Does this apply to upstream packages distributed by Gentoo too? Or just things that the Gentoo project is itself upstream, like emerge?
Gentoo AI Policy
141–150 of 206 posts
Re: Gentoo AI Policy
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being ideologically motivated is not necessarily bad (understanding ideology as a worldview associated with a set of values and priorities). FOSS as a whole is deeply ideologically motivated from its origins. The issue is that there seems to have been a change in the nature of the ideology, leading to some amount of conflict between the older and newer guard.
What change do you mean between older and newer guard?
[deleted]
Re: Gentoo AI Policy
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's no different to on boarding any new contributor. I cringe at the code I put out when I was 18. On top of all that every open source project has a gray hair problem. Telling people excited about a new tech to never contribute makes sure that all projects turn into templeOS when the lead maintainer moves on.
Unrelated to my other point, I absolutely get wanting to lower barriers, but let’s not forget that templeOS was the religious vanity project of someone who could have had a lot to teach us if not for mental health issues that were extant early enough in the roots of the project as to poison the well of knowledge to be found there. And he didn’t just “move on,” he died. While I legitimately do find templeOS to be a fa…
> While I legitimately do find templeOS to be a fascinating project, I don’t think there was anything to learn from it at a computer science level other than “oh look, an opinionated 64-bit operating environment that feels like classical computing and had a couple novel ideas”
I disagree, actually.
I think that his approach has a lot to teach aspiring architects of impossibly large and complex systems, such as "create a suitable language for your use-case if one does not exist. It need not be a whole new language, just a variation of an existing one that smooths out all the rough edges specific to your complex software".
His approach demonstrated very large gains in an unusually complicated product. I can point to projects written in modern languages that come nowhere close to being as high-velocity as his, because his approach was fine-tuned to the use-case of "high-velocity while including only the bare necessities of safety."
Re: Gentoo AI Policy
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of resolved conversation contains a comment "you should warn about incorrect configuration in constructor, look how it is done in some-other-part-of-code." This means that he did not put serious effort into understanding what, when and why others do in a highly structured project like LLVM. He "wrote" the code and then dumped "written" code into community to catch mistakes.
That is normal for a new contributor. You can't reasonably expect knowledge of all the conventions of the project. There has to be effort to produce something good and not overload the maintainers, I agree, but missing such a detail is not a sign that is not happening here.
Every hobby at some point turns into an exclusive, invitation-only club in order to maintain the quality of each individual's contribution, but then old members start to literally die and they're left wondering why the hobby died too. I feel like most people don't understand that any organization that wants to grow needs to sacrifice quality in order to attract new members.
Re: Gentoo AI Policy
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being ideologically motivated is not necessarily bad (understanding ideology as a worldview associated with a set of values and priorities). FOSS as a whole is deeply ideologically motivated from its origins. The issue is that there seems to have been a change in the nature of the ideology, leading to some amount of conflict between the older and newer guard.
What change do you mean between older and newer guard?
That's not something that fits in a comment. The point is, ideology as such, is not something new in this space.
Re: Gentoo AI Policy
#146I don't understand this anti-AI stance. Either the code works and is useful, and it should be accepted, or it doesn't work and it should be rejected. Does it really matter who wrote it?
Because the quality of the code matters more than the raw quantity.
Having code that compiles and runs is the bare minimum - we should (and do) hold ourselves to a higher standard of professionalism.
Re: Gentoo AI Policy
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They know how to ignore a PR if they don't want to review it How well does that scale as the number of such contributions increases and the triage process itself becomes a sizable effort? LLMs can inadvertently create a sort of DDoS even with the best intentions, and mitigating it costs something .
Wait and see, then change the policy based on what actually happens. I sort of doubt that all of a sudden there's going to be tons of people wanting to make complex AI contributions to LLVM, but if there are just ban them at that point.
It has happend to Curl.
Re: Gentoo AI Policy
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using AI to contribute to LLVM, which has a liberal policy. The code is of terrible quality and I am at 100+ comments on my latest PR. That being said, my latest PR is my second-ever to LLVM and is an entire linter check. I am learning far more about compilers at a much faster pace than if I took the "normal route" of tiny bugfixes. I also try to do review passes on my own code before asking for code review…
[flagged]
Your final sentence moved me. Moved to flagging the post, that is.
Re: Gentoo AI Policy
#149Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to…
I've been using AI to contribute to LLVM, which has a liberal policy. The code is of terrible quality and I am at 100+ comments on my latest PR. That being said, my latest PR is my second-ever to LLVM and is an entire linter check. I am learning far more about compilers at a much faster pace than if I took the "normal route" of tiny bugfixes. I also try to do review passes on my own code before asking for code review…
I'm a bit later in my career and I've been involved with modern machine learning for a long time which probably affects my views on this, but I can definitely relate to aspects of it.
I think there are a couple of good signals in what you've said but also some stuff (at least by implication/phrashing) that I would be mindful of.
The reason why I think your head is fundamentally in a good place is that you seem to be shooting for an outcome where already high effort stays high, and with the assistance of the tools your ambition can increase. That's very much my aspiration with it, and I think that's been the play for motivated hackers forever: become as capable as possible as quickly as possible by using every effort and resource. Certainly in my lifetime I've seen things like widely distributed source code in the 90s, Google a little later, StackOverflow indexed by Google, the mega-grep when I did the FAANG thing, and now the language models. They're all related (and I think less impressive/concerning to people who remember pre-SEO Google, that was up there with any LLM on "magic box with reasonable code").
But we all have to self-police on this because with any source of code we don't understand, the abstraction almost always leaks, and it's a slippery slope: you get a little tired or busy or lazy, it slips a bit, next thing you know the diff or project or system is jeopardized, and you're throwing long shots that compound.
I'm sure the reviewers can make their own call about whether you're in an ok place in terms of whether you're making a sincere effort or if you've slipped into the low-integrity zone (LLVM people are serious people), just be mindful that if you want the most out of it and to be welcome on projects and teams generally, you have to keep the gap between ability and scope in a band: pushing hard enough to need the tools and reviewers generous with their time is good, it's how you improve, but go too far and everyone loses because you stop learning and they could have prompted the bot themselves.
Re: Gentoo AI Policy
#150Every time I encounter these kinds of policy, I can't help but wonder how these policies would be enforced: The people who are considerate enough to abide by these policies, are the ones who would have "cared" about the code qualities and stuff like that, so the policy is a moot point for these kinds of people. OTOH, the people who recklessly spam "contributions" generated from LLMs, by their very nature, would not r…
What happened to curl?
The comment is referring to how the curl project is being overwhelmed by low-quality bug/vulnerability reports generated (or partially generated) by AI (“AI slop”), so much so that curl maintainers are now banning reporters who submit such reports and demanding disclosure, because these sloppy reports cost a lot of time and drain the team.
[generated by ChatGPT] Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45217858