I’m absolutely not a fan of the hype, inappropriate uses, bad designs, questionable ethics, and poor implementations characteristic of the recent surge in AI or LMM or whatever initials you want to call it by. I don’t want AI writing my blog (so I left Wordpress) or doing my web searching for me (so I’m very concerned about Google and Bing), and I certainly don’t want AI doing my coding — to the extent I do any coding anyway. Point is, when GitHub opens an account on the Fedi, where (at least in my home feed) I see all sorts of skepticism, antagonism, and hostility toward the AI fad, and proudly puts in their profile that they’re “AI powered”, I find that both sad and amusing, and it also brings home the idea that, yes, it really is time to abandon that platform too.
I’ve never been a Microsoft fan, though not really a Microsoft vilifier either; some of the more rabid critics seem to me as deluded as the most enthusiastic fanboys. GitHub’s always been an odd combination of useful and problematic, especially after Microsoft acquired it. But the “AI powered” Copilot project really struck me as a disastrously bad idea. You don’t have to use it, of course. I don’t even have much use for it: Mainly I use GitHub just for public distribution and backup of personal KiCad projects, and of the occasional quick and dirty Python script. So Copilot’s not actively in my way, but even so I’d like to stay as far from it as possible.
(And from Microsoft Bing, also “AI powered” now. And from SwiftKey, which used to be my Android keyboard of choice; then Microsoft bought it; then Microsoft grafted AI onto it. NO. THANK. YOU. I haven’t found a keyboard nearly as good as what SwiftKey used to be, but I’m not using SwiftKey any more.)
So I’m ending my use of GitHub. My project repos are still there for now, but aren’t going to be updated, and at some point I’ll be deleting them.
For now, at least, they’re on GitLab. I don’t have a lot of faith that GitLab isn’t going to evolve in a similar bad direction, but they seemingly aren’t there yet. And at least it’s open source. That’s one of the weird things about GitHub: They push you to use open source licensing on your projects, and yet GitHub itself is closed source.
Where was I? Oh yes, not a lot of faith, etc. I could self host a GitLab server, at least in theory, and have one less thing in my life dependent on a “free” online service that could turn bad at any moment, but maybe that’s more aggravation than I need. At least I know I can freely migrate to a different platform at a future date if the need arises. So it’s GitLab for the time being.
I’m at
gitlab.com/rsholmes
. Projects have the same name as they did at GitHub, just change the domain to gitlab.com and the username to rsholmes and you’ll find it. Or follow the above link and you’ll see my projects listing.
<– 2023-07-17_an-index-for-mfos — 2023-09-08_here-we-go-again –>