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People without guns kill a lot fewer people than people with guns. Claiming that acknowledging this fact means you’ve been “driven mad by propaganda” is dumb.
Let's just stop this conversation right here before it derails into ideological battle.
> replied to objections with LLM-generated justifications that eventually overwhelmed the maintainer into merging the fix In open source projects i participate in, "overwhelming" the maintainer gets you banned. It doesn't get your patches blindly merged. In some ways i find this one of the most shocking parts of the story.
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You can but that doesn't help you keep the flood of contributions out when you don't have the time or resources to properly discern good from bad. Maintainers would rather have 10 good human authored patches than 100 patches from LLMs, even if 20 of them are good. Even if 50 of them are good, probably.
As if a rule against LLMs actually stops those sorts of spam contributions. The only thing it does is filter good contributors out, while you still have to deal with the bad ones.
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Nothing really stopping an agent from getting a key
The agent can't exactly show up to an in-person key signing party, can it? And how many people are both dedicated enough to go to key signing parties and stupid enough to let an agent act without supervision in the name of their real-world identity?
And on the other hand, if this was actually working up to an xz style supply chain attack, the dedication would certainly not be lacking.
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I personally find the barrier of starting new (FOSS) projects much lower now days.
Do they have value? Purpose? I vibe code shop jigs all the time but I don’t FOSS them because they rarely have value outside my context.
One exception: I was using an opensource Jellyfin client called findroid but the maintainer had been busy for a long time so a lot of features I wanted had stale PR's. Instead of bugging him I forked & renamed the project and together with Claude built in all the features I personally needed. Just keeping up with upstream now and enjoying my enhanced app. Once the initial dev gets those features in I might switch back. Claude made this really easy. If the maintainer wants my code he's free to take it. Here's the repo https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce
I actually got an email from someone who was using it who found a pretty bad bug I hadn't encountered yet and I quickly fixed it. All that time I was still under the impression I was the only user haha.
> replied to objections with LLM-generated justifications that eventually overwhelmed the maintainer into merging the fix In open source projects i participate in, "overwhelming" the maintainer gets you banned. It doesn't get your patches blindly merged. In some ways i find this one of the most shocking parts of the story.
As a "new" maintainer myself - how do you decide when to ban someone? I sometimes feel overwhelmed and I can feel a big uptick in huge PRs with huge LLM written descriptions but often I also don't want to be an asshole to my community & reject all their changes.
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> the security of all our computers depends on maintainers Not getting paid anything, getting bullied and harassed while spending their free time maintaining things. Surely this isn't sustainable. And telling maintainers how to act will not fix anything.
> telling maintainers how to act will not fix anything. That depends. In this case it's good actionable advice that should hopefully lower cognitive load. Politely suggest a fork, then if the nagging persists block and move on. Sure if you're in a position of authority you have a responsibility to the community but cutting ties with a stranger who is flagrantly violating social norms is perfectly acceptable. There's…
Relying on maintainers to always do the right thing to ensure our security by telling them what to do is not the way.
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> Bad title. This isn't an agent "running amok", this is an early experiment in carrying out an Xz attack by using an agent So still an agent running amok in the project? Whether it was instructed to run amok, or did it on its own volition, is irrelevant. Except if you're arguing that each individual submission and interaction was individually requested and approved by some operator.
Would you say, “Automobile run amok in crowd, killing 22”? I think you’d say, “Person drives car into crowd, killing 12” instead. This is a similar case. Also, you don’t blame a gun for killing, but the person who pulled the trigger. The question is still out as to whether we as humans should wield any of those three things. Edit: let’s not get into ideological arguments about gun control, automobiles, etc here; I me…
>Car plows into Christmas market in Germany, killing at least 5 and injuring 200
> replied to objections with LLM-generated justifications that eventually overwhelmed the maintainer into merging the fix In open source projects i participate in, "overwhelming" the maintainer gets you banned. It doesn't get your patches blindly merged. In some ways i find this one of the most shocking parts of the story.
As a "new" maintainer myself - how do you decide when to ban someone? I sometimes feel overwhelmed and I can feel a big uptick in huge PRs with huge LLM written descriptions but often I also don't want to be an asshole to my community & reject all their changes.
"This doesn't meet the standards of our project for reason xyz. Please refrain from submitting further PRs that do not adhere to our contribution guidelines outlined in CONTRIBUTING.md."
If they continue, ban them.
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> telling maintainers how to act will not fix anything. That depends. In this case it's good actionable advice that should hopefully lower cognitive load. Politely suggest a fork, then if the nagging persists block and move on. Sure if you're in a position of authority you have a responsibility to the community but cutting ties with a stranger who is flagrantly violating social norms is perfectly acceptable. There's…
I don't really think it's actionable. It's like all those campaigns trying to steer behavior, pretty useless. Don't do drugs. Don't speed. Don't drink and drive. You can't just tell people something and expect it to happen. You need systems and guard rails in place. Relying on maintainers to always do the right thing to ensure our security by telling them what to do is not the way.
The advice is actionable because it is a concrete change that could be made. I believe it to be relevant to the context because someone in a position of authority who is badgered into accepting something would most likely benefit from reevaluating how he is interacting with the general public.