WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT YOUR GITHUB ADDICTION
by Ploum on 2023-02-22
https://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.html
Listen my fellow geeks in code, we need to have a serious conversation
about Github.
At first, Github was only a convenient way to host a git repository and
to collaborate with others. But, as always with monopolies, once you are
trapped by convenience and the network effect, the shitification process
starts to try to get as much money and data from you.
First of all, let’s remember that Github is a fully proprietary service.
Using it to host the development of a free software makes no sense if
you value freedom. It is not like we don’t have many alternatives
available (sourcehut, codeberg, gitlab, etc). It should be noted that
those alternatives usually offer a better workflow and a better git
integration than Github. They usually make more sense but, I agree, it
might be hard to change ten years of suboptimal habits imposed by the
github workflow.
One thing that always annoyed me with Github is the "fun factor". Emojis
appearing automatically in messages I’m trying to post, intrusive
notifications about badges and followers I earned. Annoying, to say the
least. (Am I the only one using ":" in a sentence without willing to
make an emoji?)
But I discovered that Github is now pushing it even more in that
direction: a feed full of random projects and people I don’t care about,
notifications to get me to "discover" new projects and "follow" new
persons. They don’t even try to pretend to be a professional platform
anymore. It’s a pure attention-grabbing personal data extorting social
networks. To add insult to injury, we now know that everything published
on Github is mostly there to serve as training data for Microsoft AI
engines.
Developers are now raw meat encouraged to get stars, followers and
commit counters, doing the most stupid things in the most appealing way
to get… visibility! Yeah! Engagement! Followers! Audience!
Good code is written when people are focused, thinking hard about a
problem while having the time to grasp the big picture. Modern Github
seems to be purposely built as a tool to avoid people thinking about
what they do and discourage them from writing anything but a new
JavaScript framework.
There’s no way I can morally keep an account on Github. I’ve migrated
all of my own projects to Sourcehut (where I’ve a paid account) or to my
university self-hosted gitlab.
But there are so many projects I care about still on Github. So many
important free software. So many small projects where I might send an
occasional bug report or even a patch. For the anecdote, on at least two
different occasions, I didn’t send a patch I crafted for small projects
because I didn’t know how to send it by mail and was not in the mood to
deal with the Github workflow at that particular time.
By keeping your project on Github, you are encouraging new developers to
sign up there, to create their own project there. Most importantly, you
support the idea that all geeks/developers are somehow on Github, that
it is a badge of pride to be there.
If you care about only one of software freedom, privacy, focus, sane
market without monopoly or if you simply believe we don’t need even
more bullshit in our lives, you should move your projects out of Github
and advocate a similar migration to projects you care about. Thanks to
git decentralisation, you could even provide an alternative/backup while
keeping github for a while.
If you don’t have any idea where to go, that should be a red light in
your brain about monopoly abuses. If you are a professional developer
and using anything other than Github seems hard, it should be a triple
red light warning.
And I’m not saying that because grumpy-old-beard-me wants to escape
those instagramesque emojis. Well, not only that but, indeed, I don’t
wanna know the next innovative engagement-fostering feature. Thanks.
The best time to leave Github was before it was acquired by Microsoft.
The second-best time is now. Sooner or later, you will be forced out of
Github like we, oldies, were forced out of Sourceforge. Better leaving
while you are free to do it on your own terms…
MODERN AI AND THE END OF PRIVACY
by Ploum on 2023-02-15
https://ploum.net/2023-02-15-ai-and-privacy.html
When you think about it, the gigacorps currently developing consumer-
facing AI chatbots are also the same companies which are spying the most
heavily on our private life.
Well, it’s obvious because every single company is now trying to spy on
you as much as it can and gathering so much data that they can’t even
handle it (no later than last week, I have asked to be removed from some
shop databases, received a reply telling me that everything was erased
yet I’m still receiving daily spam from them). Companies have so many
data, duplicated in many backups, they don’t even know what to do with
it.
And those data, sooner or later, will be used to train AI. In fact, they
already were for years: look no further than reply suggestions from
Gmail.
The first consequence is that AI chatbot will quickly start to argue
with you, insult you or, why not, send you dick pics. Those are, after
all, a huge part of written human communications.
But the terrifying part is probably that there’s no way to prevent
leaks. Anybody using a trained chatbot will quickly find ways to ask if
Alice and Bob were exchanging emails and what it was about. If Eve was
sick or not.
Worst of all, most of it will probably be hallucinations: false data
invented by the AI itself. But a few clickbait stories with real
information leakage will be enough to cast a doubt that any answer by an
AI "might be true".
Despite many warnings, we have offered total control of our lives to a
few monopolies. Even if you were careful enough, public data about you
are probably enough to "sounds mostly true". Most of your emails ended
in a Gmail or Outlook inbox even if you don’t use those services
yourself.
In my latest book, the short story "Le jour où la transparence se fit"
is about the brutal and sudden disappearance of privacy. I’m glad the
book is now in stores because, in a few months, it will probably not
sound like science fiction any more…
ON HUMANS AND MACHINES
by Ploum on 2023-02-11
https://ploum.net/2023-02-11-human-and-machines.html
In the ultimate form of marketing-capitalism, companies try to transform
human workers into replaceable working machines and ask them to produce
machines that should sound like they are humans.
To achieve that, they build machines that learn from humans.
While humans believe that, in order to gain success, they need to act
like machines acting like humans. That’s because the success is defined
by some counters created by the machines. The machines, themselves, are
now learning from machines that act like humans instead of learning from
humans.
So, in the end, we have humans acting like "machines learning from
machines acting like humans" built by humans actings like machines.
That’s make "being human" really confusing. Hopefully I don’t need to
think about what "being a machine" means.
