Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts

  • 📧 If you are an employee of a T1 ISP, US datacenter, or related company please get in touch at josh@kiwifarms.net. I have some questions.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
1780607674191.png
King Terry makes an appearance!

1780608066115.png
Is it acceptable to notice patterns now? Nobody told me, I thought this was inherently racist.

1780608157867.png
No comment.

1780608389555.png
Freudian.

The guy who merged the commits with Claude made a blog post about it too: https://medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0 (archive)
 
The guy who merged the commits with Claude made a blog post about it too: https://medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0 (archive)
So my gut feeling that the retarded commercialization of "SeCUrItY", that also gave us RIIR, was the actual root source seems to be validated.
He got overwhelmed by scary security reports and CVEs and wasn't able to vet all the clever "secure" "defense in depth" stuff he flogged claude to implement properly, that he felt pressured to implement.
 
So my gut feeling that the retarded commercialization of "SeCUrItY", that also gave us RIIR, was the actual root source seems to be validated.
Its all retarded all the way down and a direct consequence of the liminal culture we live in, both inside and out of software development. Everything has to be BLAZING FAST, and BREAK THINGS because your average guy has been mentally plundered into this state of mind where he has to constantly create and consume the $HOT_NEW_THING and be outraged about the $NEW_DRAMA and campaign the $NEW_CAUSE et cetera.

"Security" is the latest thing to be co-opted by jeets, trannies and AI cultists because of its clout-giving potential, ubiquity, and how easy it is to bully people to do malign things, such as RIIR and accept AI slop PRs, in the name of muh seekurity. They all have clout to gain from finding security issues (or rather getting Claude to find them), they exist everywhere as an inherent part of all code and thus anything can be raped with PRs so they can say "saaaaaaaaaaaaaaar I contribute to open soors saaaaaaaaaaaaaaar", or to indulge their consent accident fantasies of forcing people to implement pointless shit. It hurts my fucking teeth how common cultspeak has become. "Build", "ship", "agent" and so on. If I see any of these words in an AI-adjacent context, I immediately assume the writer is brown, and if not brow, then homosexual.

The guy who merged the commits with Claude made a blog post about it too: https://medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0 (archive)
Case in point:
Like many developers of open source packages I’ve been hit by a flood of security reports lately in my role as the rsync maintainer. Many of those reports are AI generated (not all though, there are some notable ones with very careful and high quality manual analysis).
Secuity is just a low hanging fruit for commiepedotroonjeets to reach for because anyone can run any code through Claude and go "find me vulns and make no mistakes saar!!!!". I legitimately think that people should employ an ATS-style syntax checker that automatically closes any security report that inludes common AI vernacular. if it is so important saar, then you can type it out by hand.
 
Except if AI was involved in any way, trivial or not, then it becomes an unforgivable error of biblical proportions.
I actually agree with the idea that AI should not have anything to do with core utilities like rsync that fuck around with filesystems. That can't be vibe coded.

But the absolute screaming insanity about AI being used at all, ever, is pathetic.
I legitimately think that people should employ an ATS-style syntax checker that automatically closes any security report that inludes common AI vernacular. if it is so important saar, then you can type it out by hand
This is an absolutely valid use of AI. Since skiddies are going to be using AI to attack it, you might as well use AI to find what they'll find, and fix it before they do.
 
I actually agree with the idea that AI should not have anything to do with core utilities like rsync that fuck around with filesystems. That can't be vibe coded.

But the absolute screaming insanity about AI being used at all, ever, is pathetic.
I looked briefly at the commits, and Claude's work seems just fine.
I maintain that the root issue is the security industrial complex flooding tridge with scary bug reports (sorry, SECURITY ISSUES), leading to him flogging Claude to implement a bunch of hardening, some of which broke functionality that people relied on (which could've been classified as a "security" issue).
 
Secuity is just a low hanging fruit for commiepedotroonjeets to reach for because anyone can run any code through Claude and go "find me vulns and make no mistakes saar!!!!". I legitimately think that people should employ an ATS-style syntax checker that automatically closes any security report that inludes common AI vernacular. if it is so important saar, then you can type it out by hand.
Just use mailing list instead of github PR's as brownoids are way to stupid to figure it out
 
I want your guys' opinion on something. The Guix mailing list has been conducting a GCD (Guix Consensus Document) debate as of late regarding the use of AI/LLMs in Guix System. Its a pretty even split between people wanting to either outright ban AI contribs, minimize them to only allow code reviews & AI assistance, or hold people that use AI at a higher degree of responsibility for code quality. All three seem sane in my eyes, but one thing that doesn't is this obsession with ecology and the carbon footprint impact of AI. I find it absurd that this gets brought up constantly and it honestly feels very subversive in the sense that it throws a wrench in normal discussion for the purpose of distraction or conversational hijacking. Sure, data centers are messing with a lot of nature and a lot of people, but if anyone really cared about ecology they'd be actively pressuring every nuclear power to dump their entire payload on India. Am I in the wrong thinking of the ecology angle as a red herring?
 
I want your guys' opinion on something. The Guix mailing list has been conducting a GCD (Guix Consensus Document) debate as of late regarding the use of AI/LLMs in Guix System. Its a pretty even split between people wanting to either outright ban AI contribs, minimize them to only allow code reviews & AI assistance, or hold people that use AI at a higher degree of responsibility for code quality. All three seem sane in my eyes, but one thing that doesn't is this obsession with ecology and the carbon footprint impact of AI. I find it absurd that this gets brought up constantly and it honestly feels very subversive in the sense that it throws a wrench in normal discussion for the purpose of distraction or conversational hijacking. Sure, data centers are messing with a lot of nature and a lot of people, but if anyone really cared about ecology they'd be actively pressuring every nuclear power to dump their entire payload on India. Am I in the wrong thinking of the ecology angle as a red herring?
Yeah, it's the new fashionable outrage topic.

Pseuds want to be part of the technical discussion, but they don't actually understand most of it. So instead they steer the conversation towards fuzzy feelings based shit. Like bikeshedding where you bring your own shed.
 
I want your guys' opinion on something. The Guix mailing list has been conducting a GCD (Guix Consensus Document) debate as of late regarding the use of AI/LLMs in Guix System. Its a pretty even split between people wanting to either outright ban AI contribs, minimize them to only allow code reviews & AI assistance, or hold people that use AI at a higher degree of responsibility for code quality. All three seem sane in my eyes, but one thing that doesn't is this obsession with ecology and the carbon footprint impact of AI. I find it absurd that this gets brought up constantly and it honestly feels very subversive in the sense that it throws a wrench in normal discussion for the purpose of distraction or conversational hijacking. Sure, data centers are messing with a lot of nature and a lot of people, but if anyone really cared about ecology they'd be actively pressuring every nuclear power to dump their entire payload on India. Am I in the wrong thinking of the ecology angle as a red herring?
As said above, it seems like a different manifestation of the same outrage manufacturing that led to the CoCpocalypse - retards wanting to "be contributors" while having absolutely zero of value to offer. Same desire for control over governance structures that led to the Contributor Covenant being incessantly pushed, only using a different bludgeon this time. Same shit different ass
 
Last edited:
I want your guys' opinion on something. The Guix mailing list has been conducting a GCD (Guix Consensus Document) debate as of late regarding the use of AI/LLMs in Guix System. Its a pretty even split between people wanting to either outright ban AI contribs, minimize them to only allow code reviews & AI assistance, or hold people that use AI at a higher degree of responsibility for code quality. All three seem sane in my eyes, but one thing that doesn't is this obsession with ecology and the carbon footprint impact of AI. I find it absurd that this gets brought up constantly and it honestly feels very subversive in the sense that it throws a wrench in normal discussion for the purpose of distraction or conversational hijacking. Sure, data centers are messing with a lot of nature and a lot of people, but if anyone really cared about ecology they'd be actively pressuring every nuclear power to dump their entire payload on India. Am I in the wrong thinking of the ecology angle as a red herring?
The slice of inference compute/data center capacity spent on open source coding is negligible.

Data centers are ~1% of electricity usage, ~5% of data center usage is LLMs, and like 60% of LLM usage is "my boyfriend simulator", coding is rather low comparatively, and quasi-professional open source contributions from that (i. e. not "write my genius app" from randos) is even lower.
 
The problem with AI and coding is that from all I have seen (both small and frontier models) is that the code quality is really hit and miss the bigger you stake out the scope for the LLM. Sometimes it's passable, sometimes it just works but you have no idea how and sometimes it's just broken in various obvious and non obvious ways. This cannot lead to quality code by itself, it's up to the person using the AI to understand the AI code and fix things up, even though using AI for coding is most efficient if you severely limit the scope and use the AI as an assistant who e.g. tells you if there's a library function for a thing or gives you advice on code you've written, or writes you functions that do very specific things you then can easily vet (the latter can be a real time-saver).

The problem I see is that people are lazy and addicted to little stars on github and just let an LLM iterate over code until it works without having any idea how it works or if it actually is really working as intended. That is dangerous and also easily can lead to a codebase that's completely unmaintainable.

But I don't see people using these tools responsibly and any rules projects might make against AI use are going to fail because people do not act in good conscience. This is just gonna get worse and worse until AI gets smart enough to write good code.
 
This is just gonna get worse and worse until AI gets smart enough to write good code.
That's a big "if" broski. AI is incredibly useful IN CONTEXT, like you said, as an assistant and rubber ducky, but not as just a code printer. This retarded cat and mouse game of finding bugs with AI then patching them with AI causing more bugs that you detect with other AI to then patch with AI ad nauseam is a blight on all of Free Software, especially due to the brown and clout-addicted that push this kinda shit. Or the MORE = BETTER angle, good God, everyone is just completely addled with featuritis and is incapable of producing finished software nowadays because hurr durr muh JeetHub contribution chart go brrrrr. Its so tiresome man. As useful as AI is, I can't help but resent how much power it gives utter fucking lobotomites to flood the Internet with complete dogshit.
 
The novel utility of LLMs is that they bring natural language processing from an 80% solution to a 99% solution. It's extremely inefficient, a bit like if Knuth back in the 60s just threw up his hands and said "well any context-free grammar can be parsed with enough backtracking, CPU time is cheap, developer time is expensive", but it more or less works, with the caveat that the output is unfortunately also usually natural language and there is no guarantee when you will or won't hit the 1% where it doesn't work.

As a compression technique, it's way too lossy (and inefficient) to be particularly useful for that purpose, unless you consider the lossiness to be a feature since it matches the retardation of copyright with its own retardation of "hurr I added a green tint to the simpsons so it's not plagiarism" or "downscaling to 240p is fair use".

So for something like summarizing documentation, it's... okay, I guess. You have to bear in mind that it still adds that 1% error, though, and if that's not acceptable you'll have to verify it yourself anyway. For "generating", like with all lossy compression, it really depends on how many bits it spent on the particular pattern you're looking to plagiarize.

In short, it may be another tool in the toolbox for some use cases. If that were all, I'd shrug and say "maybe I'll play around with it later, I've got work to do right now and other tools to learn / build", but unfortunately the general public is involved, and so are megacorporations. The former is stupid and the latter is, shall we say, less than selfless, and not particularly concerned for either me or the general public. If I see an issue filed and it's just "I got this error message, here's what $LLM says" and the remaining 97% of the issue is just a poor summary of what I already know, that shows that the submitter either does not value my time or legitimately believes that he is helping. The former is annoying, the latter is incorrect, neither are helpful. If you wish to ask the computer madness machine what steps you should take to debug, go for it, but what I actually need to see is the data you collected. Do not hide it in a sea of generated sludge.

Unfortunately issues are not the only area where the general public interacts with people trying to actually get work done. This used to be the realm of newbies and amateurs, people who could be mentored into greater competence. But people who show up using LLMs for contributions are not only seldom competent, they seldom even wish to become competent; they have been deluded into believing that competence is not necessary. And the portion of the general public willing to believe corporate advertising and be a nuisance to stroke their ego is far larger than the portion actually interested in learning.

And social interactions have always been the bane of free software. Which means you can't even politely tell them to leave unless the hivemind all agrees.

In Guix specifically, copyright issues have to be a factor, and there's just no sane way of deciding that. On one extreme the software could become nonfree, and on the other extreme the license could become meaningless. It's impossible to say which extreme, or both, will be taken because copyright has always been made-up judicial bullshit with no basis in reality.

tl;dr: I am inclined to say "no LLMs anywhere" solely out of spite. If they end up being useful, then people who actually understand the code will be able to make contributions indistinguishable from those not using them anyway. It filters out the timewasters and provides plausible deniability for copyright issues.
 
if anyone really cared about ecology
There's your problem, no-one screeching about carbon emissions actually cares about the environment. I doubt any "anti-AI" people actually care about carbon emisions either, these sorts of people start with their conclusion and work backwards, scrambling to fing anything that they can use to support their argument. This is why there can never be any discussion with them about this (or the CoCs, etc), they have already decided that they are right about everything so how could they possibly be wrong?
 
The only use case for LLMs (that isn't just reinventing intellisense) is maybe tangentially related to programming, but more for research.

"Thing X, find me the sources talking about it, and pages". As far as I know, the AIs still suck at this task, which is genuinely the only thing, I could use them for. I still wouldn't.

I believe the whole AI family of technologies is demonic in nature, and I wouldn't use it on religious basis alone. I do sometimes use the environment, and slave labour, that was used to make them, in my arguments against AI. But I do agree, that it is more of a corroborating evidence, than the prime reason, for my beliefs.

Ceterum autem, censeo Redmondum esse delendam.
 
tl;dr: I am inclined to say "no LLMs anywhere" solely out of spite. If they end up being useful, then people who actually understand the code will be able to make contributions indistinguishable from those not using them anyway. It filters out the timewasters and provides plausible deniability for copyright issues.
As a heavy coding agent user, I'd say this is a pretty reasonable stance. It's all well and good to vibe-code your own personal stuff for your own personal use, but if you want to contribute to someone else's project, reading and understanding the code you're submitting is bare minimum courtesy, and you can at least try to signal that you did so by e.g. removing excessive LLM comments and making the commit(s) yourself. Coding agents should help us write better code, and people should take responsibility for the shortcomings of the code they prompt.

The subspecies of LLM advocates with leftist brainworms like to talk about how egalitarian the technology is and how it makes all kinds of knowledge work more accessible, but I think the opposite is true. LLMs are an amplifier that make good developers better and bad developers worse.
 
People who worship capitalism love AI because it makes everything so much more efficient. They don't realize nor care that for people who actually care about software engineering, using AI - at all, just feels wrong and bad. Sadly that is what many have to do nowadays anyways, at least in their professional career, because the pace is just so much faster and along that, customer expectations have changed radically.

Yeah, "b-but AI is incredibly good at this and that" - yes, BUT I still fucking hate using it. Thank fuck I don't have to touch AI's when working on my hobby projects, relying on claude eats my brain alive temporarily it feels.
 
Back
Top Bottom