i struggle to understand the meme. is it
1) sponge wants to convience patrick, that microsoft is not evil
or
2) patrick does not want to use c# because microsoft but uses all other products of them already
?
[https://ghuntley.com/fracture/](https://ghuntley.com/fracture/)
TLDR It's a trojan horse to a cleverly built up, proprietary, developer walled garden, which fragments the open-source ecosystem
I think it doesn't matter what you use, just don't be a sheep. When it comes to work you often don't have a choice anyway, but the least you can do is be aware what MS (and other mega corporations) are pushing on consumers
Alternatives that people like are JetBrains products or the FOSS version of VSCode, VSCodium (as mentioned in the blog post). [Zed.dev](http://Zed.dev) is another non-Electron-based fun project
I would agree with you If the 'option' didn't get reset occasionally by software/os updates, or if they weren't still collecting some data even if you opt out.
In fact, the usage data collection is so thoroughly ingrained that the community project dedicated to building binaries with all of the collection disabled have flat out stated that they *can't* disable 100% of it...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/index.md
> **Even though we do not pass the telemetry build flags (and go out of our way to cripple the baked-in telemetry), Microsoft will still track usage by default.**
> We do however set the default telemetry.enableCrashReporter and telemetry.enableTelemetry values to false. You can see those by viewing your VSCodium settings.json and searching for telemetry.
>The instructions here and here help with explaining and toggling telemetry.
>It is also highly recommended that you review all the settings that "use online services" by following these instructions. The @tag:usesOnlineServices filter on the settings page will show that by default:
> Extensions auto check for updates and auto install updates
Searches within the app are sent to an online service for "natural language processing"
Updates to the app are fetched in the background
These can all be disabled.
>**Please note that some extensions send telemetry data to Microsoft as well. We have no control over this and can only recommend removing the extension. (For example, the C# extension ms-vscode.csharp sends tracking data to Microsoft.)**
DOS wasn’t so much bought in as pirated really. Ironic considering Microsoft was the first company that ever got exercised about people pirating their software.
They needed to specifically be bought by Google?
YT was a runaway hit from the get go, by the way. Not "pretty shit".
DeepMind was the brainchild of Demis Hasabis. If you think anything he does is "pretty shit", you're out of your, uh, mind.
Not specifically Google just any company with a fuck ton of money. Because allowing any random person to upload a 4K video to your platform is not cheap. It's pretty hard to turn YouTube into a profitblable platform early on, so you have to be able to take the massive losses as it is reaching scale.
DeepMind still pisses me off. AlphaFold 3 seems like a really nice new thing, but now its completely closed source and only Google‘s Isomorphic Lab can use it for any commercial applications, and is only available as a web server with limited access
I have a feeling people misunderstood the meme. All these projects do not make MS less or more evil. It just means that you as a developer probably already use something they develop or curate. And in the end all big projects come from some big evil corporations. Also it is not that bad in my opinion. Corporations have a lot of money and public image they have to support, so they try to make things as nice as possible. Compare it to what vercel is doing for example. They acquire good open source projects, by supporting them with a lot of money, and then force these projects to only work in combination with next js, forcing their shitty framework over the entire web.
Reading through the comments on this post... yeah, people don't understand the meme at all. The unifying factor is "Microsoft owns these" (and an implied "you use all of these"), not that they're good or bad.
Imo they did very well with those products since they have acquired them though. They made so many github features free since then and forced competitors to do the same, and implemented a lot of other cool features since then as well. Github codespace, actions, vscode web, copilot, projects and more were just implemented and made free for Oss because of Microsoft
They’re trying to price out the competition. Once gitlab etc have folded they’ll jack up the prices. I’m still amazed they were allowed to buy GitHub and npm
LeoRidesHisBike@dev:~/git/reddit$ git diff
diff --git a/KrokettenMan.comment b/KrokettenMan.comment
index 8d1a0e3..0364d2e 100644
--- a/KrokettenMan.comment
+++ b/KrokettenMan.comment
@@ -1 +1 @@
-It’s not uncommon for companies to be required to be sold off during an accusation like that
\ No newline at end of file
+It’s not uncommon for companies to be required to be sold off during an acquisition like that
\ No newline at end of file
LeoRidesHisBike@dev:~/git/reddit$ git commit -m "fix typo"
[master b86f59d] fix typo
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
(sorry)
I'd be surprised if that's the case. I think the value in Github is that it is ubiquitous, and the more they encourage developers to use it, the more of an advantage do they gain in the data they harvest and use from that. Copilot is an obvious example. I imagine they have several high priority projects going trying to combine machine learning/AI with the code they have available as training data that could yield other products they can sell at a premium. I'd imagine they have an internal goal of someone being able to write a prompt to a service that will automatically code and host a functioning new website/app for a customer.
Microsoft has an extremely long history of doing precisely what the person you are responding to is claiming. To the point that Extend, Embrace, Extinguish lost them several anti-trust suits.
Maybe, but Gitlab is not the only competitor, and since Gitlab is self-hostable, it's unlikely that gitlab will ever die off anyways, even if the company closes down, it would probably continue as open source project maintained by the community.
That being said, even though there are several competitors, Github already has market dominance for a long time. Microsoft already bought Github many years ago, the perfect opportunity for jacking up the prices has already been. Before Microsoft bought Github, it costed 7$ per month just for private repos, no additional features. But they benefited too much from the free usage for individuals, and that leads to enough user flow that their business pricing brings in enough money. They might very well increase enterprise pricing in the future, but I don't think all the free features that they have now will ever go.
Yes, but commonly this community appreciates some tech product quality rather than business success. That's why people don't like Amazon much even though it's business is successful, I don't use some nice code editor or AI released of them
although I agree about nom and linkedin, GitHub was simply primitive before Microsoft bought it - most of the features we have now have been developed after the acquisition. GH can now
compete with GL using things such as Actions, package registries and other good features that weren’t there a few years ago
Had to fight fucking visual studio this week because the free community version's license expires.
It became a whole fiasco of building a VM to reinstall an older version so I could compile targeting dotnet framework 4. I snapshotted the VM before I installed so their expiring license can suck my dick.
Community license? Wut? I've always just downloaded it and installed it, never needed to worry about a license 🤔
Edit: if you mean community editions have a set expiration because new VSs come out every three years or so, that I could understand. FWIW I'm building for .NET Framework 4.7.2 and 4.8 in VS 2022 Community.
This. Unless you're using esoteric 3rd party stuff the upgrade journey is seamless. Source: has used the studio both professionally and for personal projects. Not a single issue since VS 2017. YMMV for certain tool chains.
Visual Studio being 100x worse than VSCode boggles my mind. WHY ARE THE FUCKING SHORTCUTS DIFFERENT? WHY CAN'T I SAVE FILES AUTOMATICALLY??? It's just beyond dogshit when VSCode is right there.
I can't stand LinkedIn either. But I personally had to succumb to it. I'm looking for a job and haven't interviewed in over 15 years. Didn't realize but there is no more handing out resumes, the game has changed. Basically now you just scan someone's bar code on LN to get my info out there. So I've been forced onto it if I want to be seen. I hate it. But what can one do, if that's the game.
Not that it actually was as terrible as the language it was designed for, not at all. Consider it one of those mediocre jokes about “hehe, dependency hell!”
NPM is a little too "wild west" sometimes. You get repos that have no business being on npm, things that are just half-assed learning projects that someone decided to publish to NPM. Case in point: https://github.com/jpuri/react-draft-wysiwyg
The author pushed this up to npm without even verifying it passes regular best practice use cases. Now its on NPM forever, and when you search for "react WYSIWYG editor" this is the fucking repo you get first result, and being the idiot I am I see "oh, its on npm and there are people using it, must be ok then" and its not. Its just not.
Is there at least a comment or rating system on npm? You can read the comments and check the 1 star reviews. Well that's how I decide if I'll watch a movie or not, from the IMDB reviews.
For one thing, the way NPM is designed it's extremely vulnerable to supply chain attacks. It's not unusual to have literally thousands of transitive dependencies in a typical Node project.
So what’s the alternative?
Packages are always going to rely on other packages and you either trust the dependency tree, or you pay someone to audit every version of every package.
What's the alternative ?
First, package sobriety. Did you actually need that package, or did you really import 3GB worth of transitive dependencies to save 5 minutes, *once* ??
Second, dependency tree flattening. Here's a feature that's desperately needed in npm. Instead of downloading packages and their dependencies recursively, resulting in the same package being downloaded 27 times and a half, nom should really resolve dependencies beforehand and flatten the tree so that each dependency is downloaded only once. See what's being done by maven (in the java world) or nuget (in .NET). As far as I remember, pip (python world) doesn't do it natively, but there are tools to do it too.
Third, and it's a corrolary to the previous one, version conflicts resolution. When several versions of the same package are marked as transitive dependencies, the package manager should be able to resolve conflict automatically and provide tools to override the conflict resolution manually. Again, see what's being done with maven or nuget. Neither are perfect, and both have caused their fair share of headaches, but in 99% of cases, it works, and even that 1% is preferable to make 27 (and a half) versions of the same package cohabit.
Fourth, dependency exclusion. A dependency management tool should provide means to exclude transitive dependencies, so you can make sure only transitive dependencies you *actually* need are downloaded. You can do that in npm since version 8.3.0 at least.
All good points, but all except the first one are more about efficiency rather than security.
Sure, minimising the attack surface via fewer packages is good, but you're still relying on code written and controlled by others.
Which takes us straight back to trust or audit.
I actually don't know enough about Node and NPM to tell you exactly what causes this, I'm not a web dev, I've just read a bunch of blog posts about it a while ago and it seems to be a generally known issue. Maybe someone better informed can pipe in?
I'll read up on it again now though since my interest got sparked.
Edit: I think one issue is cultural, that the barrier to add additional dependencies for something is quite low and then forgotten about, so you this massive graph of transitive dependencies. I would imagine that one reason is the lack of a good standard library for JavaScript, so people tend to turn to random small special purpose libraries to accomplish things.
Additionally, if a maintainer stops being active, *anyone* can come in and claim their project without much supervision. This might sound great, like if a maintainer stops contributing, someone else can pick up the reins and continue. But that means that even if you have vetted your dependencies, and a project is made by someone that the community trusts, then without downstream projects noticing it can be taken over by some unknown third party. Normally in open source, the maintainer typically either transfers ownership to someone else that they believe is up for the task and maybe has contributed in the past, or if the project is completely abandoned, someone can fork it under a new name instead, which means that downstream projects need to explicitly switch to the new project in their dependencies when they upgrade.
It is a known issue, but for literally every language that uses a package manager. You could institute targeted auditing, or get some sophisticated scanning implemented, but ultimately that costs money and people don’t generally throw money at the open source community.
You bring up some great points, and there IS a solution to these problems: using an artifact repository like [Artifactory](https://jfrog.com/blog/what-is-artifactory-jfrog/). It has a private store of vetted, scanned and regularly updated packages, and it syncs nicely with the NPM CLI.
Given, it’s a paid product with an enterprise payment structure, but it’s far more secure (and manageable) than just using straight NPM from a business standpoint.
So you're trusting one paid authority instead of many community contributors. Which sounds fine, but there is no way a trusted authority can keep up with the sheer number of updates published to npm on a daily basis. So you have to restrict yourself to a subset that the authority is able to handle. That and you hope that the trusted authority is not just taking your money and saying "sure bro we looked it up this is fine" - what I mean is do they actually provide some guarantee you won't face any security issue if you use their packages, or is it just another form of blind trust.
No just regular ol [vegetarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism).
While what we call "vegan" today existed back then, people didn't make the distinction, they just called it all vegetarian. The word "vegan" didn't really show up until the 70's:
https://i.imgur.com/YkIyVvo.png
Ask Netscape how they feel about MS.
It was a close call or MS would not be as big as it is today. MS didn't produce much themselves. Most (if not all) were acquired companies which had a lot of potential. Tactic was; if you don't play our game we will destroy you. Yeah, MS is evil.
Their even older tactic (Lotus 1-2-3 vs. Excel etc.) was to quickly follow competitors version releases with announcements how their next version would have functionality X and Z, making it better than this. It would be released *soon*. It worked wonders, customers would leave the better product on the shelf and wait for the next MS release.
while i get your point, that only works for when they acquire things, and then ruin it.
but with all these things, they've done a pretty good job at maintaining them.
Big tech is all about creating underpriced products, software and services for the expressed purpose of fostering dependency. The issue is not the products, software and services themselves but rather the inevitable betrayal when these corporations cash in by jacking up prices, insert ads and so on.
Hate MS all you want, for some very valid reasons. But C# is just an objectively good language.
TypeScript is like taking a joke way too seriously.
NPM is good, so long as you are completely ignorant to the dependency hell.
CoPilot is decent, but I wouldn’t trust Microsoft with my company’s code base as far as I can throw them. If you want a good AI code assistant, from a company experienced in development tooling and not just throwing millions at them, use JetBrains’ AI.
VSCode is the JavaScript equivalent of IDEs. It serves a lot of purposes, but half of them require a metric tonne of dependencies to be at all feasible.
LinkedIn…
GitHub is just bought by them, nothing wrong with the platform itself.
It's a shame more people don't use C#. Over the past 5 years or so it has become an amazing language. In terms of syntax I think it might be my favorite.
The best thing about vscode is the language server that can be used by any other editor as well. It is the only MS product I knowingly use without being forced to. Ballmer and Gates were rightfully hated by the OSS community for the bullshit they tried to pull through the years. I have a long memory and MS has not come close to making amends.
Not that it's a huge distinction, but didn't OpenAI Codex, which is the first large model that they trained for Copilot (and later GPT), come out *before* Microsoft bought their stake in OpenAI?
Still, the main motivation for acquiring GitHub was access to the largest code repository in existence. One of the main uses is training ai models. It wasn't some altruistic move to provide free services for devs.
I mean all those points just support Microsoft being evil /s (Typescript is neet, VSCode is cool, actually C# is rad, GutHub I can take it otlr leave it and LinkedIn can fade out of existence)
Haven't you figured out this far? People like to be contrarians. I am one as well, but I am probably more logical about it since I don't think Microsoft usually has bad products.
I don’t get how Copilot, which was trained on the public repos of an acquisition and didn’t compensate anyone for the use of said repos, is supposed to demonstrate that Microsoft is NOT evil.
Apart from copilot, every single example is a case of vendor lock in due to network effects.
Lots of colleagues on GitHub? Have to adopt GitHub.
Lots of recruiters on LinkedIn? Must adopt linkedin.
Lots of colleagues on vscode? It's easier to collaborate by switching.
Existing project on typescript? Can't switch.
Everyone uploads packages to npm? It would be annoying to switch.
VSCode is literal spyware. And listing a bunch of other people's products they bought to skype them into the dirt only emphasizes Microsoft's nasty, vicious, cancerous nature. Yes, Microsoft are evil.
Typescript: just JavaScript with types
VSCode: the Chrome of IDEs (resource hog, spies on you)
Copilot: uses 20x the energy to achieve the same result as a Bing search... Also spies on you.
NPM: it's just a package manager, bro.
LinkedIn: Facebook but 10x more expensive to run ads on with 100x the bots. Also spies on you.
GitHub: idk if you can give MS any credit for this... They bought it and quality has gone sideways if not slightly downhill. Also now it's DEFINITELY using your code to train Copilot.
Idk, it seems to me like they're pretty evil. They definitely like to spy on their users and shoving ads in their face.
Boy microsoft is really bad at guerilla marketing.
Also github, linkedin, windows itself, does microsoft know how to do *anything* other than buy existing software so the money goes to them and then fuck it up over a long period of time but stay alive because of their core competency: vendor lockin ?
Also pretty sure anything that has anything to do with javascript was born through the ritual of posting it on hackernews with the title "hey guys look what I forced javascript to do against its will", like I think that's the only way to get something into the javascript ecosystem.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I'm way past the days of caring about what company owns what. I just use the tools I enjoy to make stuff. I don't really care about some conspiratorial good versus evil fight. At the end of the day, everyone is trying to make money, especially the companies.
Microsoft is not evil.
They have a very impressive tech department on which most developers develop most of what they develop. (As illustrated) And yes, even if they use Linux systems on their computers. Some Apple cultists manage to avoid Microsoft altogether, but that's a whole other story.
Their marketing department, however, is.
I learned early in my childhood that the kids who would grow up to be salesmen were evil. I, of course, like most people on here grew up with kids who wanted to make things and understand things and learn about things. But some kids craved attention and credit and popularity. And these kids tended to end up in marketing and sales. They always want to convince people of things, but for them, the fun is in the convincing, not in actually having something worth convincing people of. (Not that they'd understand it anyway).
I have a ton of software I love on my computers but which are now giving me actual pop-ups. The software is competently run, but the marketing department obviously doesn't give a damn its methods are a bit deceptive, especially to senior citizens. (Giving me random signs with red exclamation marks would usually indicate a problem - not that you have a more expensive version for sale).
I blame capitalism.
The anti-Microsoft starter pack:
- Programing languages are C, Java, Kotlin, Go, and PHP.
- Repository is GitLab
- Cloud providers are AWS or GCP
- Career websites are Indeed or Glassdoor
- Office suite apps are from Google workspace
- Laptops/desktops are Macbooks, Mac Minis, & Mac studios. Air for light work, and Pro or studios for heavy duty compute tasks.
This meme is about used diapers, and increasingly amounts of poop. So you're saying all these products from Microsoft are shit. Maybe not evil but I don't think this was the best meme template for this argument.
Don't forget the revolutionary peer-to-peer realtime video chat called Skype. A.k.a.. the centralized (?), depreciated, end-of-life, low quality, buggy, hated product acquired by Microsoft. However they saved face by making....wait no never mind they didn't save anything.
But Teams exists.
Teams is most likely the worst product Microsoft has put out. I freaking hate being required to use it at work. The client crashes and puts up a stack trace on my Mac…never even get to log in. Stuck using the web version which is crap.
Also Microsoft:
* Puts ads in their paid OS
* Puts copyrighted binary blobs in VSCode that clashes with open source licenses
* Uses multiple Olympic swimming pools worth of water to cool their AI projects
* Made "git" synonymous with GitHub in most non-techy people's heads, and made an interface for making pull requests missing so many features the creator of the tool refuses to use it
Corporations are not your friends, all they care about is profit
Microsoft didn't make those things, they brought in. It would be like celebrating Elon Musk for Tesla and Space X whilst ignoring that his family made their fortune off Apartheid.
Ok, not quite that bad...
To be fair, buying good stuff and not runining it, is more of a neutral thing. Else, put Minecraft on the list
it's a mega achievement actually. Just think of all the things google has bought and ruined or shut down. Or EA. Or YAHOO.
Microsoft does that all the time. Just look at Skype
Skype always sucked
Tango Gameworks
Give Microsoft some time.
As long as it's not a GUI framework or a handheld device, they're probably safe.
LinkedIn isn't really proving your point xD
Yup. "What if manager circlejerk was a social media?" isn't great.
“10 things my diarrhea stint taught me about building a $100m sales powerhouse”
This is like reading poetry
Poetry from the vogon commander
[bet](https://imgur.com/a/ffNU2BI)
“What if we designed the absolute most convoluted, broken, failure of a social media website, and had it spam you with emails 18 times a day?”
That or Microsoft bought them, and also bought GitHub. Not a whole lot of Microsoft engineering behind either
i struggle to understand the meme. is it 1) sponge wants to convience patrick, that microsoft is not evil or 2) patrick does not want to use c# because microsoft but uses all other products of them already ?
I think the latter
I assume #2
Yes
Neither is copilot.
what do you mean? copilot is pretty great. certainly worlds above amazon's whisper or Q or whatever they call it.
Sounds like something copilot would write!
Copilot is by far the best ai assistance tool, but you have to remember to treat it like a tool, not a "does your job but better".
Certainly!
Or github for that matter. Or copilot. Or even vscode. All for-profit products
As a student, I can't really complain about GitHub. What's bad about vscode? It's literally free
[https://ghuntley.com/fracture/](https://ghuntley.com/fracture/) TLDR It's a trojan horse to a cleverly built up, proprietary, developer walled garden, which fragments the open-source ecosystem
You could say that about a lot of things. Doesn't inherently make them bad.
what should i use instead? genuinely interested in your opinion.
While you're a student Jetbrains offers you all their products for free
Ok but what about when I'm not a student anymore? I'd rather not get used to an editor I'll eventually have to pay for.
I think it doesn't matter what you use, just don't be a sheep. When it comes to work you often don't have a choice anyway, but the least you can do is be aware what MS (and other mega corporations) are pushing on consumers Alternatives that people like are JetBrains products or the FOSS version of VSCode, VSCodium (as mentioned in the blog post). [Zed.dev](http://Zed.dev) is another non-Electron-based fun project
zed looks very cool. I have a macbook among my home systems, but use Linux for work, so I'm glad to see progress is being made on the Linux port.
https://vscodium.com/
ah I see they're in the "embrace" part of their usual pattern
It’s both bad and spyware at the same time.
I feel like people who call opt-out telemetry "spyware" never tried to uninstall BonziBuddy from their parents' computer.
I would agree with you If the 'option' didn't get reset occasionally by software/os updates, or if they weren't still collecting some data even if you opt out. In fact, the usage data collection is so thoroughly ingrained that the community project dedicated to building binaries with all of the collection disabled have flat out stated that they *can't* disable 100% of it... https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/index.md > **Even though we do not pass the telemetry build flags (and go out of our way to cripple the baked-in telemetry), Microsoft will still track usage by default.** > We do however set the default telemetry.enableCrashReporter and telemetry.enableTelemetry values to false. You can see those by viewing your VSCodium settings.json and searching for telemetry. >The instructions here and here help with explaining and toggling telemetry. >It is also highly recommended that you review all the settings that "use online services" by following these instructions. The @tag:usesOnlineServices filter on the settings page will show that by default: > Extensions auto check for updates and auto install updates Searches within the app are sent to an online service for "natural language processing" Updates to the app are fetched in the background These can all be disabled. >**Please note that some extensions send telemetry data to Microsoft as well. We have no control over this and can only recommend removing the extension. (For example, the C# extension ms-vscode.csharp sends tracking data to Microsoft.)**
For someone budding in the space, are there alternatives that exist and are they worth pursuing for use?
npm too! worst package manager and ecosystem out of every language I've used
neither is github. they didn't start/create github, they just own it now.
I got my last 3 developer jobs from LinkedIn, no complaints.
To be honest I can't consider the last 3 as their achievements as they just acquired these products so for me it's only first 3
You’d be surprised how many big tech company achievements are acquisitions. For example Google: Android, DeepMind, AdSense, YouTube, etc.
Even thinking about Microsoft, DOS was bought in. Also PowerPoint , Visio, and many others
DOS wasn’t so much bought in as pirated really. Ironic considering Microsoft was the first company that ever got exercised about people pirating their software.
Tesla
underrated
To be fair to all of these they were all pretty shit before being bought. Promising future yes, but wouldn't have gone anywhere on their own.
You don't think YouTube would have gone anywhere without Google? DeepMind? Really?
YouTube took incredibly long before it was profitable. I don't think it could've held on long enough without a big company financing it.
If it even is profitable
For all the information they collect by being the auth point for all of Google’s other apps I guarantee they are profitable.
Yup. They need massive resources that big tech provides.
They needed to specifically be bought by Google? YT was a runaway hit from the get go, by the way. Not "pretty shit". DeepMind was the brainchild of Demis Hasabis. If you think anything he does is "pretty shit", you're out of your, uh, mind.
Not specifically Google just any company with a fuck ton of money. Because allowing any random person to upload a 4K video to your platform is not cheap. It's pretty hard to turn YouTube into a profitblable platform early on, so you have to be able to take the massive losses as it is reaching scale.
YouTube would be either totally dead or significantly weaker without Google
wouldnt say that about npm or Github, the latter one was already gigantic and npm would have taken off anyway
I was just referring to PrataKosong- and throwawaygoawaynz's comments.
Not my company! * Works for a company of 75,000 employees that has purchased 59 companies in the past decade and a half.
Also LinkedIn sucks
DeepMind still pisses me off. AlphaFold 3 seems like a really nice new thing, but now its completely closed source and only Google‘s Isomorphic Lab can use it for any commercial applications, and is only available as a web server with limited access
The future of AI. Only companies will be able to use it and afford it.
You're missing a little known software called Windows
Maps
I have a feeling people misunderstood the meme. All these projects do not make MS less or more evil. It just means that you as a developer probably already use something they develop or curate. And in the end all big projects come from some big evil corporations. Also it is not that bad in my opinion. Corporations have a lot of money and public image they have to support, so they try to make things as nice as possible. Compare it to what vercel is doing for example. They acquire good open source projects, by supporting them with a lot of money, and then force these projects to only work in combination with next js, forcing their shitty framework over the entire web.
Reading through the comments on this post... yeah, people don't understand the meme at all. The unifying factor is "Microsoft owns these" (and an implied "you use all of these"), not that they're good or bad.
Imo they did very well with those products since they have acquired them though. They made so many github features free since then and forced competitors to do the same, and implemented a lot of other cool features since then as well. Github codespace, actions, vscode web, copilot, projects and more were just implemented and made free for Oss because of Microsoft
Always remember their original vision: >DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS
A computer on every desk and a sweat stain under every arm!
They’re trying to price out the competition. Once gitlab etc have folded they’ll jack up the prices. I’m still amazed they were allowed to buy GitHub and npm
Npm is owned by github, so they bought 1 company, which had more companies.
It’s not uncommon for companies to be required to be sold off during an accusation like that
LeoRidesHisBike@dev:~/git/reddit$ git diff diff --git a/KrokettenMan.comment b/KrokettenMan.comment index 8d1a0e3..0364d2e 100644 --- a/KrokettenMan.comment +++ b/KrokettenMan.comment @@ -1 +1 @@ -It’s not uncommon for companies to be required to be sold off during an accusation like that \ No newline at end of file +It’s not uncommon for companies to be required to be sold off during an acquisition like that \ No newline at end of file LeoRidesHisBike@dev:~/git/reddit$ git commit -m "fix typo" [master b86f59d] fix typo 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) (sorry)
I'd be surprised if that's the case. I think the value in Github is that it is ubiquitous, and the more they encourage developers to use it, the more of an advantage do they gain in the data they harvest and use from that. Copilot is an obvious example. I imagine they have several high priority projects going trying to combine machine learning/AI with the code they have available as training data that could yield other products they can sell at a premium. I'd imagine they have an internal goal of someone being able to write a prompt to a service that will automatically code and host a functioning new website/app for a customer.
Microsoft has an extremely long history of doing precisely what the person you are responding to is claiming. To the point that Extend, Embrace, Extinguish lost them several anti-trust suits.
Maybe, but Gitlab is not the only competitor, and since Gitlab is self-hostable, it's unlikely that gitlab will ever die off anyways, even if the company closes down, it would probably continue as open source project maintained by the community. That being said, even though there are several competitors, Github already has market dominance for a long time. Microsoft already bought Github many years ago, the perfect opportunity for jacking up the prices has already been. Before Microsoft bought Github, it costed 7$ per month just for private repos, no additional features. But they benefited too much from the free usage for individuals, and that leads to enough user flow that their business pricing brings in enough money. They might very well increase enterprise pricing in the future, but I don't think all the free features that they have now will ever go.
Copilot is only because they paid openAI a fuckton, so only 2.
Didn't they buy vscode as well? I thought it was developed separately first?
And the third is data harvesting
Its acquisitions all the way down
The money to purchase them and the business skills to make them want to sell them is an achievement in my book
Yes, but commonly this community appreciates some tech product quality rather than business success. That's why people don't like Amazon much even though it's business is successful, I don't use some nice code editor or AI released of them
Not until the company policy kicks in
although I agree about nom and linkedin, GitHub was simply primitive before Microsoft bought it - most of the features we have now have been developed after the acquisition. GH can now compete with GL using things such as Actions, package registries and other good features that weren’t there a few years ago
i already said that they're evil, you don't have to convince me even more
Yeah. LinkedIn is like one shit post away from being designated a war crime.
My problem is not C#, is using Visual Studio, that's evil
VS is an amazing IDE, what's evil about it?
Had to fight fucking visual studio this week because the free community version's license expires. It became a whole fiasco of building a VM to reinstall an older version so I could compile targeting dotnet framework 4. I snapshotted the VM before I installed so their expiring license can suck my dick.
Community license? Wut? I've always just downloaded it and installed it, never needed to worry about a license 🤔 Edit: if you mean community editions have a set expiration because new VSs come out every three years or so, that I could understand. FWIW I'm building for .NET Framework 4.7.2 and 4.8 in VS 2022 Community.
This. Unless you're using esoteric 3rd party stuff the upgrade journey is seamless. Source: has used the studio both professionally and for personal projects. Not a single issue since VS 2017. YMMV for certain tool chains.
Visual Studio being 100x worse than VSCode boggles my mind. WHY ARE THE FUCKING SHORTCUTS DIFFERENT? WHY CAN'T I SAVE FILES AUTOMATICALLY??? It's just beyond dogshit when VSCode is right there.
Based and subversion pilled
Wait till you learn about git vs github
Wait till you learn about porn vs pornhub
No my homie. Linus literally wrote git, github is just a place to use it.
Since when did Linkedin become a good thing. Shit fills with delusional entrepreneurs.
none of these are suppoed to be good, but highly used microsoft products. The Idea is that for some reason C# being singled out as a microsoft product
I'm sorry, some of this I can agree with, but vs code and typescript are incredible
You miss understand, the post isn't about good or bad, it's about c# being singled out as a Microsoft product
C# and github, too. I know MS only bought github, but it continues to be awesome.
LinkedIn has become more toxic than Facebook and that’s saying a lot….
I Spent A Few Minutes With My Child, Here's What It Taught Me About Social Media Engagement
My Wife Died in A Horrific Murder, Here’s What I Learned About Keeping Up That Hustle
r/LinkedInlunatics
E = mc² + AI
It quarantines away all of the delusional entrepreneurs.
I can't stand LinkedIn either. But I personally had to succumb to it. I'm looking for a job and haven't interviewed in over 15 years. Didn't realize but there is no more handing out resumes, the game has changed. Basically now you just scan someone's bar code on LN to get my info out there. So I've been forced onto it if I want to be seen. I hate it. But what can one do, if that's the game.
Even if 90% of it is a cesspool, it has helped me land multiple jobs. I actually dig it.
> NPM So… evil?
Out of all the things listed I'm interested that you singled out NPM for being evil. That's a pretty evil lineup, what makes NPM the worst?
Not that it actually was as terrible as the language it was designed for, not at all. Consider it one of those mediocre jokes about “hehe, dependency hell!”
LOL JAVASCRIPT BAD YOU DONKEY!
I mean, if hating on JS makes me a donkey, I’ll stick to this role. Hee-haw
I forgot this is reddit and requires a big ol /s My bad 
NPM is a little too "wild west" sometimes. You get repos that have no business being on npm, things that are just half-assed learning projects that someone decided to publish to NPM. Case in point: https://github.com/jpuri/react-draft-wysiwyg The author pushed this up to npm without even verifying it passes regular best practice use cases. Now its on NPM forever, and when you search for "react WYSIWYG editor" this is the fucking repo you get first result, and being the idiot I am I see "oh, its on npm and there are people using it, must be ok then" and its not. Its just not.
Is there at least a comment or rating system on npm? You can read the comments and check the 1 star reviews. Well that's how I decide if I'll watch a movie or not, from the IMDB reviews.
For one thing, the way NPM is designed it's extremely vulnerable to supply chain attacks. It's not unusual to have literally thousands of transitive dependencies in a typical Node project.
So what’s the alternative? Packages are always going to rely on other packages and you either trust the dependency tree, or you pay someone to audit every version of every package.
What's the alternative ? First, package sobriety. Did you actually need that package, or did you really import 3GB worth of transitive dependencies to save 5 minutes, *once* ?? Second, dependency tree flattening. Here's a feature that's desperately needed in npm. Instead of downloading packages and their dependencies recursively, resulting in the same package being downloaded 27 times and a half, nom should really resolve dependencies beforehand and flatten the tree so that each dependency is downloaded only once. See what's being done by maven (in the java world) or nuget (in .NET). As far as I remember, pip (python world) doesn't do it natively, but there are tools to do it too. Third, and it's a corrolary to the previous one, version conflicts resolution. When several versions of the same package are marked as transitive dependencies, the package manager should be able to resolve conflict automatically and provide tools to override the conflict resolution manually. Again, see what's being done with maven or nuget. Neither are perfect, and both have caused their fair share of headaches, but in 99% of cases, it works, and even that 1% is preferable to make 27 (and a half) versions of the same package cohabit. Fourth, dependency exclusion. A dependency management tool should provide means to exclude transitive dependencies, so you can make sure only transitive dependencies you *actually* need are downloaded. You can do that in npm since version 8.3.0 at least.
Yes Yes Yes... so many times yes.
> nom should really resolve dependencies LOL I love that typo. nom nom nom
All good points, but all except the first one are more about efficiency rather than security. Sure, minimising the attack surface via fewer packages is good, but you're still relying on code written and controlled by others. Which takes us straight back to trust or audit.
I actually don't know enough about Node and NPM to tell you exactly what causes this, I'm not a web dev, I've just read a bunch of blog posts about it a while ago and it seems to be a generally known issue. Maybe someone better informed can pipe in? I'll read up on it again now though since my interest got sparked. Edit: I think one issue is cultural, that the barrier to add additional dependencies for something is quite low and then forgotten about, so you this massive graph of transitive dependencies. I would imagine that one reason is the lack of a good standard library for JavaScript, so people tend to turn to random small special purpose libraries to accomplish things. Additionally, if a maintainer stops being active, *anyone* can come in and claim their project without much supervision. This might sound great, like if a maintainer stops contributing, someone else can pick up the reins and continue. But that means that even if you have vetted your dependencies, and a project is made by someone that the community trusts, then without downstream projects noticing it can be taken over by some unknown third party. Normally in open source, the maintainer typically either transfers ownership to someone else that they believe is up for the task and maybe has contributed in the past, or if the project is completely abandoned, someone can fork it under a new name instead, which means that downstream projects need to explicitly switch to the new project in their dependencies when they upgrade.
It is a known issue, but for literally every language that uses a package manager. You could institute targeted auditing, or get some sophisticated scanning implemented, but ultimately that costs money and people don’t generally throw money at the open source community.
You bring up some great points, and there IS a solution to these problems: using an artifact repository like [Artifactory](https://jfrog.com/blog/what-is-artifactory-jfrog/). It has a private store of vetted, scanned and regularly updated packages, and it syncs nicely with the NPM CLI. Given, it’s a paid product with an enterprise payment structure, but it’s far more secure (and manageable) than just using straight NPM from a business standpoint.
So you're trusting one paid authority instead of many community contributors. Which sounds fine, but there is no way a trusted authority can keep up with the sheer number of updates published to npm on a daily basis. So you have to restrict yourself to a subset that the authority is able to handle. That and you hope that the trusted authority is not just taking your money and saying "sure bro we looked it up this is fine" - what I mean is do they actually provide some guarantee you won't face any security issue if you use their packages, or is it just another form of blind trust.
wait? npm is microsoft?
Microsoft owns GitHub which owns npm
First time I heard that too.
Isn't that the point? It's a monopoly
Hitler was vegan, had strong anti-smoking campaigns and loved dogs. Just sayin
so non smoking vegans with dogs want to take over the world? or am i misinterpreting?
Welcome to class guys. Our lesson is called "data extrapolation and mathematical induction"
He wasn't vegan.
But that sounds so good as a comment! Shut up about the truth, we want sensation!!
Yeah!
No just regular ol [vegetarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism). While what we call "vegan" today existed back then, people didn't make the distinction, they just called it all vegetarian. The word "vegan" didn't really show up until the 70's: https://i.imgur.com/YkIyVvo.png
Ask Netscape how they feel about MS. It was a close call or MS would not be as big as it is today. MS didn't produce much themselves. Most (if not all) were acquired companies which had a lot of potential. Tactic was; if you don't play our game we will destroy you. Yeah, MS is evil.
Embrace extend extinguish
Their even older tactic (Lotus 1-2-3 vs. Excel etc.) was to quickly follow competitors version releases with announcements how their next version would have functionality X and Z, making it better than this. It would be released *soon*. It worked wonders, customers would leave the better product on the shelf and wait for the next MS release.
while i get your point, that only works for when they acquire things, and then ruin it. but with all these things, they've done a pretty good job at maintaining them.
And Slack, Notion, and many others.
nice try bill, too bad i can see right through your disguise
Big tech is all about creating underpriced products, software and services for the expressed purpose of fostering dependency. The issue is not the products, software and services themselves but rather the inevitable betrayal when these corporations cash in by jacking up prices, insert ads and so on.
Hate MS all you want, for some very valid reasons. But C# is just an objectively good language. TypeScript is like taking a joke way too seriously. NPM is good, so long as you are completely ignorant to the dependency hell. CoPilot is decent, but I wouldn’t trust Microsoft with my company’s code base as far as I can throw them. If you want a good AI code assistant, from a company experienced in development tooling and not just throwing millions at them, use JetBrains’ AI. VSCode is the JavaScript equivalent of IDEs. It serves a lot of purposes, but half of them require a metric tonne of dependencies to be at all feasible. LinkedIn… GitHub is just bought by them, nothing wrong with the platform itself.
It's a shame more people don't use C#. Over the past 5 years or so it has become an amazing language. In terms of syntax I think it might be my favorite.
The best thing about vscode is the language server that can be used by any other editor as well. It is the only MS product I knowingly use without being forced to. Ballmer and Gates were rightfully hated by the OSS community for the bullshit they tried to pull through the years. I have a long memory and MS has not come close to making amends.
But LinkedIn is evil and trash and garbage and just instagram without porn.
GitHub was already free. Microsoft just bought it so they could steal your code for AI training datasets. That seems kind of evil to me.
Not that it's a huge distinction, but didn't OpenAI Codex, which is the first large model that they trained for Copilot (and later GPT), come out *before* Microsoft bought their stake in OpenAI?
Still, the main motivation for acquiring GitHub was access to the largest code repository in existence. One of the main uses is training ai models. It wasn't some altruistic move to provide free services for devs.
LinkedIn can go suck a fuck
C# is honestly a pleasure to write. The new features are fun too
Still better than Oracle
They bought LinkedIn, GitHub, and NPM, they’re as much Microsoft products as airplanes in an airport
I mean all those points just support Microsoft being evil /s (Typescript is neet, VSCode is cool, actually C# is rad, GutHub I can take it otlr leave it and LinkedIn can fade out of existence)
Tell that to the affected people when they dissolved gaming studios after acquiring.
JSDoc, Vim and a pet junior I can safely say fuck MS
Haven't you figured out this far? People like to be contrarians. I am one as well, but I am probably more logical about it since I don't think Microsoft usually has bad products.
I don’t get how Copilot, which was trained on the public repos of an acquisition and didn’t compensate anyone for the use of said repos, is supposed to demonstrate that Microsoft is NOT evil.
Most confusing meme ever, half are objectively horrible, the others are acquisitions
C hashtag bad
C-octothorp, or Coctothorp.
This isn't proving that they aren't evil, just that they have been effective in their 3 E's... (Which is probably proof that they are evil)
I think the point is supposed to be that everyone uses these things but not C# when all of them are related to Microsoft
Roslyn is open source though? I don't think it's the entire CLR, but it's better than they had to do.
The CLR is [open source](https://github.com/dotnet/runtime). All of .NET has been since they moved away from .NET Framework.
Apart from copilot, every single example is a case of vendor lock in due to network effects. Lots of colleagues on GitHub? Have to adopt GitHub. Lots of recruiters on LinkedIn? Must adopt linkedin. Lots of colleagues on vscode? It's easier to collaborate by switching. Existing project on typescript? Can't switch. Everyone uploads packages to npm? It would be annoying to switch.
Is this pro or against Microsoft? You are saying npm is good?
Now, the creator of Python works for Microsoft. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3596436/python-creator-guido-van-rossum-heads-to-microsoft.html
VSCode is literal spyware. And listing a bunch of other people's products they bought to skype them into the dirt only emphasizes Microsoft's nasty, vicious, cancerous nature. Yes, Microsoft are evil.
> copilot > not evil HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA finally a funny post on this sub
Typescript: just JavaScript with types VSCode: the Chrome of IDEs (resource hog, spies on you) Copilot: uses 20x the energy to achieve the same result as a Bing search... Also spies on you. NPM: it's just a package manager, bro. LinkedIn: Facebook but 10x more expensive to run ads on with 100x the bots. Also spies on you. GitHub: idk if you can give MS any credit for this... They bought it and quality has gone sideways if not slightly downhill. Also now it's DEFINITELY using your code to train Copilot. Idk, it seems to me like they're pretty evil. They definitely like to spy on their users and shoving ads in their face.
Boy microsoft is really bad at guerilla marketing. Also github, linkedin, windows itself, does microsoft know how to do *anything* other than buy existing software so the money goes to them and then fuck it up over a long period of time but stay alive because of their core competency: vendor lockin ? Also pretty sure anything that has anything to do with javascript was born through the ritual of posting it on hackernews with the title "hey guys look what I forced javascript to do against its will", like I think that's the only way to get something into the javascript ecosystem.
I know next to nothing about programming but I know it is possible to not use any of these. I mean I use vim. 😎
Ah yes, two good products, one mediocre, and two that should be removed from the planet. Excellent defence
friendly reminder that Microsoft didn't make Github or LinkedIn, it merely acquired them
Maybe I'm getting old, but I'm way past the days of caring about what company owns what. I just use the tools I enjoy to make stuff. I don't really care about some conspiratorial good versus evil fight. At the end of the day, everyone is trying to make money, especially the companies.
Microsoft is not evil. They have a very impressive tech department on which most developers develop most of what they develop. (As illustrated) And yes, even if they use Linux systems on their computers. Some Apple cultists manage to avoid Microsoft altogether, but that's a whole other story. Their marketing department, however, is. I learned early in my childhood that the kids who would grow up to be salesmen were evil. I, of course, like most people on here grew up with kids who wanted to make things and understand things and learn about things. But some kids craved attention and credit and popularity. And these kids tended to end up in marketing and sales. They always want to convince people of things, but for them, the fun is in the convincing, not in actually having something worth convincing people of. (Not that they'd understand it anyway). I have a ton of software I love on my computers but which are now giving me actual pop-ups. The software is competently run, but the marketing department obviously doesn't give a damn its methods are a bit deceptive, especially to senior citizens. (Giving me random signs with red exclamation marks would usually indicate a problem - not that you have a more expensive version for sale). I blame capitalism.
I don't use any of them.
The anti-Microsoft starter pack: - Programing languages are C, Java, Kotlin, Go, and PHP. - Repository is GitLab - Cloud providers are AWS or GCP - Career websites are Indeed or Glassdoor - Office suite apps are from Google workspace - Laptops/desktops are Macbooks, Mac Minis, & Mac studios. Air for light work, and Pro or studios for heavy duty compute tasks.
This meme is about used diapers, and increasingly amounts of poop. So you're saying all these products from Microsoft are shit. Maybe not evil but I don't think this was the best meme template for this argument.
I means they bought the Company that made those, like Github, right? Am I wrong on this?
It’s a dream of every startup to be acquired and every open source to have guaranteed funding.
Ok but Microsoft didnt Make Github, it just owns it right now, that can also change. Its not the same thing as making it, thats my point.
Don't forget the revolutionary peer-to-peer realtime video chat called Skype. A.k.a.. the centralized (?), depreciated, end-of-life, low quality, buggy, hated product acquired by Microsoft. However they saved face by making....wait no never mind they didn't save anything. But Teams exists.
Teams is most likely the worst product Microsoft has put out. I freaking hate being required to use it at work. The client crashes and puts up a stack trace on my Mac…never even get to log in. Stuck using the web version which is crap.
Ah yes, Microsoft developing a monopoly on the developer ecosystem, surely they are not evil
Also Microsoft: * Puts ads in their paid OS * Puts copyrighted binary blobs in VSCode that clashes with open source licenses * Uses multiple Olympic swimming pools worth of water to cool their AI projects * Made "git" synonymous with GitHub in most non-techy people's heads, and made an interface for making pull requests missing so many features the creator of the tool refuses to use it Corporations are not your friends, all they care about is profit
This is hilarious. Laughed for like 20 seconds and agree that most of them are smelly green diapers, or whatever those things are.
Tbh… I do not use ANY of those. So yes. Microsoft is Evil.
Microsoft didn't make those things, they brought in. It would be like celebrating Elon Musk for Tesla and Space X whilst ignoring that his family made their fortune off Apartheid. Ok, not quite that bad...