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.
meindnoch 17 hours ago [-]
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.
gmueckl 17 hours ago [-]
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.
rustystump 17 hours ago [-]
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.
speeder 4 hours ago [-]
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.
schuyler2d 2 hours ago [-]
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?
ethbr1 30 minutes ago [-]
> why not just sell them back to their staff/former owner?
Saving corporate face
sevensor 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Gud 7 hours ago [-]
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.
ethbr1 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
novok 5 hours ago [-]
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'.
Gud 4 hours ago [-]
I’ve never come across Google docs in the wild in a corporate setting.
Seems to me Microsoft office is still the dominant player.
rpdillon 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
ghaff 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
fnord123 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
kcoddington 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
withinboredom 5 hours ago [-]
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.
kergonath 39 minutes ago [-]
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?
herbst 5 hours ago [-]
Americans don't use CSV?
withinboredom 5 hours ago [-]
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.
deanishe 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ozlikethewizard 1 hours ago [-]
this seems like less of an excel problem and more of an issue with an improperly escaped data set though?
withinboredom 1 hours ago [-]
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.
herbst 5 hours ago [-]
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.
rickdeckard 30 minutes ago [-]
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
mattmanser 4 hours ago [-]
1.01 in US === 1,01 in EU
1.01, "hi", CSV has problems, "1.01"
1,01, "hi", Yes it really does, "1,01"
See the problem now?
Your operating system cannot solve this problem.
johnisgood 2 hours ago [-]
Not all of EU though. I am European and I never used "," anywhere yet people understood.
Ygg2 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rickdeckard 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
tomalbrc 10 hours ago [-]
Lets not pretend like there wouldn't be dozen of quality and actually used software if it wasn't for microsoft existing.
eitland 8 hours ago [-]
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.
eisa01 8 hours ago [-]
Just change your windows display language to English?
alexvitkov 5 hours ago [-]
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.
achenet 8 hours ago [-]
> And declining literacy makes Powerpoint unfortunately indispensable.
I'd argue the opposite: Powerpoint makes literacy decline.
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.
automatic6131 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ethbr1 19 minutes ago [-]
> 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."
icameron 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Sharlin 6 hours ago [-]
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.
rickdeckard 15 minutes ago [-]
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...
ethbr1 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
aragilar 5 hours ago [-]
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).
ghaff 2 hours ago [-]
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.
gjvc 2 hours ago [-]
piracy in the school playground in the 90s did much to cement the use of MSFT Office at home
arielcostas 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Akronymus 2 hours ago [-]
I hate the localized function names quite a lot too. In german it even uses umlauts in some of them.
antaviana 6 hours ago [-]
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.
cdaringe 7 hours ago [-]
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?
AtlasBarfed 3 hours ago [-]
Who invented the spreadsheet?
The victors truly get to write history, don't they?
pessimizer 5 hours ago [-]
Excel and Minesweeper. I'm still so angry about what they did to Minesweeper.
xnyan 16 hours ago [-]
Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
pjerem 16 hours ago [-]
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.
rkomorn 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
nrb 13 hours ago [-]
Obviously not defending it, but isn’t the F1 movie produced by Apple?
LoganDark 11 hours ago [-]
Yes. There's still an entire drama about how inappropriate it is for the Wallet app to advertise a movie.
meindnoch 12 hours ago [-]
>Apple barely does it and only for their products
And U2
mcs5280 9 hours ago [-]
11 years later I still refuse to listen to their music
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.
const_cast 12 hours ago [-]
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?
ants_everywhere 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Sharlin 5 hours ago [-]
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.
kergonath 26 minutes ago [-]
You can also not show notifications from specific apps, which I find much better.
withinboredom 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Sharlin 5 hours ago [-]
Ah, I have the 200GB iCloud subscription, no wonder then.
p_ing 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Wololooo 16 hours ago [-]
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?
petepete 16 hours ago [-]
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.
duskwuff 7 hours ago [-]
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).
michaelmrose 13 hours ago [-]
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.
petepete 7 hours ago [-]
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.
lrvick 7 hours ago [-]
Unlike with Apple, you have virtually unlimited choices of Linux distributions that are ad-free.
nathias 2 hours ago [-]
why do you think meta is more evil than google?
kokanee 15 hours ago [-]
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
johannes1234321 15 hours ago [-]
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)
pengaru 11 hours ago [-]
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.
marcus_holmes 12 hours ago [-]
Can we add Palantir at the top?
techjamie 13 hours ago [-]
Can we get an honorable mention for Adobe? I'd put Adobe probably right under Apple.
20after4 7 hours ago [-]
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.
timuckun 12 hours ago [-]
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.
spacedcowboy 5 hours ago [-]
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.
fc417fc802 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bratsche 12 hours ago [-]
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?
20after4 7 hours ago [-]
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.
skinkestek 8 hours ago [-]
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.
terminalshort 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
geocar 7 hours ago [-]
> Google seemed so great in the beginning.
It's almost like they were good at marketing.
physix 12 hours ago [-]
What's so evil about Netflix?
They use Cassandra and make cool series ever now and then, like Love Death Robots. :-)
kaladin-jasnah 12 hours ago [-]
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.
marcus_holmes 6 hours ago [-]
Cancelling popular shows in the second season because it makes marginally more money to do that
wahnfrieden 15 hours ago [-]
Don't forget their military and surveillance contributions
dade_ 11 hours ago [-]
lol. Amerika Freedom ™
tw04 16 hours ago [-]
> 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…
rikafurude21 16 hours ago [-]
Windows normalized having ads in the OS.
pseudosavant 16 hours ago [-]
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.
free652 16 hours ago [-]
Weirdly that I don't get any ads in Android.... My phone was made by the same ad company.
LtWorf 16 hours ago [-]
No? Try installing 1 app without seeing ads for 10 other useless apps.
free652 15 hours ago [-]
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.
LtWorf 8 hours ago [-]
The store is part of the OS… if you say "no ads" and just exclude ads… that's kinda on you.
rpdillon 7 minutes ago [-]
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".
fc417fc802 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Sharlin 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
pawelduda 14 hours ago [-]
Seeing ads/recommendations in app store is miles better than finding out your fresh Windows comes with Candy Crush Saga preinstalled.
shawn_w 12 hours ago [-]
As a recovering Candy Crush addict, that's the last thing I need.
freeopinion 11 hours ago [-]
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.
HKH2 3 hours ago [-]
Is it a regional thing? I've never seen that happen.
LtWorf 8 hours ago [-]
On old devices samsung just adds an overlay with ads. I've had to factory reset and keep them not updated.
Ubuntu was basically promoting a free benefit to home users. This doesn't seem unreasonable.
luxuryballs 2 hours ago [-]
ah yes Google, the less evil company that manipulates search results to facilitate their desired election outcomes, lmao
__MatrixMan__ 1 hours ago [-]
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.
userbinator 9 hours ago [-]
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.
fc417fc802 7 hours ago [-]
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.
eviks 8 hours ago [-]
> They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
That's not a cool guy thing
frollogaston 10 hours ago [-]
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.
smcin 13 hours ago [-]
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.
That's hardly Microsoft's fault, isn't it?
smcin 9 hours ago [-]
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)
michaelmrose 12 hours ago [-]
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.
_carbyau_ 11 hours ago [-]
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.
pastage 7 hours ago [-]
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.
boobsbr 2 hours ago [-]
> Have to Use Windows XP
They're lucky, I have to use Win11.
Shorel 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
nirvdrum 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
yencabulator 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
nothrabannosir 8 hours ago [-]
You’re describing the E in EEE
sdenton4 15 hours ago [-]
Ah, but coming hot on their heels are the embracions and extingushions!
croes 2 hours ago [-]
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.
yencabulator 15 hours ago [-]
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.
fc417fc802 7 hours ago [-]
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.
gmueckl 7 hours ago [-]
Oh, I honestly didn't remember the VS Code extension shenanigans. Thanks for bringing that up.
ivanmontillam 16 hours ago [-]
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).
sebastialonso 12 hours ago [-]
Man, more than two decades of open source and people still don't understand what free as I'm freedom means. It's depressing.
yencabulator 16 hours ago [-]
I am responding to this:
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
10 hours ago [-]
yesbabyyes 15 hours ago [-]
Matt Mullenweg did nothing wrong
rahkiin 16 hours ago [-]
VsCode is in a weird licensing limbo, or some of its microsoft plugins are anyway
thiht 15 hours ago [-]
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)
debugnik 14 hours ago [-]
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.
8 hours ago [-]
croes 2 hours ago [-]
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.
soraminazuki 15 hours ago [-]
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open
> 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.
pge 13 hours ago [-]
I would add to your list that MSFT also makes decent hardware now - surface laptops and xbox have both done well
Sharlin 5 hours ago [-]
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.
cholantesh 11 hours ago [-]
Xbox has done so well that they ravaged the division that oversees it.
selcuka 12 hours ago [-]
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?
Lutger 4 hours ago [-]
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.
m463 14 hours ago [-]
I don't know why you are apologizing for them. Is it because extensive system telemetry might trace your comment back to you?
goosejuice 8 hours ago [-]
IE and it's embedded derivatives are still used in many US healthcare institutions. So dead and buried, not so much.
ocontraire 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
herbst 5 hours ago [-]
> 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
13 hours ago [-]
michaelmrose 13 hours ago [-]
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.
mock-possum 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
gmueckl 7 hours ago [-]
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.
owebmaster 14 hours ago [-]
This comment could not be more actual. The tools changed, even the methods changed, but Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is still Microsoft's strategy.
ekianjo 8 hours ago [-]
> 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?
lofaszvanitt 12 hours ago [-]
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...
ekianjo 14 hours ago [-]
> They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
you mean shit software like Teams that crash the whole time?
azangru 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ivanmontillam 17 hours ago [-]
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!
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.
yencabulator 16 hours ago [-]
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.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 13 hours ago [-]
Skepticism that is informed by history isn’t being hateful
fc417fc802 7 hours ago [-]
Not in and of itself, but it can certainly be couched in an emotionally charged manner.
4 hours ago [-]
rTX5CMRXIfFG 4 hours ago [-]
That's still not being hateful
dingnuts 17 hours ago [-]
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..)
gmueckl 17 hours ago [-]
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.
yencabulator 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, people keep bringing up VSCode all the time, but fanboys are gonna fanboy.
soraminazuki 14 hours ago [-]
And Windows, that one obscure product from Microsoft that people here keep forgetting about.
ivanmontillam 17 hours ago [-]
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:
Yeah, typical Ballmer-era.
abcd_f 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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. ---------------------------
6 hours ago [-]
fuzztester 6 hours ago [-]
if that's the case, you must not have had much energy to begin with.
Kool-Aid and tea can do that to you :)
Arch-TK 17 hours ago [-]
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.
ivanmontillam 16 hours ago [-]
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.
prinny_ 16 hours ago [-]
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.
nightski 10 hours ago [-]
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.
pjerem 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
p_ing 9 hours ago [-]
You can create an unattended answer file to skip the MSFT account.
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)
goosejuice 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pxc 15 hours ago [-]
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.
eviks 8 hours ago [-]
How do you debloat Windows 11 of the built in copy of the whole browser?
spookie 13 hours ago [-]
Honestly less time consuming to just install some GNU/Linux distro.
p_ing 9 hours ago [-]
Install, maybe. Configure? Maybe not.
graemep 3 hours ago [-]
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.
airtonix 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
michaelmrose 12 hours ago [-]
Nadella has worked in senior leadership positions at MS for 33 years. His era began in 1992 not when he became CEO.
nwsm 31 minutes ago [-]
I think you may have been under a rock for the last 5-10 years
jedberg 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pyrale 15 hours ago [-]
I'll disagree loudly with my IBM keyboards (my old model M as well as the thinkpads I've used).
jedberg 14 hours ago [-]
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!
blibble 13 hours ago [-]
they were better than the $20 crap you could buy in staples
but definitely not the best ones around
p1necone 17 hours ago [-]
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.
jedberg 16 hours ago [-]
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.
ndiddy 16 hours ago [-]
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/
wahnfrieden 15 hours ago [-]
Glove80 is a lot nicer in several ways if you're ok with the Chocs
nirvdrum 9 hours ago [-]
> - 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?
alexchantavy 7 hours ago [-]
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.
1vuio0pswjnm7 9 hours ago [-]
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
Sharlin 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jameshart 16 hours ago [-]
> 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’.
nothrabannosir 8 hours ago [-]
Windows Phone was solid. Actual innovation in mobile UI.
Commercial success hasn’t been an argument for technical supremacy since Betamax.
fatnoah 46 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
arnvald 7 hours ago [-]
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
Melatonic 17 hours ago [-]
Zune was actually kinda nice - although I agree nobody bought it!
rideontime 17 hours ago [-]
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.
SlowTao 13 hours ago [-]
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.
GoblinSlayer 4 hours ago [-]
>shipping the worst web browser in existence
Which? IE6? IE6 is the best web browser in existence though. You confuse standard with good.
rideontime 17 hours ago [-]
ActiveX plugins? MSJVM? Last 25 years? You might need to update your script.
SlowTao 13 hours 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.
high_na_euv 16 hours ago [-]
>For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
That was 10 years ago
hinkley 17 hours ago [-]
30 years, not 25. A lot of early contributions to Linux basically came with a "PS: Fuck Microsoft" at the bottom.
positron26 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dylan604 16 hours ago [-]
> - 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?
quantumwannabe 13 hours ago [-]
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.
deaddodo 16 hours ago [-]
Linux runs perfectly fine on most of the Surfaces:
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.
dylan604 16 hours ago [-]
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?
deaddodo 16 hours ago [-]
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.
dylan604 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
deaddodo 11 hours ago [-]
Then don’t ask or post hypothetical vitriol, if you don’t want a response.
This isn’t Reddit.
11 hours ago [-]
debugnik 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
deaddodo 11 hours ago [-]
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.
debugnik 3 hours ago [-]
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".
AtlasBarfed 3 hours ago [-]
25 years? Try 40.
Xelbair 4 hours ago [-]
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)
mv4 17 hours ago [-]
While I mostly agree with your assessment, I feel like the Xbox is pretty cool.
meindnoch 17 hours ago [-]
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.
SlowTao 13 hours ago [-]
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...
djhn 16 hours ago [-]
How come? Any TL;DR? Not a gamer, so I’m not up to date on consoles.
tapoxi 16 hours ago [-]
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.
SlowTao 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jorvi 16 hours ago [-]
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.
15 hours ago [-]
Tyce3312 15 hours ago [-]
Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
SlowTao 13 hours ago [-]
Yep and that is part of why I don't use them either.
boobsbr 2 hours ago [-]
I've been using a Mac since 2015 and have not seen any ads in it.
7thpower 12 hours ago [-]
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.
aleph_minus_one 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Ygg2 5 hours ago [-]
> 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:
- 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.
9 hours ago [-]
yard2010 4 hours ago [-]
Can't they be forgiven? For taking the shit show JS was/is and turning it into magical TS?
15 hours ago [-]
sixothree 17 hours ago [-]
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.
eastbound 17 hours ago [-]
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.
meindnoch 17 hours ago [-]
>LinkedIn, [...] NPM [...] and OpenAI
Your honor, I rest my case!
Tyce3312 15 hours ago [-]
I agree with you
wordofx 2 hours ago [-]
This is such a typical HN low IQ comment.
jrepinc 17 hours ago [-]
And today they are even complicit in genocide and avid supporters of fascist USA dictator Trump, can hardly get less cool then that
SlowTao 13 hours ago [-]
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.
scarface_74 16 hours ago [-]
As is half the US who voted for him…
hdgvhicv 15 hours ago [-]
And every large company, whether they want to or not, because if they don’t bend the knee…
bee_rider 19 hours ago [-]
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.
sho_hn 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
eadmund 18 hours ago [-]
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.
Sharlin 5 hours ago [-]
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.
junon 17 hours ago [-]
SIP is the obvious contra, though.
nobleach 17 hours ago [-]
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.
jwrallie 8 hours ago [-]
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?
gloxkiqcza 6 hours ago [-]
Off-topic: What were you running before and what are you running now? And are we talking about laptop use?
bananalychee 16 hours ago [-]
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.
zeroc8 6 hours ago [-]
The Mac Mini has been exciting for me. A great low cost low energy consumption desktop that does what it is supposed to do.
bee_rider 12 hours ago [-]
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.
fkyoureadthedoc 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
yndoendo 19 hours ago [-]
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.
herval 18 hours ago [-]
So you don't use a smartphone?
yndoendo 14 hours ago [-]
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.
powgpu 17 hours ago [-]
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!
fkyoureadthedoc 16 hours ago [-]
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.
herval 17 hours ago [-]
back in the 1880s, people didn't even need refrigerators!
echelon 17 hours ago [-]
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.
nozzlegear 11 hours ago [-]
We had three options, but people didn't like the Windows Phone enough to buy them. (I had one.)
rockemsockem 19 hours ago [-]
For hardware only
tonypapousek 18 hours ago [-]
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
criddell 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Sebb767 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
worik 17 hours ago [-]
No.
Linux is better.
That worm has turned, at least five years ago
fkyoureadthedoc 16 hours ago [-]
When someone makes a SteamOS level "just works" distro for desktop / gaming I'll probably happily switch
powgpu 17 hours ago [-]
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.
spookie 13 hours ago [-]
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.
SirHumphrey 2 hours ago [-]
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.
deaddodo 16 hours ago [-]
Linux works fine on ARM devices. The problem is lack of good (non-Apple) ARM devices, not Linux.
trelane 16 hours ago [-]
"Apple silicon?" Man, how well does OSX run on a raspberry pi? Clearly it's the inferior OS. /s
zamalek 14 hours ago [-]
> > 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.
11 hours ago [-]
QuantumGood 17 hours ago [-]
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.
nativeit 17 hours ago [-]
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.
QuantumGood 17 hours ago [-]
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?
herval 18 hours ago [-]
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.
QuercusMax 18 hours ago [-]
Tim Cook giving Trump a gold-plated statue in exchange for tariff preferences seems like a very bad sign.
pklausler 18 hours ago [-]
Why? It was a relatively cheap way to dodge the capricious whims of a madman who is fortunately easy to distract with shiny objects.
herval 18 hours ago [-]
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?
nozzlegear 11 hours ago [-]
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.
JohnKemeny 17 hours ago [-]
He didn't give him a statue, he gave him a gold bar. A literal gold bar. With a plaque.
elictronic 18 hours ago [-]
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.
kriops 17 hours ago [-]
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.
worik 17 hours ago [-]
> because they're not trying to sell my data
Are you sure?
echelon 17 hours ago [-]
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.
hilux 17 hours ago [-]
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.
asveikau 18 hours ago [-]
> A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.
Philadelphia 17 hours ago [-]
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.
asveikau 17 hours ago [-]
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.
aleph_minus_one 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
asveikau 8 hours ago [-]
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.
deaddodo 16 hours ago [-]
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.
LargoLasskhyfv 14 hours ago [-]
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!
JustExAWS 16 hours ago [-]
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.
brownriceowl 17 hours ago [-]
We have different ideas of what qualifies as tech people if we're talking about Liquid Glass, Siri, and Vision Pro
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.
17 hours ago [-]
dimgl 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
17 hours ago [-]
__loam 18 hours ago [-]
The rocky start for apple intelligence is what excites me
worik 17 hours ago [-]
....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
catigula 18 hours ago [-]
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.
n8cpdx 18 hours ago [-]
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.
hinkley 16 hours ago [-]
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.
JustExAWS 15 hours ago [-]
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.
catigula 18 hours ago [-]
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.
n8cpdx 13 hours ago [-]
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.
singhrac 17 hours ago [-]
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?
catigula 17 hours ago [-]
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.
inkyoto 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
hundchenkatze 17 hours ago [-]
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.
catigula 17 hours ago [-]
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.
hundchenkatze 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
p1necone 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
aleph_minus_one 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bee_rider 10 hours ago [-]
I dunno, I haven’t been to Europe. What do they favor, Linux? Sounds like paradise.
aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bee_rider 49 minutes ago [-]
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.”)
JohnFen 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.
leptons 17 hours ago [-]
Apple does plenty of harm every day when they force Safari as the only web browser engine allowed on iOS.
SlowTao 12 hours ago [-]
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!
leptons 10 hours ago [-]
"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.
dijit 4 hours ago [-]
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.
acdha 15 hours ago [-]
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.
leptons 14 hours ago [-]
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.
bee_rider 15 hours ago [-]
Right? They are really limiting Google’s development of their platform, the internet, by making some websites pander to a non-Chrome browser engine.
leptons 14 hours ago [-]
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.
acdha 10 hours ago [-]
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.
leptons 6 hours ago [-]
>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.
JohnFen 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, but with that sort of thing, the harm is at least limited to Apple customers.
leptons 14 hours ago [-]
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.
JustExAWS 15 hours ago [-]
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.
leptons 14 hours ago [-]
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.
JustExAWS 13 hours ago [-]
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…
goosejuice 7 hours ago [-]
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.
leptons 13 hours ago [-]
>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.
JustExAWS 12 hours ago [-]
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…
leptons 10 hours ago [-]
>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.
JustExAWS 10 hours ago [-]
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.
leptons 6 hours ago [-]
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.
jlarocco 13 hours ago [-]
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".
nobleach 17 hours ago [-]
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.
bee_rider 17 hours ago [-]
The joke was supposed to be that the “coolness peak” was incredibly lame. Haha.
mvdtnz 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
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.
xp84 18 hours ago [-]
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.
asveikau 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
xp84 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
deaddodo 16 hours ago [-]
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.
15 hours ago [-]
leptons 17 hours ago [-]
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.
JohnFen 18 hours ago [-]
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.
mvdtnz 16 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, what could be more stylish and cool than a company assigned work device.
raincole 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I laughed audibly when I read that sentence...
cyberax 18 hours ago [-]
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Only among people who don't have to develop for the Apple ecosystem.
yieldcrv 17 hours ago [-]
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
fHr 18 hours ago [-]
lol
cyanydeez 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dijit 18 hours ago [-]
Microsoft is so in bed with the government that bribes are far from necessary.
leoc 17 hours ago [-]
In this case it's more that hardware isn't a critical business for MS, I think.
ezoe 19 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
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.
grepfru_it 17 hours ago [-]
I would not be surprised if Steam came to Xbox
sleepybrett 17 hours ago [-]
The only way microsoft would allow that is if they got a cut of every sale.
nerdix 14 hours ago [-]
They have already added Steam support to their Xbox PC app.
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.
gabrielgio 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ivape 18 hours ago [-]
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.
tough 18 hours ago [-]
which begs the question is it just good old EEE?
brightball 20 hours ago [-]
I’m glad Gitlab is still an option, just sitting there waiting to absorb the market pivot if Microsoft takes it the wrong way.
ikidd 20 hours ago [-]
I see more people jump for Codeberg these days.
mindcrash 20 hours ago [-]
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
beeb 19 hours ago [-]
People aren't on these hosted platforms only for the git experience, they are for the social aspects and discoverability too.
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.
yencabulator 16 hours ago [-]
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.
hnlmorg 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
BlueTemplar 16 hours ago [-]
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).
hnlmorg 15 hours ago [-]
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.
hinkley 16 hours ago [-]
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.
anglesideangle 14 hours ago [-]
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
rapnie 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Hosting costs for self-hosting a popular git repo are prohibitive for many people.
lordofgibbons 19 hours ago [-]
The UI looks very similar to Gitea. Are they related? And how do they compare?
ionelaipatioaei 19 hours ago [-]
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea.
jzb 20 hours ago [-]
I love Codeberg, but they're struggling with growth/scaling -- if folks want to see Codeberg succeed, they need to open their wallets.
michaelcampbell 18 hours ago [-]
Big limitation on private repos there.
ghc 20 hours ago [-]
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.
rpep 19 hours ago [-]
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.
Aeolun 19 hours ago [-]
Gitlab is not really an option for me. Their pricing is absolutely out of this world.
taxborn 20 hours ago [-]
Additionally there is Codeburg/Forgejo, and for the atproto-enjoyers, tangled.sh is a new face that feels like it could be good.
dboreham 19 hours ago [-]
And gitea (originally a Forgejo fork).
overfeed 18 hours ago [-]
Did you mean to say gitea was originally a Gogs fork?
The lineage of those projects is Gogs => Gitea => Forgejo
I can see Gitlab in the same position in the near future. Only a matter of time...
NullCascade 15 hours ago [-]
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.
ackfoobar 19 hours ago [-]
> .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?
jayd16 16 hours ago [-]
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.
rahkiin 16 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
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.
jayd16 16 hours ago [-]
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.
ezst 16 hours ago [-]
Re: GUI library situation, are you implying that they finally came up with something that's cross platform? What is it?
debugnik 1 hours ago [-]
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."
okanat 15 hours ago [-]
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.
jayd16 15 hours ago [-]
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.
tetha 18 hours ago [-]
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.
okanat 14 hours ago [-]
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.
WuxiFingerHold 10 hours ago [-]
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.
SideburnsOfDoom 18 hours ago [-]
The server deploy experience for .NET is pretty much the same on Windows or Linux. The developer tooling experience has more options on Windows.
marcosdumay 18 hours ago [-]
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.
alternatex 17 hours ago [-]
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.
okanat 14 hours ago [-]
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.
alternatex 5 hours ago [-]
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?).
rahkiin 16 hours ago [-]
Can run SDL on linux and macos just fine, rendering visuals to the screen in X or Wayland.
pier25 16 hours ago [-]
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.
sixothree 16 hours ago [-]
Is MAUI now just a simple wrapper for Blazor projects?
ozim 15 hours ago [-]
.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#.
yread 19 hours ago [-]
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)
ozim 15 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
Agreed, but apparently company cheerleadering never goes away.
mirekrusin 16 hours ago [-]
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.
sixothree 17 hours ago [-]
Is he creating or is he relating what people think? I don't see this is him arguing so much as reporting.
segphault 19 hours ago [-]
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.
hinkley 16 hours ago [-]
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.
justin66 18 hours ago [-]
> Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
That happened three decades ago.
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
There was a new wind after Satya took over, but apparently it is slowly gone now.
jacquesm 17 hours ago [-]
To me it never made a difference. There was a concerted effort to put lipstick on the pig but it was still a pig.
hinkley 16 hours ago [-]
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.
lepicz 17 hours ago [-]
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).
pferde 17 hours ago [-]
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.
hinkley 16 hours ago [-]
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.
ed_elliott_asc 6 hours ago [-]
I think Jetbrians Rider and vscode being “good enough” to stop Microsoft investing in another IDE for Mac
frollogaston 10 hours ago [-]
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.
martin-t 17 hours ago [-]
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.
okanat 14 hours ago [-]
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.
martin-t 12 hours ago [-]
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.
informal007 10 hours ago [-]
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.
newspaper1 19 hours ago [-]
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.
everfrustrated 18 hours ago [-]
Didn't the Xamarin guy became the CEO of GitHub at one point?
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
One of them, yes.
Miguel never did, and is now focused on Swift and Apple.
newspaper1 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, and that was an incredibly odd decision.
maxrmk 16 hours ago [-]
Do you work in devdiv at Microsoft? I can see the org chart in this comment haha
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway290 19 hours ago [-]
Wait Microsoft was cool at some point?
NickC25 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Xbox, GitHub, Sataya's early days embracing open source, Zune (admittedly not cool but i loved the product).
BizarroLand 19 hours ago [-]
Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable despite its many many flaws.
wirrbel 19 hours ago [-]
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
AgentME 18 hours ago [-]
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.
geon 18 hours ago [-]
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.
BizarroLand 19 hours ago [-]
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.
brabel 19 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway290 10 hours ago [-]
I think XP is nostalgic and was everywhere but back when I used XP linux was still the coolest... even mac was cooler
worik 17 hours ago [-]
> Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable
That is very puzzling... Did you compare them to anything else?
17 hours ago [-]
pjmlp 19 hours ago [-]
Did you missed the whole Microsoft <3 FOSS, right after Satya took over?
jacquesm 17 hours ago [-]
No way anybody really believed that. Or did they?
throwaway290 10 hours ago [-]
Us people who remember EEE didn't
mightysashiman 19 hours ago [-]
did anyone believe it?!
ragnese 15 hours ago [-]
It was AstroTurfed to hell and back here and on Reddit. I know that much.
All those people who use Linux on their Windows machine instead of just installing a proper Linux distro.
owebmaster 14 hours ago [-]
You can see it very regularly when typescript is mentioned
pyuser583 16 hours ago [-]
How is Rider v. VS?
This is the sort of question I don't trust AI with yet.
pathartl 15 hours ago [-]
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
free652 14 hours ago [-]
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.
hahn-kev 7 hours ago [-]
It's there but when I tried it a few months ago I wasn't impressed. But I think it's gotten better recently.
mythz 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
hahn-kev 7 hours ago [-]
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.
CharlieDigital 15 hours ago [-]
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.
sixothree 16 hours ago [-]
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.
Hilift 5 hours ago [-]
No one wants cross platform.
scarface_74 16 hours ago [-]
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.
the_real_cher 16 hours ago [-]
They're releasing a feature on Windows which literally records your screen every few seconds!
These guys are extremely bad guys.
motorest 19 hours ago [-]
> 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?
Lich 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
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.
mightysashiman 19 hours ago [-]
first time I've ever read "Microsoft" and "cool" in the same sentence.
pferde 17 hours ago [-]
Technically not true. We were muttering "Not cool, Microsoft, not cool!" quite regularly back in the 90s and early 00s. :)
pathartl 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
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.
10 hours ago [-]
EGreg 20 hours ago [-]
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.
johnmaguire 19 hours ago [-]
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.)
EGreg 17 hours ago [-]
I meant Atom used to be the base, and now it's VSCode
johnmaguire 16 hours ago [-]
VS Code was not based on Atom's code base.
roelschroeven 4 hours ago [-]
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.
EGreg 15 hours ago [-]
I didn't say it was!
madeofpalk 19 hours ago [-]
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.
beached_whale 19 hours ago [-]
Not all of it is OSS. The core language servers are closed, I think.
benterix 20 hours ago [-]
> Visual Studio Code ... open source
Pick one.
echoangle 20 hours ago [-]
They meant VS Code (which is at least partially open source).
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.
vkazanov 18 hours ago [-]
Valve's steam deck runs on Linux/Wine. Wine is more popular than ever.
tannhaeuser 17 hours ago [-]
Wine, as part of Proton/SteamOS is a huge success.
kaladin-jasnah 19 hours ago [-]
Wine is still active, but I think mostly with Valve's proton, if that's the Wine you're talking about.
crinkly 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jongjong 16 hours ago [-]
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.
jongjong 9 hours ago [-]
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.
righthand 17 hours ago [-]
No need to extinguish what you can infinitely embrace with capital and extend into a puzzle.
SideburnsOfDoom 18 hours ago [-]
> .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.
TrueSlacker0 15 hours ago [-]
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.
SideburnsOfDoom 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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
riffraff 20 hours ago [-]
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.
coliveira 19 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 19 hours ago [-]
Yep, that is more of less the point I was making.
owebmaster 19 hours ago [-]
They didn't become cool, some people just let themselves get fooled by what they were offering for free.
anthk 19 hours ago [-]
Windows was already adware with WIndows 98. Active Desktop anyone?
crinkly 19 hours ago [-]
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.
hilux 17 hours ago [-]
Microsoft hasn't been the cool guys since at least 1995, and probably long before that.
pbiggar 19 hours ago [-]
Not just that, but Microsoft's reputation is in the process of taking a nose dive over its human rights record
That's true of most of tech in general, these days. You have to pick your poison now.
BlueTemplar 15 hours ago [-]
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...
pfisch 19 hours ago [-]
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.
mperham 19 hours ago [-]
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.
pbhjpbhj 17 hours ago [-]
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.
BlueTemplar 15 hours ago [-]
Yet. How do you think Meta acquired that reputation ?
1attice 19 hours ago [-]
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.
mikestew 18 hours ago [-]
As a former MSFT employee who disparages Microsoft on a regular basis, I ask: ‘dafuq did you get that idea?
not_a_bot_4sho 9 hours ago [-]
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.
jjani 19 hours ago [-]
For life? How can you be bound by this? Unless you sold yourself out for an extra month pay.
unethical_ban 19 hours ago [-]
That seems literally illegal, unless the disparagement would reference specific, classified programs.
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.
theptip 18 hours ago [-]
> 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).
zamadatix 11 hours ago [-]
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.
monitron 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
alecco 18 hours ago [-]
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.
It was the best model according to almost every benchmark until recently. It’s definitely SOTA.
jemmyw 14 hours ago [-]
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.
navigate8310 7 hours ago [-]
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.
qnleigh 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mattnewton 15 hours ago [-]
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.
newswasboring 17 hours ago [-]
My guess would be local AI. Apple Silicon is uniquely suitable with its shared memory.
theptip 16 hours ago [-]
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. )
qnleigh 7 hours ago [-]
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.
mrbombastic 16 hours ago [-]
They are well positioned but have a history of screwing up their AI plays, I hope they can get it right.
jen20 12 hours ago [-]
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.
GLdRH 17 hours ago [-]
Embrace the vibe, man
bodge5000 2 hours ago [-]
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
armchairhacker 17 hours ago [-]
> 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…
krior 17 hours ago [-]
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.
827a 17 hours ago [-]
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.
m4rtink 4 hours ago [-]
If its really useful, how long do you think it will take Google to kill it ? ;-)
KaiserPro 5 hours ago [-]
> 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. )
giancarlostoro 16 hours ago [-]
I mean Microsoft hosts key AI models in their AI Foundry, I don't think they're hurting.
> 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.
Rebelgecko 7 hours ago [-]
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?
theptip 16 hours ago [-]
I guess I’m using the product wrong if I find them useful?
somenameforme 19 hours ago [-]
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!
827a 18 hours ago [-]
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.
michaelt 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mzajc 18 hours ago [-]
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.
siva7 17 hours ago [-]
They realized they can't compete on processors, so they're moving on to greener pastures. Like kodak back then.
gtirloni 17 hours ago [-]
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.
coliveira 19 hours ago [-]
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.
wvenable 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
armchairhacker 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
827a 16 hours ago [-]
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.
heresie-dabord 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
zemo 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.
hnlmorg 18 hours ago [-]
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.
nik_lvk 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
vouwfietsman 17 hours ago [-]
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.
siva7 17 hours ago [-]
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.
hbn 16 hours ago [-]
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.
smcin 12 hours ago [-]
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.
smcin 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
insane_dreamer 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
827a 16 hours ago [-]
I explicitly said "big tech companies"; that's FAANG, which does not include OpenAI, Anthropic, Anysphere, or their kin.
insane_dreamer 16 hours ago [-]
with a $500B valuation, I'd say that OpenAI is now "BigTech"
827a 15 hours ago [-]
Not by any traditionally-recognized definition, but I'll certainly admit them into the club once they go public.
bongodongobob 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
coliveira 19 hours ago [-]
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.
bbor 17 hours ago [-]
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...
moregrist 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
floren 8 hours ago [-]
I think about that chart of disco sales from the Simpsons a lot these days...
gtirloni 17 hours ago [-]
Where's your evidence though? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
moi2388 18 hours ago [-]
The difference is that I can’t sell elasticsearch in my company, but I can sell an LLM.
Yeah, don’t ask..
smcin 12 hours ago [-]
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"?
moi2388 4 hours ago [-]
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?
827a 18 hours ago [-]
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.
pornel 15 hours ago [-]
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.
wolvesechoes 5 hours ago [-]
Yes yes, big corpos bad, startups good, I hecking love my Cursor agent.
codingdave 19 hours ago [-]
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.
p1mrx 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Don't hold your breath for that, Azure still has spotty IPv6 support
bsimpson 19 hours ago [-]
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.
cnst 17 hours ago [-]
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.
3eb7988a1663 8 hours ago [-]
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.
karel-3d 18 hours ago [-]
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)
mynameisvlad 17 hours ago [-]
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.
karel-3d 7 hours ago [-]
I remember that every action you could do there needed somehow be approved in Azure Active Directory
drysart 17 hours ago [-]
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.
martin-t 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Wilder7977 7 hours ago [-]
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.
rjbwork 16 hours ago [-]
>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.
martin-t 16 hours ago [-]
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.
leoc 19 hours ago [-]
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.
JohnTHaller 21 hours ago [-]
GitHub will now fall under Microsoft's CoreAI team, which give some indication of GitHub's purpose and direction going forward.
IshKebab 20 hours ago [-]
You mean all of Microsoft's direction? Look at how VSCode changelogs have morphed from editing features to 90% AI.
rs186 17 hours ago [-]
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.
sunaookami 9 hours ago [-]
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).
arielcostas 4 hours ago [-]
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
rs186 1 hours ago [-]
Just look at open issues, sorted by most thumbs up:
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.
Awesome, this is creating an opportunity for a new text editor. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
wraptile 5 hours ago [-]
Just switched to Zed because every vscode release breaks more than fixes.
mark_l_watson 10 hours ago [-]
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.
mark_l_watson 9 hours ago [-]
yes, re-reading my comment I accept your points.
on_the_train 11 hours ago [-]
Zed also turned into ai slob already
IshKebab 5 hours ago [-]
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?
moomin 20 hours ago [-]
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.
19 hours ago [-]
layer8 20 hours ago [-]
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.
jatins 19 hours ago [-]
Had to read that sentence a couple of times -- what does it even mean? It's possible Verge may have butchered it
layer8 19 hours ago [-]
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.
DeepYogurt 14 hours ago [-]
No. Jay is an idiot.
9dev 19 hours ago [-]
That sounds horrible. Who wants that??
apexalpha 18 hours ago [-]
Someone who expect to make a lot of money selling said Agents.
radicalbyte 19 hours ago [-]
It sounds like the kind of plan which would come from the Xbox division.
bgwalter 20 hours ago [-]
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.
fragmede 19 hours ago [-]
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.
coliveira 19 hours ago [-]
But that $250 billion gave them $3T in market cap, so it was a fantastic investment.
jcgrillo 19 hours ago [-]
evidence of severely advanced brain rot
ksherlock 12 hours ago [-]
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?
dathinab 21 hours ago [-]
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.
whimsicalism 20 hours ago [-]
reviewers?
layer8 20 hours ago [-]
Auditors?
dathinab 20 hours ago [-]
yes auditors from a security audit
whimsicalism 19 hours ago [-]
you could barely convince your auditors that using github was okay? well, my opinion of security audits is reaffirmed
anileated 19 hours ago [-]
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.
dathinab 15 hours ago [-]
> 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).
marcosdumay 18 hours ago [-]
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...
whimsicalism 18 hours ago [-]
from private repos? they explicitly say they do not
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
dathinab 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
shortrounddev2 2 hours ago [-]
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
UK-AL 15 hours ago [-]
People test in production in all the time via Canary releases.
dathinab 16 hours ago [-]
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.
6thbit 19 hours ago [-]
They were already under CoreAI team. The verge has amended the article with a footnote correction to note that.
cnst 17 hours ago [-]
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"?
this15testingg 5 hours ago [-]
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.
chrisco255 17 hours ago [-]
Github as a platform itself though, isn't open source.
paxys 20 hours ago [-]
The industry has collectively decided that AI is the future of all of software development, so this move shouldn't be a surprise.
shortrounddev2 18 hours ago [-]
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
mark_l_watson 10 hours ago [-]
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?
CharlieDigital 15 hours ago [-]
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.
shortrounddev2 2 hours ago [-]
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
preisschild 4 hours ago [-]
Gitlab seems to also be going into the "AI slop" direction, unfortunately, while core CI/CD features get sidelined...
Forgejo/Codeberg seems interesting
shortrounddev2 2 hours ago [-]
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
martin-t 17 hours ago [-]
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.
the8472 18 hours ago [-]
Commoditize your complement.
20 hours ago [-]
davepeck 20 hours ago [-]
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.)
jatins 19 hours ago [-]
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
justonceokay 18 hours ago [-]
CEOs of large companies are incapable of talking frankly. It is their purpose not to and how they reached their position.
12 hours ago [-]
bn-l 11 hours ago [-]
Copilot in vscode is shit. The diffs are hilariously slow. It’s like a tech demo from 2 years ago.
paxys 20 hours 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.
smsm42 17 hours ago [-]
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.
stogot 20 hours ago [-]
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
Eric_WVGG 20 hours ago [-]
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.
hardwaregeek 20 hours ago [-]
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.
bhl 19 hours ago [-]
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.
siva7 17 hours ago [-]
Well, how about rethinking your workflow instead of stacking branch after branch?
fleventynine 9 hours ago [-]
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.
dmoy 19 hours ago [-]
> 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:
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.
tedivm 19 hours ago [-]
The current desktop client is missing support for a bunch of important things too, like signing commits.
soulofmischief 20 hours ago [-]
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.
tonyhart7 19 hours ago [-]
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
coke12 19 hours ago [-]
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.
tonyhart7 16 hours ago [-]
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
fleventynine 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
j1elo 20 hours ago [-]
Fix cross-organisation "Allow edits from maintainers" #5634
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.
bhandziuk 20 hours ago [-]
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.
taormina 20 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
uticus 20 hours ago [-]
> Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
Of course there are - lots of room for improving data collection and advertising revenue streams!
rawling 18 hours ago [-]
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.
rawling 1 hours ago [-]
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)
jennyholzer 19 hours ago [-]
Microsoft would create billions of dollars in productivity if they were willing to port Magit features to Github.
shash 20 hours ago [-]
Maybe not too many improvements are needed anymore? And maybe it’s a viable business without being a “growth” space?
Nah…
dreamcompiler 9 hours ago [-]
Issue management (e.g. bug tracking) really should be a part of Git, not a proprietary addon from Github.
trenchpilgrim 20 hours ago [-]
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
bee_rider 19 hours ago [-]
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.
madeofpalk 19 hours ago [-]
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.
esafak 20 hours ago [-]
Incorporate jujitsu, and code-based CI. YAML sucks %^#0
delusional 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ElijahLynn 20 hours ago [-]
Do you mean git or GitHub?
x0x0 19 hours ago [-]
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.
Ar-Curunir 20 hours ago [-]
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
packetlost 20 hours ago [-]
GitHub Actions is hot fucking garbage basically everywhere. Coming from GitLab I hate every single minute of dealing with GH Actions.
timeon 17 hours ago [-]
Git? Maybe not. Faster front-end would be decent improvement.
smcin 19 hours ago [-]
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.
pm90 19 hours ago [-]
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).
jennyholzer 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
iamdamian 19 hours ago [-]
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.
GitLab is like, really good. No need to put your codebase in the "cloud."
Catbert59 21 hours ago [-]
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.
kstrauser 20 hours ago [-]
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.
ctz 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mdaniel 20 hours ago [-]
> Gitea support actions like GitHub's
Citation needed. nektos/act is for sure not "like GitHub's"
Sure, it's not identical, and no one claims it is. I think it's defensibly like them, though.
milliams 20 hours ago [-]
Yes it is. It's not identical, but it is "like" it.
cowmix 19 hours ago [-]
Most of my build config run on either platform (Gitea and Github) interchangeably.
dboreham 19 hours ago [-]
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.
tonyhart7 19 hours ago [-]
isn't that gitlab also for profit company???
notpushkin 19 hours ago [-]
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.
kriops 17 hours ago [-]
Gitlab didn’t arguably and allegedly hijack an established oss brand for their core product.
Catbert59 20 hours ago [-]
Thank you for the recommendation.
Will move to that fork in one of my future private infrastructure reconstructions.
scubbo 19 hours ago [-]
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.
OIDC = OpenID Connect, an open authentication protocol
maxloh 19 hours ago [-]
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.
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?
mdaniel 20 hours ago [-]
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
pornel 14 hours ago [-]
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.
dusanh 19 hours ago [-]
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?
mdaniel 16 hours ago [-]
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 $$$.
oefrha 20 hours ago [-]
Really good if you go by a feature checklist, probably. A bloated clutter of more or less working features, checking enterprise boxes.
darkwater 20 hours ago [-]
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".
yoran 21 hours ago [-]
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.
mbonnet 19 hours ago [-]
In some industries, all the tools you actually need (say, MISRA checking) all work with GitLab out of the box.
tonyhart7 19 hours ago [-]
same reason why we didn't leave github yet
most SaaS tools only have github integration which is sucks
felixgallo 20 hours ago [-]
Claude works great with forgejo/gitea. It's all just git, after all.
IshKebab 20 hours ago [-]
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).
quesera 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.
IshKebab 18 hours ago [-]
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.
quesera 17 hours ago [-]
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.]
mdaniel 16 hours ago [-]
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.
IshKebab 6 hours ago [-]
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.)
quesera 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
ectospheno 17 hours ago [-]
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.
shayief 18 hours ago [-]
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.
ElijahLynn 20 hours ago [-]
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.
mbesto 20 hours ago [-]
For a couple grand a year, not having to worry about upgrades, backups, hosting cost, etc. is 100% worth it.
maxloh 19 hours ago [-]
It is rumored that Gitlab is about to be aquired. It may not still be open-source after that.
jmclnx 20 hours ago [-]
I went there last year due to Microsoft's destruction of github.
mdaniel 20 hours ago [-]
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
CSMastermind 20 hours ago [-]
GitLab is wonderful but none of the AI tooling supports it and it's expensive.
em-bee 20 hours ago [-]
none of the AI tooling supports it
i consider that a feature
dcchambers 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
moffkalast 20 hours ago [-]
Gitlab is like the SAP of git, something for bloated big corporations. I've never seen a single FOSS repo there.
It seems somewhat popular for developers who want to avoid github. Gnome and KiCAD also use it.
elAhmo 21 hours ago [-]
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.
__turbobrew__ 20 hours ago [-]
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.
AlexandrB 20 hours ago [-]
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.
tonyhart7 19 hours ago [-]
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
tremon 19 hours ago [-]
This -- Github's future is as a training source for Microsoft's AI products, and as a honeypot for collecting more training data.
martin-t 17 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
desolate_muffin 21 hours ago [-]
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.
joduplessis 19 hours ago [-]
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.
Fulgen 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rickette 20 hours ago [-]
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.
sunaookami 8 hours ago [-]
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.
benterix 20 hours ago [-]
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.
krainboltgreene 17 hours ago [-]
Github Actions was announced in OCT 2018, the acquisition deal close was announced a few days later.
nicce 19 hours ago [-]
Has there been any reports whether GitHub actually makes any money?
mcrk 19 hours ago [-]
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
28304283409234 18 hours ago [-]
Github is the trainingmaterial for AI. It's a resource, not a product to make money with.
nicce 18 hours ago [-]
Is there evidence that GitHub has successfully prevented other AI companies from cloning open-source projects?
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
tikhonj 20 hours ago [-]
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, etc, etc.
zzo38computer 18 hours ago [-]
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 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.
hanklazard 20 hours ago [-]
What are you using for git repos?
icepat 19 hours ago [-]
Forgejo
yoyohello13 21 hours ago [-]
I moved to GitLab a year or so ago. It’s been great, I actually prefer GitLab ci
LeifCarrotson 20 hours ago [-]
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.
yoyohello13 17 hours ago [-]
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.
alabhyajindal 17 hours ago [-]
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".
alex_suzuki 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Xiol32 17 hours ago [-]
As the kids would say, Gitlab CI is the GOAT.
mixdup 21 hours ago [-]
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
delfinom 19 hours ago [-]
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.
nashashmi 20 hours ago [-]
Seven years. And that is because they didn’t want to mess with it like all the other acquisitions.
yamirghofran 41 minutes ago [-]
We are going to need a disruptor to Github the way Linear is to Jira.
IceHegel 17 hours ago [-]
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.
apexalpha 19 hours ago [-]
>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.
jrochkind1 20 hours ago [-]
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.
moderation 18 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
MerrimanInd 21 hours ago [-]
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.
odo1242 20 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
raydev 11 hours ago [-]
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.
JCM9 20 hours ago [-]
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.
bionhoward 20 hours ago [-]
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”
angry_octet 4 hours ago [-]
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.
sschueller 19 hours ago [-]
Time to move to forgio[1]. Sadly I am stuck with gitlab for now until forgio ads projects/folders to the URI.
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.
pronik 19 hours ago [-]
Moving stuff to AI teams reminds me of Google stuffing Google+ in everything back in the day. Didn't go well.
thrown-0825 5 hours ago [-]
This company was feature complete a decade ago and is just following the natural lifecycle of post acquisition decay into irrelevancy.
yamirghofran 41 minutes ago [-]
We are going to need a disruptor to Github the way Linear was to Gira.
maelito 20 hours ago [-]
Migrated to Codeberg a few months ago. Everything's good.
Animats 19 hours ago [-]
We'll know it's over when Github requires a Microsoft login.
ivanjermakov 4 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised it's still not the case for new users.
andrekandre 11 hours ago [-]
this is an underrated comment, reminds of what happened to skype (still sad about that...)
Vipitis 20 hours ago [-]
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?
threetonesun 19 hours ago [-]
Not commits, but view your repo and see ads for all the paid tier services of the packages you use.
AtNightWeCode 18 hours ago [-]
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.
OptionOfT 20 hours ago [-]
I feel that GitHub has gotten worse lately.
* Actions are more finicky, both private (paid) and public, they crash and hang more.
> 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.
bitbasher 17 hours ago [-]
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.
zemo 13 hours ago [-]
> 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
13 hours ago [-]
KyleBerezin 19 hours ago [-]
Let the skypification begin! I can't wait to see how they integrate internet explorer, or require a microsoft account.
smsm42 17 hours ago [-]
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. ?
yencabulator 15 hours ago [-]
Github logins are MS logins already, and being pushed to use all over the place.
The only good they can do by this is remove those accounts that just signed up with cool usernames and never showed up again
informal007 10 hours ago [-]
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.
divbzero 8 hours ago [-]
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.
icy 21 hours ago [-]
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.
dijit 20 hours ago [-]
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.
zdw 19 hours ago [-]
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.
icy 19 hours ago [-]
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.
smcin 19 hours ago [-]
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.
icy 19 hours ago [-]
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.
smcin 19 hours ago [-]
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?
ctenb 20 hours ago [-]
Plug or not, this is relevant and on-topic. +1 to offset this unnecessary voting behavior.
akomtu 21 hours ago [-]
Github Pages is a must too.
icy 19 hours ago [-]
We’re working on it!
NetOpWibby 20 hours ago [-]
Damn, why all the downvotes?
advisedwang 20 hours ago [-]
Probably "bit of a shameless plug, I'll admit. I'm the co-founder". Lots of HN users don't like feeling advertised to.
icy 20 hours ago [-]
Figured it would be better to be up front about it -- and people know they can ask questions.
dr_kiszonka 19 hours ago [-]
(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.
throitallaway 20 hours ago [-]
Besides the plug, calling a company with $2B+ revenue "cooked" is annoying.
iblaine 12 hours ago [-]
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.
ec109685 8 hours ago [-]
So much spin. Bottom line is that it’s embarrassing for GitHub to have lost the ai coding race (or to be losing badly).
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
TheRealDunkirk 17 hours ago [-]
Just more proof that the merger/acquisition should never have been allowed in the first place.
immibis 10 hours ago [-]
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.
asah 8 hours ago [-]
I'm still shocked that Google didn't have the foresight to buy GitHub...
golddust-gecko 18 hours ago [-]
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...
gjvc 2 hours ago [-]
MSFT could shut down github tomorrow with impunity
jeffwask 19 hours ago [-]
So Github has entered Phase 3 of the Microsoft Acquisition lifecycle
net01 18 hours ago [-]
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?
You can't make this stuff up :) Maybe he didn't embrace AI hard enough, and that's why he is exiting the industry?
Havoc 18 hours ago [-]
Was it ever "independent"? The github monoculture seemed alarming from the get go
Einenlum 6 hours ago [-]
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.
bn-l 21 hours ago [-]
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.
thewebguyd 20 hours ago [-]
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.
20 hours ago [-]
shmerl 20 hours ago [-]
Looks like the goal is to turn Github into an "agent factory". And they still can't even support IPv6.
layer8 20 hours ago [-]
That’s par for the course, since OpenAI’s API endpoints don’t either. ;)
throwzasdf 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dcchambers 21 hours ago [-]
> 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.
brownriceowl 20 hours ago [-]
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
dcchambers 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
klabb3 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
netsharc 21 hours ago [-]
Will it be Bob or Clippy?
$ git commit
The git command has been changed to bob, please type 'bob commit' to commit.
JaKXz 21 hours ago [-]
Yikes
dizlexic 20 hours ago [-]
I am shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
I still remember Atom.
ants_everywhere 17 hours ago [-]
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.
corytheboyd 12 hours ago [-]
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)
kittikitti 14 hours ago [-]
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).
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
crawsome 18 hours ago [-]
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.
betteryourweb 16 hours ago [-]
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...
zeofig 11 hours ago [-]
It was never independent from day zero, since it was always going to be sold to M$OFT or other.
wordofx 2 hours ago [-]
Well now we know why GH is turning into a POS. They stopped working on GH a long time ago.
sub7 19 hours ago [-]
Higher the mcap, higher the pressure for rev growth, higher the garbage pushed
All your code are belong to MSCodeLLMTrainer.exe now
forrestthewoods 19 hours ago [-]
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.
Rails is hard to maintain tgat is why github is slow to innovate.
j45 17 hours ago [-]
Uh oh
Does this mean source code might get synthesized and anonymized so Ai coding agents can train on it?
buyucu 21 hours ago [-]
Expect Github to get worse. Much worse.
bithive123 18 hours ago [-]
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.
Rochus 21 hours ago [-]
Why?
buyucu 20 hours ago [-]
Microsoft customer experience is usually horrible.
beefnugs 21 hours ago [-]
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...
benoau 20 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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.
Guthur 19 hours 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.
jondusaza 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
megamindbrian2 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Puts 20 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
ninetyninenine 20 hours ago [-]
Makes sense how it's part of core AI. All code in the future will be written by AI so it's relevant categorically.
zzo38computer 18 hours ago [-]
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Saving corporate face
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.
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.
Excel at this point is specialist software, like adobe photoshop. Everything else is 'good enough'.
Seems to me Microsoft office is still the dominant player.
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.)
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.
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.
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
Your operating system cannot solve this problem.
Ofc you do. In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.
> 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.
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.
I'd argue the opposite: Powerpoint makes literacy decline.
"PowerPoint makes us stupid." – General James N. Mattis, USMC [source: https://paulgraham.com/quo.html ]
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.
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.
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."
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...
My starting point would be that in their absence, a lot of problems wouldn't have been solved with computers, for want of programmers.
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.
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?
The victors truly get to write history, don't they?
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.
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 :-(
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.
And U2
So you have notifications that you can only get rid of by engaging with the Apple ads.
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?
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.
This was obviously not ok and it never happened again this was if I recall correctly around 2012.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/mark-shuttleworth-explai...
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.
My ranking from most evil to least would be:
1. Google
2. Meta
3. Microsoft
4. Amazon
5. Apple
6. Netflix
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Arguably they're all atrocious due to effects on environment and labour rights.
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.
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.
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.
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?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick
And so on.
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.
It's almost like they were good at marketing.
They use Cassandra and make cool series ever now and then, like Love Death Robots. :-)
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…
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".
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.
Samsung doesn't build the OS, but they control it on your device.
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...
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/
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.
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.
That's not a cool guy thing
The open-source stuff is whatever, only a tiny part of the picture.
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-...
That's hardly Microsoft's fault, isn't it?
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)
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 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.
They're lucky, I have to use Win11.
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.
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...
You can't use the MS extensions with VS Codium, you are forced to use VS Code.
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
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).
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
Imagine Google blocking Edge from using Chrome extensions.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
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?
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.
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.
Only if you have no soul or morals
They aren't better people just bad people operating in an environment where better behavior is beneficial.
That is some damnably faint praise re: Windows 11, and any experienced m$ users know exactly what’s meant by that.
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?
you mean shit software like Teams that crash the whole time?
- 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.
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!
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-...
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.
> 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.
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..)
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
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.
Damn. I wasn't sure if you were trolling above and now it's clear that you were.
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. ---------------------------
Kool-Aid and tea can do that to you :)
They deserve plenty of hate.
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.
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.
https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
(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)
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.
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.
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.
Their keyboards were arguably the best ones around. I'm literally typing this on a 20 year old MS keyboard right now.
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!
but definitely not the best ones around
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.
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?
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.
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
Well, yes, that's called generational change. A lot of people have never experienced the bad old Microsoft, only the pretty cool guy Microsoft.
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’.
Commercial success hasn’t been an argument for technical supremacy since Betamax.
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.
Which? IE6? IE6 is the best web browser in existence though. You confuse standard with good.
That was 10 years ago
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?
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.
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.
You've completely answered by not answering the actual question though. Is it actually a cool 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.
This isn’t Reddit.
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.
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.
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".
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)
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I love how each sector they’re invested in is a practical monopoly.
Your honor, I rest my case!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
And probably fewer still consider switching to the alternatives. Apple is, for better or worse, usually the least bad option.
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!
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.
* Xcode 26 is kinda neat, though
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.
Linux is better.
That worm has turned, at least five years ago
Oh, and if you have problems running Linux on Macs... That isn't Linux's fault.
Hopefully either Asahi support improves in the near future or Snapdragon X Elite support in Linux becomes a bit better.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Are you sure?
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.
I think we basically agree - just clarifying here.
It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.
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.
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.
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.
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!
None of these were issues on Windows 98.
IMO, "consumer electronics enthusiasts" != "tech people"
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.
"Mostly" is not good enough. The user experience of Apple is still good, the developer experience is woeful
Are any applications on your Mac touching Rosetta right now? You'd better hope not because those single percentage gains from ARM evaporate fast.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
>...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.
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.
Performance and efficiency has been great for me. I've never run into rosetta throttling. I've got the numbers - trust me bro.
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.
This love for Apple seems to be a very US-American thing.
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.
> 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.”)
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.
Save us Ladybird, you are our only hope!
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.
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.
The DOJ noticed and is suing Apple for doing this.
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.
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.
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.
Oh wait, that’s totally not the case.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
They're both the polar opposite of "tech friendly".
Good grief. Sometimes it's good to get a reminder that there are still people who think this way.
Everyone else carries Apple devices.
GNU/Linux only exists on local VMs for containers, or servers on cloud instances.
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 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.
Only among people who don't have to develop for the Apple ecosystem.
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.
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.
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.
FTFY, Microsoft is even killing studio with successful games, like Tango.
Sounds like they just bought the IP.
You'll get the same experience as Codeberg, because Codeberg is in fact running on Forgejo
[0] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
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/
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.
It's time to move on from Github, LinkedIn, and hell ideally NPM too. Microsoft is polluting the ground water.
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.
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 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.
https://forgefed.org
The lineage of those projects is Gogs => Gitea => Forgejo
I don't think this is right. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea#Forgejo_fork.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Language and std lib wise, C# sits in the sweet spot.
It currently supports Linux as a running target for servers. It supports both running desktop software and development very badly.
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.
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.
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 don't understand people who are just consumers and have no actual business to root for MSFT or AAPL or any other company.
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.
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.
That happened three decades ago.
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).
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 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.
We shouldn't ignore the influence of trend, it's like the facebook in mobile era.
Miguel never did, and is now focused on Swift and Apple.
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.
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.
That is very puzzling... Did you compare them to anything else?
This is the sort of question I don't trust AI with yet.
- 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 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.
If you do web work it's night and day compared to VS, it pretty much includes all WebStorm features in it as well.
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.
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.
At no point in time was Microsoft one of the cool guys.
These guys are extremely bad guys.
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?
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
Pick one.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
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...
No one really associates human rights with Microsoft's reputation. That is the domain of Palantir, Meta, etc.
I very much do look very negatively on Microsoft as a collaborator with modern fascist regimes, along with Meta, Palantir, X, etc.
I'm just mentioning this for no reason whatsoever. It popped into my head, for some reason.
In what country are you bound by clauses like that? I've never heard Microsoft doing something like that before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden
https://www.cracked.com/article_23358_the-6-ballsiest-moment...
Err, don't know what you're suggesting.
You do.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
For whatever reason there are tasks that work better on one model compared to another, which can be quite perplexing.
What's that? It's not obvious to me, anyway.
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 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 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. )
https://ai.azure.com/catalog
> 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.
What's the existing functional workflow for that? Downloading the captions and querying with a local LLM or a very fuzzy keyword search?
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 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.
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.
I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem that way.
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.
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.
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 find it necessary to ask AI what that sentence even means.
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 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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
The coding agents, CC, Cursor, etc. are quite good and useful.
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.
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...
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.
Yeah, don’t ask..
Is it because you're trying to pitch it with CTO arguments on capabilities, not COO/CFO arguments like "will permanently replace N humans"?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
Why is GitHub UI getting slower? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 - Aug 2025 (113 comments)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You would think with all the AI magic, they would deliver more "core editor" features/enhancement. No, just more Copilot.
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
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
Further, git is made to be decentralized. Having the government take over a business to maintain a centralized source is the peak of absurdity.
> “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.
> 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...
Microsoft under Gates at least produced real things. I wonder when Apple gets an Indian CEO to facilitate outsourcing.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with GitHub. Will they ~~agentify~~ enshittify Visual Source Safe as well?
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.
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).
https://www.copilot.live/blog/does-github-copilot-use-your-c...
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.
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.
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"?
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
EDIT: just looked, GitLab seems caught up in AI agent hype also, and have their prices gone up?
Forgejo/Codeberg seems interesting
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
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.
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.)
The features that will be prioritized will be AI not Git improvement
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.
If you help humans collaborate better, you help LLMs collaborate better.
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.
idk why they didn't do that tbh, all ingredients are already there
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's workflow for stacked PRs is still terrible. There's plenty of room for improvement.
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.
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.
Not even mentioning AI, which is a huge opportunity also.
Of course there are - lots of room for improving data collection and advertising revenue streams!
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.
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)
Nah…
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.
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 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).
It's hard for me to see anything Microsoft does as something other than an intra-corporate political play.
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/
If you only need Git plus project tracking Gitea is super mature. It runs happily on small VPS.
Interested! Some detail on how you achieve this for free would be great.
Citation needed. nektos/act is for sure not "like GitHub's"
Sure, it's not identical, and no one claims it is. I think it's defensibly like them, though.
> 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.
Will move to that fork in one of my future private infrastructure reconstructions.
[0] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/33945
[1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/25664
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...
- 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
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.
<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
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 $$$.
most SaaS tools only have github integration which is sucks
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).
That's a silly thing to say.
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.
> 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.]
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
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.
> 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.)
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.
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 consider that a feature
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.
https://community.kde.org/Infrastructure/GitLab
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
Knot DNS[1] good enough for you ? GPL licensed.
[1] https://gitlab.nic.cz/knot/knot-dns
https://gitlab.gnome.org/ - GNOME uses Gitlab
https://gitlab.com/kicad/ - KiCad uses Gitlab
so it would be feeding off itself from "vibe coder" an have an singularity generated corpus around AI tooling
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.
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.
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.
Now this time it could be different. But last time wasn't that bad imho.
Now with copilot I'd be surprised if they weren't profitable
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.)
Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864929 - Aug 2025 (66 comments)
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.
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.
This is so confusing. The "CoreAI" team is apparently doing everything except the core of AI, which is LLMs.
I still feel that there's no competitor I like as much. But that may not matter.
0. https://ersc.io/
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.
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.
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”
[1] https://forgejo.org/
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.
This surely isn't going in any good direction. What's next ads in commits?
And the hot take is that Azure devops, including git and the pipelines, is actually better. That Github yaml trash is just a pain.
* 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...
So there is no real org change, just the CEO left and they didn't immediately replace him with a new one.
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.
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
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.
Long-term, we aim to be the new social coding platform, collectively built in the open.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
> “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...
-- Satya Nadella, 2018
in the acquisition announcement https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github...
- 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?
Always assume anyone carrying water for a mega corp is a shill or a bot or some combo.
Never make a deal with the devil.
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.
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.
Im more concerned about random breakages. When you have org pressure to add features rapidly shit breaks. Stale would be best case scenario.
$ git commit
The git command has been changed to bob, please type 'bob commit' to commit.
I still remember Atom.
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.
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
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.
All your code are belong to MSCodeLLMTrainer.exe now
The lack of tech literacy among tech bloggers is incredibly disappointing. I wish I could say it was shocking, but that’s not true.
Looks like I made the right move
... Extinguish?
https://robinhood.com/stocks/GTLB
Does this mean source code might get synthesized and anonymized so Ai coding agents can train on it?
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.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/copilot-a...
That's GitHub code -> AI.
The damage will be AI code -> GitHub
CoPilot already gives (bad) code reviews on GitHub PRs.
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.
But yeah, github has been largely unaffected.
- 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).