Screw Github
November 13, 2023
Following in the footsteps this year of Twitter, Reddit, Docker, the Raspberry Pi Foundation… am I missing anyone? Following it seems in the footsteps this year of any company I write about that you're ever likely to have heard of, GitHub too is now dead to me.
I worry about encroaching neckbeardism, but I don't think it's me. Or at least apart from a growing intolerance for such things, it's not just me. I remain a man more sinned against than sinning. Also the beard's figurative. There is no beard.
With Github it's their stupid AI thing. GitHub's been slowly going off for a long time now. The ICE contracts. Bought by Microsoft, who I gave the biggest benefits of doubt to their horrible, horrible legacy. The endless creeping attempts at gamification of everything. Get a badge, get a star, get any number of things that might work on small children, & presumably pay with programmers too. But the AI thing. The pseudo AI code stealing license breaking thing isn't new, but making it ubiquitous is, & that was a bridge too far.
"Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot."
OK bye.
I moved my most active repo to Codeberg & deleted the rest. I'll move more of it to Codeberg or somewhere else in time, but for now it's offline. It took a while to plod through the gists, moving them back here, but now they're gone too. Delete, delete, delete. Over the last 10 years that code went from code on this blog, to links to gists, to embedded gists, back to links to gists, & finally back to code on the blog. The circle of life.
I'll leave a copy of Zine's code on Github until its next update carries the link to its new repo with it, but the rest's already gone, & there won't be any more.
I'm under no illusion. I know I'm such a small drop in the bucket I doubt they'd even notice if everyone I knew also left. But enough. Staying there was more than I could stomach. Enough already.