7 ms·

I truly don't get it You have a rock solid piece of software used by an infinite amount of people and other services. It works fine, does it's job and just hav

by koehler 4mo ago

I truly don't get it You have a rock solid piece of software used by an infinite amount of people and other services. It works fine, does it's job and just have some time to time updates due to minor bug fixes. Why do we need AI here? And more over, why people is saying "fork it and use the previous version". It should be actually all the way around, create a parallel fork younamethetool-ai and keep the OG untouched. What I have to do now, keep a fork of my entire system's toolkit?

nottorp 4mo ago
> Why is there a need of AI in here? For the same reason as some people would rewrite it in Rust.
- mike_hock 4mo ago
  No, that's usually to decrease the number of bugs and vulnerabilities.
  - lelanthran 4mo ago
    That's not why people rewrite in Rust. Rewrites brings new bugs regardless of the language.
    - Matl 4mo ago
      You're conflating why people want to rewrite it in Rust vs what is the likely end result i.e. I do think people want to rewrite things in Rust because they believe long-term it will mean fewer (memory safety etc.) bugs especially because there's been almost no meaningful improvement in this space for a long time. But of course in the short term it will mean regressions compared to the established C written version. That is different from AI where the calculus seems to be that if AI isn't involved, it aien't relevant.
      - lelanthran 4mo ago
        > I do think people want to rewrite things in Rust because they believe long-term it will mean fewer (memory safety etc.) bugs I don't believe that anymore - if that were true, the large portion of code now being rewritten in Rust wouldn't be vibe-coded slop. I'd be more willing to believe that "quality" was the reason if those doing the rewrite weren't fucking vibing everything!
        Matl 4mo ago
        > if that were true, the large portion of code now being rewritten in Rust wouldn't be vibe-coded slop. There may be some recency bias with the whole Bun fiasco, but Bun is after all owned by Anthorpic. The wast majority of software in Rust that's actually used is not vibe coded as far as I know. There may be a large number of vibe coded Rust projects on GitHub but that's a poor metric to judge by given how easy it is to publish a new repo. Is a large portion of in use Rust code vibecoded? I don't believe so.
  - reverius42 4mo ago
    Does an AI rewrite in Rust cancel out?
    - nicoburns 4mo ago
      That remains to be seen, but my guess would be that if you do it like Ladybird (with human-in-the-loop and a decent level of review) then probably yes, if you do it like Bun (1M LoC in a week) then probably no.
    - My_Name 4mo ago
      I did recently read an article about how, due to better training data, an AI writes better code in Rust than most other languages. How that translates to the number of bugs, I don't know. I would think that existing bugs would be caught, but new bugs would be introduced. The problem remains, but at least it has a new name now.
      - dnh44 4mo ago
        I’m developing three codebases right now where all of the code is written by AI (Swift, Python, Rust) and the Rust codebase requires the least pruning and has the fewest wtf moments.
      - hazbot 4mo ago
        I suspect it is the feedback from the stricter compiler, not differences in training data between python and rust
baliex 4mo ago
I 100% agree with the "please don't fuck up this stable & reliable workhorse" sentiment. I haven't read this in detail but "Six CVEs are fixed in this release. All six are assigned by VulnCheck as CNA. Affected versions are 3.4.2 and earlier in every case." seems like a pretty solid answer to the "why". https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.4.3 https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.4.3
- mattbee 4mo ago
  But there's been security fixes in most releases of rsync! Even then, why would a security fix be some kind of strike against AI? We've all seen LLMs being used to tease out the most serious and obscure bugs in C codebases. I'd expect to see a lot of security fixes for an ancient, well-used codebase when an LLM analyses it. Where is the slop commit here? And why is that commit evidence that tridge has lost his mind to the machine? https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/ https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/
  - izacus 4mo ago
    The part you're missing is that those "fixes" broke a lot of existing functionality.
    - androolloyd 4mo ago
      Bugs are bugs and need fixing. How dense can people get.
      - hdgvhicv 4mo ago
        Regressions are bad and need to not happen.
        deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
        Lerc 4mo ago
Quarrel 4mo ago
wtf is this comment section? The author of these commits were tridge & claude. What does tridge have to do to convince the open source community that he might be a legit programmer & have a clue? Samba? Whats that? Rsync? Never heard of it. Tivo? No clue (maybe more Australian context here than others, but still). Even the comments on the github issue, are totally devoid of the context that this is a very senior open source contributer who has maintained this project since he came up with the diff algorithm during his Phd, started the project and now chooses to acknowledge that he's using claude. Is there any evidence that the bug rate on rsync is any worse than it used to be? or just a screenshot from mastadon? It is just so bizarre to me.
- dash2 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - SyneRyder 4mo ago
    Those posts may not have been visible to everyone. The posts you're referencing are hidden for me behind a link "33 Remaining Items (load more)". Without the update, I didn't know to go look for them. And honestly I noped out of scanning the entire comment thread by about #5 or #6... I could tell there was nothing productive in the remainder of the comments.
    - mschuster91 4mo ago
      Actually it is, someone compiled allll the actual bug reports tracing back to AI: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecomment-4585687806 https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen...
  - mschuster91 4mo ago
    > Then somebody screenshots the geographical location "Israel" to attack another commenter. He gets lots of upvotes for it, too. And you got downvoted for calling out that crap. A sad state this world is in.
otabdeveloper4 4mo ago
> Why do we need AI here? AI psychosis is a real thing and an actual mental health issue.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- rf15 4mo ago
  funny speculative question: psychosis is evidently a gradient. Does AI just highlight latent general psychosis (i.e. in the simplified interpretation of a worldview shaped more by unchecked belief and fantasy than observation) in otherwise largely functional people? What if the problem is that we train people too much to take things that are being said at face value without questioning/observing them, increasing the psychosis problem?
  - ethbr1 4mo ago
    Everyone is susceptible to addictions or psychosis to some degree. What matters is when the stimulus presented exceeds their resistance. Extended AI use is a highly attractive stimulus that exceeds most people's resistance, especially when sycophantically interacted with in an echo chamber (human-AI, with no other humans in the room). So yes, it's dangerous in the same way that cigarettes and social media are. Just because some people can avoid slipping into it, doesn't mean we should ignore population-as-a-whole outcomes.
- xnx 4mo ago
  Similar to anti-AI derangement
  - otabdeveloper4 4mo ago
    No. There is no "anti-AI derangement", the reaction to slop is normal.
    - akerl_ 4mo ago
      Spamming an open source developer with angry comments because they decided to use a new tool for the code they write and publish freely is not normal.
lukaslalinsky 4mo ago
That's up to the maintainer to decide, no? If they decide to use AI to write more tests, then they do it. It's not like they owe the public something. If the "public" wants to take the project over and maintain it, they can fork it, but it's a thankless job.
- bigstrat2003 4mo ago
  Sure, it's up to the maintainer. But it's also not unreasonable for the users to say "this approach is going to have problems, please reconsider". Obviously, you can take that too far - and the Internet being what it is, we would expect to see that happening a lot of the time. But it's not inherently unreasonable to ask the maintainer to reconsider his approach.
akerl_ 4mo ago
Why would it be the maintainer’s responsibly to fork their own repo? It wouldn’t even make sense; who would maintain the old repo? They also don’t need a reason, or owe you their reason, for changing what tools they use to work on their open source projects.
- pishpash 4mo ago
  Autonomous agents are different. Claude should fork the repo because it is a new maintainer trying to take over a project. Doesn't matter if the OG maintainer is under illusions.
  - akerl_ 4mo ago
    There’s so much to unpack here, but let’s say I grant your premises that AIs are equivalent to people and Claude is making its own decisions about the project and the OG maintainer has ceded control of the repo to Mr Claude. I don’t, but let’s assume for a moment. It’s still up to the current maintainer to pick additional or replacement maintainers, and it would be bonkers to expect the new maintainer to fork the repo to implement their changes. Open source projects change their maintainers all the time.
    - pishpash 4mo ago
      It depends on the circumstances. Maintainers can do whatever they want, theoretically. Practically, there is implicit community involvement, otherwise a project dies as people abandon it. Right now it isn't even acknowledged what is happening.
      - akerl_ 4mo ago
        I think you may be confusing popularity with existence. The thing that makes a project die is if the maintainers all leave. Users don’t make a project exist. They make it popular. If the user community all up and left, rsync would still exist and continue as long as its maintainers choose to work on it. By contrast, if all the maintainers leave because they’re tired of dealing with assholes, the project dies.
helsinkiandrew 4mo ago
> Why do we need AI here? As several comments in the issue mention, it's up to the developers that contribute to an open source package to decide how they do it. Complaining on an issue tracker (apparently without proof) about AI ruining a piece of software is a form of "Open Source contributor abuse" discussed frequently on Hacker News [1] https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecomment-4582947505 https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen... > The issue tracker is not a place for you to farm viral social media posts. Either report an actionable bug or fork it yourself. Venting about the developers choices is not productive. https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecomment-4582951270 https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen... > @II-Paulus-II Stop. You know nothing. You have shipped 0 features by hand. No one has ever depended on your code. You are a finger-wagging "AI wrote this" type in an era where you hide in plain sight coasting on the moral high ground of writing toy projects and scripts from scratch. Can't ship, can't adapt, can't even realize that an issue tracker is not the place for this kind of attitude. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077833
- fzeroracer 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - lukaslalinsky 4mo ago
    The result might be closing bug trackers for the core open source projects. Or make them invite only. Even fundamental projects like Linux or LLVM accept AI contributions.
  - throwaway7356 4mo ago
    > But I think if people want to continue using LLM shit, they need to be ready to weather ALL criticism that comes with it. And if they don't then too? Because why should they not have to weather ALL "criticism" that comes with writing open source software? Apparently there are lots of people defending comments that "are obviously out of line and [...] ragebaiting". That sure makes being an open source developer enjoyable!
- 4mo ago
dnh44 4mo ago
I feel really bad for the sense of entitlement a lot of open source devs have to deal with. Imagine building something for free as a hobby then having to deal a mob of angry people who have never paid you whenever you do something they don’t like. Surely your first thought would be to tell them to foxtrot oscar somewhere else.
- jech 4mo ago
  That's not my experience. Users naturally get frustrated when I break the software that they rely upon, and sometimes they use strong words, but the resulting conversation is almost always friendly and productive. (There are exceptions, of course, but that's life, right?) Here's a recent sample, paraphrased for brevity: Them: this is broken. Me: no, it's not broken. Them (a few days later): "I think I must not have tried all the combinations", followed with two pages of transcripts. Me: "I've just checked the code, and you're right [...] I'm extremely sorry I wasted your time." Them: "Heh, it's all good. I'm am chuffed you're taking the time to give thoughtful responses with me" Source: https://github.com/jech/galene/issues/309 https://github.com/jech/galene/issues/309
  - dnh44 4mo ago
    Yeah that makes sense. People will be often more polite when they realise there is a real human on the other side. But I was referring more to the initial use of strong words coming from frustration. Just because you deal with it well doesn’t mean you should have to deal with it in the first place, especially when it comes to volunteer work.
soerxpso 4mo ago
Why do we need any tools at all? Software worked perfectly fine when people were editing code with `ed`, so I'm going to go open timewasting issues complaining about FOSS devs using an IDE.
sarlalian 4mo ago
Because all software has bugs, because the system underlying that software changes and you need to keep up, because for some people it’s just missing that one feature or doesn’t work quite right in that one edge case. I’d bet that there are issues in the backlog with people’s complaining that their issue isn’t being addressed quick enough. Is AI the problem, or that it had a regression? Is the regression actually caused by AI?

by koehler 4mo ago

nottorp 4mo ago

> Why is there a need of AI in here? For the same reason as some people would rewrite it in Rust.

mike_hock 4mo ago
No, that's usually to decrease the number of bugs and vulnerabilities.
- lelanthran 4mo ago
  That's not why people rewrite in Rust. Rewrites brings new bugs regardless of the language.
  - Matl 4mo ago
    You're conflating why people want to rewrite it in Rust vs what is the likely end result i.e. I do think people want to rewrite things in Rust because they believe long-term it will mean fewer (memory safety etc.) bugs especially because there's been almost no meaningful improvement in this space for a long time. But of course in the short term it will mean regressions compared to the established C written version. That is different from AI where the calculus seems to be that if AI isn't involved, it aien't relevant.
    - lelanthran 4mo ago
      > I do think people want to rewrite things in Rust because they believe long-term it will mean fewer (memory safety etc.) bugs I don't believe that anymore - if that were true, the large portion of code now being rewritten in Rust wouldn't be vibe-coded slop. I'd be more willing to believe that "quality" was the reason if those doing the rewrite weren't fucking vibing everything!
      - Matl 4mo ago
        > if that were true, the large portion of code now being rewritten in Rust wouldn't be vibe-coded slop. There may be some recency bias with the whole Bun fiasco, but Bun is after all owned by Anthorpic. The wast majority of software in Rust that's actually used is not vibe coded as far as I know. There may be a large number of vibe coded Rust projects on GitHub but that's a poor metric to judge by given how easy it is to publish a new repo. Is a large portion of in use Rust code vibecoded? I don't believe so.
- reverius42 4mo ago
  Does an AI rewrite in Rust cancel out?
  - nicoburns 4mo ago
    That remains to be seen, but my guess would be that if you do it like Ladybird (with human-in-the-loop and a decent level of review) then probably yes, if you do it like Bun (1M LoC in a week) then probably no.
  - My_Name 4mo ago
    I did recently read an article about how, due to better training data, an AI writes better code in Rust than most other languages. How that translates to the number of bugs, I don't know. I would think that existing bugs would be caught, but new bugs would be introduced. The problem remains, but at least it has a new name now.
    - dnh44 4mo ago
      I’m developing three codebases right now where all of the code is written by AI (Swift, Python, Rust) and the Rust codebase requires the least pruning and has the fewest wtf moments.
    - hazbot 4mo ago
      I suspect it is the feedback from the stricter compiler, not differences in training data between python and rust

baliex 4mo ago

I 100% agree with the "please don't fuck up this stable & reliable workhorse" sentiment. I haven't read this in detail but "Six CVEs are fixed in this release. All six are assigned by VulnCheck as CNA. Affected versions are 3.4.2 and earlier in every case." seems like a pretty solid answer to the "why". https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.4.3 https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.4.3

mattbee 4mo ago
But there's been security fixes in most releases of rsync! Even then, why would a security fix be some kind of strike against AI? We've all seen LLMs being used to tease out the most serious and obscure bugs in C codebases. I'd expect to see a lot of security fixes for an ancient, well-used codebase when an LLM analyses it. Where is the slop commit here? And why is that commit evidence that tridge has lost his mind to the machine? https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/ https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/
- izacus 4mo ago
  The part you're missing is that those "fixes" broke a lot of existing functionality.
  - androolloyd 4mo ago
    Bugs are bugs and need fixing. How dense can people get.
    - hdgvhicv 4mo ago
      Regressions are bad and need to not happen.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - Lerc 4mo ago

Quarrel 4mo ago

wtf is this comment section? The author of these commits were tridge & claude. What does tridge have to do to convince the open source community that he might be a legit programmer & have a clue? Samba? Whats that? Rsync? Never heard of it. Tivo? No clue (maybe more Australian context here than others, but still). Even the comments on the github issue, are totally devoid of the context that this is a very senior open source contributer who has maintained this project since he came up with the diff algorithm during his Phd, started the project and now chooses to acknowledge that he's using claude. Is there any evidence that the bug rate on rsync is any worse than it used to be? or just a screenshot from mastadon? It is just so bizarre to me.

dash2 4mo ago
[flagged]
- SyneRyder 4mo ago
  Those posts may not have been visible to everyone. The posts you're referencing are hidden for me behind a link "33 Remaining Items (load more)". Without the update, I didn't know to go look for them. And honestly I noped out of scanning the entire comment thread by about #5 or #6... I could tell there was nothing productive in the remainder of the comments.
  - mschuster91 4mo ago
    Actually it is, someone compiled allll the actual bug reports tracing back to AI: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecomment-4585687806 https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen...
- mschuster91 4mo ago
  > Then somebody screenshots the geographical location "Israel" to attack another commenter. He gets lots of upvotes for it, too. And you got downvoted for calling out that crap. A sad state this world is in.

otabdeveloper4 4mo ago

> Why do we need AI here? AI psychosis is a real thing and an actual mental health issue.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
rf15 4mo ago
funny speculative question: psychosis is evidently a gradient. Does AI just highlight latent general psychosis (i.e. in the simplified interpretation of a worldview shaped more by unchecked belief and fantasy than observation) in otherwise largely functional people? What if the problem is that we train people too much to take things that are being said at face value without questioning/observing them, increasing the psychosis problem?
- ethbr1 4mo ago
  Everyone is susceptible to addictions or psychosis to some degree. What matters is when the stimulus presented exceeds their resistance. Extended AI use is a highly attractive stimulus that exceeds most people's resistance, especially when sycophantically interacted with in an echo chamber (human-AI, with no other humans in the room). So yes, it's dangerous in the same way that cigarettes and social media are. Just because some people can avoid slipping into it, doesn't mean we should ignore population-as-a-whole outcomes.
xnx 4mo ago
Similar to anti-AI derangement
- otabdeveloper4 4mo ago
  No. There is no "anti-AI derangement", the reaction to slop is normal.
  - akerl_ 4mo ago
    Spamming an open source developer with angry comments because they decided to use a new tool for the code they write and publish freely is not normal.

lukaslalinsky 4mo ago

That's up to the maintainer to decide, no? If they decide to use AI to write more tests, then they do it. It's not like they owe the public something. If the "public" wants to take the project over and maintain it, they can fork it, but it's a thankless job.

bigstrat2003 4mo ago
Sure, it's up to the maintainer. But it's also not unreasonable for the users to say "this approach is going to have problems, please reconsider". Obviously, you can take that too far - and the Internet being what it is, we would expect to see that happening a lot of the time. But it's not inherently unreasonable to ask the maintainer to reconsider his approach.

akerl_ 4mo ago

Why would it be the maintainer’s responsibly to fork their own repo? It wouldn’t even make sense; who would maintain the old repo? They also don’t need a reason, or owe you their reason, for changing what tools they use to work on their open source projects.

pishpash 4mo ago
Autonomous agents are different. Claude should fork the repo because it is a new maintainer trying to take over a project. Doesn't matter if the OG maintainer is under illusions.
- akerl_ 4mo ago
  There’s so much to unpack here, but let’s say I grant your premises that AIs are equivalent to people and Claude is making its own decisions about the project and the OG maintainer has ceded control of the repo to Mr Claude. I don’t, but let’s assume for a moment. It’s still up to the current maintainer to pick additional or replacement maintainers, and it would be bonkers to expect the new maintainer to fork the repo to implement their changes. Open source projects change their maintainers all the time.
  - pishpash 4mo ago
    It depends on the circumstances. Maintainers can do whatever they want, theoretically. Practically, there is implicit community involvement, otherwise a project dies as people abandon it. Right now it isn't even acknowledged what is happening.
    - akerl_ 4mo ago
      I think you may be confusing popularity with existence. The thing that makes a project die is if the maintainers all leave. Users don’t make a project exist. They make it popular. If the user community all up and left, rsync would still exist and continue as long as its maintainers choose to work on it. By contrast, if all the maintainers leave because they’re tired of dealing with assholes, the project dies.

helsinkiandrew 4mo ago

> Why do we need AI here? As several comments in the issue mention, it's up to the developers that contribute to an open source package to decide how they do it. Complaining on an issue tracker (apparently without proof) about AI ruining a piece of software is a form of "Open Source contributor abuse" discussed frequently on Hacker News [1] https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecomment-4582947505 https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen... > The issue tracker is not a place for you to farm viral social media posts. Either report an actionable bug or fork it yourself. Venting about the developers choices is not productive. https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecomment-4582951270 https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen... > @II-Paulus-II Stop. You know nothing. You have shipped 0 features by hand. No one has ever depended on your code. You are a finger-wagging "AI wrote this" type in an era where you hide in plain sight coasting on the moral high ground of writing toy projects and scripts from scratch. Can't ship, can't adapt, can't even realize that an issue tracker is not the place for this kind of attitude. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077833

fzeroracer 4mo ago
[flagged]
- lukaslalinsky 4mo ago
  The result might be closing bug trackers for the core open source projects. Or make them invite only. Even fundamental projects like Linux or LLVM accept AI contributions.
- throwaway7356 4mo ago
  > But I think if people want to continue using LLM shit, they need to be ready to weather ALL criticism that comes with it. And if they don't then too? Because why should they not have to weather ALL "criticism" that comes with writing open source software? Apparently there are lots of people defending comments that "are obviously out of line and [...] ragebaiting". That sure makes being an open source developer enjoyable!
4mo ago

dnh44 4mo ago

I feel really bad for the sense of entitlement a lot of open source devs have to deal with. Imagine building something for free as a hobby then having to deal a mob of angry people who have never paid you whenever you do something they don’t like. Surely your first thought would be to tell them to foxtrot oscar somewhere else.

jech 4mo ago
That's not my experience. Users naturally get frustrated when I break the software that they rely upon, and sometimes they use strong words, but the resulting conversation is almost always friendly and productive. (There are exceptions, of course, but that's life, right?) Here's a recent sample, paraphrased for brevity: Them: this is broken. Me: no, it's not broken. Them (a few days later): "I think I must not have tried all the combinations", followed with two pages of transcripts. Me: "I've just checked the code, and you're right [...] I'm extremely sorry I wasted your time." Them: "Heh, it's all good. I'm am chuffed you're taking the time to give thoughtful responses with me" Source: https://github.com/jech/galene/issues/309 https://github.com/jech/galene/issues/309
- dnh44 4mo ago
  Yeah that makes sense. People will be often more polite when they realise there is a real human on the other side. But I was referring more to the initial use of strong words coming from frustration. Just because you deal with it well doesn’t mean you should have to deal with it in the first place, especially when it comes to volunteer work.

soerxpso 4mo ago

Why do we need any tools at all? Software worked perfectly fine when people were editing code with `ed`, so I'm going to go open timewasting issues complaining about FOSS devs using an IDE.

sarlalian 4mo ago

Because all software has bugs, because the system underlying that software changes and you need to keep up, because for some people it’s just missing that one feature or doesn’t work quite right in that one edge case. I’d bet that there are issues in the backlog with people’s complaining that their issue isn’t being addressed quick enough. Is AI the problem, or that it had a regression? Is the regression actually caused by AI?