This is a good point, we should ask some average North Koreans directly, that way we get a better balance of viewpoints. Maybe we can catch some on a vacation abroad or something.

Why isn’t “it’s informed and you can just opt out” good enough for paid users? They could’ve developed a single system instead of two if that’s a sufficient standard of care for users’ data.

Opt out means “we will be doing this, without permission, unless you tell us not to” and opt in means “if you give us permission we will do this.” Codebases can contain important and sensitive information, and sending it off to some server to be shoved into an LLM is something that should be done with care. Getting affirmative consent is the bare minimum.

The right thing is to make it opt-in for everyone, simple as that. The entire controversy goes away immediately if they do. If they really believe it’s a good value proposition for their users, and want to avoid collecting data from people who didn’t actually want to give it, they should have faith that their users will agree and affirmatively check the box.

If free users are really such a drain on them, why have they been offering a free version for so long before it became a conduit to that sweet, sweet data? Because it isn’t a drain, it’s a win-win. They want people using their IDE, even for free, they don’t get money from it but they get market share, broad familiarity with their tool amongst software engineers, a larger user base that can support each other on third party sites and provide free advertising, and more.

The best, clearest code in the world will make it perfectly clear exactly what’s going on, but not why. “database.fetch(); // Fetch from the database” is a terrible comment, sure, but “// Resource loading is done lazily on first run, so we cannot depend on it being available right away” is something that can’t be conveyed through code alone.

They’re doing as much of a bad thing as they think they can get away with. I don’t feel a particular duty to carefully acknowledge that in some circumstances they feel obligated to do the right thing instead. If they don’t like the “misleading” aspects of that, they’re free to just do the right thing completely.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2025/09/30/detailed-data-sharing-for-better-ai/

I only use it when I’ve royally messed up and the commit I need to get back is no longer referenced anywhere. Accidentally deleted a branch, finished a merge or rebase before realizing I messed up, that kind of thing, just use the reflog to find it again, get a branch pointing to it, then try again.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what the worst case scenario is… like, is some company going to get rich off of their proprietary cp and sudo implementation that they forked off of an open one?