Which is how you know they have a good product that they have full faith in.

when they have to blackmail, threaten, coerce, and force people to accept their product.

“The Sky Is Falling! Buy My Magic Umbrella!” is a classic hypeman’s trick.

For some odd reason, this calls to mind an emotionally immature parent trying to get their toddler to eat vegetables… no reason at all…

Threats work well for scams. People who couldn’t be bothered to move by promises of something new and better can be motivated by fear of losing what they already have.

It’s really unfortunate psychology is looked down upon and psychologists are viewed as some “soft” profession. Zuck is a psychology major. It’s been 2 decades, most of the radical changes in which were not radical in anything other than approach to human psychology.

BTW, I’ve learned recently that in their few initial years Khmer Rouge were not known as communist organization to even many of their members. Just an “organization”. Their rhetoric was agrarian (of course peasants are hard-working virtuous people, and from peasantry working the earth comes all the wisdom, and those corrupt and immoral people in the cities should be made work to eat), Buddhist (of course the monk-feudal system of obedience, work and ascese is the virtuous way to live, though of course we are having a rebirth now so we are even wiser), monarchist (they referred to Sihanouk’s authority almost to the end), anti-Vietnamese (that’s like Jewish for German Nazis, Vietnamese are the evil). And after them taking power for some time they still didn’t communicate anything communist. They didn’t even introduce their leadership. Nobody knew who makes the decisions in that “organization” or how it was structured. It didn’t have a face. They only officially made themselves visible as Democratic Kampuchea with communism and actual leaders when the Chinese pressured them. They didn’t need to, because they were obeyed via threat (and lots of fulfillment) of violence anyway.

This is important in the sense that when you have the power, you don’t need to officially tell the people over which you have it that you rule them.

So - in these 2 decades it has also came into fashion to deliberately stubbornly ignore the fact that psychology works over masses. And everybody acts as if when there’s no technical means to make people do something, then it’s not likely or possible.

The code reviews will continue until morale improves.

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft is forcing AI on all the employees

Because like AI, your CEO is a tool.

Because unlike with the other tools you use the CEO of your company is investing millions of dollars into AI and they want a big return on their investment.

Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done?

Not just that… why do they have to threat and push for people to use a tool that allegedly is fantastic and makes everything better and faster?.. the answer is that it does not work but they need to pump the numbers to keep the bubble going

I think part of it is because they think they can train models off developers, then replace them with models. The other is that the company is heavily invested in coding LLMs and the tooling for them, so they are trying to hype them up.

They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.

Accurate description of most managers i’ve encountered.

It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care

Because they make money selling you the AI. It’s that simple.

Studies show AI coding tools make the task slower. It only makes people feel they’re faster, but reality is different. So it’s the snake oil pitch. Nobody can know it doesn’t really work and they keep throwing money at it in an increasingly more desperate “fake it till you make it”. Because, if this thing implodes, it’ll take a large part of the market and economy with it to do a rerun of the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s because we’re expensive. That’s the long and short of it.

10 developers in Silicon Valley can run you $1-$2m in salary alone (it’s more expensive with benefits added).

The industry constantly conspires to keep the salary of software engineers down. It does it cyclically too. In 2008 I was told I would have no problem getting a 6 figure job when I graduated by 2013. Of course the economy had other ideas. Same thing with the dot Com bubble.

I currently make double what I did 10 years ago. It doesn’t actually matter much as inflation and a divorce has had my costs balloon just as much, but it’s still loads more than any other job out there.

They’ll get what they want, one way or another. Then when none of their shit works they inevitably come back begging us and we request better pay and benefits again, because we know they do this. They don’t learn, much like those reliant on AI.

Also note that it’s for open source projects only.

I agree with you 100% but theres also a small strange humour in the wordage of paying for freedom.

i urge people do do this but also donate to them too <3

Some CEO: gasp GUYS I found a new blacklisted word! Quick add non-profit to the Ai-Moderation. How dare they not pay me infinitely!

At some previous jobs, the newer devs would sometimes confuse the two. Its a real thing.

Me I lived through svn, mercerial, and file vault. So glad we ended up with git as the protocol.

Hell you can set up a git + file server and just use it without any Hub (Hob/lab/berg) if your bare metal enough. It works.

Sadly a lot of us are stuck with GitHub. Enterprise loves it because it has “Metrics”, and most companies aren’t about to jump ship over something like AI — especially when so many of them are already doubling down on AI in other areas.

AI also needs a lot of other shit to run even at a basic level. Networks, and systems… A dedicated nuclear power facility on three Mile Island.

AI can’t run without so many people plugging in the servers, and power, and installing the operating systems… The list of supporting characters is long.

What if we… Just… Stopped supporting the companies that were pushing AI?

The future is now. The future is also ten, twenty and thirty years ago! According to GitHub’s Chief Executive Idiot himself:

the skills that will matter most include system design, AI fluency, delegation, and quality assurance

Except for “AI fluency”, this has been true for fucking ever. No serious work environment evaluates their developers on how quickly they can vomit code (or so I hope): the job is indeed about design, quality and working as a team in general.
Which means a tool that does not help with any of these is already not a revolution. When the tool actively makes quality worse and collaboration more complicated, I get the impression it is actually detrimental.

Mind you, I might be dead wrong. I am personally not impressed so far. It seems to be a better autocomplete, but I don’t want to throw a glass of water out the window every time I press tab.

Yes, this isn’t just about profits for these companies.

It’s about control. They want to prove that they own us, and they’re right more often than not because of useful idiots.

It’s like all those companies who fast tracked their way into profits by ignoring the catastrophic effects they were having on the environment… Down the road.

Later is someone else’s problem. Now is when AI-pushers want to make money.

I hate where things have been heading.

same as how it goes on the stock market? they don’t care about the long term, but only the short term. what happens on the long term is somebody else’s problem, you just have to squeeze out everything, and know when to exit.

they are gambling with our lives. but not with theirs. that’s (one of) the problem: they are not fearing their lives.

it’s also sort of a description of his own role, innit?