If you scroll down to "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" in GitHub settings, you can enable or disable it. However, what really gets me is how they pitch it like it’s some kind of user-facing feature:
Enabled = You will have access to the feature
Disabled = You won't have access to the feature
As if handing over your data for free is a perk. Kinda hilarious.
It’s not so bad, there’s no double negative and it’s not a confusing “switch” that is always ambiguous as to whether it’s enabled or not.
In contrast when you create a a GCS bucket it uses a checkmark for enabling “public access prevention”. Who designed that modal? It takes me a solid minute to figure out if I’m publishing private data or not.
I went to check on this and I have everything copilot related disabled and in the two bars that measure usage my Copilot Chat usage was somehow in 2%, how is this possible?
Before anyone comes to me to sell me on AI, this is on my personal account, I have and use it in my business account (but it is a completely different user account), I just make it a point to not use it in my personal time so I can keep my skills sharp.
I wonder if that’s it! I occasionally do some code search on GitHub and then remember it doesn’t work well and go back to searching in the IDE. I usually need to look into not the main branch because I do a lot of projects that have a develop branch where things actually happen. But that would explain so I guess this is it.
If you're taking about the quota bar. That is only measuring your premium request usage (models with a #.#x multiplier next to the name). If you only use the free models and code completion you won't actually consume any "usage". If you use AI code review that consumes a single request (now). Same with the Github Copilot web chat, if you use a free model, it doesn't count, if you use a premium model you get charged the usage cost.
I guess the "perk" is that maybe their models get retrained on your data making them slightly more useful to you (and everyone else) in the future? idk
Previously, big tech used to still somehow find loopholes for GPL and licenses still had some value.
Nowadays, It genuinely feels a lot less because there are now services who will re-write the code to prevent the license.
Previously, I used to still think that somewhat non propreitory licenses like the SSPL license etc. might be interesting approaches but I feel like they aren't that much prone to this either now anymore.
I guess freedom of study and use may include also training AI, but would be cool if all the derivate work, as AI models and generated code from AI models should be licensed as GPL, layers needed here
How is it not a feature from a development standpoint? Colloquially any bit of intended functionality qualifies as a "feature" and certainly any functionality you conditionally enable/disable would be controlled by a "feature flag" regardless.
14 incidents in February! It's February 9th! Glad to see the latest great savior phase of the AI industrial complex [1] is going just as well as all the others!
An interesting thing I notice now is that people do not like companies that only post about outages if half the world have them ... and also not companies that also post about "minor issues", e.g.:
> During this time, workflows experienced an average delay of 49 seconds, and 4.7% of workflow runs failed to start within 5 minutes.
That's for sure not perfect, but there was also a 95% chance that if you have re-run the job, it will run and not fail to start. Another one is about notificatiosn being late. I'm sure all others do have similar issues people notice, but nobody writes about them. So a simple "to many incidents" does bot make the stats bad - only an unstable service the service.
I know you are joking but I'm sure that there is at least one director or VP inside GitHub pushing a new salvation project that must use AI to solve all the problems, when actually the most likely reason is engineers are drawing in tech debt.
Upper management in Microsoft has been bragging about their high percentage of AI generated code lately - and in the meantime we've had several disastrous Windows 11 updates with the potential to brick your machine and a slew of outages at github. I'm sure it might be something else but it's clear part of their current technical approach is utterly broken.
<mermaid>
flowchart TD
A["Claim: Bridge opening is conditional"] --> B["Actor: Donald Trump"]
A --> C["Project: Gordie Howe International Bridge"]
A --> D["Condition: Canadian concessions required"]
B --> E["Public statement"]
C --> F["Status: not opening (per claim)"]
D --> G["Type: policy/trade concessions"]
E --> H["Outcome framing"]
F --> H
G --> H
H["Message: No opening unless concessions are granted"]
</mermaid>
<mermaid>
flowchart TD
A["Claim: Bridge opening is conditional"] --> B["Actor: Donald Trump"]
A --> C["Project: Gordie Howe International Bridge"]
A --> D["Condition: Canadian concessions required"]
B --> E["Public statement"]
C --> F["Status: not opening (per claim)"]
D --> G["Type: policy/trade concessions"]
E --> H["Outcome framing"]
F --> H
G --> H
H["Message: No opening unless concessions are granted"]
</mermaid>
When I first typed up my comment I said "their current business approach" and then corrected it to technical since - yea, in the short term it probably isn't hurting their pocket books too much. The issue is that it seems like a lot more folks are seriously considering switching off Windows - we'll see if this actually is the year of the linux desktop (it never seems to be in the end) but it certainly seems to be souring their brand reputation in a major way.
Honestly AI management would probably be better. "You're a competent manager, you're not allowed to break or circumvent workers right laws, you must comply with our CSR and HR policies, provide realistic estimates and deliver stable and reliable products to our customers." Then just watch half the tech sector break down, due to a lack of resources, or watch as profit is just cut in half.
All the cool kids move fast and break things. Why not the same for core infrastructure providers? Let's replace our engineers with markdown files named after them.
I'm happy that they're being transparent about it. There's no good way to take downtime, but at least they don't try to cover it up. We can adjust and they'll make it better. I'm sure a retro is on its way it's been quite the bumpy month.
Copilot is shown as having policy issues in the latest reports. Oh my, the irony. Satya is like "look ma, our stock is dropping...", Gee I wonder why Mr!!
Just a note: the White House also uses archive.ph.
Search for “Americans are spending like never before: Retail sales are booming — up 5% over last year, far outpacing inflation — as Americans spend in record amounts.” [1]
There is an important lesson to be had here, not just in writing articles, but software engineering as well. We should be checking our work very diligently, including code libraries. If a developer is using agents/LLMs to steamroll their way through a project, every line of code and library needs checked.
Probably a pretty safe assumption that 4Chan script kiddies are running federal IT at this point. Why not run a search for connections in light of this news?
Why would it be LLM-assisted when maps of what sites link where are part of the core WWW infrastructure? Google made a trillion dollar business out of that.
I occasionally read these articles and wanted to know what sources they use, besides websites like The Daily Caller, to back up their claims. I noticed this some time ago and remembered it. But it took me a while to find the article again. ;)
Plot twist: it started as a network of weighted links, but, after hitting a certain complexity level, it became self aware and now it’s only trying to live its life in peace and not to be noticed.
It was taken down. In general, 18F’s open source work was in the public domain, though, and I know there have been efforts to archive it recently.
Additionally, it looks like some of 18F’s public guides are still available (e.g. the “Derisking” guide, which is all about how to structure your IT projects to be less likely to fail spectacularly: https://guides.18f.gov/derisking/)
These count as “follow up dupes” on HN and get moderated away - there’s not much point in having a front page discussion that’s nearly identical to a discussion going on in a current front page thread.
Enabled = You will have access to the feature
Disabled = You won't have access to the feature
As if handing over your data for free is a perk. Kinda hilarious.
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