Hilarious how the offender on "exhibit A" [1] is the same one from the other post that made the frontpage a couple of days ago [2].
For coding, "it seems to work for me" is good enough. For software engineering, it's not.
For coding, you can use AI to write your code. For software engineering, you can't.You can 100% use AI for software engineering. Just not by itself, you need to currently be quite engaged in the process to check it and redirect it.
But AI lowers the barrier to writing code and thus it brings people will less rigour to the field and they can do a lot of damage. But it isn't significantly different than programming languages made coding more accessible than assembly language - and I am sure that this also allowed more people to cause damage.
You can use any tools you want, but you have to be rigorous about it no matter the tool.
This is a pretty common sentiment. I think it equates using AI with vibe-coding, having AI write code without human review. I'd suggest amending your rule to this:
> For coding, you can use AI. For software engineering, you can't.
You can use AI in a process compatible with software engineering. Prompt it carefully to generate a draft, then have a human review and rework it as needed before committing. If the AI-written code is poorly architected or redundant, the human can use the same AI to refactor and shape it.
Now, you can say this negates the productivity gains. It will necessarily negate some. My point is that the result is comparable to human-written software (such as it is).
Just don't expect to get decent code often if you mostly rely on something like cursor's default model.
You literally get what you pay for.
That's my policy in each of my clients and it works fine, if AI makes something simpler/faster, good for the author, but there's 0, none, excuses for pushing slop or code you haven't reviewed and tested yourself thoroughly.
If somebody thinks they can offset not just authoring or editing code, but also taking the responsibility for it and the impact it has on the whole codebase and the underlying business problem they should be jobless ASAP as they are de facto delegating the entirety of their job to a machine, they are not only providing 0 value, but negative value in fact.
These discussions are always about tactics and never operations.
No, not if I have to maintain it.
Code is liability. LLM written PRs often bring net negative value: they make the whole system larger, more brittle, and less integrated. They come at the cost of end user quality and maintainer velocity.
I get the “AI sucks” argument from a programmers point of view. It’s weird looking and doesn’t care about “code smells” or about rearranging the code base’s deck chairs just the way you like. From an owner’s or client’s perspective, human programmers suck. You want big standard CRUD app? Like a baby’s first Django app? That’s going to take at least 6 months for some reason. They don’t understand your problem domain and don’t care enough to learn it. They work 15 minutes on the hour, spend 45 on social media or games, and bill you $200/hr. They “pair program” for “quality” to double their billed rate for the same product. They bill you for interns learning how to do their job on your dime. On top of that there is still a very good chance the whole project will just be a failure. Or I can pay Anthropic $20/month and text an AI requirements on my phone when I’ve got 5 minutes of down time. If it doesn’t work I just make a new one and try again. Even if progress on AI stopped today, the world is now so much better for consumers of programs. Maybe not for developers unless you’re writing the AI and getting paid in the millions. Good for them. I’m glad to see the $200/hr Stack Overflow copy and pasters go do something else.
The difference is that a human can learn and grow.
From your examples, it sounds like we're talking about completely different applications of code. I'm a software engineer who is responding to the original topic of reviewing PRs full of LLM slop. It sounds like you are a hobbyist who uses LLMs to vibe code personal apps. Your use case is, frankly, exactly what LLMs should be used for. It's analogous to how using a consumer grade 3d printer to make toys for your kids is fine, but nobody would want to be on the hook for maintaining full scale structural systems that were printed the same way.
Obviously there’s nuance (I’ll take slop food for starving people over a healthy meal for a limited few if we’re forced to choose), but the perverse incentives in society start to take over if we allow ourselves to be ok with slop. Continuously chasing the bottom of the barrel makes it impossible for high quality to exist for anyone except the rich.
Put another way: if we as a society said “it is illegal to make slop food”, both the poor and the rich would have easy access to healthy food. The cost here would be born by the rich, as they profit off food production and thus would profit less to keep quality high.
Even in less desperate teams, as productivity grows with AI (mine does, even if I don't author code with it it's tremendous help in just navigating repos and connecting the dots, it saves me so much time...) the reviewing pressure increases too, and with that fatigue.
It is not a worthwhile use of my time to similarly "coach" LLM slop.
The classic challenge with junior engineers is that helping them ship something is often more work than just doing it yourself. I'm willing to do that extra work for a human.
LLMs can make mistakes. Humans can't.
I think think the underlying problem people have is they don't trust themselves to review code written by others as much as they trust themselves to implement the code from scratch. Realistically, a very small subset of developers do actual "engineering" to the level of NASA / aerospace. Most of us just have inflated egos.
I see no problem modelling the problem, defining the components, interfaces, APIs, data structures, algorithms and letting the LLM fill in the implementation and the testing. Well designed interfaces are easy to test anyway and you can tell at a glance if it covered the important cases. It can make mistakes, but so would I. I may overlook something when reviewing, but the same thing often happens when people work together. Personally I'd rather do architecture and review at a significantly improved speed than gloat I handcrafted each loop and branch as if that somehow makes the result safer or faster (exceptions apply, ymmv).
LLMs can make mistakes. Humans can't."
In the rare case when there is a human that is consistently persistently confidently wrong like AI, a project can identify that person and easily stop wasting their time working with that person. With masses of people being told by the vocal AI shills how amazing AI is, projects can easily be flooded with confidently wrong aaI generated PRs.
I set boundaries during design where I choose responsibilities, interfaces and names. Red Green Refactor is very useful for beginners who would otherwise define boundaries that are difficult to test and maintain.
I design components that are small and focused so their APIs are simple and unit tests are incredibly easy to define and implement, usually parametrized. Unit tests don't keep me "sane", they keep me sleeping well at night because designing doesn't drive me mad. They don't define how the "program" is supposed to work, they define how the unit is supposed to work. The smaller the unit the simpler the test. I hope you agree: simple is better than complex. And no, I don't subscribe to "you only need integration tests".
Otherwise, nice battery of ad hominems you managed to slip in: my understanding of quality software is lacking, my problem is my approach to engineering and I'm an immature developer. All that from "LLMs can automate most of the boring stuff, including unit tests with 100% coverage." because you can't fathom how someone can design quality software without TDD, and you can't steelman my argument (even though it's recommended in the guidelines [1]). I do review and correct the LLM output. I almost always ask it for specific test cases to be implemented. I also enjoy seeing most basic test cases and most edge cases covered. And no, I don't particularly enjoy writing factories, setups, and asserts. I'm pretty happy to review them.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
in my experience these tests don't test anything useful
you may you have 100% test coverage, but it's almost entirely useless but not testing the actual desired behaviour of the system
rather just the exact implementation
Brittle meaningless tests tend to lock bad decisions in, and prevent meaningful refactoring.
Bad tests simply are code debt, and dramatically increase the future cost of rework and adaptation.
He's got like 50 repos with vibe-coded, non-working Zig and Rust projects. And he clearly manages to confuse people with it:
(Honestly, that's a lot more patience than I'd be able to give what are mostly AI-generated replies, so kudos to these folk.)
I'm a big fan of LLMs but this guy is just a joke. He understand nothing of the code the LLM generates. He says things like "The LLM knows".
He is not going to convince anybody to merge is PRs, since he is not even checking that the tests the LLM generates are correct. It's a joke.
> Beats me. AI decided to do so and I didn't question it.°
° https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35573...
But for this guy specifically there's practically complete radio silence during the crypto era. It's only recently with all the AI noise that he's become active here on HN again.
function estimate_method_targets(func_name::Symbol, types::Tuple)
# Conservative estimate
# In a real implementation, we'd query the method table
return 2 # Assume multiple possibilities
end
[1] https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ai-generated-enhancements-...
Actually, I probably shouldn't make this comment publicly. It could cause another 3-5 programmer-isekai anime series.
If anyone’s answer to “why does your PR do this” is “I don’t know, the AI did it and I didn’t question it” then they need a time out.
I don't know whether to be worried or impressed.
Yes, I made mistakes along the way.
The bottleneck is not coding or creating a PR, the bottleneck is the review.
It could first judge whether the PR is frivolous, then try to review it, then flag a human if necessary.
The problem is that Github, or whatever system hosts the process, should actively prevent projects from being DDOS-ed with PR reviews since using AI costs real money.
When the world is telling you to fucking stop, maybe take a moment and listen.
The established projects are resistant to YOLOing their projects and running them on complete LLM autopilot.
You are proposing a completely different development style.
Fork Ocaml to Oca-LLM and Julia to Jul-AI and see how it goes.
I do think this is where we are heading, though.
No, existing open source projects are not ready for this and likely won't ever be.
It will start in the corporate world and maybe already has.
The breezy "challenge me on this" and "it's just a proof of concept" remarks are infuriating. Pull requests are not conversation starters. They aren't for promoting something you think people should think about. The self-absorption and self-indulgence beggar belief.
Your homepage repeatedly says you're open to work and want someone to hire you. I can't imagine anybody looking at those PRs or your behavior in the discussions and concluding that you'd be a good addition to a team.
The cluelessness is mind-boggling.
It's so bad that I'm inclined to wonder whether you really are human -- or whether you're someone's stealthy, dishonest LLM experiment.
As a troll job for the lulz it is some amazing work. Hats off
> Claude discovered a bug in the Zig compiler and is in the process of fixing it!
...a few minutes later...
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/25974
I can see a future job interview scenario:
- "What would you say is your biggest professional accomplishment, Joel?"
- "Well, I almost single-highhandedly drove Zig away from Github"
If you think about it, Joel is net positive to Zig and its community!
the bootlicking behavior must must be like crack for wannabes. jfc
>I did not write a single line of code but carefully shepherded AI over the course of several days and kept it on the straight and narrow.
>AI: I need to keep track of variables moving across registers. This is too hard, let’s go shopping… Me: Hey, don’t any no shortcuts!
>My work was just directing, shaping, cajoling and reviewing.
How people can say that without the slightest bit of reflection on whether they're right or just spitting BS
I don't know enough about the project to know if it makes any sense, but the Zig contributor seemed confused (at least about the title).
I made the mistake of poorly documenting that PR.
I would offer this one instead.
When I was a kid, every year I'd get so obsessed about Christmas toys that the hype would fill my thoughts to the point I'd feel dizzy and throw up. I genuinely think you're going through the adult version of that: your guts might be ok but your mind is so filled with hype that you're losing self-awareness.
This is not my first interaction with him outside HN, I already talked to him privately when this was starting to unfold in the OCaml community. Then I gave up, flagged his ads for the mods and blocked him for a few months, but I've kept encountering his drama on github and HN.
> existing open source projects are not ready for this and likely won't ever be.
i.e. he is enlightened and these projects are just not seeing The Way™.
Please point out where my interaction with project maintainers has been disrespectful and I'll note it to shape up in the future.
"Thanks X Person"
You're the direct cause to open source burn out.
In either case I'd argue it is no longer good faith if asked to stop and you continue and do not learn from your peers.
Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized to make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance of getting hired. Any non-mainstream platform is not as compelling to get social credits.
Do people really get hired for bunch of PRs to random repos on GH or just think they will? My impression has always been that GH profile is completely ignored by both recruiters and interviewers.
Communication skills (or lack thereof) on PRs or issues they opened is something I try to look for if they provide a Github profile. Signs of a big ego that will likely get in the way of day-to-day work is the main thing I look out for and it's sadly not that uncommon.
https://docs.github.com/en/communities/moderating-comments-a...
Alternatively you can use a bot or a GitHub Action to automatically change the description and title of the pull request to something like “[PRs are not allowed and deleted automatically]”. But yeah not a perfect solution either…
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/top-story-industry-partner...
There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they start doing this, which ends up with you shoving yourself into a cold dark corner of the internet and still not being completely detached from the badness because Cisco provides infrastructure for nearly every major weapons manufacturer and defense department globally.
You are the one summoning that spiral by making a cheap gotcha wrt codeberg using Paypal.
The project apparently could and did move because the swith from github to codeberg wasn't that big of an impact, and because, while the new forge is not perfect, they feel the association is less severe. There is no "purity spiral" in that, just a pragmatic choice factoring in ethics.
If GitHub were the sole game in town, maybe (probably) they wouldn’t have switched. But it isn’t, and they found something which in their view is an acceptable replacement and less worse. So yeah, maybe they don’t ethically agree with everyone on every thing up the chain, but they apparently agree with them more. That matters. You take a stand where you are able to.
You are making an ethical judgment when you say, in essence, that 'it is wrong for businesses (and non-profits) to attempt to act in an ethical manner, aligned with their mission statement'.
Making an ethical argument about the purposelessness and futility of ethics is... interesting to say the least. Please, consider stopping the internet today and instead spend time with a book on ethics that you think agrees with you sensibilities, and then look at this situation again.
People that use the former like a slur seem to need to believe that the latter cannot be true.
I wouldn't want to live in a world like that personally, assuming nefarious intention behind every good act (people in positions of highest power excepted). It seems exhausting.
Andrew Kelley means what he says and says what he means (in an on-the-spectrum way). It makes him off-putting and charming in equal measure, depending on the issue. But you shouldn't assume that this is a mere 'signal', it is what he believes.
Speaking for myself, I do disassociate myself from unethical products and people. It's not always as soon as I'd like, Amazon being a good example. I've never regretted doing so.
It's not even worth bragging about, who would even care? I just despise lying, and if I want to believe that I behave ethically without lying to myself, this is the natural consequence.
They are not going Categorical imperative here.
If this forces them to rethink and build a better GitHub, can't wait.
You have a point, of course, but for many options, the best we can do is avoid the worst one as there's no perfect solution. I'm not saying that people should leave GitHub because of this, but I can see why some would and why they may pick a different, still not perfect, alternative instead of doing everything themselves.
Reducing harm where feasible is still meaningful, and certainly better than no attempt at all.
> Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE,
and the rest of the article provides technical reasons.
"I hate GitHub because X Y and Z features are bad" is a good reason to move away; "I hate GitHub because one of their thousands of enterprise customers does not align with my political views" is not, in my opinion.
For the record, I do not support ICE
This seems like a minor nitpick as those two are intimately tangled up, but it matters to make the distinction. Standing up for others is not petty or self-serving and that's exactly what this sort of conflation can falsely imply.
Did you know that all {women!} (over 12 million every year) are actually most endangered by their intimate partners, who are predominately within their same race and class?
Do you think this is more or less concerning than this inflammatory anecdata you've created an account to provide? Do you think that domestic violence prevention (less than 1 billion) should be more or less well-funded than ICE (170 billion)?
> (Under the Trump admin): Teams responsible for violence prevention have been decimated, and a reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services has eliminated divisions wholesale.
This will no doubt rankle those who align with that group, but they are a pathetic remnant of a terrible period of rampant sociopathy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's disappointing to see such a long-term community member engage so thoughtlessly. I know the guidelines also say I should just flag and move on, but this will only reenforce your narrative, and I am hoping to break the cycle.
Instead we're all sitting here talking about it instead of the technical reasons.
This is not, and has never been, about the murderers. The murderers are the excuse, the people who are actually being harassed and brutalized are not them. And as mentioned, many of them are American citizens.
The post ends with an indictment of capitalism.
I agree, and my view is that it goes much further. Quoting author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.".
They don't state it as the only reason as you imply, but as something that contributed to their decision.
[1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-u...
Jokes aside, the technical depth it takes to make that one server run is impressive. That makes me more interested in codeberg, not less, though I’m going to keep my own mirror of the zig repo until they get some better hardware.
(This should not be read to imply that I think that GitHub’s reliability is acceptable; it clearly isn’t.)
Status: CI down due to cloud issues.
Seems to be a safer bet to limit hosting related weaknesses and unknowns, considering move from github being quite disruptive already.
We do self-host all our CI machines.
After that they appreciate GitHub Sponsors, but say it is now a complete liability just because a project leader left. What are the actual changes? Any new rule? But no, it is now a "liability" and we should accept it.
Honestly speaking I like how big projects are exploring new hosting options. But there is no need to attack other platforms like this to promote your new host.
So you just chose to ignore the technical problems we have with GitHub Actions and then say there are no problems. That's certainly a take.
> That CI system created by so called monkeys is the one of the best free CI service in the world.
We self-host all our CI machines so the "free" hosted runners have no relevance here.
> Not everyone has the millions of dollars like Zig Foundation to create their own CI servers.
We don't have "millions of dollars". If only!
I'd also note that we spend our money very efficiently; most of our CI machines are consumer-grade hardware hosted in team member's homes. We don't just throw endless amounts of money at cloud providers.
> After that they appreciate GitHub Sponsors, but say it is now a complete liability just because a project leader left. What are the actual changes? Any new rule? But no, it is now a "liability" and we should accept it.
GitHub Sponsors is a liability because Microsoft can increase their cut at any time, or even axe it outright if they don't think it's profitable for them anymore. This risk is very real considering that, as Andrew pointed out, the feature has been neglected for years. It is objectively less risky for us to have donors use a platform like Every.org.
What exactly is different about GitHub sponsors here?
Some typical dynamics:
Big org platform -> exposed to risk, as you are not a significant addition to their bottom line
Small donation platform -> Can be easily bullied by payment processors to "derisk"
---
every.org is a bit special, as it only lists 501c nonprofits - which the Zig Foundation is - and AFAIK has a decent track record. Most other open source projects don't clear that bar.
Unless it's miraculously improved recently as it's been a couple years for me, they didn't even document their regex/pattern matching. Best I could find via searching was that it was whatever Ruby used, which wasn't any kind of real standard.
I don't want to call anyone names, but whoever defends said system deserves some ribbing.
PS: also Gitlab CI is so much better than GH Actions that they are not even in the same league. It is very apparent that Gitlab is actually dogfooding their stuff, which is not the impression I get from any Github feature.
Micros$$$$ft owns github.
We don't need to give some pretend sympathy.
When you can afford to have good things, and you're not, don't come crying about getting called bad names.
Actions is bad.
> I dare anyone who is delusional enough to think they can create something better to actually make something better
Actions speak louder than words.
Zig is leaving because of the issues they mentioned.
> People tried other services like GitLab and realized it is slower, uglier and overall worse than GH and came crawling back.
Maybe. I guess we'll see.
I think the OP has been pretty clear that they're not happy with it, and, they're putting their money where their mouth is.
Clearly, just complaining about broken things isn't working.
Maybe a couple more big moves like this is what GH needs to wake up and allocate some more resources (that they, can categorically afford) to fixing things.
Zig is leaving GH for another provider. They did not make a better GH and fixed all the problems with it.
You literally have to fill out a form to convince Codeberg that you need CI. I would take GH CI over that.
These aren't false claims.
Thats my point.
Microsoft can afford to make these tools better; they just dont care.
Yes, its better than having nothing, but honestly you have to be wearing blinkers not to see the decline rn.
They certainly have enough money, but can they actually improve it? Who could step in? How? Do you think more hiring would help? Or would it make it worse?
Leadership could try and step in by force. But they'd have to undermine whoever is running github actions to do so. It would be a huge, risky political move. And for what? Are they actually losing customers over gh actions? I doubt it. I'm just not sure anyone cares to spend that much political capital to "fix" something that is arguably not that broken.
Big companies also simply can't fix stuff that's broken internally. Its not a money thing. Its a culture & politics thing. Its a leadership thing.
For example, does anyone remember Google Code? It was a github-like code hosting service that predated github by many years. Compared to github, it was terrible. When github came out, google could have rewritten Code from the ground up to copy github's better design and better choices. (Kind of like android did with ios). But they didn't. Github kicked their butt for many years. But nothing happened. They couldn't fix it. Now google code is basically dead.
Or why didn't Adobe build a viable figma competitor? Why didn't microsoft make a successful iphone or ipad competitor? Why didn't intel win the contract to make the iphone CPU? These aren't money problems. Its something else.
I've only heard stories of a couple leaders who had the force of personality to fix problems like this. Like Steve Jobs. And Elon Musk pulls some wild stunts too. Frankly, I don't think I'd like to work under either of them.
> But they'd have to undermine whoever is running github actions
I'm not sure if anybody is running the GH Actions project at the moment beyond bare maintenance work and trying to keep the whole thing from collapsing into a pile of rubble. There is also no separate Github entity anymore within Microsoft, so nothing to "undermine".
Did you read the article?
That is what I meant by the BEST FREE CI provider. It is not the best if you have money for something better.
I built a similar matrix to test wazero (of which I'm a maintainer).
But if you do know of alternatives, I'm all ears.
It really isn't (look at Gitlab's for comparison), the only advantage of Github CI is that it offers free Mac runners.
The CI service itself is an absolute trash fire caused by the usual Microsoft NIH, and if they have financial means not to deal with it anymore, I see no reason for them to waste their limited development time on dealing with it.
FYI Azure has its own CI service and that's pretty bad too.
With the implication that MS is free to harvest it for LLM training?
Sad state of affairs
> with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress.
and
> More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys
are juvenile.
To me this said more than anything else in the post. The fact that there are genuine people at forgejo/codeburg that give a thought about what they are working on is pure gold.
This says more about the author than anything else.
It seems to me that the real "losers" are the ones spending so much time bitching and moaning about a software platform they don't like.
They are doing more than that.
Which is itself a political position, a privileged one at that
This is par for the course for him. He's quite a bit like Linus [1].
He needs to start following his own advice [2].
[1] https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk/112362751644363647
[2] https://andrewkelley.me/post/open-letter-everyone-butted-hea...
More opensource projects should move off GitHub. I moved off it myself.
- GitHub
- BinCode
- GitLab
- SourceHut
- CodeBerg
Codeberg (Forgejo) is Free software, GitHub isn't. Not everything is about the software features.
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2025-11-20-whats-cooking-q4-2025/
I doubt the next generation of programmers will have any idea what it means to contribute code "by mailing list".
What's this about?
The drama in the open source community is no less fun than YouTubers or celebrities.
Great way to begin Thanksgiving.
And that second link is really grasping at straws lol
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41838124
I generally like Sourcehut and Drew's writing but I just learned about this and I find it disappointing.
He collected all Stallman statements about Epstein and related subjects (this is perfectly ok) and then wrote his own summaries which completely misrepresent the things which were actually said. So what happened was that a lot of people just skimmed the summaries and concluded that Stallman molests children, or says that it's ok to do so etc etc.
If fact I have taken to link the Stallman report and add "don't read the summaries, read only the things that Stallman actually said". This only works if I believe the person is in good faith, of course. I would suggest the same to you.
Kinda horrible to see that the 4chan bigots use the same strategy to try to discredit drew devault, and implying things of ownership through their own created fake accounts and smearing campaigns. Pretty much all allegations on that page are circumstantial evidence, especially the bot ownership parts that sircmpwn even took down while citing those bigots using it to scrape child porn.
And then the dude of dmpwn posting things on image boards with the tag dmpwn, and forgetting to remove that from screenshots? lol, really?
Having experienced the same kind of doxxing attempts by 4chan bigots, /pol/ and kiwifarms, I think I am qualified to comment on how they operate.
Maybe someone needs to summon the Antichrist a second time to thin out the herd, huh?
No need, Drew does a good job himself.
Is sr.ht tainted now or still a decent place to host code? I can't quite tell.
I hate that this is now a thing you can ask unsarcastically.
Just use the tool you like the best man, screw what other people think. Yes, there's people who will go "you're bad because your use a tool that's made by a guy who said something wrong about Stallman" (or whatever he did exactly again). These people are not worth your attention.
I moved my private repos to sr.ht ages ago because it was the open source, free software, ethical, longevitable approach. And stepping away from the mega corporations and everything going on with those.
I was wondering whether this was still the case.
If you didn't know what Codeberg's political stance really is and how they treat the inconvenient part of their userbase... I guess now you know.
On the exact page you're on is a link to an issue [0] acknowledging that the CAPTCHA is inaccessible and expressing that they plan to drop it (albeit with no concrete time-frame). I don't at all understand your argument that Codeberg must be slow at replying to emails (the "manual fallback path") because Wikimedia are; these are two completely unrelated entities and I don't see why you would make inferences about one from the other.
I’m hopeful AI tools can improve qol for those who require screen readers and similar tools but have a sinking feeling that it will only transfer even more of the burden for accessible access from operator to user.
This really depends on company size, and the company in question.
Everything Microsoft does in this space is excellent, VS Code almost feels like an app specifically designed for the blind at times. Other large companies aren't as good, but their products are usually somewhat usable.
Startups are a mixed bag, Zed is notoriously and completely inaccessible for example. Most SaaS tools wouldn't pass an audit but can be used with significant annoyances.
Open Source is usually pretty bad. GTK still doesn't do any accessibility on non-Linux platforms. QT used to be completely inaccessible, although they've significantly improved in the last couple years. Linux in general has major issues that makes it almost unusable unless you understand it at a very deep level, and maybe not even then.
Accessibility isn't a sexy thing to do, so unless you're practicing manager-driven development, nobody wants to work on it.
Yep. The start menu ads are also excellent as long as you're blind and can't see them.
It mainly depends on whether the company is trying to sell to governments that have accessibility requirements anchored into their procurement process requirements. Of course there is some causality between company size and ability to service government contracts.
Accessibility is the opposite position of that - but it's by no means a universally accepted good, unfortunately, especially when it requires extra effort to implement.
Those parties still exist today.
- https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fox-friends-h...
In my country (Spain) we put eg ramps for wheelchairs no matter the political party. It's considered a human rights or moral issue, not a political one.
Admittedly some of those may be a bit ... unusual. Like the guy who created TempleOS.
So unless you've got any bright ideas, I'm stuck in this Microsoft job till someone comes up with some magical Linux roles, or I start my own Linux-based company and twiddle my thumbs because there's no customers...
Then your beef is with capitalism, not Github/MSFT.
EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. It's not a value judgement on Github employees, it's about the meaning of the word "loser". Go back to your teenage years. What's a loser? Someone, often through no fault of their own, keep being in a bad situation, having the "short end of the stick". What characteristically makes them losers is that they lack the audacity to snap out of it.
Isn't that an accurate definition of what "loser" generally means?
"Loser" is a catch-all taunt that bypasses empathy. But certainly they might be 'in a losing situation', which is an important distinction.
> Except for the "disabilities" part, which is problematic to classify
Disability in this context is something intrinsic to the person (e.g., physically, mentally) that makes the employment process substantially difficult to engage with.
In addition to disability, difficulty can also arise do to any prejudice that might be levelled against them (e.g., ageism, sexism, junior vs senior, skin color, language skills, country of origin), as well as visa consideration, financial situation, etc. There's so many things that affect the risk calculus of changing jobs.
Why bring people down so hard? That is really solid money and you can provide for a family, retire in your 40s, and it is work that does not destroy your body.
Trying to ascribe positive/negative impact to strangers isn't usually a useful exercise, even if you have enough data to make a solid case. It can be cathartic -- imagine a different world where programmers making things worse would screw off and go do something else that's not programing! (I have a similar imagining, like of a world where programming is done by those who love it even outside of work -- even though I've worked with and helped hire excellent engineers who only treated programming as a job, they weren't my favorite to work with, and some were very much not excellent.) The best you can hope for is to trigger some self-reflection, and I do think that's important on an individual level. It's better to not make the world uglier, if you notice yourself doing so, and it's not just a distortion of your thinking, then you should probably stop, do something else, or figure out if it's at a level that you can compensate. A Richard Stallman quote I like:
"The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."
It's so refreshing to read such a truly philosophical insight.
Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.
> intermittent outages
Those seem like conflicting statements to me. Last outage was only 13 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915731.
Also, there have been increasing reports of open source maintainers dealing with LLM generated PRs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274. GitHub seems perfectly positioned to help manage that issue, but in all likelihood will do nothing about it: '"Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career," Dohmke wrote, citing one of the developers who GitHub interviewed.'
I used to help maintain a popular open source library and I do not envy what open source maintainers are now up against.
I genuinely don't understand this position. Is this not what Github issues bots were made for? No matter where your repo is hosted, you take the onus of moderating it onto yourself.
Downtimes are an issue, it's why I jokingly mentioned it. Besides that I'm without gripe. Make Github a high-nines service and I'll keep using it until the wheels fall off.
I don’t use Azure or Windows. At work I push against Teams and actively try to persuade customers not to use Microsoft products. The reason isn’t even ideological - most of the time their products suck and the dev support is bad. VScode may be an exception, I’ll give them that.
But even then, you are right that that the moat of social cachet and implicit trust is still more valuable than the moat of technical implementation.
Now - what if you are not ok with it? What can you do?
> Almost offensively usable
I think you conflate two points here. One is how useable github is. The other is: control. At which point are you no longer ok with what a private company does? This is not solely about Microsoft alone by the way.
Yes. Are you not? It's one of the most effective measures to prevent a whole class of supply chain attacks. On Github the 2FA is also flexible enough to allow non-hardware passkeys, so you can choose a privacy preserving option with good UX.
For example it was impossible to remove/delete a phone number 2fa, even if you registered multiple other 2fa sources like security keys.
The outages have gone from "almost every Friday" to "several times per week".
Interestingly that is synonymous with losers according the definition of it in gervais principle. Which weirdly makes being called a loser less of an insult. (More like realist)
"I also strongly believe that you should not be proud of working for Microsoft, and particularly on GitHub for the last 5 years. I truly am sorry but you need to be called out."
https://hachyderm.io/@andrewrk@mastodon.social/1156234452984...
But it's fine to say "this PR makes no sense to me explain it better please" and close it.
LLMs reduce the effort to create a plausible PR down to virtually zero. Requiring a human to write the code is a good indicator that A. the PR has at least some technical merit and B. the human cares enough about the code to bother writing a PR in the first place.
The vast majority of of LLM generated code that gets submitted in PRs on public GitHub projects is not that - see the examples they gave.
Reviewing all of that code on its merits alone in order to dismiss it would take an inordinate amount of time and effort that would be much better spent improving the project. The alternative is a blanket LLM generated code ban, which is a lot less effort to enforce because it doesn't involve needing to read piles and piles of nonsense.
No, its pretty standard legal policy actually.
What people don't like about LLM PRs is typically:
a. The person proposing the PR usually lacks adequate context and so it makes communication and feedback, which are essential, difficult if not impossible. They cannot even explain the reasoning behind the changes they are proposing, b. The volume/scale is often unreasonable for human reviewed to contend with. c. The PR may not be in response to an issue but just the realization of some "idea" the author or LLM had, making it even harder to contextualize. d. The cost asymmetry, generally speaking is highly unfavorable to the maintainers.
At the moment, it's just that LLM driven PRs have these qualities so frequently that people use LLM bans as a shorthand since writing out a lengthy policy redescrbiing the basic tenets of participation in software development is tedious and shouldn't be necessary, but here we are, in 2025 when everyone has seemingly decided to abandon those principles in favor of lazyily generating endless reams of pointless code just because they can.
Usually I hate quoting "laws" but think about it. I do agree that it would be awesome if we scrutinize 10+k lines of code to bring big changes but its not really feasible is it?
No, I don't think it is. There's more nuance to this debate than either "we're banning all LLM code" or "all of our features are vibe coded".
A blanket ban on unreviewed LLM code is a perfectly reasonable way to mitigate mass-produced slop PRs, but it is not reasonable to ban all code generated by an LLM. Not only is it unenforceable, but it's also counterproductive for people who genuinely get value out of it. As long as the author reviews the code carefully before opening a PR and can be held responsible, there's no problem.
When there's a grey zone then there will be lots of pointless discussions like "why was this AI-generated PR accepted but not mine" etc etc...
However, I don't think that banning all AI-generated code is reasonable. Having an LLM generate a couple of functions or a bit of boilerplate in an otherwise manually coded PR should not invalidate it from being accepted if it's helpful.
LLMs jump at the first opportunity to use regex for EVERYTHING instead of doing proper lexing/parsing, for example. You need to repeatedly tell it not to use regex. In the end you might as well hand write your code, because you actually know how it works, unlike a clueless LLM.
More seriously: I probably wouldn't have called every single current employee of GitHub a "loser", but more because I think truly cool people don't define themselves by where they happen to work at any given time. I'm sure the vast majority of people at GitHub are just tech employees trying to earn a living and don't particularly care whether the Zig guy thinks they're cool or not. What actually matters is that GitHub is a big centralized platform run by Microsoft for their own ends, and it's good to be free of it.
Not only have some of these folks - including the creator - been shitting in Rust threads, but here they're in here shitting on the awesome engineers at Github for no reason at all.
Good god.
edit: this is written by Andrew, the creator. The culture is rotten from the head.
i’m really twisting my finger at the temple here.
This is only the billionth time he's said something like this. He's apologized for it in the past and said he'd change, but it clearly didn't stick.
He's a jerk and a bully like Linus.
This is the guy setting culture at Zig, which is undoubtedly why five people responded to me in this thread with homophobic remarks. His community feels emboldened to do that.
When your leader breaks the Code of Conduct and attacks people, it probably feels like a safe space for all sorts of hatred and vile behavior.
Totally toxic.
Andrew has had a chance to read this thread by now. He's had a chance to reflect on the awful things people have said. Ball's in his court.
others are shaming. many could, if not agree, at least understand that. you’re calling “rotten”. wtf man.
Anyway, the clear absurdity of this particular post aside, it's not OK to call other people monkeys. I make no statement on the quality of their engineering. But they're people! I'd hope to see a quiet dignity from the Zig folks here. They've done so much excellent work, and I'm sure it's frustrating to see what software can be and then have it sharply laid against what software often is. But kindness is always the way.
Thanks to everyone involved with Zig for their work and love of software!
That was the entirety of the contribution. It was gloating. And there is a long history of this.
There's open source contributions, and then there's this.
> Anyway, the clear absurdity of this particular post aside, it's not OK to call other people monkeys.
You don't see how the two are related?
In what way is the tone of the linked messages appropriate?
To be clear I like Rust and use it frequently and have for about as long as it's been publicly released, whereas I have only played around a little bit with Zig and I suspect I won't like it as much as Rust even when it's feature-complete. But I don't like seeing an attempt to enforce a social norm that it's wrong to point out shortcomings of Rust, especially when it's aimed at people doing the interesting and valuable work of exploring other areas of the systems programming language design space that Rust is not doing.
It reminds me of the creeps in school that punched me, shoved me into lockers, tried to assault me.
I almost killed myself as a kid because of bullies. Some people never grow out of that, it seems.
Calling people losers isn't classy, but if I were a well-paid Microsoft employee I'd laugh all the way to the bank that some community funded purist called me that. If it's supposed to be bullying he isn't very good at it.
They're punching employees on a team. People with less freedom and autonomy than the Ziglang ICs.
On the scale of FAANG comp, Microsoft is at the lower end of the scale. I've had several jobs making more in TC than Microsofties.
Regardless, it's hard for me to imagine that many readers will find great intellectual interest in a long thread about what a terrible person Andrew is.
Also recently wrote about our vision and commitment to indies and communities (and never enterprise!): https://anirudh.fi/future
You're running what aims to be a major programming language - have it where people expect and live with your gripes about the platform.
In retail you set up your store in the biggest mall with the most customers walking past - sure you can go set up in some back alley but don't expect customers to come to your store. This remains true even if the mall owns forget to mop the floor.
This feels immature and does not give confidence in the project/language leadership.
The core types who will make use of, contribute to, and/or otherwise use the repo likely don't need it to be on GitHub. Having it "where people expect" is useful for drive-by contributions but Zig doesn't really need that.
Furthermore, why should we as a larger community cede things to GitHub and Microsoft? It doesn't change unless larger parties move the needle.
For an example of another language that avoids being entirely coupled into Github, Go has it's real code hosting and CI interaction on a Gerrit instance, with some sync back and forth to GitHub for a few items.
The CI pain and operational blindness mentioned in the Zig post is entirely real.
Zig needs to behave more mainstream rather than less and technical gripes about the source hosting platform should not matter more than marketing.
People who get angry when they see bad code, so much to call the developers lackeys and monkeys.
And an organization whose code base doesn't have to be on a mainstream server to attract exactly those who agree with this choice.
so making tough decisions is now immature this days lol.
> mall owns forget to mop the floor
quite a whitewashing i would say.
Perhaps people should stop expecting all source code to be on a microsoft platform?
Not that I necessarily disagree with their reasoning, but stick to having strong feelings about your core "mission"? It just feels a bit "unstable". Hard to imagine such stuff coming from Java or Python or whatever other major language
[0]: https://sqlite.org/copyright.html#:~:text=Open%2DSource%2C%2...
It is deeply unfortunate that Git won instead of Mercurial and even more unfortunate that GitHub won. GitHub's code review/PR UI is an abomination. We had better tools 15 years ago and GitHub is still a regression. There are tons of reasons to move off it if you're willing to pay the cost of working with alternatives.
It's a double hit of latency, and for bonus points, the commit messages won't load at all if your browser is slightly out of date
I don’t hate GitHub or anything, but its UI is way slower now than it use to be.
And I this case it is a little surprising. Andrew is generally a pretty nice dude, has gone out of his way to try and make a fairly welcoming community. The Zig foundation also has Loris, who normally handles PR stuff, so he could have written this instead of Andrew.
Finally, that's such a bullshit stereotype. Plenty of people in the software world are perfectly friendly and articulate.
I’m ok if sometimes a nerd displays some emotion online.
I’m corporate, so I have to manage my shit. I use LLMs to manage that. I’m glad Andrew has a space where he doesn’t have to.
I have... questions about Zig leadership
Believe it or not, there are platforms outside of the big 3.
The GitHub Actions runner does not work on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and illumos, all of which are operating systems we either have existing support for, or intend to start supporting properly soon. (We already have FreeBSD CI; machines for the other 3 are arriving at my place tomorrow as it happens.)
And that's ignoring CPU architectures; the upstream GitHub Actions runner only supports x86 and aarch64. We had to maintain a fork that adds support for all the other architectures we care about such as riscv, loongarch, s390x, etc. We will also likely be adding mips64 and powerpc64 to the mix in the future.
Even IBM have to maintain an s390x fork because Microsoft can't even be bothered to accept PRs that add more platforms: https://github.com/uweigand/runner
That's great. I hope it works out, and you have CI for NetBSD, OpenBSD, and illumos, too.
Go's support for NetBSD has been a big boon to the more casual NetBSD user who isn't going to maintain a port. It means a random Go open-source project you use probably works on NetBSD already, or if it doesn't, it can be fixed upstream. Maybe Zig could play a similar role.
It's a shame GitHub doesn't have native CI even for FreeBSD on x86-64. I can see the economic case against it, of course. That said, the third-party Cross-Platform GitHub Action (https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/action) has made Free/Net/OpenBSD CI practical for me. I have used it in many projects. The developer is currently working on OmniOS support in https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/omnios-builder.
In fact, we do already have cross-compilation support for NetBSD (and FreeBSD). But we currently only "test" NetBSD by building the language behavior tests and standard library tests for it on Linux, i.e. we don't actually run them, nor do we build the compiler itself for NetBSD. Native CI machines will allow us to fill that gap.
As it happens, Go's cross-compilation support does indeed make our lives easier for provisioning CI machines since we can build the Forgejo Runner for all of them from one machine: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/runner/releases/tag/v12.0.0
A bug that they have encountered, have reported, with a description of the root cause, and has not been fixed. A bug that has wasted their time and money.
"We don't like being hosted under microsoft due their business practices" is perfectly fine argument, no need to nitpick bugs out of bugtracker for justification
I used to look up to the Zig folks…
Microsoft controlling GitHub is an issue, but one can see this issue emerging in different places too; see shopify puting pressure on the ruby ecosystem, ending with various developers who contributed to ruby (in particular via gems and bundler) no longer being accepted there (via RubyCentral's take-over, under shopify's directive and influence onto ruby). Many more examples can be given here. The thing is that money buys influence, ultimately dictating who can contribute and how. Python forcing mandatory 2FA onto all developers is also an example here - the hobbyist who just contributes code, has not really any benefit here, whereas corporations delegate more "security" onto unpaid folks.
People like this are ruining open source for the rest of us, and those poor maintainers really have their work cut out for them sorting through this slop.
I’m sure ICE spends more than $200k at Dunkin’ Donuts are they in a relationship ?
Aside from the bitter words against Github (and I read comments here forgetting about the very real consequences with people lives like collaboration with ICE), using codeberg is using Forgejo : those technology are by us and for us. Unlike Github we can run our own if necessary and all the technology (actions and such) can be improved and be shared between us.
An other benefit of Forgejo/Codeberg is the absence of pushing for paying more, Github is not free and lives of users going to Azure/Gemini or other Mircrosoft services. There are many parts that are made/changed to nudge people into paying more and more and be vendor-locked.
I like my life to have the fewest dark patterns as possible and Coderberg is extremely helpful.
I wouldn’t move business critical repos there .
Everyone loses their mind when GitHub goes down once every 2 years . If codeberg provided SLas , they would probably breach them weekly
Privately Forgejo is fullfilling all my needs with very little maintenance work.
Uhh ... More like every two weeks there's some kind of incident.
I push to Github and then an Action mirrors the code to Codeberg automatically.
I'd fully switch over except practically everybody is on Github and nobody is on Codeberg, and I've had more outages with Codeberg than Github over the past year.
It really feels like there could be some good tooling in this area to make working through multiple Forge's easier and not force things to be centralized so much. Hopefully more projects moving out of Github makes it easier and gets more people contributing elsewhere.
I don't think there is all that much friction in distributing git, it's one of the easiest tools to have multiple remotes on. The auxiliary tooling is all open source too, so not much in the way of hosting your own, or for hosted platforms offering the services.
The social aspect of the hosted platforms is unlikely to ever be distributed because that is basically githubs only differentiation.
A managed update service could work to replicate and then raise an error during conflicts . Call it “agentic” and you might get $75m
While I like the idea of a more distributed repository environment, I will miss the project discoverability, social aspects, and centralization that GitHub offers. It'll probably be awhile before I make a switch, but I will eventually.
Most of my commits for the past five or so years are not on GitHub (both in professional and personal contexts), but that does not equal to me not having a GitHub account and occasionally using it to raise issues / submit PRs to someone else's project that happens to be on GitHub.
GitHub is just not my go-to platform anymore.
Have fun with your newfound virtue, Zig folks!
The message itself could be a bit nicer however. I agree with what it says but not with how it is written.
Zig spent years removing dependencies on the system C compiler (zig cc), removing dependencies on libc, and is currently working to remove the dependency on LLVM (the self-hosted backend).
GitHub was just another dependency.
For a project obsessed with reproducibility and toolchain sovereignty, relying on a single proprietary platform (and its changing ToS/AI policies) was a massive architectural liability. They aren't just moving repos; they are eliminating 'Platform Risk' the same way they eliminated 'Linker Risk'.
Zig team ought to probably write about it in that manner.
Folks, we have to stop this bullshit. NOBODY is perfect. Not you. Not me. Not anyone. It IS entirely possible that some script thing was written by an intern and it doesn't quite work right. That's possible. Does that make them a shitty intern?
As I've told others, and try to tell others, empathy is super important in the tech field. As a fellow autistic person who used to be this way towards other people, I find it equally as jarring now and completely turns me off to listening to whatever that person has to say when they make posts like this.
Give people some grace, make fixes, move on with your life. That's the beauty of OSS development. Submit some patches, reach out to maintainers, open a dialog, have good conversation. Don't just shit all over someone for the sake of doing so even if they are doing something "stupid".
I promise you we will ALL be better for it.
Good move anyway.
Man, sometimes I feel like I live on a different planet. I have been using GitHub since 2010 and—while I really wish I had a nicer way of putting this—I cannot remember a time when all of the flagship products were not uniformly either worst-in-class or close to it. Code review/PRs, issues, code search, CI, a real enterprise offering, and now AI features: all of these offerings had gaps serious enough to instigate real, threatening upstarts, and some of those upstarts were themselves big enough to become public companies. Seriously. A viable path to IPO from 2013 to (say) 2019 was literally "make a version of a GitHub feature that simply does not suck."
I loved GitHub in 2010. I also remember those years, 2013 to 2019, being essentially totally lost, with no meaningful product movement at all. Am I truly alone in this? What is this Andrew talking about here?
I'm not going to defend the Microsoft acquisition, but at least—excruciatingly slowly—things like code review and issues are finally starting to receive features. It's crazy to say it out loud but that is what I see.
I just can't help but think the product "enshittification" narrative here is an ex post justification of the author's own feelings.
But that’s very faint praise.
edit: I say as a GitHub sponsor of Zig for the past few years. I do see that I'll have to move that, and maybe I will, but I don't love having yet another account with saved credit card info and subscription to manage...
Yes issues have been filed but more could be done back channel.
Personally - I think GitHub is a cultural artifact now. Of the entire planet. Hackers and curious minds from Japan to Alaska and everything in-between flock to GitHub.
If IBM cannot get Microsoft to work with them on something so small but impactful, there's no chance we can.
> Personally - I think GitHub is a cultural artifact now. Of the entire planet. Hackers and curious minds from Japan to Alaska and everything in-between flock to GitHub.
And it's in the hands of a for-profit company pushing LLM nonsense. That should be alarming! Let's instead encourage people to use platforms managed by non-profits.
It’s like sourceforge all over again. History rhymes with itself, and enshitification has been added to dictionaries for a good reason.
As a once upon a time avid slashdotter, makes me wonder if some day, HN will go the same route.
Same. UI "improvements" and LLM slop features instead of improving the developer experience
No way for those to be moved too or not worth the effort? Unless misremembering, another project that moved forges (to GitLab?) had somehow done it.
I don't miss anything from the dark days of managing self-hosted CI servers.
I like Copilot in VSCode, but this is BS.
Another problem with that is that you know what you are leaving, but you don't really know what you find in the new place. GitHub used to go down often in the early days. Now they may not be snappy and unfortunately like 99% of the web felt for this Javascript framework craziness. But the site is always up, I bet has disaster recovery and serious backup policy, and so forth. Can you find this so obviously in other smaller places?
It's a real problem to run a project like Zig if your CI doesn't work. I guess we could have paid for an external CI service, but that as well would depend on GitHub APIs, so we would have gained what, a couple years? Given the current trajectory of GitHub I wouldn't trust them to maintain those APIs correctly for any longer than that (and as far as I know the current vibe-scheduling issues might already be reflected in the APIs that third party CI providers would use).
Let's not forget that "GitHub is an AI company now".
They won't get there tomorrow or the next month, but I'm sure there has been a time where people started moving from Sourceforge to GitHub and somebody else remarked that they were doing something needlessly risky.
As far as we can tell Codeberg is a serious attempt at a non-profit code sharing platform and we feel optimistic enough about its future that we're willing to bet on it.
> A better parallel would be not posting anymore on Hacker News anything Zig related, in terms of potential outcome.
I've been thinking about this lately and in my experience (having seen the effect of HN posts in the past when Zig was smaller vs now) the community is already big and vibrant enough that an HN post alone doesn't do too much of a difference. To be clear, I don't think that HN is losing relevance (unlike all the other big platforms mentioned earlier in this conversation), but our situation has changed.
People now are more and more learning about Zig though cool Zig projects, not by looking at yet another superficial language comparison blog post, which is the kind of content that tends to get to the top of HN more often than not.
More in general I think that your point about not pulling away from all the markeplaces of ideas is valid, but most of those marketplaces are not as good as they claim to be and we have the luxury to run a project that has a strong community connected to it, meaning that we won't be starved of attention or contributors by moving away from GitHub.
This whole situation has an interesting parallel with what's happening in our community wrt chat platforms, if we happen to be at the same tech event in person I'll be happy to share with you all the details :^)
Nah
I do think the combo of not using Twitter, not using Discord, and not using GitHub does make it a bit more challenging for Zig to become a mainstream programming language. Twitter being the least important amongst those. Hard to say how much it matters in practice, as things tend to win on their strengths and not on lack of weakness
That just shows what kind of person they are, and makes me never want to use Zig, even hope for its failure.
Do they actually think the folks who run Github are in charge or making typescript?
Edit: you can register without membership.
[0]: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#what-do-i-nee...
> Thank you to the Forgejo contributors who helped us with our issues switching to the platform, as well as the Codeberg folks who worked with us on the migration
I'd love to see a writeup about these problems/solutions at some point.
This is all assuming translation tools always translate things wrong, which they do when it comes to programming terms.
> More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys
This writing really does not reflect well on Zig. If you have technical issues with Github, fine: cite them. But leave ad hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.
> Examples of behavior that contribute to creating a positive environment include:
> - Using welcoming and inclusive language.
> - Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences.
> - Showing empathy towards others.
> - Showing appreciation for others’ work.
A CoC is still a useful communication tool. Guidelines are useful to have.
The CoC is not there to protect the community, but to protect all the bad actors and give ammunition to attack the good ones.
Happens every time, the maintainers who add CoCs to projects have no problem being an ahole to others.
Update: I know some people love their CoCs, but answer me this, how is this kind of childish name calling allowed and still online, if what I wrote above is not true?
Where you born 30 minutes ago to not have realized yet that people are not infallible, are subjects of emotions and contradict themselves all the time?
Luigi Mangione shot the UnitedHealthcare CEO December 4, 2024 and had an anti-capitalist manifesto, was he center right?
What about Elias Rodriguez (leftist activist, Israeli Embassy Staff Shooting)?
Michael Reinoehl (antifa) who shot Aaron Danielson?
"No Kings" Vance Boelter who shot two politicians?
"Anti-ICE" Joshua Jahn who killed two detainees and wounding an agent in the Dallas ICE Facility Sniper Attack?
US leftists are the same murderous closeted communists as they are everywhere else.
They assassinate people (see recent cases), perform terrorist attacks (peaking at ~500 (!) bombings in 1971), form mobs to socially ostracise people they don't agree with, distribute brazen propaganda in mass media and subvert every organisation they join.
My point is that Democrats and Republicans disagree on social policies, but on the economical side they are very close to each other. They are two shades of capitalist policies. Other countries have parties that are simply non-capitalist - that is the "left".
The fact that this behavior, which would violate most CoCs ever written, came from the top tells you everything you need to know.
It’s just a document.
However, in this case, the presence of the code of conduct has made it trivially easy to point out the language as wrong in a way whoever wrote this for Zig cannot refute.
It’s working exactly as it should.
Holding the powerful to the law is unfortunately, a separate issue to whether it's worth it to have written rules/laws in the first place.
A CoC could still be better than no CoC, even if it fails to rein in abuse from the top.
A good CoC for most projects is: “tl;dr: don’t act rude or illegal”, followed by a detailed explanation of what is rude or illegal, ending with “project maintainers have final discretion”.
I'm sharing these facts not to "credential-dump", but to underscore: This comment comes from compassion, not condescension.
Vague CoCs bug me because they're well-intentioned landmines. Take "don't be an asshole"; it could mean "act in good faith" (why not just say that?), or morph into "don't seem condescending" based on who's reading.
Pair that with commitments to safe spaces for neurodivergence, like autism (where social cues in text can be a foggy maze), and you've got a recipe for unintended clashes.
An earnest comment misfires, gets flagged as jerkish, and boom: escalation via subjective enforcement.
I've flagged this before: good faith-vague inclusivity can ironically exclude through feelings-based policing, which is how communities often roll anyway. So, why not tighten rules for clarity? Swap "don't be an asshole" for "assume good intent and clarify misunderstandings." It'd make safe spaces safer for all, autists included.
I don't doubt I'll get a tirade of "how can you call Autistic people assholes" just like always, totally missing the point on purpose.
Also, when people cause social issues, they should be reprimanded referencing specific parts of the CoC, and in most cases given warnings or opportunities to recover. For when the person causing the issue genuinely isn't aware what they're doing is wrong and can learn to be tolerable; and even when the person is completely bad faith, for unaware bystanders to learn what's right and wrong.
Diagnosed autistic people aren't the only ones who suffer from unwritten social cues. Also people from other cultures, e.g. where rudeness is considered more acceptable.
Ah the good old days!
You want to work with people and the group says "yay and this is how we will work together" you do that or go away. This is entirely separate to stating a universal truth such as "Microsoft product blows because they do not care", "Oracle sucks" or famously "You can't anthropomorphise Larry Ellison"
Did Linus ever blow-torch community volunteers or did he get the pip purely with big corp submitting paid trash for their own purposes? He seems to cop a fair bit himself from people saying thou shalt not...
The standards differ. Microsoft is going to be ok guys.
Do you think there is a chance these hypothetical engineers who care actually want this kind of thing said publicly? And said as poetically invictive laden as possible? The rationale being that they might use such sentiment to get management to see the danger and /start/ caring about product quality?
I've never worked for microsoft. In my experience when product goes into quality decline, rubbish management is >90% of the reason. How futile is fighting that? How futile is fighting it for github? Does github matter in general? My own use is so limited it doesn't directly matter to me. Indirectly it might well do.
That would be easily 90% of GitHub.
Part of maturing and growing up, for me, was realizing that there are really very few people who truly deserve scorn and disrespect[1]. Those I disagree with politically, mostly think they’re doing the right thing and they think that if people only understood, they’d change their tune (and that’s basically what I think of them). Those “big companies” like Microsoft, Atlassian, etc, their incentives line up - and literally must line up - in a fashion where they make software that frustrates many users constantly. It really isn’t malice or incompetence - no one, from the intern that wrote some snippet of JS on GitHub dot com, to Satya Nadella, is either intentionally phoning it in nor waking up in the morning asking himself, “how can I frustrate the efforts of people out there?”
And anyway, because most people are trying their best, regardless of how the outcomes line up to affect my life and my interests personally, really do not deserve my scorn and derision. If I were in their situations, very little if anything would actually change. So spouting insults at these people who I don’t know, and whose roles I don’t really understand, is really not a mature, productive, nor fair thing to do.
[1] if you are curious I’d say murderers, etc. dominate that group.
Murdering can be done very well without ever having to touch weapon.
Are we talking about scientists here too or just those who give orders?
Pretty much anything can be used as a weapon and many things can be used for widespread harm.
What if you are working on something that can be used both ways? Spread good and death?
It's not really for anybody's sake except my own, because I'm the one who has to sit with a mind full of shit at the end of the day and I'm just going to wear myself down. Nobody who matters is gonna read any of the bile I could write and change who they are, after all.
The way github develops is steered by microsoft-the-company and not so much by it's individual employees. A company, especially such a huge one, is not to be trusted and can (should) be made fun of.
> And anyway, because most people are trying their best, regardless of how the outcomes line up to affect my life and my interests personally, really do not deserve my scorn and derision.
The fact that most people are "trying their best" doesn't mean that their goals and interests can't be selfish, or that their actions can't negatively impact others. Particularly people who pursue positions of power, in politics or corporations, often treat others with hostility. And unlike most hostile people, it's these high-rank individuals that have the capability to impact millions of people.
So while I agree with your overall sentiment that well-intentioned people don't deserve my scorn and derision, the real world has taught me that governments and corporations often abuse my trust, my rights, my freedoms, and my quality of life. And for that, the least I can do is speak freely about how I feel about them as people on an online forum. I'm sure that my actions have practically zero impact on their lives, unlike theirs on mine.
Not sure it does. Right there in the same link you posted:
This document contains the rules that govern these spaces only:
The ziglang organization on Codeberg
#zig IRC channel on Libera.chat
Zig project development Zulip chatAlso, the fact that the website is not covered by the CoC makes it worse, since the leadership is excluding themselves from their own engagement rules.
> This document contains the rules that govern these spaces only:
> The ziglang organization on Codeberg
> #zig IRC channel on Libera.chat
> Zig project development Zulip chat
doesnt seem to include the zig page!!
so no, it does not violate CoC
Luckily, no one cares about my (or your) opinions on that matter because, as far as I can tell, neither of us have contributed anything to Zig.
I don't particularly care for either Zig or Github, but...
they do precisely cite the technical issues. That snippet links to a Github discussion comment https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792#issuecomment-3...
(reproduced below)
"The bug in this "safe sleep" script is obvious from looking at it: if the process is not scheduled for the one-second interval in which the loop would return (due to $SECONDS having the correct value), then it simply spins forever. That can easily happen on a CI machine under extreme load. When this happens, it's pretty bad: it completely breaks a runner until manual intervention. On Zig's CI runner machines, we observed multiple of these processes which had been running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks."
"I don't understand how we got here. Even ignoring the pretty clear bug, what makes this Bash script "safer" than calling into the POSIX standard sleep utility? It doesn't seem to solve any problem; meanwhile, it's less portable and needlessly eats CPU time by busy-waiting."
"The sloppy coding which is evident here, as well as the inaction on core Actions bugs (in line with the decay in quality of almost every part of GitHub's product), is forcing the Zig project to strongly consider moving away from GitHub Actions entirely. With this bug, and many others (severe workflow scheduling issues resulting in dozens of timeouts; logs randomly becoming inaccessible; random job cancellations without details; perpetually "pending" jobs), we can no longer trust that Actions can be used to implement reliable CI infrastructure. I personally would seriously encourage other projects, particularly any using self-hosted runners, to look carefully at the stability of Actions and ask themselves whether it is a solution worth sticking with long-term when compared with alternatives."
----
I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
Unless you want to call them just that incompetent. I assume they'd complain about that label too.
In short: No it's not "the product", the people building it are the problem. Somehow everyone working in big tech wants all the praise all the time, individually, but never take even the slightest bit of responsibility fro the constant enshittification they drive forward..
https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157/files
Is : doing something unusual in GH actions?
while (time() != timeout) {;}
The fixed loop is:
while (time() < timeout) {;}
Given that Github Actions is quite popular, probably wasting large amount of energy.
But probably good at generating billable Actions minutes.
One can only hope that not many people use sleeps to handle their CI race conditions, as that itself is also not a proper fix.
Only task to do before lining up investors is how can I weave AI into our product?
Maybe a more serious fix is something like "read -t $N". If you think stdin might not be usable (like maybe it will close prematurely) this option won't work, but maybe you can open an anonymous FD and read from it instead.
Where do you draw the line, then? Is a racist screed acceptable to you as long as the following paragraph references technical issues correctly?
The language in the blog post is insulting. Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of people on the internet. Certainly you've made mistakes in your code before...or are you saying you've always written flawless code without errors?
These codes of conduct always seemed a bit superfluous to me, but after reading comments like these I can totally see why they are necessary.
To me all those mean the same thing, except the latter is more flavorful and makes my eyes less likely to glaze over.
> Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of people on the internet.
Er.. so? Why should anyone be allowed into a position of responsibility where their code impacts millions of people if they can't handle the tiniest bit of strong feedback? It was, after all, a pretty egregious bug.
> Certainly you've made mistakes in your code before...or are you saying you've always written flawless code without errors?
I've definitely made mistakes, and also accept that my output might have on occasion been "monkey-esque". I don't see what's insulting about that; we are all human/animal.
And to many others, the difference is that one is informative, the other is likely to turn them off of the author and project forever.
I noticed that you never answered my question. If this is acceptable to you, where do you draw the line? If you can answer that question, maybe you'll be able to see the flaw in your argument.
Which is absolutely fine. It's their project, their website. If they can't be colorful on their own website, where else can they be! If it turns off some people, I'm sure the author is aware of the risk and happy with that risk.
I, for one, find this kind of colorful language refreshing. Everyone trying to be politically correct makes the internet a dull place.
Surely you have your own line on what is or is not acceptable discourse. What is it?
I do but I decline to share it here. I'm not going to shift this thread from what the author is doing on their website to my personal beliefs and boundaries!
All I am saying is it is their project, their blog. They can be however much rude they want to be on their website. It's their website, their lines and their boundaries. Where I set my boundaries has no bearing on what Andrew should write on their website.
If Andrew alienates people by his writing, it's his decision, his action, his consequences that he has to deal with. How does it matter where I draw the line?
That's funny, because if that is true he violated his own code of conduct: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#safe-constructive-only
> I do but I decline to share it here
The point is that everyone has different lines for what they consider to be "acceptable" or not. That is exactly the reason why codes of conduct exist - it's an attempt to find a common denomiator so that it can help foster a community where people can feel included without feeling like they are being attacked or insulted.
Yes, he did. It is funny. I don't know why we need to talk endlessly about it. If you are bothered so much by this violation, file an official report on their issue tracker.
> The point is that everyone has different lines for what they consider to be "acceptable" or not. That is exactly the reason why codes of conduct exist
When I said I decline to share my lines and boundaries here, I meant just that. I didn't mean that I need a lecture on CoC from you. I know what CoCs are and why they exist. Thank you very much. I am not morality police. Neither are you.
My morality applies to myself. Andrew's morality applies to himself. But yeah... CoC may apply to him too. So you've got a good point. I don't know if the CoC applies to their website. If you know more and if it does, a violation of CoC should be reported on their issue tracker. If this is such an important topic for you, please do report the violation to them. That'd be fair.
Yeah, it’s hilarious! Calling someone a monkey is such a clever and thought provoking insult!
> I don't know why we need to talk endlessly about it
If you are confused by this, why are you continuing to respond?
> When I said I decline to share my lines and boundaries here, I meant just that. I didn't mean that I need a lecture on CoC from you. I know what CoCs are and why they exist.
I really don’t think you know why CoC’s exist, because you are chastising people when they point out a legitimate violation (e.g. being the "morality police").
> But yeah... CoC applies to him too. So you've got a good point
Thanks for finally admitting this, I guess? Not sure why you needed to add all the extra argumentation about it, but at least you got there eventually.
> If this is such an important topic for you, please do report the violation to them
No thank you. I’m not actually offended by what he said, I just find it weird when people rush to his defense on this.
I'm not confused by anything. That was a rhetorical question. I continue to respond because there are other things that I care about and I have things to say about that. I don't care about what style or tone or words Andrew choses on their website. But I care about people trying to be morality police and discouraging someone blogging on their own website from writing rudely and writing politically incorrectly. So that's why I continue to respond.
> Thanks for finally admitting this, I guess? Not sure why you needed to add all the extra argumentation about it, but at least you got there eventually.
Credit where credit is due. If you make good points I agree with, I'll certainly say that.
> Not sure why you needed to add all the extra argumentation about it, but at least you got there eventually.
Because there are other points of yours I don't agree with.
Must a person always 100% agree or 100% disagree? Can a person not 10% agree and 90% disagree? The latter is happening here.
This appears to be a strawman. You already admitted he violated the CoC - so he is in the wrong here.
I'm not sure what else there is to disagree with - that's been my assertion from the beginning.
If he wants to write childish stuff on his own website that is not covered by the CoC, that's his choice. I'm also free to express my opinion on that, but I never implied that he shouldn't be able to write whatever he wanted on his own personal blog.
I didn't say that. This is what I said -
"But yeah... CoC may apply to him too. So you've got a good point. I don't know if the CoC applies to their website. If you know more and if it does, a violation of CoC should be reported on their issue tracker."
Emphasis: "may", "I don't know if", "If you know more".
> But yeah... CoC applies to him too. So you've got a good point
Since you’ve just proven yourself to not be arguing in good faith, this will be my last response to you.
But you chose to reply to my outdated message although at the time you were replying my message said that I wasn't sure whether the CoC applies or not.
I don't care much about the language used. I neither intend to defend it nor criticize it. But I do care about people trying to be morality police. That's why I am spending multiple comments here.
> It feels like there’s a reason you refuse to define your line in the sand.
Yes, the reason is that my line applies to myself. My line doesn't apply to you. It doesn't apply to Andrew. So my line, which is a personal and private matter for me, isn't something I want to share here. It is irrelevant when talking about the words Andrew chose on his website. That's the reason. It's a simple reason. Don't overthink it!
One of the unfortunate side effects of the internet is that it really brings out the asshole in a lot of people.
I really want to pull on that thread more, to see how far you’ll go to defend an indefensible position, but I won’t.
I'm not the morality police. Nobody should be. I'd still take the article on its technical merits. As a random example, if Satoshi's paper called people using the banking system cattle, I'd still continue reading it.
> Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of people on the internet
It would be absolutely fine, nobody is named specifically. He wasn't like Josh Examplemann working on Actions is a piece of shit that botches any feature he touches. Nobody is going to remember a blog post and forever hold anyone that worked on Actions to an unhirable status. And personally, I think it would be good for people to feel some shame for having implemented a feature in such a terrible way. It's not like they were told by their managers to commit these the way that they did. Calling into the sleep binary wouldn't even be more work.
Whoever is behind the new React Start Menu in Windows
along with whoever is responsible for the Chrome Web Environment Integrity
along with whoever is behind the design of OSX Tahoe
along with anyone who is working on Windows Copilot that screenshots your screen
should be ashamed of themselves. The more articles that do that, the better. They are not doing good.
Ad hominem happens when someone undermines the argument based on the speaker's background. Here they are not undermining any argument. They're just name calling. This is name calling, not ad hominem.
I get frustrated with tech all the time! I get it. Grr when Actions feels so irritatingly misbehaved…
But how you handle or fail to handle your frustration demonstrates the competence of your character and speaks volumes of what you’d be like to work with.
If your workplace has a lot of name calling, consider the possibility that it may be unusually toxic, and the possibility that you’re making it toxic.
I can't speak for others. But if I am screwing up as badly as GitHub is, I'd rather someone calls me a loser and monkey for it. It's like someone splashing ice cold water on my face and showing me the reality. It's going to be very uncomfortable, yes. But I'll learn from it and try not to screw up so badly again. I find this kind of natural outburst refreshing really.
Though best case scenario, the people working on these features agree and can point their managers to the post as an example of growing discontent. I doubt it’ll have an effect, though. GitHub is now under the AI division at Microsoft.
The specific error they are criticizing is extremely egregious, akin to builder declaring a house without a roof complete. “failing and deserving to be called a monkey” is a criticism being levied against a 0/100 level mistake, not a mere minor mistake as you are claiming.
While it might be desirable to use less colorful language, it is frankly challenging to express the sheer level of grossly incompetent organizational ineptitude on display here in a reviewed and delivered product actively causing negative customer impact for literal years which is trivially fixed and yet has been ignored.
Customers of Github should be infuriated that Github gleefully foists such utterly defective software upon them. It is hard to get that across in dispassionate writing.
> Your argument is lacking nuance, declaring that the criticism being levied here must be a simple binary.
That isn't my argument. I am arguing against the idea that there is an "objective" threshold of failure where, once crossed, it becomes acceptable to call people names.
> Customers of Github should be infuriated that Github gleefully foists such utterly defective software upon them. It is hard to get that across in dispassionate writing.
See, while it has its bugs, I don't see a major problem with GitHub as a software product (setting aside the monopoly concerns). I encourage passionate discussion, but calling people names doesn't communicate passion; it communicates impatience. It suggests you don't have the patience to actually make a case for something you're supposedly passionate about, so you're choosing a shorter, more aggressive form instead.
These are people for God's sake. Empathy!
> These are people for God's sake. Empathy!
From my perspective your take and actions in this thread is itself completely devoid of empathy.
The reason for colorful language breaking through professionalism is because there is real human emotion behind those words. Real pain and suffering, lost time in the life that will never be regained, an ever widening bald spot from the stress. That type of thing yearns to be expressed in a way that generic corpo speak is by design unable to communicate.
Your response to these emotions is to simply stick your head in the sand(aka refuse to read the blog post)? Worse yet, even without that context, you are here trying to convince those around you to also stick their heads in the sand?
To dream up scenarios where theoretical someones in a giant faceless corp might maybe possibly be offended? Instead of trying to listen and understand the person already in front of you who has actually been offended?
Again everything is a matter of perspective, but from mine your comments severely lack the empathy you supposedly call for.
Shrug.
If he were berating a specific person, I might flag it. Berating Github and Microsoft as an organization? Nah.
Given that CEOs seem to now live in a Post Shame Reality(tm), I'll allow bringing some shame to the situation.
IT at higher ranks is about people. This post disqualifies Zig as an org.
But I agree on the Devon Zuegel praise. Most of the good devs and managers are gone. Only brian for the git SHA-256 migration is still there I think, though he got no time finishing it.
On the other hand Zig is often regarded as the fastest executing modern programming language. They have earned the ability to complain about performance like no one else. The article cites precise issues they have with GitHub.
Furthermore JavaScript, when not written by monkeys, is extremely fast which further qualifies their complaint. For example I have a large SPA that loads in the browser from across a network in around 0.065 seconds and achieves full rendering and state restoration in about 0.135 seconds. If I drop the largest one feature from that SPA I can get full rendering and state restoration in about 0.08 seconds. Your typical JavaScript developer, on the other hand, struggles to copy/paste code into a JSX template someone else defined with no idea how to measure performance. To me that’s what’s offensive.
I've heard people call other people "monkeys" before in a work setting. it's never good. Fact is, you don't need to call anyone names or insult them.
The takeaway for me is that the Zig project is led by people who are extremely immature and toxic. I simply don't trust any decision these people make. If you can't bring yourself to respectfully disagree with other human beings, if you resort to calling names and insults targetted at developers because of bugs, then i don't trust you to not backdoor your own code, or do something harmful to those who rely on your work because of some drama, spat or activism.
Even if actual political activists did this it would be unacceptable. If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.
Andrew: It seems you don't respect your own self or your community enough to set an example of decorum and civility. You've made Zig a platform for your own personal shitposting. Please do better!
immature and toxic : welcome to every big tech , you don't want part of them either, right ?
Having been in that situation before, if I even get a hint that I would be treated this way, I'm backing out of any interview. I won't say for no amount, but for no amount they would consider reasonable compensation would I think it's worth it. People commit suicides over this stuff. This isn't a joke. Life is too short. I mean just seeing other people treated this way is horrible on its own. I can't believe people defend this stuff. People need to learn to be ashamed again.
It seems to have decreased in the last 10 years but calling us code-monkeys was a common derogatory reference to the software department. I didn't like being compared to a monkey randomly bashing a typewriter but that's how things were.
It was better than what everyone called HR.
Either way, can we at least agree that it is an insult to those people at a personal level, it attacks who they are instead of what they did?
Like i mentioned, I've had myself/coworkers compared to monkeys in the same way. I didn't think much of it at first, but coworkers were really demoralized and kept mentioning it, and it coincided with all sorts of other hosilities from people in power.
My whole goal here wasn't to demonstrate some internet rage, but to do my part in making sure other people don't get treated like crap, especially in their work place. If this was at my work, I'd probably just quietly look for other places to work at, because I'd be afraid for my job. In this case it's not like Microsoft employees can publicly respond in like to Andrew and not lose their jobs either. I see someone with some level of authority and a public figure abusing that to harass others.
There is no asshole-badge that is granted to people when they achieve positions of authority, a louder voice or great success in life. Those of us who can implement some sort of an adverse response to this behavior, must.
Either way, I like linux but I've avoided operating systems like freebsd and openbsd for less, so I agree. I've said plenty enough against Linus when he did lose his temper and started cussing at people.
And to be clear, I consider people who defend him (and in this case Andrew) far worse of an individual than the original offenders. People mess up, they're led astray by being put in positions of leadership and authority. That I get, and that's why i'm calling him out here. If he was random person, I wouldn't have bothered. But the enablers and defenders are the real problem. I hope you're not one of them. If you are, I consider you people responsible for every single work place bullying and toxic environment out there. People do great things without being classless uncivilized bullies.
Your reading of the current political climate is very different to mine.
homo sapiens is an animal species.
Do you have an example or two of poor decisions that push you away so strongly?
The important observation for me is that he didn't know where to draw the line, and this is regarding people he doesn't work with, unknown/random Microsoft employees. Will he cross the line if someone he does know and trust does something he disagrees with? I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the bar is high when it comes to trusted software like programming language compilers.
I wish Zig all the success, but only if it's community and the tech community as a whole can hold it's leadership accountable instead of making excuses and defending him like this. It's ok to tell people you admire and respect they screwed up.
FWIW I've never programmed a line of code in zig and I don't know who this developer is.
All I got from it was "seems like GitHub is starting to deteriorate pretty hard and this guy's fed up and moving his project and leaving some snark behind".
I don't defend Linus either, but I don't consider him calling someone a monkey or dehumanizing people either. If he has, please send me the lkml archives, I've been on the fence with going full on Apple anyways :)
Is this blog post in a work setting? Oh my. You should probably run to HR and report unprofessional behavior!
Oh wait.
If Andrew considers Zig a professional software to be used in production environments, then this is a indeed a professional setting. If not, then it is a hobby project run by immature/whiny people like you, so let's just ignore it and talk about more serious people/projects.
and as of when was GitHub known for its snappiness?
I could switch on the dev console in the Browser, and see which one loads the largest amount of Javascript, but I'd be disappointed with both.
This reminds me of when Linus Torvalds would lose his shit now and then and launch gratuitous personal attacks at people who had made mistakes. Comment sections would be filled with folks laughing at Linus’ latest victim. “Couldn’t be me, I would never make this mistake”. Even Linus admits he was wrong to treat people this way and he’s taken time off to work on himself and become a better person. But there is still no shortage of people who enjoy seeing pain inflicted on others, nor people larping as a younger Linus.
"A complete lack of empathy" is a bit of a stretch, no? Calling someone a monkey is fairly lighthearted, while getting the point across that maybe they should take stock of the awareness of their abilities.
Calling people monkeys and losers is just shitty. It doesn't achieve anything, it's divisive, and it's often counterproductive because it creates cultures of fear.
> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.
> Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.
And he did. And the project he heads is better for it. You don’t need to call people names to run a project well. Linus learned that. It’s time that other people who failed to grow up learn it too.
Did you read the issue at hand?
This is not average people making "mistakes". This is severe incompetence at every layer of decision making, and a complete lack of care for quality work. If you want to be mad at someone for being unfair, be mad at the manager of these people for putting them in a position they are grossly unprepared for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Could you review the guidelines of this website and follow them?
...for one of the largest of most toxic IT companies in the history if IT?
Spare me, please. Microsoft is the last legal entity in the universe you should feel empathy for.
No, they did this when they joined Microsoft, not me. You don't get to be "an actual person" when you're paid by Microsoft to write Microsoft code for a Microsoft product.
People like you terrify me.
No, I'm asking if Microsoft emploee code gets to be judged as a work of a person instead of a corporation, and the answer is a resounding NO.
Nobody cares what Microserfs do in their personal life. (I'm sure they're great people, some of my closest relatives were Microserfs too.)
I'd like to be treated this way if I am doing really stupid things. If I am doing the kind of stupid things GitHub is doing, I'd rather someone call me out as a monkey so that I know I f-ed up.
I know calling "monkey" is not professional but my expectation of professional treatment stops at my office with my colleagues and at a few other places. I don't expect the whole world to be professional to me. I can take some bloke on the internet calling me a monkey if that helps me to introspect and make things right.
If they're nice about it and choose professional words to tell me I'm being stupid, that's great. But if they cannot and they call me "monkey", I'll take that too. I'd rather have the feedback in whatever words they can muster than not have the feedback at all.
Hackernews seems to consistently believe that you can be terrible as long as you're polite.
Elitism is far from the worst character trait unpaid code janitors can be expected to have.
I'm not going to touch the political parts. But my main point is that the migration itself is obviously not well done, he isn't even migrating issues nor migrating perks for sponsors, splitting the community and attention apart. You could even say that he's critical of people who keep using github sponsors. In my view the text is implying that you are hurting ziglang if you keep using this thing that is a liability for ziglang... oh the horror of giving someone money in a way he doesn't like. People like this forget that contributors are doing free work for them too, it's not just one way. Everything that creates friction for them is real work you just caused them.
You're probably better off for it to be honest.
But it then loses the emotional momentum and stops being colorful!
Not
'open source developers posting childish rants vs no open source developers'
they’d be hacking on shit over at Mozilla (or similar - likely for more money) right?
Sounds like a great thing compared to the sanitized corpo bullshit from nowadays. Microsoft bought themselves into OSS with github and each project has a bland CoC.
It’s pathetic. Even the github monkeys know deep down that this is wrong.
Could someone elaborate what that JS framework is? Is this recent?
I think GitHub was built on Rails, and the UI has changed relatively little in the past few years.
A pity. Saw Zig as something rising but with this kind of toxicity, no thanks.
Don't get me wrong, it is a bit toxic. However, I feel like taking one comment in a larger article and blowing it up out of proportion is just as toxic.
One person decided that something wasn't for them. How is that in the same league as someone in a leadership position being unprofessional?
And yet the context is extremely important.
> I didn't factor this in
That's how you get to false equivalencies.
No, you're just putting something into it which doesn't matter to me. Not a false equivalency.
> blowing it up out of proportion is just as toxic
Making a false equivalency of the supposed toxicity of the commenter's post and the toxicity displayed in the article.
You can just take the L; you don't have to be performatively obtuse about it.
We're at the tail end of a long decline.
> Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE…
If you actual actually wanted to put that aside, you could have…put it aside.
(Plus it being weird on a substantive basis. Selectively blacklisting specific government agencies…that’s just not a sustainable approach.)
Every service has rules but are the rules clear and consistent enough that organizations can reliably use the service without worrying they’ll be terminated.
So what? Obviously you won't respond to all the permutations, so can draw only some red lines.
> without worrying they’ll be terminated
Yes, you can have some principles without increasing these concerns
That's what I meant by not scalable/sustainable.
I mean https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24317 wasn't that long ago.
Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in deciding who gets as pass or not.
It boggles the mind why people keep using Linus as an excuse to justify rudeness. Linus apologised, he recognised what he did for years was not OK, and took time off to reflect and become a better person.
> Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in deciding who gets as pass or not.
Are all the people who commented in that submission commenting on this one? No? Then it’s not the same group of people, and opinions are different. There’s no “mob”, HN isn’t a hive mind. If it were, you’d be part of it and agree.
Having low patience is a quirk of our nerd culture, and now that the woke season has ended, it seems to be going back to how it has always been!
GHA in particular is a hot mess, I’m as surprised as a decade ago that anybody is using this crap. IMHO it’s bugs as a service kind of product, and the bugs start at the core design with the ‘pretend yaml but actually an unholy mix of shell, js and json’ language.
> This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good.
> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.
> Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.
> I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.
And he walked the walk. He became better after that. Linux is a better project for it. But I suppose it did influence a generation of people in software who looked up to Linus and thought this is the correct way to treat people you perceive as beneath you.
It’s important to keep in mind that “common” doesn’t mean “right” or “positive”. Lots of things, such as CFCs in aerosol spray cans and radioactive elements in household items used to be common.
I’m not saying that’s what your argument is—on the contrary, I get the feeling you’re making a statement and not justifying it—but still think it’s an important point to not forget.
> I was watching a YouTube video by Casey Muratori where
Do you remember what video it was? That’s a bit disappointing and I’d like to see for myself to gather context and tone. From all I’ve seen from Casey I’d expect gentle bashing of languages but not groups of people. Though I mostly have seen Casey on his own teaching or being interviewed one-on-one, I get the feeling he might be different in podcasts.
Linus is better now but the behaviour is ingrained into so many people. They now “tell it like it is”, are “straight shooters”, don’t have time to be “politically correct” and so on.
Anyway, yes, "infinite monkeys on typewriters" seemed to be the relevant meaning of "monkeys" here.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=code%20monke...
Following now.
Sheesh.
Isn't that the unfortunate status quo? At least hard requirement for JS, that is.
Google's homepage started requiring this recently. Linux kernel's git, openwrt, esp32.com, and many many others now require it too, via dreaded "Making sure you're not a bot" thing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962529
If anything, github is (thankfully) behind the curve here - at least some basics do work without JS.
Games run really well on Linux nowadays too :P
If there is one benefit in moving from GitHub it is certainly avoiding receiving AI slop issues on GitHub.
Github was on the decline anyway in the past 5 years, it's time for an alternative and we'll see. Would rather it being Codeberg over something like Sourcehut.
I tend to agree. But I don't see how an exact UI replica of Github is innovative.
I've only glanced at it though, maybe there's more features underneath the hood.
Happy to learn more about what makes it better. Is the CI system more refined than Github Actions? I was definitely never a fan of that system.
I agree it would have been nicer if the message was more polite. But if you compare that to having the backbone follow through with meaningful long-term changes against a corporation you don't trust or respect, there shouldn't even be a discussion.
And don't even get me started with the people who come in here just to point out that Codeberg isn't perfect either.
You’re framing it as either/or when it isn’t. You can push for real change and communicate like an adult. The two aren’t in conflict; often they reinforce each other.
I’d think they _are_ inherently in conflict. Every person has 24 hours per day, and they can spend them on researching and doing what’s right or on reaching consensus. There is some mutual reinforcement to some extent (as it’s usually right to have a reasonable consensus on what’s the right choice), but beyond some basic level there’s always tradeoff.
And for programming language designers, I really appreciate when they make the right long-term choices even if I don’t understand initially why they were made.
So you want people to talk about actions, not manners. Great.
> And don't even get me started with the people who come in here just to point out that Codeberg isn't perfect either.
Except actions they did with Codeberg...?
Sharing their experience about Codeberg isn't off-topic in a thread about a major repo migrating to Codeberg.
the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"
You should really take a step back and consider if MLK’s struggle for racial equality is an appropriate point of comparison for an open source project deciding to change to a different CI provider.
To the type of nerds who crash out about a git hosting provider and publicly insult other developers, moving off GitHub might even be more meaningful than whatever MLK did.
Fury can be a powerful motivator to commit to doing something you’ve been putting off. It also means your community announcement is going to be pretty spicy, unless you let someone else write it.
The zig maintainers think that, too, thus the presence of a Code of Conduct on their website. But, as always, it's a "rules for thee, but not for me" situation - if the author was called a "monkey" by someone else, I can guarantee he would invoke the CoC to call them out, but when he does it, it's fine.
I absolutely agree, but people in charge of large projects/groups, in any context, should know better than to put their personal feelings and opinion on topics into the "corporate" messages they are putting out. I am guilty of this myself, no one is holier than thou, but still. AK should know better.
I wouldn't even call it politeness, it's more like basic human decency. Would Andrew Kelly appreciate it if the LLVM guys publicly wrote a blog post calling the Zig maintainers losers and monkeys? Just screams of immaturity, which isn't surprising seeing their political views.
The internet has evolved such a Newspeak, censor-driven culture, it's sad to see. I want people to be able to tell each other "I think this is shit and here's why".
This language by Andrew is natural, real and should be valued more than anything else. Thank you, it's a refresher and it reminds me an old internet, where everyone been really free to write what and how they wanted it to be.
Who are you after all to judge how he writes his opinions?
Happy hacking, Andrew!
Finally, I can’t believe I have to say it, but a creator of an open source project is free to infuse it with whatever values he wants, no one hates on SQLite, no need to hate someone for adding his brand of politics / values to his passion project. Please go create your own “non woke” language if you hate it so much.
instead of crying about zig's coc they should work on that abomination of a framework.
I can't agree with him more that Github went to absolute shit and I can feel React crap emanating from it without even looking at the code. There's everything in the world wrong with React and I would easily call anyone advocating it a code-monkey in their face. It's not about JavaScript itself - it's about the framework ideas, which are absolute trash. If anyone's offended by a code-monkey, I feel like maybe they should be.