have besides other attorney customers.
Cloud Act and more then just one or two cases of the US engaging in industry espionage against their allies(1) makes it a high legal liability to use more or less any service from a US company even if it's in the EU and a EU daughter company
On GitHub we only have some code, which always anyway goes through additional testing and analysis before hitting production, this is why it's barely okay. No code from GitHub directly goes to production.
The only reason we ever where on GitHub is because we didn't always had sensitive customers and switching CI over is always a pain.
So I don't know if imply them being incompetent for allowing GitHub or for wanting to not allow it, but both point have very good reasons.
(1): And I mean cases before Trump, the US (as in top government, not people) was always a highly egoistic, egocentric ally which never hesitated to screw over their allays when it came to economical benefits. The main difference is that in the past the US cared (quite a bit) about upholding a image of "traditional" values like honesty, integrity and reliability. Especially when it would affect their trade routes.
When all public code including GPL and AGPL has been stolen and plagiarized already and the fabled artificial intelligence is nowhere to be seen, stealing all the private and proprietary code will surely make all the difference.
It probably won't but reselling the code to its owners is still good business. Convince people that statistical models of copyrighted work (which can reproduce said copyrighted work both verbatim or disguised) are A"I" and sadly, somehow, most people seem OK with it.
it seems like anyone continuing to use github is ok with providing free labor to Microsoft. Not that that wasn't the case already, but now it seems especially blatant. "open source" is just corporate welfare at this point.
Am I the only one who found Dohmke’s communication style to be… buzzword forward? For a company whose roots were in pragmatic engineering, I always felt that there was a too-heavy component of hype, particularly around AI, in pretty much every recent public announcement. Yet, despite all the rhetoric and GitHub’s superior position in the industry, they failed to capture the current AI editor market.
Structurally, it seems to make sense for GitHub to be part of Microsoft proper.
Perhaps this is a change for the better.
(PS: despite their “failure” to win hearts and minds, I do recommend giving Copilot in VSCode another look these days. Its agentic mode is very good and rapidly improving; I find it comparable to Claude Code at this point, particularly when paired with a strong model. Related to structure: I never quite understood the line between what parts of this GitHub made, and what parts of this the vscode and related Microsoft teams made.)
Not disregarding all the success MS has had under Nadella but his comms style is also extremely buzzword forward, so there was probably a _synergy_ there
Not too surprising considering how big a lead Github had in the generative coding space and how it managed to give it all up to a half dozen different companies over the last few years. An executive shakeup was long overdue.
For Microsoft it probably makes a lot of sense. For me as a Github user, I don't need "generative coding space" from github at all. That's not what I have been using it for for many years, and that's not what I want to use it for. I mean, Copilot is nice and useful but has preciously little to do with Github per se - if it didn't mention "Github" in the name, I'd see no relationship between the two at all. Code generation belongs in the IDE, Github is not an IDE - Github is what happens before and after the IDE, and keeping it separate works just fine. I'm afraid though Microsoft would try to push them together, and the result would be much worse than the starting point.
Are there any improvements to be done to Git? It seems like kind of a solved problem, like word processors or spreadsheets… most “improvements” to those are diminishing returns.
I don't mean to sounds like an MS apologist, btw. I fully predicted and hoped for an exodus from Github to GitLab or something back when it got acquired — I'm from the Microsux generation.
They could add stacked diffs, large monorepo features (allow user to view a slice of a repo), better submodule support (why can’t I PR multiple repos at once?). A good desktop app that is faster than the slow web client.
Stacked diffs is a huge one, and also where improving git would also improve LLM workflows. The bottleneck after code generation is PR reviews, and stacked diffs help break down large PRs into more digest-able pieces.
If you help humans collaborate better, you help LLMs collaborate better.
Because i can produce 5 clean, properly sized commits in the time it takes to do one round of reviews, so they have to be stacked. It's important that the CI run independently on each commit, and each commit builds on the work of the previous one.
but it could still be better for the truly gargantuan of code bases. Might not be worth it? Idk. Maybe with llm generated code churn, suddenly it becomes worth it? haha.
Just to think of a few, I want improved project management tools, better code review UI/UX, and cost-competitive integrated serverless hosting a la Vercel. GitHub could be a true one-stop shop with a bit more polish.
This is arguably why it makes more sense to bring GH under the umbrella. Azure integrations need to happen yesterday. The future is full-stack batteries-included low-codeish platforms that are easy to launch with and then boom you're one click from the Azure product suite. Tighter integration is the only way to do this because of the inherent distribution advantages.
Yeah, MS just too focused on desktop office and Azure enterprise customers
they should have launched an "firebase like" and full web framework "next.js like" to convert that into long term azure customer like its no brainer they didn't want to create that and recycling Teams forever
this is also issue with game development, like I know MS is big at desktop dev but they don't have presence in game dev other than xbox game studios which is fine but they could create their own game engine with all resources they have. they could save both for their usage in their massive studio while also strengthening their development pipeline from code,game engine to azure
GitHub personal access tokens could be a lot better. It'd be nice if you could assign tokens at the team level or you have more fine grained control over token permissions.
And yes, I know "Fine Grained Tokens" exist but they don't seem to be usable almost anywhere and the fine grain level of control isn't actually very fine grained so they kind of suck.
so if you create an Organization to host your project(s), now you cannot enable that maintainers make changes on incoming Pull Requests; something that is very useful and perfectly available for projects that live under a normal username.
Github Pages STILL don't have any sort of built-in analytics available. I shouldn't need GA or something else to track the basic website metrics when you absolutely know that MS and GH have been tracking these things the whole time. People have had issues up asking for this for literal years.
I've just been shunted from TFS Git (Azure DevOps?) to GitHub.
The PR UI is taking some getting used to.
Dev changes code near a comment I made? Comment is marked "Outdated" and hidden. If I open it, can I see what change they made next to the comment? Nope, I have to go find it manually!
It sorts X.Y below X.Y.A, X.Y.B etc. in the file listing.
When I select a file in the listing I'd like to just have that file open, not scroll to it in a list of all the changes.
The first PR I did showed a ton of changes that had already been merged from common history. I can see the merge commit you made, GitHub, I know you know none of these changes are actually being made.
Not caring if a required action hasn't run automatically. No "run" option, not even a "this isn't ever going to run", just "waiting for result".
Weirdly, showing the result of an action on the source branch, when it needs to pass on the merge commit.
I've not yet figured out how to require different approvers for different branches, although that one might be on my org settings. It's either the people in the codeowners file or any contributor?
No way to allow a ruleset to be bypassable while making the approvers still manually bypass it themselves. I want to know if I'm getting it wrong as much as I want to stop my junior devs messing up.
Finding conflicts in a PR between two branches that can merge cleanly if I do it locally.
Not letting you resolve conflicts in the UI if the source branch is protected, even though the UI gives you the option to commit the resolution to a new branch if you do it for an unprotected source branch.
Updating the source branch in the PR if you choose to do the above - something you can't do yourself!
Not showing branches in a hierarchy (as if they were directory paths)
That's absolutely the right question to ask. If MS just left GitHub alone, it would be fine for open source projects for years to come. The enterprise side is a little different, there they still have a lot of work to do to round out some of their more advanced features.
What worries me isn't that they stop investing. What worries me is that they actively destroy the current project while turning it into AI garbage.
Github should have the product sophistication/complexity of Atlassian with the distribution advantage of Microsoft. Anything less is an execution failure IMO.
Not even mentioning AI, which is a huge opportunity also.
Their CI / script runner tool is still total garbage. Starting with the rampant security holes (oh, make sure you pin everything you use by hash, which essentially nobody does; what was that about secure by default rather than secure by extra effort again?) and following with the only way to test it is to deploy over and over.
While git itself can be improved upon, the GitHub is not git; there are many improvements to GitHub that people have been requesting for many years now.Also, they could even just not make it worse and that would be a welcome change from their recent strategy
there's a lot that could be improved with conflict resolution and merge trains/stacked merges. see https://pijul.org for what's possible but not available in git
It's murky what Github's priorities going forward as part of CoreAI will be, and whether it will become even more of a subliminal marketing machine/ content source for AI codegen...
GitHub has (only) $2bn direct revenues (2024; subscriptions + presumably per-usage billing of features like GitHub Actions) but also generates revenue via Copilot, Marketplace (selling tools and integrations).
What are Microsoft CoreAI's revenues? surely >> GH's direct revenues. Hence, GH is likely to become a platform for pushing all sorts of AI revenue streams on its users. I wonder how Microsoft sees that, by segment.
Github at its core is a software lifecycle management product. To keep it running requires skillsets that are much much different from that of Gen AI/ML/whatever. Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra corporate political play and not something thats in the best interests of the users or the community. I expect to see a lot of the “legacy Github” folks slowly leave and be replaced by MS/Azure folks (gross). In the short to medium term this is probably gonna affect the stability of the system (its already pretty bad with several outages every month, including silent outages).
> Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra corporate political play and not something thats in the best interests of the users or the community.
It's hard for me to see anything Microsoft does as something other than an intra-corporate political play.
Forgejo is a really great self-hosted alternative to GitHub.
If you've wondered about hosting your own version of GitHub but have worried it's too hard to set up, I'd encourage you to spend even a few minutes spinning an instance up with Docker Compose and poking around.
Self hosting is a great idea. I’m curious which web features you find most useful? Is it primarily about PRs and code review?
I’m trying to think of what a bare minimum SSH remote experience would look like. Could you do code reviews with a terminal instead.
I love the git SSH experience for speed, but I find myself using GitHub for the PRs & code review. It would be nice to have a self hosted , terminal-based solution
Not working with datasets. Binary files aren't that large, and these tools are generally bad for my use case - because I am not concerned about datasets.
I need to track changes in binary files of very reasonable size. Total repo size is <1GB. But even at these small memory requirements it makes much more sense to self host with LFS. I have written this up too many times on the internet to go into great detail about how LFS isn't perfect and how I wish there was something better, but in practice it has worked extremely well for tracking a small amount of binary files. Kudos to the devs.
I prefer Forgejo, but both it and Gitea support actions like GitHub's. You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100% in-house, for free. I adore it for personal projects.
If you want to run a process after each push to a branch or merge into main or whatever, you describe it in a YAML file in that repo. Configure some workers to run those actions and off you go! I use it for things like running tests and applying Terraform changes.
I understand that part. Mostly interested where the runners are coming from? macOS especially is pretty costly to provide runners for, so who is doing that for free?
We've run Gitea actions (and contributed here and there) for a couple of years, since-by-side with Github. We host in containers on the Gitea side so there are some marginal differences as to what can be run in a job, but our experience has been very positive.
I want to signal boost the following quote from the URL above:
> Forgejo was created in October 2022 after a for profit company took over the Gitea project. It exists under the umbrella of a non-profit organization, Codeberg e.V. and is developed in the interest of the general public. In the year that followed, this difference in governance led to choices that made Forgejo significantly and durably different from Gitea.
If you take it at face value (at your peril), Gitea is about to start enshittification, while Forgejo will not at any point. My personal opinion, is that this is credible.
They are, and always were. I think we’re more accustomized to it though, and know they won’t try to pull some shenanigans with the CE at least. I guess Codeberg didn’t trust Gitea in the same way when they decided to fork, but I think as a result Forgejo would be more sustainable, them being a nonprofit and all.
I bounced away from Gitea because they don't (last time I checked) have OIDC. I started[0] trying to revive-and-drive a previous PR[1] to add it, but the test failures are beyond my motivation to investigate and resolve.
While GitHub and GitLab have dedicated design and front-end teams to improve their UI/UX, Gitea and Forgejo aren't large enough to reach that scale, even after Gitea became a company.
For example, look at the number of issues triaged with "UX" [0] or "UX Paper Cut" [1] on GitLab. It is an order of magnitude larger than you would find in any other FOSS option.
Sorry but the GitLab UI was bad, is bad, the whole software feels clunky and slow to use and everything is nested where in comparison Gitea is simple, intuitive and straightforward, just like the old Github days. I also don't know if it's a good sign that there are a lot of UX issues?
In my experience, the "really good" is that it comes batteries included:
- completely docker based CI/CD which makes reasoning about what it's going to do easier than "read through some minified .js from some rando"
- they do have composable CI/CD akin to the GitHub Actions marketplace, but I haven't used it as much in anger to speak to how valuable it is versus "competitive checkbox feature"
- built-in Terraform State, so no more S3 + Dynamo
- highly configurable JWT claim curation for ease of OIDC based access from the pipelines
- good integration between the platform and multiple Kubernetes clusters
- related to that, a strong "review environment" setup
- they were also hinting at being a Sentry replacement, but regrettably I had to switch back to GitHub before that came out of preview so I don't this second know where it stands
GitLab doesn't have an equivalent of GitHub actions (except an alpha-quality prototype).
GitHub Actions can share runtime environment, which makes them cheap to compose. GitLab components are separately launched Docker containers, which makes them heavyweight and unsuitable for small things (e.g. a CI component can't install a dependency or set configuration for your build, because your build won't be running there).
The components aren't even actual components. They're just YAML templates concatenated with other YAML that appends lines to a bash script. This means you can't write smart integrations that refer to things like "the output path of the Build component", because there's no such entity. It's just some bash with some env var.
Pedantically I think GLCI treats every environment the same, but by review environments I meant "disposable copies of the app such that one could interact with it during merge request review" e.g. https://mr-8675.example.com corresponding to /example/-/merge_request/8675 that would be provisioned when the MR was opened and torn down when the MR was merged or closed
I believe it aligns with this behavior in GitHub: <https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/deploy/configure-...> with the distinction that it appears from the GH docs that they think of that as "needs administrative approval" whereas GLCI thinks of it as "if the pipeline has permissions to run provisioning, off to the races, because names are free"
GitLab introduced the "deployment tier" I think as a means of communication to other users about the importance of the environment, but control over what credentials were made available to CI/CD was always controlled via <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/environments/#limit-the-environme...> which partially explains why the only reason to involve a repository administrator would be to install or update a secret needed to deploy successfully
“Really good” under which metric? Because it is slow, even more confusing after the terrible sidebar redesign and, to quote a famous author, its usage does not spark any joy.
Codeberg and gitea, on the other hand, feel great, like early Github. Fast and simple, instead of a product that’s adding feature on top of half-baked feature to capture the sweet corporate $$$.
I have to agree. I recently joined a company using Gitlab, coming from years of GitHub only. I have a soft spot for underdogs but I already found many features with bugs (especially related to hierarchy and inheritance) that makes you feel "meh".
I feel like all new AI tools only integrate with GitHub though, like Claude Code. We're actually thinking of moving from GitLab to GitHub, just for this reason.
Is that a problem with GitLab or a problem that should make you wary of Claude Code though? It's one thing to lock yourself into one LLM provider, but when they start chaining you to other SaSS organizations aren't they just locking you down even more?
It's... ok. But many of the really useful features are paid. E.g. merge trains or mandatory reviews.
I also don't think "it's open source!" is a huge differentiator because it's enormous, difficult to deploy from source and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero.
I think Forgejo is probably a way better option at this point even if it is less mature. It's written in Go so way easier to deploy and edit. And none of the features are paid.
I do like Gitlab but... it's not amazing. I liked Phabricator more (except for its lack of integrated CI).
It isn't. Ruby lacks static typing, and Rails heavily uses generated identifiers, which means navigating a huge codebase like Gitlab is basically impossible unless it's your full time job (or you get lucky). I've tried. I kept finding methods that - based on a grep - were never called from anywhere, and there's no IDE support for something like Find All References.
I'm sure if it was your full time job you'd eventually learn the codebase, but there's no way you can just dip in and add a feature unless you really persevere.
But I did manage to add a few features to the gitlab-runner (used for CI) - because it's written in Go, and Go has static types and pretty great IDE support these days. Night and day.
I've also added a few features to VSCode which is a similarly huge codebase. Again it's written in Typescript which has static types and good IDE support. It would have been effectively impossible if that wasn't the case.
This does not match my experience at all, and I think your "near zero" claim is silly.
> difficult to deploy from source
I won't argue with you here. There are a lot of moving pieces in a Rails deployment. This isn't different from most web app frameworks, but it is difficult.
That said, I've never worked on a Rails app where deployment was any more difficult than a variation on `bin/deploy v123 production`, because I wrote that script and it works 100% of the time.
> and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero
But this is still silly. You just don't know Rails or Ruby well, and don't want to learn them. Fine, but if you hadn't already made that decision, you would find the solution simple enough. No judgement intended -- different framework/language paradigms fit different people differently.
Rails has great IDE support also. Static typing can be a useful language feature, but a lack of same has not ever, in my experience, made it more difficult to understand real-world code.
There is a lot to love about Go too, don't get me wrong. But I would guess that the number of random developers who could drop in and be immediately productive in a Ruby/Rails app, vs a Go webapp, is basically equivalent. The overlap of projects where both would be highly appropriate choices is a bit thin.
[I hire into Ruby/Rails jobs regularly. I often hire senior developers with no Ruby/Rails background, but I do not hire people into these positions who are not open to learning. It takes a senior dev (from the C/Algol family) one day to learn Ruby, and (from a web dev background) a week or less to learn Rails. I have never seen a failure.
I also hire into Go jobs almost as frequently. The hiring criteria is a bit different (less emphasis on web awareness), but I do find it easier to teach Go to a Ruby dev, than Ruby to a Go dev. Make of that what you will.]
I am not trying to start trouble, or a heated debate, but I did want to say that my experience was the same as OPs and I am also coming from a static typing background so that likely explains my having a similar experience and expectations. I did for sure use RubyMine for attempting a change, so not "vim and yolo" but rather world class tooling and trying to discern where any random symbol came from was oppressively hard
But I was responding specifically to "in Ruby, so the chance of being able to actually modify it ... is near zero", which does not address the real issue.
It's perfectly possible to write simple, clear code in Ruby (and Rails!), but I'll concede that GitLab is not the best example of that.
If OP had said ~"... and the GitLab codebase is large and can be difficult to navigate and make drop-in contributions to ... also I have an aversion to dynamically-typed languages" :) ... then I wouldn't have bothered commenting.
I have an aversion to dynamically-typed languages because of these problems. It's not some random preference.
> You don't want to learn Ruby or Rails
Learning Ruby or Rails wasn't the problem. The Ruby language itself is fairly trivial. The issue is the lack of static types, and the fact that you can't even fall back to grep.
I know Python very well but it is almost as difficult to edit large Python codebases with no type hints. (It's not quite as bad because most Python code is greppable.)
Ruby and Rails work perfectly well for many many people, and you have chosen not to be one of them. That's a valid choice, but it's your choice and nothing more. It really isn't much about Ruby or Rails.
I grep through Rails code bases all the time. It is my first-choice method of discovery. In the very rare cases where it does not work immediately, I set a breakpoint and run from the REPL. This never does not work, even in the GitLab code base.
I have my criticisms of Ruby, and Rails, too. But your "near zero" comment is a shallow dismissal that captures your biases and presents them as some kind of informed truth. It is not.
I'll plug another option Gitpatch, however it's pretty early beta and not open-source yet, but most likely will be under AGPL at some point. It has built-in patch stacks (aka stacked PRs) and probably faster than any other Git host out there.
disclosure: I'm the author.
GitLab has a ton of options, And I find myself a bit overwhelmed by the user interface. It really needs a UX lead to simplify and create a better information architecture.
And, if you don't like something there's a very good chance you could be the change you want to see - they have a pretty welcoming contribution culture. Even if you don't want to change something, being able to read the source for it goes a long way toward aligning your understanding of the behavior, and that's not a diss on their usually pretty good documentation
GitHub was already under DevDiv, with Dohmke previously reporting to Julia Liuson. GitHub was moved under CoreAI in the reorg you mentioned. This move isn't new, it's just now more integrated and widely reported.
This was inevitable and going towards the direction, but it is sad to see this part of CoreAI division. Copilot and other AI initiatives should not be the primary driver of GitHub's vision.
Github may have more value as the largest software training corpus in the world than as a paid VCS, and Microsoft gets to uniquely utilize that as they will have non rate limited internal APIs and/or dumps to train on.
I assume they already had those APIs - Github was already owned by Microsoft. By prioritizing AI feature over the core experience it's possible that Github stops being the largest software training corpus in the future.
It's not hard to imagine an alternative universe where Github is a steward of innovation for both git and the code review process; alas, this is not the world we live in.
I'm starting to really detest the AI-everywhere thing. You're starting to feel it absolutely everywhere - good products turning shit just to capitalize on the hype.
> You're starting to feel it absolutely everywhere
Starting to? 30-50% of the HN front page has been consisting of articles about LLMs for months now, to the point that a user script to hide all AI articles vastly improves the experience.
Lots of comments here remind me of the time GitHub was purchased by Microsoft. It would be the dead of GitHub. While in fact it got better: GitHub Actions (pretty neat CI system) happend under Microsoft. Free private repos happend under Microsoft.
Now this time it could be different. But last time wasn't that bad imho.
Microsoft made the GitHub UI significantly worse by rewriting everything in React. It's now slow and bloated. Copying text from the file viewer is a nightmare. And never ever look at how GitHub Actions work under the hood, you will wish you never became a developer.
Search is very much FUBAR. I get nagged to register even though they know I have like 17 github accounts, because who does not? They missed the ball on that one. Sometimes I like to browse without any cookies on a separate browser for window shopping reasons. Leave me alone Microsoft.
I don't think they used a framework, I remember they used a lot of "vanilla JavaScript". They're using Rails after all. Here is a thread from 2022 where they began using React for their (then) new search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33576722
Gitlab had their CI/CD a few years earlier, Github had no other option. As to which one feels more productive, that's up to personal tastes, for me Gitlab's option seems far more polished.
It did not entirely get better; some things may have improved and some things may have been made worse.
Private repositories is not a feature I use (if I want the files to be private, I will not send them to Microsoft or to someone else, unless they are the intended recipient).
I use GitHub Actions to automatically assign issues to myself,
I think they have changed the HTML in many worse ways; some functions require JavaScripts, etc. They also made mandatory 2FA, and setting it up does not work properly. (I can use the API to get around both issues, for now.)
I did as well! No issues any worse than people using habitually using "github" to mean "the remote git repository in the cloud".
I expect this will continue indefinitely until the product becomes little more than an AI training corpus and genericized trademark, similar to how our Xerox machines at work are actually made by Brother, while Xerox the actual brand has faded into obsolescence.
I will note that we don't use many of the CI/CD/issue tracking/wiki/etc. features, though both Github and Gitlab offer them. I'm sure they have their own particular quirks that may be a hassle to migrate between and have people relearn. I prefer to keep those tools separate, allowing the git repository be almost exclusively a git repository and spinning up other tools as needed.
We use GitLab ci, issue tracking, dep scanning, everything at work and I can report it is amazing. All self hosted and never had any issues. I’ve got our entire deployment process setup through GitLab ci and it’s been rock solid. It’s $150/month per seat for the ultimate tier, but it’s 100% been worth it for us.
Doesn't GitLab suffer from the same problem of pushing AI? They have many AI features, and position themselves as "The most-comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform".
I'm not using any AI features, and I'm not even aware of any, but I did see it on their website too and it's a bit concerning. My hope is that it's just something they have to say right now and not a strategic direction. Otherwise I will definitely switch to self-hosting, even though the managed CI/CD in the cloud has been working very well for me.
I made the decision a few months back to go all in on self-hosting, and my own infrastructure. At least once a week I run into something that makes me realize I made the right decision. It's that time of the week again.
Surprised it took this long. I am working with Github sales team on straightening out our Github organization at my new job and it was weird to get a Zoom meeting invite from a company that has been part of Microsoft for nearly 10 years
>Microsoft’s CoreAI team is a new engineering group led by former Meta executive Jay Parikh. It includes Microsoft’s platform and tools division and Dev Div teams, with a focus on building an AI platform and tools for both Microsoft and its customers.
This is so confusing. The "CoreAI" team is apparently doing everything except the core of AI, which is LLMs.
Microsoft’s software quality is poor. Azure is extremely bloated and difficult to use, and I suspect only gained market traction due to bundling/anti-competitive tactics. Microsoft inserts tabloids news into its operating system.
GitHub is their most trusted “tech” brand by far, and it has their only successful AI product, Co-Pilot.
It’s almost inevitable that GitHub and all its products will be consumed with Microsoft bloat in the next 5 years as more and more products coast off the GitHub brand.
I think many of the concerns are valid, but I'm not sure I'd read too much into the name of the absorbing org. Org names at Microsoft end up being misaligned and unintuitive all the time.
While that may be true, I don't think the specific name of the team at Microsoft absorbing GitHub is what's concerning users. I can't think of a team up there that wouldn't be a red flag in this case.
Interested to see what East River Source Control [0] are going to build on jujutsu. Not affiliated in anyway but keen to see a GitHub competitor break out to scale, adoption.
Not surprising. The OpenAI partnership is fading. The GenAI as a product space overall is looking a bit frothy and house of cards-ish. GitHub is a strong product that is ripe for GenAI features that make it more interesting.
Like it or not this makes sense as a business move. Microsoft is positioning itself for the next phase of the current AI hype cycle where standalone AI products will struggle and the “it’s a feature not a product” phase will take hold.
Can’t GitHub just stick to its core business instead of rushing into AI slop? The growth of vibe coding absolutely already benefits GitHub if they maintain the core business.
If they fuck up the core business rushing into AI, then aren’t they likely to get replaced by something else that does the core thing better?
Not to mention all the earnest worries about them reading private codebases to train AI nobody asked for.
You’d think being a trusted source of truth for many critical codebases would be “enough”
The GitHub website experience is already messed up with forcing Copilot into everything. But then asking for user feedback about new setting options for issues but denying any request for a user default.
This surely isn't going in any good direction. What's next ads in commits?
On the one hand, this probably means it gets the funding it needs to keep going strong.
On the other hand, I'm worried that this means that GitHub is going to focus exclusively on building AI features while the core product becomes stale/abandoned.
Did GitHub have a funding problem? They doubled revenue last year, with 40% of that coming from GitHub Copilot. I imagine that for 2025, the increase will be much higher than even that.
I expect that the problem that Microsoft aims to fix is that people can use GitHub effortlessly without locking into Azure and Power Platform
I don't believe so, and I didn't mean to imply that. Rather just that if they are part of the "Core AI" org then they will likely remain a priority area of investment for Microsoft...right now anyway.
Sorta related, I was thinking recently: after much personal experience with the terrible PR review performance over the last couple years, and the recent blog posts covering terrible performance across GitHub features, I remembered that GitHub is a Microsoft product now.
So I expect everything about the GitHub experience to degrade to (awful, slow, poorly designed) Teams/Outlook quality, since Microsoft doesn't really care about your experience as long as you're locked in and you can eventually accomplish what your job requires of you.
The part in the article that is frustrating is something I've already been fearing, that GitHub is moving towards more and more AI. It's unfortunate, but GitHub has all but completely given up on improving GitHub features that don't have anything to do with AI. No more features or even regressions are happening in the realm of quality of life and usability features. Issues are just ghost towns of people requesting, for years, very basic but enabling features, and GitHub employees are nowhere to be found on these issues. It doesn't appear that they do _any_ non-AI feature development anymore beyond just basic keep things affloat maintenance.
You really didn't see that coming at the moment they bought Github? That was their entire intent, to have full access to all of the greatest minds in software... Everyone should have bailed immediately after acquisition... If you don't control the servers that your code is on, it's no longer your code, at the very least, you're sharing with your hosting provider. But, everyone needs to hurry up and jump to market, instead of taking the time to build their own servers, custom development environment, etc. So, because everyone followed the herd, now everyone is lead slaughter... This was a collective choice made out of laziness, convenience, false sense of necessity, greed, etc... We have no to blame but ourselves, because it wouldn't have happen if we didn't choose it...
Github has become too mission critical for many companies--their pipelines and processes often rely on Github workflows that may or may not be working each day. I was recently at a company that was dependent on Github workflows to make changes to their CDN and we had to come up with a "github is down" strategy for their team because it had become a consideration.
In general, git itself has become a bloated product. There's like 2-3 ways to do everything now and devs now argue about which is the purest, "right" way and it's annoying to deal with opinions of egotistical people when you're just trying to get work done.
You're comparing politics regarding actual political events and private code being scraped without opt-in or permission being requested, what is going on here indeed man.
> 3. Microsoft pushes VSCode and kills GitHub's Atom.
Zed was born as a result, which is drastically better. Zed tried to go into the AI thing, then made it possible to use it without any AI stuff, which is good.
GitHub was getting more and more corrupt as Microsoft matured it. The worst were the fake stars and engagement from bots. Then Big Tech gatekeepers fast tracked your job application if they saw you had hundreds of stars (they didn't care if it was fake).
I wonder how long before Microsoft starts pushing people using Github into MS ecosystem - MS logins, showing MS AI down user's throats, pushing actions towards "works on Azure, don't care about the rest", etc. ?
> “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon,” says Dohmke in a memo to GitHub employees today. “I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.”
Is interesting to me. There is quite a number of rumors that MSFT will be Returning to Office next year. The prominence of 'remote first' in this quote may indicate that such concerns are playing a role here...
Maintaining "independence" after selling the company to MSFT has always been a facade. Even from the perspective of the users, there was this palpable difference between before and after MSFT acquisition
Yeah, GitHub is cooked. Now's a good time to consider migrating to alternative forges like Tangled (https://tangled.sh; bit of a shameless plug, I'll admit. I'm the co-founder). We've got a more advanced PR flow, jujutsu change-id support and we just launched our in-house CI! https://blog.tangled.sh/ci
Long-term, we aim to be the new social coding platform, collectively built in the open.
Tangled is a pretty cool idea, but I'm sorry to say that I'm hoping Gerrit gets a resurgence.
It fits my "do one thing, do it well" philosophy as it doesn't have opinions about CI, Issue trackers or even how you view the code online.
I'll admit that it's a nasty bastard to set up properly though, and the options for viewing repositories are universally terrible when not bundled with a code-review system (like Gitea, Github and Gitlab). Alas.
There are .rpm/.deb packages for Gerrit that make installation/upgrades pretty simple.
The fact that it stores everything in files on disk (no databases except for caches that can be regenerated) makes backup/restore and replication a breeze compared to many other more complicated systems.
You say "forge" and stuff like "collectively built in the open"?
Do you consider the repos "public", "private" or what?
You have a very short privacy policy [https://tangled.sh/privacy], but no guarantees of AI-bot-scraping protection. What if anything is your users' expectation of privacy of their repos against third parties, including malicious ones? Really you need to set that out clearly in your privacy policy.
Not sure I understand your first comment. Repositories are currently public only since we’re built on the AT Protocol, which doesn’t yet have private data (in the works!).
Thanks for the feedback re: the privacy policy. It’s still actively being improved and we
take a lot of effort to protect against AI scrapers. I’ll update the policy verbiage to include that.
You were suggesting GitHub users migrate to your forge, and historically, one of GitHub's big features was private repos. And at least historically, Github private repos claimed to provide protections against unauthorized access/scrapers.
But AT Protocol can't.
So currently, you're only suitable for non-commercial users. (Can you name any commercial org using Tangled.sh on source code?)
Does AT Protocol have any rough milestone (date?) for private data?
> we take a lot of effort to protect against AI scrapers.
Sorry that's not stating a guarantee of anything, it's an unquantifiable aspiration. I asked what you guarantee your users. IP access logs? Alerts? Response times? Blocks? IP whitelisting?
(I didn't downvote you.) I think being upfront about it is always good. What is even better is stating it in the first sentence and making sure your whole comment is not an ad, except for maybe the "what are you working on" type of threads. This is just my opinion and not something codified in the guidelines, etc.
It sure is going to be painful migrating everything off github as the bit rot slowly seeps in. The eternal frustration of dead links, the constant astroturfing of LLM generated malware pretending to be what you're looking for, hoping to stumble across a fork in a random user's account.
I've always used self-hosted https://scm-manager.org for personal stuff and never felt any need to move to anything else. It is a surprisingly good and for some reason not very popular, piece of software.
Well, that's my stage left... I had already brought my github usage to bare minimum... For any of my clients through my business, I'm suggesting they host their own gtt repo's and only using Github and Gitlab for the visibility, not as an actual service to house their shit
Like it or not, mergers/acquisitions are matters of money, not whether you like the product or not. In fact, all corporations are beholden to make the most money, not the best products. Frequently the product that makes the most money is the one that constantly nags you to give it more money, which everyone hates.
Today I watched the WHY2025 talk about what happened to XS4ALL (a Dutch hacker-ethic ISP). Here's the summary: "we sold our profitable smallish independent startup with anti-corporate culture to a big corporation for lots of money, because we thought they'd continue it being awesomely anti-corporate, but all they did was squeeze our customers for more money, lay off all our staff and then move the customers to the corporation's own brand. We fought them in the courts, but the courts decisively ruled they were allowed to do all that because they own us, and it turns out they'd got expensive lawyers who did all the paperwork and pulled the right strings to make us look like the bad guys." Like, no shit? What were you expecting to happen? Does this story sound familiar to you?
Everyone needs to realize "the scorpion and the frog" is about corporations. Anyway, there's nothing illegal about selling your soul for money. It's almost mandatory in fact.
At some point, doesn't humankind rise up and demand that our governments stop... you know... actually fucking us like this? After all the trust-busting at the turn of the century, we're right back in another golden age of robber barons, almost as if we learned nothing about this as a civilization. Being paid in company scrip that can only be used in the company's store with products from their global monolith doesn't sound far-fetched at this point. We seem to be heading straight for the cyberpunk version of our inevitable dystopian future.
This is common. Big company buys smaller company. Smaller company execs stay on and establish the idea of independence. Eventually smaller company execs move on and Big company fills the ranks with their employees. Nothing sinister. Just how it goes.
git SSH remotes are easy, complete and practically free to host, with many features that GitHub doesn’t offer (like reflog, backup, updateOnPush, rebase & subtree), though you have to get comfortable with PR & code review via email or text file.
Sourcehut aka sr.ht is a free email-driven GitHub alternative. If you like email patches flows instead, check that out.
SSH unleashes the true distributed nature of git. With confidence you can move commits across instances , pushing to various repos. You can build some very flexible publishing and archiving patterns with git alone.
Everything is possible to be integrated to AI, AI expectation is so huge, even Google is try to implement AI into search engine. it's not much surprise that Github become the rock on the road for MS to AI.
IMO this was predictable and I recall walking a few people in the industry through the argument and suggesting they maintain a path to migrate off GitHub for when it finally gets re-orged.
Whenever someone makes a promise that a subsidiary or product will remain unchanged (typically because that's how customers/users prefer it), it's useful to ask whether that promise has any legal force that will prevent the company from reneging on the promise if organizational or market circumstances change.
There is almost never a barrier to having the organization change their mind, which means that the promise is at best a soft promise that in the near term they don't intend to change too much too quickly.
GitHub was such a cool product of its time, the complete epitome of ridiculous SV tech companies. The Oval Office. The whiskey library. A room full of swag. A product ubiquitously known by every nerd in the bay, then, world. I didn’t work there, but it was cool to be around it in SF at the time. Always sad to see them fall apart (yes yes I know it’s been happening for a long time)
Interesting that they always focus more on AI while their product is less and less usable. I want a usable and efficient pull request page, not useless AI features. Seems like the priorities are all wrong. The enshittification of GitHub is absolutely dramatic.
Sorry, is anyone even remotely surprised? This has and will always be Microsoft's modus operandi.
The bit most of us seem to completely misunderstand is that the name of the capitalist game is not competition it's monopoly rent. All major corporations time and again look to capture a monopoly, it's the winning play.
One tried-and-true classic is to delete old stuff, and GitHub has a lot of old stuff... in a couple years someone will calculate an amount they can save.
two years ago, I opened a PR asking for an LLM commit feature, and they flat-out said they weren’t doing it. Meanwhile, Cursor was eating their lunch and lapping them twice. I couldn’t believe how complacent and out-of-touch they were—it was pure laziness dressed up as “product focus.” And let’s not forget the ancient bugs rotting in their backlog that they refuse to fix. It’s like they actively don’t care about their users.
If you want to make a better version control service, then you might consider:
- Free public repositories and free API access.
- Mutual TLS authentication. Use X.509 extensions for partial delegation of authorization, so that someone can issue a certificate to themself or others with a limited set of permissions.
- Mirroring on multiple independent services.
- Allow SHA-1 (for compatibility with a lot of existing repositories that use it, and anyone using software that does not support other hashing algorithms) but also allow other more secure hashing algorithms to be used in case you do not want to use SHA-1.
- Make the HTML to work without CSS and JavaScripts (even if they can provide enhancements, do not make them required).
- Support some parts of the GitHub API, in order that existing software which uses GitHub API will be able to work with it.
- If you are making a new API as well, then it might use DER, that can use binary data, non-Unicode text data, etc better.
- Do not require TLS for read-only access to public data (but still allow using TLS even in this case).
I think that just like it happened with Apple after they made it out of bankruptcy, Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
Xamarin is no more, after the whole MAUI rewrite without backwards compatibility to Xamarin.Forms, killing VS4Mac, shortly after having rewriten the underlying Xamarin based IDE into Mac, what survives is a subset of Xamarin tech for mobile and WebAssembly workloads.
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
A proper cross platform IDE experience requires getting Rider.
Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Github even with the previous CEO was already a delivery mechanism for Azure and AI efforts, now it will be full steam ahead, as per new org chart.
VC++ after betting other compilers in C++20 support, seems to have lost its resources struggling to deliver C++23, and also probably affected by the Secure Future Initiative, and decisions for safer languages.
But hey 4 trillion valuation, so from shareholders point of view, everything is going great.
Microsoft being the cool guys? The cool guys? Mwuhahahhaa.
This gave me the good belly laugh I needed.
For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
- being the no. 1 enemy of free software
- shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share
- making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite
- creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)
- making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The last time they might have been considered the "cool guys" was sometime in the 90s.
This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.
Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
Idk i can think of a long list of awful stuff coming out of ms that is modern. They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.
I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
The only side of ms that i have any love for is xbox but that is also waning with all the studio acquisitions.
The fact you still only got bothered by studio acquisitions show you don't even noticed the studio closures...
MS fired thousands of gamedevs in the last few weeks, cancelled a lot of games, including games the execs liked to play the prototypes, cancelled publishing deals, and even closed entire studios, some of them literally successful that had just released profitable products.
In the profitable cases (and maybe just as open offer), why not just sell them back to their staff/former owner?
There's no point to keep the IP of games that are shuttered.
Maybe the offer was made and a bunch didn't take it?
Dunkey has a great overview of how Microsoft handles studios/IP: https://youtu.be/GWrcUh2GuPQ
For the last decade they acquire studios/IP’s, let them languish, then without warning strip them for parts. Make a successful game? Doesn’t matter, you’re all fired. Y’all want to make a game? Sure! We can even promote it! 12-18mo of no news after an announcement ah dang guys we were so hyped but we’re pulling the plug.
It is baffling how many studios they own and yet they have almost no exclusives/big cross platform hits developed for the Xbox this generation.
> There's no point to keep the IP of games that are shuttered.
Any movie studio that rebooted a franchise after a decade or two of dormancy would beg to differ
I don't think MS considered any of this. For example there were situations were they had a meeting giving green light one day, and cancelled the next.
Seemly what happened is that MS high-level decision makers, concluded that MS need a lot of cash for AI research, and decided to mass-close studios and cancel games with little verification, just go firing people until the cash liberated for AI is enough, doesn't matter if those people gave even greater revenue recently.
> why not just sell them back to their staff/former owner?
Saving corporate face
Amen. Also, forcing us to tie our local OS into their cloud nonsense is a travesty. Hearing that they will soon disallow updates to those of us that don't capitulate to their cloud-account ransom has kick-started my efforts in formally moving away from Windows. I'd rather lose most games than get a cloud account.
You dont lose your steam games. They launch on Linux
Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence, but I can’t see what the point of the company is beyond that. Enterprise something something maybe. And declining literacy makes Powerpoint unfortunately indispensable.
> Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence
Debatable. Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard. But loads of people don't do this. They see a file on their desktop and double click it. Why can't double clicking a CSV file just open the import wizard!? (Because they want people to share xlsx files as a data format.)
I assume most Americans don't run into the CSV hell that other countries do. In my current country, whether CSVs open as a comma-separated or semi-colon seperated document depends on whether the OS is set to use a , or a . for decimal numbers. It's absolutely annoying.
Right but the import wizard can fix things. They just don't make the double-click go through the import wizard - and people use 'open' or double-click their files. LibreOffice Calc opens the import wizard when you open a csv and it's fine.
For the life of me I cannot comprehend why they cannot let us choose the decimal separator independently from the locale. Or for fuck’s sake, just be smart about it. My desktop is for boring administrative tasks, of course I want it in my language. No, I don’t want to manually change settings in Word for every fucking document I create because ~none of them will be in English. But then why do I have to search-and-replace . with , or click 12 times through an inane bullshit wizard just to paste some data in Excel?
Respecting regional settings is so inconsistent among Office applications. The desktop ones usually get it, but online is a crapshoot. Whenever there's a date like 3/4/25 I get the play the fun guessing game of whether that's March or April.
For Project Online, the most reliable way I found to fix it was to manually edit the URL to replace en-US with en-AU, then bookmark that.
Americans don't use CSV?
Depending on whether your OS uses a , or a . for decimal numbers changes how excel will parse a CSV file. Americans use a . for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a CSV. Other countries use a , for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a SSV (semi-colon separated) and everything will be in a single column.
To make matters worse, randomly, employees will have their OS using US or GB locales so that if you distribute a CSV, it will work for some employees, but not for others.
Excel's behaviour is almost as annoying. It's basically impossible to produce a correctly-formatted German document on an English OS and vice-versa.
this seems like less of an excel problem and more of an issue with an improperly escaped data set though?
No. Excel changes the SEPERATOR when parsing depending on the locale settings. This means a CSV generated or saved with a decimal of . will not be able to be opened by one with a , and vice-versa. This is an Excel issue, as it doesn’t even try to determine or ask which separator to use. Hence why the comment above said you need to use the import wizard and not double click.
I don't know any of these problems. I use a modern operating system and office suite that supports CSV not a specific subset and syntax of it.
The syntax that MS Office uses to read/write a CSV is defined by the Regional Settings of your PC.
Open control-panel for regional settings, select "Advanced settings" button on the bottom control.exe intl.cpl
If you don't know any of these problems, then all the people and systems you work with have a "." as decimal and "," as separator, and you are spared from the hell of MS Office being unable to overrule these OS-settings when treating a CSV
Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain. Obviously both . And , are used way to often not only for numbers. I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.
> Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain.
Thing is, it is not about what you used, you are not able to control this from happening when your CSV should work for people in other countries. Whatever configuration you used which never got a complain, if your recipients also used Excel to work with those documents, they probably have the same regional setting on Windows for list/thousands/decimal separator.
If you use ";" as separator, i.e. Excel in UK, US, Japan, China, Korea will not be able to correctly open your CSV.
But even better: If you created this CSV on a France or Sweden regional setting, the thousands separator will be a whitespace ("1 000" instead "1,000" or "1.000"), so Excel in e.g. Italy will not detect those properly.
> I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.
It is a (intentional) weakness of MS Office for those who work in an international environment, because Excel links itself to .csv files to hinder the experience, as it is neither able to properly detect them nor guide their users through a process to properly handle them.
1.01 in US === 1,01 in EU
See the problem now?Your operating system cannot solve this problem.
CSV already solved this problem with quotes. Maybe not the most convenient solution for some users but that's no excuse for the Excel behavior of making up a different format depending on the locale.
Excel really doesn't care what users think. I mean, in biology, we've already had to change the names of genes to accommodate Excel's auto-date conversion routines. So, why would it care to have globally consistent CSV formats?
Is this 2025? Why would any software safe it invalid like that to begin with?
Not all of EU though. I am European and I never used "," anywhere yet people understood.
I don't understand the down-votes, but okay, have it your way, lmao. Someone really hates dots.
I guess the downvotes are because you also didn't understand the context.
It's not about people, it's about the Windows locale setting and how MS Excel interprets a CSV-file when you doubleclick it
Yeah, I agree with that and I find it frustrating.
OMG--we had a worfklow where less-techy folks were supposed to edit a csv, then check it in to github, which would kick off a whole process automatically for them. I kid you not--anyone who edited the csv in Excel would eff the whole file up every single time! They just needed a text editor, which we told them to use, and the changes were literally simple, either editing an existing entry or adding a new entry. Nope, these college educated "IT" workers could not handle it! We ended up having to scrap the entire automation workflow because the employees were simply too dumb to use a text editor and github.
Maybe I’m just not understanding the nuances of what you were working on, but is it possible that there was something wrong with the solution if literally every person was screwing it up?
CSV is data only. Excel handles way more than that. XLSX is the preferred file format because it's compressed XML that can hold all kinds of things.
Also, CSVs seem to open just fine on my Excel. If it's not formatted with a standard delimiter or isn't handing quoted strings the proper way, sure maybe the data wizard is needed.
Excel is terrible in a lot of aspects, but CSVs seem to be something it handles as well as anything else in my experience.
> Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard.
Ofc you do. In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.
yeah, what Excel does is, it assumes the comma and separator of your regional settings and doesn't care if it fails or not.
> In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.
Ofc it is. Now try to edit that CSV with Excel and save it again in that format.
Microsoft are wielding the entire office suite as a weapon against free and interoperable formats…
It is the single biggest blocked against open computing.
If Microsoft were serious about open source like another poster claimed, they would let us run it on all platforms.
Much like iOS/Android & the Web killed MSFTs stranglehold on OSes, google docs & markdown killed MSFT office's stranglehold on office. So many businesses are google doc shops, vast majority of schools are google docs, vast majority of casual document usage is google docs and google docs is open-enough with it's export formats.
Excel at this point is specialist software, like adobe photoshop. Everything else is 'good enough'.
I’ve never come across Google docs in the wild in a corporate setting.
Seems to me Microsoft office is still the dominant player.
Microsoft Office is probably still the largest player but a former large company I worked for absolutely used Google for 95% of purposes. I didn't even have a Microsoft Office license. It's very common. If we had to exchange docs with someone that didn't use Google, we'd export formats in some way including, often, to PDF.
Anecdata, 10k+ Eng department, it’s all GSuite. Office365 exists as well for external interop but I’ve never seen anyone reach for it due to preference since it existed.
Gsuite (including docs) is the norm at most companies I’ve worked at that have been founded since 2010, though the finance depts usually also had their own excel licenses.
That being said, excel itself is still more powerful than google sheets, but the collaborative nature of Gsuite beats the pants off of MS Office, online or native.
I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs. I don't know that most people need it. I will say that interactive mode in gdocs is slightly better. I also like Outlook slightly better, though I do wish they'd slim it down a bit, it feels bloated.
My last decade has been a mix, some o365, some GDocs. I do wish there was something opened that was nearly as good as Visio myself, rather than renting it as an add-on. diagrams.net/draw.io is pretty good for some things, but Visio has a lot of features that aren't even close. I haven't tried the web version of Visio lately, last I had it was only halfway decent for read-only, but apparently most features now work. So next time I need it in mac/linux it should be an option.
> I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs.
I reinstalled Wordpad. Wordpad is sufficient for most things (including opening and editing most simple word documents--though that may be because I created them myself with office 2007) and if I really need a word processor (styles, page layout, etc) then I also have LibreOffice. I didn't even consider an Office license when I rebuilt last.
It basically comes down to whether your sales arm demands native Teams and subsequent MSFT stack. Anyone deploying major production in GCP/GKE tends to go full Technical Partner with GOOG, google docs included.
FWIW Docs isn't bad, and slides is... useable, but sheets is a poor excel alternative.
I find Docs and Slides are fine and really preferable because they do a good job with 95%+ of the functionality you probably want without word art and stuff like that. Sheets is more stripped down relative to Excel but absent pivot tables and the like, most people don't need that.
My experience for smaller companies is more like:
- if you have GMail, people(esp engineering) use docs and 1-n people have Excel on top
- if you are all in on MS, then of course no one will use GDocs
It's all anecdotal, but I haven't seen Microsoft Office in my job since 2010. It's been wall-to-wall Google for the past four companies.
Thoughtworks was on GSuite when I was there.
That's being charitable to OSS office packages' UX.
Some wounds are self-inflicted, and open source has a well-known last-20%-polish problem that's especially painful in mass-user scenarios like office software.
OOo wasting the 00s with a circa-90s UI (and Oracle being assholes) is equally responsible for MS Office's continued popularity in enterprise.
This is not an interface problem but deliberate action to make office formats non-compatible with other software.
Personally I prefer 90s software design over the bloated crap of today.
> And declining literacy makes Powerpoint unfortunately indispensable.
I'd argue the opposite: Powerpoint makes literacy decline.
"PowerPoint makes us stupid." – General James N. Mattis, USMC [source: https://paulgraham.com/quo.html ]
Related
Cognitive Style of Powerpoint - Edward Tufte
http://makingdatatalk.com/Lecture01/Reading/Tufte-TheCogniti...
Lets not pretend like there wouldn't be dozen of quality and actually used software if it wasn't for microsoft existing.
I actively prefer Libre Office.
Yes, Excel is probably a lot better if you use English setup and advanced functions.
For me,
- not having to use Norwegian for formulas (my work machine has Norwegian setup and Excel insists on using Norwegian formulas)
and
- not having it trying to find something it can misinterpret as a date, preferably some random place in a list of thousands of items
makes it worth it.
Just change your windows display language to English?
Should I also change it on my mother's computer who doesn't speak English? We can also start distributing .bat files that change the system language along with our spreadsheets, for anyone who wants to open them. Maybe automate it with VBS, so it changes automatically when you open the spreadsheet. That's the solution.
The VBS should then also lock the spreadsheet to foreground while it's opened, because the global change may affect other apps, like Windows Calculator may swap the comma/thousand separator.
Will write a user story for that if you share the link /s
Work computer, so I might not be able to do it.
Also, why shouldn’t I be able to choose which language I use in Excel when they’re clearly all available?
Why do software companies these days insist on treating me as though I can’t look after myself?
Interesting. I consider Excel the worst of Microsoft's misdeeds. Not that there's not an abundance to pick from, but Excel may very well top the list.
It's perhaps the single worst database in the world; with no type control, no relationship management, no data safety whatsoever to speak of (it even actively mangles your data), its interface is utter madness, and yet - it's the most used database in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst development and runtime environment in the world, obscuring code, making reasoning about code and relations between code almost impossible, using a very obscure macro language that even morphs between different computers, and yet - it's the most used development and runtime environment in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst protocol/data exchange format in the world, with dozens of intentionally obscure, undocumented versions, insane format with surprising limitation (did I mention it actively mangles your data? - it's worth repeating anyway), supremely inefficient, and yet - it's the most used protocol/data exchange format in the world.
I can't really think of anything in the computing world that has done as much damage as Excel.
What you fail to realize is that (nearly) everything you think of as a flaw here is a key feature.
Excel allows norm(al users)ies to scale Mt Impossible from the bottom where they don't care about types, or relationships, and don't want to (because it's too abstract). They want to solve a problem. So they start with simple data given meaning by physical space, and work up from there.
It's genius. It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.
> It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.
That's a bingo, although I'd phrase it even more glowingly as "It allows people to solve many common problems with computing, without knowing about pointers."
Everything you say is not wrong. But despite being so horrible, the business world still runs on excel. Finance, underwriting, accounting, engineering tools, fantasy football leagues… Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs. It’s timeless and hated by many for valid reasons, but its impact is vast.
But that's just path dependency. If Excel didn't exist, everything would run on something or somethings else. And it's not clear whether this timeline is better or worse than the average timeline in that respect.
Without a doubt, if Excel didn't exist, someone would have created it.
It's the lowest-barrier programmable logic, a coordinate-system where arithmetic can be applied to contents of any given coordinates.
And it likely would have grown into the same exact mess as Excel, with continuous expansion of the arithmetic part, as people kept reaching the limits of it but wouldn't go back and recreate everything in a DB...
I'd need a pretty strong argument to believe the world would be better absent spreadsheet programs.
My starting point would be that in their absence, a lot of problems wouldn't have been solved with computers, for want of programmers.
> Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs.
What frustrates me the most about this is I've seen some insane excel wizardry from the accounting department at various jobs over the years that is effectively programming, and that if these people had put just as much effort into learning Python & using a database, they'd be better off and might actually make good developers. In my view, Excel ends up becoming sort of an artificial barrier to departments outside of IT being able to make business software.
Also a good point- but there is no python runtime on accounting and PMs computers. And it’s also a huge mess to try and support. Imagine some python code from 10 years ago, then juggling the versions, then god forbid any module dependencies. It’s simply not portable. Meanwhile the VBA written in 2000 is still working all contained in an excel Workbook.
Now let's talk about MS Access!
I'm told there were better spreadsheet software back in the day, but that Excel basically won accounting/finance by allowing itself to be shareware (i.e. effectively free), in a similar way to how Microsoft has at times turned a blind eye to piracy of its other produce (e.g. Windows).
Not so much.. I mean if Word Perfect and Lotus 123 had a merger, then they would still be competitive as neither was really better than the MS Office counterparts, but as a combo they would have had more entrenchment to work from.
IBM buying Lotus and not Word Perfect was probably a mistake, had they really wanted to take it seriously... but they seemed more interested in Lotus Notes (think Outlook+Access in a self-hosted cloud environment), it was imho nasty af.
Not really. Once Windows came in, Excel was pretty much the best game in town. Lotus didn't really do a great job on Windows. There were some attempts at more integrated office suites but they didn't really take off. There were also some attempts at different spreadsheet models but people were probably too used to essentially the original Visicalc model. Not sure that Excel was anymore effectively shareware than any of its competitors.
piracy in the school playground in the 90s did much to cement the use of MSFT Office at home
I would dare to say that all business apps start as an Excel sheet (or Google Sheet) and after the usefulness of data collection and data arrangement/presentation is validated (often long after the usefulness is validated) they eventually become a full-fledged business web app.
And as a casual Excel user (to get data from CSV, remove some rows, move few things around, etc.) it isn't even great. You can't open two files with the same name because Excel seems to have some "global state" between windows; to the point where you might be hitting Control+Z to undo some changes, and it's undoing stuff on the other spreadsheet without you noticing.
Doing something as "simple" as a LEFT JOIN of data requires having two separate documents (or one, but saved on your system), open them in the Power Query editor (if it's the same document you do it twice, once per table) which creates two "queries", and then you can either use one to join against the other, or create a third one "joining" them. In the end, you get three new sheets on your docs: the original tables and the merged one.
Then there's the annoyances: if you use Excel in English (US at least), apparently you get a CSV separated by actual commas "," (ASCII 0x2C) but using it in Spanish (Spain) you get it separated by semicolons ";" because commas actually separate number decimals. Meaning whenever I build a program that parses/writes CSV, I need to consider the chance it's using semicolons and commas instead of commas and dots. Not that it's non-standard: CSV doesn't specify a delimiter, but you could stick to the same format everywhere, or give an option to customise, or create "Tab-Separated Values" (essentially CSV with tabs separating values).
Another one is formulae, that also change based on language, and their arguments separator also changes. In en_US you'd use `=SUBTOTAL(109,B2:B7)` while in Spanish it's `=SUBTOTALES(109;B2:B97` (plural instead of singular, and semicolon instead of comma). Meaning any guide, documentation or tutorial in English requires me having to "guess" how the function is translated, and manually changing commas to semicolons.
With all this, I mean to say: Excel isn't even that great for the "normal" user. Or perhaps I'm too "power user" for this and just lazy enough to bother with it instead of using "proper" tools like Python or R.
CSV literally stands for Comma Separated Values, so I don't know what you expect. For the most part, you should have (double)quotes around your values that contain commas and double the double-quotes for literal instances.
UTF-8 is now pretty much the defacto standard for the files, where as historically you'd have a number of different code pages, and/or UTF-16 (BE/LE with or without BOM) and a lot of other variances that were much harder to deal with.
Pretty much any software library for CSV handles these things for you. As for localization of input/language parameters, can't really speak to that aspect of things. And I'm not generally using multiple spreadsheets, etc... at most I'll have a database source connected to work against queried data.
I hate the localized function names quite a lot too. In german it even uses umlauts in some of them.
If pleebs can understand it, surely it’s not as foul as you state.
Nonetheless i hear your argument. I feel that python is the same abomination of the programming world. Yet it flourishes and is even loved.
Haveth we stockholm syndrome to our own garbage tools?
Excel and Minesweeper. I'm still so angry about what they did to Minesweeper.
Who invented the spreadsheet?
The victors truly get to write history, don't they?
I just wish the Mac version wasn’t so painful
Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
Apple barely does it and only for their products. I agree with you that that’s already too much and too annoying but that’s an order of magnitude less than Microsoft who advertise their products pretty aggressively AND ALSO are advertising for whoever gave them money too.
Ubuntu I didn’t use it for years, there are tons of other distributions that I prefer now but last time I checked, there was a removable default shortcut to amazon. That’s an awful symbol, if you ask me, to associate Ubuntu and its meaning to Amazon but it’s nothing when compared to Apple or Microsoft (dare I say Google) behaviors.
Apple barely does it and only for their products.
With the recent notable exception of the F1 movie advertisement that arrived as a notification from the Wallet app. https://daringfireball.net/2025/06/more_on_apples_trust-erod...
I disabled Wallet notifications immediately :-(
Obviously not defending it, but isn’t the F1 movie produced by Apple?
Yes. There's still an entire drama about how inappropriate it is for the Wallet app to advertise a movie.
Yes. And the debacle was so loud because it does not happen generally (I’d have to go back to the U2 album thing to find something comparable).
They nag too much about their services, though. I don’t fucking want Fitness whatever or News thing, I would like the OS to stop putting a red dot in my settings. But anyway that’s not as brain dead as what I’ve seen on Windows.
I agree.
Not getting stuff pitched to you constantly by everyone is such an unending exercise of updating preferences, "unsubscribing", rejecting permissions requests, etc. It feels almost futile.
Not to mention the "ask again later..." option having replaced the flat out "no" option.
Even the people you'd imagine might be more sensible (eg Proton) email the crap out of you by default.
So when even the OS starts doing it, it's somewhat infuriating.
>Apple barely does it and only for their products
And U2
11 years later I still refuse to listen to their music
That's okay, they'll be fine With or Without You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XayyES2vO8Q <3
Apple pushes their products often on iOS and many of them can't ve turned off or can't be turned off easily.
So you have notifications that you can only get rid of by engaging with the Apple ads.
Yes, the most egregious of which being the setting app.
Its an OS setting app. Its the most fundamental bundled application in an operating system, second only to maybe the file manager or package manager. Is nothing sacred?
lol I was actually thinking of the setting app in my comment. I agree, it bugs me every time I pick up my phone.
It's gotten to the point where I resist looking at my iPhone because I'm going to have to take up my brain space with the unwanted notifications. I'm not sure what it is but on Android it's less pushy and I can clear all notifications with a single click. So most of the time my new iPhone sits in a drawer and I use my old Android as I go about my day.
Hmm, what notifications do you get from the Settings app? I don't recall ever getting any. And you can clear all notifications with a single tap on iOS.
When you open the app, the top half of the screen is dedicated to selling you their subscriptions. If you're already subscribed, you won't see it. It looks like a settings app. If you're not subscribed, you enter an ad hell and you can't make those notifications disappear until you at least view the ads.
Ah, I have the 200GB iCloud subscription, no wonder then.
You can also not show notifications from specific apps, which I find much better.
I definitely appreciate the android interaction for notifications, in that I can long-press a notification and jump straight into settings to disable if I like.
I have most notifications disabled at this point.
News app is part of the OS image and littered with ads. I just got an ad in Settings for the month to month Applecare because mine is expiring. Took a few tries of declining to get the badge on Settings to go away.
I have yet to see a single ad on either the menus on Ubuntu or in OSX. Care to elaborate on what you mean by that?
A few times over the years Ubuntu included Amazon ads in the OS. Each time, afaik, the community reacted angrily and it didn't last.
There's also a couple places where Ubuntu advertises their commercial services in the OS, including in apt ("Get more security updates through Ubuntu Pro...") and in the default login message (promotions for Ubuntu Landscape, as well as various other products and services through motd-news).
Once ever. The default search returned results from Amazon and local files potentially leaking your search intended to find local files to Ubuntu who in turn claimed that it was ok because potentially intensely personal info that could be inferred from queries weren't personally attributable to you.
This was obviously not ok and it never happened again this was if I recall correctly around 2012.
Ah thanks. I did a quick search before posting and this article was listed as from 2019, but that was when it was last updated - it did just happen once in 2012.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/mark-shuttleworth-explai...
> Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
I looks like Ubuntu was created just in order to be able to dismiss Linux as "also advertise products". It's just a single distribution out of a hundred, and far from the best, so it's completely wrong of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300531.
Unlike with Apple, you have virtually unlimited choices of Linux distributions that are ad-free.
Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind the scenes, presenting to consumers a tiny little sliver of this massive digital beast lurking under the hood. They're always 15 years ahead of policy, so they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more, on a scale that I don't think we even fully understand.
My ranking from most evil to least would be:
1. Google
2. Meta
3. Microsoft
4. Amazon
5. Apple
6. Netflix
Ranking evil is hard, but I'd rank Amazon's control of global supply chains as more evil than at least Meta. While Meta got WhatsApp, which is big. (Escaping Facebook, Instagram etc is a lot simpler)
Enabling Cambridge Analytica[0] alone ranks Meta far worse than Amazon. Amazon has done nothing remotely close to necessitating abandoning their own brand AFAIK.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Project Nimbus is Amazon and Google together. Meta was early on the genocidal train, in e.g. Myanmar and Ethiopia, as well as adjacent to the 'regime change' obsession of usian elites.
Arguably they're all atrocious due to effects on environment and labour rights.
I think what's almost shocking about this is that Google seemed so great in the beginning. "Don't Be Evil" was even like an internal code of conduct slogan or something.
I never worked there and have no inside knowledge of what happened. Did they get taken over by MBAs who gained control of the company? Was it always evil and we were just misled the whole time? Something else?
They merged with DoubleClick¹, an advertising company. The combined company was about twice the size of the old google so it severely diluted their ranks with a huge cohort of the worst kinds of MBAs: Advertising & Marketing executives.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick
Nothing fundamentally changed. The only real difference is they hit that inevitable point for any business that they had to start making money. They weren't evil then and they aren't now. They're a business, and they are responding to market demand for free to consumer products paid for by advertisement. What nobody on HN wants to admit is that the vast majority of people would rather have that than pay for their software in dollars. People love to complain about the Google panopticon but aren't willing to grapple with the fact that it has tremendous benefits too.
They single-handedly dismantled a thriving browser ecosystem. They pushed Real Name policies, used Google+ to stifle innovation, and then finished the job by shutting Google+ down.
And so on.
You are making exactly the mistake I am pointing out in my comment. Outside of the HN bubble nobody cares at all about a "thriving browser ecosystem." They want a browser that works so well they don't have to think about it and Chrome has provided that. And this is where Google's dominance has a tangible benefit. The amount of resources that Google can apply to Chrome development is massive compared to what could be done in the highly competitive market that existed before it.
You can argue that maybe a highly competitive browser market would lead to more innovation, but I'm not sure that's the case. Could a highly fragmented market build something that is as good as Chrome? IDK, but my (moderate confidence) bet is no. Browsers are a pretty mature product at this point and I don't think that competition would produce enough competitive pressure to outweigh the massive resources of a dominant near monopoly.
> They want a browser that works so well they don't have to think about it and Chrome has provided that.
And now Google is slowly but surely moving to shut down ad blocking.
Some of us just saw it coming a mile away.
> Google seemed so great in the beginning.
It's almost like they were good at marketing.
Can we add Palantir at the top?
Can we get an honorable mention for Adobe? I'd put Adobe probably right under Apple.
Adobe would be far more evil if they weren't so bad at making software. I think their intentions and business practices are clearly equal to or more evil than Apple, they just don't have nearly the scale and market reach that Apple has.
Does google collect more information than Apple, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Palantir etc?
I don't think so. Collecting data is a baseline for all those companies, you have to rank the evil they do with that data.
> Does google collect more information than Apple
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
Yes. Yes they do. Collecting data is most of the point of Google apps/services/devices.
Google then aggregate all that data in the cloud, whereas even if Apple do collect data it’s almost never sent to the cloud for cross-analysis, it’s almost always on-device and therefore private.
What's so evil about Netflix?
They use Cassandra and make cool series ever now and then, like Love Death Robots. :-)
DRM is probably something that people take issue with, and it's probably harder to buy physical media that you "own" more than streaming services.
Cancelling popular shows in the second season because it makes marginally more money to do that
> they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more
Citation needed. Did you forget that Google owns YouTube among other things? They don't need to torrent training data when people voluntarily upload an endless stream of it to their platform.
Don't forget their military and surveillance contributions
lol. Amerika Freedom ™
why do you think meta is more evil than google?
ah yes Google, the less evil company that manipulates search results to facilitate their desired election outcomes, lmao
> They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.
As did Ubuntu.
>I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
Huh? The same google caught tracking your every move even if you opted out? The Google that seems to serve ads based on your conversations if anyone in the room has an Android phone? The Google that actively tries to kill any and all ad blockers?
They aren’t even close…
Windows normalized having ads in the OS.
Ads in the OS? That isn’t Microsoft’s idea, or even Apple’s (they have places they do it too). No, that was popularized by the mobile OS made by an ad company, Android.
Weirdly that I don't get any ads in Android.... My phone was made by the same ad company.
No? Try installing 1 app without seeing ads for 10 other useless apps.
Haven't installed an app in ages, but seeing an ad in a store isn't as bad as seeing an ad in my app launcher. And yes, windows puts ads in the start menu.
I was an insider user of Windows for close to a decade... the first time I saw an ad in the start menu search results, that's when I changed my default drive to Linux and have not looked back. I booted to windows on that system twice since (firmware updater). I don't have a Windows drive on my current desktop at all, and my personal laptop is a Macbook. My work laptop is Windows though, the down side is the environment is so locked down, I can't even run WSL or Docker.
> Haven't installed an app in ages
I haven't used a phone in 10 years and surprisingly I haven't seen any ads on phones for years!
The store is part of the OS… if you say "no ads" and just exclude ads… that's kinda on you.
I install apps all the time without seeing an ad, because 90% of the apps I use are installed from F-Droid.
The apps I install from F-Droid often help me block ads in my browser, so I see very few ads as I use my phone day to day.
Meanwhile, my understanding is that Apple's App Store has ads in it, but that's the only app store allowed. So it seems like maybe iOS is the one that "has ads in the operating system".
fdroid is not part of android.
Right. But the query was whether I can install an app on Android without seeing ads. I can.
> Try installing 1 app without seeing ads for 10 other useless apps.
Not at all. The claim was that there are no ads on android.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44869520
Yeah, I'm not responding to that. I'm responding to your much weaker follow-up that I already quoted.
So you're replying ignoring context? Ok but discussions become kinda meaningless in this way.
Look, there are lots of us using Android and not seeing any ads. So we want to speak up when folks blab on about ads on Android. In reality, iOS and Windows and Android all have ads in their marketplace.
So if you want to have a substantive discussion, it should be centered around the places in the OS where ads are present, whether competing products have ads in similar locations in their OS, and whether those ads can be avoided, both on Android and on other platforms.
My contention is that Android ads are overblown, and generally Android has ads in all the same ways iOS does, and not any more than that. There are of customized versions of Android that add various anti-features, but that's not what I'm focusing on here: I'm focusing on a user's ability to avoid advertising.
But I'm arguing in good faith, and putting in effort to focus on the substantive user experience. I get the feeling you're in this to win some semantic battle with low-effort replies, so I'm going to disengage.
I mean yes, technically, but really no that's clearly not what was being objected to. Finding adds in arbitrary interfaces seems dystopian to me. Whereas having a discreet "suggested" or "promoted" tab or bracket for software in the app store - the place I go to get software - doesn't bother me. There are certainly ways they could screw it up but they don't seem to have done so yet.
Also as it happens I don't even see those because I exclusively use FDroid at this point. So ironically I see no ads when using a device designed and sold by an advertising company and haven't for years.
Seeing ads/recommendations in app store is miles better than finding out your fresh Windows comes with Candy Crush Saga preinstalled.
As a recovering Candy Crush addict, that's the last thing I need.
Samsung installs a bunch of 3rd-party game apps with every system update. At least they tell you they did and offer to tell you which apps they added.
Samsung doesn't build the OS, but they control it on your device.
On old devices samsung just adds an overlay with ads. I've had to factory reset and keep them not updated.
Is it a regional thing? I've never seen that happen.
Ubuntu had ads in the terminal in 2022: https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-plac...
Unless you're going to call letting users know they have access to onedrive for free an "ad", Microsoft didn't do anything until Windows 11 in 2024.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-pushes-start-menu-ads-t...
Windows 10 is still too fresh in people's mind to gaslight people into thinking there were no ads in it.
2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20121004004109/http://community....
2015: https://web.archive.org/web/20151015182852/http://betanews.c...
2015: https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-10-solitaire-requires-a-subs...
2016: https://www.howtogeek.com/243263/how-to-disable-ads-on-your-...
2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160602204008/http://iskandar.m...
2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20250721092516/https://www.theve...
2018: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/192251/microsoft...
2020: https://winaero.com/wordpad-is-gettings-ads-in-windows-10/
Ubuntu was basically promoting a free benefit to home users. This doesn't seem unreasonable.
Ubuntu lost the spot as the default recommendation to newbies since then. Ads weren't the only reason for that but they are hardly a good excuse for Microsoft's behavior.
Having gotten tired of subjecting windows users to a phishing campaign to trick them to use edge under the auspices of it being chrome, they're now moving on to obsoleting all windows machines without a TPM so they can cryptographically secure their right to use their users' need to authenticate as an opportunity to sell data about that user to the third party.
They have no respect for the agency of their users. We're no different than cattle to them, an asset to be squeezed until no more money comes out of it.
and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
That should be a good clue that it's not worth much to them anymore, and tjat they'd rather rely on random free labour from the "community" than their own developers.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
Which is a horribly bloated pig that only helps forced obsolescence of hardware. It should be a very disturbing sign that Microsoft itself doesn't seem to know how to do native code anymore, as they invented Win32 and Windows.
I agree that Electron is an abomination.
As for open sourcing software. Is it even possible for them to do something that you would view favorably here? To me it seems like remain closed and they'll get criticized but open up at least some of it and ... they get criticized?
As far as I'm concerned, regardless of other factors the more source code that's out in the open the better off everyone is.
> They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
That's not a cool guy thing
No, IE has not been dead and buried for ages. Not everyone's a US corporation.
A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.
And just for reciprocity, here's Indian Defense Review (5/2025) "These People Never Moved On: They’re Stuck 24 Years in the Past and Have to Use Windows XP" : "Thousands of workers across the US and Europe still depend on a system from 2001. From hospitals to railways, entire operations run on technology long considered obsolete."
https://indiandefencereview.com/these-people-never-moved-on-...
> A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.
That's hardly Microsoft's fault, isn't it?
They literally promoted the shitty web tech that companies built their shit on which obligated them to stick with an old OS or rewrite entirely.
I simply stated as a fact that IE has not been dead and buried for ages. The official 2022 shutdown is recent.
Regardless of who we each might consider to be responsible (and in what proportion), that fact is a fact. Agreed?
(and I've seen lots of end-of-life cycles in software and hardware, and gone through them as both user, customer and vendor)
Yeah, if you've done support in large MS corporate environments with MEM etc then you've come across crappy business apps that have crappy requirements stuck in the past.
On the one hand, longevity of a platform is nice and MS screwed up IE in so many ways.
On the other hand, at some time the business has to manage their software lifecycle - including the death of old systems - and you can't blame MS for that.
The problem was the Microsoft zealotry of technical people they invent non existent problems often repeated like a cargocult by MS consultants/partners. They loved IE as a default browser. This has nothing todo with the apps being hard to fix, because that turned out to be an actual easy technical problem and I did 10 internal apps.
The only thing that helped was MS taking responsibility and killing IE. The problem I had was that IE was becoming an support burden on our tools, no customers were using IE but the internal staff was forced to.
> Have to Use Windows XP
They're lucky, I have to use Win11.
> IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
Because we remember the evil Microsoft. Many young people still follow advice from the elders.
> Because we remember the evil Microsoft. Many young people still follow advice from the elders.
I get the point you're making, but it really seems like we haven't remembered. We've worked ourselves back into one juggernaut owning most of the web browser space and then collectively acted surprised when they started flexing their muscles. I encounter sites that only run in Chrome the same way I had sites that only ran in IE 6. It seems to me we're doomed to repeat history as long as that path is easier or more profitable.
The Chrome situation is non-ideal but still nowhere as bad. True IE was Windows-only (Mac one doesn't really count), closed-source so no other browsers could act like it, also it sucked per se.
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
Try using VSCodium legally with the same functionality as VSCode; remote development, Python language server, C++ debugging, and so on.
People who think Microsoft is doing open source work for the good of their hearts are still in for a lesson in EEE.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
These are extensions. No one is preventing OSS communities from developing their own remote dev, Python, and C++ extensions. The VSCode extension API allows it. There are actually some efforts being made to do it.
You’re describing the E in EEE
Ah, but coming hot on their heels are the embracions and extingushions!
You're moving the goalposts! I am responding to
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
But ... they literally did that here? I don't think it's malicious in this case. In fact I think they're giving away genuinely useful tools here with no obvious downsides to their use.
But I do think it qualifies.
Bit like the example of Martin Luther King being a criminal.
I think it's not about the extensions but the market place.
You can't use the MS extensions with VS Codium, you are forced to use VS Code.
As GP said:
> Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
They are a business. You seem to misunderstand that businesses cannot behave like charities.
Being a business implies being for-profit.
Nobody said open source had to be free as in free beer, it just had to be free as in freedom.
It's their prerogative to make the plugins marketplace to alternative editors or not. Servers cost money. It's a business.
Does Matt Mullenweg has to let WPEngine sap server resources? Arguably not; and this opinion comes from a guy (me) that strongly dislikes WordPress (and by extension: Matt and Automattic).
Man, more than two decades of open source and people still don't understand what free as I'm freedom means. It's depressing.
I am responding to this:
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
Matt Mullenweg did nothing wrong
Oh, I honestly didn't remember the VS Code extension shenanigans. Thanks for bringing that up.
Businesses don't and shouldn't operate as charities, but Microsoft is the only big tech company that manages to be a negative in every way. The only thing they've ever innovated on is lock-in. Now exploring the frontier of how bad Windows can be without people leaving.
The open-source stuff is whatever, only a tiny part of the picture.
You should be aware that Microsoft's idea of open source is very much at odds with everything open source before Microsoft boldly slapped a "Microsft <3 open source" right and left. They may have progressed beyond Ms-PL, but they have tried to coup and steal open source projects several times. But, altho understandable, the simple fact that their primary products, Visual Studio, Office, Windows, and even worse: former versions of any of these, are simply not open source in any way precisely contradicts the expression of loving open source.
> simply not open source in any way
What do you mean by this? I've traced code into the Windows OS to debug a problem by downloading the source.
While I mostly agree, I will say they're leaps and bounds better than a couple decades ago. Windows now accounts for less than 10% of MS revenue, and definitely lacks in attention by all indications. Linux on Azure outweighs their Windows use by an increasingly wider margine, and a significant amount of the progress that has occurred on Windows has been to make Linux development easier.
.Net and a lot of other tooling and projects are on Github under BSD licensing, and that's pretty cool... almost everything they do outside Windows/Office works in Linux these days. I do think they should at LEAST get a version of office (offline) that works in Linux... even if it's a bastardized web version that runs in Electron.
Aside: I couldn't say how much I appreciate the work Valve has done to improve gaming on Linux, and have no expectations of ever moving back to Windows. MS seems to want to extract literally every cent of value out of every Windows user, and it sickens me.
>Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
It's so sad that this is all it takes for some of you lol. A collection of public relations code bases.
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open
VS Code?
https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-ar...
> they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now
Windows has been going out of its way to be hostile to users for over a decade now.
VsCode is in a weird licensing limbo, or some of its microsoft plugins are anyway
No, it’s pretty clear. Some extensions are NOT open source. It’s not ambiguous, and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as these extensions don’t have superpowers (ie. access to unexposed VSCode APIs)
But they do. Microsoft extensions are the only ones whitelisted in the VS Code marketplace to request experimental ("proposed") APIs in their manifest. Remoting, notebooks and now Copilot have all been using experimental APIs, verboten to anyone else in the marketplace until they become stable a long time later.
What's wrong is that those extensions don't work with VS Codium because VS Codium isn't allowed to access the VS Code marketplace. Why?
Imagine Google blocking Edge from using Chrome extensions.
I would add to your list that MSFT also makes decent hardware now - surface laptops and xbox have both done well
Xbox has done so well that they ravaged the division that oversees it.
They've "always" made decent hardware, as far as I recall. The original XBox is 23 years old, and in the 90s they made great joysticks and other controllers for PCs. And their mice and keyboards have always been good.
Also their HID hardware was usually excellent. It's a shame they closed that division.
> a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
Simply releasing corporate projects under a permissive license is not what many people understand to be the fundament of "open source."
> to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open
What do you think their entire operating system is?
Literally the same leadership including the CEO who held a senior leadership position during prior malfeasance.
They aren't better people just bad people operating in an environment where better behavior is beneficial.
With time, they will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
This comment could not be more actual. The tools changed, even the methods changed, but Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is still Microsoft's strategy.
> And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
Except that their macOS software still is non-parity with Windows for really no good reason other than anti-competitive. They’ve also had the opportunity to open-source Windows, but won’t go that far willingly, with the exception of those that did it without approval.
I don't know why you are apologizing for them. Is it because extensive system telemetry might trace your comment back to you?
> Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
two things can be true at the same time. MS doing some open sourcing and being truly evil too in many other ways. why do you need to settle on one or the other?
Holy shite what I just read. It's like telling people: mafioso people are not so bad, they keep the streets clean and there is discipline around the city. They only pickpocket the foreigners...
> they have behaved relatively nicely
That is some damnably faint praise re: Windows 11, and any experienced m$ users know exactly what’s meant by that.
I intended that line to be ambiguous. My real point is that whatever their true motives, they have managed to shed a lot of the Evil Empire appearance and younger people weren't even around when the really bad behavior was at its peak. So it's understandable that there's a wide gulf in the perception of MS between older and younger IT guys.
> And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
Only if you have no soul or morals
IE and it's embedded derivatives are still used in many US healthcare institutions. So dead and buried, not so much.
Not really. They still have the same sales tactic as they always have: make an inferior product that barely ticks the boxes, then manipulate everyone to ditch their competitors in all kinds of ways except for making a better product. These manipulative tactics are sometimes fair game, most are quite unethical and some even illegal.
You can make a product that pleases its users, or just cater to the interests of the ones with the buying decision, for enterprise users they are almost never the same. Microsoft, like Oracle, leans heavily on the second strategy. Their developer tools are often (not always) an exception to this principle. I think this is the true reason Microsoft is so disliked as a brand.
> They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
you mean shit software like Teams that crash the whole time?
These are the kind of claims that make some Linux users tiresome to talk to. (Full disclosure: I am also a Linux user).
I'm not defending Microsoft, they are not necessarily my cup of tea, but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
Feel free to express your opinions, but don't be hateful!
You are defending Microsoft.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...
I am not.
Also, I am not a VSCode user or would-be VSCodium user.
I am happily married to JetBrains IDEs. Thanks.
I don't need Electron nor WebView2 bloat on my nice, beautiful ThinkPad.
You literally said
> these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
in response to parent's
> - creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)
and VSCode is a perfect example of that happening right now.
The grandparent was also wryly highlighting the crevasse between post-Nadella Microsoft's PR, which you seem to believe, and their actions.
Despite "MS <3s Open Source" they never changed, you're just referencing a very successful era of marketing.
And poor Linux users are out here catching strays. Very "don't you say that about the $1T company!!!" of you to defend them, "fellow Linux user" (also very hi fellow kids..)
Then you surely have a laundry list of examples from the last 10 years where MS showed the same anticompetitive nature that they had in the 90s.
Yes, people keep bringing up VSCode all the time, but fanboys are gonna fanboy.
And Windows, that one obscure product from Microsoft that people here keep forgetting about.
I try not to drink the Kool-Aid either on Microsoft's side (again, they are not necessarily my cup of tea), but the prevalence of the people with the "Hey! Remember that Steve Ballmer called Linux a cancer? Micro$$$hit!!" attitude sucks my energy dry.
who at microsoft said open source is unamerican
https://www.google.com/search?q=who+at+microsoft+said+open+s...
one of the results:
Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-American:
https://www.linux.com/news/weekly-news-wrapup-microsoft-clai...
from 2001.
well, gosh, I feel sorry for those American Linux developers of that time. I guess they were unAmerican, according to Allchin. if they were of this time, i guess they would have been deported by ICE.
sorry for the victim now ...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-48lNCrmqxA
Well, for starters: Linux is of Finnish origin.
Linus Torvalds might be a U.S. citizen today, but during the first years of Linux he was certainly not thinking U.S. values and that someday his biggest userbase would be there.
> Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-American:
Yeah, typical Ballmer-era.
> he was certainly not thinking U.S. values
Damn. I wasn't sure if you were trolling above and now it's clear that you were.
yeah!
jfc.
what a pompous, fake hipster mentality he has.
I looked him up, via his HN profile:
here is his About me section, at the bottom of his blog's main page - https://www.ivanmontilla.com/ :
I found it so funny and hypocritical that I highlighted some of the sillier phrases below - in italics :
------------------------- About me
Ivan Montilla
I self-define as a challenger of the status quo.
Usually, I question trends. Normalcy is to be avoided. Some of the greatest opportunities lie where no one else is looking. I’m more of a niche markets guy.
My interests are ever-changing, but I’m currently interested in financial markets technology. I’m also passionate for software performance.
I do develop some software, but not professionally. I’m more of a power user of programming languages. I see it as a craft, both engineering and some form of art. ---------------------------
if that's the case, you must not have had much energy to begin with.
Kool-Aid and tea can do that to you :)
Skepticism that is informed by history isn’t being hateful
Not in and of itself, but it can certainly be couched in an emotionally charged manner.
That's still not being hateful
Nadella has worked in senior leadership positions at MS for 33 years. His era began in 1992 not when he became CEO.
Microsoft continues to produce absolute garbage (except now it's also adware) and continues to utilise aggressive tactics to gain market share.
They deserve plenty of hate.
I can agree anti-consumer behaviour is still ingrained in parts of Microsoft, as a dormant beast waiting to be Ballmer-ized for a new round.
But again, why the baseless argument based on hate?
You can (for example) de-bloat Windows 11 out from the telemetry and annoying widgets nobody uses, including the invasive Copilot.
After de-bloating, it's a decent OS on its own.
I should have the right to have a clean Windows out-of-the-box, but de-bloating is still a viable path.
The thought that I would have to go through the trouble of reading some git repo to run a script that will debloat my OS, no matter how easy or straightforward might be, makes me feel tired. I don't want to fight my OS, I want it to work with me. Between searching and learning stuff for my job and searching and learning stuff for my personal development or hobbies, investing time in tinkering windows of all things doesn't exactly feel me with excitement. I would rather switch to Mac or invest time tinkering a linux distribution that actually respects me.
You really don't. It just requires messing with some group policy and settings. I did this 5-10 years ago and haven't had to really mess with it much since. I've never used an OS that did not require some effort to get in a state I like.
Your last statement is correct.
Spending time to configure your OS to your liking is one thing. Having to actively fight all the crap that the OS vendor has jammed into it is quite a bit different.
I don't think the two are equivalent, since one has a much more adversarial flavor to it.
> You can (for example) de-bloat Windows 11 out from the telemetry and annoying widgets nobody uses, including the invasive Copilot. > After de-bloating, it's a decent OS on its own.
Sure you can. I, as a tech savvy person, can debloat Windows 11. If I dare to do it. If I know I can do it. If I search for information on the internet on how to do it. If I know how to search and follow those instructions. If I follow all the steps (and hope my tutorial covers everything). If Microsoft doesn’t push an update to bloat it again.
And with that, well I still don’t know how to install it without a Microsoft account. It’s so incredibly user hostile that even the insufferable Apple Walled Garden don’t force you into all of this shit.
You can create an unattended answer file to skip the MSFT account.
https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
Of course I can. And when this method will not be available anymore, I will still be able to reverse engineer the Windows ISO to hack it.
(Sorry for the ça sarcasm, I know you wanted to be helpful, I already knew that but maybe someone will read your comment and discover it so thank you)
Didn't know you knew, cool. I doubt this is a method that will become unavailable as enterprises still use it. Never say never, of course, but as long as Active Directory is still around there will need to be some way to suppress the MSFT Account option.
> insufferable Apple Walled Garden don’t force you into all of this shit
No, but they will lock you out of your account if you have a long gone debit card on there that you don't remember the numbers for or access to that school email your uni yanked back.
I wonder how many college kids got locked out of their iTunes account permanently after they graduated.
Not really. You can't fully remove large parts of the bloat without breaking Windows Update, and true removal of some features is invasive enough that it has to be done offline.
When you actually look at those de-bloating scripts or techniques in detail, it's clear that they only barely address the issues with Windows, and they're always chasing a moving target of anti-user bullshit.
How do you debloat Windows 11 of the built in copy of the whole browser?
Honestly less time consuming to just install some GNU/Linux distro.
Install, maybe. Configure? Maybe not.
Linux tends to tempt people to spend time configuring it, but most of that is customisation to taste that Windows users very rarely do.
You can just skip it and use everything with the distro defaults. it many even be less work than Windows as a lot more software is installed by default on installation.
I used to configure Windows, now I don't bother. But with Linux, I do because I must. Many OOTB defaults just aren't great, or some part of it requires configuration.
LoD is _fine_ but not great.
(Slackware 4.0 was great)
> but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era
Why does this matter? How does that invalidate anything? Are global companies only accountable for their actions so long as they maintain the same CEO?
>but don't be hateful!
Won't someone please think of the poor global technology conglomerate!
> For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
- Creating a language (typescript) that took the front-end web community by storm.
- Becoming one of the real adopters of "progressive web apps". Apple is actively hostile to them, because they would eat into the 30% cut they are making from the apps distributed via the app store; Google, once a champion, has grown kinda tepid, because it also gets a cut from apps distributed via Google Play; but Microsoft now behave as if they are a believer.
- Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
> - Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
Which feels sluggish compared to how it used to be. They keep tacking on too much cruft to it. I used to call it a lightweight IDE, but now its just a bloated editor.
Sorry, but even with typescript, the frontend web community a shit-storm.
Anything Microsoft + web is a nightmare. Their login system is a redirect and re-auth hell and I loath anytime I need to log into anything Microsoft related.
> making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased
Their keyboards were arguably the best ones around. I'm literally typing this on a 20 year old MS keyboard right now.
I'll disagree loudly with my IBM keyboards (my old model M as well as the thinkpads I've used).
Sorry, I can't hear you over that racket!
But in reality my favorite keyboard before I switched to the MS keyboards was the one that came with my original IBM PC with the clicky keys. The biggest downside was that my mom and dad always knew when I was on the computer!
Likewise the Intellimouse Pro is my favourite mouse. Sadly they seem to have discontinued it in favor of the Surface mouse which has atrocious ergonomics.
They also discontinued the ergo keyboard that I am using to type this. I'm very worried that when this keyboard goes out I won't have another option.
There is a clone on the market, which I use at home, that so far has been pretty promising, but we'll see if it has they lasting power that this one does.
Kinesis makes a keyboard that's basically the Microsoft ergo layout but mechanical and you can remap the keys. I have one and like it. https://kinesis-ergo.com/keyboards/mwave/
Glove80 is a lot nicer in several ways if you're ok with the Chocs
they were better than the $20 crap you could buy in staples
but definitely not the best ones around
> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
I don't personally get too attached to devices I purchase or begrudge others for what they buy so, I'm curious what made them "cringe hardware" in your opinion. Adoption aside, they looked like pretty compelling devices to me. Is this a case of buying anything that isn't Apple isn't cool? Or is there something deeper there?
> making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The 25 year window you picked actually coincides almost exactly with the time since the original X-Box was launched. Seems an odd omission from the list of hardware MS released in that time period.
Also the IntelliMouse Explorer was released in late 1999, which nobody who has ever had to clean the gunk off a mouseball roller would describe as ‘cringe’.
This "Microsoft are good guys" is a bizarre recurring comment that has appeared on HN for quite a while now
It's like pretending people must choose from Russia, North Korea, South Sudan or the Central African Republic
Who are the good guys
None of these companies are "good guys"
These "Leave Microsoft alone" HN comments will undoubtedly persist
Perhaps there are MS employees who comment on HN and they are sensitive about criticism
The idea Microsoft is somehow benign is truly hilarious
It is not difficult to argue the damage this company causes today without retribution is far worse than what they did in the past
IME, Microsoft is very cult-like; the employees believe that Microsoft has a solution for any problem, and there is never, ever any contemplation that the company creates problems ;this does not stop with the employees, it can extend to others who are "bought in" to the Redmond ecosystem
> This "Microsoft are good guys" is a bizarre recurring comment that has appeared on HN for quite a while now
Well, yes, that's called generational change. A lot of people have never experienced the bad old Microsoft, only the pretty cool guy Microsoft.
Are pretty cool guys in command and firmly desiring to keep up with their ethos, or mere disposable shiny pawns that are one giant layoff away whatever good the profit are?
> For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
That's true, but there is a catch in your wording. For the last 15 year, Microsoft has:
- Adopted open source/free software and gave contributions to various project (e.g. Linux in 2012 https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTEwNzE)
- Abandoned the worst web browser in existence. That they created :)
- Abandoned ActiveX (29 years ago), Silverlight (4 years ago)
+ Opened .NET to more platform than just Windows. It can now run very well on Linux, Mac, etc.
+ Made many of its locked down stuff open source - .NET, Z3, hell there was that few weeks ago open sourcing of the WinUI framework, etc.
+ Pivoted towards the cloud where OSS software synergizes with their cloud offerings.
Do they do corrupt deals with governments? Well yes, but so does every other big corp. And making cringe hardware isn't a crime in itself.
Do they still do a lot of shady shit? You bet, but they only started getting worse a few years ago. You are thinking it doesn't come in waves and it was all evil, all the time.
It's always better when companies are hungry for business. I thought that in 2016ish it was super cool for Microsoft to get into Linux, build VS Code, and make bets like the Surface Studio.
For comparison, I think Mac OS in 2008 was also at a bit of a golden age:
- You had native file support for .iso, .zip without needing to install crapware like Winzip.
- You even could preview *.psd files out the box.
- You had first-party apps like Image Capture to scan documents without needing to install extra software.
- There was an amazing third-party app ecosystem with things like Yojimbo, OnyX, Little Snitch, Quicksilver, Handbrake, Coda, Adium.
This was around the time of the "I'm a Mac" campaign when Apple was _hungry_ to win business away from Windows. All of these small, polished advantages made me fall in love with the experience.
OSX today is still good but there definitely isn't that same level of "underdog hunger" showing up in the products as of late.
Anyway I'm just trying to say companies being hungry for business shows up in its products and that's better for consumers.
Zune was actually kinda nice - although I agree nobody bought it!
The same was reportedly true of Windows Phone 7. "Cringe hardware" seems to simply mean hardware that was good, but couldn't gain market share.
Unfortunately for their timing, the Zune HD was them finally getting their idea of a music player spot on. It just happened to be 2 years after the release of iPhone.
Windows Phone was solid. Actual innovation in mobile UI.
Commercial success hasn’t been an argument for technical supremacy since Betamax.
Talk to some developers with 3-5yoe, they do see Microsoft as a cool company. For them it’s a company that created TypeScript, supports open source, runs NPM, created VSCode etc. None of them thinks of Internet Explorer, Zune, or anti competitive behavior. You will always associate MS with these failures, the generation after you won’t
ActiveX plugins? MSJVM? Last 25 years? You might need to update your script.
>For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
That was 10 years ago
Hey! I liked my Windows Phone. Original Xbox and the first half of Xbox 360 where also cool. End of list of good things however.
30 years, not 25. A lot of early contributions to Linux basically came with a "PS: Fuck Microsoft" at the bottom.
> - shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share
Original non-Chromium Edge was damn good btw. It had the best butter-smooth and elegant epub reader implementation I have even seen in any software.
While I mostly agree with your assessment, I feel like the Xbox is pretty cool.
At this point it's an open secret that there won't be another Xbox. So yeah, they made something cool, and managed to fumble it.
I don't think this is the last generation of Xbox hardware but they definitely are not going to push the next iteration hard. I suspect they will start to license out the OS and have a broad set of hardware specs to follow. Treat it like the Surface, it will co-exist with other machines.
Essentially, the business model of the 3DO has finally been proven correct 30 years later. Do keep in mind a lot of the 3DO team did end up at Microsoft... maybe they played the long game...
How come? Any TL;DR? Not a gamer, so I’m not up to date on consoles.
Basically, PS5 sales recently reached 80 million. Xbox Series X/S is estimated about 30 million. They lost the generation where digital libraries were built and can't gain the market back.
There's been a lot of rumor lately that Xbox becomes a shell on top of Windows and just runs regular Windows games. The announcement of the Xbox ROG Ally using this same approach gives it a lot of weight.
It is crazy how they managed the bungle the Xbox One launch at just the right time to cause this cascade of issues over a decade later. It doesn't help that MS haven't had a huge AAA exclusive title in a very long time. Now that they have started cutting in hard on their game dev teams, they may end up more like the Microsoft Studios before Xbox was a thing.
Nothing of the sort has been leaked or said by Microsoft.
However, their strategy seems to be going all-in on Gamepass. And if you subscribe to Gamepass, Microsoft does not care if you play on your Steam Deck, iPad or Xbox.
This is also why they mentioned they might open up the Xbox to other stores (Steam), and why they have been releasing first party titles onto the PS5[0].
If you couple that info with them axing their own handheld and instead licensing out the Xbox name to Asus with the ROG Ally Xbox, it isn't a huge leap to assume they'll just license out the Xbox name to whichever OEM feels like making a console. The Xbox One and Series X / S already run the Windows Core kernel which would make going more wide on the hardware support quite easy, and the current hardware is semi off-the-shelf stuff from AMD anyway.
[0] this led to some memery: https://images3.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED187/67a6bce7291...
As a Windows gamer, it was the worst.
Not the Xbox itself, if it was just the standalone device, but the way they had chosen to modify Windows to have Xbox compatible APIs, which are worse than the previous Windows APIs.
The enshittification of Windows gaming started with the removal, or sometimes deprecation, of the Windows gaming APIs.
I think you may have been under a rock for the last 5-10 years
Far more than that, so tell me, are my association of Russia and United-States to imperialist behaviors actually outdated, or are some cultural traits unfortunately still persisting through time?
I don't know where you've been the last decade, but it's clear they have been perceived this way. Him describing that perception only to be ridiculed by you is a pretty low blow.
Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
Yep and that is part of why I don't use them either.
I've been using a Mac since 2015 and have not seen any ads in it.
Microsoft is also LinkedIn, GitHub, Typescript, NPM (NPM! Where do you host your dependencies?), games and OpenAI.
I love how each sector they’re invested in is a practical monopoly.
>LinkedIn, [...] NPM [...] and OpenAI
Your honor, I rest my case!
> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
Add the most recent lineup of Xbox consoles to this
Much as it was all true and a lot of us were there, Microsoft moved on and so must open source. These aren't the Bobs anymore.
This is bullshit, the Zune was great and was doing incredibly well, at least around here.
It was THE device to have, people were going crazy for them; there was enough pent up demand that people were breaking windows and sliding into cars to get them.
I still miss that thing.
At least in Germany at the time of the release of the various Zune generations, Zune was both hated by hipsters for not being "fashionable" (these users strongly preferred iPods), and by free software advocates (who were very vocal at the time, and also had at that time much more influence on the sentiment and feelings of "average users" than today) for its in-built DRM system.
> Zune
The Zune was 100% uncool, but man did I like the hardware and software sooo much better than the iPod / ITunes. I was just sad that I never found anyone to "squirt" at.
> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The Surface looks cool to me, but since it runs Windows, I will never use it. Does it only look cool, or is actually a cool device?
In addition to being able to run any regular Windows application, it had the best and most intuitive feeling UX of any tablet in history. Amongst many other features, window management was gesture controlled and Internet Explorer had an alternate UI that moved the tabs to the bottom of the screen to make them easier to reach.
Sadly, Windows 10 removed all the good parts of Windows tablet mode, but its ideas were so good that Apple is still slowly copying bits of its interface for the iPad to this day.
This feels more like the OS is what you liked. Nothing really about the hardware which this thread is about regarding Microsoft making crap hardware products. Is the hardware so mediocre that the best thing about it was the OS where nothing about the hardware deserves comments? If that's the case, maybe that points to validating Microsoft makes crap hardware being a true comment.
The hardware was good but nothing that an iPad doesn’t have nowadays. It was revolutionary for the time with the detachable keyboard and trackpad and Wacom-like pen. The software was what made it an amazing device though.
Linux runs perfectly fine on most of the Surfaces:
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supporte...
There's the usual asterisk here or there, as with most laptops; but, outside of some golden devices, it's about on par with most.
Great, but I'm not looking to run Linux either.
You've completely answered by not answering the actual question though. Is it actually a cool device?
You specifically stated "since it runs Windows, I will never use it" and I addressed that point. If your qualifier is "runs MacOS/iOS", then your following question is moot for every non-Apple device.
Either way, no one can answer your subjective opinion-based query. Go test it out at the dozens of kiosks in any city in a Western nation (or, barring that, watch a youtube video) and judge for yourself.
> Linux runs perfectly fine on most of the Surfaces [...] There's the usual asterisk here or there,
Are we reading the same tables? The last several models are full of question marks and crosses in the support matrix, and many models old and new seemingly require the linux-surface kernel fork for key features like touchscreens and even some touchpads, you can't just install your distro of choice.
Even compared to my disappointing experience running Linux at home, I'd say that's more of an asterisk minefield, except for a few Surface Laptop models.
Did you miss all of the columns before the literal latest version of the Surface Pro?
Or the other tables of other hardware models where all versions work?
If so then yes, it seems like we’re not seeing the same data.
I'll give you that the laptops models fare better, I said as much already I think, but I feel you're overselling the support for the form factor most people associate with the Surface brand:
The 5G version of the Surface Pro 10 (second to last) is completely unusable, the SP8-10 need a kernel fork just for keyboard and touchpad (!), SP4-10 need it for the touchscreen (SP4 is 2015), and the cameras won't work at all since SP7 (2019).
Don't get me wrong, I still run Linux on my devices and would be willing to tinker with custom kernels if certain hardware were worth it. I just can't consider this "runs perfectly fine".
eh, they had short blip in the relatively recent history, especially with developers, in mid 2010s.
With dotnet core 1-3 - open source cross platform .net, that was modern, fresh and clearly a project done by developers for developers. add vscode to this and it seems nice.
but as soon as 5 hit, if you look into details, they went to their usual bullshit, starting with stapling together winforms and wpf to it. the feel of the project shifted from 'developers for developers' to usual top down management.
vscode is also a weird case - it looks open source, but isn't at all(the builds you get aren't just from the same codebase + no access to extensions legally if you build your own, or fork it)
>shipping the worst web browser in existence
Which? IE6? IE6 is the best web browser in existence though. You confuse standard with good.
25 years? Try 40.
I agree with you
Also champions of idiotic subscription models instead of providing long-term value to customers.
Can't they be forgiven? For taking the shit show JS was/is and turning it into magical TS?
And today they are even complicit in genocide and avid supporters of fascist USA dictator Trump, can hardly get less cool then that
Microsoft has for the longest time been about business only. Any virtue signaling was just marketing.
Years back they were gloating about how their AI systems (pre-LLM stuff) could allow for great oil production while at the same time talking projecting the image of a clean green future.
As is half the US who voted for him…
And every large company, whether they want to or not, because if they don’t bend the knee…
This is such a typical HN low IQ comment.
Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies. Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made noises that seemed not awful.
In terms of coolness, Microsoft peaked right around the time they were hiring the cast of Friends to promote their OS.
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Wait, do they?
I mostly remember:
- A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
- Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch everyone described it as
- Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc.
- Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on Liquid Glass
It's the laptop to get for compute/battery, which definitely is not nothing, but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
You forgot things like shipping decades-old free software with their OS because Apple are so implacably opposed to their users having freedom to use, examine, modify and share that software.
I've always heard Apple's refusal to use GPL3 code was due to the patent clause. They certainly don't seem to mind including GPL2 software.
Funnily I just yesterday realized that my macOS-bundled bash version is (was) from 2007 because $BASH_ALIASES (introduced in bash 4) didn't work.
SIP is the obvious contra, though.
If that's what you "mostly" remember, your memory is awfully selective. It's totally fine for you to have a bias, but you're overlooking decades of massively successful products and services.
Having owned plenty of Thinkpads (Linux), Dells(Windows and Linux) and plenty of Macbook Pros, I can say, Apple's superiority of hardware is so far beyond the rest. Having an OS with a BSD-ish experience is really nice as well. I've spent 27 years in engineering and during most of that time I get the random "Linux is far superior", "I like Windows better" folks... but by and large, yes, Apple's tech has a ton of good will.
I don’t get your comment, do you mean superiority in what? Are you comparing operating systems or hardware? The combined experience?
If you asked me 2 years ago I would say something different about Linux than I would said today, because I’m running a different distribution with a different desktop environment and that changed my experience completely, even though I’m running on basically the same hardware.
I run Linux in Apple hardware too, how does that rank in your comparison?
I think we could compare hardware AND software.
Hardware: Apple announced an ARM based CPU and started shipping. It was _mostly_ a seemless experience thanks to Rosetta2. The performance on these well-built machines was outstanding. Even the Intel-based machines previously had really strong performance. The machines themselves (on average) were among some of the most well-built. Yes, there were outliers with the butterfly keyboards. Yes there were outliers with silly features like the touchbar. We're talking on average.
Software: Apple's OS is just a boring Unix that works. Yes I realize that Unix is in name only - but on top of that XNU microkernel really is a lot of BSD. Having the GNU tools available AND Sound/Fingerprint Reader/HiRes Display that actually scales... that is still not the reality in Linux. (I still love Linux btw - I keep multiple machines around the house running it) So not having to spend a great deal of time fiddling with config files when I plug in an external monitor actually is a big deal. Most folks don't want the hassles of messing with pavucontrol just because they switched to their external audio setup. Most folks will appreciate when they drag a window to that exterinal monitor that the HiDPI didn't cause text to go wonky.
So those are the areas where Apple is just massively superior. They nailed it in the "it just works" department. They've nailed it in the "quality hardware" department.
Windows also does fairly well in a lot of these areas.
As far as running Linux on Apple hardware? I had a buddy come into a meeting running Gnome+Ubuntu on his MacBook Pro back around 2017... as soon as he plugged into the projector, it was a mess. I'm sure it's gotten better since then.
Off-topic: What were you running before and what are you running now? And are we talking about laptop use?
Of course it does in the US tech bubble, if you talk to people who haven't been using Macs for 30 years you might hear a different story. While Apple makes good hardware they also have plenty of blunders, especially in recent years, much like Microsoft in its domain really. Both are coasting on their past successes and familiarity. I get it, many of my coworkers watch their announcement streams like they're video game announcements. From my standpoint they haven't put out anything exciting since the iPhone/iPod Touch, but I don't have the money for toys that cost thousands of dollars apiece like the Mac Studios or their VR headset, so maybe I'm missing out.
The VR headset was such a flop that I think it might paradoxically have not hurt their reputation. Like nobody is saying “wow, this Apple vision thing really sucks,” because nobody has seen one.
Also no one cares about it positive or negative because it’s such a nothing burger. No one even thinks apple thought it would be big, it was an experiment that’s all.
The Mac Mini has been exciting for me. A great low cost low energy consumption desktop that does what it is supposed to do.
> but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform
And probably fewer still consider switching to the alternatives. Apple is, for better or worse, usually the least bad option.
You have to pay me to use Apple, Microsoft, and Google products. None of those organizations are good.
Apple and Google both use immutable locked down OSes on their main products that prevents improving device security, such as IP & DNS filtering / blocking.
Microsoft user experience keeps getting worse. Latest version of Teams, as of today, says I'm at the "Calendar" screen and the navigation and content screen both show "Chat". "Calendar" was unpinned because I find Teams to be at interacting with content. No reason it should be a PDF viewer when the desktop application is actually usable allows for viewing chat and content at the same time.
I understand developing for those platforms makes money or is needed for other products. Unless I have to develop products that support those companies, I will never pay with my personal income to support those organizations.
So you don't use a smartphone?
Apple and Google directly, No.
I actively invest my personal income to organizations / businesses that are working to provide viable alternative. All are fruitful in reducing the barrier to a viable product. From improving hard-ware design to getting software in a stable state. Currently waiting on a phone from EU from a company on their attempt.
Went with a Farirphone 4 running /e/OS/. Yes, /e/OS/ is based on AOSP. This phone has a high chance of full postmarketos support. It is the closet from being disconnected from Google that I find to be stable. Postmarketos would allow for a quick jump.
In the mean time, still investing in companies and organizations that don't want to help Google in the smartphone market. It is a long-term investment.
Me and many people don't.
Just laptop is good enough. Although currently switched back to apple silicon ATM for LLM, price and convince reasons, and as soonest linux on Apple Silicon reach some maturity, will switch over completely.
However not using a smartphone is probably good for one's mental and physical healthy now days. It is understandable if your work require you to have one, but if I'm not getting paid, why would I even get a smartphone?
Back in the 80's there are investment people managing billions dollars and deals over pen paper and a land line!
Laptops are way heavier and more bulky than phones, and phones can do 90% of what a laptop can do across a cross section of most people’s daily tasks. You don’t have to be a genius to see the value in one. The mental health stuff is about social media apps and things, which aren’t mandatory.
If you don’t want one because of some principled stance that’s fine, but don’t pretend there’s no value in them.
I'm the opposite, I didn't own a personal computer from like 2015 until last year when I built a new gaming PC. I had a MacBook Pro from work of course, but I just got by on my phone / iPad for my personal life.
back in the 1880s, people didn't even need refrigerators!
Because antitrust enforcement has been so lax, we only have two options.
The DOJ/FTC/EU/ASEAN/etc. need to force a breakup of first party app stores, first party payment, first party web browser, and first party messaging. They also really need to require web installs without hidden menus and scare walls.
We'll see a proliferation of offerings if that happens.
We had three options, but people didn't like the Windows Phone enough to buy them. (I had one.)
And WebOS, and Symbian, and Blackberry, and Tizen. Making an OS that people want to use is hard. Maybe impossible at this point if you want to compete against such large established ecosystems.
No.
Linux is better.
That worm has turned, at least five years ago
When someone makes a SteamOS level "just works" distro for desktop / gaming I'll probably happily switch
for X_86 family for sure, but the experience on other chip set such as Apple Silicon (maybe the arms) for desktop usage are quite rough around the edges.
Never had issues with other ARM chips other than the Apple co-designed ones.
Oh, and if you have problems running Linux on Macs... That isn't Linux's fault.
But Apple ARM chips currently represent most of the laptop and desktop computer market share for ARM processors. Sure, Linux in embedded and semi-embedded capacity works perfectly well with almost all ARM (and even RISC-V) processors, but I doubt most of the people here will be switching to raspberry pi as the daily driver anytime soon.
Hopefully either Asahi support improves in the near future or Snapdragon X Elite support in Linux becomes a bit better.
Linux works fine on ARM devices. The problem is lack of good (non-Apple) ARM devices, not Linux.
"Apple silicon?" Man, how well does OSX run on a raspberry pi? Clearly it's the inferior OS. /s
For hardware only
It’s ok to have preferences, it’s not ok to say “x is objectively bad” just because you personally don’t like it.
Eh, macOS is still the UNIX with the most commercial software available. 26 feels like a misstep*, of course, but I’ll take it over a Windows environment any day.
* Xcode 26 is kinda neat, though
A mac can (legally) run more software than any other computer. Obviously, macOS apps work, but you can also run most Windows and Linux applications (in a VM). There's also a bunch of iOS/iPadOS apps that can work and some Android apps can run through BlueStacks.
> but you can also run most Windows and Linux applications (in a VM).
This is really just a cheap rhetorical trick. Linux [0] can run just as much software, if you include VMs, but you can't legally virtualize MacOS, therefore buying a Mac is the only way to legally run their software, in addition to everything else. Now, you are technically correct, but the casual interpretation of
> Eh, macOS is still the UNIX with the most commercial software available.
isn't really that you can simply run everything unavailable on MacOS in a VM (or several layers of VMs). It's the same as arguing that Powerpoint is all you ever need, as it is Turing complete.
[0] And so can Windows, if you run said VMs in a Linux VM.
In my business (partly home studio support), it's hard to support MacOS for new-ish users.
If the OS is old, things like FFMPEG will not work with things like Audacity. And to use an old version of FFMPEG, you have to guess which one, then install a variety of dev tools to compile it, waay beyond the capability of the average "I just want to record my podcast user". Audacity itself has an extensive help article devoted to this issue for Mac.
If you have a new Mac, you'll find companies have given up going through the cost and time of certifying for each new Mac OS, like Evoluent (early vertical mouse maker), who gave up several versions ago and won't support using all the extra mouse buttons their product has on Mac.
If you want to use many audio plugins, you'll have to deal with special permissions if it didn't come from the app store. If you want to use zoom to let a remote tech control your screen, you have to find and set two security permisssions.
For all four of these issue on Windows, it just works.
UPDATE: As commenter below pointed out, experienced users have a different experience than new users, which doesn't invalidate the specific issues I've mentioned, and which I encounter every month, and sometimes weekly.
I’m a producer since Cool Edit Pro and Fruity Loops. I’ve used Windows and Macs for audio and video production extensively over the last two decades. I have no idea what you’re on about.
I gave four specific examples that frequently slow me down when helping people who are new to studio stuff. You ignored my examples, and pointed out you have decades of experience. Why do you start by pointing out you're not the user I'm talking about and ignore the examples?
Apple is certainly fumbling in recent years, and it's clearly behind in some games (Siri, AI in general, iPhones turning into a yearly snooze-fest). But of all the FAANG, I'd say it's the only one I trust, simply because they're not trying to sell my data and have a consistent stance on security.
> because they're not trying to sell my data
Are you sure?
They use it internally for marketing and sales.
They also use it for their growing ad platform.
Can't let people find your app for free. You need to pay to defend your trademark and lead in a given app category.
Plus they've severed the customer relationship and inserted themselves as Mafia middlemen. They'll sell that to companies too.
Tim Cook giving Trump a gold-plated statue in exchange for tariff preferences seems like a very bad sign.
Why? It was a relatively cheap way to dodge the capricious whims of a madman who is fortunately easy to distract with shiny objects.
It certainly is. It's not exclusive to Apple, however - _all_ the big tech (and non-tech) companies offered tribute, in one form or another. Despite it being illegal, it seems to be the new government practice.
Whether that'll lead to the government requiring Apple to break their encryption, it remains to be seen. I imagine Apple has a bit of an edge here anyway, since iCloud is allegedly e2e encrypted?
He didn't give him a statue, he gave him a gold bar. A literal gold bar. With a plaque.
Unless Cook starts letting ICE have free roam of Apple's campus, I have trouble faulting him or any business owner for trying to avert the mad king's gaze.
It seems like they got the memo. Pay Trump personally or have your business destroyed.
Im not really sure how that benefits me as a US citizen but that is who the majority of the population seems to want and once the rules are set you follow or face made up tariffs that rip you apart. Right.
Why? Regardless of your view of Trump, would you not expect mr. Cook to play the game? His only job is literally and figuratively to navigate hell or high waters to deliver value to the shareholders.
Apple is behind in AI because they've prioritized keeping private data on your device, rather than in the cloud, but today's best (or even good) inference models still require cloud-scale compute, i.e. they don't fit on a phone.
I think we basically agree - just clarifying here.
> > Wait, do they?
The echo chamber is still reverberating. People say that MacOS is good because other people have told them so. The people claiming that is better don't have an earnest effort outside of the ecosystem to support their claims. I was forced to use MacOS at work up until a little over 1.5 years ago, I have perspective on both, and it is categorically incompetent. It doesn't hold a candle to dev on Linux.
As for Windows? Windows 7/11 are probably still better than MacOS (as you implied with your comment about neglect), but it's probably as bad or slightly better than Win 11.
I’ve used Windows at work for years, my personal/gaming machine is Linux (mint), my personal/development machine is MacOS.
They’re all perfectly viable options with strengths and weaknesses. None of them are especially great. I’m partial to MacOS, personally.
It’s willful ignorance to think that the many millions of people that like MacOS are just parroting what they’ve been told.
> It’s willful ignorance to think that the many millions of people that like MacOS are just parroting what they’ve been told.
This is so entirely true.
I've installed so many different Linux distributions (and multiple Windows versions) on my personal laptop. Currently noodling around with NixOS.
I've never been tempted by a non-macOS laptop for work.
Whatever faults macOS has, it is very good at staying out of my way for getting work done, and all the small ancillary bits (eg webcam and audio support for chatting) have worked flawlessly for me for two decades. I cannot say the same about either Windows or Linux.
> A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.
Mac OS 8 was new in 1997 and was pretty innovative for user-facing features, if not the underlying operating system. It blew Windows 98 out of the water as far as that went.
I was around at the time.
Mac OS 8 had no preemptive multitasking or meaningful address space protections. A single bad pointer dereference in user mode took down the entire system, and a single busy loop without a yield locked up the entire system.
Both of these were universally admitted to be bad and outdated by technically minded people.
By 1997 they had looked at replacing it with BeOS or NEXTSTEP, and purchased the latter with the goal of replacing Mac OS. The Rhapsody OS, an OS8 style UI with NeXT underneath, had already been started. Before that, they had also attempted and failed to write a next gen classic Mac OS (Copland).
Windows 9x had a lot of problems, but had preemptive multitasking and much better address space isolation. Windows NT 4 Workstation was also a thing at the time and much better. It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
> It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
Rather: It took them two more releases until they offered a version that had a price tag (setting the price was a conscious decision by Microsoft) that made a Windows NT derivate also affordable to non-professional users.
I don't think it was that simple. Hardware support wasn't good on NT, and it had poor compatibility with a lot of 9x software. These were two things that MS considered obstacles at the time.
If all you did was look at it, sure. OS 8 was a mess internally with an archaic and badly designed kernel. Windows 98 was much better at multitasking, system recovery, process isolation, etc. And that's saying a lot for the BSOD-ridden mess that that was. Then you had NT, which made both look like children's toys.
And that's just in the Microsoft vs Apple camp. If you left that then Unix, BSD, BeOS, etc also blew it out of the water.
MacOS 8 looked pretty, but it was far from a "good" OS.
OS 8 was designed to run on 68020 without the mmu so you could run on the Mac II and LC. Likewise, MS was trying to keep backwards compatibility with windows 3.11 era software which led to 98 being a compromise, where NT was a much better os. Incidentally, you could pop in an MMU and install A/UX for a os 8 style ui running Unix underneath on those older Macs.
A/UX isn’t Mac OS 8.
Your reasoning also isn’t sufficient. The classic Microsoft Kernel was able to support a much wider variety of hardware because it was modular (internally, not architecturally). The classic Macintosh Kernel had a far smaller ecosystem to support and couldn’t even add support for hardware that existed on many of their own devices that would make the kernel on-par with the 9x kernel and be transparent (except for improved usability) for users.
So to recap, OP claimed that OS 8 (not A/UX) was superior to 9x. And that’s simply false. Many consider the 98 kernel garbage, even for its time; and yet it’s objectively better to OS 8’s.
If we’re simply arguing Apple hardware OSes versus Intel options (as you seem to be conflating this to), then the latter still wins with Xenix, any number of Unices, BSD, Linux, etc; all more stable and better supported than A/UX as well as better UI-centered OSes (NT, OS/2, BeOS, XFree86, etc).
> If we’re simply arguing
Not arguing. The context is that MS had much more capable hardware to run 95 on than the 68020 based Macs.
> seem to be conflating
Not really. Just providing some context as to why MS was able to get a jump while Apple got held back by hardware.
> The context is that MS had much more capable hardware to run 95 on than the 68020 based Macs.
MacOS 8's initial release was after PowerPC-based hardware was already released. The OS had a separate kernel for that hardware. MacOS 9 never ran on 68k hardware (with an MMU or not).
It was perfectly capable of having that functionality, yet didn't.
You're just retroactively applying rationale to a bad design and making bad faith arguments (or "explanations"). Even Apple knew it was bad, that's why they threw it out.
Can't remember 98 having BSODs. Think that was a thing from NT4 on, and upwards.
98 just crashed, or showed something DOSish white on black before rebooting.
edit: Hrrm. According to Wikipedia it did. Still can't remember that, though.
Aye repent! Aye repent!
MacOS 8 was not innovative by 1997 standards. I had it running on my PowerMac 6100/60. It was crash prone and Netscape could easily crash the entire OS, cooperative multitasking, you as an end user still had to manually allocate how much memory an app could have.
None of these were issues on Windows 98.
We have different ideas of what qualifies as tech people if we're talking about Liquid Glass, Siri, and Vision Pro
IMO, "consumer electronics enthusiasts" != "tech people"
They aren’t doing a great job exactly, but what is there to recommend to somebody who doesn’t want to use the command line? SteamOS, maybe, haha.
> I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
Maybe you're speaking for yourself? I absolutely love my Macbook and the M-series are the best devices I've ever owned.
> - A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
Really? I haven't noticed.
The rocky start for apple intelligence is what excites me
....and their tools are very flash, bright colours and buttons...and they mostly work
"Mostly" is not good enough. The user experience of Apple is still good, the developer experience is woeful
It's also amazing that they convinced developers that running a non-standard CPU instruction set through a laundered Rosetta layer was somehow battery or compute friendly lb for lb when an AMD processor (or even Intel) is plenty efficient and cool.
Are any applications on your Mac touching Rosetta right now? You'd better hope not because those single percentage gains from ARM evaporate fast.
Delusional take. Rosetta is for maintaining compatibility during the transition. Efficiency is fine with Rosetta. But it doesn’t matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done. Not true, unfortunately, for Windows.
Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
Pile onto that the fact that a lot of us are in the cloud, and the cloud has ARM processors, and they're generally priced as competetive, especially with m7i and m7a. So it's not the worst thing in the world to be using arm64 architecture on your dev machine.
Which matters very little in my experience whether the cloud is ARM or not. I still need to build my code in a Docker container with Amazon Linux even on my ARM based Mac when targeting an ARM based AWS runtime environment.
What is the efficiency loss specifically? Do you even know, or are you just asserting it?
>it doesn't matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done
'Essentially' is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here, but, putting that aside, A. you're wrong, I've recently ran into Rosetta throttling and B. it's not a good reason to begin the project at all, it's only a good reason when it's already done. You're essentially ceding "Yes, I've been wrong and this has been a fool's errand for the past x years until right this moment as the project is done". It's not done and it'd a weak argument.
>Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
Specifically what are the numbers? Because I have performance/tdp numbers and the M-series performs well but it isn't a categorical difference. In fact, that's no difference, it performs okay but AMD is at the top of the heap currently. Sad.
I switched from a 2019 MBP to a new M4 Pro a few weeks ago and I didn’t even know Rosetta wasn’t installed (I assumed on and installed by default) until I had to run a Go binary that hadn’t been updated since 2020.
I use a lot of nonstandard software (not just a browser), not a single piece needed Rosetta.
I agree recent AMD chips are power efficient like the M series (though I don’t have one to compare with) but I thought everyone agreed the comparable chips in 2020 weren’t?
Apple's marketing on this was a very impressive effort on this, evidenced by:
>...I thought everyone agreed the comparable chips in 2020 weren’t?
Possibly, but it was likely far, far closer (see maybe the AMD Ryzen 7 4800U) than justified defense of the project.
Anyways, with the addition of the Rosetta translation layer there's no way the Apple M1 was as efficient as the Ryzen.
> A. you're wrong, I've recently ran into Rosetta throttling […]
Can you please define and explain the meaning «Rosetta throttling»? Rosetta 2 is static binary translation + JIT optimisations at the run time. Is Rosetta injecting delays slots or delay loops into the translated code? Or, is it injecting branch instructions that consistently fail the branch predictor? Something else? Since you seem to have analysed specific code paths, the esteemed congregation on here is eager to pick the disassembled code apart.
Without the direct evidence, such claims are as credible as that of a vegetable vendor at the local farmer market claiming that spinach they sell cures cancer.
When the M1 transition started, Intel and AMD devices simply were not competitive, even after factoring Rosetta losses (https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1-chip-emulating-x86-b...). That was the relevant comparison to Rosetta; it has been 5 years since the transition started, and nowadays as others have stated, it is common to not have Rosetta at all. MacOS is dropping support soon.
The real difference maker is efficiency. MacBook owners simply do not need to worry about whether they are plugged in or not; the performance does not change and the battery lasts many hours, even on demanding tasks. Occasionally you can cherry pick a benchmark where AMD appears to be competitive, but always at much higher power draw.
AMD and Intel users don’t really appreciate how much of a qualitative difference that is. Being even close in performance, while offering far superior reliability and battery life, puts apple silicon in a league of its own.
Share your numbers please. I’m having trouble finding reliable sources that aren’t YouTube videos or forum posts, but nothing I’ve been able to find contradicts my claims.
then post the numbers? You're just here doing the same thing, asserting that the efficiency is bad, only using more words.
Performance and efficiency has been great for me. I've never run into rosetta throttling. I've got the numbers - trust me bro.
The null hypothesis is that Apple chips aren't better. You simply assumed they were into evidence. It's up to you to provide the figures that they are.
Of course, they really aren't, which is pretty obvious. It doesn't make sense that Apple would randomly invent some categorically new CPU technology when they don't even own an instruction set or foundry and that they would simply be concocting some vendor lock-in supply chain scheme.
> Because I have performance/tdp numbers
It sounds like you've already done the work... why not just share the numbers. I'm just asking to see what you claim to have. Unless... you don't have them and you're just making stuff up.
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Do they? I feel like this is a bimodal thing from what I've seen of other peoples opinions - they're either amazing and all you ever use, or they're the worst company ever.
As a developer I've always seen Macs as a necessary evil - they were the only polished "working out of the box" unix-like system you could buy for a long time but you had to put up with locked down software, comically bad pricing and cooling issues.
Now with the Mx stuff the hardware is amazing, and pretty fantastic value for money if you avoid the weird points in the price scale where they massively overcharge for RAM. But you still have to use their locked down software stack and ecosystem.
> Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies.
They are very different companies in very different businesses. Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company. That affects everything (and is why the two are not fundamentally competitors).
I don't think one has ever been better behaved than the other at all, though. The main difference is that for most of their time, Microsoft was just in a position where it could do more harm than Apple.
Apple does plenty of harm every day when they force Safari as the only web browser engine allowed on iOS.
We certainly are in a predicament aren't we!?
Now I am what you would consider a "Full Stallman" free software guy, but you can imagine my mixed feelings when I ended up being interviewed by Business Insider on why Microsoft shouldn't be giving up with web engine for a Chromium based browser. Yes, things like Safari are proprietary junk but they still keep things like Chrome dominance at bay. Alas I feel we are better having a few proprietary systems than a singular monolithic one. Once Apple lets that one go, it is only a matter of time until Google almost single handled controls the framework of the internet.
Save us Ladybird, you are our only hope!
"Chrome dominance" isn't my concern, and it isn't the problem with Apple.
The problem is Apple is intentionally hobbling their web browser and forcing every other browser maker to use it, which prevents web applications that use any kind of hardware API from functioning on iOS - the only alternative being making a native app for iOS where Apple can charge a significant amount for any purchases made through the native app. Web applications threaten Apple's greed, so they forbid any other browser maker from using anything but Safari on their platform.
Microsoft got sued in an antitrust and lost just because they bundled IE with Windows - not for forbidding any other browser on the platform like Apple has been doing, which is way worse IMHO. And that's one of many reasons the DOJ is suing Apple for abusive business practices.
Eh, this is annoying because I agree with you in principle except there's a handful of things you're simply wrong about.
I'll start with the most eggregious one to save time so you can just click away but: Microsoft wasn't sued for bundling a browser, it was sued because it used one monopoly position to aid another. Apple mobile devices are 57% of the market in the US (which is the highest percentage globally from what I can tell at a glance) and a far cry from 1997 Windows which was a staggering 96%+ of all desktop operating systems in the US. That is a monopoly which is not explicitly forbidden in the US unless you use it to further domination in some other field: Web browsers were considered another field.
That said, while I agree with you in principle, in practice I really don't like the idea of a browser monoculture. We already see the effects of it with WebUSB (for real) and Manifestv3 which nobody really wants but is essentially foisted on us.
There are two types of people: those who think the web is an application delivery platform, and those who think it's a window into information.
The more leaky the sandbox the worse security will get over time (even if we put a lot of eggs into the basket) and the more bloated things will get. But the people in the first camp cannot see passed their next meal for want of a "better" application delivery system. Anything that keeps them at bay is welcome to me, even if it's something I also don't agree with.
The lesser devil.
Nope, I'm not wrong:
"The central issue was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its IE web browser software with its Windows operating system. Bundling the two products was allegedly a key factor in Microsoft's victory in the browser wars of the late 1990s, as every Windows user had a copy of IE. It was further alleged that this restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera), since it typically took extra time to buy and install the competing browsers."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Yeah, Windows has a larger market share than Apple ever will, but that doesn't change the abusive business tactics Apple is using to satiate their greed.
When someone installs Chrome on iOS, they aren't getting Chrome, they are getting Safari with a wrapper. It's way worse than what Microsoft did with IE by simply bundling a browser with Windows - was it really so inconvenient to download and install a different browser when downloading and installing software is the de facto means of obtaining and running any software? I think the case against Microsoft was a bit absurd, honestly. And I don't care if Apple's market share is smaller, that isn't the point. They are preventing competition so that they can pocket even more money from developers.
>There are two types of people: those who think the web is an application delivery platform, and those who think it's a window into information.
And yet the web is both of those things. I think it's both, so am I a third type of person? What else are you getting wrong about this?
I’m don’t seem to be getting anything wrong as you haven’t disproved anything I said; in fact it reinforces it.
you don’t mention what a third type of person would look like, i only can see that you’re the first type from your comments. They’re fundamentally incompatible with each other (or, will cause major issues for each other) so being a blend of both is to be a walking contradiction.
What else are you wrong about!?
That’s more complicated because the alleged harms are quite limited (it’s not like Android or desktop users are using PWAs much) and the biggest direct impact is the unalloyed good of “the web” not being synonymous with the Google Chrome roadmap. Everyone has benefited from proposed specs with significant negative privacy and security impacts not being adopted, so we have to ask how much the negatives outweigh the positives here.
Remember when Microsoft got sued in a class action because they simply bundled IE with Windows? Well Apple is doing far worse than that. The DOJ finally noticed and was suing Apple for it as well now, and rightfully so.
Right? They are really limiting Google’s development of their platform, the internet, by making some websites pander to a non-Chrome browser engine.
No, they are making it impossible to implement some kinds of web applications on the entire iOS platform so they can push developers to make a native app, where they can collect a significant percentage of any money made through the app.
The DOJ noticed and is suing Apple for doing this.
That comparison is somewhat more complicated because it was much more broadly tied into Microsoft's control of the by-far dominant PC operating system and was in the era where browsers were commercial products which cost money and significantly predated the rise of open source software.
That's likely why the DOJ is _not_ “suing Apple for doing this”. Browsers are conspicuously not on the list of charges and I think it's because in the subsequent 3 decades, we've had some key changes: all of the major browser engines are open source, very few people question the demand for standard libraries for rendering web content even in desktop apps, statistically nobody pays for web browsers. A large part of the Microsoft trial was discussing how they colluded to prevent PC vendors from bundling other companies' software but in this case Apple isn't trying to restrict another vendor's decision about what software they ship on their hardware and users don't show much sign of being bothered by the lack of PWAs, which have negligible usage on any platform. If someone was making a lot of money with a PWA on Android but having to pay Apple's in-app fees on iOS, that'd be a much stronger argument for market distortion.
The actual lawsuits are focused where Apple's behavior is more clearly like 90s Microsofts: restricting access to the NFC APIs, restricting game streaming platforms, and restricting the ability of WearOS watches to work with iOS phones or Apple Watches working with Android phones. Unlike PWAs, there are other mobile payment companies who'd love to ship tighter integration, customers who want more gaming options, or who want to have something like a Garmin device as tightly integrated as an Apple Watch. I don't know how likely the DOJ's case is to succeed but at least in those cases it's easy to show that there's a real market being affected whereas it's much harder to argue that a PWA market would suddenly spring into being or that Google is somehow being deprived of Chrome revenue by having to use WebKit on iOS. I'm aware of the technical arguments but it seems fairly challenging as a legal argument to make the case that the DOJ should respond to Apple abusing a monopoly position with a fifth of the market by allowing Google to push their share over 90%. The only way the web is better off out of this is if there's some coordinated simultaneous action.
>Browsers are conspicuously not on the list of charges
Wrong.
"60. For years, Apple denied its users access to super apps because it viewed them as “fundamentally disruptive” to “existing app distribution and development paradigms” and ultimately Apple’s monopoly power. Apple feared super apps because it recognized that as they become popular, “demand for iPhone is reduced.” So, Apple used its control over app distribution and app creation to effectively prohibit developers from offering super apps instead of competing on the merits.
61. A super app is an app that can serve as a platform for smaller “mini” programs developed using programming languages such as HTML5 and JavaScript. By using programming languages standard in most web pages, mini programs are cross platform, meaning they work the same on any web browser and on any device. Developers can therefore write a single mini program that works whether users have an iPhone or another smartphone."
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl
A browser engine made by a company other than Apple is considered a "super app". It's the same thing Apple got sued for in Europe and lost, and now iOS in Europe has to allow other browser engines.
>A large part of the Microsoft trial was discussing how they colluded to prevent PC vendors from bundling other companies' software
That is pretty much what Apple is doing.
You can try to deny it all you want but Apple is being sued by the DOJ for many things, and one of this things is them forcing Safari on every web browser running on iOS.
I really don't care what Apple does to hobble Safari, so long as they let other more modern and capable browser engines on the platform.
> Wrong.
You say that, but consider that they might not have used the word “browser” because super apps are not the same (your attempted redefinition is not how that term is normally used). That's going back to the App Store control of code distribution, there's certainly no technical reason why someone can't use HTML5 or JavaScript in an iOS app given how many do that every day.
Again, I'm not saying that what Apple is doing is blameless but it's important to read the actual DOJ cases so you can understand why these aren't the same. For example, you baldly assert “That is pretty much what Apple is doing” completely missing that Apple is only controlling what you can do with their hardware and is making no effort to prevent, say, Google or Samsung from doing something different on their own hardware. That's significantly different from Microsoft preventing Dell, IBM, Gateway, etc. from shipping alternate operating systems and those kind of legal distinctions matter a lot in court.
Apple already lost this exact fight in the EU where they are now forced to let Chrome use its own browser engine. The US lawsuit is definitely about this, as well as many other abusive practices. It's one of many reasons the DOJ is rightly suing them.
You're trying to weasel around the fact that "Super App" is definitely what a native browser app not using Safari is considered to be. The DOJ is explicitly mentioning HTML and Javascript, and you're just handwaving that away.
Good luck to you sir or madame, I don't care to continue this pointless back and forth.
Yes, but with that sort of thing, the harm is at least limited to Apple customers.
No, it isn't. It's forcing developers to write native apps instead of web applications, which then lets Apple collect a significant percentage of any sales made through the app. This is why Apple is being sued for this by the DOJ, among many other abusive business practices.
I do not want to pay Apple for the privilege to develop a native app, as well as being forced to buy not just their mobile devices, but a full computer just to develop that native app on, when it could just be done as a web application. It's hurting me, a non-Apple user.
That’s why there are so many great PWAs for Android and most companies avoid writing Android apps and just tell Android users to use the web apps.
Oh wait, that’s totally not the case.
My web app works great on Android, but will never work on iOS because they refuse to implement APIs I need, and they won't let anyone else implement a browser with the APIs either.
I refuse to pay Apple and buy their hardware to be able to develop a native app for their walled-garden platform, where they can then further extort me for any money my users spend through the app I create.
And the DOJ agrees with me, which is why they are suing Apple for abusive business practices.
Your web app is statistically irrelevant. If PWAs were so much better on Android, then why do companies still make Android apps and web apps?
Well, one reason is that most Android phones being sold are so underpowered that you have to make a native app to get decent performance. Facebook for one found out early on that it couldn’t get away with just having an app that was a web wrapper because of low end Android devices.
So where are all of the great groundbreaking popular web apps?
And saying the current US government is in agreement with you about anything isn’t the positive thing you seem to be implying it is…
The vast majority of what people use a phone for works perfectly fine as a PWA on cheap hardware.
Apple is essentially responsible for the shit show that is react native, flutter and all the other cross platform crap. Just let us build for the web with basic support for a native like experience. Works fine on every platform but iOS and iPadOS.
I as a small business don't want to write three separate fucking apps. I don't want to charge customers more to cover that. It's a waste of everyone's time and money.
If it’s just Apple, then why are most companies still releasing Android apps.
So Apple is now responsible for the shit show of current web development and at the same time isn’t keeping up or doesn’t care about the web? Which is it?
I could swear that the two most popular web frameworks over the years either came from Google or Facebook.
How praytell is Apple responsible for Google’s Flutter - that they also have basically abandoned.
And run once run anywhere has never worked in the history of the industry.
> So Apple is now responsible for the shit show of current web development and at the same time isn’t keeping up or doesn’t care about the web? Which is it?
Yes. Apple, who once promoted the web as a distribution model, changed course once they realized that doing so would lead to less revenue. They have been actively hostile to open web standards and PWAs as a distribution model.
https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/did-apple-just-break-web-...
https://proton.me/blog/apple-lawsuit
> And run once run anywhere has never worked in the history of the industry.
Yet it works pretty damn well on the web.
You get it. It's expensive to develop for iOS (or multiple native apps), and on top of that, once you do get into their app store, you pay Apple a significant percentage of any purchases made through the app, as well as the possibility that Apple will steal your idea and add it to their OS as they have done in the past. Fuck all that noise, when web apps are perfectly capable, secure, and the only thing stopping them is Apple's greed.
If that’s the case, why do companies bother about making Android apps?
Not even reading your response.
You really don't need to reply. I'm just going to give you canned response from here on out because I'm not wasting any more of my time with an Apple shill.
>Your web app is statistically irrelevant.
So you think I'm the only person who ever had this problem? The DOJ apparently disagrees with you.
>Well, one reason is that most Android phones being sold are so underpowered that you have to make a native app to get decent performance.
Bullshit. It has nothing to do with performance, it has everything to do with Apple's abusive business practices not allowing any other web view on their platform, and purposely hobbling their browser for anti-competitive greedy business reasons.
>So where are all of the great groundbreaking popular web apps?
So where are your goalposts moving next?
>And saying the current US government is in agreement with you about anything isn’t the positive thing you seem to be implying it is…
I didn't say the current US government, the DOJ under the previous administration is the one that filed the charges against Apple. But I know you aren't arguing in good faith, so maybe we should just agree to disagree.
Those were always my goalposts - web apps sucked when Microsoft tried to do it with Windows CE, RIM tried to do it, Palm and even Apple. They suck on mobile, electron apps sucked, etc
If the only reason web apps aren’t on iPhones is because of Safari and if there are other browser engines available for Android and Chrome is so much better, wouldn’t you expect to see great PWAs on Android? Especially with it being 70% of the world wide market?
> Bullshit. It has nothing to do with performance, it has everything to do with Apple's abusive business practices not allowing any other web view on their platform, and purposely hobbling their browser for anti-competitive greedy business reasons.
It doesn’t have anything to do with performance of iOS devices that’s true - because Apple doesn’t make any devices with substandard hardware with bad browser performance. But there are plenty of crappy Android device (most of them by sales volume) that do have subpar hardware performance.
But native apps are more performant than web based apps and web wrappers. Are you denying that?
> I didn't say the current US government, the DOJ under the previous administration is the one that filed the charges against Apple. But I know you aren't arguing in good faith, so maybe we should just agree to disagree.
One of us haven’t checked to see what the DOJ’s complaints are about - none of which are alternate browser engines…
>web apps sucked when Microsoft tried to do it with Windows CE, RIM tried to do it, Palm
Wow, that's quite the reach. Again, bad faith.
>wouldn’t you expect to see great PWAs on Android?
I do, YMMV. I even created one myself. But again, bad faith from you.
>because Apple doesn’t make any devices with substandard hardware
"You're holding it wrong" proves you wrong.
>that do have subpar hardware performance.
None of this is about a hardware dick-measuring contest, but you sure are trying to move the goalposts that way. Again, bad faith from you.
>But native apps are more performant than web based apps and web wrappers. Are you denying that?
This is another logical fallacy. I'm done with you, you're comments are not grounded in anything except your hatred of anything not Apple.
>One of us haven’t checked to see what the DOJ’s complaints are about - none of which are alternate browser engines…
Again, just more bullshit from you.
"The complaint also alleges that Apple’s conduct extends beyond these examples, affecting web browsers, video communication, news subscriptions, entertainment, automotive services, advertising, location services, and more. Apple has every incentive to extend and expand its course of conduct to acquire and maintain power over next-frontier devices and technologies."
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
The "affecting web browsers" part is exactly the thing I described.
Apple already lost that exact thing in Europe, because Europe sued them for it too, and now you can use alternative browser engines on iOS in Europe. Apple's going to lose that one in the US too.
You really don't need to reply. I'm just going to give you canned response from here on out because I'm not wasting any more of my time with an Apple shill.
So you have magically become the first person in history who has created a web app that is just as performant as a native app with local assets, written in a language that is compiled down to assembly and delivered as such (iOS) or even close enough in the case of Android native apps these days (yes I know Java has come a long way, that’s just the point)?
You should be working for Facebook or Google, they both came to the conclusion that their apps should use native frameworks for performance reasons…
It very much is about hardware. Most Android phones suck statistically (yes I know there are some performant ones. But that’s not what most of the world is buying) and your web app is not going to perform well on them.
By the way, what’s the ARR on your web app? Monthly active users? Have you tested it on one of the low end free phones?
And it’s not me being an Apple shill, your web app probably sucks like every other web app that has ever existed on mobile. I wouldn’t say the same about a native Android app.
Not even reading your response.
You really don't need to reply. I'm just going to give you canned response from here on out because I'm not wasting any more of my time with an Apple shill.
> Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
This love for Apple seems to be a very US-American thing.
I dunno, I haven’t been to Europe. What do they favor, Linux? Sounds like paradise.
Apple computers are typically rather mostly used by people from media and audio production (+ some hipsters). GNU/Linux has its very vocal users, but as a matter of fact, it is rather a niche outside of nerd circles.
I would thus rather say many European countries are more Microsoft-centered, even though at least in Germany I would say that people deeply hate and distrust the more and more spying functionalities that Microsoft introduces into its software. So I would claim this current dominance of the Microsoft ecosystem is fragile.
Surprisingly, at least in Germany I observe that Microsoft plans to stop providing updates to Windows 10 (and forces the users to buy new computers) has made quite a lot of mainstream users to at least consider switching to the GNU/Linux ecosystem:
It is perhaps difficult to understand to people who are used to the US mentality, but the fact that Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will be the last Windows, and after that broke this promise (and particular importantly: cease to provide further updates for Windows 10 despite this promise) is considered to be near "high treason" by many PC users - a nigh-unforgivable sin. In particular US-American companies should really learn to understand that (in the eyes of German users, who consider such promises to be sacred) if you give a promise, and break it, this is (I am only slightly exaggerating) something that the CEO (or even the board) of the respective company should better commit suicide for because of the shame that he brought to the company.
A lot of people are annoyed with Microsoft in the US as well, although I guess we’ll see if that translates into switching.
> Apple computers are typically rather mostly used by people from media and audio production (+ some hipsters).
For what it’s worth, this is the sort of stuff I meant by “stylish and cool,” these are the fashionable people, right? That doesn’t make their decisions good, at all (I intentionally picked the description “stylish and cool,” not “good and technically solid.”)
> For what it’s worth, this is the sort of stuff I meant by “stylish and cool,” these are the fashionable people, right?
The difference is: outside of these bubbles (somewhat excluding the audio production people: these are in my opinion rather pragmatic about their computers; it's just that Apple historically had the best support for their requirements) Apple is not considered stylish and cool, but rather ridiculed, and fun is made of this Apple-fanboi-ism.
So, it's rather some "Apple bubble" where the people inside it (in particular the hipsters and some media people inside this bubble) praise each other (and themselves :-) ) for being stylish, cool and having a refined taste, but outside of this bubble this judgment is not shared.
Europe is a Microsoft stronghold in almost all areas except some tiny tech focused startups with young founders,
> Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will
Good grief. Sometimes it's good to get a reminder that there are still people who think this way.
On my office, only folks like myself that also do Windows development, have Thinkpads with Windows.
Everyone else carries Apple devices.
GNU/Linux only exists on local VMs for containers, or servers on cloud instances.
Since when does carrying Apple device(s) mean we have goodwill for Apple?
I dev on a Mac all day and own 2 macs at home. Why?
* not going to try to convince the whole family to change and I want the various family & imessage features that everyone uses to all work
* all the developers at my company use macs and I don't want to have to set up my own unique configurations for everything using WSL and stuff.
* In the US, often the Android versions of "apps" you're forced to use by random businesses (instead of the Web which usually would work fine), are pawned off on an offshore team, and no execs use Android so there's no accountability when those apps suck.
* Windows also has many recent disappointments (ads in the start menu, increasingly dumber and worse settings screens), so they're doing a bad job of winning over people like me, dampening my enthusiasm to switch.
* Linux is cool but I'm too busy to want a project as my daily driver PC.
I have nothing but scorn for Tim Cook's Apple and have zero goodwill for them. They haven't shipped an actual smart idea for any of their platforms besides maybe Shortcuts (which they bought), and even then it took them 3 years to let me run automations unattended.
I, like many developers was handed a Macbook Pro upon starting my first day at the company. I gave MacOS a shot (again, I used to be a mac sysadmin at a design company), but was happier when I could install Windows on it. Finder is a joke, and so many other things about MacOS are just stupid. Sure, Windows has some crap too, but it lacks the pretentiousness and ridiculous things I dislike about Apple products. I also covered the white lit-up Apple logo on the laptop screen with red-circle-strikeout sticker, because I really disliked Apple after being a sysadmin getting all too familiar with their products and OS.
> In the US, often the Android versions of "apps" you're forced to use by random businesses (instead of the Web which usually would work fine), are pawned off on an offshore team
I haven't seen this.
Also I would imagine those businesses would do the same for their iOS development? It's odd that you would assume they don't.
> It's odd that you would assume they don't.
The point is that regardless of whether one or both are offshored, the VP or CEO will get on your ass immediately if the iOS app has a crash or even a layout bug because they all use iOS personally. Whereas the most influential person in the company who even owns an Android device tends to be some IT manager.
YMMV but this is precisely how it worked in my last two jobs. For instance, in one company, we outsourced both, but the Android app was developed entirely in India, whereas the iOS team was supervised and led by a US-based contractor that we could (and did frequently) talk to.
Of course, only a tiny number of such "commercial" apps are native, 90% are some cross-platform framework. But the iOS versions tend to get far more attention when sloppy habits and lack of skill result in lag, race conditions, bugs, etc.
PS: I belive completely that this dynamic either does not exist, or is actually in REVERSE, in countries where Android is more dominant. In the US, iOS users dominate the top 80% of the orgchart in basically every company besides Google.
While rarely offshored, a decade and a half of experience in the tech sphere shows that Android is almost universally treated as a second class citizen. Some companies won't bother supporting it at all, the majority will have an Android team 1/5-1/3 the size of the iOS team.
There's a huge regional variation on this. In some parts of the US, Apple is everywhere. In others, it's rare enough to be worthy of comment when it gets spotted in the wild.
Ah yes, what could be more stylish and cool than a company assigned work device.
Yeah, I laughed audibly when I read that sentence...
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Only among people who don't have to develop for the Apple ecosystem.
Neither of them respect their users, and their major products are all black boxes that you're not allowed to change, inspect, understand, etc.
They're both the polar opposite of "tech friendly".
But I've yet to meet a person that said, "Oh, Rachel and Chandler from Friends... maybe Windows IS cool!". It wasn't cool, it wasn't anything. Apple was trendy with the designers and creative types, and Windows was what you probably used at your doldrums day job. The only place where MS has ever been "cool" is with gamers. I think your "Walmart" analogy is a perfect one.
The joke was supposed to be that the “coolness peak” was incredibly lame. Haha.
I used to think that way, and I’m not rushing to apply to Microsoft, but I do notice the various divisions, studios, stock price growth and comparable RSU packages that all make me totally forget about its antiquated branding and association
lol
You forgot to mention the gaming section.
Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
I guess generating hype by acquisition and increase valuation cause more profit than developing a real product.
I'm beginning to think that using Microsoft services(yes, GitHub included) is morally questionable behaviour right now. I can't support the current Microsoft behaviour of laying off many employees so casually.
Yes, the whole XBox division has been a mess, especially after ABK.
However XBox plus Microsoft Gaming Studios, is still one of the biggest group of AAA publishers, they have a big enough slice of the market.
Hence why now they're dominating PlayStation charts with cross-platform games.
Many Microsoft haters don't have an good enough idea of how big they have become on games industry, regardless of layoffs and such.
SteamOS keeps being around until they feel like doing a netbooks like move, taking all their games out of Steam, or whatever else Microsoft might think of.
Hence why I regularly complain Valve should keep trying to bring developers to target GNU/Linux natively instead of translating Windows games.
I would not be surprised if Steam came to Xbox
The only way microsoft would allow that is if they got a cut of every sale.
They have already added Steam support to their Xbox PC app.
https://www.theverge.com/news/690967/microsoft-xbox-app-wind...
Its not a stretch to think that they will add Steam to the next gen Xbox. They are dead last in the console wars and have been for basically 2 generations. I don't think they will do it out of benevolence but I think they are the "throw shit against the wall and see if anything sticks" phase before just giving up and exiting the market.
Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
Sounds like they just bought the IP.
which begs the question is it just good old EEE?
> Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
FTFY, Microsoft is even killing studio with successful games, like Tango.
I couldn't believe the number of people who were saying that "Microsoft are the good guys now" or "Microsoft loves open source now".
Microsoft stopped openly attacking open source at a time when open source was clearly winning:
- most servers were running linux
- most phones and tablets were running android
- people were buying tablets instead of desktops
- Google was openly promoting open source through GSOC
- large corporations were regularly releasing their tools as open source
Most importantly, developers openly hated Microsoft for holding the industry back (remember IE6?).
So they did what any good corporations does - they went along with the winning side.
And now they they have positive emotional connotations in devs' minds, or at least organizational buy-in again, they can do what corporations do best - making money by abusing their position with barely any competition.
---
The lesson here are: - Corporations should simply not have this amount of power. - Corporations are amoral, they don't have values, views or beliefs. They are systems designed for optimizing goals. You can never _trust_ a corporation - not because they are untrustworthy but because trust is a human-to-human level concept, it does not have any meaning in human-to-system interaction.
I think big corporations are not amoral, they are immoral. There is no wealth that has been built obeying morality or showing emphaty. Once them two become obstacles for profits, they will be thrown out.
The people in charge or corporations certainly are very often immoral.
I don't think ascribing morality to a system is useful when it's comprised of many people who can be replaced at any time.
But, I also think that top down hierarchical power structures are fundamentally harmful, abusive and exploitative so you do have a point. Cooperatives are much healthier structures.
I’m glad Gitlab is still an option, just sitting there waiting to absorb the market pivot if Microsoft takes it the wrong way.
I see more people jump for Codeberg these days.
Or even better, claim full sovereignty (again) and install Forgejo (https://forgejo.org/) on your own hardware.
You'll get the same experience as Codeberg, because Codeberg is in fact running on Forgejo
People aren't on these hosted platforms only for the git experience, they are for the social aspects and discoverability too.
Forgejo is hard at work, defining and implementing federation, adding cross-forge interaction, social functionality and discovery: https://forgejo.org/faq/#is-there-a-roadmap-for-forgejo
Also check the ActivityPub protocol extension for forge federation at https://forgefed.org which may be on the roadmap [0] of the Forgejo federation support, after they have implemented basic ActivityPub protocol support. Right now ForgeFed needs to mature a lot further, but also needs the help of the developer community to achieve that.
[0] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
For hosting and publishing your code maybe.
But the power of Github is more the social platform and collaboration at global scale.
In that sense the only mature alternative I know is Radicle
- https://radicle.xyz/
This is what people forget about GitHub. Its popularity isn't because it has the best tools on the market. It is popular because of the network effect. It's the social network of developer tooling.
I don't really want to be using a Microsoft product but I use github for the same reason I use Linkedin: because it benefits my career to be visible on these social networks.
Yes, that's why everyone is still on Sourceforge. I too check Freshmeat regularly for updates.
It's time to move on from Github, LinkedIn, and hell ideally NPM too. Microsoft is polluting the ground water.
> Yes, that's why everyone is still on Sourceforge. I too check Freshmeat regularly for updates.
Sourceforge and Freshmeat weren't social networks. Plus its not like other social networks haven't collapsed despite being popular, like MySpace.
> It's time to move on from Github, LinkedIn, and hell ideally NPM too. Microsoft is polluting the ground water.
As I said, I don't want to be using Microsoft products but it benefits my career to be visible on these social networks.
And this is a big part of the reason why it's pretty much a violation of professional deontology to use LinkedIn, GitHub (and Discord).
That kind of ideology is great in principle, but if you struggle to get a job because you have limited presence in an employer's market, then you're practising deontology without a profession.
I'm an opinionated MS-hater, like most of my peers who lived through 90s Microsoft, like I had. But I also have a family to feed and bills to pay. Sometimes pragmatism trumps ideology.
I have PRs open on five different OSS projects at the moment. My throughput is being limited by trying to remember all the details of PRs I filed 3-6 weeks ago.
I thinK I have to admit to myself that as little as I like github having all the projects, I'd be less effective having to track inboxes across half a dozen different hosting platforms.
If you made something like Mastodon, where alerts propagate across instances, I could probably deal. But without that? No, I'll pass.
The problem with a federation system like mastodon/activitypub is that relying on propagation hurts usability and discoverability. [tangled.sh](https://tangled.sh/) is to federated forgejo what bluesky is to mastodon, where it relies on atproto to have decentralization without sacrificing ux
There is an ActivityPub protocol extension that is specific to federation of code forges, called ForgeFed. It is an NLnet funded project, that receives funding through EU Next Generation Internet programs. But the project is struggling, because of a lack of community help and implementers giving feedback to help steer and mature the specs.
https://forgefed.org
It’s a great piece of software. I set it up in a Docker container, and have a few of their CI runners on a couple machines I own. Great experience so far.
OneDev (https://onedev.io/) is self-hostable, too, and works great.
Hosting costs for self-hosting a popular git repo are prohibitive for many people.
The UI looks very similar to Gitea. Are they related? And how do they compare?
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea.
I love Codeberg, but they're struggling with growth/scaling -- if folks want to see Codeberg succeed, they need to open their wallets.
Big limitation on private repos there.
Among enterprises I work with, I'm seeing way more migration to self-hosted Gitlab than I was a few years ago. Even among Azure-dependent orgs.
I think there’s some risk with this though too - more and more is behind the enterprise tier. People try to work around this in various ways but its an unsatisfying experience. For e.g. trying to enforce merge request approval with pipeline stages.
Gitlab is not really an option for me. Their pricing is absolutely out of this world.
Additionally there is Codeburg/Forgejo, and for the atproto-enjoyers, tangled.sh is a new face that feels like it could be good.
And gitea (originally a Forgejo fork).
Did you mean to say gitea was originally a Gogs fork?
The lineage of those projects is Gogs => Gitea => Forgejo
> And gitea (originally a Forgejo fork).
I don't think this is right. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea#Forgejo_fork.
Vice versa, forgejo is a gitea fork.
As a Deno user, this news also makes me see more value in JSR. (Relative to npm's ownership, that is.)
Yes, as long as you don’t look at their pricing :/
https://www.opencode.net/
Left Gitlab after they changed the UI nearly every month, it's still very cumbersome to use.
I can see Gitlab in the same position in the near future. Only a matter of time...
It's funny. Nobody complains that there is a lack of free multi-platform desktop GUI profiling tools for Go, Python, Ruby, Elixir etc. Somehow we just accept those languages are only for web services, web apps, and command-line utilities.
What is the problem with Microsoft keeping "nice to have" desktop GUI stuff for their own proprietary ecosystem when everything else has open sourced? Including the primitives needed for the community to build their own GUI and developer tooling stuff, just like JetBrains did with Rider.
Yeah guys, what's the difference between organic projects that have been open source since the start and a global technology conglomerate open sourcing things later that compete for mind share against those projects.
What could be the difference? Oh dear, I just can't think of anything.
This is an odd comment. Xamarin has never been relevant. GitHub is historically OSS focused. Xamarin was some weird niche product for Windows devs. Hardly any overlap with GitHub’s core audience. I don’t know what will happen next, but hodgepodge of weird MS tech isn’t the lens to view this through.
Didn't the Xamarin guy became the CEO of GitHub at one point?
One of them, yes.
Miguel never did, and is now focused on Swift and Apple.
There was only ever one Xamarin CEO, Nat. Miguel was CTO
Yes, and that was an incredibly odd decision.
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
On HN I keep hearing that associating .NET with Windows is outdated perception.
Writing JVM languages I feel that the developer experience is pretty much the same on any OS. It seems this cannot be said for .NET?
If you're writing a server or a web app then its good and runs well.
Visual Studio is still not ported to Linux or Mac, you need to use Rider or VSCode. If you use JetBrains for Java, using Rider will feel good no matter where you are.
The GUI library situation is a tough one. In many ways its far more advanced than other languages but their newest attempt is not as good as the older Windows only API. But what other language is graded for its great native GUI library?
I'm not calling MS cool but at the same time I think the goalposts are different.
I do not understand the hungup on visual studio.
We dont do the same for java, rust, or c… there are good IDEs for each of them and none are made by the maintainers of the language.
Java IDEs have historically been made by maintainers of the language.
Netbeans was a product acquired by Sun, Sun Forte was its "Professional" variant in Solaris, and Oracle still takes care of it in the context of Solaris and Oracle Linux.
Eclipse was a rewrite from Visual Age products, originall written in Smalltalk, by IBM, and IBM keeps being a Java vendor with their own implementations.
I do get the sentiment to some degree. Part of it is that Microsoft does have a conflict of interest as an OS vender. They do need to show that they aren't/won't be abusing that. That does put them in a position where they're asked to go above and beyond as a form of litmus test.
Re: GUI library situation, are you implying that they finally came up with something that's cross platform? What is it?
They tried, by forking Xamarin Forms into MAUI, and even then they ignored Linux. It's really rough though, to the point many projects use it as just a glorified webview for Blazor. I expect it to eventually go into a silent maintenance mode along with WinUI 3.
Avalonia is the go-to library for cross-platform UI in .NET right now. But Microsoft's own apps have been switching to web stacks, in a clear case of "Do as I say, not as I do."
There is actually a much better but less well-known open source library in .NET: Avalonia. Look it up their gallery of apps. Avalonia is the cross platform version of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) libs. It is quite good for desktop apps and many commercial pieces of software uses it.
MAUI apparently has Windows, Mac and Mobile support but no distro Linux support (unless Wine counts). You could use the web stack to be truly cross platform.
The server deploy experience for .NET is pretty much the same on Windows or Linux. The developer tooling experience has more options on Windows.
It can. DX is pretty much the same for backend and CLI stuff using VS Code on Mac, Linux and Windows. I'm working daily on C# backend and CLI stuff on a Mac (those are the dev machines at my employer). DX is on par with Go and Rust (at least dotnet CLI, LSP, Debugger, I can't speak for the profiler as I've never used it). I like the Rust tooling most, but dotnet CLI is not far behind.
Language and std lib wise, C# sits in the sweet spot.
Mh, I'm not the most experienced guy with .NET.
We have a few .NET applications running on the infrastructure on Linux hosts and it's just like every other thing.
But in some contexts, e.g. PowerBI, it pulls in a dependency and BOOM it's Windows Only to the point that not even Wine or Proton can help you. For something, that should be, mind you, a dumb SQL proxy like the PowerBI Embedded Gateway.
I think the success of Proton and Wine in games clouds the vision of Linux community. The contributors did great work on them. However the gaming API of Windows is a very limited slice of the vast API.
Games are quite standalone programs they don't depend deeply integrated Win32 stuff. They don't even use standard UI stuff from Win32. With Vulkan, porting DirectX became very viable and that was the grunt work. There are no DCOM servers or OLE stuff in games which is where Windows API actually becomes huge and sometimes nastier. Business apps however deeply depend on those.
Pretty much no, it can't be said for .Net.
It currently supports Linux as a running target for servers. It supports both running desktop software and development very badly.
It supports Linux as a running target for console apps, which can be servers, background apps, systemd apps, etc. So everything except UI apps.
The development experience with Rider is also great on Linux. I think you need to be more specific with the complaints because I have many beefs with Microsoft's approach to many things, but I could not pick up on what you meant.
You can use Avalonia to develop cross-platform apps with .NET.
GUI stuff from Windows depends deeply on Win32 and how Windows's core APIs work. So expecting Microsoft to port stuff like .Net Windows Forms is meaningless. They are open source though. Maybe with some completion effort Wine can run them.
I'm an Avalonia UI user myself, but didn't want to mention it since Microsoft themselves have done nothing to contribute to its existence. The UI rendering for Avalonia on Linux is not a Microsoft technology so I think that praise should go to the Avalonia team and whoever is developing Skia (Google?).
Can run SDL on linux and macos just fine, rendering visuals to the screen in X or Wayland.
I love C# and .NET is amazing for some specific use cases like REST APIs but there's so much stuff that just doesn't work or needs a lot more effort to get somewhere.
MAUI is a mess.
Blazor will never work as a general solution for full stack web apps. Even if a small app didn't have to download like 10MB of WASM code the DX is terrible and performance just as bad. Elixir Phoenix developed with a fraction of the budget is just so far ahead.
C# hot reload has been broken for years. I doubt it will ever be as good as what you get in JS with Vite.
Minimal APIs are a great idea but 4 years later and still fundamental features like validation are missing (it's coming in .NET 10).
They've been investing a ton of effort into Aspire. It's cool but is it more important than core features?
And now with AI, Microsoft is more distracted than ever and I'm starting to regret getting into .NET at all.
Is MAUI now just a simple wrapper for Blazor projects?
I'm not sure what you mean by some of the things you write, but the part about Microsoft being "cool guy phase" was hilarious.
I'd say Microsoft buying GitHub was part of a strategy to not lose relevance in the world that moves slowly towards Open Source Software. Or put another way, the world moves in a direction away from Microsoft, and by capturing GitHub they can manipulate the outcomes that would otherwise have been adversarial to Microsoft interests. It's just like when Microsoft forked Java back in the 1990s, and later created .NET. The whole VSCode or Visual Studio thing... it's just Microsoft Word for software engineers, and the whole point is to create an ecosystem that locks people into the ecosystem.
To think in terms of what Microsoft does, you have to step back and look into economic theory, at least a little bit. There is this idea in economics about isolated economies, and integrated economies. For example, Europe or North America relies on cheap manufactured goods from China, and so China's economy is intrinsically linked (integrated) into the economies of Europe or North America. THAT is the idea of what Microsoft does. They start by adding value, a soft-dependency you might say, and then make moves to becoming a hard dependency... to put into terms of a dependency graph. Then they link to dependency graphs together GitHub into VSCode, OpenAI into VSCode, One Drive into GitHub or One Drive into Hotmail...
I'll say for sure, at least Microsoft has a strategy, unlike Google where they seem to have a lot of failed projects.
I’ve been in the industry for 30 years professionally and 10 years as hobbyist who paid as much attention to the industry as one could before the internet in the 80s early 90s including lying as a 9th grader pretending to be a big spender to get a free subscription to MacWeek and PCWeek.
At no point in time was Microsoft one of the cool guys.
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales - I think MSFT doesn't care just as they don't care about GUI workloads, because only thing they care now is having developers run their stuff on Azure. You don't need VS for those cloud .NET apps and you don't need front end frameworks like Forms, Xamarin or MAUI. Seems like C++ is also something they would not be interested investing into when they can get people into cloud easier with C#.
Why do people need to create anthropomorphising narratives around companies? Don't be any company's cheerleader, use the stuff that's best for you (and the environment)
I built my career on MSFT stack I am going to be their cheerleader, don't want them to go down or stagnate as I would have to switch stack.
I don't understand people who are just consumers and have no actual business to root for MSFT or AAPL or any other company.
>I don't understand people who are just consumers
They're not just consumers, they're actual engineers. People who simp for companies like MS are just acolytes in developer's clothing.
If you only know one stack from one company, then you built your career on esoteric, arbitrary knowledge. Not on engineering things.
Agreed, but apparently company cheerleadering never goes away.
The same way cheerleading USA presidents doesn't go away, but if you look around you see things like Switzerland with direct democracy that just works without it.
Is he creating or is he relating what people think? I don't see this is him arguing so much as reporting.
Microsoft not being terrible was a zero interest rate phenomenon. The news today is a lot worse than just Github not being independent anymore. It sounds like literally the entire development division is being rolled into this "Core AI" business unit.
When Nadella announced plans to double the company's revenue by 2030, it was pretty clear that the enshitifiction was going to ramp up significantly, but it doesn't seem like it will ever relent now that they have to squeeze out more free cash flow to cover all of this AI capex. Windows is practically malware at this point, they've made extremely deep cuts to .NET engineering headcount, and it's just going to get worse.
fifteen years ago I predicted that if we ever have a bloody AI revolution, the most likely case would be that it would be Microsoft's fault because they are the kings of unintended consequences.
The second most likely case being some AI figuring out how to hack AWS to steal compute time, probably by getting access to billing information.
Microsoft seems to be slowly pulling ahead at the moment.
> Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
That happened three decades ago.
There was a new wind after Satya took over, but apparently it is slowly gone now.
To me it never made a difference. There was a concerted effort to put lipstick on the pig but it was still a pig.
More like put lipstick on the scorpion.
It is in their nature. It takes a lot of work to excise bad practices from an organization and removing the guilty parties is only step one. Everything continues to work the way the bad actors wanted them to work for a long, long time.
Gates was bad. Balmer was worse. He was still in charge 11 years ago, in a company he helped build 40 years ago. Their personalities are the bones of that organization.
to put lipstick on the wrong end of a pig :)
this is a mystery to me: ms has all the money in the world to make it right.. yet they can't. windows ecosystem is like one of those eastern european barnyards, where animals live and die between old halves tractors and rusty Lada(s).
That was a mask the corporation put on in a bid to lure in the younger crowd who doesn't remember all the underhanded stuff Microsoft did in the past. But they haven't really changed at all.
The thing that surprises me the most about Satya is how he managed to survive in MS so long if he really is different from the previous administration.
> Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over
I'm going to re-post something that I wrote in 2022:
I'm a bit surprised at how many of my friends have jumped ship to Visual Studio Code, including those who are very much for free software. They have always been in the business of embrace, extend, extinguish[0]. People tend to forget how evil M$ used to be because recently they have seemed like a beacon for Open Source, but I think they are just still evil[1].
I think we're still dealing with the same Microsoft that we've dealt with through the 90s. They are not a champion of open source, and they are still up to their old tricks.[2]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31966414
[1] https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
[2] https://social.platypush.tech/@blacklight/108719097530863121
Wait Microsoft was cool at some point?
Yeah. Xbox, GitHub, Sataya's early days embracing open source, Zune (admittedly not cool but i loved the product).
Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable despite its many many flaws.
I always wonder at these attributions. Like all windows versions gave you bluescreen and ran Microsoft excel. To me not one stood out particularly bad or good compared to the others maybe after Windows 98 service pack something
Windows 98 was so bad when it came to drivers, lol.
It had the plug and play standard but that only worked half of the time, and if you messed up by doing something like connecting the peripherals before installing the driver you could BSOD while trying to install the drivers and have to rescue the whole OS. Happened to me enough for me to remember it.
And my sister demonstrated how you could delete the recycle bin if you were bad enough at computers, which was fun.
I've also had nearly as many kernel panics on OSX or hangs on Linux as I have had BSODs on Windows (when graphed as a ratio of use over time).
All OSes have flaws and issues, there would never be a perfect operating system with our current understanding of computers, and that's ok.
That being said, my critique does not include OSes that spy on you (for what will be considered a several trillion dollar crime syndicate when this era is written down in history), which is its own entire rant.
Windows Vista got saner permissions support and made the OS survive certain kinds of driver crashes, but on launch a lot of existing software and drivers weren't updated to support those changes so it got a bad reputation. Nobody gave Windows proper credit for these advancements until Windows 7 which had a cleaner launch since most software and drivers were already updated for Vista's changes.
Win98 was terrible. I used to reinstall it every month or so, as routine maintenance.
Win2k was so much better it's not even comparable.
XP had a bit of a rough start, but by sp3 it was a lot better than 2k.
I skipped the other windows-es until 10. It has been solid.
I was on Windows 95 until a few years ago :D. That for me was the cooler one, given the improvements (in visuals at least) over Windows 3.11.
I think XP is nostalgic and was everywhere but back when I used XP linux was still the coolest... even mac was cooler
> Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable
That is very puzzling... Did you compare them to anything else?
Did you missed the whole Microsoft <3 FOSS, right after Satya took over?
No way anybody really believed that. Or did they?
Us people who remember EEE didn't
did anyone believe it?!
It was AstroTurfed to hell and back here and on Reddit. I know that much.
You can see the reactions in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524082 . Pretty positive overall!
All those people who use Linux on their Windows machine instead of just installing a proper Linux distro.
You can see it very regularly when typescript is mentioned
They're releasing a feature on Windows which literally records your screen every few seconds!
These guys are extremely bad guys.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
This is Microsoft's primary strategy. There are a lot of victims out there.
... he says after spending several months porting a win32 app to Silverlight as part of a Gold Partner/MS case study with much fanfare, only to have to spent the next few years backporting everything into the win32 app it never replaced, and then it was shit canned and only the win32 version remains.
We're planning to rewrite it in Qt at some point as some of our customers use RHEL.
I once worked for a company which outsourced the development of a Silverlight app for $1 million and then canned the whole thing one year later. It's just crazy how these life-changing amounts of money are thrown around like garbage in this industry.
Oh and I didn't mention how these founders went on to raise more and more funding. It's like there is no connection to performance.
What about Wine? Is that still a thing?
Visual Studio Code seems to be their big open source push, besides GitHub. Everyone uses it, and most development environments and UX are based on it. Used to be Atom, I remember.
Pedantic, but VS Code does not share a lineage with Atom, besides the fact that it is built on Electron (which was, admittedly, originally built for Atom.)
I meant Atom used to be the base, and now it's VSCode
VS Code was not based on Atom's code base.
What EGreg is saying is that most development environments and UX used to be based on Atom, while they are now based on VS Code.
EGreg didn't mean to say that VS Code used to be Atom, or is based on Atom, though I agree his wording was a bit ambiguous and it could be interpreted that way.
Oh interesting. This claim makes more sense, but I'm actually surprised by it too - my memory of things is that Sublime Text 2 (released 2012) was one of the most popular editors for scripting languages (JS, PHP, Python, etc.) However, there was a long period of inactivity before Sublime Text 3 was released (2017) with support for Python 3 plugins, and ST was getting stale as Python 2 was slowly phased out.
During that time, Atom was released (2014). But I don't recall it ever being especially popular - at least outside of the JS ecosystem. For one thing, it was kind of slow on release (people still complain about Electron!) and while it offered a lot of customization, these customization often seemed to worsen its performance. It was VS Code that really seemed to draw a wider audience from my perspective.
That said, I switched to vim around the time Atom came out, so I may be out of touch. I doubt there are any solid stats anywhere...
This is next and not Electron-based: https://zed.dev/
I took the claim ("Atom used to be the base, now VS Code is") to mean that custom DE toolchains used to be predominantly built on Atom but are now built on VS Code, not that VS Code was built on Atom. (The statement is pretty clearly saying VS Code replaced Atom as the base for something else, not that Atom was VS Code's base.)
I didn't say it was!
I don't understand how VS Code is an "open source push". It's technically open source, but open source doesn't seem to be strategically important to it.
Not all of it is OSS. The core language servers are closed, I think.
> Visual Studio Code ... open source
Pick one.
They meant VS Code (which is at least partially open source).
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt
Heard of Apple Game Porting Toolkit? That's built on the back of Wine.
Microsoft has been open sourcing a bunch of their programs for a while now too. Majority are inconsequential but they are still nice to see. People on Linux OS's are excited about Microsoft calculator being open source but these open source projects still show that some people there have interest in the push.
Valve's steam deck runs on Linux/Wine. Wine is more popular than ever.
Wine, as part of Proton/SteamOS is a huge success.
Wine is still active, but I think mostly with Valve's proton, if that's the Wine you're talking about.
I remember all the PR about Satya Nadella making the company cool, modern, user-friendly, and open source friendly. Thought wow, he must also be a hypnotist.
first time I've ever read "Microsoft" and "cool" in the same sentence.
Technically not true. We were muttering "Not cool, Microsoft, not cool!" quite regularly back in the 90s and early 00s. :)
I don't get why Github is reporting to the AI Core Team. It should be the other way around.
I think Jetbrians Rider and vscode being “good enough” to stop Microsoft investing in another IDE for Mac
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only,
The monetisation of .NET is less about selling Windows licences, and more about selling Azure compute etc. The OS used on Azure is less relevant, you pay MS either way.
You can run .net without azure very easily. I personally have 4x web apps written in .net 8, razor. They used to be on a aws windows instance years ago but it was overly expensive for what I needed. Then I switched them to a small digital ocean server running ubuntu. When I started these apps I wrote them on windows 7 for windows server. I switched the server probably 2 years ago. I recently made the switch off of windows to ubuntu as my daily driver, instead of going to 11. Everything still works great. I do miss visual studio, but I am getting used to linux and its tools now. Point is, server is running and there is zero azure involved.
> You can run .net without azure very easily
That's true, and we're all well aware of it. I've done that for a job too.
Nevertheless, the point stands. MS gives away a lot of the .NET tools for free. It is a "Loss leader", "to draw customers into a store where they are likely to buy other goods." (1).
"You can't run .NET without Azure" is not what I said, what I said is that .NET is free, but MS believes that continuing to invest in it, drives Azure sales. Ask yourself why MS spends money developing tools such as Aspire or YARP.
The fact that you specifically didn't buy some Azure today means little: this is still the plan, and it still seems to be broadly working. I have heard MS people say as much, and also say that the side-effect of some people running .NET on AWS etc is fine too.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
If Github/Copilot wins the war of coding assistant and becomes the next growth point in MS, the story will be total different.
We shouldn't ignore the influence of trend, it's like the facebook in mobile era.
Do you work in devdiv at Microsoft? I can see the org chart in this comment haha
No, but I code for Microsoft platforms since MS-DOS 3.3, so one gets to know how it all works, when having read so many docs, MSJ articles, MSDN, PDC and BUILD sessions, podcats and what not.
How is Rider v. VS?
This is the sort of question I don't trust AI with yet.
I have been a .NET dev for the past 8 years and have switched fully to Rider. The only thing I miss from VS is the quick nav to see all the properties and methods in a file on the top bar. Everything else is vastly better:
- Auto complete is a bit smarter (even the free AI suggestions are better) - Refactoring across files is often faster - Package management is undoubtedly the latest performance difference. I would go from taking 1-2 minutes from using VS's "Manage packages for solution" to under 10 seconds in Rider. - In VS there's always a noticeable delay when the debugger hits a breakpoint / exception and the IDE takes a few seconds to actually display. This is about halved in Rider. - The built in terminal is vastly better than VS's, though not as good as Windows Terminal
does gemini code assist work with Rider? Since its a jetbrain ide? I would drop VS2022 in favor of anything, but vscode isn;t cutting it.
It's there but when I tried it a few months ago I wasn't impressed. But I think it's gotten better recently.
Rider is very nice and a perfectly competent development environment. It gets first class support and often has the ability to test preview features from dotnet upcoming language and runtimes.
It's biggest problem is that it's not Visual Studio, so it is very hard for people who have lived in VS for a decade to move over.
It does away with some bloat and also provides some features of Resharper natively instead of as an extension.
You can quite literally use this as your primary development environment.
> How is Rider v. VS?
Rider is far better than VS for everything apart from Desktop UI Apps and perhaps Blazor WASM hot reloading, which is itself far behind the UX of JS/Vite hot reloading, so I avoid it and just use Blazor static rendering. Otherwise VS tooling is far behind Intellij/Rider for authoring Web dev assets, inc. TypeScript.
I switched to Rider/VS Code long before moving to Linux, which I'm happy to find works just as well in Linux. Not a fan of JetBrains built-in AI Integration (which IMO they've fumbled for years), but happy with Augment Code's Intellij Plugin which I use in both Rider and VS Code.
Rider is where I live for dev work.
If you do web work it's night and day compared to VS, it pretty much includes all WebStorm features in it as well.
VS - great if you are Windows only shop for dev and want all the bells and whistles
Rider - has all of the the nice things JetBrains does and the best option on Mac if you need advanced refactoring; UI feels a bit cluttered at time (though they improved this).
VSC - for whatever reason, I always end up back to VSC for .NET for backends. Good enough, fast, and lightweight enough. Plays nicely with Node and full-stack monorepos.
I would commit to VSC and try to make it work. If you find you need advanced refactoring support, then try out Rider.
the debugger is a tiny bit nicer in VS, but otherwise Rider has much better ergonomics and features that are actually useful.
> A proper cross platform IDE experience requires getting Rider.
I seem to remember a lot more .NET IDEs before .NET Core... This frustrates me.
You really think Microsoft has been ”cool” for the past decade or so?
First the rampant spyware, then they gradually wreck every single piece of software into unusable buggy AI-slop-mess just to play the trashy MBA valuation games.
I still hold nostalgic value for the old OSes (say up to XP/7) but everything after has been nothing but maximal profit extraction.
Dont get me started on Azure
Not OP, but I do.
The '90s/00s era of people hating on M$ and picturing them as the Borg had left room to the 10s/20s of MS being "friendly" and releasing open source and free things (typescript, vs code, core.net, wsl, work on python etc) and not completely screwing up acquisitions like GitHub or Mojang.
Windows became adware, and office became some crappy online thing, but _microsoft_ had became nicer and gained goodwill.
This seems to have started evaporating in the last year or so.
Only people without any sense of reality believed this. Being exploitative is a core feature of MS, since its foundation. It's like believing a serpent won't bite you. They're in the middle of the embrace, extend and extinguish cycle for open source technologies.
Yep, that is more of less the point I was making.
They didn't become cool, some people just let themselves get fooled by what they were offering for free.
Windows was already adware with WIndows 98. Active Desktop anyone?
Yeah that.
HN has a short memory. About 10 years ago everyone was all over Satya like he was Jesus' second coming.
Look where we are now.
Not just that, but Microsoft's reputation is in the process of taking a nose dive over its human rights record
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
Nobody even knows about this, no one thinks "Microsoft, hell no, they are a key player in the gaza conflict."
No one really associates human rights with Microsoft's reputation. That is the domain of Palantir, Meta, etc.
I guess you speak for everyone?
I very much do look very negatively on Microsoft as a collaborator with modern fascist regimes, along with Meta, Palantir, X, etc.
Yet. How do you think Meta acquired that reputation ?
What about Apple there? Bringing golden offerings to their god-king and so supporting the further corruption of the regime. One of the few with the power/money to stand against them instead kneeling before Trump like a teen beauty pageant hopeful.
as a former MSFT employee (who quit for reasons, well before the layoffs) I am not permitted to disparage or portray my former employer in a negative light.
I'm just mentioning this for no reason whatsoever. It popped into my head, for some reason.
As a former MSFT employee who disparages Microsoft on a regular basis, I ask: ‘dafuq did you get that idea?
That seems literally illegal, unless the disparagement would reference specific, classified programs.
For life? How can you be bound by this? Unless you sold yourself out for an extra month pay.
I'm also a former employee but based in the US where such things are illegal.
In what country are you bound by clauses like that? I've never heard Microsoft doing something like that before.
That's true of most of tech in general, these days. You have to pick your poison now.
You really don't have to.
And as a developer you have the option to go for otherwise trickier alternatives, like not using iOS nor Android.
But of course someone that uses the word 'tech' for a tiny subset of it might not see that...
Like IBM in the forties.
nothingburger
No need to extinguish what you can infinitely embrace with capital and extend into a puzzle.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Can you elaborate on why you believe that? I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework. I mean, their Win32 API is still alive and well, as well as MFC, ATL, etc. WPF still gets some minor updates too here and there.
I have no idea what you mean by web, too. ASP.NET is perhaps one of the better maintained web frameworks around. What exactly do you interptet as a concern?
Blazor is also Microsoft's alternative to JavaScript and it's main value proposition is being able to write webassembly apps using Microsoft technology exclusively. What do you think is replacing this?
Pointing out Aspire is even weirder. It's a containerization framework to help with observability and manage distributed applications. What exactly is the overlap?
I sense a great deal of confusion in your comments. What exactly are you trying to say?
> I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework.
WinUI3 is dead, lol. I tried to migrate from UWP to WinUI3, but it is literally dead. There doesn’t seem to be any team at MS actively working on it, the community calls have died, and the last build conf didn’t have any WinUI3 talks, all AI stuff. Yes, you can build apps with WinUI3, but development and support for it has stalled and I couldn’t justify moving the companies product over to WinUI3.
No they aren't placing all their chips on WinUI3, only those that never went through all reboots since Windows 8, believe that.
WPF got taken out of legacy mode at BUILD 2024, exactly because hardly anyone outside Redmond cares about WinUI 3.
Anyone that has been long enough around, has seen ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Core MVC (not compatible with MVC 5 predecessor), Razor Pages, Minimal APIs, Blazor,...
So it is a mess doing consulting and depending on what .NET version the customer team is allowed to use, and existing code, what gets to be used by that portfolio.
Minimal APIs have been designed to bring in Python and JavaScript developers into .NET, which many of us see as not working at all, while having created the need now everyone creates their own controllers infractruture, as means to tame having minimal APIs all over the place, there are even MVVM like frameworks now for that purpose.
Blazor is really only usable as path forward for those still stuck in WebForms, due to the similar approach to do Web UIs, and to .NET shops without frontend teams.
In the age of distributed computing with microservices and frontend teams, it is a hard sell to make them adopt Blazor and learn C#, instead of React, Angular, Vue.
At least they have adopted TypeScript, the next language that Anders Hejlsberg decided to focus on.
Aspire is something that has been pivoted, now they try to sell it as Microsoft's Pulumi, but everyone has to write the orchestration code in C#, thus only relevant to .NET shops.
Maddy Montaquila has said in a few .NET podcast interviews that they are trying to use Aspire as means to sell .NET to UNIX shops, given the low adoption numbers outside the traditional Microsoft shops, even after almost a decade being open source.
> it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3
Not it isn't, based on the paltry resources and team size they have working on it, the pace of bug fixes (non existent), the fact that in 2024 they stated WPF is on par with WinUI 3 as a recommended GUI framework. I'm not sure what signals to you they are "all in" on it.
Look at the size of this thread [0], and how many people tried to give WinUI 3 a chance but have been burned by lack of support. This is not the sentiment that surrounds a platform that has a lot of chips betting on it.
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/discussions/9...
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
... what?
They could do a better job with the native frameworks, but the rest of these are completely unrelated. For web, MVC is pretty much dead and you might want to use Blazor SSR instead. Web API via controllers is still supported, but minimal API endpoints are the hot thing. Blazor is being treated as a first class product. Aspire is there to assist in local orchestration of distributed applications... and is built on Blazor.
Exactly that, now try to pick the best one of all of those on enterprise projects, depending on the version they are using, and there is no budget for updates.
No one wants cross platform.
Microsoft hasn't been the cool guys since at least 1995, and probably long before that.
"Microsoft being the cool guys phase" lol, ok
My deepest concern at this time isn't that AI eventually gets written down to nothing; because I don't think it will. Its that these companies are so scared of being out-competed by an AI-first competitor that they're willing to make deep sacrifices to their core businesses just to effectively virtue signal that they're AI first and unable to be out-competed.
It is deeply concerning because all things point to reality shaking out with irony. None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it. Apple has nothing, Microsoft wants to put spyware on every Windows computer and builds the worst coding agent on the market despite having privileged access to every line of source code ever written, Meta put a chatbot in Whatsapp then decided paying researchers ten mil would solve their problems, Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
Their fear is going to lose them everything. Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed. Everyone learned that lesson and decided "we'll never be unwilling to innovate ever again"; but now their core product stable undergoes constant churn that is pissing off customers and driving competition to eat their lunch.
There is long-term, durable beauty in investing majority effort into making Github the single best place to host and organize code. That need is never going away. There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world, no one doubts that, but its a matter of proportion and humility. Microsoft/Github will never build AI products that lead the market. Its not a technology problem; its an organizational and political one. But that's ok, because they could dominate the market with the world's best code hosting platform, an average AI strategy, and a library of integrations with the rest of the frontier world.
> Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product.
YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.
I think folks sleep on Google around here. They are slow but they have so many compelling iterative AI usecases that even a BigTech org can manage it eventually.
Apple and Microsoft are rightly getting panned, Apple in particular is inexcusable (but I think they will have a unique offering when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for).
Google was the absolute king of AI (previously "ML") for at least 10 years of the last 20. They are also an absolute behemoth of tech and have consistently ranked among the most valuable companies in the world for multiple years, valued at trillions of dollars today. Hell, they're on version 7 and production year 10 of their custom AI ASIC family.
When considering the above, the amount of non-force-fed "modern AI" use they've been able to drive is supposed to be shown by things to the level of a question button on YouTube and some incremental overlaying of Gemini to Docs? What does that leave the companies without the decade head start, custom AI hardware, and trillions to spend to look to actually do worth a damn in their products with the tech?
I'm (cautiously) optimistic AI will have another round or two of fast gains again in the next 5 years. Without it I don't think it leaves the realm of niche/limited uses in products in that time frame. At least certainly not enough that building AI into your product is expected to make sense most of the time yet.
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
lol if this is the perfect example, "AI" in general is in a sad place. I've tried to use it a handful of times and each time it confidently produced wrong results in a way that derailed my quest for an answer. In my experience it's an anti-feature in that it seems to make things worse.
The best and latest Gemini Pro model is not SOTA. The only good things it has are the huge context and the low API price. But I had to stop using it because it kept contradicting itself in the walls of text it produces. (My paid account was forced to pay for AI with a price hike so I tried for a couple of months to see if I could make it work with prompt engineering, no luck).
Google researchers are great, but Engineering is dropping like a stone, and management is a complete disaster. Starting with their Indian McKinsey CEO moving core engineering teams to India.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core...
There are problems with every model, none of them are perfect. I've found Gemini to be very good but occasionally gets stuck in loops: it does, however, seem to detect the loop and stop. It's more cost effective than the Claude models, and Gemini has regular preview releases. I would rate it between sonnet and opus except it's cheaper and faster than both.
For whatever reason there are tasks that work better on one model compared to another, which can be quite perplexing.
It was the best model according to almost every benchmark until recently. It’s definitely SOTA.
No amount of big context window can stop the model from context poisoning. So in a sense, it's a gimmick when you start having the feel of how bad the output is.
> when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for
What's that? It's not obvious to me, anyway.
My guess would be local AI. Apple Silicon is uniquely suitable with its shared memory.
Yeah exactly. The MacBook Pro is by far the most capable consumer device for local LLM.
A beefed up NPU could provide a big edge here.
More speculatively, Apple is also one of the few companies positioned to market an ASIC for a specific transformer architecture which they could use for their Siri replacement.
(Google has on-device inference too but their business model depends on them not being privacy-focused and their GTM with Android precludes the tight coordination between OS and hardware that would be required to push SOTA models into hardware. )
I see. It'll be interesting to see how much on-device models take off for consumers, when off-device models will be so much more capable. In the past, the average consumer has typically been happy to trade privacy for better products, but maybe it will be different for llms.
Agreed. I think the latency wins could be meaningful for many of the obvious phone-centric usecases (Siri, app-/browser-enrichment, etc.) but the capability gap is definitely a hindrance.
Privacy is already a key differentiating feature for iPhone which is why I think they will continue to try to make this option viable. (They already do ChatGPT fallback which is a pragmatic concession to the reality that you highlight here.)
They are well positioned but have a history of screwing up their AI plays, I hope they can get it right.
This is only true if you consider AI to be LLMs and chatbots. The non-LLM AI built into just the iPhone camera is almost certainly the largest scale consumer deployment of any AI but largely goes unnoticed because it works so well.
inference hardware, especially starting with on device ai for the mac. I think they should go as far as making a server chip, but that's less obvious today.
Embrace the vibe, man
The biggest counterexample would be that dead-ai-autotranslate-voice sucking every gram of joy out of watching your favourite creators, with no ability to turn it off.
Yeah to be clear, I think Google is the strongest in AI product development of the FAANG companies. I included them in the list because the most complaints I see about AI product integration among FANNG comes from Google products; the incessant bundling of Gemini chatboxes in every Workspace product.
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
I remember when I was trying to find a YouTube video, I remembered the contents but not the name. I tried google search and existing LLMs including Gemini, and none could find it.
It would also be useful for security: give the AI a recording and ask when the suspicious person shows up, the item is stolen, the event happens, etc. But unfortunately also useful for tyranny…
> Apple in particular is inexcusable
This isn't me defending apple, but, let me play out a little scenario:
"hey siri, book me tickets to see tonight's game"
"sure thing, champ"
<<time passes>>
"I have booked the tickets, they are now in your apple wallet"
<<opens up wallet, sees that there is 1x £350 ticket to see "the game", a interactive lesson in pickup artistry>>
You buy apple because "it works" (yes, most of that is hype, but the vertical integration is actually good, not great for devs/tinkerers though.) AI just adds in a 10-30% chance of breaking what seems to be a simple workflow.
You don't notice with chatGPT, because you expect it to be the dipshit in your pocket. You don't expect apple to be shit. (although if you've tried to ask for a specific track whilst driving, you know how shit that is. )
I agree with this as one reason Apple hasn’t rolled out Apple Intelligence. It’s a fair point.
However, I think it was a strategic blunder to go announce a full guns-blazing release that solves all of these problems, before taking the easier iteration of just making Siri not suck.
If you had the conversational fluency of ChatGPT with a very locked down set of tool calls (maybe no write actions, or maybe it can only propose simple intents that you must manually confirm, and definitely no purchases) I think they would not be perceived to be as far behind.
Nobody has solved the AI personal assistant product. It’s an insanely massive market segment just for consumers. Going after this as your V1 seems like a bad choice to me.
> You don't notice with chatGPT, because you expect it to be the dipshit in your pocket. You don't expect apple to be shit.
So many people don't realize this for some reason, but I think it's precisely why we haven't seen anything shown at WWDC '24. Apple tried and quickly realized the tech wasn't ready, and letting it run wild on their platforms would do irreparable brand damage.
This tech (LLMs) have barely been available to the public for ~3-4 years. That's no time at all, anyone using AI regularly now is very much an early adopter, something Apple historically isn't and Apple's users generally appreciate that aspect of them.
I get wanting to stay ahead of the curve and be competitive, but I don't understand this seemingly deep seated fear of these big tech companies that is making them go 100% all in on AI at the cost of all other areas of their business.
OpenAI is the fastest growing consumer tech company of all time. The big guys have to move at what for them is breakneck speed, just to have a chance at retaining their market share.
They will be swept away if they sit and wait a couple years for some uppity startup to build the AI disruptor and eat their lunch.
> They will be swept away if they sit and wait a couple years
I'm not sure that assertion is entirely correct, but I'm aware that I'm making tech predictions that I am very bad at.
The long term future is AR glasses. But the problem is, physics and battery chemistry means thats not going to happen for ~10 years at the very minimum.
Until then its still tablet/phones. The problem for openAI is that for them to provide useful results, they need access to all your "context" (messages, photos, location, spending, conversations, videos everything) Apple isn't going to allow that, which means that openAI isn't going to be all that useful on ios.
Android however is much more loosey goosey. The issue is, will google allow a competitor to steal all that context and muscle them out of their own platform?
I'm not sure openAI is going to win this, mainly because they need their own platform, and they only thing they have is brand loyalty, rather than a network effect. chatGPT is fungible with any of the other providers. The only thing that makes them stand out is the tools that are bundled with chatgpt. that and weird personification/pack bonding.
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
> Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.
These are great examples of insulting and invasive introductions of LLMs into already functional workflows. These are anti-features.
The Ask button in YouTube is a game changer for the use case of "what timestamp in this hour-long video talks about topic x?".
What's the existing functional workflow for that? Downloading the captions and querying with a local LLM or a very fuzzy keyword search?
Perhaps this is a difference in terminology, but in no way do you need a LLM for fuzzy search. Semantic search, fuzzy keyword search, and text to speech have existed for years and predate the technology for an LLM. In your use-case, do you really need a chatbot to "ask the video" about this, wouldn't a "search in video" function that does the same thing be better?
Yeah, I was using the term "fuzzy" a bit loosely/incorrectly. I want to be able to say "where's the joke about British people?" even if the transcript only uses related but distinct terms like "Scotsman". I know you can get close to that with Transformers sans LLM, but LLMs are kinda like regex where they're often a non optimal but adequate way to solve a problem quickly.
I guess I’m using the product wrong if I find them useful?
If its really useful, how long do you think it will take Google to kill it ? ;-)
Those examples are interesting and novel, but don't anywhere near live up to the promise of the next great technological revolution, greater than even the internet. I'm fairly sure if an all-knowing genie were to tell Google that this is the best AI gets, their interest in it would drop pretty quickly.
I think for most people, if NotebookLM were to disappear overnight it'd be a shame but something you can live with. There'll be a few who do heavily rely on it, but then I wouldn't be surprised to hear that at least one person heavily relies on the "I'm feeling lucky" button, or in other words, xkcd 1172
I mean Microsoft hosts key AI models in their AI Foundry, I don't think they're hurting.
https://ai.azure.com/catalog
What you're describing would seem to be a borderline miraculously positive thing. Every single generation of tech companies starts off absolutely amazing. Then they get big, and in surprisingly rapid order enter into the abyss from which they never return
But in modern times the particularly level level of big, scaling back of anti-competitive law enforcement, and a government increasingly obsessed with making [economic] number go up, regardless of the cost, have all created a situation where the current batch is dying a lot slower than they probably otherwise would.
If 'AI' is the pandora's box of self destruction that can move the show along to the next batch of companies, then it'll have been worth the trillions of dollars in investment after all!
I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle. When Standard Oil held a monopoly on the oil world, it was mostly possible because they were monopolizing a discrete set of natural resources. Tech isn't that: Especially with AI lowering the barrier of entry to learning and generating code, tech is extremely resource-unconstrained. The main resource we fight over is just humans who have the ability and desire to spend money.
I also don't feel it will happen in "rapid order". These companies are too big. Its happening business-unit by business-unit. In the far future, these companies will still exist, just heavily optimized into the much smaller handful of units that still generate profit.
> I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle.
Depends if you agree with somenameforme's theory that tech companies start off amazing, get big, then become awful.
You may have noticed, in recent decades, we haven't bothered with enforcing anti-trust law. If Facebook wants to buy Instagram and Whatsapp, they can. If Microsoft wants to buy Github and Activision they can. If Google wants to buy Youtube, Doubleclick and Nest they can.
If we accept the premise that FAANG is where innovation goes to die, going 25 years without any antitrust enforcement might not have been the smartest move.
intel.com's <title> says "Simplify Your AI Journey - Intel". Their description meta tag says "Deliver AI at scale across cloud, data center, edge, and client with comprehensive hardware and software solutions." Their frontpage mentions "AI" 9 times, but has only 3 mentions of "processor" and zero of "CPU".
I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem that way.
They realized they can't compete on processors, so they're moving on to greener pastures. Like kodak back then.
Intel has traditionally been behind in software quality and discrete GPUs, I wonder if they are making this move out of desperation because nobody thinks "yay, Intel!" when both topics are mentioned.
Yes, I find it greatly satisfying that these mega companies are turning away their most important asset: super qualified people capable of creating new products. They're basically betting on their own extinction.
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it.
Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and workflows blah blah."
Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify the choices.
Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't even needed.
I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.
It's very funny that for pretty much any use case of LLMs, they're either too expensive or too incapable or both! There may be a few uses that make sense, but it seems to be incredibly hard to find the balance.
It blows my mind how many computing professionals truly think this is the case. It doesn't take a tech blogger to draw a trend line through the advancements of the past 2.5 years and see where we're headed. The fact that grifters abound on the edges of the industry is a sign of the radical importance of this unexpected breakthrough, not an indication that it's all a grift.
To engage in some armchair psychology, I think this is in large part due to a natural human tendency for stability (which is all the stronger for those in relatively powerful positions like us SWEs). Knowing that believing A would imply that your mortgage is in jeopardy, your retirement plan up-ended, and your entire career completely obscured beyond a figurative singularity point makes believing ~A a very appealing option...
> It doesn't take a tech blogger to draw a trend line through the advancements of the past 2.5 years and see where we're headed.
People did this with airplanes in the 60s, and based on that trajectory we should be exploring the outer edges of our solar system by now. Turns out the market for supersonic jets was unsustainably small and the cost/risk of space exploration is still very high.
Every sigmoidal curve looks exponential as it starts to enter the linear regime. But eventually the curve turns over, either due to limits in the technology, the marginal cost of the technology, or no clear way to further commercialize it.
I don't know that we've reached that point with AI, but a do know that extrapolating from a trend line is fraught with peril.
I think about that chart of disco sales from the Simpsons a lot these days...
Where's your evidence though? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
It's a weird way to talk about the destruction people livelihood's as inevitable. Like none of this is preordained, we can stop it or impede it.
Yes, that's something that makes me very angry. The media and most people talk about this as if its a natural phenomenon that cannot be stopped, when in fact governments and investors are giving billions of dollars to make it happen; and at the same time they're doing nothing to prevent the job losses that have already started.
The difference is that I can’t sell elasticsearch in my company, but I can sell an LLM.
Yeah, don’t ask..
Why doesn't your company get the use case for Elasticsearch?
Is it because you're trying to pitch it with CTO arguments on capabilities, not COO/CFO arguments like "will permanently replace N humans"?
No, they do get it. They just don’t want to invest time in it, so only through a third party.
But AI is sexy, so LLMs doing document search? Yes please, let’s have some teams dedicate their time and effort to develop it ourselves.
It’s because AGI is going to come, you know, so if we invest now they can replace everybody with AI
Are you laughing as hard as I was when they told me this?
If your mgmt is so technically illiterate, why not just pitch them you're investigating using LLMs, then do the ElasticSearch work and sprinkle on some magic LLM pixie dust so it looks good on their mgmt slides? Should keep you all happy. That's generally what I've seen happen under such types.
We just recently implemented a doc search "agent". It's no better than just using the built in search in Teams/M365. Complete waste of time. One of our dev teams spent an entire quarter on it and no one is going to use it because it is slower and outside of everyone's normal workflow.
Yep. We do the same. We also do copilot agents. Just don’t tell anybody that behind the scenes it’s the same 10 year old power automate flows running..
I think there's a lot of really interesting (and profitable) AI products out there. And: there's so many more that can be built. We're only scratching the surface of what the industry has already invented can do. Not in an "AGI Inevitable" capacity; what we have, today, with more context engineering, better user interfaces, better products with deeper AI-first thinking, etc.
My point was more-so that FAANG isn't even scratching the surface; they're punching it bloody with their fists while yelling "look at all this AI we have, see dad we can't be disrupted we're the disrupters we're the disrupters".
It reminds me a lot of Xbox over the past six years, so much so that I think Xbox is a canary for how many business units in these companies will look in five more years.
There's a lot of "promising" and "interesting" stuff, but I'm not seeing anything yet that actually works reliably.
Sooner or later (mostly sooner) it becomes apparent that it's all just a chatbot hastily slapped on top of an existing API, and the integration barely works.
A tech demo shows your AI coding agent can write a whole web app in one prompt. In reality, a file with 7 tab characters in a row completely breaks it.
> A tech demo shows your AI coding agent can write a whole web app in one prompt. In reality, a file with 7 tab characters in a row completely breaks it.
I like how all the demos just show these crazy simple, single page "web apps" that are effectively just coding tutorial material, and people eat it up. There's no talk of auth, persistence, security, deployment, performance, etc.
Cool...it vibe coded a janky snake game with no collision, now what?
> Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed.
Is it though? There's a reason why Microsoft's JVM competitor is called ".NET". They were planning Windows .NET Server 2003, Office.NET, etc.
I don't think an inversion of the hype cycle, it's just another hype cycle exactly. I think, in fact, it's extremely comparable. I remember people joking about Pets.com -- just imagine buying your pet food online?!? Crazy stuff. AI is the same. It's hyped up massively, there will eventually be some kind of correction, and then it'll become the new normal.
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective.
Not true. Ironically, the first exception I can think of is Github Copilot.
It is true these companies haven’t recouped anywhere near the $trillion they’ve invested in AI.
Only a sentence later do I explicitly reference Github Copilot; yet they belong on the list because despite having every advantage a company could have, the resources of a megacorporation, all the source code in the world, the semi-independence of a smaller team; they still managed to produce a mediocre and uninteresting product.
But, again: I think that state for Copilot is totally fine for Github. That product state of "its there, its builtin, and its fine" is a fantastic and extremely efficient market to service.
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective
The coding agents, CC, Cursor, etc. are quite good and useful.
I explicitly said "big tech companies"; that's FAANG, which does not include OpenAI, Anthropic, Anysphere, or their kin.
with a $500B valuation, I'd say that OpenAI is now "BigTech"
Not by any traditionally-recognized definition, but I'll certainly admit them into the club once they go public.
> Apple has nothing
I always hear this but people use Siri all the time, and I think outside of talking to programmers, a lot of consumers probably consider that the level of AI they care about using. "is Siri really AI" seems like a real "is a hotdog a sandwich" question. Who cares? People eat hot dogs and talk to Siri.
It seems what Apple has less of is LLM products that cost enormous sums of money to make that people don't like using. Sure, they have a little of it, they fell flat on their faces with their news summaries thing last year and AppleVision was a nothingburger, but when it comes to "sinking huge amounts of money into deeply unpopular ventures", it seems to me that Apple's reluctance to deploy its largess here might be prudent. It seems like they're less exposed on the hype.
I do wish Siri was a little more intelligent to be honest.
I use Siri when I need a fast, distraction-free, action. Which makes it perfect when driving or performing other tasks where my hands a busy and/or I cannot put my attention on my phones LCD screen.
The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction.
I'd love it if Siri was smart enough to differentiate between:
- an automation request. eg setting an alarm or ringing a contact. The kind of interaction what you wouldn't want to offload to a 3rd party but is the kind of interaction where you don't need vast datastores of training.
- and an open-ended question. eg What time are Oasis playing in London tonight? Who was the 23rd President of Germany? What are the rules of Dodgeball? these sort of things are less confidential and don't require handing control of your phone to a 3rd party.
And I'd love it if Siri automatically offloaded from their local AI to ChatGPT (or whatever) when the latter was identified. That should be opt in, but when opted in, it should be automatic. I shouldn't have to consent each time after I've opted in.
> The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction.
My hunch tells me this is a temporary stopgap until Apple figures out their "private cloud compute" or whatever where they can run their own model, after that it'll be seamless. Try to do as much on device as possible, and if that fails/is not possible, offload to the model running on Apple's servers rather than a 3rd party service.
Maybe they're "behind" (although, this tech is still so early I don't think anyone is truly behind), but I appreciate their approach to try and do as much on device as possible. They are the only ones around that aren't just defaulting to "harvest as much data as possible and ship it to our servers."
I can be patient - Siri works fine for what I want it for anyway - it can set reminders, timers, alarms, dictate messages, and create notes. That's about all I use it for and would use it for. Anything else I'm not going to ask my phone, I'm going to take it out and head to Google.
> Anything else I'm not going to ask my phone, I'm going to take it out and head to Google.
But my while point was there’s a plethora of different reasons why “heading to Google” isn’t always practical. Like when you’re driving. When you’re cooking. Even when you’re just playing with the kids, a question gets asked, and you don’t want to spoil the momentum of the play by staining at an LCD screen for 2 minutes.
Siri really damn convenient for those occasions when you want an action performed but don’t want the distraction of performing that action.
In fact, I’d go further and say that’s the biggest selling point for current gen consumer AI.
> Maybe they're "behind" (although, this tech is still so early I don't think anyone is truly behind)
The tech is still early but Siri are most definitely behind.
It’s not even remotely close to the capabilities of even open source models, let alone the commercial ones.
And the fact that they had to bolt on ChatGPT in such an ad hoc way speaks volumes about how Apple realise themselves just how far behind Siri has gotten.
I think you’re right that it’s not their long term plan. But that doesn’t change that it presently feels like a very ugly kludge.
I'm not sure if you're in a country that has already received some upgrade, but over here in Europe Siri is seen as a funny tamagochi that sometimes misunderstands and thinks its needed and is then quickly told to shut up.
I think the last time I talked to anyone about siri we were wondering why it was still so bad, now that we have LLMs.
I've never seen people in europe regularly using siri except to bash how bad it is. I would be really interested taking a look at the secret usage stats of siri in europe compared to other regions.
> There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world,
I find it necessary to ask AI what that sentence even means.
Do I have any fellow Duolingo users here?
I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you fluent, etc etc
But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good starting point and something to keep you consistent every day. As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish.
That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely overhauled their curriculum with AI slop. The stories are bland at best and confusing at first, the questions are brain-dead simple, it'll have sentences and questions that I've confirmed with native speakers are confusing/incorrect, it's riddled with mistakes, and somehow they even broke the TTS so it'll pronounce things wrong. One of the character voices consistently can't say a couple of letters, like it pronounces all the 'd's with 'v's or something. I can't believe they actually shipped it in this state, they completely broke it overnight. At this rate if it's not fixed by the time my annual subscription is up to renew, I will be cancelling.
It's absolutely the worst AI slopification of any product I use, and the CEO and everyone who pushed to ship it needs to be fired.
Yes I've been chronicling the enshittification of Duolingo here for several years (below). But unlike Github/CoreAI, DuoLingo is tied to a single (and imperilled) revenue-stream from a single product, plus they had a 7/2021 IPO in the heady days of Covid, so they started out in a subscriber market awash with cash. Also like other sites with a formerly vibrant community and forums, they rug-pulled the way they extracted value from the user community's posts then copyright-washed it through AI, then turned around and tried to remarket it back to said users ('Duolingo Max = Super Duolingo + features like AI-powered "Explain My Answer" and "Roleplay" options for more advanced practice'). While laying off thousands of their contractors and translators.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44165464
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44165398
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102081
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297240
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35679783
Was catching up on this thread and can't believe I said "X at best and Y at FIRST"
going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me.
Clozemaster is much more rudimentary but I do like how they use AI - there's a single button that gives you an AI grammatical summary of the translation and calls out any idioms or grammatical conventions in the target language compared to your native one.
Bought the lifetime license but it's free to use, you just get a limited amount of flash cards a day. If you wait until christmas there's generally a big discount on the lifetime license.
> going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me.
Duolingo was always aiming at the casual app user (not serious language learners, think getting casual 14-30yo users to switch 10 min a day from playing casual games instead or consuming SM), and openly admitted they crafted the product and their metrics around gamification and socially acquiring new (paying, non-freemium) users. So judge their behavior by that. Also, you can turn off some but not all of the default gamification + social features.
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective.
Exactly, but this is just the nature of this technology. It can sort of fake human intelligence but not really. You can't count on it to do human work without supervising it so what's the point?
Yes yes, big corpos bad, startups good, I hecking love my Cursor agent.
I've been in a three different scenarios where I worked for independent companies under the umbrella of a large parent organization. In all 3, the leadership left or was fired, and the remainder of the company was merged into a division of the parent company.
The product quality went to shit in all 3 scenarios. There were different reasons and nuances to them all, but all 3 boiled down to one common factor. Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
They all turned into political battles at the leadership level, low morale at the product level, and decent jobs for the engineers as long as they were happy just doing what they were told. For the customers, everything just stagnated. It took years before all the politics sorted themselves out, people chose whether to stay or go, and you got product leadership running who could balance it all out without the baggage of the merger.
So as a Github customer, this does not have me running for the hills. We won't lose functionality. But we won't gain anything we truly desire either - we'll see new features come out that relate to Microsoft's dreams, not our own. At a strategic level, I'd start telling my teams to be sure not to get vendor-locked to any Github features, and always have a migration plan at least conceptualized so that once we see where it all really goes, we are well prepared to either stay or go depending on exactly what Microsoft does in the next couple years.
I've heard this story so many times.
1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.). 2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work. 3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed.
How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.
I completely agree with you.
The best answer I can give myself to your (perhaps rhetorical) question is twofold: - tech companies, for whatever reason, seem to need millions and millions of funding upfront to get started. Despite a tech company not needing essentially any asset (besides a few workstations and internet connections?). The VC era inherently created a huge distortion so that it's virtually impossible to start something without selling your soul to those who want you to be exactly like the others. You will be laughed out of the door from banks if you try to get some credit. Since the tech economy has been essentially a proxy for financial speculation, building a sustainable business that doesn't aim solely to IPO and "growth" is an idea that won't get any money to anybody. All of this to say, if workers today want to fund a co-op, as I want to, they need to wait until they have enough money saved to bootstrap it themselves. - until now, and for maybe a while longer, the job market for tech workers has been fairly comfortable, with perks and high wages. Things are clearly changing, as the streak of layoffs post-2021 shows. For a sector with low unionization and with the extreme pressure from companies to reduce workers power, I think in the next 5-10 years tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs. Once that will be the case, the incentive to do effectively a bullshit job in a big(ger) org - which many of us do, building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value - will not be there anymore, and I want to hope more people will choose alternative paths like co-ops and to develop products with different goals.
It's actually not rhetorical - I really wanna know what leads to this to-me-obvious contradiction.
One answer is obvious - every organization's primary goal is its own survival. So a democratic state will indoctrinate ("educate") children into believing democracy is the right way. But no school teaches about corporate power structures and cooperatives are so rare that they have little influence on the curriculum.
What I absolutely hated was for example when Microsoft opened an extra curricular program for students to teach them some tech skills and some soft skills and (in exchange?) they were allowed to hang posters promoting their products at school. Linux does not have the money or organizational capacity to do this kind of thing so the entrenched players have a massive advantage.
> The VC era
As a gamedev, this reminds me of how the metagame shifts as the collective playerbase learns the rules of a game - what works and what doesn't. Step 1) IRL you need to build something valuable and you get paid according to how much value you produced. 2) Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work. 3) And now people realized when you have enough money you can just buy those power structures from step 2 wholesale. Oh and you can buy up housing and take a third of someone's salary too.
A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce. This would completely invert those power structures. Need marketing? You as a positive-sum worker hire those zero-sum workers.
But we're heading in the opposite direction instead. All intellectual work has now been stolen and it being resold to people who produced it in the first place.
And then you straight up have people who wanna replace even physical workers with robots. And they sell it to people by claiming they will no longer need to work, which sounds great. Until you realize that up until that point the rich zero-summers at least still needed positive-sum workers. Even governments needed humans to oppress other humans...
> tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs
Yep. "We" (technically long before I entered the workforce) had all the power and slowly gave it away because we were interested in the cool tech we were making and not the power struggle that the people who only extract value from us are so good at.
> building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value
I'd like to see a graph of the percentage of people whose work is positive-, zero- and negative-sum over time. Because I suspect the latter two are growing rapidly.
> Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work
This is just a classic mistake: failing to account for risk as a significant input. Any business that needs money to start needs people to risk their reputation or their money to get it going, possibly long before any profit is made.
> A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce.
If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?
> Any business that needs money to start needs people to risk their reputation or their money to get it going
Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.
Money? Sure. There's two kinds of people here:
a) Rich but not obscenely so - you can save up enough from normal work to get enough runway to start a small company which grows organically - you get a few really good people (who might even accept a lower salary than they could command it a corporation just because they want to work on something meaningful for once) and/or you do a lot of the work yourself. Then you keep building until you get income or run out of money. Factorio is a great example of this approach succeeding - but even they needed to use Indiegogo at one point and were close to not making it.
b) Those obscenely rich - those who have more money than a single person could make from positive-sum work, no matter how skilled. (Art/sport/showbusiness are interesting exceptions but are they really positive sum?) These people have so much money they don't care if they lose it sometimes, as long as they multiply it sometimes. If you fund 10 companies, each with 10% chance of success, only 1 needs to make it and give you >10x return on investment. If you own an apartment complex with 30 people and take a third of each person's salary, you can afford to fund a company of 10 people indefinitely.
As a result, the obscenely rich get a much higher chance to succeed, in turn owning more companies, in turn getting more rich.
> If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?
Ownership does not have to be exclusive. In fact, it almost never should. It should be distributed based on the amount of work, skill required, competence, etc.
It can get complex but let's not pretend it's worse than the current salary negotiations where one side is basically blind and pair per unit of work and the other has all the information and takes a cut from everyone's output.
> Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.
Of course they are; if someone's going to get money from VCs they risk their reputation in asking for it.
> Money? Sure. There's two kinds of people here: (Rich/obscenely rich)
No - lots of VCs represent large pools of money including pension funds that service giant numbers of people. Your "rich" company example, Factio, is about the silliest example I can imagine of a capital-intensive business. Your "obscenely rich" example isn't really about money any more, but so few people are like this it doesn't really affect anything.
> It can get complex but let's not pretend it's worse than the current salary negotiations where one side is basically blind and pair per unit of work and the other has all the information and takes a cut from everyone's output.
It's impossible to tell if it's worse, as you haven't described it yet. It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.
> Of course they are; if someone's going to get money from VCs they risk their reputation in asking for it.
You are unintentionally proving me right. There 2 kinds of people starting businesses which need an investment - those risking their own money (and not reputation) and those risking other people's money (and even then, if a VC wants to judge their reputation, they should look at the details, not binary failed/succeeded).
As a result, you have rich people risking nothing of relevance to them, just playing a game where they statistically win. All the risk if borne by the people doing actual work who are not obscenely rich.
> No - lots of VCs represent large pools of money including pension funds that service giant numbers of people
And there's still some rich asshole at the top who takes a cut which represents more money (sometimes by orders of magnitude) than a person doing positive-sum work can make. So he's not even risking his own money, great, a real improvement.
> Your "rich" company example, Factio, is about the silliest example I can imagine of a capital-intensive business.
I gave it as an example of people saving up in order to quit their day jobs and start a company. How is that silly? Would people saving up to open a small store also be silly? Would a person saving up to buy equipment to open a motorcycle repair shop be silly? Because those are all things people who want to do positive-sum work do.
> Your "obscenely rich" example isn't really about money any more, but so few people are like this it doesn't really affect anything.
Funny how much noise those "few" make. Not so long ago one of them pretty much bought himself a president in a very rich country. Though I have a feeling that is one investment which didn't go as well as he planned.
I also directly know a person who owns so many houses, office spaces and companies he never has to work again and can keep buying more. And he's still several orders of magnitude less rich than the first narcissistic asshole.
Both live a parasitic lifestyle.
Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM - to quote "1% of of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth". Does that fall under your "doesn't really affect anything"?
> It's impossible to tell if it's worse, as you haven't described it yet.
In the case of 1 designer, 1 producer, they distribute compensation according to how much work each did. Assuming design took a few orders of magnitude than producing a single item, the designer gets most in the beginning. As more items are produced, the designer gets less and producer more.
- If the producer would earn too little at first, they might agree on recalculating after a batch instead of single item,
- or the producer would go into debt owed to the designer (optionally there could be a condition that the debt is to be repaid only if the item makes enough to repay it),
- or they would both agree on a scheme which is mutually agreeable to both (licensing the design for a fixed price for a fixed number of items at first).
Point 1 is the designer as a person owns his design, there is no company which takes it because he did it "on company time".
Point 2 is all transactions and agreements are made with consent of those doing the real work.
Note that if you're unwilling to engage constructively, I am unwilling to write thousands of words in a HN comment you're just gonna passively aggressively dismiss.
> It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.
1) People do it, just rarely - those working in cooperatives almost always recommend the experience. Can't say the same for people in hierarchical organizations.
2) People do it rarely because most have never even heard about it. (And because there's a direct way to remove a dictatorship - those successful gain the top level of power and become the judges or right and wrong; there's no direct way to remove the C-suite - if you employ the same methods people historically used to remove dictators, even democratic governments will attack them in turn while calling it punishment.)
3) For most of history, with rare exceptions, governments were dictatorships. If we lived 200 years ago, would you say democracy is likely worse as people don't do it? This whole last sentence is fallacious.
---
BTW, if you're gonna insult me, I don't see any point in continuing this. It does not matter how covert your insults are, the intent matters.
> I gave it as an example of people saving up in order to quit their day jobs and start a company. How is that silly? Would people saving up to open a small store also be silly? Would a person saving up to buy equipment to open a motorcycle repair shop be silly? Because those are all things people who want to do positive-sum work do.
Just responding to this as it seems the simplest: a capital-intensive business is something that will need millions of dollars over many years before it turns the first inkling of a product. Excluding this incredibly important type of business, and only thinking about tiny businesses when you're thinking of the phrase "capital-intensive business" is the problem.
You brought capital-intensive business into it and it's a fair example which needs more elaboration but now you're acting like that's the only example that matters.
There are plenty of businesses, not just "tiny" ones as you say, which can be built up gradually without large investments.
As for capital-intensive:
There are 2 currencies - money and human time. You can call them resourced but it's the same thing. What I object to is that two people can invest roughly the same amount of time into something and one can get several orders of magnitude more money out of it.
That goes directly against the party line that "everybody is equal".
Anyway, there is clearly a conversion rate between human time and money - hourly rate. So in a system where people own the product of their work according to the amount of work, we can factor invested capital as additional work performed by the investor and reward them accordingly.
We could use for example the median wage but it would be interesting to consider using the investor's past hourly wages (the more they got pair per hour, the less their investment would gain them now).
> BTW, if you're gonna insult me, I don't see any point in continuing this. It does not matter how covert your insults are, the intent matters.
There aren't any insults in their posts. You're conflating someone dismantling your claims with insulting you. Which is obviously, clearly, laughably false.
You claimed something that's just wrong:
> Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.
Then they proceeded to show how you're wrong, and you deflected with
> You are unintentionally proving me right.
Then you throw in emotionally manipulative statements like
> but let's not pretend
> Both live a parasitic lifestyle.
> Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like
Then link to a random YouTube video that says that the richest people in America have a much larger fraction of the wealth than they would if it was evenly distributed (which is extremely obvious), with zero actual elaboration of any sort of negative effects, then say
> Does that fall under your "doesn't really affect anything"?
And make arbitrary moral claims like
> Ownership does not have to be exclusive. In fact, it almost never should.
There's no coherent arguments here. Just angry opinions and envy and greed invoked by those that have more than you. The only person being "unwilling to engage constructively" here is the one being outraged and thinking that their outrage is a substitute for an argument, and who is unable to parse actually coherent arguments and so thinks that they're "passive aggressive dismissal".
> There aren't any insults in their posts.
Intellectual dishonesty is a form of insult. As is, for example, "laughably false". If you think I am wrong, you can explain why. But you choose to insult me because you enjoy it.
> manipulative statements
"But let's not pretend" is not manipulative, it's a figure of speech.
Parasitism is a fairly well defined term in biology which can be extended to sociology/economy.
"Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like" - you're right, I lost patience with someone defending rich people and being dismissive without any reason.
> the richest people in America have a much larger fraction of the wealth than they would if it was evenly distributed
That's not what the video says. I suggest rewatching with a less dismissive attitude.
> And make arbitrary moral claims like
It's called an opinion. Now, entertain me, which part do you have an issue with? Do you think ownership or a product made by multiple people should usually be exclusive?
---
The rest can be summed up as you defending inequality and trying to provoke me into insulting you. I have no problem with people who work harder or more skillfully than me having more (proportionally). I have a problem with people getting themselves into positions of power which allow them to take a cut from other people's work without contributing much or anything at all.
> Intellectual dishonesty is a form of insult.
That's manipulative rhetoric that isn't even relevant here - not only did you not point out a single instance of their alleged intellectual dishonesty, but it's not even something you can prove in the first place because you have to know what's going on inside the other person's head. And, that's not how anyone would take the your usage of "insult" as you initially wrote it. Dishonest redefinition of your existing words.
> As is, for example, "laughably false". If you think I am wrong, you can explain why.
Because only people who have massive, fragile egos believe that they are never wrong, and so refuting their ideas amounts to attacking them personally. The vast majority of people can understand the difference between those things if you ask them about it.
> But you choose to insult me because you enjoy it.
Factually false. I did not insult you, I pointed out that one of your statements was false. It seems like you're incapable of even understanding the difference between refuting your points and attacking you personally.
> "But let's not pretend" is not manipulative,
Again, false - it's an emotionally-charged, manipulative figure of speech. I usually don't like doing this, but let's ask an LLM what it thinks, because you won't concede points (even if they're obviously true to the vast majority of humans) unless there's a citation for them, and because LLMs carry a large amount of encoded information on human speech (and because dictionaries don't carry information like this):
The phrase “let’s not pretend that…” usually carries a skeptical or confrontational tone. It implies:
- Dismissal of false optimism or denial – signaling the speaker believes a certain idea is unrealistic or insincere.
- Challenge to the listener – pushing them to acknowledge what the speaker sees as an obvious truth.
- Impatience or frustration – suggesting the topic is already settled in the speaker’s mind.
- Assertiveness – positioning the speaker as cutting through pretense or spin. It can sound blunt, accusatory, or even cynical, depending on context and delivery.
<LLM content ends here>
So, it is factually true that that's a manipulative phrase. It's obviously not neutral. Are you not a native English speaker? Because this is something that virtually no English speaker past the high-school level or so would fail to understand (and I'm trying to be charitable by not assuming that you're a native speaker intentionally lying about the emotional connotation of that phrase).
> Parasitism is a fairly well defined term in biology which can be extended to sociology/economy.
...which, again, is not how English speakers use this phrase in a non-biological context (which we're obviously not in). You didn't provide any definition of how it might be extended, so this is another false statement. Again - the vast majority of English speakers know that this is always used as a pejorative term unless it's specifically defined in a biological context (which you did not).
> I lost patience with someone defending rich people
Ah, so there's your agenda: you're just emotionally upset with rich people and trying to attack them through any means possible - whether it's outrage, misinterpretations of common English words and phrases, or logical fallacies.
> and being dismissive without any reason
They made concrete logical points that you were unable to respond to. Again - reduction of logic to "dismissiveness", which is a logical fallacy.
> That's not what the video says.
That's what you said, literally in the same line as the link:
> to quote "1% of of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth"
I'm just repeating your own description of the video back to you.
> It's called an opinion.
Yes, you can have an opinion that's also an arbitrary moral claim. That's not the same as an actual argument for your position.
> Now, entertain me, which part do you have an issue with?
No, I don't think I need to. I don't need to present an opinion to point out all of your logical fallacies, and in general it's useless to even try to present an opinion to someone who makes these kinds of factually false statements, logical fallacies, and emotional attacks, because if they were capable of making arguments without resorting to those things, they would have.
> The rest can be summed up as you defending inequality
Yet again, factually false. Refuting your statements is factually not the same as arguing for some perceived opposite position of whatever you hold.
> and trying to provoke me into insulting you
...what? This is not only wrong, it's just...so completely off the rails that there's no coherent response to it.
It massively undermines your positions that you can't defend them without rhetoric, emotional manipulation, falsehoods, and fallacies. Someone who can actually defend their arguments doesn't have to do those things.
You know that the point of Hacker News is intellectual curiosity, which means rational discussion, and not just emotional outbursts and fallacies, right? The entire point of this platform is to challenge each others' ideas.
If you can't take someone else challenging your ideas without thinking that they're personally attacking you (which, as previously stated, is false), or you immediately assume that someone is arguing the negative (which is also false), then you should take a break, instead of degrading the quality of the site.
> not only did you not point out a single instance of their alleged intellectual dishonesty
>> It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.
> This whole last sentence is fallacious.
I did point it out, quite explicitly so.
> but let's ask an LLM what it thinks > So, it is factually true
LLM don't operate on facts, LLM generated output is irrelevant to your assertion. (I could do the same for your and robertlagrant's replies and get the same results but I won't bother. Do it yourself if you disagree with me.)
> intentionally lying about the emotional connotation of that phrase
I don't care that it's emotionally charged. I challenge you[0] to come up with a better way to say people are getting exploited without being emotionally charged.
[0]: Oh, I guess this is also manipulative. Might be just the way people talk to each other.
---
For the record, the video compares 3 distributions - what people think it should be, what people think it is, and what it actually is. Neither me nor the video mentioned "evenly distributed" like you claim.
> That's what you said, literally in the same line as the link:
And now you inexplicably claim something else:
>> to quote "1% of of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth"
Are you arguing 1% owning 40% and even distribution are the only 2 options?
> Just angry opinions and envy and greed > outraged and thinking that their outrage is a substitute for an argument > unable to parse actually coherent arguments > "passive aggressive dismissal" > the point of Hacker News is intellectual curiosity, which means rational discussion, and not just emotional outbursts and fallacies
Please take your own advice here.
Note that ad hominems are still ad hominems even if you speak about me in third person. You claim you only attack my arguments and then conclude with this??? ;)
I am happy for people to challenge me and improve the way I can argue. I am also open to being proven wrong but then there has to be another explanation for inequality. Yes, you have no obligation to find it and I could be arguing wrong for the right position. However then refuting arguments against inequality without offering a solution is effectively supporting it - if people get the message that all arguments against it are wrong, then they will get the impression inequality is right.
---
Look, you might have had some good points in your first response and I might have assumed bad faith from robertlagrant too early because several things in his first post ticked me off. But your first reply already concluded with strongly emotionally manipulative language. Your second reply reads like you grasping for straws, any straws, to discredit me, throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. It does not further the solution to inequality in any way.
> I did point it out, quite explicitly so.
No, you factually, objectively, did not, because fallacious arguing is not the same as intellectual dishonesty (as can easily be learned from looking up the definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_honesty). So, this is the first factually incorrect thing you have stated in this post.
> LLM don't operate on facts, LLM generated output is irrelevant to your assertion.
This is the second factually incorrect thing. LLMs are trained on vast corpus of human writing and so have an extremely large amount of latent understanding of tone of language. Factually, the output of an LLM is relevant to my assertion.
> I don't care that it's emotionally charged.
> I am happy for people to challenge me and improve the way I can argue.
So now you're being a hypocrite and a liar - if you don't care that it's emotionally charged, then you're definitely not happy to have people improve the way you can argue, because emotionally charged statements are not arguments.
> However then refuting arguments against inequality without offering a solution is effectively supporting it
Third factually incorrect statement. I don't have to tell the cook how he made my soup wrong if it tastes bad. I just have to say that it's not good, and that's that.
That's three falsehoods and one lie in just those parts of this comment, let alone the many others in your other comments. You have no intention to actually engage in debate or seek truth.
From your link
> not twisted to give misleading impressions
Pretending something is worse because people don't do it is misleading (whether the other person is aware of the bias/fallacy or not)
> LLMs are trained on vast corpus of human writing and so have an extremely large amount of latent understanding of tone of language
[citation needed]
Also https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-...
> because emotionally charged statements are not arguments.
Arguments can be emotionally charged or neutral. Those things are orthogonal.
> I don't have to tell the cook how he made my soup wrong if it tastes bad.
Bad analogy. Systematically refusing arguments of one side while not doing the same to the other gives onlookers a biased impression (conscious or not).
---
You can be angry all you want and try to be pedantic to "prove it", it's not gonna change anything. This conversation is over.
>How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Funny you should ask this. A co-worker was unironically glazing monarchies and suggested some books to me when we were drinking at dinner Friday. I was disgusted, tbh. But do not underestimate the desire of people to be ruled and told how to think and act.
When I encounter this, it's usually a belief that a strong and implicitly good leader is needed so that he can somehow remove/punish all the bad people.
What the people don't get is that:
- Truly good people are incredibly rare. - Those who are prone to abusing power will only show their true colors when actually given power. - Power corrupts, everyone has head this. But it also attracts people who are corrupt in the first place. And of course, they will lie and pretend to be good to get that power. - What about succession? Even if their fav leader was actually good and was so "pure" he fathered (most such promoters of this assume a man) only good children, each generation the amount of his "good genes" they'd have would halve (assuming no Habsburgcest).
---
IMO the cause is people knowing they are largely powerless in the grand scheme of things (barring self-sacrifice and violence which they are increasingly indoctrinated against) but this learned helplessness is so internalized they can't conceive of a better solution than giving even more of their power away.
> Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0 in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here.
[0] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ipv6-essentials/0596001...
Don't hold your breath for that, Azure still has spotty IPv6 support
From a product POV, GitHub seems like a solved problem. It's been working well-enough with the current feature set for over a decade, with many companies building themselves on top of its stack. If they stagnate in MS bureaucracy but keep the lights on for push/pull/PRs, that's probably good enough for most people until something completely changes how software is made.
The problem is that someone still has to polish their resume when working for GitHub (aka resume-driven development), so, they're actually making GitHub worse now:
Why is GitHub UI getting slower? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 - Aug 2025 (113 comments)
Dear GitHub wasn't all that long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904671
I think GitHub also doesn't have the same vendor lock-in that other companies do. I am very happy with their service, and I wouldn't want to move off of it. But at the same time there are numerous alternatives and it wouldn't be that hard to switch. Because, as you say, it is pretty much a solved problem, and because of that there are several competitors with feature parity at this point.
At this point you are fighting, "Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft." There are viable alternatives on the market, but GitHub is the known quantity for which conversations are required to use something different.
Right now there just isn't any incentive to move off of GitHub. GitHub is cheap, and it provides a very familiar, extensible, and reliable service.
My point is more that if Microsoft did dig their heels in and make the product worse, it would be very easy for people to switch. Some people would stay because it is the de facto standard, but I think a lot more people than you think would switch, because the switching costs are so low.
My hope is that this acts as a strong enough incentive for them to maintain the quality of GitHub, so we don't have to switch.
Yeah, this is sensible.
I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)
ADO is just the rebranded Visual Studio Team Services which is just the rebranded Team Foundation Service (which itself is the cloud version of ADO/VST/TF Server). It isn't really integrated in Azure aside from the naming, and it is intended to be more of a Jira/Bitbucket/etc replacement than GitHub.
I remember that every action you could do there needed somehow be approved in Azure Active Directory
Azure DevOps is.... okay. It's functional, and it's not really anything unique or innovative; but it never really strived to be anything like that. It started out as the online, service-based version of Team Foundation Server and was very clearly being cultivated into turning into "Github, but integrated into the Azure ecosystem" and that particular strategic need evaporated for Microsoft when they acquired the actual Github.
Azure DevOps went into zombie mode basically the same day the acquisition closed; I don't think it's received any new features since 2018.
I went through an acquisition by Microsoft (the Skype one) and I feel that independent leadership isn't all it's cracked up to be in such scenarios.
We were indeed left as our own division (other than the fact that Lync got merged into us in 2012) for quite some time, but the Microsoft culture seeped in via middle management anyway.
Skypers would leave on the ~2 year cycle that is common in tech and would get replaced by life-long Microsofters. They saw opportunities to have a bigger remit in a less mature division and applied internally. And they brought the company culture along with them much more than any decisions made by Satya.
A software dev simply cannot afford to say "I just do technical" which I've heard numerous times. The sad reality is --- apart from small companies and ms/phd research which likely comes with more insulation --- organizational and political culture will weigh mightily on your tech work and freedom to do the right thing. So I definitely agree with parent.
That is an universal truth in acquisitions, it has also been my experience, in all my career I also have been through multiple of them, and after three years on average, the original culture is gone, and everything starts going bad and slowly it is time to leave or hold on until there is a good opportunity to jump ship.
I've seen enough: as the recognised authority and designated responsible person ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525256 I'm officially recognising this as the final end of 2010s Cool Microsoft.
> 74 points by leoc on April 3, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler
> Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).
Historical debate may now begin.
I kind of agree, I was there when Apple was showing up at CERN IT trying to sell OS X a great UNIX workstation, and also though .NET was going to be fully open source, and to this day we have to thank the community efforts from Avalonia and Uno, for the actual GUI frameworks that support all major consumer OSes.
Also Microsoft lost a big opportunity with Unity (not helping them updating .NET) and killing off XNA, two major ways how kids get into .NET.
That coupled with Unity's mismanagement, means indies are more likely to keep using C++ based engines like Godot or Defold, and losing yet another adoption vector. Yes Godot does support C#, but GDscript is winning the heart of indie devs.
Just wait for the new, kinder, gentler Oracle, that one will be a hoot. Ellison will probably have to be carried out first, unfortunately.
Contrary to HN folks, I habe no issues with Oracle, it is my favourite database engine.
Also it was the only company that cared to buy Sun.
People love to hate it, everyone praises Sun, yet in the end no one felt it was worth rescuing, not even Google, that could have taken advantage to finally control Java.
I guess most would rather have seen Java die in version 6, and Maxime VM ideas never becoming mainstream, or the first UNIX with hardware memory tagging for taming C never coming out.
And since I am not a fan boy I am also quite aware that what doesn't produce profit, is immediately killed by Oracle, and they are quite found of enforcing their licenses, hence why people have to actually read those licenses.
IBM did bid, but Oracle jumped in with a higher offer. Supposedly (IIRC) the Sun leadership had wanted and expected IBM to buy Sun but didn't feel it could refuse the higher bid. Aside from Java Google would surely have been a very awkward fit with Sun, as Google was basically the poster child for never buying anything from Sun.
Yes, and they decided to widthraw almost as quick as they did the offer.
And no one else did, I also bet HNers would appreciate IBM being the new owner just as they appreciate Oracle.
Regardless of the tiny detail that when Java came to be, the two companies that joined Sun's efforts right away, with Java support on their OSes, databases and thin client efforts, were exactly Oracle and IBM.
GitHub will now fall under Microsoft's CoreAI team, which give some indication of GitHub's purpose and direction going forward.
You mean all of Microsoft's direction? Look at how VSCode changelogs have morphed from editing features to 90% AI.
Thank you, this does not get discussed enough on HN. I used to look forward to monthly releases of VSCode and actually read the changelog carefully to see what new features/enhancements I could make use of. These days I just glance and ignore it completely -- almost everything is Copilot, MCP blahblah. Such a disappointment.
You would think with all the AI magic, they would deliver more "core editor" features/enhancement. No, just more Copilot.
Man this reminds me of the early days of Edge where MS actually made a good browser for a few months and then stuffed it full of bloatware, ads, a crypto wallet (!) and now AI (not even GOOD AI features).
Do you really miss stuff in VS Code's core editor? I mean, coming to think about it, VS Code feels "feature complete", I haven't found in other editors features that I thought "wish I had this in VS Code". Not to justify the whole changelog being about Copilot (isn't it supposed to be a separate extension anyway?), but I guess it's either that or going for a while without updates, or really small changes you'd probably not notice
Just look at open issues, sorted by most thumbs up:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20st...
One that I am interested in is tree sitter syntax highlighting support: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/50140
There are a ton of things that could be done. The fact that you haven't personally needed more features doesn't mean it's "feature complete". Not even close. You just haven't hit those pain points in your workflow.
Also, look at what May 2024 changelog looks like https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_90
vs most recent one https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_103
May I ask how you feel about editors like vim/neovim or emacs or helix? I find that the best editing experience is one you can easily customize to support your needs, for me that is neovim but for you it could be something outside of VS Code?
Also shocked to learn VS Code is using textmate instead of treesitter.
They probably see Cursor as a threat and are trying hard to keep up and avoid losing market share.
Yes I stopped reading the release nots a while before the big LLM bang.
Now I'm trialing Copilot off and on and I'm actually interested in these AI tool improvements.
Awesome, this is creating an opportunity for a new text editor. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
There is still Emacs, Sublime Text, Brief (oldie but still around), Notepad++,...
The problem are the extensions, I bash Electron all the time, yet I use VSCode almost daily because of certain extensions.
When I get fed up with VSCode, I run Emacs and I feel happy until I start working on something else that can be done a little faster on VSCode because of the available extensions.
I feel like we almost need government intervention to keep GitHub an open commons, but I am a Libertarian and I distrust the government perhaps even more than the tech industry - still an open question for me.
Lock in and control by huge corporations is almost always uniformly bad. I have accepted the message of great books like Privacy is Power, The Tech Coup, and Surveillance Capitalism, and I feel pretty good about just using Google’s Gemini APIs when I need them, and lean as hard as possible on open models running on Ollama and LM Studio. There are also little things you can do like not installing apps and using web apps.
Back to test editors: the Lem Emacs-like editor written in Common Lisp is an interesting project https://github.com/lem-project/lem
GitHub is not, and never has been, an open commons. There has always been a terms of service, and GitHub has been able to remove accounts and repositories at will.
Further, git is made to be decentralized. Having the government take over a business to maintain a centralized source is the peak of absurdity.
yes, re-reading my comment I accept your points.
Just switched to Zed because every vscode release breaks more than fixes.
Zed also turned into ai slob already
I don't object to AI features. I just don't want them to only work on AI features. There are plenty of editor related things that they should still be doing. E.g. the ability to show images in the editor. How neat would that be?
Speaking as an Emacs user: embedded images are cool, but their usefulness is debatable. Makes perfect sense for Emacs given org-mode, Auctex, and because due to Emacs' design it's the only way to include icons and whatnot for non-document purposes, but I doubt it's a useful feature for most code editors outside little error indicator icons and the like.
I can confidently predict that the breakout dev tool in the next few years will have LLM features, but won’t have forgotten stuff like editing features. As Claude Code has already demonstrated, you do t even need an editor for good LLM integration.
Some more indication:
> “Just like how Bill [Gates] had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory,” said Parikh [the CoreAI team lead].
That Bill Gates analogy seems rather far-fetched, though.
Had to read that sentence a couple of times -- what does it even mean? It's possible Verge may have butchered it
The quote actually appears to be recited from an earlier Verge article [0]:
> Parikh, who transformed Facebook engineering teams, now leads a transformation that he describes as building an AI “agent factory” for Microsoft’s customers.
> ”I described this agent factory idea to Bill [Gates], not knowing that he and Paul [Allen] described Microsoft 50 years ago as the software factory,” Parikh says. “Just like how Bill had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory.”
[0] https://www.theverge.com/notepad-microsoft-newsletter/672598...
It means that Microsoft used to be a software company and it is now supposed to become a software factory company, meaning that it produces factories (=agents) that produce software. That seems like a good goal to have for them.
No. Jay is an idiot.
And the prompt engineers running the agents will be sitting in Bangalore. Or perhaps outsourced to Infosys.
Microsoft under Gates at least produced real things. I wonder when Apple gets an Indian CEO to facilitate outsourcing.
It was the American CEO Tim Cook which spent some $250 billion investing in training in China, which is more than the Marshall plan (inflation adjusted) or the CHIPS act, for outsourcing the factories to China in which their products get produced.
But that $250 billion gave them $3T in market cap, so it was a fantastic investment.
That sounds horrible. Who wants that??
Someone who expect to make a lot of money selling said Agents.
It sounds like the kind of plan which would come from the Xbox division.
evidence of severely advanced brain rot
Let's think about MicroSoft back in the 90s. There are no agent factories, whatever they are, but non-programmers are using Visual Basic, Excel, and Access to write their own software. Maybe throw in some ASP as well. (What if ClippyGPT had been available back in the day?) So thinking about that, if you ignore the buzzwords and squint, it kind of looks familiar.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with GitHub. Will they ~~agentify~~ enshittify Visual Source Safe as well?
I just switched from Github to Gitlab. For anyone who is interested in doing the same, but doubtful because of the effort required: Gitlab has a pretty good migration tool. You authenticate against your github account and gitlab will import all your repos for you. We've been using gitlab at work for a bit and the CI/CD took a little getting used to but I'm overall happy with Gitlab.
Some people think a github presence is important for their personal portfolios/careers, but I've personally never seen any evidence that a recruiter or anyone has ever actually looked at my github profile. Plus I can just put gitlab on there instead now
It's not that simple; their CI workflow architectures are completely different. The way projects and permissions work are completely different. The entire way GitLab organizes the taxonomy is different.
Oh sure for an organization with lots of ci/cd its a big deal. But for individuals who mostly just use github as a code repository for personal projects and dont have a ton of deployments, its real easy
I have worked for companies using GitLab and I really liked it. I need to have just about a dozen of my repos that kind of have to be on GitHub because of integrations with third parties, but most would live fine on GitLab.
EDIT: just looked, GitLab seems caught up in AI agent hype also, and have their prices gone up?
Gitlab seems to also be going into the "AI slop" direction, unfortunately, while core CI/CD features get sidelined...
Forgejo/Codeberg seems interesting
How do you mean? I dont hold it against a company just for having an AI offering. The thing with github/Microsoft is theyre really forcing it down your throat. Github copilot is now a default UI element in Visual Studio and every time I open it up they say "use github copilot, its free!". Every update to visual studio is all about their AI crap now and legit IDE features are always listed at the end
Plus github has also been trying to be a social media sites for a while, too, which I never really apprecisted. The only reason I ever used github in the first place, as a personal user, was because its what everyone else uses on their resume. But I no longer put personal projects on my resume so I dont see the point in using github anymore. We use gitlab at work and it works great.
Though the other providers look good, too. Im not trying to denigrate them. Codeberg, however, looks like it requires a subscription fee, and im just not using enough features of my git provider to justify paying for it
They were already under CoreAI team. The verge has amended the article with a footnote correction to note that.
right ... wtf
We could barely convince the reviewers on the last review that using GitHub is okay as long as we take some extra steps, I guess we should prepare to switch to a different platform with the next review.
reviewers?
Auditors?
yes auditors from a security audit
you could barely convince your auditors that using github was okay? well, my opinion of security audits is reaffirmed
Security audits are just theater. If they were not, you could not ever convince them that using a platform feeding unlicensed source (including apparently from private repositories) to their commercial LLM is ever a pass.
Absolute theater. They do nothing to validate that you are compliant with whatever ISO cert you're pursuing. They make you install a root cert on your macbook and they say that's good enough to ensure compliance. You just attest that you don't do stupid shit like committing directly to master or testing in production and they believe you
> compliant with whatever ISO cert you're pursuing
ISO cert compatibility audits are very different from a proper security audit.
And weather they do anything to check if depends on which you high, many of the slightly more expensive ones have the reputation to be "fast" and "overlook most issues".
But that doesn't apply to all security audits (but most audits for ISO compatibility, like really it's bad).
Anyway see my way to long answer about the on a sibling comment.
I'm certain there are good firms out there which will actually give you a legit audit and make recommendations. But if the client is not actually interested in security, there will always be unscrupulous firms who will essentially sell you an ISO cert for no effort required. In my experience, most medium to small sized companies place little value in security
People test in production in all the time via Canary releases.
> Security audits are just theater.
It really depends on you auditor, audit approach and goals.
There are many audit companies which have a "under the hand" reputation of not properly looking and being easy to convince that you are secure, naturally at a above average audit cost (same but worse btw. for certificates showing compatibility with industry standards).
So if the audit was paid for by the company themself you can't trust it at all (which doesn't mean the company wanted to hide anything, this "bad" audit companies also tend finish the audit fast. So sometimes companies go for it, even if they don't have anything to hide).
Similar sometimes audit companies ask if they can audit you, this is for boosting their publicity using your name. This can easily turn into a "one hand washes the other" situation where they won't overlook massive issues, but still judge issues leniently.
Lastly there are some automated partial audit services which scan you public APIs/websites etc. Realistically they tend to be kinda dump, and might tell you they find a medium issue because (no joke) your REST API allows PUT and DELETE (1). Still I now take them a bit more serious after they pointed out, that there was a configuration error of a web gateway leading to some missing security headers.
(1: There is some history behind that, it's still dump for 90% of REST APIs)
Anyway, the situations so far are security audits which are at least 50% theater. BUT if a huge customers fully pays a audit company with a good/strict reputation then it often really isn't a security theater and can be quite a bad surprise if you company isn't prepared (because you have to fix so much). Like such reviews tend to not only be focused at your deployment or code but the whole software live cycle, including fun questions like "what measurements have you taken in case one of your developers tries to inject a supply chain attack" (which to be clear don't need to have perfect answers, just good enough, and most importantly clear and well documented).
From a company with a long history of leaking private data... That AFAIK never even claimed to have fixed their side of the Solar Winds issue...
from private repos? they explicitly say they do not
https://www.copilot.live/blog/does-github-copilot-use-your-c...
Check ToS.
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/gith...
yes, what i said
The link you posted is not ToS.
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
(The link I posted is also not the proper ToS, it is more of an abridged version. They made the actual ToS somewhat hard to find and I cannot be bothered.)
the terms of service links to the privacy policy to explain how private repos are treated, the privacy policy is equally binding. from your link:
> Short version: We treat the content of private repositories as confidential, and we only access it as described in our Privacy Statement—for security purposes, to assist the repository owner with a support matter, to maintain the integrity of the Service, to comply with our legal obligations, if we have reason to believe the contents are in violation of the law, or with your consent.
I think it is safe to assume that more generous (for them) interpretation is the one that will be used by any big company. My link:
> You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time.
> parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers
This is an “AI” platform now. “Improving the service” means that. “With your consent” means you have accepted the ToS (which by the way can be changed at any point and your continued use of the service means you consent to it).
we are EU based and have besides other attorney customers.
Cloud Act and more then just one or two cases of the US engaging in industry espionage against their allies(1) makes it a high legal liability to use more or less any service from a US company even if it's in the EU and a EU daughter company
On GitHub we only have some code, which always anyway goes through additional testing and analysis before hitting production, this is why it's barely okay. No code from GitHub directly goes to production.
The only reason we ever where on GitHub is because we didn't always had sensitive customers and switching CI over is always a pain.
So I don't know if imply them being incompetent for allowing GitHub or for wanting to not allow it, but both point have very good reasons.
(1): And I mean cases before Trump, the US (as in top government, not people) was always a highly egoistic, egocentric ally which never hesitated to screw over their allays when it came to economical benefits. The main difference is that in the past the US cared (quite a bit) about upholding a image of "traditional" values like honesty, integrity and reliability. Especially when it would affect their trade routes.
When all public code including GPL and AGPL has been stolen and plagiarized already and the fabled artificial intelligence is nowhere to be seen, stealing all the private and proprietary code will surely make all the difference.
It probably won't but reselling the code to its owners is still good business. Convince people that statistical models of copyrighted work (which can reproduce said copyrighted work both verbatim or disguised) are A"I" and sadly, somehow, most people seem OK with it.
The industry has collectively decided that AI is the future of all of software development, so this move shouldn't be a surprise.
This is kinda pretty ridiculous.
Isn't GitHub's entire visibility and pervasiveness is entirely due to the OSS?
So, now they're basically saying to OSS, "so long, and thanks for all the fish"?
Github as a platform itself though, isn't open source.
it seems like anyone continuing to use github is ok with providing free labor to Microsoft. Not that that wasn't the case already, but now it seems especially blatant. "open source" is just corporate welfare at this point.
Commoditize your complement.
Am I the only one who found Dohmke’s communication style to be… buzzword forward? For a company whose roots were in pragmatic engineering, I always felt that there was a too-heavy component of hype, particularly around AI, in pretty much every recent public announcement. Yet, despite all the rhetoric and GitHub’s superior position in the industry, they failed to capture the current AI editor market.
Structurally, it seems to make sense for GitHub to be part of Microsoft proper.
Perhaps this is a change for the better.
(PS: despite their “failure” to win hearts and minds, I do recommend giving Copilot in VSCode another look these days. Its agentic mode is very good and rapidly improving; I find it comparable to Claude Code at this point, particularly when paired with a strong model. Related to structure: I never quite understood the line between what parts of this GitHub made, and what parts of this the vscode and related Microsoft teams made.)
Not disregarding all the success MS has had under Nadella but his comms style is also extremely buzzword forward, so there was probably a _synergy_ there
CEOs of large companies are incapable of talking frankly. It is their purpose not to and how they reached their position.
Copilot in vscode is shit. The diffs are hilariously slow. It’s like a tech demo from 2 years ago.
Not too surprising considering how big a lead Github had in the generative coding space and how it managed to give it all up to a half dozen different companies over the last few years. An executive shakeup was long overdue.
For Microsoft it probably makes a lot of sense. For me as a Github user, I don't need "generative coding space" from github at all. That's not what I have been using it for for many years, and that's not what I want to use it for. I mean, Copilot is nice and useful but has preciously little to do with Github per se - if it didn't mention "Github" in the name, I'd see no relationship between the two at all. Code generation belongs in the IDE, Github is not an IDE - Github is what happens before and after the IDE, and keeping it separate works just fine. I'm afraid though Microsoft would try to push them together, and the result would be much worse than the starting point.
Heres the thing: it was a dev company with a side-AI business, but now Microsoft has signaled it wants an AI-GitHub with a dev-side business.
The features that will be prioritized will be AI not Git improvement
Are there any improvements to be done to Git? It seems like kind of a solved problem, like word processors or spreadsheets… most “improvements” to those are diminishing returns.
I don't mean to sounds like an MS apologist, btw. I fully predicted and hoped for an exodus from Github to GitLab or something back when it got acquired — I'm from the Microsux generation.
They could add stacked diffs, large monorepo features (allow user to view a slice of a repo), better submodule support (why can’t I PR multiple repos at once?). A good desktop app that is faster than the slow web client.
Stacked diffs is a huge one, and also where improving git would also improve LLM workflows. The bottleneck after code generation is PR reviews, and stacked diffs help break down large PRs into more digest-able pieces.
If you help humans collaborate better, you help LLMs collaborate better.
Well, how about rethinking your workflow instead of stacking branch after branch?
Because i can produce 5 clean, properly sized commits in the time it takes to do one round of reviews, so they have to be stacked. It's important that the CI run independently on each commit, and each commit builds on the work of the previous one.
> large monorepo features (allow user to view a slice of a repo)
I am reminded of this discussion between fb devs and git devs from 13 yrs ago:
https://public-inbox.org/git/CB5074CF.3AD7A%25joshua.redston...
git has definitely made improvements since that thread, e.g.:
https://graphite.dev/guides/git-monorepo#tools-and-strategie...
but it could still be better for the truly gargantuan of code bases. Might not be worth it? Idk. Maybe with llm generated code churn, suddenly it becomes worth it? haha.
The current desktop client is missing support for a bunch of important things too, like signing commits.
Just to think of a few, I want improved project management tools, better code review UI/UX, and cost-competitive integrated serverless hosting a la Vercel. GitHub could be a true one-stop shop with a bit more polish.
they have azure and they have github, being an cloudflare or vercel competitor is should be default and easy to achieve
idk why they didn't do that tbh, all ingredients are already there
This is arguably why it makes more sense to bring GH under the umbrella. Azure integrations need to happen yesterday. The future is full-stack batteries-included low-codeish platforms that are easy to launch with and then boom you're one click from the Azure product suite. Tighter integration is the only way to do this because of the inherent distribution advantages.
Yeah, MS just too focused on desktop office and Azure enterprise customers
they should have launched an "firebase like" and full web framework "next.js like" to convert that into long term azure customer like its no brainer they didn't want to create that and recycling Teams forever
this is also issue with game development, like I know MS is big at desktop dev but they don't have presence in game dev other than xbox game studios which is fine but they could create their own game engine with all resources they have. they could save both for their usage in their massive studio while also strengthening their development pipeline from code,game engine to azure
> Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
Github's workflow for stacked PRs is still terrible. There's plenty of room for improvement.
GitHub personal access tokens could be a lot better. It'd be nice if you could assign tokens at the team level or you have more fine grained control over token permissions.
And yes, I know "Fine Grained Tokens" exist but they don't seem to be usable almost anywhere and the fine grain level of control isn't actually very fine grained so they kind of suck.
Fix cross-organisation "Allow edits from maintainers" #5634
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/5634
4 years and counting...
so if you create an Organization to host your project(s), now you cannot enable that maintainers make changes on incoming Pull Requests; something that is very useful and perfectly available for projects that live under a normal username.
Github Pages STILL don't have any sort of built-in analytics available. I shouldn't need GA or something else to track the basic website metrics when you absolutely know that MS and GH have been tracking these things the whole time. People have had issues up asking for this for literal years.
For Git? Maybe not. For GitHub? IPv6 support would sure be nice: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539
I've just been shunted from TFS Git (Azure DevOps?) to GitHub.
The PR UI is taking some getting used to.
Dev changes code near a comment I made? Comment is marked "Outdated" and hidden. If I open it, can I see what change they made next to the comment? Nope, I have to go find it manually!
It sorts X.Y below X.Y.A, X.Y.B etc. in the file listing.
When I select a file in the listing I'd like to just have that file open, not scroll to it in a list of all the changes.
The first PR I did showed a ton of changes that had already been merged from common history. I can see the merge commit you made, GitHub, I know you know none of these changes are actually being made.
Not caring if a required action hasn't run automatically. No "run" option, not even a "this isn't ever going to run", just "waiting for result".
Weirdly, showing the result of an action on the source branch, when it needs to pass on the merge commit.
I've not yet figured out how to require different approvers for different branches, although that one might be on my org settings. It's either the people in the codeowners file or any contributor?
No way to allow a ruleset to be bypassable while making the approvers still manually bypass it themselves. I want to know if I'm getting it wrong as much as I want to stop my junior devs messing up.
Finding conflicts in a PR between two branches that can merge cleanly if I do it locally.
Not letting you resolve conflicts in the UI if the source branch is protected, even though the UI gives you the option to commit the resolution to a new branch if you do it for an unprotected source branch.
Updating the source branch in the PR if you choose to do the above - something you can't do yourself!
Not showing branches in a hierarchy (as if they were directory paths)
> Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
That's absolutely the right question to ask. If MS just left GitHub alone, it would be fine for open source projects for years to come. The enterprise side is a little different, there they still have a lot of work to do to round out some of their more advanced features.
What worries me isn't that they stop investing. What worries me is that they actively destroy the current project while turning it into AI garbage.
Github should have the product sophistication/complexity of Atlassian with the distribution advantage of Microsoft. Anything less is an execution failure IMO.
Not even mentioning AI, which is a huge opportunity also.
"more complexity" is kind of a funny ask
> Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
Of course there are - lots of room for improving data collection and advertising revenue streams!
Their CI / script runner tool is still total garbage. Starting with the rampant security holes (oh, make sure you pin everything you use by hash, which essentially nobody does; what was that about secure by default rather than secure by extra effort again?) and following with the only way to test it is to deploy over and over.
Microsoft would create billions of dollars in productivity if they were willing to port Magit features to Github.
Maybe not too many improvements are needed anymore? And maybe it’s a viable business without being a “growth” space?
Nah…
While git itself can be improved upon, the GitHub is not git; there are many improvements to GitHub that people have been requesting for many years now.Also, they could even just not make it worse and that would be a welcome change from their recent strategy
there's a lot that could be improved with conflict resolution and merge trains/stacked merges. see https://pijul.org for what's possible but not available in git
Git is already fine.
One idea though, they could make a nice site like SourceHut so you can host repos and browse through them.
I mean, Microsoft has this GitHub social media site with stickers and AI, but something serious for programmers could be nice too.
Not to "git", but to repo/project management there's huge opportunities. They've been building a lot of this over the past few years.
Incorporate jujitsu, and code-based CI. YAML sucks %^#0
Issue management (e.g. bug tracking) really should be a part of Git, not a proprietary addon from Github.
Do you mean git or GitHub?
Git? Maybe not. Faster front-end would be decent improvement.
GitHub Actions is hot fucking garbage basically everywhere. Coming from GitLab I hate every single minute of dealing with GH Actions.
It's murky what Github's priorities going forward as part of CoreAI will be, and whether it will become even more of a subliminal marketing machine/ content source for AI codegen...
GitHub has (only) $2bn direct revenues (2024; subscriptions + presumably per-usage billing of features like GitHub Actions) but also generates revenue via Copilot, Marketplace (selling tools and integrations).
What are Microsoft CoreAI's revenues? surely >> GH's direct revenues. Hence, GH is likely to become a platform for pushing all sorts of AI revenue streams on its users. I wonder how Microsoft sees that, by segment.
Unsurprising but its a terrible move.
Github at its core is a software lifecycle management product. To keep it running requires skillsets that are much much different from that of Gen AI/ML/whatever. Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra corporate political play and not something thats in the best interests of the users or the community. I expect to see a lot of the “legacy Github” folks slowly leave and be replaced by MS/Azure folks (gross). In the short to medium term this is probably gonna affect the stability of the system (its already pretty bad with several outages every month, including silent outages).
> Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra corporate political play and not something thats in the best interests of the users or the community.
It's hard for me to see anything Microsoft does as something other than an intra-corporate political play.
Forgejo is a really great self-hosted alternative to GitHub.
If you've wondered about hosting your own version of GitHub but have worried it's too hard to set up, I'd encourage you to spend even a few minutes spinning an instance up with Docker Compose and poking around.
https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/admin/installation/docker/
Self hosting is a great idea. I’m curious which web features you find most useful? Is it primarily about PRs and code review?
I’m trying to think of what a bare minimum SSH remote experience would look like. Could you do code reviews with a terminal instead.
I love the git SSH experience for speed, but I find myself using GitHub for the PRs & code review. It would be nice to have a self hosted , terminal-based solution
How is forejo's git LFS support? I self host gitea (from before the split) but I am considering making the switch. LFS is a must for me though.
How big are your datasets? Working on an Open Source git-lfs replacement called "oxen" if you are interested.
https://github.com/Oxen-AI/Oxen
Not working with datasets. Binary files aren't that large, and these tools are generally bad for my use case - because I am not concerned about datasets.
I need to track changes in binary files of very reasonable size. Total repo size is <1GB. But even at these small memory requirements it makes much more sense to self host with LFS. I have written this up too many times on the internet to go into great detail about how LFS isn't perfect and how I wish there was something better, but in practice it has worked extremely well for tracking a small amount of binary files. Kudos to the devs.
How does it compare to huggingface's Xet?
GitLab is like, really good. No need to put your codebase in the "cloud."
GitLab is great - but super fat. The performance will suffer heavily if you don't give it the resources it wants (all RAM you can find, lol).
If you only need Git plus project tracking Gitea is super mature. It runs happily on small VPS.
I prefer Forgejo, but both it and Gitea support actions like GitHub's. You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100% in-house, for free. I adore it for personal projects.
> You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100% in-house, for free.
Interested! Some detail on how you achieve this for free would be great.
Well, Forgejo’s Actions are very similar to GitHub’s: https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/actions/
If you want to run a process after each push to a branch or merge into main or whatever, you describe it in a YAML file in that repo. Configure some workers to run those actions and off you go! I use it for things like running tests and applying Terraform changes.
I understand that part. Mostly interested where the runners are coming from? macOS especially is pretty costly to provide runners for, so who is doing that for free?
You provide the runners on your own hardware. Perhaps a Mac mini would fit the bill?
> Gitea support actions like GitHub's
Citation needed. nektos/act is for sure not "like GitHub's"
Here's Gitea's own comparison to GitHub's Actions: https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/comparison
Sure, it's not identical, and no one claims it is. I think it's defensibly like them, though.
We've run Gitea actions (and contributed here and there) for a couple of years, since-by-side with Github. We host in containers on the Gitea side so there are some marginal differences as to what can be run in a job, but our experience has been very positive.
Yes it is. It's not identical, but it is "like" it.
Most of my build config run on either platform (Gitea and Github) interchangeably.
Gitea is neat, and the Actions compatibility is promising. Though I’d suggest a fork, Forgejo: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/
I want to signal boost the following quote from the URL above:
> Forgejo was created in October 2022 after a for profit company took over the Gitea project. It exists under the umbrella of a non-profit organization, Codeberg e.V. and is developed in the interest of the general public. In the year that followed, this difference in governance led to choices that made Forgejo significantly and durably different from Gitea.
If you take it at face value (at your peril), Gitea is about to start enshittification, while Forgejo will not at any point. My personal opinion, is that this is credible.
isn't that gitlab also for profit company???
They are, and always were. I think we’re more accustomized to it though, and know they won’t try to pull some shenanigans with the CE at least. I guess Codeberg didn’t trust Gitea in the same way when they decided to fork, but I think as a result Forgejo would be more sustainable, them being a nonprofit and all.
Gitlab didn’t arguably and allegedly hijack an established oss brand for their core product.
Thank you for the recommendation.
Will move to that fork in one of my future private infrastructure reconstructions.
I bounced away from Gitea because they don't (last time I checked) have OIDC. I started[0] trying to revive-and-drive a previous PR[1] to add it, but the test failures are beyond my motivation to investigate and resolve.
[0] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/33945
[1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/25664
OIDC = OpenID Connect, an open authentication protocol
Gitea's UI is ugly.
While GitHub and GitLab have dedicated design and front-end teams to improve their UI/UX, Gitea and Forgejo aren't large enough to reach that scale, even after Gitea became a company.
For example, look at the number of issues triaged with "UX" [0] or "UX Paper Cut" [1] on GitLab. It is an order of magnitude larger than you would find in any other FOSS option.
[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B...
[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B...
Sorry but the GitLab UI was bad, is bad, the whole software feels clunky and slow to use and everything is nested where in comparison Gitea is simple, intuitive and straightforward, just like the old Github days. I also don't know if it's a good sign that there are a lot of UX issues?
In my experience, the "really good" is that it comes batteries included:
- completely docker based CI/CD which makes reasoning about what it's going to do easier than "read through some minified .js from some rando"
- they do have composable CI/CD akin to the GitHub Actions marketplace, but I haven't used it as much in anger to speak to how valuable it is versus "competitive checkbox feature"
- built-in Terraform State, so no more S3 + Dynamo
- highly configurable JWT claim curation for ease of OIDC based access from the pipelines
- good integration between the platform and multiple Kubernetes clusters
- related to that, a strong "review environment" setup
- they were also hinting at being a Sentry replacement, but regrettably I had to switch back to GitHub before that came out of preview so I don't this second know where it stands
GitLab doesn't have an equivalent of GitHub actions (except an alpha-quality prototype).
GitHub Actions can share runtime environment, which makes them cheap to compose. GitLab components are separately launched Docker containers, which makes them heavyweight and unsuitable for small things (e.g. a CI component can't install a dependency or set configuration for your build, because your build won't be running there).
The components aren't even actual components. They're just YAML templates concatenated with other YAML that appends lines to a bash script. This means you can't write smart integrations that refer to things like "the output path of the Build component", because there's no such entity. It's just some bash with some env var.
I can map most of the list but I can't recall what would be the "review environment setup" What did you mean by that?
Pedantically I think GLCI treats every environment the same, but by review environments I meant "disposable copies of the app such that one could interact with it during merge request review" e.g. https://mr-8675.example.com corresponding to /example/-/merge_request/8675 that would be provisioned when the MR was opened and torn down when the MR was merged or closed
<https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/#environment> plus <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/#dynamic-environments> et al
I believe it aligns with this behavior in GitHub: <https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/deploy/configure-...> with the distinction that it appears from the GH docs that they think of that as "needs administrative approval" whereas GLCI thinks of it as "if the pipeline has permissions to run provisioning, off to the races, because names are free"
GitLab introduced the "deployment tier" I think as a means of communication to other users about the importance of the environment, but control over what credentials were made available to CI/CD was always controlled via <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/environments/#limit-the-environme...> which partially explains why the only reason to involve a repository administrator would be to install or update a secret needed to deploy successfully
---
it the spirit of "they really, really drink their own champagne," one can see the environments for GitLab itself https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/environments
“Really good” under which metric? Because it is slow, even more confusing after the terrible sidebar redesign and, to quote a famous author, its usage does not spark any joy.
Codeberg and gitea, on the other hand, feel great, like early Github. Fast and simple, instead of a product that’s adding feature on top of half-baked feature to capture the sweet corporate $$$.
Really good if you go by a feature checklist, probably. A bloated clutter of more or less working features, checking enterprise boxes.
I have to agree. I recently joined a company using Gitlab, coming from years of GitHub only. I have a soft spot for underdogs but I already found many features with bugs (especially related to hierarchy and inheritance) that makes you feel "meh".
I feel like all new AI tools only integrate with GitHub though, like Claude Code. We're actually thinking of moving from GitLab to GitHub, just for this reason.
Is that a problem with GitLab or a problem that should make you wary of Claude Code though? It's one thing to lock yourself into one LLM provider, but when they start chaining you to other SaSS organizations aren't they just locking you down even more?
Claude works great with forgejo/gitea. It's all just git, after all.
In some industries, all the tools you actually need (say, MISRA checking) all work with GitLab out of the box.
same reason why we didn't leave github yet
most SaaS tools only have github integration which is sucks
It's... ok. But many of the really useful features are paid. E.g. merge trains or mandatory reviews.
I also don't think "it's open source!" is a huge differentiator because it's enormous, difficult to deploy from source and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero.
I think Forgejo is probably a way better option at this point even if it is less mature. It's written in Go so way easier to deploy and edit. And none of the features are paid.
I do like Gitlab but... it's not amazing. I liked Phabricator more (except for its lack of integrated CI).
> written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero
That's a silly thing to say.
It isn't. Ruby lacks static typing, and Rails heavily uses generated identifiers, which means navigating a huge codebase like Gitlab is basically impossible unless it's your full time job (or you get lucky). I've tried. I kept finding methods that - based on a grep - were never called from anywhere, and there's no IDE support for something like Find All References.
I'm sure if it was your full time job you'd eventually learn the codebase, but there's no way you can just dip in and add a feature unless you really persevere.
But I did manage to add a few features to the gitlab-runner (used for CI) - because it's written in Go, and Go has static types and pretty great IDE support these days. Night and day.
I've also added a few features to VSCode which is a similarly huge codebase. Again it's written in Typescript which has static types and good IDE support. It would have been effectively impossible if that wasn't the case.
This does not match my experience at all, and I think your "near zero" claim is silly.
> difficult to deploy from source
I won't argue with you here. There are a lot of moving pieces in a Rails deployment. This isn't different from most web app frameworks, but it is difficult.
That said, I've never worked on a Rails app where deployment was any more difficult than a variation on `bin/deploy v123 production`, because I wrote that script and it works 100% of the time.
> and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero
But this is still silly. You just don't know Rails or Ruby well, and don't want to learn them. Fine, but if you hadn't already made that decision, you would find the solution simple enough. No judgement intended -- different framework/language paradigms fit different people differently.
Rails has great IDE support also. Static typing can be a useful language feature, but a lack of same has not ever, in my experience, made it more difficult to understand real-world code.
There is a lot to love about Go too, don't get me wrong. But I would guess that the number of random developers who could drop in and be immediately productive in a Ruby/Rails app, vs a Go webapp, is basically equivalent. The overlap of projects where both would be highly appropriate choices is a bit thin.
[I hire into Ruby/Rails jobs regularly. I often hire senior developers with no Ruby/Rails background, but I do not hire people into these positions who are not open to learning. It takes a senior dev (from the C/Algol family) one day to learn Ruby, and (from a web dev background) a week or less to learn Rails. I have never seen a failure.
I also hire into Go jobs almost as frequently. The hiring criteria is a bit different (less emphasis on web awareness), but I do find it easier to teach Go to a Ruby dev, than Ruby to a Go dev. Make of that what you will.]
I am not trying to start trouble, or a heated debate, but I did want to say that my experience was the same as OPs and I am also coming from a static typing background so that likely explains my having a similar experience and expectations. I did for sure use RubyMine for attempting a change, so not "vim and yolo" but rather world class tooling and trying to discern where any random symbol came from was oppressively hard
That's not even getting into attempting to use their "happy path" <https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v18.2.1-ee/.gitp...> -> https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit#local which I found just incredibly challenging getting it to use my copies of the repos. But, just like in every one of these conversations, it's been a number of years since I tried it so maybe it's much better now
I wasn't either, believe it or not! :)
But I was responding specifically to "in Ruby, so the chance of being able to actually modify it ... is near zero", which does not address the real issue.
It's perfectly possible to write simple, clear code in Ruby (and Rails!), but I'll concede that GitLab is not the best example of that.
If OP had said ~"... and the GitLab codebase is large and can be difficult to navigate and make drop-in contributions to ... also I have an aversion to dynamically-typed languages" :) ... then I wouldn't have bothered commenting.
I have an aversion to dynamically-typed languages because of these problems. It's not some random preference.
> You don't want to learn Ruby or Rails
Learning Ruby or Rails wasn't the problem. The Ruby language itself is fairly trivial. The issue is the lack of static types, and the fact that you can't even fall back to grep.
I know Python very well but it is almost as difficult to edit large Python codebases with no type hints. (It's not quite as bad because most Python code is greppable.)
Ruby and Rails work perfectly well for many many people, and you have chosen not to be one of them. That's a valid choice, but it's your choice and nothing more. It really isn't much about Ruby or Rails.
I grep through Rails code bases all the time. It is my first-choice method of discovery. In the very rare cases where it does not work immediately, I set a breakpoint and run from the REPL. This never does not work, even in the GitLab code base.
I have my criticisms of Ruby, and Rails, too. But your "near zero" comment is a shallow dismissal that captures your biases and presents them as some kind of informed truth. It is not.
Every place I write code I use whatever GitHub like thing the admin installed. They all work well enough.
At home I prefer fossil. It isn’t without rough edges but for the small developer headcount stuff I do it is quite lovely.
I'll plug another option Gitpatch, however it's pretty early beta and not open-source yet, but most likely will be under AGPL at some point. It has built-in patch stacks (aka stacked PRs) and probably faster than any other Git host out there. disclosure: I'm the author.
> No need to put your codebase in the "cloud."
Yes and no. If all you want is a remote git server then no, there's not. But there's plenty of legitimate reasons to use a SaaS tool like GitHub.
I went there last year due to Microsoft's destruction of github.
GitLab has a ton of options, And I find myself a bit overwhelmed by the user interface. It really needs a UX lead to simplify and create a better information architecture.
Gitlab is like the SAP of git, something for bloated big corporations. I've never seen a single FOSS repo there.
Yeah, who's ever heard of this weird company named nvidia <https://gitlab.com/nvidia>, or inkscape <https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape>, or F-Droid <https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient>
In what world does nvidia fall under FOSS and not big corporation? That seems like an odd example to lead with.
FOSS and "big corporation" are not antonyms. Today, many of the largest FOSS contributors are big corporations.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/ - Freedesktop which is the org for many projects such as Wayland uses gitlab
https://gitlab.gnome.org/ - GNOME uses Gitlab
https://gitlab.com/kicad/ - KiCad uses Gitlab
and https://salsa.debian.org/public - Debian uses Gitlab.
Same for Arch - https://gitlab.archlinux.org/
The entire KDE ecosystem is on gitlab
https://community.kde.org/Infrastructure/GitLab
I don't care much for gitlab either, but for example inkscape lives there
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
It seems somewhat popular for developers who want to avoid github. Gnome and KiCAD also use it.
Didn't nobody ever tell you to "never say never" ?
Knot DNS[1] good enough for you ? GPL licensed.
[1] https://gitlab.nic.cz/knot/knot-dns
For a couple grand a year, not having to worry about upgrades, backups, hosting cost, etc. is 100% worth it.
It is rumored that Gitlab is about to be aquired. It may not still be open-source after that.
And, if you don't like something there's a very good chance you could be the change you want to see - they have a pretty welcoming contribution culture. Even if you don't want to change something, being able to read the source for it goes a long way toward aligning your understanding of the behavior, and that's not a diss on their usually pretty good documentation
GitLab is wonderful but none of the AI tooling supports it and it's expensive.
none of the AI tooling supports it
i consider that a feature
The CoreAI team is where DevDiv got reorged into earlier this year: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342793/microsoft-ai-eng...
DevDiv was arguably the place where GitHub would have ended up had it become integrated earlier, so it makes sense that it would end up there.
GitHub was already under DevDiv, with Dohmke previously reporting to Julia Liuson. GitHub was moved under CoreAI in the reorg you mentioned. This move isn't new, it's just now more integrated and widely reported.
This was inevitable and going towards the direction, but it is sad to see this part of CoreAI division. Copilot and other AI initiatives should not be the primary driver of GitHub's vision.
Github may have more value as the largest software training corpus in the world than as a paid VCS, and Microsoft gets to uniquely utilize that as they will have non rate limited internal APIs and/or dumps to train on.
I assume they already had those APIs - Github was already owned by Microsoft. By prioritizing AI feature over the core experience it's possible that Github stops being the largest software training corpus in the future.
I assume they would make other major company to have an github integration out of the box
so it would be feeding off itself from "vibe coder" an have an singularity generated corpus around AI tooling
This -- Github's future is as a training source for Microsoft's AI products, and as a honeypot for collecting more training data.
You're looking at it from a developer's POV. Your goals are a quality product that helps you with your work.
Microsoft's goal is to make money by making software or ~~selling~~ renting services. You are a cost center.
And what do managers do to cost centers? They outsource them, either to artificial "intelligence" or actual Indians.
By plagiarizing stolen code, disregarding its original license, they hope to make the former actually work.
It's not hard to imagine an alternative universe where Github is a steward of innovation for both git and the code review process; alas, this is not the world we live in.
I'm starting to really detest the AI-everywhere thing. You're starting to feel it absolutely everywhere - good products turning shit just to capitalize on the hype.
> You're starting to feel it absolutely everywhere
Starting to? 30-50% of the HN front page has been consisting of articles about LLMs for months now, to the point that a user script to hide all AI articles vastly improves the experience.
Lots of comments here remind me of the time GitHub was purchased by Microsoft. It would be the dead of GitHub. While in fact it got better: GitHub Actions (pretty neat CI system) happend under Microsoft. Free private repos happend under Microsoft.
Now this time it could be different. But last time wasn't that bad imho.
Microsoft made the GitHub UI significantly worse by rewriting everything in React. It's now slow and bloated. Copying text from the file viewer is a nightmare. And never ever look at how GitHub Actions work under the hood, you will wish you never became a developer.
Search is very much FUBAR. I get nagged to register even though they know I have like 17 github accounts, because who does not? They missed the ball on that one. Sometimes I like to browse without any cookies on a separate browser for window shopping reasons. Leave me alone Microsoft.
What was it before react? I do remember it being much faster.
I don't think they used a framework, I remember they used a lot of "vanilla JavaScript". They're using Rails after all. Here is a thread from 2022 where they began using React for their (then) new search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33576722
Gitlab had their CI/CD a few years earlier, Github had no other option. As to which one feels more productive, that's up to personal tastes, for me Gitlab's option seems far more polished.
Github Actions was announced in OCT 2018, the acquisition deal close was announced a few days later.
Has there been any reports whether GitHub actually makes any money?
I feel like it doesn't matter at this point as long as MS valuation goes up it's all worth the costs. We're living in the VC economy :D
Github is the trainingmaterial for AI. It's a resource, not a product to make money with.
Is there evidence that GitHub has successfully prevented other AI companies from cloning open-source projects?
Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43936992
Microsoft doesn't disclose much but there were headlines in 2022 saying they were now at $1B annual recurring revenue.
Now with copilot I'd be surprised if they weren't profitable
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, etc, etc.
It did not entirely get better; some things may have improved and some things may have been made worse.
Private repositories is not a feature I use (if I want the files to be private, I will not send them to Microsoft or to someone else, unless they are the intended recipient).
I use GitHub Actions to automatically assign issues to myself,
I think they have changed the HTML in many worse ways; some functions require JavaScripts, etc. They also made mandatory 2FA, and setting it up does not work properly. (I can use the API to get around both issues, for now.)
I moved to GitLab a year or so ago. It’s been great, I actually prefer GitLab ci
I did as well! No issues any worse than people using habitually using "github" to mean "the remote git repository in the cloud".
I expect this will continue indefinitely until the product becomes little more than an AI training corpus and genericized trademark, similar to how our Xerox machines at work are actually made by Brother, while Xerox the actual brand has faded into obsolescence.
I will note that we don't use many of the CI/CD/issue tracking/wiki/etc. features, though both Github and Gitlab offer them. I'm sure they have their own particular quirks that may be a hassle to migrate between and have people relearn. I prefer to keep those tools separate, allowing the git repository be almost exclusively a git repository and spinning up other tools as needed.
We use GitLab ci, issue tracking, dep scanning, everything at work and I can report it is amazing. All self hosted and never had any issues. I’ve got our entire deployment process setup through GitLab ci and it’s been rock solid. It’s $150/month per seat for the ultimate tier, but it’s 100% been worth it for us.
Doesn't GitLab suffer from the same problem of pushing AI? They have many AI features, and position themselves as "The most-comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform".
I'm not using any AI features, and I'm not even aware of any, but I did see it on their website too and it's a bit concerning. My hope is that it's just something they have to say right now and not a strategic direction. Otherwise I will definitely switch to self-hosting, even though the managed CI/CD in the cloud has been working very well for me.
As the kids would say, Gitlab CI is the GOAT.
Related ongoing thread:
Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864929 - Aug 2025 (66 comments)
I made the decision a few months back to go all in on self-hosting, and my own infrastructure. At least once a week I run into something that makes me realize I made the right decision. It's that time of the week again.
What are you using for git repos?
Forgejo
Surprised it took this long. I am working with Github sales team on straightening out our Github organization at my new job and it was weird to get a Zoom meeting invite from a company that has been part of Microsoft for nearly 10 years
Would probably help if Teams wasn't such a clusterfuck. God help you if your other user is in a sovereign microsoft cloud on their desktop client.
Seven years. And that is because they didn’t want to mess with it like all the other acquisitions.
Wait, isn't that the guy that two weeks ago said that we should be embracing AI or existing the industry?
- 2-nd of Aug 2025 Github CEO delivers stark message to developers: "Embrace AI or get out of the industry" https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...
- 11-th of Aug 2025 Github CEO resigns https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...
You can't make this stuff up :) Maybe he didn't embrace AI hard enough, and that's why he is exiting the industry?
>Microsoft’s CoreAI team is a new engineering group led by former Meta executive Jay Parikh. It includes Microsoft’s platform and tools division and Dev Div teams, with a focus on building an AI platform and tools for both Microsoft and its customers.
This is so confusing. The "CoreAI" team is apparently doing everything except the core of AI, which is LLMs.
Which is more confusing when you consider the trove of data GitHub hosts for coding LLMs.
Microsoft’s software quality is poor. Azure is extremely bloated and difficult to use, and I suspect only gained market traction due to bundling/anti-competitive tactics. Microsoft inserts tabloids news into its operating system.
GitHub is their most trusted “tech” brand by far, and it has their only successful AI product, Co-Pilot.
It’s almost inevitable that GitHub and all its products will be consumed with Microsoft bloat in the next 5 years as more and more products coast off the GitHub brand.
Expect tabloid news in GitHub products soon.
I do not think of Github as primarily an AI product or service. That Microsoft does is certainly alarming.
I still feel that there's no competitor I like as much. But that may not matter.
I think many of the concerns are valid, but I'm not sure I'd read too much into the name of the absorbing org. Org names at Microsoft end up being misaligned and unintuitive all the time.
While that may be true, I don't think the specific name of the team at Microsoft absorbing GitHub is what's concerning users. I can't think of a team up there that wouldn't be a red flag in this case.
I’m pretty sure the fact that it’s the AI team is a pretty big factor. It would at least make sense if it was, for example, the Azure team.
Interested to see what East River Source Control [0] are going to build on jujutsu. Not affiliated in anyway but keen to see a GitHub competitor break out to scale, adoption.
0. https://ersc.io/
Give Up GitHub https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/
Not surprising. The OpenAI partnership is fading. The GenAI as a product space overall is looking a bit frothy and house of cards-ish. GitHub is a strong product that is ripe for GenAI features that make it more interesting.
Like it or not this makes sense as a business move. Microsoft is positioning itself for the next phase of the current AI hype cycle where standalone AI products will struggle and the “it’s a feature not a product” phase will take hold.
Can’t GitHub just stick to its core business instead of rushing into AI slop? The growth of vibe coding absolutely already benefits GitHub if they maintain the core business.
If they fuck up the core business rushing into AI, then aren’t they likely to get replaced by something else that does the core thing better?
Not to mention all the earnest worries about them reading private codebases to train AI nobody asked for.
You’d think being a trusted source of truth for many critical codebases would be “enough”
We'll know it's over when Github requires a Microsoft login.
I'm surprised it's still not the case for new users.
this is an underrated comment, reminds of what happened to skype (still sad about that...)
> Correction, August 11th: GitHub was already part of CoreAI, but its leadership will no longer be under a single CEO.
So there is no real org change, just the CEO left and they didn't immediately replace him with a new one.
Time to move to forgio[1]. Sadly I am stuck with gitlab for now until forgio ads projects/folders to the URI.
[1] https://forgejo.org/
Moving stuff to AI teams reminds me of Google stuffing Google+ in everything back in the day. Didn't go well.
Migrated to Codeberg a few months ago. Everything's good.
The GitHub website experience is already messed up with forcing Copilot into everything. But then asking for user feedback about new setting options for issues but denying any request for a user default.
This surely isn't going in any good direction. What's next ads in commits?
Not commits, but view your repo and see ads for all the paid tier services of the packages you use.
I can't even use the Github site without hitting rate limits all the time.
And the hot take is that Azure devops, including git and the pipelines, is actually better. That Github yaml trash is just a pain.
> GitHub moving into Core AI team
On the one hand, this probably means it gets the funding it needs to keep going strong.
On the other hand, I'm worried that this means that GitHub is going to focus exclusively on building AI features while the core product becomes stale/abandoned.
Did GitHub have a funding problem? They doubled revenue last year, with 40% of that coming from GitHub Copilot. I imagine that for 2025, the increase will be much higher than even that.
I expect that the problem that Microsoft aims to fix is that people can use GitHub effortlessly without locking into Azure and Power Platform
> Did GitHub have a funding problem?
I don't believe so, and I didn't mean to imply that. Rather just that if they are part of the "Core AI" org then they will likely remain a priority area of investment for Microsoft...right now anyway.
> while the core product becomes stale/abandoned
Im more concerned about random breakages. When you have org pressure to add features rapidly shit breaks. Stale would be best case scenario.
Will it be Bob or Clippy?
$ git commit
The git command has been changed to bob, please type 'bob commit' to commit.
I feel that GitHub has gotten worse lately.
* Actions are more finicky, both private (paid) and public, they crash and hang more.
* Publishing changes without testing them: https://github.com/actions/toolkit/pull/2106
* 5+ second loads on the GitHub mobile app
* AI buttons everywhere (Your administrator can pay for CoPilot)
* Releasing Node24, completely skipping Node22 in their actions: https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/tag/v2.327.1
One of the most disgusting features that they did build is the ability for administrators to check how often a user accepts the CoPilot suggestions.
I was about to complain that they still don't have YAML anchors, but it seems that that was merged in 7 days ago: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182#issuecomment-3...
Lots of actions repos are stopping active development, including actions/checkout and actions/cache: https://mastodon.social/@hugovk/114987592399377240
Sorta related, I was thinking recently: after much personal experience with the terrible PR review performance over the last couple years, and the recent blog posts covering terrible performance across GitHub features, I remembered that GitHub is a Microsoft product now.
So I expect everything about the GitHub experience to degrade to (awful, slow, poorly designed) Teams/Outlook quality, since Microsoft doesn't really care about your experience as long as you're locked in and you can eventually accomplish what your job requires of you.
From:
https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...
>GitHub has operated as a separate company ever since Microsoft acquired it.
Yeah, right.
And Santa Claus exists, Virginia.
Oxymoron of the decade ...
https://www.google.com/search?q=oxymoron+meaning
Let the skypification begin! I can't wait to see how they integrate internet explorer, or require a microsoft account.
The part in the article that is frustrating is something I've already been fearing, that GitHub is moving towards more and more AI. It's unfortunate, but GitHub has all but completely given up on improving GitHub features that don't have anything to do with AI. No more features or even regressions are happening in the realm of quality of life and usability features. Issues are just ghost towns of people requesting, for years, very basic but enabling features, and GitHub employees are nowhere to be found on these issues. It doesn't appear that they do _any_ non-AI feature development anymore beyond just basic keep things affloat maintenance.
Sucks they trained on our data and hard work when all we wanted was a place to put our code and have others look at it.
Microsoft ruins everything they touch. They will find a way to ruin Github shortly.
Anyone posting a step-by-step to do a full migration from Github to another provider would get a lot of traffic to their blog in short time.
You really didn't see that coming at the moment they bought Github? That was their entire intent, to have full access to all of the greatest minds in software... Everyone should have bailed immediately after acquisition... If you don't control the servers that your code is on, it's no longer your code, at the very least, you're sharing with your hosting provider. But, everyone needs to hurry up and jump to market, instead of taking the time to build their own servers, custom development environment, etc. So, because everyone followed the herd, now everyone is lead slaughter... This was a collective choice made out of laziness, convenience, false sense of necessity, greed, etc... We have no to blame but ourselves, because it wouldn't have happen if we didn't choose it...
Looks like the goal is to turn Github into an "agent factory". And they still can't even support IPv6.
That’s par for the course, since OpenAI’s API endpoints don’t either. ;)
Github has become too mission critical for many companies--their pipelines and processes often rely on Github workflows that may or may not be working each day. I was recently at a company that was dependent on Github workflows to make changes to their CDN and we had to come up with a "github is down" strategy for their team because it had become a consideration.
In general, git itself has become a bloated product. There's like 2-3 ways to do everything now and devs now argue about which is the purest, "right" way and it's annoying to deal with opinions of egotistical people when you're just trying to get work done.
> git itself has become a bloated product. There's like 2-3 ways to do everything now
can you elaborate?
After a decade of use I've seem some more cutesy porcelain popping up, but the commit-tree basic concepts have never changed.
The company I work at is using the same exact branching strategy I introduced when we moved to git, with essentially no discussion in the meantime.
GitHub has been a growing disappointment for quite a while.
1. GitHub itself isn't opensource despite being the opensource forge.
2. Microsoft (of all companies) acquired it.
3. Microsoft pushes VSCode and kills GitHub's Atom.
4. GitHub employees are quite political (master branch rename, ICE protest resignations, etc).
5. GitHub striking down repositories and user accounts (the Russian developer, yt-dlp, etc).
6. LLMs trained on public and private code without consent or opting in.
7. GitHub forcing AI agents in pull requests and in various pages on GitHub.
8. GitHub's CEO resigning and now in more of Microsoft's AI control.
I left back when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft. I wondered if it was a mistake for me to leave, but.. I haven't regretted it yet.
> GitHub employees are quite political (master branch rename, ICE protest resignations, etc).
ah ok so the politics of power aren't of interest to you
> LLMs trained on public and private code without consent or opting in.
ah ok so the politics of power ARE of interest to you
what's goin on here man
You're comparing politics regarding actual political events and private code being scraped without opt-in or permission being requested, what is going on here indeed man.
Atom was terrible and Microsoft had the talent to build a performant IDE. That's what happened to Atom.
> 3. Microsoft pushes VSCode and kills GitHub's Atom.
Zed was born as a result, which is drastically better. Zed tried to go into the AI thing, then made it possible to use it without any AI stuff, which is good.
If I could trade Zed for Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, I'd give up Zed. We lost way more than we gained.
Yes-- Zed allows you to disable the AI now. However, you still can't remove the GitHub login button on the editor. What's up with that?
I see the endless potential of Zed, and it has no specific corporate shackles.
GitHub was getting more and more corrupt as Microsoft matured it. The worst were the fake stars and engagement from bots. Then Big Tech gatekeepers fast tracked your job application if they saw you had hundreds of stars (they didn't care if it was fake).
I wonder how long before Microsoft starts pushing people using Github into MS ecosystem - MS logins, showing MS AI down user's throats, pushing actions towards "works on Azure, don't care about the rest", etc. ?
Github logins are MS logins already, and being pushed to use all over the place.
Github documentation is already pushing primarily Azure, for example https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/deploy/deploy-to-... has 8 Azure links up front, then 1 link for AWS, 1 for Google, and 1 about Apple.
And don't forget that NPM is Microsoft property too, https://docs.github.com/en/actions/tutorials/publish-package... has no equivalent document for e.g. JSR.
Perhaps it's nothing, but:
> “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon,” says Dohmke in a memo to GitHub employees today. “I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.”
Is interesting to me. There is quite a number of rumors that MSFT will be Returning to Office next year. The prominence of 'remote first' in this quote may indicate that such concerns are playing a role here...
Maintaining "independence" after selling the company to MSFT has always been a facade. Even from the perspective of the users, there was this palpable difference between before and after MSFT acquisition
Yeah, GitHub is cooked. Now's a good time to consider migrating to alternative forges like Tangled (https://tangled.sh; bit of a shameless plug, I'll admit. I'm the co-founder). We've got a more advanced PR flow, jujutsu change-id support and we just launched our in-house CI! https://blog.tangled.sh/ci
Long-term, we aim to be the new social coding platform, collectively built in the open.
Tangled is a pretty cool idea, but I'm sorry to say that I'm hoping Gerrit gets a resurgence.
It fits my "do one thing, do it well" philosophy as it doesn't have opinions about CI, Issue trackers or even how you view the code online.
I'll admit that it's a nasty bastard to set up properly though, and the options for viewing repositories are universally terrible when not bundled with a code-review system (like Gitea, Github and Gitlab). Alas.
There are .rpm/.deb packages for Gerrit that make installation/upgrades pretty simple.
The fact that it stores everything in files on disk (no databases except for caches that can be regenerated) makes backup/restore and replication a breeze compared to many other more complicated systems.
Yeah, fair enough. Gerrit is solid software but it’s really just a review tool: not an alternative code forge — which we’re aiming to be.
You say "forge" and stuff like "collectively built in the open"? Do you consider the repos "public", "private" or what?
You have a very short privacy policy [https://tangled.sh/privacy], but no guarantees of AI-bot-scraping protection. What if anything is your users' expectation of privacy of their repos against third parties, including malicious ones? Really you need to set that out clearly in your privacy policy.
Not sure I understand your first comment. Repositories are currently public only since we’re built on the AT Protocol, which doesn’t yet have private data (in the works!).
Thanks for the feedback re: the privacy policy. It’s still actively being improved and we take a lot of effort to protect against AI scrapers. I’ll update the policy verbiage to include that.
You were suggesting GitHub users migrate to your forge, and historically, one of GitHub's big features was private repos. And at least historically, Github private repos claimed to provide protections against unauthorized access/scrapers.
But AT Protocol can't.
So currently, you're only suitable for non-commercial users. (Can you name any commercial org using Tangled.sh on source code?)
Does AT Protocol have any rough milestone (date?) for private data?
> we take a lot of effort to protect against AI scrapers.
Sorry that's not stating a guarantee of anything, it's an unquantifiable aspiration. I asked what you guarantee your users. IP access logs? Alerts? Response times? Blocks? IP whitelisting?
Plug or not, this is relevant and on-topic. +1 to offset this unnecessary voting behavior.
Github Pages is a must too.
We’re working on it!
Damn, why all the downvotes?
Probably "bit of a shameless plug, I'll admit. I'm the co-founder". Lots of HN users don't like feeling advertised to.
Figured it would be better to be up front about it -- and people know they can ask questions.
(I didn't downvote you.) I think being upfront about it is always good. What is even better is stating it in the first sentence and making sure your whole comment is not an ad, except for maybe the "what are you working on" type of threads. This is just my opinion and not something codified in the guidelines, etc.
Besides the plug, calling a company with $2B+ revenue "cooked" is annoying.
This company was feature complete a decade ago and is just following the natural lifecycle of post acquisition decay into irrelevancy.
It sure is going to be painful migrating everything off github as the bit rot slowly seeps in. The eternal frustration of dead links, the constant astroturfing of LLM generated malware pretending to be what you're looking for, hoping to stumble across a fork in a random user's account.
I've always used self-hosted https://scm-manager.org for personal stuff and never felt any need to move to anything else. It is a surprisingly good and for some reason not very popular, piece of software.
Wild. He was just on the decoder podcast last week. https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/72...
Well, that's my stage left... I had already brought my github usage to bare minimum... For any of my clients through my business, I'm suggesting they host their own gtt repo's and only using Github and Gitlab for the visibility, not as an actual service to house their shit
Just more proof that the merger/acquisition should never have been allowed in the first place.
Like it or not, mergers/acquisitions are matters of money, not whether you like the product or not. In fact, all corporations are beholden to make the most money, not the best products. Frequently the product that makes the most money is the one that constantly nags you to give it more money, which everyone hates.
Today I watched the WHY2025 talk about what happened to XS4ALL (a Dutch hacker-ethic ISP). Here's the summary: "we sold our profitable smallish independent startup with anti-corporate culture to a big corporation for lots of money, because we thought they'd continue it being awesomely anti-corporate, but all they did was squeeze our customers for more money, lay off all our staff and then move the customers to the corporation's own brand. We fought them in the courts, but the courts decisively ruled they were allowed to do all that because they own us, and it turns out they'd got expensive lawyers who did all the paperwork and pulled the right strings to make us look like the bad guys." Like, no shit? What were you expecting to happen? Does this story sound familiar to you?
Everyone needs to realize "the scorpion and the frog" is about corporations. Anyway, there's nothing illegal about selling your soul for money. It's almost mandatory in fact.
At some point, doesn't humankind rise up and demand that our governments stop... you know... actually fucking us like this? After all the trust-busting at the turn of the century, we're right back in another golden age of robber barons, almost as if we learned nothing about this as a civilization. Being paid in company scrip that can only be used in the company's store with products from their global monolith doesn't sound far-fetched at this point. We seem to be heading straight for the cyberpunk version of our inevitable dystopian future.
The government forcing people to not do anything they like with their property is slavery apparently.
This is common. Big company buys smaller company. Smaller company execs stay on and establish the idea of independence. Eventually smaller company execs move on and Big company fills the ranks with their employees. Nothing sinister. Just how it goes.
git SSH remotes are easy, complete and practically free to host, with many features that GitHub doesn’t offer (like reflog, backup, updateOnPush, rebase & subtree), though you have to get comfortable with PR & code review via email or text file.
Sourcehut aka sr.ht is a free email-driven GitHub alternative. If you like email patches flows instead, check that out.
SSH unleashes the true distributed nature of git. With confidence you can move commits across instances , pushing to various repos. You can build some very flexible publishing and archiving patterns with git alone.
The resignation tells it was not independent for quite sometimes.
Besides, M&A means the acquirer OWNS the sold entity the independent. No independent whatsoever can take place when a company is owned by others.
Everything is possible to be integrated to AI, AI expectation is so huge, even Google is try to implement AI into search engine. it's not much surprise that Github become the rock on the road for MS to AI.
We are going to need a disruptor to Github the way Linear is to Jira.
So Github has entered Phase 3 of the Microsoft Acquisition lifecycle
lol GitHub was in no shape way or form “independent” prior to this.
The lack of tech literacy among tech bloggers is incredibly disappointing. I wish I could say it was shocking, but that’s not true.
I understand why GitHub is a core asset for CoreAI, but it saddens me that GitHub isn’t respected as a standalone business in its own right.
[dupe] more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864929
The only good they can do by this is remove those accounts that just signed up with cool usernames and never showed up again
I am part of a rocketry group I wonder if training on sensitive data such as ITAR restricted code would make this an issue? any ideas?
So much spin. Bottom line is that it’s embarrassing for GitHub to have lost the ai coding race (or to be losing badly).
Ah so do we enter the Extinguish phase now?
Higher the mcap, higher the pressure for rev growth, higher the garbage pushed
All your code are belong to MSCodeLLMTrainer.exe now
for what? there's no one who thinks microsoft's ai is even good, let alone going to compete with companies that are actually serious about this
they sacrifice their few areas of credibility just to make bad ai models that no one uses
It was never independent from day zero, since it was always going to be sold to M$OFT or other.
I'm still shocked that Google didn't have the foresight to buy GitHub...
I'm sure that would have ended well...
Never trust Microsoft, when they are approaching, it's always time to quit
Looks like I made the right move
Was it ever "independent"? The github monoculture seemed alarming from the get go
> which will [..] operate independently
-- Satya Nadella, 2018
in the acquisition announcement https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github...
I mean, it has been over 7 years since then. I don't think anyone would reasonably assume that to mean it would operate independently in perpetuity.
Damn. I remember being heavily downvoted and flamed when I said this would be the inevitable outcome on Reddit when they were bought.
Always assume anyone carrying water for a mega corp is a shill or a bot or some combo.
Same. Everyone now is like surprise pikachu face and all I can do is say "I told you so"
Never make a deal with the devil.
We are going to need a disruptor to Github the way Linear was to Gira.
Yikes
I am shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
I still remember Atom.
MSFT could shut down github tomorrow with impunity
Falling for the "Embrace" part again...
IMO this was predictable and I recall walking a few people in the industry through the argument and suggesting they maintain a path to migrate off GitHub for when it finally gets re-orged.
Whenever someone makes a promise that a subsidiary or product will remain unchanged (typically because that's how customers/users prefer it), it's useful to ask whether that promise has any legal force that will prevent the company from reneging on the promise if organizational or market circumstances change.
There is almost never a barrier to having the organization change their mind, which means that the promise is at best a soft promise that in the near term they don't intend to change too much too quickly.
Maybe time to buy GTLB?
https://robinhood.com/stocks/GTLB
GitHub was such a cool product of its time, the complete epitome of ridiculous SV tech companies. The Oval Office. The whiskey library. A room full of swag. A product ubiquitously known by every nerd in the bay, then, world. I didn’t work there, but it was cool to be around it in SF at the time. Always sad to see them fall apart (yes yes I know it’s been happening for a long time)
Interesting that they always focus more on AI while their product is less and less usable. I want a usable and efficient pull request page, not useless AI features. Seems like the priorities are all wrong. The enshittification of GitHub is absolutely dramatic.
Rails is hard to maintain tgat is why github is slow to innovate.
Well now we know why GH is turning into a POS. They stopped working on GH a long time ago.
Sorry, is anyone even remotely surprised? This has and will always be Microsoft's modus operandi.
The bit most of us seem to completely misunderstand is that the name of the capitalist game is not competition it's monopoly rent. All major corporations time and again look to capture a monopoly, it's the winning play.
I hope GitHub keeps autonomy somehow and stays away from the dumpster fire that is Azure.
I hope GitHub dies. Microsoft should not have so much power over open source software.
Uh oh
Does this mean source code might get synthesized and anonymized so Ai coding agents can train on it?
I'm surprised no-one seem to have called for a boycott of Github because of Microsoft's involvement with the genocide in Gaza yet.
In the Netherlands we protested on Microsoft's roof: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/10/activists-in-n...
But yeah, github has been largely unaffected.
Expect Github to get worse. Much worse.
That didn't take long. There appears to be some kind of outage now, I'm seeing unicorns all over the place. I even got a 403 from githubstatus.com.
Why?
Microsoft customer experience is usually horrible.
What more damage can they do besides train AI on all code without consent? Oh wait i guess fisting ads into other peoples code somehow...
One tried-and-true classic is to delete old stuff, and GitHub has a lot of old stuff... in a couple years someone will calculate an amount they can save.
Who knows? Deprecate manual code writing someday? 'You're trying to commit some code, sir, but Microsoft Defender©, Git Edition™ has determined it wasn't generated by any of our tools, as reported by telemetry, so changes have been blocked for your own convenience, safety and ultimately, wellbeing. Starting september, 2029 we're only accepting commands from Microsoft products such as Visual Studio Autocode©, Cortana AGI Edition™ and Microsoft Office 2028 Clippy©. Please ask Microsoft James Bond® to take action and he'll solve the issue for you [Charges may apply]. We're also deprecating git push, pull, etc. since Microsoft Tools are so much more secure, optimized and convenient that nobody wants to use those ancient commands anymore.'
It’s Microsoft. Look how much they’ve mismanaged their current assets.
> What more damage can they do besides train AI on all code
That's GitHub code -> AI.
The damage will be AI code -> GitHub
CoPilot already gives (bad) code reviews on GitHub PRs.
Today we can still anonymously clone repos.
They could spam you with low-quality AI (but I repeat myself) PRs. Maybe add some vaguely plausible but utterly incorrect bug reports as well.
Look at the some of the AI slop curl deals with -- https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s... -- and imagine your issues list filled with that.
I’m envisioning VSCode Vibe Server 2026 edition.
It's called "CoPilot Agent Mode"
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/copilot-a...
Embrace, (check) Engulf, (check)
... Extinguish?
two years ago, I opened a PR asking for an LLM commit feature, and they flat-out said they weren’t doing it. Meanwhile, Cursor was eating their lunch and lapping them twice. I couldn’t believe how complacent and out-of-touch they were—it was pure laziness dressed up as “product focus.” And let’s not forget the ancient bugs rotting in their backlog that they refuse to fix. It’s like they actively don’t care about their users.
Makes sense how it's part of core AI. All code in the future will be written by AI so it's relevant categorically.
If you want to make a better version control service, then you might consider:
- Free public repositories and free API access.
- Mutual TLS authentication. Use X.509 extensions for partial delegation of authorization, so that someone can issue a certificate to themself or others with a limited set of permissions.
- Mirroring on multiple independent services.
- Allow SHA-1 (for compatibility with a lot of existing repositories that use it, and anyone using software that does not support other hashing algorithms) but also allow other more secure hashing algorithms to be used in case you do not want to use SHA-1.
- Make the HTML to work without CSS and JavaScripts (even if they can provide enhancements, do not make them required).
- Support some parts of the GitHub API, in order that existing software which uses GitHub API will be able to work with it.
- If you are making a new API as well, then it might use DER, that can use binary data, non-Unicode text data, etc better.
- Do not require TLS for read-only access to public data (but still allow using TLS even in this case).