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The results are not wrong, they are AI. Google wants that to become a distinct thing that is neither. What's a better answer for Google than one that generates more usage? If we all push in the same direction we can make AI work, we just need to accept we will need to hold its hand for a while.

I think this is sarcastic but man some people really do have some wild defenses for LLM’s so I can’t be sure lol

Name one thing Microsoft didn't run into the ground post-acquisition

hey now, LinkedIn was terrible before Microsoft.

Java or Bedrock edition, and have you tried logging into your EntraID Microsoft Teams for Xbox account lately? Make sure to check the box to keep you logged in!

Last I heard UK Minecraft players aren't even allowed to talk anymore without ID verification.

And if someone makes a server that doesn't do the chat verification, Microsoft blacklists that server in the client-side server address textbox. This system was developed to destroy pay-to-win servers, but they're now applying it against servers that refuse to censor "fuck".

Not as bad as it is now. All I see are suggested posts from people I never connected with and those are full of instagramesque self-promoting banal vibes.

TBH, even LinkedIn seemed to provide me with posts advertising events that happened two weeks ago a bit less pre-acquisition.

I think Minecraft is still in good shape

I wouldn't know, somehow this game I bought maybe 15 years ago is no longer playable for me, my account was supposed to be migrated from Mojang to Microsoft or similar, but then that never happened or something, and trying to login now asks me to contact Microsoft support, which I've tried 3-4 times, never had anyone respond to me so who knows how the game is today? I stopped trying at this point...

Personally, once a game I own is janked from my hands because of organizational decisions, that's the time I'll stop consider the game "in good shape", but I'm sure the people who had to buy the same game a second time still enjoy it.


Yes, the account migration was a mess. Support response times were at least 30 days, if you ever actually received a response at all (I never did). I did buy the game a second time in order to play with my kids.

They deleted my account from 2010 because I didn't convert it to a Microsoft one. They baked an incredibly aggressive chat filter into multiplayer, even if you're not playing on official servers. They've added microtransactions for things that we previously free (skins, resource packs). They force you into their shitty, bloated, user-hostile launcher with adverts.

It's been nonstop content-slop since the acquisition. New mobs, new blocks, new items, new blocks, new items, new mobs, new mobs, new biomes. Some of them are good but the totality of adding a bunch of stuff has been to destroy the simplicity that was one of the draws of the original game. Now it's an exploration and niche-mechanics-exploitation game more than a virtual legos game. You don't go mining any more, you find trading loops with villagers.

This was happening to some degree pre-acquisition, but since the acquisition it's been this non-stop.

Some of it's good. The Nether and the oceans were really boring before their respective updates.

They should have called Minecraft "done" around the acquisition time and started on Minecraft 2.


GH was acquired by microsoft some eight years ago. It has been working quite well until recently.

People may have had complaints about functionality, features, commercial issues, but the thing used to at least have a decent uptime until recently.


Has nothing to do with Microsoft acquisition... AI usage has increased demand and load. More PRs, more Action runners, more of everything firing. GitHub just wasn't ready for the scale and are now having issues catching up with it as it continues to increase exponentially.

This is a convenient lie that GH likes to tell. Growth is nothing like exponential, its at most 300% over several years according to their own public numbers (presented misleadingly on graphs)

But a couple of years ago they were crowing about how much work they were doing to prepare for “a billion developers”. If they had actually done that then the actual load from agents should have been no problem.


Is this growth in resource usage or growth in revenue? Because those numbers aren't necessarily coupled. I.e most action runners are free

usage

There was an x post in another thread under this post that showed all the standard usage numbers are way up: 14x, 2.1x, etc. And the OP hinted at the usage growth being non-linear for 2026

Are you sure? Seems like they "completed" a migration about the same time all these problems started to become daily. https://www.theverge.com/tech/796119/microsoft-github-azure-...

Yeah, that and Microsoft has been slow to move the infrastructure to something that scales better to handle that load.

The more surpassing part is that Microsoft hasn't figured out a way to manage/contain the AI-sourced traffic better so it doesn't create all this noisy neighbor problems for non-AI usage/users.


Github's core platform doesn't really make that separation, anything a human can leverage on github an AI agent can as well, just faster and with heavier usage. End of day agents and humans are using the same services.

Sure, still need to enable access the same info but feels like bucketing the clients into

bucket1 = clients that were working just fine before (users and whatever automation they had in place) bucket2 = ai clients that contributed to, if not flat out caused, the scale problems

then slowing down/limiting the bucket2 clients while keeping the bucket1 clients rolling as-is, is both doable and keeps existing customers happy while the underlying infra gets scale/perf improvements needed to support ai clients at scale.


MSFT is also forcing its subsidiaries to “lean into AI” so that they can fire people to cover for Satya’s bad investments

> It has been working quite well until recently.

I'm not sure how reliable the data is, but average uptime seems to have dipped measurably starting within a year of the aquisition, according to https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/


FWIW, I'm not convinced that chart is necessarily an accurate representation of pre-acquisition reality. It would really surprise me if GitHub did not have a single sev-0 pre-acquisition, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were not formally captured and reported in a format that would make its way into their current status page's database.

They moved to Azure. Nothing improves on Azure.

It also used to be run as an independent company with access to MS's resources.

Now it's a unit in their AI hype machine.


MSFT was pretty arms length for the first 5-6 years. I was honestly kind of impressed and it made my opinion of MSFT better. But then AI made it too attractive of a target and MSFT couldn't help but make it a place the former CEO wanted to leave (and it has been running headless for about a year now).

It's quite disappointing objectively, but I expected worse from MSFT.


Dave Cutler?

Sure. Don't use GitHub.

You can now hire me as an overpriced consultant instead of paying Microsoft.


There's a lot of things these days that you can't do that are being done.

And this is by far one of the more innocent, unfortunately.

It isn't, they just bought the term and redefined it. Nothing a few millions to the main dictionary editors won't fix.


Seriously how is this surprising? We all know AI companies stole troves of data to train their models, why do you think they'll stop? Have they faced consequences for the mass theft of copyrighted data?

You can't steal or profit off of that data, but it's fine for them for whatever reason. I guess because they're a force for good in the world and are pushing humanity forward eh?


That data is not stolen. It's still there.

I've had my writings directly plagiarized by other people--people who made word-for-word copies of my work, replaced my name with their own, and made a tidy profit on it. They profit more than I ever managed, because they have more resources. In the aftermath, my writings are still "there", not "stolen" in the physical world sense, but my ability to make a living is damaged, and the plagiarism is deeply unethical.

LLMs and "AI" are just one small step removed from straight-up plagiarism. They are massive moral injury[1] machines.

[1] https://moralinjuryproject.syr.edu/about-moral-injury/


the income from the data, on the other hand...

Are the livelihoods of the original creators still there?

> You can't steal or profit off of that data, but it's fine for them for whatever reason.

The reason is quite simple. When Microsoft steals YOUR work, GDP go up. When YOU steal Microsoft's work, GDP go down. And the people who create and enforce our laws want GDP to go up. To these people morality and rights are a thin guise that can be conveniently discarded when it's invonvenient for them.


> why do you think they'll stop

Because the sources are now polluted with AI. That's at least one reason they stop scraping.


> it's fine for them for whatever reason

the reason is crony capitalism. I wish I knew what the fix was


[flagged]


I paid tuition. The library bought its books. The theater sold me a ticket. Money changed hands every step, which is the part your analogy skips.

Where did money change hands when you looked at a random image on DeviantArt and got inspired and made a similar image yourself?

Most artists considered it a one to one exchange. They appreciated attribution and were flattered to inspire people. Some got gigs. Some got laid. The money flowed to DeviantArt, hosting providers, and ad providers. The artists were okay with this. They were the ones paying.

Then DeviantArt built a tool to automate the "make a similar image yourself" part and here we are. It removed all the fun parts: the personal contact, the attribution, the inspiration.

Artists realized they unwittingly contributed to the death of not only the community, but the art form they love. Lawsuits pending.


Seriously. I recall a thousand hours of movies. Those memories sit in my head and I pay no royalties

Put what you recall on paper, turn it into a screenplay. Let me know how quickly you get sued.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Trillion dollar companies license.

One could argue most screenplays are derivative.

I heard somewhere there's like eight basic plots or something. and everything else is just an elaboration on that

Hollywood has extraordinarily well-defined controls for keeping things legal and everyone in the chain compensated. Plus a separate Oscars category for it.

True, they live in your head rent free. But if you produce a derivative work, you have to pay.

Derivative work has a specific and narrow definition that's not applicable here. You don't have to pay anyone when you answer questions for money.

OP says he has movies in his head and doesn't have to pay royalties. I told him that if he produces a derivative work, he has to pay royalties. Your comment doesn't follow, but I'll address it.

A trivia host doesn't have to pay royalties to ask questions, and the players don't have to pay royalties to answer them. If that turns into "movie night" at the bar then they have to pay royalties to screen the full film. If a professor plays clips in film class, he doesn't.

Your implication is that an LLM is little more than an brilliant film scholar or exceptionally well-read librarian, and that the matter is settled. The billions of dollars in play across a dozen active court cases say it isn't.


Everytime something gets posted on HN about a bad or unfair state of affairs, some cynical nihilist posts “doh why r u surprised” and I’m sick and tired of it. These comments aren’t insightful, helpful or thought-provoking. You’re just helping a bad situation stay bad.

My only imagined motivation for such posts is, “Look at me, I’m not surprised by this due to my superior intellect, why are you surprised?”

“No one is surprised, jackass, it’s just adults having a conversation about the current state of affairs.”

Yes, it’s tiring and rarely contributes positively to the conversation.


Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I'm not sure what your point is - can you expand?

I am also an AI skeptic, but I would rather have used the 1000 monkeys with a 1000 typewriters will eventually write the whole works of Shakespeare analogy.

When you consider the amount of computation which went into this discovery it is less impressive. Like if you spend a lot of fuel you can travel really fast, much faster then a bicyclist. Similarly Go-engines can beat the best humans at go, but they spend several orders of magnitude more energy to do so.

Mathematicians prove or disprove conjectures all the time and use orders of less energy to do so. Using LLMs is kind of just throwing money at the problem and hoping it works. In this case it did. But this is not the most efficient way to do this, and it won‘t scale.


> Go-engines can beat the best humans at go, but they spend several orders of magnitude more energy to do so.

From what I can find AlphaGo Zero runs at ~400 watts, while a human brain uses ~20. So really only about 1 order of magnitude difference.

Of course, training costs are a different question entirely.


People are marveling at what AI can discover purely out of time and chance. AI will undoubtedly find awesome things because there's very few things we've thrown this much money at. For every awesome thing AI finds, there's a million mistakes, fake leads, hallucinations, etc. Amaze away but let's not forget this is an exception much more than the norm.

Presumably with automated proofs, hallucinations (aka, creativity or confabulation, if we hadn't botched the naming) is a good thing. It's in the empirical world where trusting an LLM is a stupid thing because there's no automated form of fact checking.

I'm sorry. But whats the point of this critique?

That a raw LLM hallucinates?

That we never see all the mistakes and dead ends a complex system using AI hits?

Does it even matter if its accuracy rate across all its experiments is < 100% if it can run trillions of experiments in the same time a human could run 1?

We don't see many of the failed attempts of Human Researchers. Why? Because it doesn't matter.

What amazing here is that it shows our society can make discoveries faster in the post LLM world. Thats incredible.

Your "critique" of how it happened. Not so much.


As a human, I have many stupid and wrong ideas all day long - most of those don't bubble up to my conscious awareness. If LLMs hallucinate and come up with crazy things, maybe that's ok given that we can filter out the sensible and novel ones.

And in doing so you spend what, a 100 watt hours per bad idea? Compared to how many megawatt hours of AIs failed attempts at proving math capabilities to investors only to prolong the AI bubble another month?

I bet your stupid ideas also taught you a valuable lesson and you learned at least something from the experience, maybe your next idea won’t be so dumb, and those 100 watt hours weren’t actually wasted (though it may feel like they were). Compered to a failed LLM experiment, where all those billions of billions of computations are completely wasted. the model knows exactly as much after a failed experiment as it did going into it. Those Megawatt hours were simply wasted, turned into heat energy, paid for by raising the power bills of the of the datacenter’s neighbors.


> As a human, I have many stupid and wrong ideas all day long - most of those don't bubble up to my conscious awareness

I'm sorry to nitpick, but isn't an unconscious idea an oxymoron?


It depends upon what you mean. A dream is a stream of unconscious ideas in a way. One could also look at Jungian psychology and point to the ideas your conscious mind rejects by projecting onto others as unconscious ones, with the idea being that we refuse to face them in ourselves and so must put them outward.

Maybe we’re using terms in different ways, but in my mind I have subconscious thoughts, ideas, perceptions, emotions, etc. I’m unsure why you would consider that to be an oxymoron?

Unless you’re defining an idea as something that only exists in your conscious awareness?


Kind of seems to me, the heart of the critique is that 1. unthinkable amounts of financial and social and political credit have been thrown at this which necessarily has deducted it from other fields we could have invested in, instead. 2. Thus, with such wealth you would expect at least a couple of discoveries.

Not my post, but I think point 1 is stronger than 2.


> 1. unthinkable amounts of financial and social and political credit have been thrown at this which necessarily has deducted it from other fields we could have invested in, instead.

That's not necessarily true. If our only counterfactual to investing resources in project A were to invest them in some other project B, then, yes, the conclusion above follows. But often people just consume the resources.

(In the end, the goal of all economic activity is consumption. We invest resources so that we can consume more later. If there's no good enough project around, might as well consume more now.)


Of course. Just look at the SEO industry Google created. You can't search for anything without a full page of sponsored/SEO bullshit, and everyone agrees it's precisely why Google results are less relevant today than 10 years ago. But here we are, this is exactly the same thing. We used to search with a term, Google monetized that. We now search with a sentence, do you think Google's gonna leave that cash on the table?

Yeah man we've been saying negative things about them for like 40 years must we constantly dwell on what they do wrong? It's time we find positive angles

They keep doing negative things that influence the industry and infringe upon the freedoms of hundreds of millions of people. Yes we should keep dwelling on that.

I read the parent as sarcastic. Since the mentioned the continued negative things they do.

Positive HN-appropriate angle: they're very financially successful and have been for 40 years.

>Yeah man we've been saying negative things about them for like 40 years

Well gee, I wonder why people have been saying negative things about them for so long?

Perhaps if it's been that long there's a kernel of truth to the matter.

Perhaps they're a shitty company who does shitty things selling shitty products.


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