91–100 of 162 posts
I've submitted PRs for typos in the (pre-LLM) past, not to boost my GH profile, but because I thought I was being helpful. Guess I was wrong...
Scale matters. If people do it, it's maybe 10 PRs like that per month. With AI there could be hundreds per day.
Hi Neil, fun to see you on HN. I agree with your points and I you summarized it very well as "Ultimately, open source is built on trust". AI is destroying trust in open source and many other areas and I think this will discourage teams from publishing their source code in the future. On the other hand, personal connections are becoming even more important, which is unfair to the younger generation and people who don'…
Today's conception of open source is different from the original anyway. It used to be "we made this thing, here's the code" but now it's turned into some kind of weird parasocial thing more akin to Facebook.
I didn't agree with your comment when I glanced through it, but then further ahead in the discussion I stumbled upon a whole thread of people commenting that PRs generated by AI coding assistants are strealing merit, and even posters talking about the need to tell apart AI PRs from AI-free PRs with proof of work schemes just to feed the merit angle.
Crazy times we live in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This isn't zero sum. True, it is actually negative sum, because fake merit erodes trust in real merit, as it makes it a lot harder to spot the latter.
I think Goodhart's law applies really well here. When people make commits for the sake of having made a commit to some famous repo, the "merit" that a commit measures is already useless. Remember Hacktoberfest 2020, before LLMs were popular? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
Ironically this seems like a perfect use for AI from the maintaner side. "Find low-effort/AI-like PR's without associated issues from new contributors. Discuss with the contributors in the PR about how contributions should be made, then reject their PR's. If any bad behavior is detected in this interaction, block the accounts for 24 hours and add them to a list of accounts to review for permanent banning from the pro…
Bots don't understand how their words can hurt people's feelings, and can even less understand that talking to a LLM is even more sad/infuriating for actual humans. I can handle CI/tests just fine, but LLMs playing on my human emotions will have me swearing in no time.
I contribute to free software projects because i want user control over the machine (that was the idea, long before LLMs). Slopware might technically be FLOSS, but it's certainly not in the spirit of FLOSS.
Open source contribution on github specifically is no longer about building and maintaining something, its a parasocial signal that has more in common with linkedin hustle bloggers.
Ironically this seems like a perfect use for AI from the maintaner side. "Find low-effort/AI-like PR's without associated issues from new contributors. Discuss with the contributors in the PR about how contributions should be made, then reject their PR's. If any bad behavior is detected in this interaction, block the accounts for 24 hours and add them to a list of accounts to review for permanent banning from the pro…
Since AI makes it easier for incompetent people to look smart, AI can help us expose those people for what they are.
Do recruiters actually care about your open source contributions? Especially now when only LLMs read CVs and match them against strict criteria, I doubt there are many companies that actually care about your work outside of work, in fact they might care in opposite direction - thinking that you'll be distracted from work
Just speculating (I use zero automation when recruiting), but automated candidate ranking systems could well still look for signals that were valuable years ago, but no longer are. It's not a given that people using this stuff even understand the criteria under the hood. Same story as SEO, I presume. Google surely understood their ranking criteria deeply, yet couldn't exactly win that fight.
There weren't that many with high ranking. I could filter out most of them in like a week of working normally and just right clicking them with the blacklist extension in Firefox.
Nowadays it is probably harder though when Google have broken the internet culture.
I've submitted PRs for typos in the (pre-LLM) past, not to boost my GH profile, but because I thought I was being helpful. Guess I was wrong...
Scale matters. If people do it, it's maybe 10 PRs like that per month. With AI there could be hundreds per day.
Ironically this seems like a perfect use for AI from the maintaner side. "Find low-effort/AI-like PR's without associated issues from new contributors. Discuss with the contributors in the PR about how contributions should be made, then reject their PR's. If any bad behavior is detected in this interaction, block the accounts for 24 hours and add them to a list of accounts to review for permanent banning from the pro…
I think the idea of leveraging AI to find useless PRs is right. I didn’t like the second part though where it starts banning people for “bad behavior”. I get that AI resistance will be a thing in the next few years, but realistically engineers who plan on being around for the next 20-30 years just need to embrace it instead of being sour about it. Because of machines, things have arguably improved for humanity as a w…
That's a very narrow view of the situation. I agree that this side of the coin exists, but there's also the other side where drinkable tap water is becoming a luxury in much of the global North, giant tornadoes and fires are sweeping the Earth, and temperatures are growing out of control.
So, to make lives more comfortable with machines for some millions of privileged people, they triggered the 6th mass extinction. That's the other side of the coin.
My big hope for LLM coding is that it will finally force us to focus on minimizing the amount of code that is out there instead of ever producing more.