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We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

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Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#31
I am friends with a solo maintainer of a major open source project.

He repeatedly complains that at the beginning of some semester, he sees a huge spike of false/unproveable security weakness reports / GutHub issues in the project. He thinks that there is a Chinese university which encourages their students to find and report software vulns as part of their coursework. They don’t seem to verify what they describe is an actual security vuln or that the issue exists in his GitHub repo. He is very diligent and patient and tries to verify the issue is not reproducible, but this costs him valuable time and very scarce attention.

He also struggles because the upstream branch has diverged from what the major Linux distribution systems have forked/pulled. Sometimes the security vulns are the Linux distro package default configurations of his app, not the upstream default configurations.

And also, I’m part of the Kryptos K4 SubReddit. In the past ~6 months, the majority of posts saying “I SOLVED IT!!!1!” Are LLM copypasta (using LLM to try to solve it soup-to-nuts, not to do research, ideate, etc). It got so bad that the SubReddit will ban users on first LLM slop post.

I worry that the fears teachers had of students using AI to submit homework has bled over into all aspects of work.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why you don’t just put an AI guardian to close or to ask them to change the story. Or shadow ban

Subjecting every real contributor to the "AI guardian" would be unfair, and shadow banning is ineffective when you're dealing with a large number of drive-by nuisances rather than a small number of dedicated trolls. Public humiliation is actually a great solution here.

How effective is it against people who just simply does not care?

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#33
post #3

Context: [1, 2] > Open source code library cURL is removing the possibility to earn money by reporting bugs, hoping that this will reduce the volume of AI slop reports. > cURL has been flooded with AI-generated error reports. Now one of the incentives to create them will go away. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46701733 [2] https://etn.se/index.php/nyheter/72808-curl-removes-bug-boun...

Money for a report and a patch, with convincing test cases, might be worthwhile. Even if a machine generates them.

I've read this idea that we could make people pay for security reports a few times here on HN (and you get back the money if the report is deemed good). That feels very wrong.

If I find a security issue, I'm willing to responsibly disclose it, but if you make me pay, I don't think I will bother.

Punishing bad behavior to disincentivize it seems more sensible.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#35
post #11

I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…

Noticed it in corporate context too. About 40% of the performance feedbacks I saw this year were AI written. India and USA crowd. Everything from Europe looked pretty organic but imagine that’ll change too next cycle

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#36
post #20
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? What does trump have to do with allowing early denial of bad ORs

Reading between the lines a bit, but I think the point is that public ridicule and personal attacks as well a general lack professionalism is a page out of his book. So I think OP is trying to insinuate POTUS' behavior inspires a general lack of decorum, a la trickle-down dickonomics. Which is a sentiment I can't in good faith disagree with entirely, but it seems like a stretch in this case.

is public ridiculing of somebody who intentionally submits garbage in order to potentially earn a few bucks a bad thing? it's like with patent trolls, dragging their shady actions to public and ridiculing them is best thing that can happen

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#37
post #11

I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…

Why you don’t just put an AI guardian to close or to ask them to change the story. Or shadow ban

I intensely dislike the idea that we need more AI in order to deal with AI.

If I ever need to start using an AI to summarize text that someone else has generated with AI from a short summary, I'm gonna be so fucking done.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#38
post #11

I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…

I've seen this - it's tiring even at low volume. Goes something like: Someone creates a garbage issue. Someone else asks to be assigned. Someone from the project may say "we don't assign issues" (this step has zero effect over later steps). Someone else submits a PR. Maybe someone else will submit another PR. Maintainers then agonise how they can close issues and PR(s) without being rude or discouraging to genuine ef…

This is precisely what we've seen

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subjecting every real contributor to the "AI guardian" would be unfair, and shadow banning is ineffective when you're dealing with a large number of drive-by nuisances rather than a small number of dedicated trolls. Public humiliation is actually a great solution here.

How effective is it against people who just simply does not care?

Most people do, and those who don't still get banned so...

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#40
post #11

I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…

>Indian students Resume glorification and LinkedIn / GitHub profile attention do that. I am seeing a lot of people coming up with perceived knowledge that's just LLM echo chambers. Code they contribute comes straight out of LLMs. This is generally fine as long as they know what it does. But when you ask them to make some changes, some are as lost as ever. Torvalds was right, code maintenance is going to be a headache…

Regard to code maintenance:

I’m actually of the mind it will be easier IF you follow a few rules.

Code maintenance is already a hassle. The solution is to maintain the intent or the original requirements in the code or documentation. With LLMs, that means carrying through any prompts and to ensure there are tests generated which prove that the generated code matches the intent of the tests.

Yes, I get that a million monkeys on typewriters won’t write maintainable code. But the tool they are using makes it remarkably easy to do, if only they learn to use it.

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