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PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

greptile.com

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Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#81
post #53
post #2

Maybe we should cut out the middle-man and make it easy for people to donate token credits to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide how to use them.

Maybe we should cut out the middle man and make it easy for people to donate money to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide whether to use them on tokens or hosting or developer salaries or something else.

Let them eat tokens.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#84
It's not at all like e-mail spam. Vast majority of contributors made a change useful for themselves that they wish to share with others. It's better to think of this as an influx of new programmers or existing programmers picking up new domains. They can be taught to use coding agents better and are likely to stick with projects that facilitate this rather than shutting them out. Maybe it's best for everyone. Let Linux kernel be super locked down to l33t contributors only and let alternative OSes that nobody paid attention to before gain new developers.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#86

If anyone is interested in what it was like fighting spam in the early 2000s, I worked for a company that captured spam, analyzed it and then passed the analysis s on to the law firms of the big email providers for targeting under CAN-SPAM. Twitter thread about it below but happy to do a AMA here. https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1208948480867127296?s=20

Ironically one of the first recognizable spam campaigns was perpetrated by lawyers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

On the flip side, the lawyers that represented the big tech firms at the time were some of the most impressive people I've ever met.

You could speak to them as a peer when it came to technical issues or system architecture AND they were experts in technology law. Especially impressive given that anti-spam was still in it's infancy and rapidly evolving.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#87
post #65
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is altruism entirely about self interest? I'm not saying that to take away from it, but people do things to feel good, or because they get something out of it. Either way you are being rewarded. This explains plenty of bizarre outcomes. I was speaking to a guy who worked at a food bank. They would take cash donations, buy food at full price at the supermarket, then have volunteers (in a paid for space) pack up boxes.…

The majority of food banks get discounted supplies. They seldom pay full retail price. In some cases I know about, distributors and retailers will sell older perishable stock to food banks when they don't think they can move it quickly enough. The trouble with food vouchers is that junkies trade them for drugs. Vouchers are more "liquid" than physical food.

No. They were paying full price, I specifically checked.

I mean the junkies could just use the money they didn't spend buying food to buy drugs. I'm not entirely sure this isn't just an extension of people feeling like they're doing a good thing rather than actually doing a good thing. And that's assuming a meaningful proportion of food bank users are actually junkies.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#88

GitHub just recently added configurable PR limits for maintainers to help partially address this problem: https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/how-pull-request...

> Draft pull requests will not count towards your limit.

Disappointing, it seems that those also need limits too, although the limit could be higher.

I could easily see the limit for PRs be at 1 for untrusted contributors, and drafts at 3-5.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#89
post #53
post #2

Maybe we should cut out the middle-man and make it easy for people to donate token credits to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide how to use them.

Maybe we should cut out the middle man and make it easy for people to donate money to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide whether to use them on tokens or hosting or developer salaries or something else.

Prompting an AI, and carefully reviewing its output is work, and time consuming. The goal is to get high-quality PRs, not SPAM PRs.
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