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Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

alexispurslane.github.io

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Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#461

Post by FooBarWidget »

kelnos wrote: post #424
kelipso wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the maintainers don’t owe users nothing is a disgusting sentiment that doesn’t stand real scrutiny. There is a social contract here. If you want to be respected and get recognized as “tridge” or whatever your name is, you owe the people that recognize you and that wider community in general.

First off: I don't agree that there's a social contract here at all. That's just some imaginary thing that you (and others) have decided exists. It's funny how lots of people who aren't open source maintainers seem to think it's ok to make up social contracts for other people without their consent. But ok, let's just pretend for a second that maintainers have indeed entered into some sort of social contract that give…

This. Best writeup I've seen on the topic of entitled/abusive users. You should publish this as a blog post or launch some sort of campaign or something, something people can refer to. I haven't encountered entitled users myself, but my gawd, I'm so annoyed at users who feel entitled to other open source maintainers. I'm raging with a drive to protest against people who treat the rsync maintainer with such disrespect.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#462

Post by Topfi »

red75prime wrote: post #371
eschaton wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found exact matches. I also found inexact matches, where C functions had been turned into C++ member functions and the like. “Recognized” does not somehow imply a lack of precision. The LLM the person used was trained on a very large corpus of Open Source code, and reproduced that code exactly. Just like LLMs have reproduced chapters of books and articles from the New York Times exactly.

> I found exact matches. Were those functions trivial? With, say, 1% probability of someone who have not seen them writing them like that? > Just like LLMs have reproduced chapters of books and articles from the New York Times exactly. Have you read the articles? As far as I remember they fed large chunks of an article multiple times to an LLM to sometimes get a not-so-long exact match. It can mean that LLMs can infe…

> […] fed large chunks of an article multiple times to an LLM […]

So they had to prompt? An LLM? I got this argument before and still don’t get what it’s trying to say. These models do not output anything unless prompted, that’s not any kind of gotcha.

On the code outputting front there is a lot of relevant evidence beyond the NYC lawsuit [0].

If I slightly modify GPL code, that doesn’t give me the right to relicense.

[0] https://arxiv.org/html/2601.02671?amp=&amp= and https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12286 and https://ai.stanford.edu/blog/verbatim-memorization/

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#463

Post by nl »

Eufrat wrote: post #370
rsc wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long-time open-source maintainer, I find all the second-guessing and armchair psychoanalysis here (not just in this comment, all over HN) about Tridge's motivations, state of mind, and so on incredibly off-putting. Tridge doesn't owe anyone anything as far as rsync is concerned. Yet he is spending his time maintaining it, only to be attacked for his efforts. To respond to the specific technical point, there real…

> As a long-time open-source maintainer, I find all the second-guessing and armchair psychoanalysis here (not just in this comment, all over HN) about Tridge's motivations, state of mind, and so on incredibly off-putting. I agree that the entire episode is obscene, but I am also unsure of what to do here either. On some level this is the same problem movie stars run into. I agree that guessing or waxing about the mot…

> However, I strongly believe that when you create something for people to use that there’s an implicit social contract about how to go about doing certain things.

Wow.

The entitlement in this statement is outrageous.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#464

Post by nl »

Eufrat wrote: post #397
tptacek wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No there isn't.

I just cannot understand this logic, can you explain why there is no responsibility whatsoever on the part of a maintainer towards the users? Selling a toaster has an implicit warranty of merchantability. Society expects that if you sell me something, it should have certain promises. Yes, there’s no monetary exchange here, the work is given gratis, but there’s still a relationship and an interaction here and I think…

> Selling a toaster has an implicit warranty of merchantability. Society expects that if you sell me something, it should have certain promises. Yes, there’s no monetary exchange here, the work is given gratis, but there’s still a relationship and an interaction here and I think it is clear some people, like myself, believe that there are implied expectations.

No there isn't.

Pay money and there's a contract.

Anything else is in your head.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#465

Post by cap11235 »

kelipso wrote: post #383
Eufrat wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a long-time open-source maintainer, I find all the second-guessing and armchair psychoanalysis here (not just in this comment, all over HN) about Tridge's motivations, state of mind, and so on incredibly off-putting. I agree that the entire episode is obscene, but I am also unsure of what to do here either. On some level this is the same problem movie stars run into. I agree that guessing or waxing about the mot…

Yeah the maintainers don’t owe users nothing is a disgusting sentiment that doesn’t stand real scrutiny. There is a social contract here. If you want to be respected and get recognized as “tridge” or whatever your name is, you owe the people that recognize you and that wider community in general.

[dead]

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#466

Post by lemming »

JetSetIlly wrote: post #413
rsc wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long-time open-source maintainer, I find all the second-guessing and armchair psychoanalysis here (not just in this comment, all over HN) about Tridge's motivations, state of mind, and so on incredibly off-putting. Tridge doesn't owe anyone anything as far as rsync is concerned. Yet he is spending his time maintaining it, only to be attacked for his efforts. To respond to the specific technical point, there real…

> As a long-time open-source maintainer, I find all the second-guessing and armchair psychoanalysis here (not just in this comment, all over HN) about Tridge's motivations, state of mind, and so on incredibly off-putting. Much of the language from both groups is incredibly off-putting, frankly. Tridge in his blog post describes people as "foaming at the mouth"?! The rhetoric around this has gotten way too emotional f…

Tridge in his blog post describes people as "foaming at the mouth"?!

Did you see the picture in the article where the user posted a picture of them strangling the maintainer? I think “foaming at the mouth” is probably gentler than how I would characterise that.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#467

Post by nazgul17 »

In a scenario like this, where we can only know if the code has bugs, not if it doesn't, isn't survival analysis a more appropriate statistical technique? I.e. a technique where time is a first-class citizen.

By the way, I did find this a bit hard to read but, as instructed by OP, I'll go fuck myself.

For what it's worth, I find AI written prose easy to read, and am annoyed by all the constant HN comments which just point out the author was AI, without anything else substantive to add.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#468

Post by lemming »

wolletd wrote: post #453
kelnos wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're willing to step up and be that person, it's not your place for you to suggest it.

I don't agree with that, I can very well still discuss that. He clearly sounds like someone who doesn't want to do this work anymore and should have searched for a successor. That's my impression from that sentence, at least. Don't you agree? So, why didn't he do it? Because just firing up Claude and let it rip is way easier than finding real people and building up trust? Did Claude increase bugs in rsync? Or did Cla…

Because just firing up Claude and let it rip

Based on Tridge’s post, this seems an unfair characterisation of how he used Claude.

Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

TFA answered this, the answer is “no”.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#469

Post by baq »

bruce343434 wrote: post #429
baq wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sprintf() should be a longer way to write abort(), change my mind

I'll change your mind: If you pass NULL as the destination pointer, it doesn't write any string. If you combine this with %n at the end of the format string, you can get the exact length that the output string would be. Then you allocate that, then you print again, into the actual destination buffer this time.

If anything I just got entrenched in my opinion. The second best option, maybe, would be to not accept any destination pointers and have the default and only possible behavior just like what you describe.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#470

Post by prmoustache »

wolletd wrote: post #453
kelnos wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're willing to step up and be that person, it's not your place for you to suggest it.

I don't agree with that, I can very well still discuss that. He clearly sounds like someone who doesn't want to do this work anymore and should have searched for a successor. That's my impression from that sentence, at least. Don't you agree? So, why didn't he do it? Because just firing up Claude and let it rip is way easier than finding real people and building up trust? Did Claude increase bugs in rsync? Or did Cla…

> and should have searched for a successor.

He doesn't have to do that. If he ever do not care enough he can just stop maintaining it and that's it.

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