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Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

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Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#81

I hope it works out better than Microsoft and using it on Windows 11...

Source? The rumor is the opposite, that Microsoft has actually used AI to discover and fix common security issues at scale.

Those are 2 different questions. They wouldn't even be the same people involved.

Your appsec engineers will be the ones bug hunting with Mythos or whatever. Your regular engineers will be the ones implementing features. If the feature is a bad design and functions badly as a result, that is entirely orthogonal to whether it contains coding errors or bugs.

Also, there are bugs on the integration side that won't be caught running Mythos against source code, because it's not a source code issue. Even using Mythos for DAST is going to be very limited compared to how actual users will move through something as complex as a 'mature' OS like Windows.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#82
post #43

New policy boils down to "AI or not, it's still your code and you're responsible for it". I can get on board with that.

A good thing about the "you're the author regardless of the tool you used to produce the code" policy is that if a developer repeatedly submits poor quality AI generated code, one does not blame the model or the agent, one bans/terminates the developer.

What stops them from submitting PRs from another account?

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#83
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. I personally know people, people whom I know for a fact were good programmers before, who have now completely stopped using their brains. When you ask them why they did something in the code, they say "I don't know, Claude did that and I didn't really question it". There was no such analogous phenomenon with IDEs.

They're not dumb. They just don't care. They didn't before either. Now they just have an easy excuse.

Completely wrong generalization.

I'm a person who is over-reliant on LLMs, doesn't know how most of the things in the codebase work, and is atrophying both in programming and in general cognition.

I used to care, a lot. And I still do.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#85
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. I personally know people, people whom I know for a fact were good programmers before, who have now completely stopped using their brains. When you ask them why they did something in the code, they say "I don't know, Claude did that and I didn't really question it". There was no such analogous phenomenon with IDEs.

IDEs enable us to not bother memorizing the number and order of arguments, long names beyond the first word or two, etc. the impact is comparable, freeing some of the very limited space in our memory for more important things. sure, students and juniors shoot themselves in the dick if they let LLMs do everything, but they're fucked anyway so it doesn't matter,

With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code. I would not say something that helps me remember a function name is comparible.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#86

New policy boils down to "AI or not, it's still your code and you're responsible for it". I can get on board with that.

> it's still your code I wholly agree with your comment, but is it legally "your code"? Copyright is implicit at the moment of human creation. But there isn't yet settled law on AI-assisted creation. So it might be a problem for projects to accept contributions where it's not clear who actually owns that work.

At this point, who could bring a copyright claim? Well, considering the massive AI training effort hoovering everything up, seems it might be approximately everyone.

Who would they be making the claim against? Well, considering the massive uptake of AI across the tech industry & beyond... approximately everyone.

Yes, the model companies are in the middle, but it's getting to the point where it seems a bit doubtful that claims will have any significant outcomes.

NYT might be able to get OpenAI to pay them for their content, but that's more of a financial tweak than a up-ending of industry.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know that Windows 11 has suffered due to the use of genAI or is that just a random snipe?

Either they're using GenAI or the entire team collectively lost their minds and started getting a huge number of colossally bad ideas about fundamental primitives of Windows that hadn't changed for decades. Backwards compatibility used to be the major concern and now it feels like they didn't even know what would break ahead of time. If that doesn't feel like GenAI then I don't know what does

Keep in mind that Microsoft laid-off a large share of their developers shortly before and during the interval the GP talks about.

Repeatedly.

You are right that's one or the other. Probably both are contributing.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can we use this coding tool amidst the general rising tide of fascism?? /s

I've seen people claim that using Claude Code makes you racist. https://bsky.app/profile/boxobark.ing/post/3mtr7j3tpok26

I don't know if they truly believe that persons using CC are racist (like they examined the thing logically from bottom to top and came back with that conclusion) or if it's the new Goodwin --pulling the emergency brakes and damn the consequences.

It's as though people want to find the most dubious of non-existent connections and use that as leverage to besmirch something they don't like.

There are many things one can do where a person has no awareness of the tenuous connection but where you can have someone go back and then ex-post make that connection and declare that thing or person racist. It's a tactic.

Like one _could_ make the argument that factory automation in China is racist because without automation they would have to import labor from (some non-Chinese population). However, the Chinese never began automation with the intention of being racist.

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