I’ve moved off GitHub. 👋

You can find me on Codeberg, but most of my code will be on a self-hosted Forgejo instance anyway, to keep it away from LLM creeps.

The short of it is I've had enough of GitHub’s overall enshittification, degradation of service,¹² deal-breaking bugs,³ security issues⁴⁵ and having to depend on corporations like Microsoft Microslop⁶⁷ who actively make software a liability.⁸⁹¹⁰ There were already many other reasons to move on: the Give Up GitHub initiative covers those at length.

The longer version is a bit of a rant.

I'm tired of the evident lack of care for consent,^11121314 copyright^151617181920 environmental harms^212223242526 and labour rights²⁷²⁸²⁹ that tech CEOs like Microslop's Satya Nadella exhibit when training, deploying and shoving their monstrous LLMs down our throats.³⁰³¹³²

They have helped unleash a flood of GenAI slop³³ that has been detrimental to the arts,³⁴ open-source,^353637383940 the open web,⁴¹ research,⁴²⁴³ our language,⁴⁴ our thoughts⁴⁵ and our already fragile sense of shared reality.⁴⁶⁴⁷

The tech is fundamentally unserious,⁴⁸⁴⁹ inaccurate,^50515253 insecure,⁵⁴⁵⁵⁵⁶ unpopular,^{57585960616263} unprofitable^6465666768 and economically ruinous.⁶⁹⁷⁰⁷¹ It is definitely neither intelligent⁷² nor sentient.⁷³⁷⁴ It is a con⁷⁵ and a cognitive trap.⁷⁶ It is causing shortages and massive price hikes in computer hardware⁷⁷⁷⁸⁷⁹ that may last a decade.

To its users it inflicts cognitive decline,^80818283 deskilling,⁸⁴⁸⁵⁸⁶ addiction,⁸⁷ psychosis⁸⁸⁸⁹ and self-harm.⁹⁰⁹¹⁹² It has brought stress,⁹³ burnout⁹⁴ and despair⁹⁵ to workers.

CEOs have wilfully ignored these harms and threatened their workforce to use-AI-or-else⁹⁶⁹⁷ for imaginary productivity increases,⁹⁸ then used AI as an excuse anyway to enact mass layoffs,^{99100101102103} sometimes backtracking¹⁰⁴¹⁰⁵ or rehiring¹⁰⁶ after facing backlash or realising a chatbot is not replacement for labour.

Above all, I am exhausted from hearing so-called "thought-leaders" and "disruptors" from Silicon-Valley and their useful idiots (tech bros, the managerial class, LinkedIn lunatics, misinformed media) bloviate^107108109 about a technology they deeply misunderstand¹¹⁰ and try to convince us it is inevitable. I'm sick of their rotten ideologies¹¹¹ and their dystopian visions of the future^112113114115 they want to force on us.

If this sentiment resonates with you and – in the context of GitHub – you would like to reclaim some of your digital sovereignty, then I’d encourage you to move off if you can. There are several alternatives:

• Codeberg, SaaS code forge, operated by a non-profit, funded through donations. It runs on Forgejo.
• Forgejo, self-hostable, open-source code forge software. Maintained by the Codeberg non-profit. It is a fork of Gitea.
• SourceHut, SaaS and self-hostable open-source code forge software. Explicitly no AI, tracking or ads.

I would actively discourage you from using Gitea¹¹⁶ or GitLab.¹¹⁷¹¹⁸

I will still engage with GitHub where absolutely necessary, like reporting bugs on projects still hosted on the platform. But I won’t be hosting my own code there anymore. My hope is the open-source community will move off over time. My hope is that you will play a small part in rejecting what the tech industry has become.

Beyond GitHub, my advice would be to seek open-source, decentralised, federated software (not platforms!) that do what you need, e.g Forgejo, Matrix, OpenCloud, Mastodon, etc. and support those you find really helpful. I'd also encourage you to help organisations who have a positive impact on the open web, like Wikipedia, through donations or contributions.

As for the scourge of GenAI itself, if you work with tech check out Open Slopware to avoid open-source software tainted by LLM slop. Otherwise, tune into folks like Karen Hao, Ed Zitron's newsletter and podcast, Adam Becker's book and podcast, and Brian Merchant's newsletter. They have helped me sift through the hype and bullshit, kept me sane and helped me educate myself on this topic. Hopefully they will help you, too. And if you have been asked to embrace AI, why not become actually informed on the subject by reading lots of books about it?

Good luck out there. ✌️

PS: The abundance of footnotes in this post reflects my exasperation at people who still portray this technology as transformational despite the equally abundant evidence to the contrary. You just have to look.

Footnotes

1. GitHub's Historic Uptime, damrnelson.github.io ↩

2. The Missing GitHub Status Page, mrshu.github.io ↩

3. "GitHub bug messed up customer code; COO plays down incident", The Stack. ↩

4. "Sensitive data published through GitHub can be accessed even after being deleted", TechSpot. ↩

5. "Critical GitHub Vulnerability Exposed Millions of Repositories", SecurityWeek. ↩

6. "'Microslop' trends on social media — backlash to Microsoft's on-going AI obsession continues", Windows Central. ↩

7. "Microsoft Bans the Word 'Microslop' on Copilot Discord, Gets So Humiliated That It Locks Down the Whole Server", Futurism. ↩

8. "GitHub says sorry and vows to do better as uptime slips and devs complain", The Register. ↩

9. "Microsoft admits Windows 11 update is nuking system drives, albeit there's a 'limited number of reports' of these disasters", TechRadar. ↩

10. "Windows 11 update KB5074109 is breaking systems — Microsoft says uninstall it ASAP. Here's how.", Windows Central. ↩

11. "AI Is Being Trained on Images of Real Kids Without Consent", Futurism. ↩

12. "Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user's public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option", ABC. ↩

13. "GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all", The Register. ↩

14. "'This could cost people their jobs': VS Code added Copilot as co-author without permission or notice", Windows Central. ↩

15. "‘No consent’: Australian authors ‘livid’ that Meta may have used their books to train AI", The Guardian. ↩

16. "Anthropic Knew the Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical Books, Secret Documents Reveal", Futurism. ↩

17. "OpenAI Says It’s Fine to Vacuum Up Everyone’s Content and Charge for It Without Paying Them", Futurism. ↩

18. "OpenAI admits it's impossible to train generative AI without copyrighted materials", Engadget. ↩

19. "Australian authors' works feature in Books3 dataset of pirated ebooks used to train generative AI", ABC. ↩

20. "AI can rewrite open source code—but can it rewrite the license, too?", Ars Technica. ↩

21. "ChatGPT Energy Consumption Visualized", Business Energy UK. ↩

22. "AI has an environmental problem. Here’s what the world can do about that", United Nations Environment Programme. ↩

23. "Elon Musk’s xAI accused of pollution over Memphis supercomputer", The Guardian. ↩

24. "Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact", MIT News. ↩

25. "Box Elder County data center’s projected daily heat equivalent to 23 atomic bombs", ABC4. ↩

26. "Generative AI exacerbates the climate crisis", Science.org. ↩

27. "The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence", Noéma. ↩

28. "Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic", TIME. ↩

29. "Behind the AI boom, an army of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’", The Washington Post. ↩

30. "Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats", The Register. ↩

31. "Microsoft touts new Copilot features in Excel, but says you shouldn’t use them if you want accurate results", ITPro. ↩

32. "Google's AI-enabled mouse pointer understands 'this' and 'that'", The Register. ↩

33. "Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella becomes AI influencer, asks us all to move beyond slop", The Register. ↩

34. "The AI-inflected crisis artists are facing, in 4 charts", Blood in the Machine. ↩

35. "The end of the curl bug-bounty", Daniel Stenberg at daniel.haxx.se. ↩

36. "Migrating from GitHub to Codeberg, ziglang.org. ↩

37. "Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face", Drew DeVault at drewdevault.com. ↩

38. "Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’", The Register. ↩

39. "Godot maintainers struggle with 'draining and demoralizing' AI slop submissions", The Register. ↩

40. "Contributions policy", tldraw at GitHub.com ↩

41. "Endgame for the Open Web", Anil Dash at anildash.com. ↩

42. "A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data", The Conversation. ↩

43. "ArXiv will ban researchers for a year if they submit papers with AI slop", TechSpot. ↩

44. "Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain", 404 Media. ↩

45. "A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts", The New Yorker. ↩

46. "ChatGPT now lets users create fake images of politicians. We stress-tested it", CBC. ↩

47. "The Generative AI Paradox: GenAI and the Erosion of Trust, the Corrosion of Information Verification, and the Demise of Truth", Arxiv.org. ↩

48. "Copilot is ‘for entertainment purposes only,’ according to Microsoft’s terms of use", Tech Crunch. ↩

49. "Over 150 Mathematicians Warn Governments Not to “Believe the Hype” About AI", Futurism. ↩

50. "OpenAI Admits That Its New Model Still Hallucinates More Than a Third of the Time:, Futurism. ↩

51. "Yet another experiment proves it's too damn simple to poison large language models", The Register. ↩

52. "Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog", Futurism. ↩

53. "Medical AI transcriber for Ontario doctors 'hallucinated,' generated errors: auditor general", CBC. ↩

54. "Claude Code, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot Agents Vulnerable to Prompt Injection via Comments", SecurityWeek. ↩

55. "Five Eyes spook shops warn rapid rollouts of agentic AI are too risky", The Register. ↩

56. "Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked", 404 Media. ↩

57. "Views of AI’s impact on society and human abilities", Pew Research Center. ↩

58. "AI Is One of the Least-Liked Things in America, According to New NBC Poll", CNet. ↩

59. "Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’", 404 Media. ↩

60. "Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area", Gallup. ↩

61. "Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt booed by graduates at mention of AI", BBC. ↩

62. "Ronny Chieng Address | Harvard Class Day 2026", Harvard University on Youtube. ↩

63. "Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks", 404 Media. ↩

64. "There Is No AI Revolution", Ed Zitron at www.wheresyoured.at. ↩

65. "The AI Industry Is Still Light-Years From Making a Profit, Experts Warn", Futurism. ↩

66. "GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40 billion on fire", The Lancet. ↩

67. "AI's Economics Don't Make Sense", Ed Zitron at www.wheresyoured.at. ↩

68. "Large Study Finds That Replacing Workers With AI Is Backfiring Badly", Futurism. ↩

69. "Beneath the AI Bubble, the Economy Looks Bleak", Futurism. ↩

70. "The AI bubble won’t survive this question | Ed Zitron", The Tech Report. ↩

71. "Anthopic, OpenAI Should Not Be Allowed to IPO, Says Ed Zitron", Bloomberg Podcast. ↩

72. "Large Language Models Will Never Be Intelligent, Expert Says", Futurism. ↩

73. "No, Today’s AI Isn’t Sentient. Here’s How We Know", Times. ↩

74. "How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time", MIT Technology Review. ↩

75. "The AI Con by Emily M Bender and Alex Hanna review – debunking myths of the AI revolution", The Guardian. ↩

76. "Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk", Baldur Bjarnason at www.baldurbjarnason.com. ↩

77. "AI data centers are swallowing the world's memory and storage supply, setting the stage for a pricing apocalypse that could last a decade", Tom's Hardware. ↩

78. "AI is gobbling up the world’s memory chips, sending smartphone prices to record highs, report says", CNN. ↩

79. "The AI RAM shortage is also driving up SSD prices", The Verge. ↩

80. "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task", Arxiv.org. ↩

81. "'Cognitive surrender' leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds", Ars Technica. ↩

82. "Experimental Evidence of the Effects of Large Language Models versus Web Search on Depth of Learning", The Wharton School Research Paper. ↩

83. "The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers", Microsoft. ↩

84. "How AI Impacts Skill Formation", Arxiv.org. ↩

85. "Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy: a multicentre, observational study", The Lancet. ↩

86. "AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance", arxiv.org. ↩

87. "The Dark Addiction Patterns of Current AI Chatbot Interfaces", ACM Digital Library. ↩

88. "We Investigated Al Psychosis. What We Found Will Shock You", A More Perfect Union at youtube.com. ↩

89. "The AI users falling into delusion | The Global Story", BBC News at youtube.com. ↩

90. "'Our Bond Is the Only Thing That's Real:' A New Lawsuit Alleges Google Gemini Drove a Man to Suicide", TIME. ↩

91. "AI chatbots often validate delusions and suicidal thoughts, study finds", Financial Times. ↩

92. "AI Chatbots and Psychological Harm: A Comprehensive Stanford Study", The Human Line Project. ↩

93. "AI is exhausting workers so much, researchers have dubbed the condition ‘AI brain fry’", CNN. ↩

94. "The first signs of burnout are coming from the people who embrace AI the most", TechCrunch. ↩

95. "AI Killed My Job: Tech workers", Blood in the Machine. ↩

96. "Canva to job candidates: Thou shalt use AI during interviews", The Register. ↩

97. "Microsoft pushes staff to use internal AI tools more, and may consider this in reviews. 'Using AI is no longer optional.'", Business Insider. ↩

98. "Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity", Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR). ↩

99. "Block lays off nearly half its staff because of AI. Its CEO said most companies will do the same", CNN. ↩

100. "PayPal to Cut 20% of Staff Amid Turnaround Push", Wall Street Journal. ↩

101. "Ticketmaster Cuts 350 Jobs, Shifts Focus To AI", Hoodline. ↩

102. "Cloudflare to fire 1,100 staff whose jobs just aren’t AI enough", The Register. ↩

103. "Amazon cuts more jobs months after mass layoffs", Business Insider. ↩

104. "Amid Backlash, Duolingo Backtracks on Plans for AI Pivot", PCMag. ↩

105. "Commonwealth Bank backtracks on AI job cuts, apologises for 'error' as call volumes rise", ABC. ↩

106. "A small number of Block employees say they were rehired after layoffs", Business Insider. ↩

107. "OpenAI Employees Say Firm’s Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims", Futurism. ↩

108. "Please Seek Help Immediately", Aftermath. ↩

109. "Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code", Futurism, ↩

110. "Why Marc Andreessen Is Facing Backlash Over an AI Prompt", Techloy. ↩

111. "The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares", Truthdig. ↩

112. "A new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry", The Conversation. ↩

113. "For tech CEOs, the dystopia is the point", Blood in the Machine. ↩

114. "Iran war heralds era of AI-powered bombing quicker than ‘speed of thought’", The Guardian. ↩

115. "Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’ amid UK contract fears", The Guardian. ↩

116. A for-profit company took control of the Gitea project without the community's consent. This is what prompted the community to create Forgejo. https://forgejo.org/2022-12-15-hello-forgejo/. ↩

117. "Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab: Vetting non-evil customers is 'time consuming, potentially distracting'", The Register. ↩

118. "GitLab promises a different kind of layoff as biz pivots toward AI", The Register. ↩