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PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

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Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#131

Post by imrehg »

I value Open Source very highly, and enjoy contributing. Fix a bug here, add a small feature there, most OSS projects have low hanging opportunities. And these days, to "switch off" from my at-work code, try to do more OSS contribution as well.

What I see instead, really, is that most projects no longer, or very rarely look at any contribution, and e.g. any issue + PR/MR combo I make, has a much higher chance of never being looked at and some bot just closes it. Even though the rest of the project might be actually quite active.

It takes some getting used to, apparently being filed together with the "noise", when I try to go out of my way to be as much "signal" as possible. But well, if I really wanted to, I can just run my own changes locally, that's the beauty of OSS, but I hope we can get to some more balanced place over time (being forever the optimist).

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#132

Post by [deleted] »

Orphis wrote: post #37
runarberg wrote: post #3

AI agents who review the slop created by other AI agents is not the answer here. I much prefer a blanket ban on PRs and issues created by AI agents (which is what I personally do for my repos; so far I have closed one[1]). In fact I would love a github alternative which considers AI contributions to be a breach of their terms of use and ban any people who let AI agents loose on their platform. 1: https://github.com/r…

But what about the good AI driven contributions though? Do you categorize all AI changes as slop by default or only the real bad ones that mix refactoring and tons of other unrelated changes with a fix? Some can fix real issues, with a well targeted fix (not rewriting the world), well defined test and write up. If you accepted PRs before for other issues, you should be able to review and accept those too.

[deleted]

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#133

Post by benj111 »

mlyle wrote: post #112
benj111 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. They were paying full price, I specifically checked. I mean the junkies could just use the money they didn't spend buying food to buy drugs. I'm not entirely sure this isn't just an extension of people feeling like they're doing a good thing rather than actually doing a good thing. And that's assuming a meaningful proportion of food bank users are actually junkies.

I'm not saying that food banks never pay full price for food-- I'm sure it happens some. But for the most part food banks pay way below market rate. But, for example, if you make a >$100 donation to Second Harvest Food Bank (i.e. so that transactional costs are small), each 50 cents becomes a distributed meal. Note that they collect a few additional cents from the partner charity that is distributing the meal. OTOH,…

Well this food bank does. So it would be silly to claim otherwise :-p.

I'm not saying all food banks should just do vouchers. I'm saying that if you're at the point of paying retail prices, you may as well give someone a voucher rather than spending time, effort and money on a tin of beans that a person doesn't even like.

The point of my example is that they could pretty easily do better for those that they're trying to help, but that would involve doing less themselves. Which demonstrates that it isn't all about helping others, it's about demonstrating that your helping others.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#134

Post by onel »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #13
Retr0id wrote: post #2

Maybe we should cut out the middle-man and make it easy for people to donate token credits to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide how to use them.

Like this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48621645

I went over their website in the description and I'm still finding it hard to understand how they work. Do contributors fund the pool that then pays for API cost of using a model?

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#135

Post by flyingshelf »

j2kun wrote: post #4

In my main project we added a new requirement that all new contributors meet a maintainer in a non-textual format before their first PR is merged. Seems to work well for a small project.

I contribute to OSS substantially and my GitHub project has 150000 active users (users, not stars). Yet, I would not call you up just to send a PR to your project.

It's sad that it has come to this and to me it just means OSS is dead.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#136

Post by junon »

Retr0id wrote: post #2

Maybe we should cut out the middle-man and make it easy for people to donate token credits to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide how to use them.

Ah yes, the for-profit companies that trained their commercial models off of all our open source code from the last 50 years need more money from us.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#137

Post by Grimblewald »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #122
guidoiaquinti wrote: post #55

GitHub just recently added configurable PR limits for maintainers to help partially address this problem: https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/how-pull-request...

> At OpenClaw we get a huge volume of pull requests from the community and had to build our own bots for fighting spam. I find it ironic that the people who originate the idea of AI-code-spam are being negatively impacted by this. But all they will do is build an AI agent to review the code written by an AI agent, that probably never needed to be written to begin with.

A real leopards ate my face moment

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#138

Post by Beigale »

cheald wrote: post #24
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source contributions being a great way to learn and to pad out your CV has been considered good advice on all sides of the various seas I’ve lived throughout my career too - it’s not just a dubious code camp thing.

A robust open source profile is my single favorite hiring profile indicator. However, with the current state of things, if I get a whiff of AI-driven "contribution" it becomes an instant black mark against the candidate.

[flagged]

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#139

Post by Beigale »

parliament32 wrote: post #36
runarberg wrote: post #3

AI agents who review the slop created by other AI agents is not the answer here. I much prefer a blanket ban on PRs and issues created by AI agents (which is what I personally do for my repos; so far I have closed one[1]). In fact I would love a github alternative which considers AI contributions to be a breach of their terms of use and ban any people who let AI agents loose on their platform. 1: https://github.com/r…

I would kill for an LLM-free platform. Personally I just stopped accepting public contributions entirely. File issues, sure, but no PRs apart from accounts I added who have contributed before the slopageddon started. Maybe the whole web-of-trust idea will make a comeback for code contributions, it seems like a clean solution.

web of trust is already quietly back, just informal. the PRs i actually merge now come from people i know from discord or a mutual. cold drive-by contributions went to near-zero acceptance. same thing happened to hiring at the same time, same mechanism: the open funnel stopped carrying information so we rebuilt the referral network. on the same note though, if i would like to create a software vision with all designed architecture and tickets, i wouldn't mind public contributions. why not? helping each other.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#140

Post by Beigale »

j2kun wrote: post #4

In my main project we added a new requirement that all new contributors meet a maintainer in a non-textual format before their first PR is merged. Seems to work well for a small project.

i do a lighter version on a small repo. first-time contributors get a "what problem were you hitting?" question before i look at the diff. genuine ones answer in two sentences. the spam PRs either go silent or paste back something that doesn't match their own changes and too long. even those with em dash terminator are still easy to spot. it costs 30 seconds and filters almost everything. a proper profile is also a must. i mean, we can all spot fake facebook pages. i believe we can spot auto generated github profiles. and if their bot is actually good? why not? fix
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