The Wikipedia user based his drawing off of this sculpture from 1711, so it seems the american continent was actually already quite well mapped back then.
The armorials of the South Sea Company, according to a grant of arms dated 31 October 1711, were: Azure, a globe whereon are represented the Straits of Magellan and Cape Horn all proper and in sinister chief point two herrings haurient in saltire argent crowned or, in a canton the united arms of Great Britain. Crest: A ship of three masts in full sail. Supporters, dexter: The emblematic figure of Britannia, with the shield, lance etc all proper; sinister: A fisherman completely clothed, with cap boots fishing net etc and in his hand a string of fish, all proper.[61]
The artifact you link shows a map of the Americas in which California is an island and either Tierra Del Fuego is huge or the bottom of Argentina is an island and the northwest of the continent trails off into nothing, and Florida is sort of a stubby nub (other maps from this period show a more accurate Florida, so this might be a small-size-of-the-object problem).
They had a decent view onto the east coast of the Americas, but after that things got quite inaccurate. It's like... I don't know what anyone's expectations are, but it certainly isn't the perfect world map that's shown in the main image of Wikipedia's article.
What’s more, GitHub has basically stopped maintaining their own actions, pushing people to sketchy forks to do basic things. Their entire ecosystem is basically held up with duct tape and gets very little investment.
They had working infra and a great case for keeping fairly "close to the metal". Complicated files-heavy workload that needs tons of clever caching to perform well, lots of writes, lots of non-HTTP TCP traffic.
Retrofitting that into "cloud" bullshit is such a bad idea.
Using bare-metal requires competent Unix admins, and Actions team is full of javascript clowns (see: decision to use dashes in environment variable; lack of any sort of shell quoting support in templates; keeping logs next to binaries in self-hosted runners). Perhaps they would be better off using infra someone else maintains.
An interesting things is that GitHub is an expensive service and my guess would be that MS makes good money on it. Our small company paid about 200+ USD monthly for GitHub, much larger cumulative cost than Windows licenses. My believe was that Windows is getting worse, because it is considered legacy business by MS in favor of new offerings such as GitHub subscriptions.
GitHub also runs a free tier with significant usage.
There are ~1.4b paid instances of Windows 10/11 desktop; and ~150m Monthly active accounts on GitHub, of which only a fraction are paid users.
Windows is generating something in the region of $30b/yr for MS, and GitHub is around $2b/yr.
MS have called out that Copilot is responsible for 40% of revenue growth in GitHub.
Windows isn't what developers buy, but it is what end users buy. There are a lot more end users than developers. Developers are also famously stingy. However, in both products the margin is in the new tech.
github value maybe as not apparent as other product
but github is pair well with MS other core product like Azure and VS/VSC department
MS has a good chance to have vertical integration on how software get written from scratch to production, if they can somehow bundle everything to all in one membership like Google one subs, I think they have a good chance
hey there! blacksmith solutions engineer here :) love to hear we've helped speed up your tests and docker builds!!
could you shoot me your GH org so I can apply your startup discount? feel free to reach out to support@blacksmith.sh and I'll get back to you asap.
thanks for using blacksmith!
Thank you for the kind shout out! Always happy to see comments like this. If anyone is looking for a better GitHub or GitHub Actions experience, feel free to reach out anytime.
Founder of Depot here. We provide faster and more reliable GitHub Actions runners (as well as other build performance services) at half the cost of GitHub [0]
The legacy business usually explains why there are no new features, only minor maintenance, it doesn't explain why there is a lot of investment into work that makes it worse
There's direct evidence that GitHub Actions was the rewrite of Azure Pipelines that was originally planned to finish 5 years ago and got "stuck" (because all their resources moved to GitHub). For a while you could find 2020 roadmap repositories (on GitHub) for AzDO talking up a Pipelines rewrite bringing a lot more features (including better Docker alignment versus Pipelines' much more complex "runner skills") that instead showed up in the first version of GitHub Actions.
Microsoft claims Azure DevOps still has a roadmap, but it's hard to imagine that the real roadmap isn't simply "Wait for more VPs in North Carolina to retire before finally killing the brand".
github doesn't pay microsoft for the azure runners. that's why they came up with actions at all. microsoft gets streetcreds for stable runners, github could replace travis and appveyor.
It's not really that expensive. GitHub Enterprise is like $21/month/user while GitLab Ultimate was $100/month/user the last time GitLab published prices. These days GitLab Ultimate is "contact us for pricing" while the cheaper GitLab Premium is $29/month/user.
I guess Bitbucket is cheaper but you'll lose the savings in your employees bitching about Bitbucket to each other on Slack.
The quality of setup-* actions has definitely gone down and there are a lot of strange decisions being made. I assume the original authors of these actions have long left the company.
Thank you for your interest in this GitHub repo, however, right now we are not taking contributions.
We continue to focus our resources on strategic areas that help our customers be successful while making developers' lives easier. While GitHub Actions remains a key part of this vision, we are allocating resources towards other areas of Actions and are not taking contributions to this repository at this time. The GitHub public roadmap is the best place to follow along for any updates on features we’re working on and what stage they’re in.
What they are really saying is they don't want third party contributions. They don't have anyone triaging Issues or PRs so don't send them.
They will occasionally make changes if it aligns with a new product effort driven from within the org.
Saying they're dropping support is a stretch esp as very few people actually pay for their Support package anyway..... (Yes they do offer it as a paid option to Enterprise customers)
> Instead of writing bespoke scripts that operate over GitHub using the GitHub API, you describe the desired behavior in plain language. This is converted into an executable GitHub Actions workflow that runs on GitHub using an agentic "engine" such as Claude Code or Open AI Codex. It's a GitHub Action, but the "source code" is natural language in a markdown file.
This seems like a real headache to me. I understand the value proposition of LLMs in the development cycle, but CI/CD is probably the last place where I want any degree of nondeterminism.
This looks like backwards. I would understand using a LLM to generate a GitHub Actions YAML, but always running your action from a Markdown file seems extremely wasteful in terms of resources.
Edit: ok, looking at example it makes more sense. The idea is to run specific actions that are probably not well automated, like generating and keeping documentation up-to-date. I hope people don't use it to automate things like CI runs though.
Because they know most abusive business relationship partners don't leave (see also Oracle). No matter how many bruises, CIO's are not going to get fired for buying Big Blue or whoever is the current abusive standard.
The funny thing about the last one is that those actions ultimately boil down to invoking their CLI tool (which is pre-installed on the runners) with "gh release create ...", so you can just do that yourself and ignore the third-party actions and the issues that come with them. Invoking an action isn't really any easier than invoking the CLI tool.
Yeah, what really needs to happen with that repo is to put that in the README to use the gh CLI instead of pointing to the third-party action with questionable security policies. If they were accepting PRs for that repo, it would be an easy PR to make.
That issue with their own small private forks has actually raised its head while testing out the AI slop generator thing it has, making anything it produces for you not self hoatable unless you rewrite a lot of basic functions. Sweet irony.
With AI you won't need CI anymore, it's all going straight to prod anyway /s
Actions is one thing, but after all these years where the new finegrained access tokens aren't still supported across all the product endpoints (and the wack granularity) is more telling about their lack of investment in maintenance.
I never used any actions and never understood why would I need to. I just wrote bash script to build my project and that's about it. This modern tendency to add dependencies for trivial things baffles me. You don't need "action" to do `git clone`.
I’d appreciate not being called lazy for mentioning a lack of investment on Microsoft’s side to secure their paid and fairly lucrative service that they bought a popular code hosting platform to integrate with.
Can someone explain what this somewhat recent phenomenon is where people feel the need to defend the worlds biggest billion dollar businesses, that are also often subsidized by tax payer money in weird ways?
How did we go in 20 years from holding these companies to account when they'd misbehave to acting as if they are poor damsels in distress whenever someone points out a flaw?
> How did we go in 20 years from holding these companies to account when they'd misbehave to acting as if they are poor damsels in distress whenever someone points out a flaw?
Honestly I think the problem is more a rosy view of the past versus any actual change in behavior. There have always been defenders of such companies.
> How did we go in 20 years from holding these companies to account when they'd misbehave to acting as if they are poor damsels in distress whenever someone points out a flaw?
They hired a ton of people on very very good salaries
The original comment said to stop giving money to these companies if they are not giving you a satisfactory service.
The opposite, to be lazy and to continue giving them money whilst being unhappy with what you get in return, would actually be more like defending the companies.
The original comment actually criticized Microsoft for a lack of investment to secure their paid and fairly lucrative service that they bought a popular code hosting platform to integrate with.
The opposite we see here: to not criticize them; to blame Microsoft's failure on the critics; and even to discourage any such criticism, are actually more like defending large companies.
I won't "defend" Microsoft in this case, but I am always annoyed by phrases like "world's biggest billion-dollar businesses... bablah".
Their size or past misbehaviors shouldn't be relevant to this discussion. Bringing those up feels a bit like an ad hominem. Whether criticism is valid should depend entirely on how GitHub Actions actually works and how it compares to similar services.
There is a massive problem in open source where some people equate pointing out a problem with being too lazy to solve it — when in reality this just stifles the conversation. Especially when a prerequisite to any group project accomplishing anything is to first discuss the problem to be solved.
No that's actually a completely different issue. You're talking about volunteers working on side projects that are sometimes foundational to the way the internet works and then people feel entitled to tell them what to do without contributing.
Here we are talking about one of the worlds most valuable companies that gets all sorts of perks, benefits and preferential treatment from various entities and governments on the globe and somehow we have to be grateful when they deliver garbage while milking the business they bought.
No, that's actually the same issue. "Entitled to tell them what to do without contributing" is not a problem. Let them tell whoever what to do, the response is always the same: "patches welcome," or if that isn't even true (which it doesn't have to be), "feel free to fork."
don't confuse 'receiving something you did not pay for' with 'being allowed to feel entitled to anything' is all. 'open source' is just that, nothing more. if you want a service with your source, be prepared to sponsor it.
I still think people should want things and be vocal about what they want. This is the natural way for people to know what needs to be built. It is different from demanding something.
And besides that, a lot of people on here do pay for Github in the first place.
Well, actually, no, not everyone is free to use alternatives. Anyone using CI for "Trusted Publishing" of packages to PyPI or npm needs to use GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD. CircleCI and Travis CI are not supported. So many big open source projects for the two most popular languages in the world are now locked out of the alternatives you propose.
(I find it extremely sketchy from a competition law perspective that Microsoft, as the owner of npm, has implemented a policy banning npm publishers from publishing via competitors to GitHub Actions - a product that Microsoft also owns. But they have; that is the reality right now, whether it's legal or not.)
Trusted Publishing on PyPI supports Google Cloud and ActiveState as well. It’s not tied to GitHub or GitLab. To my recollection I looked at CircleCI support a while back, and ran into limitations on the claims they exposed.
(It can also be extended to arbitrary third party IdPs, although the benefit of that is dependent on usage. But if you have another CI/CD provider that you’d like to integrate into PyPI, you should definitely flag it on the issue tracker.)
I was never convinced that trusted publishing solves any security problem, other than letting pypi eventually solve the problem of banning russian/iranian/whatever people just by relying on github doing it for them.
> unless they put the money where their mouth is, it's just noise
I used to work for a Japanese company, and one of their core philosophies was “Don’t complain, unless you have a solution.” In my experience, this did not always have optimal outcomes: https://littlegreenviper.com/problems-and-solutions/
I don’t make the purchasing decision for my employer, but I certainly have to deal with their fallout, so I’ll keep complaining if that’s okay with you.
I've used CircleCI quite a bit in the past; it was pretty good. Feels tough for them to compete with GHA though when you're getting GHA credits for free with your code hosting.
I used Travis rather longer ago, it was not great. Circle was a massive step forward. I don't know if they have improved it since but it only felt useful for very simplistic workflows, as soon as you needed anything complex (including any software that didn't come out of the box) you were in a really awkward place.
CircleCI made great steps the last few years, f.e. to better support proper DRY working, supporting OPA policies-as-code, VSCode extensions with "dry-run" options.
> Anyone can complain as much as they want, but unless they put the money where their mouth is, it's just noise from lazy people.
Once I'm encharged of budge decisions of my company I'll make sure that none will go to any MS and Atlassian product. Until then I'll keep complaining.
buildkite is leaps and bounds above the others. especially if you need to really tailor your workloads to the change diff (say in a monorepo), the dynamic pipeline support is superb.
really surprised there are no others though. dagger.io was in the space but the level of complexity is an order of magnitude higher
What that type of section usually means is "there's someone from Microsoft that signed up for our service using his work account", sometimes it means "there's some tiny team within Microsoft that uses our product", but it very rarely (if ever) means "the entire company is completely reliant on our product".
Apple’s Mac security team in general kind of sucks at their job. They are ineffectual at stopping real issues and make the flow for most users more annoying for little benefit.
Nope, it is. This is a shallow question with no understanding behind why the additional folders were added, which was to bring a lot of functionality that used to litter your entire computer into a place where it is tied to the app that installed it. So the complaint is like looking at a trash can in the park and going “ew this garbage is ugly the park is going downhill” when the reality before that can existed was people threw the litter all over the park.
> When running a command tool in macOS, its Mach-O executable is launched by launchd, whose purpose is to run code.
That’s not what launchd’s main goal is and also not the path command line tools go through. They’re forked or spawned from your shell like any other UNIX system.
Sure, they could have taken a bit more, like proper AOT instead of it being a feature only available in third party commercial JDKs, or some low level niceties like C#.
I would look to the UCSD p-System as a precedent to the JVM. Both are byte-code interpreted VMs. Gosling used the p-system earlier in his career, prior to joining Sun.
If it points to mirror.ubuntu.com, it'll be mirroring at host end, instead of inside apt. But as apt does do resolution to a list, it'll be fetching from multiple places at once.
Yes, the () operator dereference function pointers automatically for you for convenience. There's also the surprise that you can infinitely dereference function pointers as they just yield you more function pointers.
One baffling thing I see people do with typedefing function pointers is insisting on adding in the pointer part in the typedef which just complicates and hides things.
If you want to typedef a function pointer, make a completely ordinary function declaration, then slap 'typedef' at the beginning, done.
This does require you to do "foo_func *f" instead of "foo_func f" when declaring variables, but that is just clearer imo.
typedef int foo_func(int); // nice
typedef int (*foo_func)(int); // why?
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