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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"

#501

Post by newswasboring »

Barrin92 wrote: post #494
newswasboring wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are equating governance failures with technological ones. At one hand you are asking me to prove how technology like writing or cars are useful but on the other hand you are bemoaning people's declining reading abilities. What even is your point?

that's not what I said at all. I pointed out that there are technologies that facilitate human development, and there are technologies that stunt and replace it, say a car. What I was asking was is: If it's true as you say that we have replaced our atrophied skills with other ones, what are some of those, or technologies that facilitate them? Be that governmental, social or otherwise. Because we have a decline in rea…

Bro we recently saw the trailer for GTA 6. I personally work on machines which have to compensate for relativistic effects of individual photons in real time. I am not sure how else to prove that we are doing more advanced in making software systems.

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

#502

Post by bodge5000 »

asveikau wrote: post #319
bodge5000 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine, really nice guy, is training as a lawyer at the moment. He has zero interest in law or justice, but heard that lawyers make a lot of money. Not too long about, programming went through a very similar phase. To be clear its not that I think programmers or lawyers shouldn't make good money, they absolutely should and it is deserved, its just it has the unfortunate side effect of attracting people who…

> really nice guy, is training as a lawyer at the moment. He has zero interest in law or justice, but heard that lawyers make a lot of money. Sorry to say this, but he doesn't sound like a nice guy.

I can say with a great degree of certainty that I know him better than you would from half a paragraph. Would you like to think that someone would judge your character from so little?

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

#503

Post by fluidcruft »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #498
fluidcruft wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly can ask it to produce a verifiable report that tells you how to verify its claims. Yes, you do need to verify the results and confirm you agree with it. I do this sort of thing a lot to discover misunderstandings Claude has about things and iterating on them. There's a difference between reading everything yourself vs having a discussion where one of you (Claude) will happily dig through everything and…

Really? Verifiable, really? If you ask it 3 times to generate 3 verifiable reports that confirm its claims, will it answer with the same process and same answers each time? See, when you ask a human to justify a result or a decision, they can often do this very meticulously. If a judge writes a decision from the bench, or a firefighter describes how his battalion knocked down an apartment fire, or a systems admin des…

Are you under the impression that if you ask two programmers to solve the same problem, you will receive the same code or design from both?

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

#504

Post by sarchertech »

Loughla wrote: post #490
sarchertech wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well historically the consensus was that it was harder to read code than to write it, but that leads to uncomfortable conclusions these days, so that bit of common wisdom has mostly been ejected. > I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts? I’m not trying to be mean, but this comment is basically “I have no experience with this topic, but it can just be boiled down to this one simple question right?”

I don't think that's being mean at all, and it's valid. Yes that's literally why I asked it. Simple questions, here, regularly elicit long form explanations. I was interested in this topic and have no experience. So I thought I'd try a broad overview type question to see if I could learn something today.

I think I read it as a bit more flippant than you meant it because it was worded assuming the answer was yes.

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

#505

Post by asveikau »

bodge5000 wrote: post #502
asveikau wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> really nice guy, is training as a lawyer at the moment. He has zero interest in law or justice, but heard that lawyers make a lot of money. Sorry to say this, but he doesn't sound like a nice guy.

I can say with a great degree of certainty that I know him better than you would from half a paragraph. Would you like to think that someone would judge your character from so little?

I would not study law with no interest in justice, being motivated by megabucks. This is sociopathic.

People judge me for less all the time and I usually don't care.

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

#506

Post by bmurphy1976 »

tdrz wrote: post #417
bfgeek wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue that open source projects are facing at the moment is that it takes significantly less effort to submit a patch for review. A lot of developers who are submitting these AI patches don't necessarily understand the patch, so the onus is on the reviewer/code-owner. The reviewers are getting swamped (some reviewers are receiving 100s or patches per month). If feedback is provided at lot of the time the patch au…

I'm an OSS maintainer and to me it's not just about the review itself. Being greeted by a wall of text for every little small thing is counter-productive. I hate going through 2 pages of text for each PR. It usually shouldn't take more than a couple of sentences if you understand the issue and the solution. But most important for me: lots of time the PR just adds even more code, although other options do exist (ie so…

How do you handle them? I'm not facing this problem as the team I work with is very senior and have good taste and discipline. But I can imagine it will be a problem at some point, and I frequently have to personally tell Claude to rewrite it's vomit in English. That's probably step one for people submitting poorly written PRs, reject them until they are written clearly and concisely. And if they are too big, also rejecting them and telling them to go back to the drawing board and submit smaller more focused change. But I'm not int his position so I'm taking an educated guess.

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

#507

Post by bmurphy1976 »

othmanosx wrote: post #493
embedding-shape wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, the SaaS-less approach, if a issue description is too messy/long, close it with "Please reopen with proper and concise description focusing on the issue" then lock it. Eventually people catch up and stop with the slop, just like in real life. But you have to be able to say "No ...", rather than just slapping another subscription on top of an already broken workflow.

If you're maintaining OSS, that's understandable, and you're free to say no, but in the corporate world, that's not realistic, AI is here to stay, if they don't harness it they would just be left behind. even if the AI gets good and stops writing sloppy stuff, it's still gonna write a lot of stuff, and you're gonna review it anyway, and take responsibility and ownership, and it's still gonna take you more time, becau…

That's not true at all of the corporate world. If your team is mass producing slop and you don't have processes in place to get it under control, you've got a big problem on your hand.

If any engineer sent me a 20,000 line refactor I'd immediately reject it and tell them to go back and start making changes incrementally at minimum. More likely I'd force them to have a whole design discussion with the team to make sure that what they are doing even makes sense.

What happens if they push out slop that significantly increases your infrastructure costs? What happens if they push out slop that significantly increases the number of bugs or outages? What happens if they push out slop that has no observational metrics, dashboards, or tooling?

In every case you push back on the team and make them fix their shit. I don't care if they are using LLMs or not. They are responsible for their work being sufficient quality. If they aren't meeting those standards, then they need to step it up.

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