Iām not questioning the benefits of version control, for the right audience - but the average user, working alone, isnāt that audience. Version control still requires manually checking items in to the repo, and the process of restoring an individual lost file from the version control system isnāt exactly trivial for somebody that doesnāt live in Git.
Given the existence of tools like Arq that will allow somebody to do automated, differential backups on an hourly basis, thereās no need for the average person to go into the weeds figuring out Github and the associated software.
I would STRONGLY urge you NOT to use GitHub. Even PRIVATE repos are scraped to use in training Microsoftās AI models and they are notorious for deciding that code and documentation are their property even when you wrote it.
Microsoft does not scrape or train on private repos. They do train on public repos.
What data has GitHub Copilot been trained on?
GitHub Copilot is powered by generative AI models developed by GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft. It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub.
If your GitHub account has private repositories, you control the access to that information. GitHub personnel does not access private repository information without your consent except as provided in this Privacy Statement and for:
security purposes
automated scanning or manual review for known vulnerabilities, active malware, or other content known to violate our Terms of Service
to assist the repository owner with a support matter
to maintain the integrity of the Services, or
to comply with our legal obligations if we have reason to believe the contents are in violation of the law.
According to folks who have private repos with very custom names of variables etc. the only way that Copilot can have suggested the code it did was if it had seen and trained on their personal stuff. Iāll try to dig out the blogs where several people described what happened with a timeline. It was a while ago. It wouldnāt surprise me that the backlash forced Microsoft to change the terms of service. I also would not trust that Microsoft actually complies with what they say they do. Too many years of history of the company as a whole lying to users and developers.
Microsoft does not properly credit or release code in compliance with copyleft licenses.
I think Iāve seen some of the posts are you talking about. Some of them were from formerly public repos that ended up in The Stack dataset. Others, code that couldāve plausibly been generated without knowledge. I understand wanting to be cautious and self-host some repos myself, but thereās so much security-critical code in Github that we wouldāve been rocked by scandalous leaks many times by now if they were expressable by CoPilot. A minority of concerns were from LLM hallucinations self-reporting that they were trained on private data.
Abuse of copyleft is definitely an issue. Microsoft arenāt good guys, in general.
Just a side-note, security-by-obscurity is not security.
I canāt comment on whether Microsoft improperly/illegally trained on private github repos, but nonetheless having security code ending up in AI training data doesnāt, by itself, make anything more or less secure.
Iāve never had a house burn down in 34 years. I still have insurance.
Yes, there are a lot of threads about iCloud problems. You only hear the bad stories. Honestly, I had my own bad story. It lasted 843 days. But before and since that period I have had zero persistent issues. So subtract one from that thread count. Also subtract all those who just stopped using iCloud because they didnāt trust it. They have no idea whether their issue was resolved.
iCloud isnāt terrible because you read about other peopleās problems. Itās terrible if you have problems.
We all know Appleās white Lightning cables are terrible, right? Not for me. Iāve broken exactly one in 21 years by making a single dumb mistake. I still buy white Apple cables when I need more ā people borrow (and possibly break) them, I want longer ones, Iām creating a travel kit, etc.
WHAT?!?!?! How is that even possible? Did you encase them in a type of shellac and leave them in an underground bunker!?!?
I do think their cables are better now, but I really thought of those as an embarrassment to Apple. All their other hardware was rock solid but those cablesā¦
Maybe we should all learn from you on cable maintenance.
I also donāt see the point of MagSafe (as in the laptop version). I meanā¦ itās slightly easier to plug and unplug, but the whole āwhat if your kid trips over the cable?ā thing is foreign to me. I was brought up not to allow trip hazards. I was also brought up not to put a glass of water near the edge of a bench/table. āBut what if you have to?ā You donāt. You never have to.
So for the cables, treat them as what they are, not what you want them to be. Always coil them to store, and put them in something small, rather than just jamming it in the bottom of a bag. Never strain them at the ends, neither at right angles due to distance nor torsionally due toā¦ wellā¦ laziness.
Iām not lying when I say one, ever, that I have broken. I can tell you which hotel I did it in ā Sky City, Auckland, where they inexplicably put the power sockets on the floor, under the bed. Imagine a 30mm block on the floor, on top of which a classic white (iPhone) power brick, and a white USB-A plug poking out the top. There was around 30mm of clearance for the cable to bend. Just enough. Except not when you sit/lie on the bed!
Thatās it. From my first iPod in 2004 through to my current devices, not a single cable broken through wear and tear.
And iCloud is 100% free of persistent sync issues ā since macOS 12.3 (and prior to macOS 11), and for all time on iOS and iPadOS.
I believe the issue is now user-related. Since the last update, I havenāt experienced any problems and have been using the app daily on all my devices. However, itās essential to ensure that all devices are updated to the latest version. Ulysses specifically mentioned this bug in their update description.
Iām glad you have not run into syncing issues. I wish that were the case for me. As Iāve stated several times, I like Ulysses, and the developers are very responsive. But, as I wrote in my original post, I am fully up to date (I always am, for that matter):
Iām more than willing to take the blame for many things, but in this case, I can say with confidenceāitās not me. The issue lies with how Ulysses is (or isnāt) syncing with iCloud. My hardware is current, my operating systems and apps are fully up to date, and I keep a minimal set of installed applications. I canāt imagine what else could be causing the problem on my end. And if I were the only one experiencing it, I might assume it was something on my side. But as Iāve already noted, others have encountered the same issue.
At this point, itās water under the bridge. Iāve moved on to Scrivener, especially for the book project. Iām even beginning to get a handle on the compile feature.
Iāve had those cables fray if they never even leave my bedside table. I think the plastic they used was simply corrosive and reacted poorly to different environments, humidity levels, etc, let alone the care of them. My wife has a cable that has never left her bedside and it looks like a dog chewed it. Itās not stressed.
Maybe itās climate-related then. That simply doesnāt happen to me. The worst Iāve seen a discolouration which I put down to storing with darker items, like a battery pack.
Iāve had some of them go bad, and Iāve had some last quite a while. The thing that strikes me though (at least about Appleās older cables) is that other companies made better ones. Much better ones. And they made them for massively less money.
I get that Apple is expensive. But when I can buy a cable for $10 thatās significantly more durable than a $30 Apple cable, something is out of kilter.
