Define losing? My company pays for Copilot but not for Cursor, and it's not at all clear to me that we're the exception rather than the norm. What numbers and data are you working with?
That's not actually how unseating an incumbent works. The incumbent can adapt to the threat for quite a while if they act on it, they just have to not be Blockbuster. Copilot is showing every sign of making up ground feature-wise, which is bad news for the runners up.
Incumbent advantage of being in VS Code already? Thing is, Cursor is basically just VS Code, there's hardly any barrier to switching, so it's quite a weak advantage.
In brand velocity maybe, but copilot is rapidly reaching feature parity with cursor and will invariably overtake it—while costing less to users.
Same with Google vs OpenAI. I tend to agree with the sentiment that I most frequently hear which is that OpenAI is the currently popular brand, but that can only carry them so far against what will eventually be a better offering for cheaper.
GitHub has been failing upward for more than 5 years. They could have totally dominated software development and security - failed. Could have been the undisputed champion of code hosting - failed. Should have dominated development co-pilots - failed.
I actually find it a little reassuring that they can't seem to get out of their own way.
It's a close call - I make this based on the fact that GitHub is viewed as an anti-choice by some in the community, a huge change from the "you don't use GitHub?!?!" energy they had pre-acquisition.
The MS acquisition traded the developer community to briefly appeal to enterprises, then quickly let both down.
Both the startups I worked at and the mega corps are all on github or moving there from bitbucket. They are in a bit of autpilot mode in terms of useful new features aside from actions but I can't think of any new bitbucket feature since I graduated and started working.
Bitbucket is not a player, as you said there are only people leaving. Gitlab has a better enterprise posture than GitHub and can be deployed more securely. Most developers aren't unhappy with GitHub, but IT and security teams are.
I dunno, for me Github is better than it was pre-acquisition. Sure, the rate of improvement has slowed a lot, but they did fix some old annoyances. But come to think of it, I can't really think of any ways that it has enshittified. I don't use any of the CI/Actions stuff though.
To be fair, they have been behind the competition for many years. Gitlab had extremely good CI, security scanning, organisational concepts, etc. for years before GitHub introduced their ones (and Actions still has a worse UX, and GitHub still doesn't have anything below an organisation).
GitLab UI is inferior IMO, and I've used both quite extensively.
I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus
I also disagree about GitLab CI, not that it wasn't smart for them to include alot sooner than GitHub, but Actions is really good and really easy to get up and moving with. I find they run faster, have better features - like they can annotate a PR with lint errors and test failures - with very little comparative configuration.
GitLab CI yaml is a mess by comparison. GitHub was smart to push things to the runner level once a certain complexity threshold is hit.
This has been my experience of course, and so much of it is really subjective admittedly, but I don't think GitLab is truly ahead at this point.
> I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus
Nah, I hate that. At my job we have a few different orgs, with terrible SSO boundaries (having to auth multiple times to GitHub because I work on repositories from different GitHub orgs). Allowing you to have a proper structure with nestedness, while still having good search, is great. You can also easily move projects and namespaces around, so if the structure doesn't work, it can evolve.
Why would you have the 50 library repositories you've had to fork as top level projects polluting your org? You also can't really do shared variable, environment, CI configs between repos of the same project/type.
And it being open core (MIT) means spinning up a version to test something is incredibly easy. Not exactly resource cheap, as it's still a rails app with multiple servers "smuggled" in the docker image, but it is easy
And I have long held that they are hungry, shipping like clockwork on or about the 20th of every month, showing up with actual improvements all the time https://about.gitlab.com/releases/ It seems this month brings 18.0 with it, for whatever that version bump happens to include
They also have a pretty good track record of "liberating" some premium features into the MIT side of things; I think it's luck of the draw, but it's not zero and it doesn't seem to be tied to any underhanded reason that I can spot
Yeah, it's almost certainly the network effect. Although poor GitLab isn't doing themselves any favors by picking what seems to be the slowest web framework one can possibly imagine
But, anytime I am empowered to pick, I'm going to pick GitLab 100% of the time because it has every feature that I care about and "being popular" isn't a feature that I care about
Well you’re right (especially wrt things like security scanning), but you sort of have to include Azure DevOps in the conversation nowadays. I think the end goal for Microsoft is to get the larger organizations into ADO, either cross-pollinate pipelines and actions or just replace actions with pipelines at some point, and leave GitHub for simpler project structures and public codebases.
That’s why you won’t see a ton of work go into e.g. issues/projects on GitHub. Those features all already exist and are very robust in ADO, so if you need those kinds of things (and the reporting an enterprise would want to be able to run on that data), then you belong on ADO.
I can say with a high level of confidence that the goal is definitely not to push larger orgs to ADO over GitHub. ADO is and will continue to be supported and you’re right that its project management features are much more advanced than GitHub, but the mission is not to push people off of ADO and into GitHub.
Your opening and closing statements aren’t mutually exclusive, but I can’t tell if one is a typo (or if so, which one it is).
I didn’t mean to imply that MS wanted to migrate anyone, just that the different offerings serve different kinds of customers, so you can’t really just compare GitLab to GitHub and say MS is lacking in serving some group of them.
I don't think bias is the right word. It's more that a station not bound by corporate sponsors better has the ability to reflect the voice of the people, and Americans generally lean progressive when you ask them directly about policy.
While I don't watch NBC or CNN (they talk about 5 minute topics for 2 weeks), I notice often that a progressive bias, as far as I understand, is not immediately bending the knee to any rightwing pushback. It shouldn't be biased to say climate change is real, for instance, but that has been politicized so much that it's seen as a progressive bias. It's only in recent years that Republicans have switched from "It's not real" to "well doing something about it is too hard."
A better example of a bias would be texts from Fox news anchors privately trashing Sidney Powell as a lying hack while they, simultaneously, plan to boost her appearances to make election interference seem more plausible [1]. Or saying they can't fact check Trump anymore [2].
I listen to planet money and a few other podcasts. They seem pretty fair to me. The only way I could maybe see a progressive bias is that they have representation in their staff of racial and sexual minorities. I see no issue with that.
Honest question, does NPR have any token conservative pundits or voices on their broadcasts or shows? I know they have a lot of minority representation. As usual, Trumps proposed solution is idiotic. But maybe there could be an unofficial settlement to make sure all perspectives are heard?
does NPR have any token conservative pundits or voices on their broadcasts or shows?
They do the same format almost all news shows do where they introduce an issue and have two people with opposing views discuss it (there was a recent one about fossil fuels and renewables which I can't find...). This format doesn't always fall along "conservative vs other" lines though, because issues aren't necessarily that simple.
It is important not to just have someone to represent a viewpoint, but also that they are equally "good" at it (I'm not sure what that means!). One way to be biased is to have someone incompetent represent a viewpoint - creating a strawman that is easy to knock down.
There have been loads of others but here is a prominent and slightly ironic example of what you are asking about: Tucker Carlson built his early TV career in large part as a conservative pundit on PBS.
> does NPR have any token conservative pundits or voices on their broadcasts or shows?
They used to (e.g., Bob Edwards, who founded Morning Edition) but the Overton Window shifted out from under them. Steve Inskeep today lies somewhere in the center-right (a fiscally conservative Never-Trumper is my brief take on him) but that’s not right enough to count as a conservative these days.
It's shifted so far right that looking at news headlines gives me anxiety that we're in a bad enough time / timeline that modern events will be chapters in future history books; assuming we still have books (in any form).
What he's alluding to is that currently conservative voices seem utterly incapable of just not lying. Fox has progressed from a bias, to misinformation, to now just straight up disinformation.
When that is the other "side", then honesty will seem biased. The middle is would be something like lying 25% of the time.
That's possible I suppose, but do you have any evidence of that or is it just your personal biases causing you to assume the worst motivation you can imagine must be the correct one?
I know personally that given the choice I'd probably rather use Signal than whatever messaging system the DoD contractors managed to come up with. And private conversations between senior military officials over encrypted DoD communication channels probably aren't FOIAable anyway.
But the simple answer is that the devices suck and people don't want to use them. This is going to be more and more true as time goes on because new people coming in will be used to the creature comforts they have from their personal equipment. I'm not defending anyone here, the people in power need to be held to a higher standard than some rando citizen on the street.
> That's possible I suppose, but do you have any evidence of that
Yes, in the chat where a reporter was accidentally present, many of the messages were set to be disappearing. I don't know why anyone would do that if not to avoid recordkeeping laws.
> The images of the text chain show that the messages were set to disappear in one week.
Oddly, the Project 2025 training videos that presumably the members of the executive cabinet have seen say _not_ to delete messages or set messages to auto-deleting _because_ that would be in violation of federal record keeping legislation.
Jails have been around longer, but I'm not sure how much it really matters. Jails and containers both share the kernel across workloads. A kernel exploit is generally accepted as the barrier to break out (and of course implementation bugs). VMs don't share kernels across workloads, but do share a hypervisor which can also have breakout bugs. Both jails and containers depend on the kernel to be bug free.
VMs (depending on hypervisor) are easier to secure by default, you can't easily forget an overlay fs, or make other mistakes that expose some part of the host to containers.
The trick to competing with Duolingo is to _actually_ teach people new languages that they actually learn, rather than giving away the illusion that they are learning a new language on Duolingo.
At the end of the day, whether it's effective or not, Duolingo sells the feeling that you are learning a language to people. Winning a competition with Duolingo means doing better at making people feel like they are learning a language -- the strategy to win against Duolingo probably involves watering down the learning even more, to better sell the feeling.
A good way to think about it is look at some organization that wants to be effective at actually teaching its employees a new language, like the state department:
Yes, it takes commitment to master a language. In the case of Japanese, which traditionally takes the most weeks to master when coming from English, we made Japanese Complete based on frequency analysis to help speed up the process of acquisition. With 777 kanji carefully selected by frequency you can get 90% coverage of kanji in the wild. This is about a third of the "daily use" set of ~2200 kanji so the process is greatly accelerated. If you're interested in seeing what 777 kanji look like, I recently created a small kanji quiz game that quizzes by English meaning words [0].
there is an underserved audience that wants an engaging way to learn a language and are disillusioned with Duolingo already
Duolingo is for people that will never travel for more than a weekend once every other year, and its fine that its entertaining for them or their last minute crash course to feel less ignorant. Lately I've seen it used by people that want to feel closer to their roots.
But I don't think people actually engaging with other cultures and going abroad to do so are still using this. On the other hand, LLM's are really good at slang and colloquialisms, something neither Duolingo or an in person teacher will reveal to you.
> there is an underserved audience that wants an engaging way to learn a language and are disillusioned with Duolingo already
I'm just very unsure whether it's possible to design an effective language learning program that is "engaging" in the way that Duolingo users want it. At the end of the day, you should feel engagement from using the language (and seeing yourself improve) and not from external gimmicks.
True but then I remember that most people are just paying for the feeling. There's millions to be made actually teaching people stuff (learning is hard) but there are billions to be made making people feel like they are.
That said, I do think betting against Duolingo will pay off long term. But the put options are so expensive... probably better to just short the shares
> rather than giving away the illusion that they are learning a new language on Duolingo
I disagree that it's an illusion. People are learning a new language when using Duolingo, but 5-10 minutes/day means it will take a long time before they are proficient. Someone else linked to the state department website showing 550-690 hours of learning required on the English adjacent languages.
