There absolutely are serious issues at all times, regardless of how busy the trains are. I'm sorry, but as someone who actually lives in Portland I'm telling you that mentally ill drug users do not give a crap about how many people there are in the train car. After the third time I had to move my kids to different cars or even exit the train entirely due to open drug use and dangerous behavior, I swore off public transit for good.
> I also don't understand why people aren't more upset about the privacy issues.
I think a lot of people are starting to realize that despite years of doom-and-gloom finger wagging about privacy, their lives have never actually been negatively impacted by the horrors of targeted ads and, if anything, are materially improved (free internet search engines, free email, free social networks, and so on).
It recently became very real for a lot of people. The US government is buying that harmless advertising data to target, locate, and arrest/deport people.
If I was an immigrant of any legal status, I would now absolutely think twice about providing a real name or address to any online service. Any benign good-faith "its only for ads" argument has been destroyed within the last year. GrapheneOS/Librem/Pursim should start advertising heavily in immigrant communities.
This also intertwines with the coordinated ID push for many social media networks. It builds an effective framework to target anyone. Trump casually designates people "terrorists" already.
By every available measure, Waymo is safer and more equitable than cabs and rideshares. Waymos don't refuse service on skin color or disability. They don't have to stop every block along a fixed route like TriMet. And they're not profitable. So what's your actual beef, here?
I actually live in Portland, and Waymos are going to be a massive improvement over the chronically inattentive, unskilled drivers around here. Waymos aren't glued to their phones at intersections. That, alone, is 70% of all pedestrian crashes caused by human drivers in Portland.
That part should be worrying; will they need to increase prices significantly when they decide to become profitable?
But more broadly, I agree that Waymo is an improvement over taxis or Uber/Lyft. The comparison to public transit is a complicated and local question (I don't live in Portland and have never ridden TriMet), but in general I think there's a place for both.
The worst part of all this is that GitHub's CTO and VP of Engineering sent out the usual "here's what we'll do to fix things" letter to their larger customers and, without exaggeration, it boiled down to: 1) "Here's a bunch of stuff we already did!" which... clearly isn't working, and 2) "We're continuing our Azure migration." also clearly not working.
So needless to say, if you depend on GitHub for critical business operations, you need to start thinking about what a world without GitHub looks like for your business and start working your way toward that. I know my confidence in GitHub's engineering leadership is at rock bottom.
I could sorta see a situation where the reality is "we're in the middle of a miserable transition and it'll clean up when we're done" but I don't think anyone has confidence that's all it is at this point.
Even that doesn’t really make sense to me, unless they’ve done it in a way where everything has to move at once.
Everywhere I’ve worked, if a migration is causing this much downtime then you kill the migration or slow it down. If every change has a 10% chance of bringing the site down, you only do a change every week or two until you can work out the kinks.
Reminds me of the bank for my business where a larger bank with terrible IT bought a smaller bank with great IT - guess which systems they standardized on? Online banking is still much worse than before and the web interface still says "will be migrated by end of 2023" for some parts. Many customers just left and complaints were widely reported in the media. I probably should leave, too.
Here are some relevant excerpts from an October 2025 article[1]:
> In a message to GitHub’s staff, CTO Vladimir Fedorov notes that GitHub is constrained on capacity in its Virginia data center. “It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot, which are changing how people use GitHub,” he writes.
> The plan, he writes, is for GitHub to completely move out of its own data centers in 24 months. “This means we have 18 months to execute (with a 6 month buffer),” Fedorov’s memo says. He acknowledges that since any migration of this scope will have to run in parallel on both the new and old infrastructure for at least six months, the team realistically needs to get this work done in the next 12 months.
If you consider that six month parallel window to have started from the time of the October memo (written presumably at the start of October), then that puts us currently or past the point where they would have cut off their old DC and defaulted to Azure only.
Whether plans or timelines changed, I have no idea of course but the above does make for a convenient timeline that would explain the recent instability. Of course, it could also just be symptomatic of increased AI usage generally and the same problems might have surfaced at a software level regardless of whether they were in a DC or on Azure.
Putting that nuance aside, personally I like the idea that Azure is simply a giant pile of shit operated by a corporation with no taste.
>It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot
if by chance the CTO reads this, as a user of GitHub I would find it really existential if GitHub continues functioning as a reliable hub for git workflows (hence the name), and I have the strong suspicion nobody except for the shareholders gives a lick about copilot or 'AI' if it makes the core service the site was designed for unusable
Why? What is the correlation between profit and shareholder sentiment (besides the fact that shareholders want said profits)? They don't really influence the operation of the business meaningfully.
Sure, but I think it's the wrong way around. Appeasing shareholders doesn't make you profitable, being profitable appeases shareholders. I think there is a wealth of evidence that appeasing shareholders actually impedes profits overall.
Incorrect. They need to appease/trick/threaten/etc those that are paying for their services. Shareholders just demand they do so at the greatest (often short term) rate.
i heard that they asked LinkedIn to do this too and they either refused or their systems were too complex so they refused to. Maybe that explains why LI availability seems ok
The New York Times has been thriving. They're profitable and their stock is near all-time highs. If the internet killed WaPo, why didn't it kill NYTimes?
As the sibling said, papers used to make money via ads and classifieds. NYTimes pivoted to games. This gives people a reason to go to NYT every day and gives them upsell opportunities to full subscriptions. WaPo and others don't have the alternate revenue source.
It's notable that they blame "our upstream provider" when it's quite literally the same company. I can't imagine GitHub engineers are very happy about the forced migration to Azure.
Having worked there around 2020-2021 there were many folks not happy with being forced to use azure and being forced to build GitHub actions based on azure devops. Lots of AWS usage still existed at that time but these days u bet it’s mostly gone.
True enough. The world is never as predictable as the computers we program, and the computers we program are never as predictable as we feel they should be.
Nobody is happy with Oracle anything! It has some users because it is free. It has paid users because Larry Ellison bribed the government. Nobody would choose it voluntarily.
A few years ago I talked to an developer advocate for Azure. I wanted to know why it took for ever when you wanted a new public IP. My take was that it felt like they went out on the internet to look for an IP to purchase from a 3rd. party. The answer I got was that do to the silos within Microsoft it might as well be a 3rd party supplier. The slowness is exactly because IPs are/were a managed by another Microsoft entity, who views any interaction, even within the company, as hostile.
I get your point, but it just sounds a bit funny when it's an artefact of corporate structure that it's true.
Like imagine if AWS was composed of separate companies for different services - Fargate was an Heroku acquisition say - and then they all went down and blamed their 'upstream provider' because they can't work without say VPC or EC2 availability.
I think that's all GP meant, it just reads a bit funny, not that it's wrong.
It's an incredible show but the finale "season" catapults it into my personal top 3 children's shows of all time. They did an incredible job of bringing it full circle and tying a bow on it. Tumble Leaf doesn't normally make you cry the way Bluey does, but the finale will have you bawling.
He co-founded and sold Segment. You think he was just at OpenAI to collect a check? He lays out exactly why he joined OpenAI and why he's leaving. If you think everyone does things only for cynical reasons, it might be a reflection more of your personal impulses than others.
Just because someone claims they are speaking in good faith doesn’t mean we have to take their word for it. Most people in tech dealing with big money are doing it for cynical reasons. The talk of changing the world or “doing something hard” is just marketing typically.
Calvin works incredibly hard and has very little ego. I was surprised he joined OpenAI since he's loaded from the Segment acquisition, but if anyone it makes sense he would do this. He's always looking to find the hardest problem and work on it.
That's what he did at Segment even in the later stages.
Newborns need constantly mom, not dad. Moms need husbands or their moms to help. The way it works is you agree what to do as a family (to do it or not to do it) and everybody is happy with their lives. You can be a great dad and husband and still do all of it when it makes sense and your wife supports it etc. Not having kids in the first place could be considered ego driven, not this.
No, he's right. I just went through newborn phase right now and the only person that needed is mom. Kid wanted nothing to do with me. He just wanted food and sleep.
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