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PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

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Re: PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

#181

Post by Aurornis »

Person 1 finds an exploit the old fashioned way. Keeps it secret because they’re doing some PS5 Linux work and want to keep it unpatched until GTA6 releases in 2 weeks. I don’t have a PS5 but I assume new games might require a firmware update to play?

Person 2 uses an LLM and finds the same exploit.

Person 1 asks Person 2 not to report it and collect the bounty until GTA6 is released. Person 2 agrees.

Person 3 also finds the same exploit independently.

Person 2 discovers that Person 3 has found the exploit. Person 2 decides the cat is out of the bag and submits it to Sony while they still have a chance.

Now the community is angry that Person 2 didn’t sacrifice the bounty. PS5 Linux effort seemingly falls apart in response? Departing developer directs community to be angry at Person 2, who is taking time away to be with their critically ill mother.

Honestly I can’t blame Person 2. They earned the bounty and played by the rules of the bounty program. The PS5 Linux dev who abandoned the project and started deleting things is entitled to do so, but blaming Person 2 for the crash out is too much.

Re: PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

#182

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

kanzure wrote: post #121
GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

completely different world, but i've seen this happen in music spaces as well. the idea of gatekeeping is often seen as elitist or exclusionary (fairly enough in many cases) but i think this can be an exaggerated description of a culture that necessarily requires a standard of... let's say, desire to engage with material on a sufficiently deep level. many things can be for anybody, but they are not for everybody. in…

While you might have access to the subculture, there is no obligation for anyone else to respond, collaborate or engage with random you. This is a common mistaken understanding about open-source software projects where users often believe they have "rights" to compel or coerce volunteer developers to listen or reply to them. Developers collaborating together isn't a conspiracy, it's just preferences getting played ou…

> While you might have access to the subculture, there is no obligation for anyone else to respond, collaborate or engage with random you.

true, but i think there's historically often been good-faith efforts to engage with newcomers in any field that requires intellectual or artistic curiosity or experimentation. what we're seeing played out is that this default good nature ignores the risk involved in growing a small garden beyond one's own property. there is a change in meta-social requirements at scale.

the extremes of this are super apparent in FOSS - one side of this being death-by-committee and overgovernance at the expense of the original project (requiring a support organization that outgrows the actual "work", for example, look at how many HNers view unions or internal policy committees), and the other side a harsh rejection of newcomers or calcification against new ideas at the expense of the long-term viability of a project. these issues can be imperceptible or not important in smaller projects.

but they're not limited to FOSS. i think these are probably fairly well-studied ideas in any form of organizations - business, social groups, churches, non-profits, unions, etc. i don't really know where to start to learn more about this or what the right approaches are (and i suspect they're often pretty unique to the group in question). i don't have an answer but i'm really interested in the huge grey area between fully-gatekept cultures and fully-open ones.

Re: PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

#183

Post by dmitrygr »

Aurornis wrote: post #181

Person 1 finds an exploit the old fashioned way. Keeps it secret because they’re doing some PS5 Linux work and want to keep it unpatched until GTA6 releases in 2 weeks. I don’t have a PS5 but I assume new games might require a firmware update to play? Person 2 uses an LLM and finds the same exploit. Person 1 asks Person 2 not to report it and collect the bounty until GTA6 is released. Person 2 agrees. Person 3 also f…

> earned the bounty

Yeah, nothing like the hard work of typing "look at this binary and find a bug" The sweat, the tears it must have taken!

Re: PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

#184

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #45
eugenekolo wrote: post #29

Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people. It's definitely become a game of just spam claude for answers with zero understanding or care for how anything actually works. That's fine to get things done and fine for a lot of side projects, but it definitely ruins the joy that people have in understanding systems and working with intellectuals.

In general, society is experience a decoupling of fun from work. I can't say I enjoy every aspect of my job, but it's nice to enjoy some of it, and lots of people do find a lot of their job at least somewhat rewarding. People who hate their job of course like to come out of the woodwork and say no one should enjoy it, but isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people can enjoy their work? I used to enjoy…

Us techies have taken the fun out of a lot of professions with the tools we are developing and selling. I guess it was only a matter of time until we killed the fun in our profession.

Re: PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

#185

Post by ssl-3 »

BrtByte wrote: post #155
ssl-3 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now imagine how many other devs and maintainers are contemplating this but just haven't been pushed to their personal breaking point yet. or take note of how many, when asked about the spam problem, just nervously go "yeah it's kinda rough haha..." At first, my brain parsed "spam" as in ye olde email spam. It took a moment for it to sink in that you meant code spam, instead. But now that the two concepts are linked…

The funny part is that we'd probably recreate the entire email spam arms race

That's OK. Maybe it's even inevitable.

I've been on both sides of the spam arms race at different times of my life. While they'll never be able to claim victory, the good guys (usually!) seem to be winning -- and that's a lot better than accepting defeat.

Re: PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

#186

Post by user43928 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #102
user43928 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern problems require modern solutions. Why not set up a triage bot with only read permissions on the project and restricted network access in order to triage issues? Perhaps this way one could turn the influx of spam into a source of useful information.

These exist. Very elaborate systems in many cases. Otherwise Hermes would probably have 30,000. Like a lot of agent tools they merge a ton of slop though so I wouldn’t consider them leaders.

So, what is the problem then?

Genuine question. Is having a prioritized list of reported issues still not useful in practice?

Re: PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

#187

Post by Shorel »

sva_ wrote: post #33
arnaudsm wrote: post #12

Misleading title, there's another major reason: it's an embargo agreement violation that jeopardizes Linux support on PS5. https://x.com/theflow0/status/2099987019954831744

> The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony. Sounds like he is salty that somebody found an exploit using LLM that he found manually (which probably took a significant amount of time.) I can pa…

No guarantee at all that a new exploit will be found, and even much lower probability that a suitable lead developer will be found. The slop kiddy was just an asshole TBH.

Re: PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

#188

Post by digitalsushi »

My mom sure can hydrate a pizza. My grandma, rest her soul, said mom has no artistry in it. I heard stories that my grandmother worked the dough with her bare hands (ew); it always came out slightly different; more ridiculous, I heard her generation would devote a portion of an entire day (if you can even humor that ridiculous notion) to pizzacraft.

Grandma was always a broken record with that stuff. The family would sit around that table, apparently, gabbing about nothing, and everything, just staring into a raw pizza, pulling and stretching it, starting over, living with their hunger, for a flawed process to bake slowly.

These days, fresh pizza is 10 seconds away, it's always identical and we never have to share. It's hydrated, eaten, and in the trash by the time I am onto my next attention, always perfect, always on time, always identical. I don't think about this much, but I sometimes really feel pity for what the old timers suffered through, all those ridiculous, pointless wasted interactions and delays, sitting there for what felt like ages, for a random pizza shaped thing.

I dont get it.

Re: PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

#189

Post by concinds »

hypfer wrote: post #73
eugenekolo wrote: post #29

Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people. It's definitely become a game of just spam claude for answers with zero understanding or care for how anything actually works. That's fine to get things done and fine for a lot of side projects, but it definitely ruins the joy that people have in understanding systems and working with intellectuals.

> Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people It is insane just how miserable the experience of FOSS hardware hacking in public is. The expectation does not even the slightest match reality. You'd think "ah yes many eyes meaning all bugs get shallow", but instead you get worst of XDA-Developers and toxic wastelands where no sane person even answers…

It's the oldest unsolved problem of the internet: how to attract high-value people and keep out low-value contributors.

Re: PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"

#190

Post by ndiddy »

Aurornis wrote: post #134
eugenekolo wrote: post #29

Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people. It's definitely become a game of just spam claude for answers with zero understanding or care for how anything actually works. That's fine to get things done and fine for a lot of side projects, but it definitely ruins the joy that people have in understanding systems and working with intellectuals.

In my hobby groups there has always been a second, smaller, more intimate invite-only space for people doing the deep work. It’s the only way to do the work in the age of 1000-member Discords where important conversations get lost in the scroll back instantly. The experience in these spaces is largely the same. LLMs can be used there, too, but when the experts are using them with experience to back it up the results…

> This PS5 incident has some strange element where supposedly keeping the reveal secret for 2 more weeks would have changed something with the GTA6 release.

Well it's that GTA 6 comes out in mid-November, so he wanted to wait until then to release the exploit so people could legally run GTA 6 on their hacked PS5s. Disclosing the exploit before the release means that they'll patch it before GTA 6 comes out so this is no longer an option.

I think this is unrelated because it happened after theflow0's statement, but Sony just released a major PS5 update that significantly increases the PS5's security ahead of GTA 6's release. Apparently it's impossible to rip games now without a hypervisor exploit, and since the last one just got reported to Sony this means that even people with hacked PS5s on old firmwares won't be able to pirate GTA 6 because nobody will be able to rip it. https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5_Jailbreak/comments/1wi0gpx/its_...

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