If your IP (and possible your browser) looks “suspicious” or has been used by other users before, you need to add additional information for registration on gitlab.com, which includes your mobile phone number and possibly credit card information. Since it is not possible to contribute or even report issues on open source projects without doing so, I do not think any open source project should use this service until they change that.
Screenshot: https://i.ibb.co/XsfcfHf/gitlab.png
I remember when gitlab.com was the most accessible alternative to GitHub out there, but it seems they’re only interested in internal enterprise usage now. Their main page was already completely unreadable to someone not versed in enterprise tech marketing lingo, and now this.
Thankfully Gitea and Forgejo have gotten better in the meantime, with Codeberg as a flagship instance of the latter.
On a tangent, why are all of these companies pushing AI programming? This shit isn’t nearly as functional as they make it seem and all the beginners who try it are constantly asking questions about why their generated code doesn’t work
We are in the hype cycle so everyone is going bananas and there’s money to be made prior to the trough of disillusionment.
Haha so true.
I tried to use chatgpt to convert a monstrosity of a SQL query to a sqlalchemy query and it failed horribly.
It’s their wet dream. Making software without programmers.
Execs have never cared about the technology or the engineering side of it. If you could make software by banging on a pot while dancing naked around the fire, they’d have been ok with that.
And now that AI has come along that’s basically what it looks like to them.
VC’s and companies like OpenAI have done a really good job of propagandizing AI (LLMs). People think it’s magical and the future, so there’s money in saying you have it.
Because it brings in mad VC funding
I’m hyped about AI assisted programming and even agent driven projects (writing their own code, submitting pull requests etc) but I also agree that it seems just too early to actually put money behind it.
Its just so marginal so far, the UI/HMI has too much friction still and the output without skilled programming assistance is too limited.
For my private repos, hosted on my home server, I moved from Gitlab to Forgejo (Git, artifacts and containers images) and Woodpecker for CI builds. Woodpecker is not as powerful and feature complete as Gitlab, but for simpler needs it gets the job done.