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Did these Ocaml maintainers undergo some special course for dealing with difficult people? They show enormous amounts of maturity and patience. I'd just give th

by benterix 11mo ago

Did these Ocaml maintainers undergo some special course for dealing with difficult people? They show enormous amounts of maturity and patience. I'd just give the offender Torvalds' treatment and block them from the repo, case closed.

Mariehane 11mo ago
I think you naturally undergo that course when you are maintainer of a large OSS project.
- pjc50 11mo ago
  Well, you go one of two ways. Classic Torvalds is the other way, until an intervention was staged.
  - kylereeve 11mo ago
    There's a very short list of people who can get away with "Classic Torvalds"
    - MrDresden 11mo ago
      Frankly the originator of this pull request deserves the "classic Torvalds" treatment, no matter who is delivering it.
    - bfkwlfkjf 11mo ago
      In fact, anyone can get away with it. What are they going to do, call the police because you called them a moron?
      - phendrenad2 11mo ago
        Consider the facts: (1) most open-source maintainers have a real job (2) an unwritten rule of corporate culture is "(appear) nice" (see all of the "corporate speak" memes about how "per my last email" means "fuck off") (3) these developers may eventually need a job at another company (4) their "moron" comment is going to live forever on the internet...
        PunchyHamster 11mo ago
        If you're famous enough for that to filter to the whoever is handling your resume, it anything it will be positive
hypeatei 11mo ago
It's clear some people have had their brain broken by the existence of AI. Some maintainers are definitely too nice, and it's infuriating to see their time get wasted by such delusional people.
- ares623 11mo ago
  That’s why AI (and bad actors in general) is taking advantage of them. It’s sick.
- jodrellblank 11mo ago
  > "It's clear some people have had their brain broken by the existence of AI." The AI wrote code which worked, for a problem the submitter had, which had not been solved by any human for a long time, and there is limited human developer time/interest/funding available for solving it. Dumping a mass of code (and work) onto maintainers without prior discussion is the problem[1]. If they had forked the repo, patched it themselves with that PR and used it personally, would they have a broken brain because of AI? They claim to have read the code, tested the code, they know that other people want the functionality; is wanting to share working code a "broken brain"? If the AI code didn't work - if it was slop - and they wanted the maintainers to fix it, or walk them through every step of asking the AI to fix it - that would be a huge problem, but that didn't happen. [1] copyrightwashing and attribution is another problem but also not one that's "broken brain by the existence of AI" related.
  - nsagent 11mo ago
    It's clear Claude adapted code directly from the OxCaml implementation (the PR author said he pointed Claude at that code [1] and then provides a ChatGPT analysis [2] that really highlights the plagiarism, but ultimately comes to the conclusion that it isn't plagiarized). Either that highlights someone who is incompetent or they are willfully being blasé. Neither bodes well for contributing code while respecting copyright (though mixing and matching code on your own private repo that isn't distributed in source or binary form seems reasonable to me). [1]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3557357958 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35573... [2]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3556624486 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35566...
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
torben-friis 11mo ago
I honestly reread the whole thread in awe. Not due to the submitter, as clickbaity as it was, but reading the maintainers and comparing their replies with what I would have written in their place. That was a masterclass of defending your arguments rationally, with empathy, and leaving negative emotions at the door. I wish I was able to communicate like this. My only doubt is whether this has a good or bad effect overall, giving that the PR’s author seemed to be having their delusions enabled, if he was genuine. Would more hostility have been productive? Or is this a good general approach? In any case it is refreshing.
- squigz 11mo ago
  I don't think 'hostility' is called for, but certainly a little bit more... bluntness. But indeed, huge props to the maintainers for staying so cool.
- BriggyDwiggs42 11mo ago
  I think it’s really good for people to have good case studies like this they can refer to in the case of ai prs as a justification rather than having to take the time themselves
- knollimar 11mo ago
  I work with contractors in construction and often have to throw in vulgarity for them to get the point. This feels very similar to when I'm too nice
- mncharity 11mo ago
  Years back I attended someone doing an NSF outreach tour in support of Next Generation Science Standards. She was breathtaking (literally - bated breath on "how is that question going to be handled?!?"). Heartfelt hostile misguided questions, too confused to even attain wrong, somehow got responses which were, not merely positive and compassionate, but which managed to gracefully pull out constructive insights for the audience and questioner. One of those "How do I learn this? Can I be your apprentice?" moments. The Wikipedia community (at least 2 decades back) was also notable. You have a world of nuttery making edits. The person off their meds going article by article adding a single letter "a". And yet a community ethos that emphasized dealing with them with gentle compassion, and as potential future positive contributors. Skimming a recent "why did perl die" thread, one thing I didn't see mentioned... The perl community lacked the cultural infrastructure to cope with the eternal-September of years of continuous newcomer questions, becoming burned out and snarky. The python community emphasized it's contrast with this, "If you can't answer with friendly professionalism, we don't need your reply today" (or something like that). Moving from tar files with mailing lists, to now community repos and git and blogs/slack/etc, there's been a lot of tech learned. For example, Ruby's Gems repo was explicitly motivated by "don't be python" (then struggling without a central community repo). But there's also been the social/cultural tech learned, for how to do OSS at scale. > My only doubt is whether this has a good or bad effect overall I wonder if a literature has developed around this?
mnming 11mo ago
I wonder if it's the best outcome? The contributor doesn't seem to have a bad intention, could his energy be redirected more constructively? E.g. encouraging him to split up the PR, make a design proposal etc.
- collingreen 11mo ago
  Is (or should that be) the goal, responsibility, or even purview of the maintainers of this project?
- mrguyorama 11mo ago
  The constructive outcome is the spammer fucks off or learns how to actually code. Lots of people all over the world learn some basics of music in school, or even learn how to play the recorder, but if you mail The Rolling Stones with your "suggestions" you aren't going to get a response and certainly not a response that encourages you to keep spamming them with "better" recommendations. The maintainers of an open source project are perfectly capable of coercing an LLM into generating code. You add nothing by submitting AI created code that you don't even understand. The very thought that you are somehow contributing is the highest level of hubris and ego. No, there's is nothing you can submit without understanding code that they could not equally generate or write, and no, you do not have an idea so immensely valuable that it's necessary to vibe code a version. If you CAN understand code, write and submit a PR the standard way. If you cannot understand code, you are wasting everyone's time because you are selfish. This goes for LLM generated code in companies as well. If it's not clear and obvious from the PR that you went through and engineered the code generated, fixed up the wrong assumptions, cleaned up places where the LLM wasn't given tight enough specs, etc, then your code is not worth spending any time reviewing. I can prompt Claude myself thank you. The primary problem with these tools is that assholes are so utterly convinced that their time is infinitely valuable and my time is valueless because these people have stupidly overinflated egos. They believe their trash, unworkable, unmaintainable slop puked out by an LLM is so damn valuable, because that's just how smart they are. Imagine going up to the Civil Engineer building a bridge and handing them a printout from ChatGPT when you asked it "How do you build a bridge" and feeling smug and successful. That's what this is.
yodsanklai 11mo ago
In my big tech company, you don't want to be dismissive of AI if you don't want to sound like a paria. It's hard to believe how much faith leadership has in AI. They really want every engineer to use AI as much as possible. Reviewing is increasingly done by AI as well. That being said, I don't think that's why reviewers here were so cordial, but this is the tone you'd expect in the corporate world.
- phendrenad2 11mo ago
  This is a good point. There's a lot of cheering for the Linus swearing style, but if the average developer did that they'd eventually get a talking-to by HR.
- robertheadley 11mo ago
  I wouldn't say they were dismissive of AI, just that they are unwilling to merge code that they don't have the time or motivation to review. If you want AI code merged, make it small so it it's an easy review. That being said, I completely understand being unwilling to merge AI code at all.
  - joelreymont 11mo ago
    Why would you be unwilling to merge AI code at all? Consider my other PR against the Zig compiler [1]... I was careful to make it small and properly document it but there's a strict anti-AI policy for Zig and they closed the PR. Why? Is it not small? Not carefully documented? Is there no value it int? I'm not complaining or arguing for justice. I'm genuinely interested in how people think in this instance. If the sausage looks good and tastes great, and was made observing the proper health standards, do you still care how the sausage was made?! [1] https://github.com/joelreymont/zig/pull/1 https://github.com/joelreymont/zig/pull/1 [2] https://ziggit.dev/t/bug-wrong-segment-ordering-for-macos-using-the-non-llvm-arm64-backend/13221 https://ziggit.dev/t/bug-wrong-segment-ordering-for-macos-us...
    - heavyset_go 11mo ago
      > Why would you be unwilling to merge AI code at all? Because AI code cannot be copyrighted. It is not anyone's IP. That matters when you're creating IP. edit: Assuming this is a real person I'm responding to, and this isn't just a marketing gimmick, having seen the trail you've left on the internet over the past few weeks, it strikes me of mania, possibly chatbot-induced. I don't know what I can say that could help, so I'm dropping out of this conversation and wish you the best.

Mariehane 11mo ago

I think you naturally undergo that course when you are maintainer of a large OSS project.

pjc50 11mo ago
Well, you go one of two ways. Classic Torvalds is the other way, until an intervention was staged.
- kylereeve 11mo ago
  There's a very short list of people who can get away with "Classic Torvalds"
  - MrDresden 11mo ago
    Frankly the originator of this pull request deserves the "classic Torvalds" treatment, no matter who is delivering it.
  - bfkwlfkjf 11mo ago
    In fact, anyone can get away with it. What are they going to do, call the police because you called them a moron?
    - phendrenad2 11mo ago
      Consider the facts: (1) most open-source maintainers have a real job (2) an unwritten rule of corporate culture is "(appear) nice" (see all of the "corporate speak" memes about how "per my last email" means "fuck off") (3) these developers may eventually need a job at another company (4) their "moron" comment is going to live forever on the internet...
      - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
        If you're famous enough for that to filter to the whoever is handling your resume, it anything it will be positive

hypeatei 11mo ago

It's clear some people have had their brain broken by the existence of AI. Some maintainers are definitely too nice, and it's infuriating to see their time get wasted by such delusional people.

ares623 11mo ago
That’s why AI (and bad actors in general) is taking advantage of them. It’s sick.
jodrellblank 11mo ago
> "It's clear some people have had their brain broken by the existence of AI." The AI wrote code which worked, for a problem the submitter had, which had not been solved by any human for a long time, and there is limited human developer time/interest/funding available for solving it. Dumping a mass of code (and work) onto maintainers without prior discussion is the problem[1]. If they had forked the repo, patched it themselves with that PR and used it personally, would they have a broken brain because of AI? They claim to have read the code, tested the code, they know that other people want the functionality; is wanting to share working code a "broken brain"? If the AI code didn't work - if it was slop - and they wanted the maintainers to fix it, or walk them through every step of asking the AI to fix it - that would be a huge problem, but that didn't happen. [1] copyrightwashing and attribution is another problem but also not one that's "broken brain by the existence of AI" related.
- nsagent 11mo ago
  It's clear Claude adapted code directly from the OxCaml implementation (the PR author said he pointed Claude at that code [1] and then provides a ChatGPT analysis [2] that really highlights the plagiarism, but ultimately comes to the conclusion that it isn't plagiarized). Either that highlights someone who is incompetent or they are willfully being blasé. Neither bodes well for contributing code while respecting copyright (though mixing and matching code on your own private repo that isn't distributed in source or binary form seems reasonable to me). [1]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3557357958 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35573... [2]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3556624486 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35566...

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

torben-friis 11mo ago

I honestly reread the whole thread in awe. Not due to the submitter, as clickbaity as it was, but reading the maintainers and comparing their replies with what I would have written in their place. That was a masterclass of defending your arguments rationally, with empathy, and leaving negative emotions at the door. I wish I was able to communicate like this. My only doubt is whether this has a good or bad effect overall, giving that the PR’s author seemed to be having their delusions enabled, if he was genuine. Would more hostility have been productive? Or is this a good general approach? In any case it is refreshing.

squigz 11mo ago
I don't think 'hostility' is called for, but certainly a little bit more... bluntness. But indeed, huge props to the maintainers for staying so cool.
BriggyDwiggs42 11mo ago
I think it’s really good for people to have good case studies like this they can refer to in the case of ai prs as a justification rather than having to take the time themselves
knollimar 11mo ago
I work with contractors in construction and often have to throw in vulgarity for them to get the point. This feels very similar to when I'm too nice
mncharity 11mo ago
Years back I attended someone doing an NSF outreach tour in support of Next Generation Science Standards. She was breathtaking (literally - bated breath on "how is that question going to be handled?!?"). Heartfelt hostile misguided questions, too confused to even attain wrong, somehow got responses which were, not merely positive and compassionate, but which managed to gracefully pull out constructive insights for the audience and questioner. One of those "How do I learn this? Can I be your apprentice?" moments. The Wikipedia community (at least 2 decades back) was also notable. You have a world of nuttery making edits. The person off their meds going article by article adding a single letter "a". And yet a community ethos that emphasized dealing with them with gentle compassion, and as potential future positive contributors. Skimming a recent "why did perl die" thread, one thing I didn't see mentioned... The perl community lacked the cultural infrastructure to cope with the eternal-September of years of continuous newcomer questions, becoming burned out and snarky. The python community emphasized it's contrast with this, "If you can't answer with friendly professionalism, we don't need your reply today" (or something like that). Moving from tar files with mailing lists, to now community repos and git and blogs/slack/etc, there's been a lot of tech learned. For example, Ruby's Gems repo was explicitly motivated by "don't be python" (then struggling without a central community repo). But there's also been the social/cultural tech learned, for how to do OSS at scale. > My only doubt is whether this has a good or bad effect overall I wonder if a literature has developed around this?

mnming 11mo ago

I wonder if it's the best outcome? The contributor doesn't seem to have a bad intention, could his energy be redirected more constructively? E.g. encouraging him to split up the PR, make a design proposal etc.

collingreen 11mo ago
Is (or should that be) the goal, responsibility, or even purview of the maintainers of this project?
mrguyorama 11mo ago
The constructive outcome is the spammer fucks off or learns how to actually code. Lots of people all over the world learn some basics of music in school, or even learn how to play the recorder, but if you mail The Rolling Stones with your "suggestions" you aren't going to get a response and certainly not a response that encourages you to keep spamming them with "better" recommendations. The maintainers of an open source project are perfectly capable of coercing an LLM into generating code. You add nothing by submitting AI created code that you don't even understand. The very thought that you are somehow contributing is the highest level of hubris and ego. No, there's is nothing you can submit without understanding code that they could not equally generate or write, and no, you do not have an idea so immensely valuable that it's necessary to vibe code a version. If you CAN understand code, write and submit a PR the standard way. If you cannot understand code, you are wasting everyone's time because you are selfish. This goes for LLM generated code in companies as well. If it's not clear and obvious from the PR that you went through and engineered the code generated, fixed up the wrong assumptions, cleaned up places where the LLM wasn't given tight enough specs, etc, then your code is not worth spending any time reviewing. I can prompt Claude myself thank you. The primary problem with these tools is that assholes are so utterly convinced that their time is infinitely valuable and my time is valueless because these people have stupidly overinflated egos. They believe their trash, unworkable, unmaintainable slop puked out by an LLM is so damn valuable, because that's just how smart they are. Imagine going up to the Civil Engineer building a bridge and handing them a printout from ChatGPT when you asked it "How do you build a bridge" and feeling smug and successful. That's what this is.

yodsanklai 11mo ago

In my big tech company, you don't want to be dismissive of AI if you don't want to sound like a paria. It's hard to believe how much faith leadership has in AI. They really want every engineer to use AI as much as possible. Reviewing is increasingly done by AI as well. That being said, I don't think that's why reviewers here were so cordial, but this is the tone you'd expect in the corporate world.

phendrenad2 11mo ago
This is a good point. There's a lot of cheering for the Linus swearing style, but if the average developer did that they'd eventually get a talking-to by HR.
robertheadley 11mo ago
I wouldn't say they were dismissive of AI, just that they are unwilling to merge code that they don't have the time or motivation to review. If you want AI code merged, make it small so it it's an easy review. That being said, I completely understand being unwilling to merge AI code at all.
- joelreymont 11mo ago
  Why would you be unwilling to merge AI code at all? Consider my other PR against the Zig compiler [1]... I was careful to make it small and properly document it but there's a strict anti-AI policy for Zig and they closed the PR. Why? Is it not small? Not carefully documented? Is there no value it int? I'm not complaining or arguing for justice. I'm genuinely interested in how people think in this instance. If the sausage looks good and tastes great, and was made observing the proper health standards, do you still care how the sausage was made?! [1] https://github.com/joelreymont/zig/pull/1 https://github.com/joelreymont/zig/pull/1 [2] https://ziggit.dev/t/bug-wrong-segment-ordering-for-macos-using-the-non-llvm-arm64-backend/13221 https://ziggit.dev/t/bug-wrong-segment-ordering-for-macos-us...
  - heavyset_go 11mo ago
    > Why would you be unwilling to merge AI code at all? Because AI code cannot be copyrighted. It is not anyone's IP. That matters when you're creating IP. edit: Assuming this is a real person I'm responding to, and this isn't just a marketing gimmick, having seen the trail you've left on the internet over the past few weeks, it strikes me of mania, possibly chatbot-induced. I don't know what I can say that could help, so I'm dropping out of this conversation and wish you the best.