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I think the idea of having a bot that does this is interesting, and worthy of discussion, with interesting arguments on both sides. But what’s really incredibl

I think the idea of having a bot that does this is interesting, and worthy of discussion, with interesting arguments on both sides. But what’s really incredible here is how poorly this bot was coded. I cannot imagine writing something this terribly implemented and obviously poorly tested and setting it loose via automated bot upon the world.

wolverine876 5y ago
What makes you say it is poorly coded and implemented?
- mplanchard 5y ago
  If you look at the PR, it’s changing words like “here” to “theyre” and “help” to “theylp.” It’s basically just a simple find and replace with no concern for whitespace or whether any of the generated content makes up actual words.
  - bloak 5y ago
    The diff is moderately entertaining. I thought it might be an April Fool's. many -> persony hero -> theyro che non sono [Italian] -> che non childo
- golem14 5y ago
  Did you look at the actual commit ? https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/pull/6801/commits/5257301642c173e2dc4f034f8c0460ce7ea99de6 https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/pu...
  - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    Lol. It's literally `find . -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i -e s/her/them/g -e s/him/them/g ... && git commit -a`. This is a bash one liner. Has to be April Fool's.
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Minor49er 5y ago
This is nothing new. Most spam bots in the past have been poorly implemented
xigoi 5y ago
Not to mention that automatically correcting gendered words is an AI-complete problem, since you need human context to tell which words are gendered correctly.
- lodi 5y ago
  And furthermore, human context is necessary but not sufficient: (nsfw) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT8-5KBInls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT8-5KBInls
kazinator 5y ago
I think the situation of developers being harassed by bot-generated pull requests is deplorable. At the same time, they brought it on themselves for using Github, so serves them right.

wolverine876 5y ago

What makes you say it is poorly coded and implemented?

mplanchard 5y ago
If you look at the PR, it’s changing words like “here” to “theyre” and “help” to “theylp.” It’s basically just a simple find and replace with no concern for whitespace or whether any of the generated content makes up actual words.
- bloak 5y ago
  The diff is moderately entertaining. I thought it might be an April Fool's. many -> persony hero -> theyro che non sono [Italian] -> che non childo
golem14 5y ago
Did you look at the actual commit ? https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/pull/6801/commits/5257301642c173e2dc4f034f8c0460ce7ea99de6 https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/pu...
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  Lol. It's literally `find . -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i -e s/her/them/g -e s/him/them/g ... && git commit -a`. This is a bash one liner. Has to be April Fool's.
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Minor49er 5y ago

This is nothing new. Most spam bots in the past have been poorly implemented

xigoi 5y ago

Not to mention that automatically correcting gendered words is an AI-complete problem, since you need human context to tell which words are gendered correctly.

lodi 5y ago
And furthermore, human context is necessary but not sufficient: (nsfw) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT8-5KBInls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT8-5KBInls

kazinator 5y ago

I think the situation of developers being harassed by bot-generated pull requests is deplorable. At the same time, they brought it on themselves for using Github, so serves them right.