It’s funny, because one might argue that a lack of awareness of, or empathy for the fact that other people also have thoughts and autonomy also demonstrates a lack of self-conscious critical thought.

I can't imagine this is at top of mind for many voters, or even in mind at all. People are more concerned with things like the cost of living, immigration and things like local planning law.

Markdown is ubiquitous in the kinds of places Hacker News visitors also tend to visit, like GitHub, various ticketing and project management systems like Jira, note takers like Obsidian and Notion (or an approximation of Markdown).

I've used `--` for years in place of an em-dash, which markdown renders as an actual em-dash.

And then there's the cheesecake from La Viña which stands above all others.

I've been making the Basque burnt cheesecake every year lately, it really is a delight

I think that's the point, no? The page is light on text but appears to be some kind of weird art project making fun of the inane "helpful and friendly" personas given to LLM chatbots

Are you sure? Given it’s from Block I really cannot tell if it is some meta irony or serious

Just because Billy misbehaved doesn’t make it ok for Jenny to do the same.

I just use GitHub for the basics: repo hosting, reviews and actions - what are the "social media psyop manipulations"? I've never really paid much attention to the other features.

All the metrics based around how many commits you have made, how many stars your repo has, etc. Why is that info gamified? Its a dopamine addiction channel.

It’s for subset of people who cares about that. You can just blanket-ignore everyone who cares about that, and move on.

Yeah but then VC use these metrics to fund projects and suddenly what was previously a joke now becomes a way to make wealth.

Seriously?

You outlined what it (and all git hosting other services) are for: repository hosting, optionally issue tracker, mandatorily pull requests (for syncing with master or other branches), Actions for automated steps on merge to a tracked branch.

But now the users who only use core functions (re: repo hosting, reviews and actions) suffer when the service is down due to overreach with feature implementation.

It's good you can isolate yourself from it. But there's plenty of cases.

Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues. Or being feed AI slop to review endlessly. Or recruiters filtering resumes via Github activity graphs or repository stars.

And obviously the side shady market of all of the above (e.g. buying/selling popularity).

Like the parent comment, I can't wait for social media to be completely obliterated from code repositories.

> Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues

This isn't "psyops". Sure, it's a bad side of social interactions, but when you interact with other people, there's always some of this - in person as well as online.

The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".

I have no argument that selling popularity is bad and filtering by stars is stupid, but I don't blame Github for any of that.

You could equally well assign the success of certain coders to YouTube because they came to attention by showing off their work in livestreams. Which I do not. They found a way to advertise their own success, but it's theirs.

> The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".

The argument is that there's no need for that much social interaction to produce quality code, quite the contrary, the more social interaction, the more focus is lost.

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but there's a reason why the Linux Kernel communication is still done through acerbic email threads.

None of this is specific to GitHub. The exact same problems will sometimes happen any time users and developers communicate, which is a basic requirement of developing useful software. I doubt GitHub issues are worse than mailing lists or any other mechanism.

They almost have to be - which users will be able to get to your issues page and which will be able to find a mailing list? You'll have a much more selective audience in the latter

Demanding work isn't really an issue. Anyone can do that, and also reject the work. Dishonest actors on the other hand would take money for someone else's work.

Audio doesn’t seem to work in mobile safari.

It worked for me by unmuting my ringer and raising my volume. Agree UX isnt great.

> rules[...] have the potential to enable NPC like behaviour which is all too common

Would you mind explaining this? What is NPC-like behaviour?

I'm not that commenter, but it seemed clear from the context. Inflexible, decision-tree-like behavior -- like an NPC from a video-game.

NPCs are Non-Player-Characters in video games, i.e. "extras". Their programming is usually kept simple, so they're kind of famous for robotically repeating the same lines or doing the same actions.

I think here it might mean getting attached to the rules for the rules' sake and forgetting the deeper reason why the rules are there in the first place - like waiting on a red light on a deserted street.