Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means.
They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people.
This really is the quote of the century:
> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads
> They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads
The people who created the tech and the ones that use it for ads in this case are two different groups - the first one is from Google (initial discovery) and OpenAI (realizing the potential of discovery and developing it into a product), whereas the second is the same company that decided that building ads into an operating system is an excellent idea.
I understand why you felt the need to do it, but it’s still sad that you have to apologise for it. It’s not like if using technology for killing is a fringe hypothesis, it’s happening right now and on the news. It’s a discussion worth having.
> This really is the quote of the century
I loathe that quote. The people thinking about how to make others click ads are only concerned with themselves and their own profit. To me that does not qualify as a “best mind”. Maybe a “smart” or “good at computers” or “good at manipulation” mind, but certainly not “best”. A “best mind” should be capable of empathy and have a broad societal view of consequences for their actions.
> A “best mind” should be capable of empathy and have a broad societal view of consequences for their actions
Empathy and introspection are so 20th century. They are a hindrance when your aim is to make as much money and put it on fire as quickly as possible. Because somehow that’s how we decided to measure success.
I see it as just preparation for selling the space. After a few months of "tips" they go to companies and say, "hey, you know those tips we have in our PRs? You can be in every 10th one of them for X dollars?"
People buy things because of ads all the time. Probably you've done it too.
I go out of my way not to buy products advertised to me, but I've definitely fallen to the incessant brain-washing of brand advertising. Probably regular advertising too depending what you include as adverts.
I was surprised speaking to someone the other day, just out and about. They'd purposefully gone out to buy doughnuts they'd seen advertised. Kinda shook me. They seemed happy as Larry about it all though.
The thing that really messed with me recently was when I started thinking deeply about the fact that I’ve been seeing so many Southwest ads about their switch to assigned seating…
I realized that they probably made that whole change, along with all of the ads, because they knew it would spark mild outrage and discussion from people who saw it — they’d discuss if assigned seating is actually better or worse than the previous fist-come-fist-serve system. I can understand either angle but I liked that they were different than other airlines, etc.
But really it’s because they removed the free checked bags that had been their policy forever, now you need to pay like any other airline. Which completely ruins their value prop. But by advertising the seating changes so heavily for months, they make you forget about that part that actually makes a much bigger difference in the experience
I have definitely bought things I’ve seen in ads. And I know many people who have. There are brands that I know exist only because I’ve seen ads for them. What is an alternative to advertisements that you suggest??
A lot of amazing technology has been invented just for the purpose of killing people. It's nothing new. Humans are monkeys that like to kill other monkeys and no amount of civilization will change that.
Our current incentives system is absolutely amoral, there's no financial/economic benefit for being moral, it's the opposite: being moral is penalised since you'd be disadvantaged competing with others who don't care about it.
I completely agree with you, moral progress should be incentivised somehow...
Just to push back a little, I think if the U.S. did now what they did to Germany and Japan in WW2 it would be unconscionable. They are getting a lot of flak for bombing a school. But I think it’s fair to say there were a lot of schools in Dresden and Hiroshima.
This isn’t to excuse anything but to say there has been progress even if it’s not as fast as we’d like.
As far as the technology angle, the precision we have now and information we have now allow much more narrow targeting, but at the same time allows us to scrutinize military actions more.
a) Germany and Japan started their respective wars, with much worse atrocity records. And with aerial bombing of their own. Japan was already bombing Chongqing in 1938. And during the counterinvasion of some of the islands did things like arm a school, including providing grenades to the children so they could avoid capture.
b) The scale of WW2 is so wildly different from the present that people find it difficult to imagine. The firebombing of Tokyo caused more casualties than one of the nuclear weapons.
(Follow on point from a: the original sin of all war crimes is starting a war of choice in the first place. Which the current war with Iran definitely is.)
Small correction: there was one very publicized school bombing with a lot of casualties, but there's more than one bombed school.
The US and Israel have bombed several schools, hospitals, and civil servants' offices, and residential buildings. I read HRANA's report on the war every morning. [1] It's a quick read, they are a reliable Iranian opposition source (now based in the US).
Each day, there are multiple strikes on civilian infrastructure. No matter how precise they are, they are still war crimes.
Surely it's the precision that makes them war crimes? If the missiles weren't meter-accurate, and the intelligence didn't eg show the lines painted on the playground (even in images available to the public) then they would be able to pass it off as mistakes or enemy propaganda.
No, what makes them war crimes is the intentional targeting of non-combattants. Being lousy at aiming weapons does not absolve of any war crime.
The accuracy helps with showing intent, though, because when your 50% accuracy radius is a couple of meters and you put a couple of missiles on a target that’s a hundred of meters of anything else, it’s hard to argue they were sidetracked.
Unlike in any other pursuit, in war, governments have at least some incentive to be efficient, lest they be outcompeted by the other side.
In peacetime science, all they care about is crossing the is, dashing the ts, and making sure that no icky ethics violations are likely to cause a PR scandal and get somebody ousted from their post.
It certainly won't change with that kind of attitude. Don't you want to live a peaceful life and be free from your baser instincts? I believe most people do, and if they don't, the mission of those who have education and means should be to show the way in that direction, instead of shrugging off the worst things and excusing them on "monkeys", which IMO is insulting to monkeys.
Yeah they just use their tentacles to catch prey and bring it into their body cavity, where they feed on and defecate out of the same opening. Maybe they don't because they lack the intellect to do so, not because they have any sense of morality.
Well not sure where the disgust for jellyfish is coming from but there isn't really much of a moral argument here. What you are saying is akin to: look you just ate a burger, what's next–the holocaust?
(The organisation of the functioning of bodily orifices of the organism isn't really at all relevant for that.
One might also add, that in the case of the burger, there might actually be an argument for some structural analogy that depends on the origin of the meat in a process of captivity and killing, that is organized in an industrial fashion..)
Of course, we all want to live peaceful lives and be free from our baser instincts, but the entire society that allows you to live a "peaceful life" is based on exploitation and war. Just because you don't see it at home doesn't mean you don't profit/benefit from human violence and exploitation.
As for my comment on "monkeys":
1. Larger primates like chimpanzees are known predators that hunt and consume smaller monkeys, specifically targeting babies
2. In the famous Gombe Chimpanzee War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War), a once-unified community split into two factions; over four years, one group systematically hunted down and killed every male member of the other.
3. In captive or introduced settings, groups may relentlessly bully "outsiders" who do not know the social norms, preventing them from eating or resting.
4. Non-lactating females may steal an infant from its mother and refuse to give it back, holding it until the baby dies of starvation or dehydration.
"Insulting to monkeys" is only an idea when you anthromorphize monkeys from the actual animals they are to something like Rafiki from Lion King. Nothing is insulting to monkeys because they don't understand the meaning of insult or care about it. They're raw animals and so are human beings.
If you look at the world around you today and think "yes, this is the result of people wanting to live a peaceful life" then I would say you're not being realistic.
You know, I'm well aware of how an LLM works (partially. mostly anyway), but if you pulled in any layperson from the street and ask them to explain how it's possible that they can speak natural language commands into their phones and get a useful response as if they were talking to a human, you'd be hard pressed to get a more precise answer than along the lines
> It's something with to do with data, and I know it's not magic, but...
Maybe you were not familiar with the quote I was alluding to:
> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
> We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
> A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.
That was the idea in the forefront of AI in 1984 - software can perform intellectual work. This idea is now mainstream since ChatGPT, but for many people in the decades prior, software couldn't be called intelligent - they just follow rules!
Then they wouldn’t be able to explain how any part of their computing life works. Not hardware, not software. LLMs are not at all special in that regard, to the layperson they are equally as magical as anything else.
I don’t think the quote is particularly fair. You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it.
For every microsecond level ad auction broker there’s a free Android update, cat video platform enhancement, calendar app feature, or type checked scripting language release.
HFT on the other hand — now there’s a tech black hole!
[edited to add What have the Romans ever done for us?, below]
It brought panhandling to where generosity once prevailed.
It brought us social media engagement metrics and 140-character-limited 'interaction' and cluttered, flashing, distracting, human-psyche hacking interfaces.
It brought all the c*nts who only saw dollar signs.
Agree on HFT.
(Disclaimer: I'm focusing on the negatives to make a point, there probably are some wild benefits, but I'm on the side of preferring to have taken longer to get there without all the examples I've listed - yes, I'm wishing for utopia, it's my comment I can say what I want).
Edited to add: People would share their cats whether or not internet advertising existed. The cats would demand it.
> You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it.
That's a false dichotomy.
First of all, the technology is far from "free". It's easily accessible, perhaps, but users pay handsomely to use it, even if they're unaware of it, which most adtech companies go out of their way to ensure.
Secondly, advertising isn't the only business model companies can choose. Far from it. It may be the most profitable, and the easiest to deploy, simply because adtech companies have made it so. Companies can just as well choose to prioritize user experience, user privacy, and all the things they claim to care deeply about, over their revenues, which is what they actually care about.
Oh, and lastly, I would strongly argue that social media, web search, office suites, etc., are hardly "amazing" technology. There are very good alternatives to all of these that don't come with the drawbacks of ad-supported software. It's just that adtech companies are also unsurprisingly quite good at advertising themselves, and using their position and vast resources to dominate the market.
It's hardly a black and white area, and there's more to this question than just GOOG, but there's a joke here that has some relevance:
Those bastards have bled us dry with their algorithms, taken all the data we had, and not just from us, but from our children, our children's children, our children's children's children, our children's children's children's children... and what have they ever given us in return?
The search engine
...and a free phone OS
Oh yeah, the phone OS! Remember what the flip phones used to be like?
OK, but apart from the search engine and the phone OS...
Global Street View coverage!
Oh yes yes, oh that's a good one! So useful!
Chrome and Chromium
Well obviously that goes without saying: the browsers are very good
Docs and Sheets. I can't do me shopping without 'em!
Oh yes yes! -all nod-
OK, but apart from the search engine, the phone OS, the street view, the browsers, all the open source work, scholar, an office suite, an open DNS resolver,
web fonts, gmail, and video calling, what has Google ever done for us?
That's amusing, but it's another logical fallacy (non sequitur). :)
Was advertising necessary to produce all of this inarguably useful technology? Is this technology somehow unique in the world?
There are alternatives to all of those products that are not monetized via advertising. You may argue that they're not good enough, and I may agree to some extent, but they certainly work well enough for many people who decide to not use Google and other ad supported products and services.
Google et al don't have a monopoly on "amazing" technology. They just dominate the market to make it seem like they do.
But does anyone else feel we might need to cross the search engine off this list soon? Since whatever happened which is reducing the usefulness of Google search (Search Engine Optimisation?), is search better now than it was in the pre-Google days?
Tangential question - would search engine optimisation have been less effective/destructive if there was more variety in the search engine people choose?
I'm torn about this because I believe there's an amount of online services that should be truly free, for all, forever
For example, email. I use free emails since the 90s, never paid for it. I went long stretches having no disposable income at all - if I had to pay for email, I would have dropped it multiple times. However email is a postal box in the Internet - people don't stop sending you emails just because you decided that this month, a bag of rice is more valuable than an email subscription
(Nowadays email is like your online identity. People don't send you emails, instead, it's all services you use that send you access codes. Losing your email is truly scary)
On the other hand, I really loved the backup service of Colin Percival, tarsnap. It's an ultracapitalist, even libertarian, and it seemed to me very fair that you would pay for exactly what you use. If you stop paying he deletes your data, on the spot, no questions asked. (actually not sure if there's a grace period for permanent removal. but even if there is, this makes no difference for people that don't have money)
I had to stop paying due to life circumstances, I lost a backup.
I still have backups from around the same time in Google Drive, even without paying anything.
So really if we live under capitalism and such essential services like email and backup MUST be provided by private entities, then we really, really need ads and ad supported business that gives users permanent free stuff.
Fortunately capitalism can't and won't last forever. (but unfortunately it will surely outlast me and you)
It was not! I don’t think it adds much to this thread to refute the accusation though, but I would add: if you’d tried to out me by asking me to write a haiku about buttons, you’d be reading a haiku about buttons right now. It’s as reliable a signal as looking to see if I use hyphens and dashes. (I love haiku!)
Oh, this is just the usual Microsoft Stockholm syndrome. I've been witnessing this for over 20 years now and have been told that it has been a thing for much longer than that.
"No, we can't switch to OpenOffice you weird Open Source hippie! I can't e-mail documents to other people anymore, nobody can open them. Besides, the UI is all different, I won't be able to find anything!"
Then Office 2007 happened, tossing out the waffle menu for the ribbon and people started receiving e-mails with strange docx/xlsx files that nobody could open. IIRC that was still an issue 3 years later.
But no, when Microsoft does it, it is different: "This is progress! Are you against progress, you weird Luddite?"
I remember by the time Windows 8 was released ("Kachelofen edition" - "hurr, your desktop is a tablet!"), I was discussing with a Unix graybeard friend in the cafeteria how long it will take until the complainers accept that "this is the way now". I think it was him who suggested that if Microsoft sent a sales rep around to shit on peoples lawns, it would take at most a year until they start defending it as the inevitable cost of technological progress.
No matter how slow and bloated the GitHub web UI gets, or how many nonsense anti-features Microsoft stuffs into it. People will accept it and find funny excuses (network effect will be the main one).
Every time someone claims “everyone on HN thought X”, I go back to check and find out that it was not true and that the discussions had both people in favour and against. Every time. But this case is particularly bad, I’m checking the top voted comments and so far the feeling is of dread and wariness, the complete opposite of what you claim.
I really wish people would stop this silly “everyone thought X” shtick. It’s embarrassing. Verification is trivial. What do you gain from it? It’s just spreading heated reactions based on a lie.
This common trend of invoking the goomba fallacy is a thought-terminating way to excuse and justify away any popular opinion. Even if single individuals have different opinions, the common sentiment on the forum was that Microsoft of 2010s was not Ballmer’s Microsoft, and the unsavoury anticompetitive behaviours had been done away with.
Startups are about making money, take they capital with a promise of making more capital, and the logic of capital is uniform, no matter where it comes from. It always, without exception, will end up the same, with the only difference how much time it will take.
Does it matter these days if a company or administration are "the good guys"? Does "good" even have a meaning anymore? The "good" part of the world rotates in disbelief since Trump was re-elected in a democratic vote. Everyone says Microsoft is evil, since, what, the 90s?! But still, Windows is everywhere. Is anyone still buying this moral bullshit? "Goodness" obviously has no majority.
Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.
I'm pro-AI adoption but the way Microsoft distastefully forces Copilot into everything is how you get people to hate AI.
I’m guessing product teams are told by upper management to AI-fy every product they own. Teams are then rushed to just get something out there whether they make sense or not.
There was a great quote in an article I read from here recently along the lines of: Microsoft have invested enough in OpenAI that it's not their problem -- not Sam Altman's -- if it doesn't work out.
> Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.
The worst, or just ahead of the curve? Because you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think every other AI company or company integrating AI into their products won’t be using it as an advertising delivery vehicle.
> We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward.
Why does this read as they are saying it was a mistake ? Because it absolutely wasn't, and it will absolutely happen again, maybe just less obvious next time.
How do you know better if it was a mistake than GitHub themselves? It is possible that the tip was only supposed to show up in some other place and it accidentally started getting added somewhere it shouldn't have been.
> We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent. The goal was to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow. But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call. We won't do something like this again.
Either way, even if it was a mistake, giving the ability to modify someone else's PR without prompt, in any scenario should have been tested, oh I don't know.. At least once.
Instead of polluting PRs, Copilot will insert comments and logging and text fields and buttons with links to web sites with helpful product tips into your code and user interfaces.
I mean, this is a very obvious future step. I was imagining this too, although I stopped short at the 'ads in comments' stage, but who knows, they could easily go further.
Microslop is clearly flailing. They were first movers with the OAI investment but OAI is doing fine on its own and microslop failed to capitalize on that early momentum. Now they’re resorting to increasingly desperate measures across their product portfolio to stay relevant.
I just saw the headline fly by yesterday and thought that this was just another dumb bug in what is the slow decline of GitHub. To find out today that this was very much intentional is even worse.
> Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations, GitHub, said in a statement: "GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward."
What a joke. It literally went in and edited the PR description 8 minutes after the user submitted it.
That's not a tip somehow ending up in the wrong context. If it were it would have happened at submission time. At least be honest. Yuck.
I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them.
I believe there are two caveats on it:
1. Approach: to make the experience worth it, so that ads are not very intrusive , done correctly, which, over and over and over, it is proven contrarious to the interest of the user.
2. Relevance: if you are going to put ads onto your product, make sure things are done correctly, curate if possible what will be shown (I believe Microsoft's worse fear would be to see online casinos ads onto something like GitHub, as an example).
I think we'll see companies increasingly adopting the X approach: charged tiers for 'fewer' ads. With no actual guarantee as to the absolute quantity of ads, just 'fewer, relative to the people who aren't paying as much'. We're basically on a downward slope where not seeing ads is going to get steadily more and more expensive over time.
It's great that they backed down, but they still did it in the first place. GitHub is on borrowed time now; my own repos are insignificant, but I'll definitely look to move somewhere else this year, and I'm sure many others will too.
So, after Windows cleanup announcement nobody at Github thought "may be we should review all our copilot integrations to avoid another embarrassment for MS" ?
That shows either it was just a Windows org announcement and not a culture change at MS or it was just an empty promise to temporarily deflect mounting criticism.
Either way it is disappointment for anyone who thought it was a genuine case of introspection and change of heart at MS.
I'm not suprised Raycast is involved in this marketing scheme. They pollute their own product with ads where they shouldn't be. Whoever is running their marketing team needs a lesson in not pissing off your userbase.
Someone, claiming to be from the Raycast team, in the original HN thread said that they were not aware of the advert or were involved with it in any manner.
Sometimes I see something nifty in Raycast and it tempts me. Then I see something weird from them, look in the Alfred manual, and realize it already supports the same feature and that I’ll stay put, thanks.
> Hearing feedback from the community following Manson's post and the kerfuffle it generated, Rogers said, has helped him realize that "on reflection," letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge "was the wrong judgement call."
Thankfully, they need the community feedback to realize it was wrong. It was so hard to guess it was wrong without the feedback! It's good to know these people are in charge of building Copilot.
> letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge
Wait, did they really sneak this in entirely without user interaction? So people trying not to use AI would still risk being ""contaminated""? Incredible breach of trust. Similar kind of thing to lying about whether your product is vegan.
I haven’t seen it but the article makes it sound like, when you ask for it to make a change to your code, that’s the point it puts the ad in.
I think (but not 100% sure) that it also puts it directly into your codebase, without you knowing ahead of time, without your permission. If that’s correct then it’s truly heinous.
This is corporate PR speak 101, external or internal doesn't matter. None of that sentence is true and everybody knows that.
Its just a theatre since other peers are dancing the same dance and they can't stick out as too rough or honest or whatever. Of course they realized this very well from the start, weighted risk of backfiring, reward for meeting some fucked up quarterly or yearly objective set by higher ups and decided to go ahead.
You can safely ignore the words, just make a mental mark that this is/are sociopathic assholes, move on with life and leave the mark there for next 4 decades and act according to that knowledge the next time you deal with them or their products, if you have to.
They posted previously on YN that they too were caught offguard. The 'tips' weren't specific to Raycast, they've been going on for a while and Raycast was just one product it decided to feature now.
Feels like you never worked at corporation it goes more like this:
"old employees who know the environment and are in tune with community are playing safe so they don't bring in immediate results, feels like progress stagnates, so they move those people to other tasks"
"new clueless manager joins, has to come up with a brilliant idea (that actually is bad across the board for someone who understands the environment) to get quarterly bonus, then convinces bunch of |out of touch suites| with power point presentation where numbers go up"
"he gets burned by community response, becomes more conservative - next quarters he is moved away or he moves away on his own - new clueless can come into his place"
The problem is that Microslop is not THINKING. What is the point of inserting ads? That just increases the spam output. Sure, Microslop may think this helps boost their revenue but many people hate ad-spam. After I started to use ublock origin, there was no way back to the unsafe ads-down-the-turtles approach anymore. Ads waste people's time and money.
Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means.
They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people.
This really is the quote of the century:
> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads
What a waste.
> They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads
The people who created the tech and the ones that use it for ads in this case are two different groups - the first one is from Google (initial discovery) and OpenAI (realizing the potential of discovery and developing it into a product), whereas the second is the same company that decided that building ads into an operating system is an excellent idea.
OpenAI is testing ads already: https://openai.com/index/testing-ads-in-chatgpt/
> sorry about the tangent
I understand why you felt the need to do it, but it’s still sad that you have to apologise for it. It’s not like if using technology for killing is a fringe hypothesis, it’s happening right now and on the news. It’s a discussion worth having.
> This really is the quote of the century
I loathe that quote. The people thinking about how to make others click ads are only concerned with themselves and their own profit. To me that does not qualify as a “best mind”. Maybe a “smart” or “good at computers” or “good at manipulation” mind, but certainly not “best”. A “best mind” should be capable of empathy and have a broad societal view of consequences for their actions.
> A “best mind” should be capable of empathy and have a broad societal view of consequences for their actions
Empathy and introspection are so 20th century. They are a hindrance when your aim is to make as much money and put it on fire as quickly as possible. Because somehow that’s how we decided to measure success.
It's just the natural evolution of "They're not advertisements. They're recommendations."
They were not ads though. The companies did not pay for those, from what I can tell. Microsoft seemed to really thought they were being helpful here.
That's a generous interpretation.
I see it as just preparation for selling the space. After a few months of "tips" they go to companies and say, "hey, you know those tips we have in our PRs? You can be in every 10th one of them for X dollars?"
There is no way they didn’t think they could sell those spots in the future.
First hit is always free
And nobody has ever bought anything just because of an ad.
It's just a thin veil for surveillance.
People buy things because of ads all the time. Probably you've done it too.
I go out of my way not to buy products advertised to me, but I've definitely fallen to the incessant brain-washing of brand advertising. Probably regular advertising too depending what you include as adverts.
I was surprised speaking to someone the other day, just out and about. They'd purposefully gone out to buy doughnuts they'd seen advertised. Kinda shook me. They seemed happy as Larry about it all though.
The thing that really messed with me recently was when I started thinking deeply about the fact that I’ve been seeing so many Southwest ads about their switch to assigned seating…
I realized that they probably made that whole change, along with all of the ads, because they knew it would spark mild outrage and discussion from people who saw it — they’d discuss if assigned seating is actually better or worse than the previous fist-come-fist-serve system. I can understand either angle but I liked that they were different than other airlines, etc.
But really it’s because they removed the free checked bags that had been their policy forever, now you need to pay like any other airline. Which completely ruins their value prop. But by advertising the seating changes so heavily for months, they make you forget about that part that actually makes a much bigger difference in the experience
> I go out of my way not to buy products advertised to me
The most likely way to get me to not buy your product is to advertise it to me.
I have definitely bought things I’ve seen in ads. And I know many people who have. There are brands that I know exist only because I’ve seen ads for them. What is an alternative to advertisements that you suggest??
One of the most provably false statements of all time
A lot of amazing technology has been invented just for the purpose of killing people. It's nothing new. Humans are monkeys that like to kill other monkeys and no amount of civilization will change that.
I find it sad that while technological progress is seen almost as a given by virtually everyone, moral progress is often not even an aspiration
Our current incentives system is absolutely amoral, there's no financial/economic benefit for being moral, it's the opposite: being moral is penalised since you'd be disadvantaged competing with others who don't care about it.
I completely agree with you, moral progress should be incentivised somehow...
Just to push back a little, I think if the U.S. did now what they did to Germany and Japan in WW2 it would be unconscionable. They are getting a lot of flak for bombing a school. But I think it’s fair to say there were a lot of schools in Dresden and Hiroshima.
This isn’t to excuse anything but to say there has been progress even if it’s not as fast as we’d like.
As far as the technology angle, the precision we have now and information we have now allow much more narrow targeting, but at the same time allows us to scrutinize military actions more.
a) Germany and Japan started their respective wars, with much worse atrocity records. And with aerial bombing of their own. Japan was already bombing Chongqing in 1938. And during the counterinvasion of some of the islands did things like arm a school, including providing grenades to the children so they could avoid capture.
b) The scale of WW2 is so wildly different from the present that people find it difficult to imagine. The firebombing of Tokyo caused more casualties than one of the nuclear weapons.
(Follow on point from a: the original sin of all war crimes is starting a war of choice in the first place. Which the current war with Iran definitely is.)
To be fair, Germany and Japan started the whole thing and were pretty determined not to lose easily.
Small correction: there was one very publicized school bombing with a lot of casualties, but there's more than one bombed school.
The US and Israel have bombed several schools, hospitals, and civil servants' offices, and residential buildings. I read HRANA's report on the war every morning. [1] It's a quick read, they are a reliable Iranian opposition source (now based in the US).
Each day, there are multiple strikes on civilian infrastructure. No matter how precise they are, they are still war crimes.
[1] https://www.en-hrana.org/
Surely it's the precision that makes them war crimes? If the missiles weren't meter-accurate, and the intelligence didn't eg show the lines painted on the playground (even in images available to the public) then they would be able to pass it off as mistakes or enemy propaganda.
No, what makes them war crimes is the intentional targeting of non-combattants. Being lousy at aiming weapons does not absolve of any war crime.
The accuracy helps with showing intent, though, because when your 50% accuracy radius is a couple of meters and you put a couple of missiles on a target that’s a hundred of meters of anything else, it’s hard to argue they were sidetracked.
This is where incentives strike us once again.
Unlike in any other pursuit, in war, governments have at least some incentive to be efficient, lest they be outcompeted by the other side.
In peacetime science, all they care about is crossing the is, dashing the ts, and making sure that no icky ethics violations are likely to cause a PR scandal and get somebody ousted from their post.
It certainly won't change with that kind of attitude. Don't you want to live a peaceful life and be free from your baser instincts? I believe most people do, and if they don't, the mission of those who have education and means should be to show the way in that direction, instead of shrugging off the worst things and excusing them on "monkeys", which IMO is insulting to monkeys.
The reflex to assign our morally wrong behaviour to the animal part in us is quite ironic. I just don't see jellyfish building concentration camps.
It’s a defense mechanism. Something we like to tell to convince ourselves that we are not as bad as they are.
Yeah they just use their tentacles to catch prey and bring it into their body cavity, where they feed on and defecate out of the same opening. Maybe they don't because they lack the intellect to do so, not because they have any sense of morality.
Well not sure where the disgust for jellyfish is coming from but there isn't really much of a moral argument here. What you are saying is akin to: look you just ate a burger, what's next–the holocaust?
(The organisation of the functioning of bodily orifices of the organism isn't really at all relevant for that. One might also add, that in the case of the burger, there might actually be an argument for some structural analogy that depends on the origin of the meat in a process of captivity and killing, that is organized in an industrial fashion..)
Of course, we all want to live peaceful lives and be free from our baser instincts, but the entire society that allows you to live a "peaceful life" is based on exploitation and war. Just because you don't see it at home doesn't mean you don't profit/benefit from human violence and exploitation.
As for my comment on "monkeys":
1. Larger primates like chimpanzees are known predators that hunt and consume smaller monkeys, specifically targeting babies
2. In the famous Gombe Chimpanzee War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War), a once-unified community split into two factions; over four years, one group systematically hunted down and killed every male member of the other.
3. In captive or introduced settings, groups may relentlessly bully "outsiders" who do not know the social norms, preventing them from eating or resting.
4. Non-lactating females may steal an infant from its mother and refuse to give it back, holding it until the baby dies of starvation or dehydration.
"Insulting to monkeys" is only an idea when you anthromorphize monkeys from the actual animals they are to something like Rafiki from Lion King. Nothing is insulting to monkeys because they don't understand the meaning of insult or care about it. They're raw animals and so are human beings.
If you look at the world around you today and think "yes, this is the result of people wanting to live a peaceful life" then I would say you're not being realistic.
Chimpanzee behaviour is chimpanzee behaviour.
Aspects of that behaviour appear in the behaviour of other primates, but not all primate groups have identical behaviours.
Chimpanzee behaviours also vary by troop and circumstances, just as might be expected from social behaviours.
Such behaviours _exist_, but they may not in fact be optimal, inevitable, etc.
Perhaps chimpanzees behave as they do 'cause the bonobo's didn't invite them to the cool parties.
Monkeys don't generally like killing other monkeys though.
if its indistinguishable from magic please do some reading or refrain from using.
You know, I'm well aware of how an LLM works (partially. mostly anyway), but if you pulled in any layperson from the street and ask them to explain how it's possible that they can speak natural language commands into their phones and get a useful response as if they were talking to a human, you'd be hard pressed to get a more precise answer than along the lines
> It's something with to do with data, and I know it's not magic, but...
Maybe you were not familiar with the quote I was alluding to:
> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
Data is like mana, LLMs are like djinns, and prompts are like incantations
This reminds me the introduction of SICP
https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...
> We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
> A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.
That was the idea in the forefront of AI in 1984 - software can perform intellectual work. This idea is now mainstream since ChatGPT, but for many people in the decades prior, software couldn't be called intelligent - they just follow rules!
> if you pulled in any layperson from the street
Then they wouldn’t be able to explain how any part of their computing life works. Not hardware, not software. LLMs are not at all special in that regard, to the layperson they are equally as magical as anything else.
I don’t think the quote is particularly fair. You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it.
For every microsecond level ad auction broker there’s a free Android update, cat video platform enhancement, calendar app feature, or type checked scripting language release.
HFT on the other hand — now there’s a tech black hole!
[edited to add What have the Romans ever done for us?, below]
Hard disagree.
It brought panhandling to where generosity once prevailed.
It brought us social media engagement metrics and 140-character-limited 'interaction' and cluttered, flashing, distracting, human-psyche hacking interfaces.
It brought all the c*nts who only saw dollar signs.
Agree on HFT.
(Disclaimer: I'm focusing on the negatives to make a point, there probably are some wild benefits, but I'm on the side of preferring to have taken longer to get there without all the examples I've listed - yes, I'm wishing for utopia, it's my comment I can say what I want).
Edited to add: People would share their cats whether or not internet advertising existed. The cats would demand it.
Doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
> You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it.
That's a false dichotomy.
First of all, the technology is far from "free". It's easily accessible, perhaps, but users pay handsomely to use it, even if they're unaware of it, which most adtech companies go out of their way to ensure.
Secondly, advertising isn't the only business model companies can choose. Far from it. It may be the most profitable, and the easiest to deploy, simply because adtech companies have made it so. Companies can just as well choose to prioritize user experience, user privacy, and all the things they claim to care deeply about, over their revenues, which is what they actually care about.
Oh, and lastly, I would strongly argue that social media, web search, office suites, etc., are hardly "amazing" technology. There are very good alternatives to all of these that don't come with the drawbacks of ad-supported software. It's just that adtech companies are also unsurprisingly quite good at advertising themselves, and using their position and vast resources to dominate the market.
It's hardly a black and white area, and there's more to this question than just GOOG, but there's a joke here that has some relevance:
Those bastards have bled us dry with their algorithms, taken all the data we had, and not just from us, but from our children, our children's children, our children's children's children, our children's children's children's children... and what have they ever given us in return?
The search engine
...and a free phone OS
Oh yeah, the phone OS! Remember what the flip phones used to be like?
OK, but apart from the search engine and the phone OS...
Global Street View coverage!
Oh yes yes, oh that's a good one! So useful!
Chrome and Chromium
Well obviously that goes without saying: the browsers are very good
Docs and Sheets. I can't do me shopping without 'em!
Oh yes yes! -all nod-
OK, but apart from the search engine, the phone OS, the street view, the browsers, all the open source work, scholar, an office suite, an open DNS resolver, web fonts, gmail, and video calling, what has Google ever done for us?
That's amusing, but it's another logical fallacy (non sequitur). :)
Was advertising necessary to produce all of this inarguably useful technology? Is this technology somehow unique in the world?
There are alternatives to all of those products that are not monetized via advertising. You may argue that they're not good enough, and I may agree to some extent, but they certainly work well enough for many people who decide to not use Google and other ad supported products and services.
Google et al don't have a monopoly on "amazing" technology. They just dominate the market to make it seem like they do.
I like this, and I agree with the sentiment!
But does anyone else feel we might need to cross the search engine off this list soon? Since whatever happened which is reducing the usefulness of Google search (Search Engine Optimisation?), is search better now than it was in the pre-Google days?
Tangential question - would search engine optimisation have been less effective/destructive if there was more variety in the search engine people choose?
I'm torn about this because I believe there's an amount of online services that should be truly free, for all, forever
For example, email. I use free emails since the 90s, never paid for it. I went long stretches having no disposable income at all - if I had to pay for email, I would have dropped it multiple times. However email is a postal box in the Internet - people don't stop sending you emails just because you decided that this month, a bag of rice is more valuable than an email subscription
(Nowadays email is like your online identity. People don't send you emails, instead, it's all services you use that send you access codes. Losing your email is truly scary)
On the other hand, I really loved the backup service of Colin Percival, tarsnap. It's an ultracapitalist, even libertarian, and it seemed to me very fair that you would pay for exactly what you use. If you stop paying he deletes your data, on the spot, no questions asked. (actually not sure if there's a grace period for permanent removal. but even if there is, this makes no difference for people that don't have money)
I had to stop paying due to life circumstances, I lost a backup.
I still have backups from around the same time in Google Drive, even without paying anything.
So really if we live under capitalism and such essential services like email and backup MUST be provided by private entities, then we really, really need ads and ad supported business that gives users permanent free stuff.
Fortunately capitalism can't and won't last forever. (but unfortunately it will surely outlast me and you)
If you don’t think that LLMs won’t result in an insurmountable volume of spam on all web foru
Oh wait, your post was written by an LLM.
It was not! I don’t think it adds much to this thread to refute the accusation though, but I would add: if you’d tried to out me by asking me to write a haiku about buttons, you’d be reading a haiku about buttons right now. It’s as reliable a signal as looking to see if I use hyphens and dashes. (I love haiku!)
"You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now."
-- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition
Oh, this is just the usual Microsoft Stockholm syndrome. I've been witnessing this for over 20 years now and have been told that it has been a thing for much longer than that.
"No, we can't switch to OpenOffice you weird Open Source hippie! I can't e-mail documents to other people anymore, nobody can open them. Besides, the UI is all different, I won't be able to find anything!"
Then Office 2007 happened, tossing out the waffle menu for the ribbon and people started receiving e-mails with strange docx/xlsx files that nobody could open. IIRC that was still an issue 3 years later.
But no, when Microsoft does it, it is different: "This is progress! Are you against progress, you weird Luddite?"
I remember by the time Windows 8 was released ("Kachelofen edition" - "hurr, your desktop is a tablet!"), I was discussing with a Unix graybeard friend in the cafeteria how long it will take until the complainers accept that "this is the way now". I think it was him who suggested that if Microsoft sent a sales rep around to shit on peoples lawns, it would take at most a year until they start defending it as the inevitable cost of technological progress.
No matter how slow and bloated the GitHub web UI gets, or how many nonsense anti-features Microsoft stuffs into it. People will accept it and find funny excuses (network effect will be the main one).
> ca. everyone here
Every time someone claims “everyone on HN thought X”, I go back to check and find out that it was not true and that the discussions had both people in favour and against. Every time. But this case is particularly bad, I’m checking the top voted comments and so far the feeling is of dread and wariness, the complete opposite of what you claim.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286
I really wish people would stop this silly “everyone thought X” shtick. It’s embarrassing. Verification is trivial. What do you gain from it? It’s just spreading heated reactions based on a lie.
This common trend of invoking the goomba fallacy is a thought-terminating way to excuse and justify away any popular opinion. Even if single individuals have different opinions, the common sentiment on the forum was that Microsoft of 2010s was not Ballmer’s Microsoft, and the unsavoury anticompetitive behaviours had been done away with.
"Microsoft loves open source now!"
Oh, they adore it. Specially once they figure out how to plaster all open source projects with ads...
Relevant thread
"Microsoft acquires Github" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286
It's funny - many of our greatest concerns back then are things we now accept.
There's that old misconception about how to boil a frog..
Afaik turning up the temperature slowly wouldn't work on an actual frog. But works on people without fail.
Misconception? That's a playbook, not a misconception.
Thinking of megacorps as anything other than slimy, amoral, scum honestly requires superhuman levels of mental gymnastics.
And thinking that megacorps are in any meaningful way different than your last underdog startup darling is another level of copium.
Sure. But a startup could, in theory end up profitable and self-sufficient without a public offering. It's not impossible.
Startups are about making money, take they capital with a promise of making more capital, and the logic of capital is uniform, no matter where it comes from. It always, without exception, will end up the same, with the only difference how much time it will take.
That's why I said in theory. Consider that at some point Valve was a startup.
Does it matter these days if a company or administration are "the good guys"? Does "good" even have a meaning anymore? The "good" part of the world rotates in disbelief since Trump was re-elected in a democratic vote. Everyone says Microsoft is evil, since, what, the 90s?! But still, Windows is everywhere. Is anyone still buying this moral bullshit? "Goodness" obviously has no majority.
Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.
I'm pro-AI adoption but the way Microsoft distastefully forces Copilot into everything is how you get people to hate AI.
I’m guessing product teams are told by upper management to AI-fy every product they own. Teams are then rushed to just get something out there whether they make sense or not.
Microsoft doesn't believe in consent, it believes in yes or every 3 days.
I am reminded of Steve Jobs's video where he says Microsoft has no taste everytime MS pushes this stuff on it's users. True in 90s, true now
Video https://youtu.be/lahX_ARGTqA?si=AnULWzRbl7cc3UWu
Well Unfortunately I can also argue, Apple has no taste anymore. At least, less of it day by day.
> Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.
Microsoft will always be a company that pushes things on people rather than building things that attract people. It's in their DNA.
There was a great quote in an article I read from here recently along the lines of: Microsoft have invested enough in OpenAI that it's not their problem -- not Sam Altman's -- if it doesn't work out.
They've only invested $13b in OpenAI. They spent $68b on Activision Blizzard.
I don't buy that quote. I think Microsoft is actually under huge threat from AI companies replacing their revenue stream.
> Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.
The worst, or just ahead of the curve? Because you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think every other AI company or company integrating AI into their products won’t be using it as an advertising delivery vehicle.
> We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward.
Why does this read as they are saying it was a mistake ? Because it absolutely wasn't, and it will absolutely happen again, maybe just less obvious next time.
How do you know better if it was a mistake than GitHub themselves? It is possible that the tip was only supposed to show up in some other place and it accidentally started getting added somewhere it shouldn't have been.
Because it was already mentioned that it was a bad call by an internal dev.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233
> We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent. The goal was to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow. But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call. We won't do something like this again.
Either way, even if it was a mistake, giving the ability to modify someone else's PR without prompt, in any scenario should have been tested, oh I don't know.. At least once.
Microsoft will probably try to sneak it back in later. They've done that with other intrusions.
Migrating away from Github just increased in priority.
Instead of polluting PRs, Copilot will insert comments and logging and text fields and buttons with links to web sites with helpful product tips into your code and user interfaces.
I mean, this is a very obvious future step. I was imagining this too, although I stopped short at the 'ads in comments' stage, but who knows, they could easily go further.
Talking about doing it is virtue signaling.
Don't just say, do! If you have a popular repository, share news of your migration to drive others to do the same.
VOTE WITH YOUR FEET, PEOPLE!
https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilo...
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573353.
^ Prediction market spam
Did you mean to link the parent HN comment from someone on the copilot team?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233
Microslop is clearly flailing. They were first movers with the OAI investment but OAI is doing fine on its own and microslop failed to capitalize on that early momentum. Now they’re resorting to increasingly desperate measures across their product portfolio to stay relevant.
> GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub
They already did! https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65245
I just saw the headline fly by yesterday and thought that this was just another dumb bug in what is the slow decline of GitHub. To find out today that this was very much intentional is even worse.
Exactly same for me.
If I think about it, that was in my head accounted as „no one would be that stupid”.
It’s good they walked it back, but the fact it was implemented in the first place is a signal of their thinking and inexcusable in itself.
Trust is easier to lose than to gain, and Microdoft continues to break trust.
> Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations, GitHub, said in a statement: "GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward."
What a joke. It literally went in and edited the PR description 8 minutes after the user submitted it.
That's not a tip somehow ending up in the wrong context. If it were it would have happened at submission time. At least be honest. Yuck.
I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them.
I believe there are two caveats on it:
1. Approach: to make the experience worth it, so that ads are not very intrusive , done correctly, which, over and over and over, it is proven contrarious to the interest of the user.
2. Relevance: if you are going to put ads onto your product, make sure things are done correctly, curate if possible what will be shown (I believe Microsoft's worse fear would be to see online casinos ads onto something like GitHub, as an example).
> I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them.
The endgame is not "or", it's "and": eventually come to the conclusion that, why choose between revenue streams when we could just have both?
I think we'll see companies increasingly adopting the X approach: charged tiers for 'fewer' ads. With no actual guarantee as to the absolute quantity of ads, just 'fewer, relative to the people who aren't paying as much'. We're basically on a downward slope where not seeing ads is going to get steadily more and more expensive over time.
The issue is context. GitHub is a professional workbench, not social media. Any "tip" that serves as an ad is just noise in a high-focus environment.
Would you like Copilot to generate ads?
[Yes] [Maybe later]
It's great that they backed down, but they still did it in the first place. GitHub is on borrowed time now; my own repos are insignificant, but I'll definitely look to move somewhere else this year, and I'm sure many others will too.
Remember when they wanted to charge for self hosted runners and “backed down”, let’s see how long it lasts
So, after Windows cleanup announcement nobody at Github thought "may be we should review all our copilot integrations to avoid another embarrassment for MS" ?
That shows either it was just a Windows org announcement and not a culture change at MS or it was just an empty promise to temporarily deflect mounting criticism.
Either way it is disappointment for anyone who thought it was a genuine case of introspection and change of heart at MS.
That just means they'll be more subtle once the dust settles.
I'm not suprised Raycast is involved in this marketing scheme. They pollute their own product with ads where they shouldn't be. Whoever is running their marketing team needs a lesson in not pissing off your userbase.
Someone, claiming to be from the Raycast team, in the original HN thread said that they were not aware of the advert or were involved with it in any manner.
Sometimes I see something nifty in Raycast and it tempts me. Then I see something weird from them, look in the Alfred manual, and realize it already supports the same feature and that I’ll stay put, thanks.
And what about the companies that thought that advertising (sorry, suggesting) their product through this channel was a good idea?
But why were they running unpaid ads for third party services? It makes no sense
This was a humiliation ritual!
> Hearing feedback from the community following Manson's post and the kerfuffle it generated, Rogers said, has helped him realize that "on reflection," letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge "was the wrong judgement call."
Thankfully, they need the community feedback to realize it was wrong. It was so hard to guess it was wrong without the feedback! It's good to know these people are in charge of building Copilot.
> letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge
Wait, did they really sneak this in entirely without user interaction? So people trying not to use AI would still risk being ""contaminated""? Incredible breach of trust. Similar kind of thing to lying about whether your product is vegan.
I haven’t seen it but the article makes it sound like, when you ask for it to make a change to your code, that’s the point it puts the ad in.
I think (but not 100% sure) that it also puts it directly into your codebase, without you knowing ahead of time, without your permission. If that’s correct then it’s truly heinous.
That’s what makes it feel off — not the ads, but the loss of control.
If something can change your PR without you explicitly asking, that’s where it crosses the line.
Would be cool if they listened to us about the top voted feedback of all time, re: when the destroyed the feed
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188
This is corporate PR speak 101, external or internal doesn't matter. None of that sentence is true and everybody knows that.
Its just a theatre since other peers are dancing the same dance and they can't stick out as too rough or honest or whatever. Of course they realized this very well from the start, weighted risk of backfiring, reward for meeting some fucked up quarterly or yearly objective set by higher ups and decided to go ahead.
You can safely ignore the words, just make a mental mark that this is/are sociopathic assholes, move on with life and leave the mark there for next 4 decades and act according to that knowledge the next time you deal with them or their products, if you have to.
I think a CEO literally saying "I fucked up" on a corporate blog could genuinely be an interesting hiring tactic these days. I'd work for that guy.
Microsoft github.com should restore classic web compatibility for the core functions (issue tracking, etc) and be native IPv6.
This is peak entishitification and a quick way to burn a lot of goodwill and trust fast.
I would be curious what Raycast’s reaction is. They just got caught in the crossfire or they deliberately bought ads to be placed with Copilot
Doubt Raycast would have known about this, think they are smarter than that. But who knows.
They posted previously on YN that they too were caught offguard. The 'tips' weren't specific to Raycast, they've been going on for a while and Raycast was just one product it decided to feature now.
I'm sure they sold this ad space at a premium and someone over there thought it was a brilliant idea. How else would it have happened?
"OK guys, back to the drawing board. How can we market this better? How long do we wait until this WILL fly under the radar?"
Feels like you never worked at corporation it goes more like this:
"old employees who know the environment and are in tune with community are playing safe so they don't bring in immediate results, feels like progress stagnates, so they move those people to other tasks"
"new clueless manager joins, has to come up with a brilliant idea (that actually is bad across the board for someone who understands the environment) to get quarterly bonus, then convinces bunch of |out of touch suites| with power point presentation where numbers go up"
"he gets burned by community response, becomes more conservative - next quarters he is moved away or he moves away on his own - new clueless can come into his place"
I wonder if the PM responsible for this will be held accountable. Who should resign?
I'm guessing the answers will be predictable and disappointing.
> Who should resign?
And achieve what?
A healthy culture where leadership is held accountable, and egregious errors in judgement are treated with the seriousness they deserve.
Push push push. When your customers are livid at you take a small step back. Wait for a moment then come back at them from another angle.
I hate this philosophy. But it’s seems to be the preferred path for Microsoft.
> GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub
For another six months.
First of all, I find it enraging that dimwitted AI companies decided to edit PR descriptions for anything at all.
Wouldn't it change the hash, making push requests conflict in many case?
GitHub was only modifying the description of the PR itself, not the commit messages for the commits included in the PR.
The problem is that Microslop is not THINKING. What is the point of inserting ads? That just increases the spam output. Sure, Microslop may think this helps boost their revenue but many people hate ad-spam. After I started to use ublock origin, there was no way back to the unsafe ads-down-the-turtles approach anymore. Ads waste people's time and money.
perhaps they forgot to set thinking mode in the LLM payload
the microsoft playbook
Yet Sourceforge has been putting ads on open source projects for decades.
Yeah, that's part of why nobody wants to use Sourceforge.
Ironically, that's what probably killed Sourceforge and helped GitHub take off. It remains to be seen whether Codeberg will now repeat the process.
Wow, I haven't heard that name for decades.