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The year I worked at Google was the Year Of Social, and everyone's OKRs involved integrating with Google+ somehow, and if you did that you got a large bonus.
Anyway getting strong vibes like that when GitHub's new font family's landing page starts randomly talking about Copilot half-way.
Update: The above has been described as a cheap dunk, and to be fair the CoPilot output having different font thing is fine. But. I guess I should expand with some context about my year at Google—
The company I worked at was acquired by Google, I was tired of what I was doing, and due to RSI I could only be a product manager, couldn't type enough to write software. And I didn't want anything to do with selling ads. So I figured, Google Books—selling books is a fine business, they had a local team, I like books, hurrah.
I had some ideas, some I still haven't seen anyone do, but what I mainly learned is what it's like working at Google: upper management is akin to weather. In particular—
—the product manager I met at Google Books who seemed really smart and competent didn't get to actually work on making the product. Instead, first he had to do the all-Google-standard-design, and then it was the Year Of Social (none of those features ever landed in Google Books AFAIK—hope they got a bonus?), and then Books got moved under Android (maybe due to Kindle HD release?), and then he just gave up and switched to a different part of Google.
So again, upper management was like weather—
—they made some random decision at levels far far above you that you couldn't control, and you just had to live with it.
And the "Copilotization of GitHub" sounds like the same thing. Some of this will result in reasonable outcomes, some of it will result in whole teams wasting multiple person-years on building useless stuff (but hey they might get a bonus).
The whole thing gives me really bad management vibes, especially since per WSJ they're losing money on every CoPilot user.
@arthurwyatt @itamarst @acb its 2008 lets gamify fonts
@itamarst Well they've "re-founded on Copilot" and I can't decide what level of bleakness this is.
@itamarst I don't know where to find this page but I'm really curious. Where's the font family landing page?
@itamarst Wow, this really is like that Google+ thing you described. This is insane lmao
@itamarst your bigger point may or not be true, but that’s a cheap dunk on some really great work on the font. Using a typeface to distinguish between LLM-generated and human-written code is a genuinely good idea.
@jacob Probably fair, I expanded heavily to get the more important point across.
@itamarst I haven't taken the time to archive.org check this but it really leaves a bad taste in my mouth that copilot is free for 12 months for open source developers...
@itamarst I don't use it, but I am on a free plan. So I guess now I need to be extra careful and make sure that I don't end up with a $10 bill.
> Once awarded, if you are still a maintainer of a popular open source project when your initial 12 months subscription expires then you will be able to renew your subscription for free.
Their usage of “renew” here puts the responsibility on the user, not the company.
@itamarst it reeks of inability to back away from bad decisions in exactly the same way that Google has made an entire business model out of.
The really aggravating part is that this kind of deliberate wastefulness seems to be below the noise floor in megacorps. There's so much capital sloshing around and so much division, it seems to get lost in the shuffle.
The incentives to do *checking notes* sustainable and reasonable business stuff are weak, even if somebody with power happens to notice.
@itamarst I've benefitted a lot from GitHub. Would be sad to see it risk everything on CoPilot.
@sgillies @itamarst it sounds like they are profitable so I don't think it's risking all, but I definitely think their greatest opportunity is GitHub enterprise and the built in DAST/vulnerability scanning tool.
I think it's way overpriced at the moment but that could make some big jumps if everyone who had GitHub had that and took it seriously
@itamarst the weather right now says AI
@itamarst they're losing money on every copilot user?? lmao
@chrisisgr8 @itamarst it is difficult to overstate how obscenely expensive the operational costs of the current crop of models are, but it stands to reason when you consider that the they have O(100 B-1 T) weights.
An (admittedly quite speculative) estimate flew around a few months ago that ChatGPT alone costs $700k/day in operational expenses, although I don't know what user counts are like.
All signs point to growing anxiety about what happens if a grown-up business model never materializes.
@chrisisgr8 @itamarst on the other hand, MSFT's $10 B investment is a lot of capital. "Loss leader" takes on a whole new meaning when you're dealing with corporate megafauna. They can afford to hemorrhage money for *decades* if the credulous powers that be can be convinced to go for it.
Considering how much of the exercise revolves around hoovering up data and intellectual property rights laundering… maybe the data they're making off with will be worth what the window-smashing crowbar costs
@itamarst I like your weather analogy. :-) So apt about management in big companies, in general.
@itamarst lmao at your update, i'm getting told to integrate copilot with the C++ standard library - it's absolutely nonsense
@streganil Ooh, inside info.
1. Sorry to hear that!
2. Is there a bonus scheme, or is this just a management mandate? I'm guessing the latter...
3. Were you provided with user stories or motivation, or just "integrate"? C++ is probably the last language I'd want stochastically generated, templates mean you shouldn't need to write much repetitive code, and the excessively sharp edges mean you need to be careful and deliberate.
@itamarst yeah, definitely just a management "mandate" (aka we ignore management because that's dumb as hell)
we saw an example of copilot with C++ - it suggested returning an address of a local in order to get optional returns lmao
@streganil @itamarst a static local maybe?
@streganil @itamarst
Is that management the reason you leave MS?
@streganil @itamarst
I hope you find/found greener pastures!
All the best ! Enjoy the holidays!
@itamarst I was in Platforms during that. Apparently having every machine in every data center have a Google+ account that reported its health and what jobs it was running wasn't quite what they meant.
@philippe See my replies on that thread.