Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Changing how we develop Ladybird

ladybird.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 602 posts

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#511

Post by elestor »

TalkingCodeMonk wrote: post #367
gregoriol wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintainers can also use the exact same tools to help review and validate PRs

So the solution is for FOSS developers to pay large sums of money to AI companies, to solve the problem that the AI companies created, for profit? ... and you typed this out as though extorting charities were a solution, instead of a grotesquely immoral and unethical systemic failure?

I'm on your side, but don't you think 'grotesquely immoral and unethical' is a bit of an exhaggeration? It's just software.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#512

Post by tarkin2 »

potsandpans wrote: post #451
tarkin2 wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rust conversion was a byte-for-byte replica of the original's bytecode, was it not? Thereby it was easily possible to validate the quality of the AI-based work. The same would obviously not be possible for patches. I don't believe you can use the rust conversion as a valid, if implied, argument that you can take AI-patches in good faith.

Fair call out. My implied argument is not so much that "because llm was used, then llm must be used." The original argument proposed by the author is essentially distilled into, "because llm could be used, we must no longer accept public contributions." Which is, in my opinion, a disproportional and misguided overreaction. The llm was apparently good enough to do the byte for byte replica, so we know that it can be u…

From my fairly quick reading, their premise seems to be "we can no longer trust /unknown/ developers who use AI to understand and maintain the code they submit", rather than a simple attack on those who use AI.

This seems fair to me: numerous developers would love to put "contributed to the Ladybird project" on their curriculum vitaes, and AI tools can now make this within the reach of a huge number of people.

But the Ladybird project needs more than just working-code, something that AI can easily produce: they need code that is understood and maintainable by the person who submitted it.

Not only does AI-generated code fail to guarantee this understanding and maintenance (to a greater degree than before), but the developers increasingly need to get through an avalanche of AI-generated pull requests rather than, say, code new features.

I would prefer projects to be developed in the open: but when developing in the open makes the code checking exponentially harder, and the chance of the submitters sticking around becomes significantly lower, then I can at least understand.

When the dam starts to overflow, then something needs to be done.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#513

Post by mvanveen »

I think from what I can understand about Serenity OS and Ladybird from afar and the kind of Cathedral culture that Andreas Kling values and feels Apple benefits from I'm not wholly surprised that the development of Ladybird took this course.

What I am curious about as someone who has been kind of cheering off on the sidelines is if there's any way that folks could get involved still in the future or if this is in practice permanently a closed project?

BSDs are more cathedral style and getting maintainer status is usually pretty onerous from what I understand but there are at least routes to it available to people willing to make an appropriate level of investment.

I'm not at a point in my life where I can meaningfully provide that kind of time and energy into serenity or ladybird but if my circumstances changed it's the kind of open source project that I would love to dedicate my time and energy towards in the future and I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that way.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#514

Post by rickydroll »

Marsymars wrote: post #487
dcrazy wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, you must hate those handymen who put up YouTube videos showing how to do basic home maintenance. A truly class-conscious handyman would insist that the homeowner hire them to replace a light switch.

There certainly exists a class of electricians who believe that homeowners shouldn't be changing a light switch, and jurisdictions exist where a permit is required to do so.

I have seen some homeowners who shouldn't own a screwdriver or a hammer try to do minor electrical work. It was not pretty.

I've often thought that it would make sense to have a DIY electrician's certificate, proving that you know how to do basic home wiring, such as outlets, switches, ceiling lamps, basic solar (DC and AC), installing new wire, load calculations, and connecting to breakers in a service panel

I have no problems pulling a permit and going through an electrical inspection.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#515

Post by robin_reala »

pulsartwin wrote: post #18

This seems quite misguided and is sad to see. They have every right to do this, but I was looking forward to continuing testing Ladybird as it improves and contributing in the future. I hope servo stays open to contributions, as it seems like it's all we have left.

https://mastodon.social/@taym95/116697302689826448

As a Servo maintainer, I'd like to remind people that @ServoDev continues to welcome contributions from everyone. We actively mentor newcomers, help people learn Rust and browser engine development, and review community PRs.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#516

Post by bsammon »

trumpdong wrote: post #422
thewebguyd wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope this spreads to all of the internet. It is. Unfortunately, its not happening with open platforms. Communities are migrating to private discord servers, and less is discussed in public/in the open. I think we should still separate "working in the open" from "allowing or not outside contributions." Outside contributions are fine to be denied, however I think work and discussions should still more or less happe…

World readable has become a liability as well. How many times has some random disagreement been blown up by observers and lead to people being kicked out of groups, jobs being lost, or SWAT raids?

Okay, I'll bite: How many time has that happened? I'm definitely not an avid follower of such things, but I've never heard of that happening. I'm not arguing that it doesn't happen, but I'd like to hear/read details.

I've heard of people within the argument directing SWAT raids at each other, or contacting employers, but I've not heard of it being driven by uninvolved observers.

Now... I've heard of people posting things on social media that others found offensive, and losing jobs/gigs over it, so that sorta supports what you're saying, but even in these "edgy" social media cases (which weren't "arguments" per se, in the cases I've heard about), I've not heard of SWAT/police reactions.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#517

Post by foresto »

crabmusket wrote: post #231
noIdeaTheSecond wrote: post #137

"A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds." I believe this is the key point the article makes and it's valid for most projects out there

The generalised form of this, which we are rapidly discovering, is that AI breaks the social contract that used to exist between an author and a reader (of prose, code, anything).

> AI breaks the social contract that used to exist between an author and a reader (of prose, code, anything).

And to be clear, it is reasonable to expect an author to invest more effort than a reader, because the work in question will reach many more readers and demand time and attention from all of them.

This principle was a part of basic netiquette back in the days of Usenet. I wish I could find the document (maybe it was a FAQ?) where I first saw it stated succinctly.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#518

Post by benrutter »

rurban wrote: post #269
Fraterkes wrote: post #66

I've been looking a lot at Godot (another big open source project) PRs lately, and there's been kind of a surge of wholy ai-generated PRs (both code and description). This is agains project-policy, so people creating these PRs usually get mildly told off. What's surprising is that while many submitters take that fairly well, some people get really indignant, essentially calling the maintainers ungrateful. It's kinda…

There massive value in AI PR's. If a feature and ignored, it can forked to provide more value to the users. If unaccepted bugfixes, the maintainers are just silly. They need to be forked off.

I don't agree with you, but I think the interesting thing is that we'll both get to find out.

In two or so years time, we can find out if heavily AI produced projects become more maintainable, ship more features and dominate the open source landscape. Or if human written and maintained code has a long term advantage. (Or more likely somewhere in between)

Either way, whatever anyone claims, none of us know, but we'll find out son enough.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#519

Post by fc417fc802 »

marknutter wrote: post #363
fc417fc802 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of people say this time is different but I guess when electricy showed up people would've said the same? No. Electricity didn't raise the skill floor all that much. Certainly nowhere near the human skill ceiling. > the internet would kill all street level businesses That was never going to happen overnight, if at all. But online retail (and food delivery, etc) does seem to be slowly but surely eating away at…

> That was never going to happen overnight, if at all. Very easy to say that in hindsight.

It was trivially predictable the entire time, just like it's trivial predictable that advances in robotics can only replace human labor at a rate that takes the necessary capital expenditure and associated manufacturing capacity into account. On top of the basic reality of logistics and infrastructure, the sears catalog provided a practical example that long predated the dotcom era.
Post reply on HN