BST, GitHub and Stockholm Syndrome

We are back onto BST today and longer days are here. Rejoice! It’s that time of year again when tax returns become due and must be paid. No rejoice.

On my first day of BST (bullsh*t summer time), I notice a lot of complaints again about dear GitHub. Everyone is up in arms, rage-baited once more by something or other GitHub-related. Oh, today they are upset by GitHub’s plans to train AI on data generated from users Copilot interactions.

From April 24 onward, interaction data — specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context — from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users will be used to train and improve our AI models unless they opt out.

Source: updates-to-github-copilot-interaction-data-usage-policy

I have no sympathy for you, dear user of GitHub and AI. No sympathy at all. You can stay getting mad at GitHub for (a) all their frequent outages, and (b) all their syphoning of your data. YOUR data. What do you expect? Seriously people? What is it going to take, what is it going to actually take to get people to open their eyes?

I’m not shocked, I’m only very slightly surprised that so many smarter minds than mine would rather spend their precious time writing stern rebuttals instead of making a move. Braying into the void (as if GitHub bosses give a toss) at GitHub’s lack of morals. And, once the stern words have been written? Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Those minds smarter than mine go right back to doing absolutely nothing differently. They go right back to sending their Git commits to GitHub.

Outage after outage, theft after theft. And still they persist, still they stay put. They love it. Stockholm Syndrome if I ever saw it.