71–80 of 142 posts
I built a tool that monitors commits and tries to detect silent bug fixes. With GPT-5.5-class models, it can identify fixes hidden within otherwise routine commits quite reliably. Obfuscating the code changes enough to avoid detection is difficult. I have heard of at least one project (c-lightning?) temporarily releasing a closed-source binary as a workaround until users could update safely.
I built a tool that monitors commits and tries to detect silent bug fixes. With GPT-5.5-class models, it can identify fixes hidden within otherwise routine commits quite reliably. Obfuscating the code changes enough to avoid detection is difficult. I have heard of at least one project (c-lightning?) temporarily releasing a closed-source binary as a workaround until users could update safely.
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I feel like someone somewhere is working on an opensource GPU compute resource pool you guys could pull from as part of a donation type framework. I got a bunch of local gpu resources just relaxing, and if I could load up a a binary to provide compute for X hours a day overnight or whatever, that'd be cool.
http://github.com/buzz/block is quickly becoming a reasonable approach to shared agent compute, though it's still a bit more hands-on than the older 'compute donation' projects like SETI or Folding@Home.
It's easier to find bugs, fix them, yet there's less will than ever. My bosses just want speed and will give me a 30 minute lecture on why I don't need to solve a bug that Claude solved in 5 minutes, I've verified, and it's already in an open PR. All the while we're pushing out bugs faster and faster. No matter how good AI gets at fixing bugs we'll never fix them when there's no will to fix things. Software will neve…
Most places I've worked have been infuriatingly uninterested in fixing bugs, and would release software with major known bugs and a vague plan to fix them later. Of course, when "later" came, there were more features to cram. No time to fix those bugs. I'm hoping one of the unintended side effect of it being essentially free to find and exploit (and fix) software bugs is that companies become less cavalier about ship…
This describes my life as an open source maintainer at the moment! In the first 10 years of the rclone project we received about 20 security disclosures through GitHub. We had to deal with over 40 in the last month! That has taken a huge amount of my time, even using AI tools to triage and come up with fixes for review. The hit rate for those security disclosures is pretty good - about 75% of them have a nugget of so…
Thank you for making and maintaining rclone. It is truly a blessing.
I can't express in polite words how pathetic it is to see the only official blob storage bulk transfer CLI tool from a multi-trillion-dollar company fail to do the simplest, most essential functionality after ten major revisions.
Meanwhile, rclone Just Works(tm).
Thank you from me too!
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!!! You described my experience in the workforce to a t! So frustrating that tech managers look at tech debt as a thing to be maintained at a certain level instead of allowing us to achieve perfection
Well, that goes with the metaphor. Debt is not an intrinsically bad thing, and most people agree on that: countries run deficits, people get mortgages and millionaires trade on leverage.
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Did CrowdStrike actually suffer? That was a huge outage and their stock is today at an all time high. Seems like no one actually cares. Neither the companies providing the software, the companies purchasing the software, nor the markets. To me, this is the craziest part about all of it. Why doesn't anyone seem to care?
Why would they suffer? They showcased that they were big enough to disrupt the global economy. Why _wouldn't_ you invest in something so big and powerful? This is the same as when junkies specifically seek batches of drugs on which others overdosed.
No mention of memory safe languages? Sure, it does not help existing projects, and sure, of course you can still have logic bugs (or memory bugs using escape hatches like unsafe). But they do help significantly in reducing the number of exploitable bugs.
Yeah, but there's already plenty written on that topic elsewhere; the OP is making a distinctly different point and everything else in it still applies, I think. Even if you are using a memory safe language -- if you are developing security sensitive software, you need to understand that exploits can now be researched, developed, and deployed in hours (or for stupid bugs, minutes!) instead of days or weeks or months.…
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Most places I've worked have been infuriatingly uninterested in fixing bugs, and would release software with major known bugs and a vague plan to fix them later. Of course, when "later" came, there were more features to cram. No time to fix those bugs. I'm hoping one of the unintended side effect of it being essentially free to find and exploit (and fix) software bugs is that companies become less cavalier about ship…
Bugs are a choice by managers, not developers.
We've all seen developers who game the system. They hide the bugs just enough so checked out management doesn't see them. They convince themselves that those bugs don't matter, even when they trip over them later. They get rewarded because they appear to move fast, eventually become management, and the whole thing gets worse as time goes on.
It's a structural problem. Yes, the level of influence is higher the higher up in the org chart you go, but there is still "power" at every level. Even the most junior developer has power. The worst thing we can do is become apathetic, shrugging it off, saying "well what can we do?" That attitude is one of many factors that got us to this point. Importantly, it is a factor we actually can influence.
That's why I object to it. Not because I think it is going to solve the problem overnight, but because it is a thing we have some power over. And it is a very different situation when one engineer in a team is vocalizing "our software has issues" while most of the team silently agrees vs several members of the team simply vocalizing agreement. There's no magic single variable fix to problems like these, but we got here because a bunch of little problems added up. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the way to solve it is through solving a bunch of little problems. Each seems insignificant in isolation, but they accumulate
It's easier to find bugs, fix them, yet there's less will than ever. My bosses just want speed and will give me a 30 minute lecture on why I don't need to solve a bug that Claude solved in 5 minutes, I've verified, and it's already in an open PR. All the while we're pushing out bugs faster and faster. No matter how good AI gets at fixing bugs we'll never fix them when there's no will to fix things. Software will neve…
Something that might come out of all of this is that companies that previously slow rolled security fixes will now be forced to fix them quickly, because the speed of AI and the liability of being insecure.