💪 Tough Guys Drew Chadwick DeVault / ddevault / SirCmpwn - Opinionated white-male-guilt-ridden software developer. Cancelled Hyprland and slandered it as "toxic" and transphobic. Hates X11 users and Hacker News. Lolicon.

Max Weber said:
Drew sneeds over Vim and NeoVim having AI-assisted commits in them: A eulogy for Vim (archive) and announces a fork of Vim 8, vim-classic.
Hacker News discussion with slapfights.
Lobsters discussion, unsurprisingly, much more positive.
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Is that his wrist with the hjkl tattoo?

66af7169.jpg
 
Max Weber said:
Drew sneeds over Vim and NeoVim having AI-assisted commits in them: A eulogy for Vim (archive) and announces a fork of Vim 8, vim-classic.
Hacker News discussion with slapfights.
Lobsters discussion, unsurprisingly, much more positive.
Click to expand...
This blogpost is so bad that if I knew Devault in real life I would be concerned for him. And if I didn't know about all the horrid stuff about him documented here.

I didn’t know Bram Moolenaar. We never met, nor exchanged correspondence. But, after I moved to the Netherlands, Bram’s home country, in a strange way I felt a little bit closer to him. He passed away a couple of years after I moved here, and his funeral was held not far from where I lived at the time. When that happened, I experienced an odd kind of mourning. He was still young, and he had affected my own life profoundly. He was a stranger, and I never got to thank him.
There's no point in trying to articulate how moronic this kind of blackpilling about the same economic system he has been okay with, and as a computer programmer, living off of for his whole adult life is. Reading his reasoning I wonder if Drew would have been against the development of the transistor? (Hey, I might have been. But in a cool aryan way and not in this embarrassingly shabbos way) I think we should be against allowing the continued development of Drew Devault, personally.
I won’t speculate on how he would have felt about generative AI, but I can say that GenAI is something I care about. It causes a lot of problems for a lot of people. It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands. And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies.

Meanwhile, this whole circus is enabling the rising tide of fascism around the world, not only by supercharging propaganda but also by directly financially supporting fascist policies and policymakers. All this to enrich the few, centralize power, reduce competition, and underwrite an enormous bubble that, once it bursts, will ruin the lives of millions of the world’s poor and marginalized classes.

I don’t think it’s cute that someone vibe coded “battleship” in VimScript. I think it’s more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don’t understand how awful all of this is. I don’t want to use software which has slop in it. I do what I can to avoid it, and sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software.

So this is how, a few years after Bram’s passing, I find myself in another unusual moment of mourning: mourning Vim itself. What an odd feeling.

I appreciate that on some level it's just the thoughts of every other soy golem articulated in black and white text and therefore not really anything new but this is just such a blast of goy energy I was taken aback upon reading it. These are the thoughts of the thoughtless.
 
Bagger 293 said:
This blogpost is so bad that if I knew Devault in real life I would be concerned for him. And if I didn't know about all the horrid stuff about him documented here.
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I'm not gonna read all that bullshit but I agree on principle. I don't want AI slop in something I use to edit system files running as root.
 
Redeemer said:
Is that his wrist with the hjkl tattoo?

View attachment 8759839
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True and Honest Vim users don't need cheatsheets.

His motivation for making the fork seems to be... a callout box in the release notes showing that Vim9 script can be used by Copilot to make plugins. Not a commit in the actual Vim source, or a sloppy PR that's been accepted. Just a reference to AI being used by a contributor on separate projects. EDIT: Actually those too, I didn't read the post properly.
The maturity of Vim9 script's modern constructs is now being leveraged by advanced AI development tools. Contributor Yegappan Lakshmanan recently demonstrated the efficacy of these new features through two projects generated using GitHub Copilot:
  • Battleship in Vim9: A complete implementation of the classic game, showcasing classes and type aliases. [GitHub]
  • Number Puzzle: A logic game demonstrating the efficiency of modern Vim9 for interactive plugins. [GitHub]
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But wait...
Contributor Yegappan Lakshmanan
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Hmmm....
"Lakshmanan" is a South Indian name derived from Sanskrit
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Maybe there's something to this Vim Classic idea after all...
 
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Slurred said:
His motivation for making the fork seems to be... a callout box in the release notes showing that Vim9 script can be used by Copilot to make plugins. Not a commit in the actual Vim source, or a sloppy PR that's been accepted. Just a reference to AI being used by a contributor on separate projects.
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Not quite:
I don’t want to use software which has slop in it. I do what I can to avoid it, and sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software.
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Those links go to submissions to to the Vim and Neovim githubs written (or apparently written) with some AI. People in the Vim repo seem to have the sensible stance that this potentially makes the codebase unstable.

And I don't know who's going to break it to these people that "AI-slop" has its origins in the vile antisemitic dogwhistle "goy-slop"
 
His other blogpost: https://drewdevault.com/2026/03/28/2026-03-28-rsync-without-rsync.html

So apparently rsync is slop now. When I heard, I wanted to drop a quick note on my blog to give an alternative: tar. It doesn’t do everything that rsync does, in particular identifying and skipping up-to-date files, but tar + ssh can definitely accomodate the use case of “transmit all of these files over an SSH connection to another host”.
Consider the following:
Code: 
tar -cz public | ssh example.org tar -C /var/www -xz
This will transfer the contents of ./public/ to example.org:/var/www/public/, preserving file ownership and permissions and so on, with gzip compression. This is roughly the equivalent of:
Code: 
rsync -a public example.org:/var/www/
Here’s the same thing with a lightweight progress display thanks to pv:
Code: 
tar -cz public | pv | ssh example.org tar -C /var/www -xz
I know tar is infamously difficult to remember how to use. Honestly, I kind of feel that way about rsync, too. But, here’s a refresher on the most important options for this use-case. To use tar, pick one of the following modes with the command line flags:
  • -c: create an archive
  • -x: extract an archive
Use -f <filename> to read from or write to a file. Without this option, tar uses stdin and stdout, which is what the pipelines above rely on. Use -C <path> to change directories before archiving or extracting files. Use -z to compress or decompress the tarball with gzip. That’s basically everything you need to know about tar to use it for this purpose (and for most purposes, really).
With rsync, to control where the files end up you have to memorize some rules about things like whether or not each path has a trailing slash. With tar, the rules are, in my opinion, a bit easier to reason about. The paths which appear on the command line of tar -c are the paths that tar -x will open to create those files. So if you run this:
Code: 
tar -c public/index.html public/index.css
You get a tarball which has public/index.html and public/index.css in it.
When tar -x opens this tarball, it will call fopen("public/index.html", "w"). So, whatever tar’s working directory is, it will extract this file into ./public/index.html. You can change the working directory before tar does this, on either end, by passing tar -C <path>.
Of course, you could just use scp, but this fits into my brain better.
I hope that’s useful to you!
Update: As a fun little challenge I wrapped up this concept in a small program that makes it easier to use:
https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/xtar
Example:
Code: 
xtar -R /var/www me@example.org public/*

When you're telling people not to use vim and rsync, how much further can you go before you realise you're fighting a losing battle?
 
Bloom Worm Cross Field said:
When you're telling people not to use vim and rsync, how much further can you go before you realise you're fighting a losing battle?
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Not only that, at least in the case of Vim the argument was that a jeet over-zealously applied AI to make random commits that broke things and had to be reverted. Here he's not even making any argument on technical grounds and advocating for a clearly inferior solution with a learning curve (rsync -avP <src> <dst> is pretty straightforward, piping tar over ssh much less so).

I guess "X is slop" is Drew's new "X is made by Nazi fascists". Of course to Drew an autistic Polish high school student is literally Hitler, so you can guess what he considers "slop".
 
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/b...e/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst
This document provides guidance for AI tools and developers using AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel.
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Very reasonable, common-sense guidance.
Code: 
.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0

.. _coding_assistants:

AI Coding Assistants
++++++++++++++++++++

This document provides guidance for AI tools and developers using AI
assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel.

AI tools helping with Linux kernel development should follow the standard
kernel development process:

* Documentation/process/development-process.rst
* Documentation/process/coding-style.rst
* Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst

Licensing and Legal Requirements
================================

All contributions must comply with the kernel's licensing requirements:

* All code must be compatible with GPL-2.0-only
* Use appropriate SPDX license identifiers
* See Documentation/process/license-rules.rst for details

Signed-off-by and Developer Certificate of Origin
=================================================

AI agents MUST NOT add Signed-off-by tags. Only humans can legally
certify the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). The human submitter
is responsible for:

* Reviewing all AI-generated code
* Ensuring compliance with licensing requirements
* Adding their own Signed-off-by tag to certify the DCO
* Taking full responsibility for the contribution

Attribution
===========

When AI tools contribute to kernel development, proper attribution
helps track the evolving role of AI in the development process.
Contributions should include an Assisted-by tag in the following format::

  Assisted-by: AGENT_NAME:MODEL_VERSION [TOOL1] [TOOL2]

Where:

* ``AGENT_NAME`` is the name of the AI tool or framework
* ``MODEL_VERSION`` is the specific model version used
* ``[TOOL1] [TOOL2]`` are optional specialized analysis tools used
  (e.g., coccinelle, sparse, smatch, clang-tidy)

Basic development tools (git, gcc, make, editors) should not be listed.

Example::

  Assisted-by: Claude:claude-3-opus coccinelle sparse

Waiting for Drew to announce linux-classic...
 

Building and scaling Hare's community governance​


March 26, 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz5sbsQpxbo
Turnout:
audience.jpg

01:54 - "We are 12 maintainers, and the last time I counted there was about 140 contributors in total."
05:58 - "We try to use the tools that we have as little as possible, and rely instead on good cultures and good shared values to keep our community running smoothly."
06:53 - "We get an average of 1 RequestForComment per month maybe, most of the software doesn't require one, conduct issues are rare, I have a list of case studies which actually exhaustively covers all of the times the code of conduct has been enforced in this talk, and mostly we operate on a priniciple of informal consensus building."
11:56 - "And the other thing we're noticing is that at this point I'm sure you all remember, the writing is already on the wall that radicalization is on the rise and communities very much like ours are starting to suffer from problems that come with that."
16:39 - "So as you might be aware, we are existing in a kind of moment in society, and we wanted to both introduce social spaces but also have expectations about what kind of conduct was appropriate in those social spaces, keeping it professional neatly circumvents that problem so we kind of had to address it when we dropped that."
17:01 - "And we also wanted to preemptively deal with the fact that a lot of people in our community were the kind of people who are being the target of harassement, and violence, and the rising tide of the far right, and radicalization. We have people who are effected by that and it's important to protect them."
17:49 - "We carve out our answer to the paradox of tolerance, which is we want to welcome everybody willing to welcome everybody, right?"
18:12 - "They often forget to mention that they want to invite people to be leaders, they want to be led by all of these people that we are calling out as welcome. Women, people of color, transgender people, sexual orientations."
18:38 - "One important thing we changed about the contributor covenant was we all agreed to apply the code of conduct outside of the community."
19:03 - "Well, no not really actually, because if somebody is a jerk who's on their best behavior within our walls but then goes out on their twitter and starts posting fascist propaganda, that's not somebody we want to work with because that effects the people we have in our community in a negative way."
19:44 - The Case Studies
19:56 - "Joe Famous is somebody that if I told you his real name you all would recognize him. He sent us an email saying that he is really excited to work with the project and we all know everything that Joe Famous has done some of his work are the shoulders we stand upon and that's exciting to see. But also, he's taken a hard right turn recently and his blog is covered in misogyny, sexism, queerphobia, racism, all kinds of bad stuff."
20:31 - "We collectively agreed to proactively ban him from the project and we replied to his kind email by saying as politely as possible: no thanks."
20:58 - "Why? This sucks so much. Now, that's not actually against the rules to say that. But it illustrates a pattern of behavior with John Doe where he would set a tone in his conversations that we didn't really appreciate."
21:52 - "This is a bit of a loss for us because John has contributed some good stuff to the project but at the same time the rhetoric and tone of the community improves in his absence which we appreciate and I think that leads in the long term to more people feeling safe and welcome in the community and all of their contributions presumably outweight John's contributions in the end."
22:13 - "Jane has this exciting project she's working on that controls sex toys using hare."
25:04 - Questions
27:22 - "We're likely to adopt a policy that refuses LLM-assisted contributions in the near-future."
 
Drew shat out a wall of text "addressing" the allegations in DeVault Report among other things. The only thing he has addressed is the 14yo IUD comment claiming he wrote it when he was a dumb teen. The rest is just seethe.
 
Drew DeVault said:
The abuse crescendoed in October of 2024, when I was involved in editing The Stallman Report.
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Oh hey, he no longer denies it.
Drew DeVault said:
I don’t feel that it’s necessary to rebuke most of the report. But, there is a grain of truth in the report, the grain of truth that led me to retract my shitty Reddit comments and reflect on myself, and that grain of truth is this: in early adulthood, I was a huge asshole.
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Was?
Drew DeVault said:
I’m often still a firebrand, but I’ve chosen much better hills to die on. My passion is invested in making a more just world, building safe and healthy communities, elevating my peers, and calling for justice and a just society. I have taken the lessons I have learned and tried to share them with other people, and to stand up for what I can now say I know is right, both online and in real life. Through a process of learning, reflection, and humility, I acknowledge that I have done a lot harm in my youth. To repair this harm, I have committed myself to doing more than enough good now to make sure that the world is a better place when all is said and done. That’s what justice means to me when I turn my principles inwards and hold myself accountable.
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Ah. So he's still a cunt, but he's a cunt on the right side of history now.
Drew DeVault said:
No one that I’m aware of has ever attempted a rebuttal of the Stallman Report in good faith.
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:story:
 
306h4Ge5eJUJ said:
Oh hey, he no longer denies it.
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He still denies that his actions (in particular starting a cancel campaign against Stallman for no good reason) had anything to do with "the abuse" that "crescendoed" in October 2024. Literally nobody would have found out he likes little kids if he hadn't sperged out about Stallman.
in good faith.
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I suspect this phrase is doing a lot of work for Drew. He can just respond to any rebuttal he doesn't like with "b-b-but you didn't make it in good faith!" So who fucking cares about good faith? Why don't you focus on whether or not somebody is correct than if they're a hecking evil literal Nazi?

It's also funny when the person with the least good faith here is the lolicon pedophile who authored the Stallman Report in the first place.
 
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