HN is not your army, and it isn’t a theater of ideological battle.

Please don’t do that here.

I’d be happy to email mods if you think they can tell you better. I’m no authority or guide, as my own comment history shows. I’m not better than you, or who I am replying to. I say this because I care to have a discussion that (only?) HN can enable. We can backbite anywhere (else) online, but the folks who created HN made it for something else, and arguably something greater.

I don't believe the behavior that is analyzed here was done in good faith, it is in fact a direct attack on things that I strongly believe in. Striving for good faith argument is only effective when both sides agree that they gain mutual benefits through agreement, otherwise your good faith is used as a tool to stall, disrupt, and do harm.

In that case, shaming is an appropriate response.

I may agree that this is an unequal yoke slung across both a good faith commenter and a rules-lawyered troll, assuming that your interpretation is accurate. However, it is not for us to say that bad faith must be answered with bad, and in fact the guidelines say that we must keep the good faith even in the face of bad. Otherwise we become the very thing we wrestle against.

You’re arguing for a kind of strained logic that suggests that two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts do, as if that could justify driving the wrong way down a one-way street. All roads might lead to Rome, but you can’t get there from here.

For what it’s worth, the comment I’m referring to in which shaming by me was perhaps not consistent with the guidelines was this one, in which I say that the commenter was wrong, their comment was bad, and they should feel bad. Dang said that this wasn’t okay, and I tend to agree to a point. We aren’t solely preaching to the choir here, so it’s not for me to say that they should feel bad per se, because that would be to stand in judgment of them as a person, and not merely to find their views contemptible. I don’t know if I find dang’s reasoning entirely convincing on the points, but I know his heart is in the right place by calling me out when I emailed him about being rate limited. You may also feel free to judge me, as I have also found myself feeling as you do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44568173

Unless you're somehow saying telemetry doesn't report anything about what a user is doing to it's home server.

In fact the Chinese entities are even less likely to share your secrets to your governement than their best friends at Google

Even if we interact with your rhetoric[1] at face value, there is a big difference between data going to your own elected government versus that of a foreign adversary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

But a foreign government is limited to what it can do to you if you are not a very high-value target.

So I try as much as possible to use software and services from a non-friendly government because this is the highest guarantee that my data will not be used against me in the future.

And since we can all agree that any data that is collected will end up with the government some way or another. Using forging software is the only real guarantee.

Unless the software is open source and its server is self-hosted, it should be considered Spyware.

It should be a crime for Google as well.

"Whataboutism" is a logical fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

"What about Google" is not a logical continuation of this discussion

Apple provides telemetry services that strips the IP before providing it to the app owners. Routing like this requires trust (just as a VPN does), but it's feasible.

Why is it relevant whether they provide it to app owners directly? The issue people have is the information is logged now and abused later, in whatever form.

If the app owner can't obtain PII, I don't believe the app owner is spying.

Is Apple spying?

> Routing like this requires trust

It depends on if you trust them, and their privacy policy. If they're functioning as a PII stripping proxy, as they claim, then I would claim no, to the extent of what's technically possible. I would also claim that a trustworthy VPN is not spying on you. YOMV.

So many US universities running such nodes, without ever getting legal troubles. Such lucky boys

Distinguishing factors from your example include

1. PII is actually encoded and handled by computer systems, not the mere capability for that to occur.

2. PII is actually sent off site, not merely able to be sent off site.

3. It doesn't assert that the PII is collected, which could imply storage, it merely asserts that it is sent as my original post does. We don't know whether or not it is stored after being received and processed.

Try talking to your users instead.

> The more users software has, less skills they have in average to accurately report any issues.

No amount of telemetry will solve that.

It’s easy to argue that if you are a PowerShell user or developer you benefit from no telemetry, but it’s hard to argue that you benefit from the tool you use being sidelined or defunded because corporate thinks nobody uses it. “Talk to your users” doesn’t solve this because there are millions of computers running scripts and no way to know who they are or contact them even if you could contact that many people, and they would not remember how often they launched it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

To take your logic to its extreme, you have a disease and are prescribed pills, and the pharmaceutical company says "we will track when you take the pills - unless you don't want us to?" and you would prefer the researchers get shut down for not knowing whether anyone actually takes the pills, and an unlimited number of people die from treatable diseases that don't get cured.

The connection is clear if your salary doesn't require you to not understand it.

Developers don't opt-in to telemetry? Maybe it's because they don't want to enable that telemetry, your experiments be damned.

Use proper engineering to demonstrate that your scripts work instead of demanding that users be your free software test team.

This telemetry is not about demonstrating that scripts work, as I have said to you multiple times.

I did not say that. Within the context of Microsoft's internal funding, maybe, but we could have the same improvement by Microsoft throwing more money at the PowerShell team without this telemetry. The core thing I said was that the information the telemetry gets cannot be got by "talk to your users" not that the telemetry leads to amazing improvements.

It is still difficult for you to make the case that someone choosing to download PowerShell can be "not consenting" (and before you reply saying "PowerShell ships with Windows", the PowerShell which has telemetry does not [yet] ship with Windows).

Similarly, a medical trial will take a very detailed consent before you can start.

Your opt-out telemetry is akin to your insurance sending you powered and Bluetooth enabled toothbrushes out of the blue to track you and threaten to cancel your insurance if you don't use that toothbrush and send data to them.

Or as a more extreme example, going through an important procedure not with the known and proven method but with an experimental one, because you didn't opt-out and nobody bothered to tell you this. In reality, you need to sign consent and waiver forms to accept experimental methods.

Yes, I agree that person's comparison to non-consensual medical research is stupid.

> "Your opt-out telemetry is akin to your insurance sending you powered and Bluetooth enabled toothbrushes out of the blue to track you and threaten to cancel your insurance if you don't use that toothbrush and send data to them."

More akin to your insurance company making a public RFC where you can discuss the coming telemetry, then you choosing to ask your insurance for an optional toothbrush, being able to opt out of telemetry if you want to, the insurance company documenting how to opt out[1], you being able to edit the toothbrush source code to remove the telemetry entirely with the insurance company's approval because it's MIT licensed, and absolutely nothing happening to you if you opt out.

Let the corporation suffer then. With an open API, a third party will make a better one. Microsoft can buy that; corporations have a habit of doing that.

> “Talk to your users” doesn’t solve this because there are millions of computers running scripts

Why are you worried about the problems that scripts face? If the developer encounters issues in scripts, the developer can work to fix it. Sometimes that might mean filing a bug report... or a feature request for better documentation. Or the developer might get frustrated and use something better. Like bash.

> there are millions of computers running scripts and no way to know who they are or contact them

Why do they matter to you, or a corporation then?

> they would not remember how often they launched it.

If your users aren't interacting with you for feature requests and bug reports, then either you don't have users or you don't have good enough reachability from the users to you.

Corporations provide value to others. It's not just the corporation that is missing out.

Bash isn't better.

> "Why are you worried about the problems that scripts face? Why do they matter to you?"

because I write and run such scripts.

> "Let the corporation suffer then"

Microsoft wouldn't suffer, PowerShell users would suffer.

> "sometimes that might mean filing a bug report... or a feature request for better documentation. "

In this scenario the PowerShell team has been defunded or sacked. Who will the bug report go to? Who will implement the feature request?

> "If your users aren't interacting with you for feature requests and bug reports, then either you don't have users or you don't have good enough reachability from the users to you."

Users are interacting with Microsoft for feature requests and bug reports. There are a thousand open issues on https://github.com/powershell/powershell/ and many more which were closed "due to inactivity". What difference does that make if Corporate doesn't want to fund a bigger team to fix more bugs unless it can be shown to benefit a lot of customers not just "a few" devs who raise issues?

It is, by virtue of running on Linux.

> because I write and run such scripts.

'kay. Learn how to do Engineering and the software will come just fine. You don't need telemetry to tell you anything about scripts. You need good error reports for your users to send to you instead.

> Microsoft wouldn't suffer, PowerShell users would suffer.

So what you're saying is that Microsoft doesn't care about its users. PowerShell users should use products from better companies then.

> In this scenario the PowerShell team has been defunded or sacked. Who will the bug report go to? Who will implement the feature request?

Why were they sacked?

Oh, right, because they didn't interact with their users.

Who will the bug report go to? Clearly it's the same as before: nobody. That's a Microsoft problem.

> What difference does that make if Corporate doesn't want to fund a bigger team to fix more bugs unless it can be shown to benefit a lot of customers not just "a few" devs who raise issues?

If Corporate doesn't want to fund bugfixes and features for people who actually file bug reports and talk to you, then that's poor behavior of corporate. Why do you want to contribute to the decline of your users privacy?

That's good, because if running on Linux is what it takes to make something good, PowerShell is good, and has been good since before you created your HN account.

> "'kay. Learn how to do Engineering and the software will come just fine. You don't need telemetry to tell you anything about scripts. You need good error reports for your users to send to you instead."

This does not tell you the thing I said the telemetry was added for. Try again. Or don't but if you're going to, at least understand the claim and address it.

> "So what you're saying is that Microsoft doesn't care about its users. PowerShell users should use products from better companies then."

That is not what I am saying. A team which is fighting to get more funding so it can address more issues is demonstrating that it does care about users.

> "Why were they sacked?"

If you are forgetting the context of the chat, you can re-read it.

> "Oh, right, because they didn't interact with their users."

I refer you back to my previous comment where I link to the Github where you can see they are interacting with their users, and wonder why you are immediately saying the opposite and thinking that will fly.

> "If Corporate doesn't want to fund bugfixes and features for people who actually file bug reports and talk to you, then that's poor behavior of corporate"

That's because they use different metrics for different goals, but let's say yes it is.

> "Why do you want to contribute to the decline of your users privacy?"

Were you listening at all, or were you just waiting for a chance to tell everyone you don't know what people do with computers, haven't looked, don't care, but are certain all they need is Markdown and a terminal with a tiling window editor?

Is there even a single distribution of linux with PowerShell as the default shell?

No, of course not, because PowerShell does not work on Linux. It does not work with coreutils, it does not work with bash, it does not work in any way that's useful to Linux.

> This does not tell you the thing I said the telemetry was added for. Try again. Or don't but if you're going to, at least understand the claim and address it.

If your servers don't have users, then why are they running scripts?

Your servers have users. The users are you, the server admins, whoever's consuming the data being served by them. Your users need to tell you that something is wrong, voluntarily. If you are not getting reports from your users, then you are doing it wrong.

> If you are forgetting the context of the chat, you can re-read it.

'kay. Neat. Nothing was forgotten.

> That is not what I am saying. A team which is fighting to get more funding so it can address more issues is demonstrating that it does care about users.

> I refer you back to my previous comment where I link to the Github where you can see they are interacting with their users, and wonder why you are immediately saying the opposite and thinking that will fly.

It's because you're too stubborn to recognize that you're fighting for things that harm users.

A team which is fighting to get more funding, and debases themselves to do it, is not a good team. A corporation which fosters that kind of thinking is a terrible corporation.

Showing github issues and PRs and stuff? Cool, good interactions.

Trying to justify telemetry by tying it to funding? No, not good.

Get your github issues status to be tied to your funding instead.

> Were you listening at all, or were you just waiting for a chance to tell everyone you don't know what people do with computers, haven't looked, don't care, but are certain all they need is Markdown and a terminal with a tiling window editor?

I'm not sure what you're getting at.

I suppose Markdown came about because it's extremely simple and great for inline code / readmes when contrasted with all of the bloat that comes with HTML, or contrasted with the binary blob that is PDF. It's great and there are plenty of people who don't use Markdown. How do I know? Because I talk to people.

As for a terminal with a tiling window editor? There are plenty of people who don't use terminals, and plenty of people who do. Have you sat down and talked about how and why? Have you tried to actually have conversations with multiple other developers to understand their workflows?

Because if not, then you're only guessing at why people use a given thing. Telemetry doesn't solve that at all.

Is there even a single distribution of Linux with nushell or oilshell as the default shell? Therefore they don't work on Linux?

> "No, of course not, because PowerShell does not work on Linux. It does not work with coreutils"

In what way does it "not work with coreutils"?

> "it does not work in any way that's useful to Linux"

Yes it does. It can read text, do regex processing on text, run native binaries, pipeline text from and to them, read files, write to files, be a shebang scripting language.

> "If your servers don't have users, then why are they running scripts?"

Seriously you have never encountered - and cannot imagine - a headless server running a script? Automation tools run scripts.

> "Your users need to tell you that something is wrong, voluntarily. If you are not getting reports from your users, then you are doing it wrong."

We are not talking about things going wrong. As I said before. This is something you made up and are fixated upon, because if you addressed what I actually said, you'd have to face up to the fact that your suggested alternative is not an alternative.

> "'kay. Neat. Nothing was forgotten."

Yes, actually, because you just went straight back to "if something is wrong" which is not the scenario I was ever talking about.

> "It's because you're too stubborn to recognize that you're fighting for things that harm users."

I am not fighting for it, I am fighting your claim that doing something different will get you the same information that this telemetry can get, which it will not and cannot.

> "is not a good team"

'kay it's a bad team. That doesn't change anything about your claim that you can get the same information from voluntary feedback being wrong.

> "Trying to justify telemetry by tying it to funding? No, not good."

Lying that dev feedback gets you the same information, because you don't like the truth? Not good.

> "Because if not, then you're only guessing at why people use a given thing. Telemetry doesn't solve that at all."

The one single point I made is that telemetry can tell you how often a thing is running, when nobody is opening a Github issue to tell you that. Nobody was talking about why people use a thing.

I understand that Microsoft believes in "show me numbers or GTFO", but the problem is they ignore Goodhart's law repeatedly, and they don't learn from their mistake. To recap; "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

So, to keep the line go up, Microsoft's all tools are enshittifed over time, and this metric collection is marred by internal power struggles, confirmation bias, and representation inequality (when a company uses a feature in all their installations because it runs a script developed and distributed by a single engineer, their representation is amplified, for example).

Do you remember how a single person gutted .NET Core to remove hot reload support because of a power struggle, despite the community and the numbers screamed the opposite? This is the Microsoft we know, and since we rank ourselves by our HN account creation dates, you know it way better than me.

In many software communities, it's shown over and over again a distilled stream of human feedback is way better than playing the numbers game with some automated number collection and crunching, because it's way better filtered than some raw numbers. Another problem is Microsoft is not merging the numbers with actual feedback, and going for a hybrid approach either. They are not a company like this. They are not formed like this, and their DNA doesn't allow that. They may be able to do it top down maybe in a decade, but today they're not there yet. Their community response is just fronting the issue trackers and let some feedback trickle to keep the community happy. Yes, I don't believe in or trust Microsoft a bit to care about their users unless it affects their bottom line.

Like it or not, regardless of Gates, Ballmer or Nadella; Microsoft has never changed at the core. It's a company based on IP, suppressive monopoly, and "win at all costs" mantra.

So, at the end of the day, the numbers are not there to secure user happiness, or giving clout to the Powershell team. They unfortunately have to do it for job security, and to have some arm's length distance from the shredder. You today have PowerShell because, some big customers said they need it, team can show it's being used by some other minions, and maybe a couple of internal teams benefit from its existence.

Don't get distracted. It's about money [0].

[0]: https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted

P.S.: ...and yes, Bash maybe a terse language, but it's better than PowerShell, a lot.

> "Another problem is Microsoft is not merging the numbers with actual feedback"

That is a problem, I agree.

> "So, at the end of the day, the numbers are not there to secure user happiness, or giving clout to the Powershell team."

Members of the Powershell team are/were active on Reddit, Steve Lee the Software Engineering Manager for PowerShell commented[2] when telemetry was introduced: "Telemetry can help increase Microsoft investment in PowerShell. If the data shows increasing usage, we can justify increasing the size of the team. However, if the data shows the opposite, then we would need to justify our existence". Your claim that that is not the reason flies in the face of the people who put it there saying why they put it there. And the public RFC they did before adding it, linked in the comment.

> "You today have PowerShell because, some big customers said they need it,"

We have PowerShell because Jeffrey Snover ported Linux/Unix tools to Windows, found they were no use, and designed a shell for Windows. Then argued Bill Gates into having an automation system that wasn't graphical to compete with Linux. Before it was PowerShell it was called Monad and Snover wrote a blog post about his design document[1] where he talks about the design being customer focused and the team getting feedback that they were then one of the most customer-focused teams.

> "P.S.: ...and yes, Bash maybe a terse language, but it's better than PowerShell, a lot."

As you can read in the Monad Manifesto linked in the blog post: "the traditional approach to composing solutions is difficult and fragile. It uses pipelines to perform prayer-based parsing of text streams. These mechanisms are awkward, inconsistent, and imprecise. Admins spend the majority of their thought process on mechanisms instead of problem solving.". Having the shell do argument parsing for all cmdlets makes the user experience more predictable and consistent, the tooling for completing parameters better and more consistent, and reduces the effort needed to develop scripts and cmdlets. Better.

Everyone promptly moves from Bash to Python for scripting. PowerShell is a scripting language. Extensible syntax makes it usable in interactive shell and in code. Better.

"Monad takes a different approach providing a rich set of management oriented services for developing management GUI tools. These services allow management GUIs to be layered on top of the scripting engine and Cmdlets. This provides auditing, macro record/playback and integrated GUI/command line tools" - Bash has nothing like this at all.

Bash associative arrays are keyed by strings, PowerShell's can be keyed by different types because PowerShell uses .NET types. PowerShell can call almost any .NET code (C#'s standard library) and use the same object instances and call methods on them and the data is not serialised to text at any point. Bash cannot do this.

PowerShell can import modules over its remoting system from a remote system, run the cmdlets locally, get serialised objects to the local machine, which can invoke methods on the remote machine. Bash cannot do this.

Bash is not in the same league, not playing in the same game, much more narrowly scoped, and when it comes to language design it's not well designed. Both are full of warts and footguns, which is expected from a Microsoft tool but should not be the case for something which has been open source since 1989 in a world where its fans say open source means anyone can fork and improve stuff and stuff gets better over time. Given its much narrower scope and much wider fanbase, it should be trip-hazard free. Nobody should be moving to Python to make reliable small administration scripts, instead of everyone recommending that.

[1] https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2011/10/01/monad-manifesto/

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/ohieet/anyone_k...

To be clear, I consent to send telemetry from some of the tools I use and deploy.

Their common pattern? They wait a bit, and ask nicely about whether I want to participate. Also, the dialog box asking the question defaults to off.

I read the fine print, look a the data they push, ponder and decide whether I'm cool with it or not.

Give me choice, be upfront and transparent. Then we can have a conversation.

https://github.com/grafana/tempo/discussions/5001#discussion...

(Yes, that's for Grafana tempo, but the issue in `grafana/grafana` was just marked as duplicate of this.)

In this case, the software being analyzed is the alternative that sucks.

I work at Apple, so I’m not concerned about being monitored—it’s all company-owned equipment and data anyway.

It was the same when I worked at Microsoft. I used Microsoft products exclusively, regardless of any potential privacy concerns.

Employees at Google and Amazon do the same. It’s known as “dogfooding”—using your own products to test and improve them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food).

As for why people outside these companies use their products, it usually comes down to two reasons: a) Their employer has purchased licenses and wants employees to use them, either for compliance or to get value from the investment; or b) They genuinely like the product—whether it’s because of its features, price, performance, support, or overall experience.

> Why do people use obvious spyware when free software exists?

So, even though the poster was referring to ByteDance when they said "obvious spyware", I was feigning incomprehension in order to ask the question, how do we differentiate ByteDance from what Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon (and the rest) do.

It's a real question - why do technical people, who arguably should know better, and can do something about it - continue to use these data-harvesting and user-selling platforms? The answer is obvious when it's the case of an employee of those companies, I grant you that.

My apologies if you feel your response did address that, and I missed it. If so, please help me see what I missed.

This is not because it is better and I've seen no inclination that it would somehow be more private or secure, but most enterprises already share their proprietary data with AWS and have an agreement with AWS that their TAMs will gladly usher Kiro usage under.

Interesting to distinguish that privacy/security as it relates to individuals is taken at face value, while when it relates to corporations it is taken at disclosure value.

Your analysis is thorough, and I wonder if their reduction of processes from 33 to 20...(WOW) had anything to do with moving telemetry logic elsewhere (hence increased endpoint activity).

What does Bytedance say regarding all this?

1. Try using pi-hole to block those particular endpoints via making DNS resolution fail; see if it still works if it can’t access the telemetry endpoints.

2. Their ridiculous tracking, disregard of the user preference to not send telemetry, and behavior on the Discord when you mentioned tracking says everything you need to know about the company. You cannot change them. If you don’t want to be tracked, then stay away from Bytedance.

For what it's worth, I do use Google products personally. But I won't go near Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram.

Please see hn guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Luckily for you (and many others) there is no requirement that points be coherent.

On Apple devices, first-party applications get to circumvent LittleSnitch-like filtering. Presumably harder to hide this kind of activity on Linux, but then you need to have the expertise to be aware of the gaps. Docker still punches through your firewall configuration.

In fact, most web browsers are using DoH, so pihole is useless in that regard.

https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/dnscrypt-proxy/

The SNI extension is sent unencrypted as part of the ClientHello (first part of the TLS handshake). Any router along the way see the hostname that the client provides in the SNI data, and can/could drop the packet if they so choose.

Although there are caveats -- if an app decides to use its own DNS server, sometimes secure DNS, you are still out of luck. I just recently discovered that Android webview may bypass whatever DNS your Wi-Fi points to.

Every single person has "something to hide", and that's normal. It's normal to not want your messages snooped through. It doesn't mean you're a criminal, or even computer-saavy.

Like the Casio watches, travelling to Syria, using Tor, Protonmail, etc…

When it is better in reality to have a regular watch, a Gmail with encrypted .zip files or whatever, etc.

It does not mean you are a criminal if you have that Casio watch, but if you have this, plus encrypted emails, plus travel to some countries as a tourist, you are almost certain to put yourself in trouble for nothing, while you tried to protect yourself.

And if you are a criminal, you will put yourself in trouble too, also for nothing, while you tried to protect yourself.

This was the basis of Xkeyscore, and all of that to say that Signal is one very good signal that the person may be interesting.

2. Using a secure, but niche, service is still more secure than using a service with no privacy.

Sure, you can argue using Signal puts a "target" on your back. But there's nothing to target, right? Because it's not being run by Google or Meta. What are they gonna take? There's no data to leak about you.

If I were a criminal, which I'm not, I'd rather rob a bank with an actual gun than with a squirt gun. Even though having an actual gun puts a bigger target on your back. Because the actual gun works - the squirt gun is just kinda... useless.

Actually, there was a case... I can't recall but it might have been in Argentina, where the robbers did explicitly use fake guns when robbing the banks because doing so still actually worked for the purposes of the robbery, and it also reduced their legal liability.

Dang said a similarly small minority of users here do all the commenting.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

HN discussion of that link for anyone curious

I'm trying ZED too, which I believe as a commercial product comes with telemetry too.. but yeah, learning advanced rules of a personal firewall always helpful!

Any recommendations?

This seems like an easy win for a software project

Microsoft is content with funding it, the price is your telemetry (for now).

For high quality development tools I use true FOSS; or I pay for my tools to avoid not knowing where the value is being extracted.

The price of VSCode is halo effect for Azure products

Specifically: the remote code extension, the C/C++ extension and the Python extension.

JetBrains products. Can work fully offline and they don't send "telemetry" if you're a paying user: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/settings-usage-statisti...

Isn't that what VS Codium is for?

Either way it uses electron. Which I hate so much.

Sad to hear that. I really enjoyed VS Codium before I jumped full-time into Nova.

(Unsolicited plug: If you're looking for a Mac-native IDE, and your needs aren't too out-of-the-ordinary, Nova is worth a try. If nothing else, it's almost as fast as a TUI, and the price is fair.)

what other software packages have 200 year old jokes about them?

Because no other company was willing to spend enough money to reach critical mass other than Microsoft. VSCode became the dominant share of practically every language that it supported within 12-18 months of introduction.

This then allowed things like the Language Server Protocol which only exists because Microsoft reached critical mass and could cram it down everybody's throat.

Opening IDEA after those three days was the same kind of feeling I imagine you’d get when you take off a too tight pair of shoes you’ve been trying to run a marathon in.

ymmv, of course, but for $dayjob I can’t even be arsed trying anything else at this point, it’s so ingrained I doubt it’ll be worth the effort switching.

- popup context windows for docs (kind of there, but having to respect the default character grid makes them much less capable and usually they don't allow further interaction)

- contextual buttons on a line of code (sure, custom commands exist, but they're not discoverable)

- "minimap"

  > debuggers

  >> DAP

  > popup context windows for docs

  > contextual buttons on a line of code

  > minimap

The "minimap" is the only one here that isn't native. You can also have the file tree on the left if you want. Most people tend to use NerdTree[4], but like with a lot of plugins, there's builtins that are just as good. Here's the help page for netrw[5], vim's native File Explorer

Btw, this all works in vim. No need for neovim for any of this stuff. Except for the debugger, this stuff has been here for quite some time. The debugger has been around as a plugin for awhile too. All this stuff has been here since I started using vim, which was over a decade ago (maybe balloons didn't have as good of an interface? Idk, it's been awhile)

[0] https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/debugger.html

[1] https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/options.html#'balloon...

[2] https://github.com/wfxr/minimap.vim

[3] https://github.com/preservim/tagbar

[4] https://github.com/preservim/nerdtree

[5] https://vimhelp.org/pi_netrw.txt.html#netrw

And are not interactive as far as I know. I've not seen a way to get a balloon on the type in another balloon and then go to the browser docs from a link in that.

> Do you mean something like this?

Yes, but that's still restricted to terminal characters (you could probably do something fancy with sixel, but still) - for larger files with big indents it's not useful anymore.

> contextual buttons on a line of code

For example options to refactor based on the current location. I could construct this manually from 3 different pieces, but this exists in other IDEs already integrated and configured by default. Basically where's the "extract this as named constant", "rename this type across the project" and others that I don't have to implement from scratch.

  > [balloons] are not interactive as far as I know

  > [tabbar is] still restricted to terminal characters (you could probably do something fancy with sixel,

  > For example options to refactor based on the current location.

Second, sure, I refactor all the time. There's 3 methods I know. The best way is probably with bufdo and having all the files opened in a buffer (tabs, windows, or panes are not required). But I'm not sure why this is surprising. Maybe you don't know what ctags are? If not, they are what makes all that possible and I'd check them out because I think it will answer a lot of your questions.

  > Basically where's the "extract this as named constant", "rename this type across the project"

But honestly, I really can't tell if you're just curious or trying to defend your earlier position. I mean if you're curious and want to learn more we can totally continue and I'm sure others would love to add more. And in that case I would avoid language like "vim doesn't" and instead phrase it as "can vim ___?", "how would I do ____ in vim?", or "I find ___ useful in VS code, how do people do this in vim?" Any of those will have the same result but not be aggressive. But if you're just trying to defend your position, well... Sun Tzu said you should know your enemy and I don't think you know your enemy.

[0] https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Browsing_programs_with_tags

[1] https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Search_and_replace_in_multiple_b...

[2] https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/refactoring.nvim

Very basic one. What I mean is once you get the completion, how do you interact with that view - let's say you want to dig into a type that's displayed. Then you want to get to the longer docs for that type. There's nothing out there that does it as far as I know.

> Wait... you want it as an image?

Yes, the asciiart minimaps are cool, but they really don't have enough resolution for more complex longer files in my experience.

> The best way is probably with bufdo and having all the files opened in a buffer

You see why this is not great, right? That's an extra thing to think about.

> Maybe you don't know what ctags are?

I know. It's step 1 out of many for implementing proper refactoring system.

> but you are asking about "search and replace" right?

Search and replace with language and context awareness. You can diy it in vim or start stacking plugins. Then you can do the same with the next feature (like inserting method stub). But... I can just use an actual IDE with vim mode instead.

> And in that case I would avoid language like "vim doesn't"

Vim doesn't do those things though. There's a whole ecosystem of additions of plugins of the day that add one thing or another. But it turns out it's easier to embed nvim in an ide than play with vim plugins until you get something close to ide. Been there for years, done that, got tired. VS with vim mode has better ide features than vim with all the customised plugins.

  > Very basic one

  > That's an extra thing to think about.

  %s/foo/bar/g
  bufdo %s/foo/bar/g

And it's not very hard to remember things like bufdo, windo, tabdo because I'm already familiar with a buffer, tab, and window. It's not an extra item in memory for me, so no, I don't see. It's just as easy and clear as if I clicked a button that said "do you all files"

  > Search and replace with language and context awareness

  > Vim doesn't do those things though.

I mean there's a lot of stuff that people that have been using vim for years don't know but is in vimtutor. I mean how many people don't know about basic things like ci, competition (including line or file path), or <C-[>? How many people use :wq lol

I just like vim man. You don't have to, that's okay. I like that I can do marks. I love the powerful substitution system. I mean I can just write the signatures of my init functions and automatically create the class variables. Or deal with weird situations like this time some Python code had its documentation above the function and I could just bufdo a string replace to turn those into proper docstrings. I love that I can write macros on the fly, trivially, and can apply them generously. I love registers and how powerful they are. I mean I can write the command I want on a line, push it into a register, and then just call it with @. It's trivial to add to my rc if I like it enough. I love that it's really easy to drop in a local config file that sets the standards for the project I'm working on when it differs from my defaults and I can even share that with everyone! I really like the fact that I can have my editor on just about every nix machine and I don't even need to install it. I can work effectively on a novel machine disconnected from the internet.

I mean my love for vim isn't really just the navigation. But even in the navigation I'm constantly using bindings that most vim plugins don't have. It's not easier for me to use another system and add vim keybindings because that's only a very small portion of vim. I'd rather have all of vim and a fuck ton more of my resources.

https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp.html#vim.lsp.buf.rename() (HN seems to not link the () part, you have to add it yourself)

All the other similar fanciness like renaming a file and automatically updating module references is also provided by the LSP, and is also available in nvim.

Popup context windows for docs are super good in neovim, I would make a bet that they are actually better than what you find in IDEs, because they can use treesitter for automatic syntax highlighting of example code. Not sure what you mean with further interaction.

Contextual buttons are named code actions, and are available, and there are like 4 minimap plugins to choose from.

How do I get a memory graph with custom event markers overlayed on it then? That's the default for VS for example.

  > VIM is a text editor, not an IDE

vi? Good luck with that.

And I say that as an experienced vim user who used to tinker a bit.

  > I install vscode from scratch, install a few extensions I need, set 3 or 4 settings I use regularly, and bang in 5 minutes I have a customized, working environment catered for almost any language.

Hell, I will even feel comfortable in a vi terminal, though that's extremely rare to actually find. Usually vi is just remapped to vim

Edit:

The git folder with *all* my dotfiles (which includes all my notes) is just 3M, so I can take it anywhere. If I install all the plugins and if I install all the vim plugins I currently have (which some are old and I don't use) the total is ~100M. So...

You misread. I'm using 74K for *vim* configs. (Mostly because I have a few files for organization's sake)

I rounded up to 3M from 2.3M and 1.4M of that is .git lol. 156K is all my rc files, another 124K for anything that goes into ~/.confg, 212K for my notes, 128K for install scripts, 108K for templates, and 108K for scripts

I'll repeat myself, with the *same emphasis* as above. Hopefully it's clearer this time.

  >> The git folder with **all** my dotfiles (which includes all my notes) is just 3M

It's kind of nonsense to bring them up in this conversation.

Here are the key findings:

1. Extreme Resource Consumption: Out of the box, Trae used 6.3x more RAM (~5.7 GB) and spawned 3.7x more processes (33 total) than a standard VSCode setup with the same project open. The team has since made improvements, but it's still significantly heavier.

2. Telemetry Opt-Out Doesn't Work (It Makes It Worse): I found Trae was constantly sending data to ByteDance servers (byteoversea.com). I went into the settings and disabled all telemetry. To my surprise, this didn't stop the traffic. In fact, it increased the frequency of batch data collection. The telemetry "off" switch appears to be purely cosmetic.

3. What's Being Sent: Even with telemetry "disabled," Trae sends detailed payloads including: Hardware specs (CPU, memory, etc.) Persistent user, device, and machine IDs OS version, app language, user name Granular usage data like time-on-ide, window focus state, and active file types.

4. Community Censorship: When I tried to discuss these findings on their official Discord, my posts were deleted and my account was muted for 7 days. It seems words like "track" trigger an automated gag rule, which prevents any real discussion about privacy.

I believe developers should be aware of this behavior. The combination of resource drain, non-functional privacy settings, and censorship of technical feedback is a major red flag. The full, detailed analysis with all the evidence (process lists, Fiddler captures, JSON payloads, and screenshots of the Discord moderation) is available at the link. Happy to answer any questions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* (which, btw, are at https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

Something I'm chewing on: we're in a bit of a sticky wicket if new accounts can post LLM-generated content and saying as such is aggressive.

I don't want LLM-generated content any more than you do, and I'm confident that the vast majority of the community agrees. The problem is that there are lots of nuances yet to be worked out, so we shouldn't be heavy-handed. Is it ok, for example, for a non-native speaker to use an LLM to fix up their English?

Actually, it's clear that HN would be better off with what they originally wrote; non-native speakers are totally welcome, nearly always do just fine, and we want people to speak in their own voice. But someone who doesn't know HN very well and is nervous about their English couldn't know that. People need to be treated gently.

The cost of being hostile to newcomers, instead of focusing on what's interesting about their work, drowns out the benefit of enforcing conventions. It's going to drive away people we ought to be embracing. The community's zeal for protecting what we have is admirable, but can easily turn unhelpful. The biggest threat to HN at this point is not that its quality will collapse (it has been relatively stable for years now*), but that it will die out due to lack of new users.

Like I said, I'm sure you didn't mean to have that effect. The problem is that most of us underestimate such effects in our own comments, so we end up propagating it without meaning to. The fact that several users replied indicating that they felt this way (edit: I mean that they felt your original post was too hostile) is a strong indicator.

* not that it's all that great, but these things are relative

Hi HN, I was evaluating IDEs for a personal project and decided to test Trae, ByteDance's fork of VSCode. I immediately noticed some significant performance and privacy issues that I felt were worth sharing. I've written up a full analysis with screenshots, network logs, and data payloads in the linked post. Here are the key findings:

1. Extreme Resource Consumption: Out of the box, Trae used 6.3x more RAM (~5.7 GB) and spawned 3.7x more processes (33 total) than a standard VSCode setup with the same project open. The team has since made improvements, but it's still significantly heavier.

2. Telemetry Opt-Out Doesn't Work (It Makes It Worse): I found Trae was constantly sending data to ByteDance servers (byteoversea.com). I went into the settings and disabled all telemetry. To my surprise, this didn't stop the traffic. In fact, it increased the frequency of batch data collection. The telemetry "off" switch appears to be purely cosmetic.

3. What's Being Sent: Even with telemetry "disabled," Trae sends detailed payloads including: Hardware specs (CPU, memory, etc.) Persistent user, device, and machine IDs OS version, app language, user name Granular usage data like time-on-ide, window focus state, and active file types.

4. Community Censorship: When I tried to discuss these findings on their official Discord, my posts were deleted and my account was muted for 7 days. It seems words like "track" trigger an automated gag rule, which prevents any real discussion about privacy.

I believe developers should be aware of this behavior. The combination of resource drain, non-functional privacy settings, and censorship of technical feedback is a major red flag. The full, detailed analysis with all the evidence (process lists, Fiddler captures, JSON payloads, and screenshots of the Discord moderation) is available at the link. Happy to answer any questions.

By coincidence, I was just doing the same thing on the original comment. Since it's more or less identical now to what you posted, I'm going to move this subthread underneath https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44703481, where it will probably make more sense.

(Incidentally, mostly all we both did was add newlines, and it's on my list to see if I can get the software to do this automatically without screwing up other posts.)

I bet I sound a lot dumber than this when I'm renting servers in Hong Kong in Cantonese.

1. how you know the above.

2. how not speaking English natively means you can't recognize your carefully formatted comment ended up as a big blob o' text

3. how not speaking English natively means you can't recognize when the LLM started spitting out 4 bullet lists for the last half of your submission

4. if it's a good idea, helpful, or really anything other than patronizing, to if someone spoke another language other than English growing up, eschew remarking on the fact a submission is half-LLM generated 4-bullet-lists and the copy-pasted markdown ended up a blob.

EDIT: Don't recognize your account, sorry, no shitlist shortlist entry. :( I don't even see any threads in your last 3 pages of comment history that look familiar. Might be worth considering if we've ended up in a situation where you're taking note of interactions with me and getting upset, and are projecting that behavior on to me. Feel free to reach out at email in profile it is sticking with you over days, you, and no one else on HN, should be in a position where you're tracking interactions with me.

I don't know how I got on your shitlist shortlist (I'll assume you don't do this with everyone), but give it a rest.

Also, I hope getting to #1 on the front page with your first post led to more positive vibes than getting harangued led to negative ones :)

extra

line breaks

so that there's enough space between your sentences.

I'm always surprised when corporate IT departments allow that given what's not allowed these days.

The server installed on the remote machine is part of vscode itself called the REH (remote extension host). It’s the core of the editor running in headless mode on the server.

Here is an example open source implementation of the non-free binary client (it’s a 4 files that call various editor APIs) https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-oss

This is REH entry (the binary installed on the remote machine) https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/main/src/vs/server/...

(or maybe you just have a similar writing style)

From what I've seen, people generally do not like reading a generated content, but every time I've seen the author come back and say "I used it because it isn't my main language" the community always takes back the criticism. So I'd just be upfront about it and get ahead of it.

Even if you don't agree with it, publishing AI generated content will exclude from ones audience the people who won't read AI generated content. It is a tradeoff one has to decide whether or not to make.

I'm sympathetic to someone who has to decide whether to publish in 'broken english' or to run it through the latest in grammar software. For my time, I far prefer the former (and have been consuming "broken english" for a long while, it's one of the beautiful things about the internet!)

It's clear that this isn't what OP was doing. The LLM was writing, not merely translating. dang put it well:

> we want people to speak in their own voice

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44704054

Devil's advocate: why does it matter (apart from "it feels wrong")? As long as the conclusions are sound, why is it relevant whether AI helped with the writing of the report?

The last few sections could have been cut entirely and nothing would have been lost.

Edit: In the process of writing this comment, the author removed 2 sections (and added an LLM acknowledgement), of which I referred to in my previous statement. To the author, thank you for reducing the verbosity with that.

We've been reading highly-informative articles with "bad English" for decades. It's okay and good to write in English without perfect mastery of the language. I'd rather read the source, rather than the output of a txt2txt model.

But I also think it's a different thing entirely. It's different being the sole reader of text produced by your students (with responsibility to read the text) compared to being someone using the internet choosing what to read.

simple as

Pretty much everyone has heuristics for content that feels like low quality garbage, and currently seeing the hallmarks of AI seems like a mostly reasonable one. Other heuristics are content filled with marketing speak, tons of typos, whatever.

I can't decide to read something because the conclusions are sound. I have to read the entire thing to find out if the conclusions are sound. What's more, if it's an LLM, it's going to try its gradient-following best to make unsound reasoning seem sound. I have to be an expert to tell that it is a moron.

I can't put that kind of work into every piece of worthless slop on the internet. If an LLM says something interesting, I'm sure a human will tell me about it.

The reason people are smelling LLMs everywhere is because LLMs are low-signal, high-effort. The disappointment one feels when a model starts going off the rails is conditioning people to detect and be repulsed by even the slightest whiff of a robotic word choice.

edit: I feel like we discovered the direction in which AGI lies but we don't have the math to make it converge, so every AI we make goes completely insane after being asked three to five questions. So we've created architectures where models keep copious notes about what they're doing, and we carefully watch them to see if they've gone insane yet. When they inevitably do, we quickly kill them, create a new one from scratch, and feed it the notes the old one left. AI slop reads like a dozen cycles of that. A group effort, created by a series of new hires, silently killed after a single interaction with the work.

TL;DR: Because of the bullshit asymmetry principle. Maybe the conclusions below are sound, have a read and try to wade through ;-)

Let us address the underlying assumptions and implications in the argument that the provenance of a report, specifically whether it was written with the assistance of AI, should not matter as long as the conclusions are sound.

This position, while intuitively appealing in its focus on the end result, overlooks several important dimensions of communication, trust, and epistemic responsibility. The process by which information is generated is not merely a trivial detail, it is a critical component of how that information is evaluated, contextualized, and ultimately trusted by its audience. The notion that it feels wrong is not simply a matter of subjective discomfort, but often reflects deeper concerns about transparency, accountability, and the potential for subtle biases or errors introduced by automated systems.

In academic, journalistic, and technical contexts, the methodology is often as important as the findings themselves. If a report is generated or heavily assisted by AI, it may inherit certain limitations, such as a lack of domain-specific nuance, the potential for hallucinated facts, or the unintentional propagation of biases present in the training data. Disclosing the use of AI is not about stigmatizing the tool, but about providing the audience with the necessary context to critically assess the reliability and limitations of the information presented. This is especially pertinent in environments where accuracy and trust are paramount, and where the audience may need to know whether to apply additional scrutiny or verification.

Transparency about the use of AI is a matter of intellectual honesty and respect for the audience. When readers are aware of the tools and processes behind a piece of writing, they are better equipped to interpret its strengths and weaknesses. Concealing or omitting this information, even unintentionally, can erode trust if it is later discovered, leading to skepticism not just about the specific report, but about the integrity of the author or institution as a whole.

This is not a hypothetical concern, there are numerous documented cases (eg in legal filings https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/) where lack of disclosure about AI involvement has led to public backlash or diminished credibility. Thus, the call for transparency is not a pedantic demand, but a practical safeguard for maintaining trust in an era where the boundaries between human and machine-generated content are increasingly blurred.

this kind of overreaction is exactly why real privacy concerns get ignored. it misses the point and just ends up misleading devs who actually care about meaningful issues.

https://theia-ide.org/

It was rough a few years ago, but nowadays it's pretty nice. TI rebuilt their Code Composer Studio using Theia so it does have some larger users. It has LSP support and the same Monaco editor backend - which is all I need.

It's VSCode-with-an-Eclipse-feel to it - which might or might not be your cup of tea, but it's an alternative.

* https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages/markdown#_inser...

I don’t mind project being done and in maintenance mode. But I am not investing my time into starting using it.

Getting started page has screenshots broken on AWS.

At some point in time, I'd like to take the time to invest building a custom version of the extension to bump dependencies to access more modern support for plantuml/mermaid diagrams.

I belong to the class of people who believe in customising their tools as they please. So I'd have written an Emacs package to do this. But then again, this is Emacs, so someone's probably already done it. Oh, here it is: https://github.com/mooreryan/markdown-dnd-images

Also it used to be kinda heavy, but it became lighter because of Moore's law and good code management practices all over the board.

I'm planning to deploy Theia in its web based form if possible, but still didn't have the time to tinker with that one.

This is why I used "(as in ecosystem)" in the first paragraph. It was a bit late when I wrote this comment, and it turned out to be very blurry meaning wise.

My bad.

Using Eclipse as "the Java LSP" in VSCode makes more sense now.

Nevertheless, as much as I respect Erich for what he did for Eclipse, I won't be able to follow him to VSCode, since I don't respect Microsoft as much.

It is kid of hard to avoid nowadays.

Here a session with him related to VSCode history,

"The Story of Visual Studio Code with Erich Gamma and Kai Maetzel"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTYx7MCIK7Y

I don't do Web Development, I live in the trenches. Since I don't own a desktop system anymore, I don't honestly game.

I'm exposed to them via systemd and Linux Kernel, yes, but at least both are licensed with GPL.

At least I'm trying to minimize my exposure.

For more context, please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44634786

Thanks for the video, btw. I'll take a look the moment I have time.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redhat.j...

click

> Please login to use this demo

close tab

(Scroll down to Selected Tools based on Eclipse Theia)

Can you please expand on that? I have trouble understanding how telemetry helps me, as a user of the product, understand how the product works.

Or (if you're working lower level) you can see an obfuscated function is emitting telemetry, saying "User did X", then you can understand that the function is doing X.

That's not helping me, the user.

That's helping me, the developer.

> Or (if you're working lower level) you can see an obfuscated function is emitting telemetry, saying "User did X", then you can understand that the function is doing X.

Again, it helps me, the developer.

Neither of these help me, the user.

I'm not defending Trae’s telemetry — just pointing out the hard truth about why pricing works and why many people care less about privacy concerns (all because there are no better alternatives for them, considering the price.)

By the way, for those who care more about pricing($7.5/M) — here you go: https://www.trae.ai/. It’s still not as good as Cursor overall (just my personal opinion), but it’s quite capable now and is evolving fast — they even changed their logo in a very short time. Maybe someday it could be as competitive as Cursor — or even more so.

Because the person using it works at Bytedance.

I guess your question is better phrased as: “Why would any non-Bytedance employee use Bytedance VSCode fork?”, to which I have no answer.

    System Information: Hardware specs, OS details, architecture
    Usage Patterns: Active time, session duration, feature usage
    Performance Metrics: Response times, resource consumption
    Unique Identifiers: Machine ID, user ID, device fingerprints
    Workspace Details: Project information, file paths (obfuscated)

not saying this is good but everyone do this

Handwaving away this abuse of privacy by saying "everyone does it because it makes money" is a gross justification.

no one force you to use these tools, you can use another tools that suit your needs

if you read terms of service and privacy policy then you agree to it because you use it then company have right too

But the telemetry settings not working and the actions of the Trae moderators to quash any discussion of the telemetry is extremely concerning. People should be able to make informed decisions about the programs they are using, and the Trae developers don't seem to agree.

we don't have to accept it. but people say "it's just how we do it" and suddenly people just accept it.

i really feel like our society is going to collapse soon, if it hasn't already begun to. the amount of total crap that people are put through just so that ads can be more targeted to users. we are creating a hellscape for privacy and freedom just so people click on ads. it is pure and complete insanity, and no one cares.

Unique Identifiers: Machine ID, user ID, device fingerprints Workspace Details: Project information, file paths (obfuscated)

Plus os details.

I'd rather none.

Then you don't have to worry about "abuse".

I was interested in learning Dart until the installer told me Google would be collecting telemetry. For a programming language. I’ve never looked at it again.

We all pick our own battles.

Anonymization is usually a lie:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513521

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21428449

Also please stop with security/privacy nihilism, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975

I'd like there to be a push back against these companies because I find their practices disgusting but running linux with only open source software and a fairphone is just an extreme I'm unwilling to entertain because it's just not possible in my (or most people's) world.

And yet you are fine with personalized telemetry from Google on your PC? This is self-contradictory.

Your phone almost certainly knows where you are at all times, for example. It may know whether you're walking or sitting. It knows who calls you, who you call, who you message.

The laptop may know some of that, but it doesn't have the same sensors, and doesn't stay with you most times you leave the house.

Indeed, it's true for most people, but I use Librem 5 with hardware kill switches for modem, sensors etc.

There's a middle ground between living deep in the woods without windows and walking around naked in public.

I keep it disabled for both Dart and Flutter.

I suspect they aren't actually doing that, but the GDPR cares not what you're doing with the data, but what is possible with it, hence why any identifier (even "obfuscated") which could lead back to a user is considered PII.

edit: to be clear I see that they X-out the topmost window of the editor and then re-launch from the bottom bar, but it's not obvious that this is actually restarting the stuff that matters

Either way, it’s useful to see the telemetry payloads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44706580

Would be sad if wrong one is murdered.

But it seems like traeide.com is in the best case someones extremely misleading web design demo, worst case a scam.

One the traeide website:

> Educational demo only. Not affiliated with ByteDance's Trae AI. Is Trae IDE really free? What's the catch? Yes, Trae IDE is completely free with no hidden costs. As a ByteDance product, it is committed to making advanced AI coding tools accessible to all developers.

By the way TRAE isn't free anymore, they now provide a premium subscription.

If the later really is just a web design demo it has a bunch of red flags. Why the officially sounding domain? Download links for executables!!! If it is just a web design demo for portfolio -> why are there no contact information for the author whose work and skills it's supposed to advertise?

If you continue to send telemetry after I explicitly opt-out, then I get to sue (or atleast get a cut of the fines for whistleblowing)

I’m in Trae’s Discord (recently decided to try their Pro) and don’t see any regulation. There are multiple users discussing about privacy mode or tos but didn’t see any pushback.

What is telemetry data?

Telemetry is anonymous, aggregated usage data that helps developers understand how a product is being used. It usually includes stuff like: - What features are being used (e.g. “X% of users use the terminal panel daily”) - How often the app crashes, and where - Performance stats (e.g. memory usage, load times) - Environment info (like OS version, screen resolution — not personal files)

It does NOT include your source code, files, passwords, browser content, or any personal identifiers unless explicitly stated. And in most reputable products, it’s either anonymized or pseudonymized by default.

Who uses telemetry? Everyone. - VS Code collects telemetry to improve editor performance and user experience. For products that are vscode fork, they inherit the vscode telemetry switch by default. - Chrome uses telemetry to understand browser performance, crashes, and feature adoption, -Slack, Discord, Postman all rely on telemetry to debug, prioritize features, and improve product quality

Without telemetry, you can’t know which features are working, where users are getting stuck and what’s actually causing bugs.

So when people say “telemetry = privacy breach,” they’re confusing helpful system analytics with data exploitation. The real concern should be around what is collected, how it’s stored, and whether users can opt out — not the mere existence of telemetry data itself. Telemetry data itself doesn’t directly cause high CPU usage. CPU hog could cause by a lot of different reasons.

Sharing here just because some reasonings and arguments in the original post seems off. Don’t want people to get confused

It doesn’t include: - Your code files - What you’re writing - proprietary IP - Passwords, tokens, env vars - Anything personally identifiable

Instead, telemetry usually looks like “User clicked on send button” or “App crashed with error XYZ on macOS 14.1”