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.
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.
Because greedy investors are gullible and want to make money from the jobs they think AI will displace. They don’t know that this shit doesn’t work like they’ve been promised. The C-levels at Gitlab want their money (gotta love publicly traded companies), and nobody is listening to the devs who are shouting that AI is great at writing security vulnerabilities or just like, totally nonfunctioning code.
Because it ain’t here to generate all their code for them. It’s a glorified autocomplete and suggestion engine. When are people gonna get this? (not you, just in general)
I use CoPilot myself, but if you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing yourself, you and CoPilot will both quickly hit a dead end together. It doesn’t actually understand what you want the code to do. Only what is similar to what you have already written or prompted for, which may be some garbage picked up from a noob on the web somewhere. Books and research using your meatbrain are still very much needed.
Because it brings in mad VC funding
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.
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.