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Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

alexispurslane.github.io

71–80 of 611 posts

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#71
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, made me chuckle that an LLM— probably Claude— was used to write this. The use of "regime shift" is what gave it away for me. I've never seen a human write that, but Claude does from time to time. At least they removed occurrences of "load-bearing".

"quietly" seems to be the new one recently

Ohhh, quietly load-bearing is the real just. No noise. Pure fact. Delivered robustly.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#72
post #45
post #91

[stub for offtopicness] [see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416020 for how all this happened in the first place]

A lot of people criticizing because it's heavily written with LLM, but I mean, if someone produced this piece pre-LLM, would they criticize it? is the critique due to use of LLM or due to the content being truly hard to follow? I read it and I would say, there are some problems with the writing, but its not a bad piece. Of course this is a bigger problem, as its now harder to distinguish content that is "AI slop" wit…

The most quoted line here is "A simple distributional analysis of every rsync release with bug data. No model. No assumptions. Just placement." Not only is it cringe to read, it's also nonsensical ("placement" means what?)

If OP had said "here's an AI summary of the data" and generated a conscise summary, I think I would fine with it. But default AI writing is really verbose -- the opposite of a compression algorithm, spewing out cliched phrases that don't add information. It's exhausting to read, and it lacks the interesting noise of a human response.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#73

> The analysis uses a single metric: bugs per 10 commits (bugs/10c). Bugs per commit as a metric papers over severity, both in terms of security severity as well as the effect on the user. A mislabeled button has the same weight as the entire app crashing in this framework.

Why don't you prove the bugs increased then?

Why is it that some unfounded claim is made and the onus is suddenly on the project maintainer to prove it beyond all doubt?

It should be on the person making the claim to prove it

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#74

> But the critics' accusation is also blunt: "Claude is making things worse." A blunt instrument is the fairest response. So the criticism was bad, and that somehow makes it ok to use a bad metric?

AI + Interest != Expertise

I come to hn because I get very nuanced, informed information and glorious puns.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#75
post #91

[stub for offtopicness] [see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416020 for how all this happened in the first place]

So the original unfounded claim has 400+ comments because its perfect HN ragebait

The author provides evidence to the contrary and the HNers won't even engage with it instead just talking about the writing of the article in classic HN bikeshedding fashion.

How about after that we talk about the formatting of the website and the colors?

This site is really going down hill

Where is the accountability for your own opinions?

Are you guys only upvoting things that confirm your existing gripes?

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#76
post #68
post #91

[stub for offtopicness] [see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416020 for how all this happened in the first place]

This submission was heavily flagged, presumably because the article sounded like genai. But the article now says the following: > After posting this on Hacker News and recieving almost no substantive input, discussion, or response on the actual content of the article, I decided to rewrite all of the prose in my own voice. I've therefore turned off the flags and hopefully people can actually now discuss the claims/fin…

> I decided to rewrite all of the prose in my own voice.

Soo... it didn't just sound like genai but was genai?

___

Huh. From the article:

> If anyone complains about my verbosity or sentence structure — as they usually do, which is the reason I originally let the AI write the prose, among other reasons obsoleted by templating — they can go fuck themselves.

This is kinda sad, honestly. But also should show the author that doing what people try to bully you into doing will not stop them from bullying you.

Just stick with your unique voice man. If people don't want to read that that's fine. They do not have to. You're fine

.. what are those em-dashes doing there though?

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#77
post #68
post #91

[stub for offtopicness] [see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416020 for how all this happened in the first place]

This submission was heavily flagged, presumably because the article sounded like genai. But the article now says the following: > After posting this on Hacker News and recieving almost no substantive input, discussion, or response on the actual content of the article, I decided to rewrite all of the prose in my own voice. I've therefore turned off the flags and hopefully people can actually now discuss the claims/fin…

> I decided to rewrite all of the prose in my own voice

"Claude, rewrite all of the prose in my own voice."

The funny part is that it probably works.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#78

> The analysis uses a single metric: bugs per 10 commits (bugs/10c). Bugs per commit as a metric papers over severity, both in terms of security severity as well as the effect on the user. A mislabeled button has the same weight as the entire app crashing in this framework.

IMO "bugs per commit" is even worse than that, because, in addition to what you say, it also hides the extraordinary spike of commit activity of a project that had previously been stable. [0]

It is the exact metric you'd choose if you wanted to make the current situation of rsync look like not a big deal.

[0] https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/graphs/commit-activity

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#79
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some notes on this: - I used GLM 5.1 to help with the coding and math for this. - However, I explicitly dictated where the data should be pulled from (GitHub, Bugzilla, mailing list), how it should be tagged and grouped, and what data to look at (e.g. bugs instead of regressions) - Additionally, I consulted with my wife, who has a master's degree in statistics from Penn State University for what sort of statistical m…

I really struggle to believe you wrote text like: > A simple distributional analysis of every rsync release with bug data. No model. No assumptions. Just placement.

I don't even know what "just placement" is.

(I need a better model to translate from llmese.)

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#80
Unfortunately for the people mad about this, I predict the only thing they will accomplish by pressuring the rsync maintainers, is to discourage everyone else from responsibly disclosing their use of AI. You’re just going to make people disable Claude attribution on their commits to avoid drama.
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