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Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

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Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#131
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You're a human, who went through real life experiences. You learned, developed as a human being. You made mistakes and grew from them. You did what you have to do to advance. What you output has intrinsic value because of all this. I argue that even when you roll your face on your keyboard, the output is more valuable than ten pages of slop output from an LLM, since it's human, with all the history, experience, e…

I don't know why this got downvoted. I've already been so frustrated by HN LIDAR mindsets but holy shit. Human society exists because we value humans, full stop. The easiest way to "solve" all of humanity's problems is to simply say that humans aren't valuable. Sometimes it feels like we're conceding a ridiculous amount of ground on that basic principle every year - one more human value gone because it "doesn't matte…

> I don't know why this got downvoted. I've already been so frustrated by HN LIDAR mindsets but holy shit

The extreme sides (proponents, opponents) are clear, opposites, and fight each other. More nuanced takes get buried as droplets in a bucket. Likely a goal.

> Human society exists because we value humans, full stop.

Call me cynic, but I do not believe every human being agrees with this sentiment. From HR acting as if humans are resources, to human beings being dehumanized as workers, civilians, cannon fodder, and... well, the product. Every time human rights are violated, and we do not stand up to it, we lose.

I have a very simple question as human right: the right for a human being to know the other side is a human being yes or no, and if not: to speak gratis (no additional fee allowed) to a human being instead. Futhermore, ML must always cite the used sources, and ML programmer is responsible for mistake. This would increase insurance costs so much, that LLM's in public would die, but SLM's could thrive.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#132

My two cents: I've been coding practically my entire life, but a few years back I sustained a pretty significant and lasting injury to my wrists. As such, I have very little tolerance for typing. It's been quite a problem and made full time work impossible. With the advent of LLMs, AI-autocomplete, and agent-based development workflows, my ability to deliver reliable, high-quality code is restored and (arguably) bett…

Putting aside the specifics for a second, I'm sorry to hear about your injury and glad you've found workarounds. I also think high-quality voice transcription might end up being a big thing for my health (there's no way typing as much as I do, in the positions I do, is good).

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#133
The website is absolutely atrocious, dark mode has pitch-black background with bold 100% white glowing text in foreground, shitty font, way to wide text.

Seriously how is lwn.net even still so popular with such an atrocious unreadable ugly website. Well yes I get the irony of asking that on HN (I use an extension to make it better).

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#135

My two cents: I've been coding practically my entire life, but a few years back I sustained a pretty significant and lasting injury to my wrists. As such, I have very little tolerance for typing. It's been quite a problem and made full time work impossible. With the advent of LLMs, AI-autocomplete, and agent-based development workflows, my ability to deliver reliable, high-quality code is restored and (arguably) bett…

> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place. That doesn't address the controversy because you are a reasonable person assuming that other people using AI are reasonable like you, and know h…

>other people are reasonable like you

No AI needed. Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet. And for this I'll define unreasonable as "committing an action they would not want committed back at them".

AI here is the final nail in the coffin that many sysadmins have been dealing with for decades. And that is that unreasonable actors are a type of asymmetric warfare on the internet, specifically the global internet, because with some of these actors you have zero recourse. AI moved this from moderately drowning in crap to being crushed under an ocean of it.

Going to be interesting to see how human systems deal with this.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#136
post #38

I think it's a complicated issue. A lot of low quality AI contributions arrive using free tiers of these AI models, the output of which is pretty crap. On the other hand, if you max out the model configs, i.e. get "the best money can buy", then those models are actually quite useful and powerful. OSS should not miss out on the power LLMs can unleash. Talking about the maxed out versions of the newest models only, i.e…

It's the difference between raw LLM output vs LLM output that was tweaked, reviewed and validated by a competent developer. Both can look like the same exact type of AI-generated code. But one is a broken useless piece of shit and the other actually does what it claims to do. The problem is just how hard it is to differentiate the two at a glance.

> It's the difference between raw LLM output vs LLM output that was tweaked, reviewed and validated by a competent developer.

This is one of those areas where you might have been right.. 4-6 months ago. But if you're paying attention, the floor has moved up substantially.

For the work I do, last year the models would occasionally produce code with bugs, linter errors, etc, now the frontier models produce mostly flawless code that I don't need to review. I'll still write tests, or prompt test scenarios for it but most of the testing is functional.

If the exponential curve continues I think everyone needs to prepare for a step function change. Debian may even cease to be relevant because AI will write something better in a couple of hours.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#137

Concerns about the wasting of maintainer’s time, onboarding, or copyright, are of great interest to me from a policy perspective. But I find some of the debate around the quality of AI contributions to be odd. Quality should always be the responsibility of the person submitting changes. Whether a person used LLMs should not be a large concern if someone is acting in good-faith. If they submitted bad code, having used…

The real invariant is responsibility: if you submit a patch, you own it. You should understand it, be able to defend the design choices, and maintain it if needed

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#139

My question on AI generated contributions and content in general: on a long enough timeline, with ever improving advancements in AI, how can people reliably tell the difference between human and AI generated efforts? Sure now it is easy, but in 3-10 years AI will get significantly better. It is a lot like the audio quality of an MP3 recording. It is not perfect (lossless audio is better), but for the majority of user…

The system works because responsibility sits with the submitter

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#140
In some sense, I think the promise of free software is more real today than before because everyone else's software is replicable for relatively cheap. That's probably a much stronger situation for individual freedom to replicate and run code than in the era of us relying on copyright.
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