Please don't attack people for showing up to engage in discussion like this. I'm sure you don't intend to, but it quickly becomes part of mob behavior. We don't want that on HN for obvious reasons, and I'm sure nobody intends it, exactly, but it happens all too easily anyhow.

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

Absolutely my bad it came across like this.

I appreciate the reply. As mentioned, it happens unintentionally. One way to describe the (desired) HN community is everyone learning together how to avoid unintended effects.

> everyone learning together how to avoid unintended effects.

Okay, but when will Microsoft?

Or is it a more charitable interpretation to suggest they did intend this to be the effect?

No, I wouldn't argue that. The point is we need to do this for ourselves, regardless of what some company or other group of people do.

>It’s rather bold to post here…

it is rather nice, honestly. would you prefer to scream into the void and not get any response at all?

an open line of communication with the responsible people seems like literally the best possible option, why are you actively discouraging it?

>Maybe you all want to talk to Microsoft PR/legal before posting?

you would rather not hear anything, or get word-salad legalese that doesnt mean anything? how exactly would that be better?

I’m not intentionally discouraging it.

The responses are affecting my impression of Microsoft and Github extremely negatively. I don’t think I am alone.

It’s already pretty word salad legalese in my opinion, at least from Github.

>would you prefer to scream into the void and not get any response at all?

At this point, yes. What has false platitudes done except cause more in-fighting?

>an open line of communication with the responsible people

And here's how the in-fighting begins. I'm not falling for the "they responded on social media. They're just like us!" anymore.

I don't want words, I want actions. Tired of playing whack a mole.

>you would rather not hear anything, or get word-salad legalese that doesnt mean anything?

Hearing nothing doesn't waste my time.

>Hearing nothing doesn't waste my time.

if not wasting time is your goal, several layers deep into the comments of a hackernews post is probably not the correct place to be.

Perhaps. But I still do find insight in seeing the vibes of the community. Not as much from corporate PR.

We are not training on the contents of private repos, but we do plan on training on usage data with Copilot unless you opt out before April 24. Details here: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi...

That post has a link to the FAQ which might also be helpful: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488

> We are not training on the contents of private repos

Supremely ethical of you to ignore the license terms of open source code, but respect the license for proprietary code.

This too is creepy.

The behavioral impositions by the court in the United States versus Microsoft trial discourage it from Monopoly behavior by opening third-party apis to competitors.

Q: Will Microsoft share its access to users private repos where they have not opted out of this training via its GitHub subsidiary, with third parties (eg OpenAI and Anthropic), in the spirit of its loss to the United States during its trial for Monopoly behavior?

Eg ethically today, Microsoft may be able to be argued to be monopolizing user data for its own AI tooling advantage.

Yes or No: Hypothetically I put customer data in a private repo, a single file. I use copilot to analyze the file, submitting its contents to that backend. This is the only thing in the repo. Is that data collected and trained on? If the answer is not no, you are lying about what this opt in is.

What am I supposed to opt out of? The only setting in "Privacy" is "Suggestions matching public code" which is blocked and seems wholly unrelated to this.

How much has Microsoft paid you to sell your soul?

Opt out is horse shit

Opt out is the same as forcing this on people that don’t want it. You know this.

Microslop proving their name time and time again.

why not make it opt-in?

and I wonder if this opt-out applies to data we stored under your umbrella before having opted-out.

Why such strong opposition to getting user consent before doing any of this? Not respecting consent seems to be a very common theme with MS these days, and it really doesn't reflect well on the company or you personally.

Bypassing consent has been a very pervasive theme in tech and beyond this decade.

IANAL I wonder how that is legal in the EU, at least for private individuals, since under the GDPR you need consent for collecting such data. (A timed opt-out is not consent.)

I’ve felt similarly about moving off GitHub. I bought a small 5U server rack years ago for my home network setup.

I’m considering getting a 1U device to host my own git server. I feel like if I move off, I should do it generally vs just moving to another provider who may also pull shenanigans.

For low-resource usage, Forgejo has a good reputation: https://forgejo.org

ie you can run it effectively on even a Raspberry Pi

Remember to ensure you have proper backups regardless of whatever you decide to host it on. :)

i had a gitea instance in a beaglebone black! Self hosting can have really low requirements (now it's a much beefier banana pi R3 router, but there are many containers running on it)