Discussion

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

aurareturn: Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.I'm pro-AI adoption but the way Microsoft distastefully forces Copilot into everything is how you get people to hate AI.

Animats: Microsoft will probably try to sneak it back in later. They've done that with other intrusions.Migrating away from Github just increased in priority.

computerfriend: https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilo...From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573353.

yosamino: Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means.They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people.This really is the quote of the century:> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click adsWhat a waste.

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

altmanaltman: > Hearing feedback from the community following Manson's post and the kerfuffle it generated, Rogers said, has helped him realize that "on reflection," letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge "was the wrong judgement call."Thankfully, they need the community feedback to realize it was wrong. It was so hard to guess it was wrong without the feedback! It's good to know these people are in charge of building Copilot.

scbrg: "You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now."-- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition

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

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

Dansvidania: the microsoft playbook

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

verdverm: perhaps they forgot to set thinking mode in the LLM payload

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

ozim: Exactly same for me.If I think about it, that was in my head accounted as „no one would be that stupid”.

verdverm: Would be cool if they listened to us about the top voted feedback of all time, re: when the destroyed the feedhttps://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188

kakacik: This is corporate PR speak 101, external or internal doesn't matter. None of that sentence is true and everybody knows that.Its just a theatre since other peers are dancing the same dance and they can't stick out as too rough or honest or whatever. Of course they realized this very well from the start, weighted risk of backfiring, reward for meeting some fucked up quarterly or yearly objective set by higher ups and decided to go ahead.You can safely ignore the words, just make a mental mark that this is/are sociopathic assholes, move on with life and leave the mark there for next 4 decades and act according to that knowledge the next time you deal with them or their products, if you have to.

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

lynx97: Does it matter these days if a company or administration are "the good guys"? Does "good" even have a meaning anymore? The "good" part of the world rotates in disbelief since Trump was re-elected in a democratic vote. Everyone says Microsoft is evil, since, what, the 90s?! But still, Windows is everywhere. Is anyone still buying this moral bullshit? "Goodness" obviously has no majority.

devsda: So, after Windows cleanup announcement nobody at Github thought "may be we should review all our copilot integrations to avoid another embarrassment for MS" ?That shows either it was just a Windows org announcement and not a culture change at MS or it was just an empty promise to temporarily deflect mounting criticism.Either way it is disappointment for anyone who thought it was a genuine case of introspection and change of heart at MS.

gib444: > Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.Microsoft will always be a company that pushes things on people rather than building things that attract people. It's in their DNA.

Ygg2: Thinking of megacorps as anything other than slimy, amoral, scum honestly requires superhuman levels of mental gymnastics.

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

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

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

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

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

pjc50: > letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledgeWait, did they really sneak this in entirely without user interaction? So people trying not to use AI would still risk being ""contaminated""? Incredible breach of trust. Similar kind of thing to lying about whether your product is vegan.

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

ra: [delayed]

notachatbot123: ^ Prediction market spam

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

zendist: Talking about doing it is virtue signaling.Don't just say, do! If you have a popular repository, share news of your migration to drive others to do the same.VOTE WITH YOUR FEET, PEOPLE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

crvdgc: > GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHubThey already did! https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65245

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

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

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

heyethan: That’s what makes it feel off — not the ads, but the loss of control.If something can change your PR without you explicitly asking, that’s where it crosses the line.

janalsncm: Just to push back a little, I think if the U.S. did now what they did to Germany and Japan in WW2 it would be unconscionable. They are getting a lot of flak for bombing a school. But I think it’s fair to say there were a lot of schools in Dresden and Hiroshima.This isn’t to excuse anything but to say there has been progress even if it’s not as fast as we’d like.As far as the technology angle, the precision we have now and information we have now allow much more narrow targeting, but at the same time allows us to scrutinize military actions more.

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