171–180 of 507 posts
Would people recommend it? I feel like I have such huge inertia for changing shells at this point that I've rarely seriously considered it.
It should just be $1 to submit PR. If PR is good, maintainer refunds you ;) I noticed the same thing in communication. Communication is now so frictionless, that almost all the communication I receive is low quality. If it cost more to communicate, the quality would increase. But the value of low quality communication is not zero: it is actively harmful, because it eats your time.
But a non-zero cost of communication can obviously also have negative effects. It's interesting to think about where the sweet spot would be. But it's probably very context specific. I'm okay with close people engaging in "low quality" communication with me. I'd love, on the other hand, if politicians would stop communicating via Twitter.
I believe interviewing devs before allowing them to contribute is a good strategy for the upcoming years. Let’s treat future OS contributors the same way companies/startups do when they want to hire new devs.
This adds friction, disincentivizes legitimate and high quality code commits and uses humans even more.
GitHub and LLMs have reduced the friction to the point where it's overwhelming human reviewers. Removing that friction would be nice if it didn't cause problems of its own. It turns out that friction had some useful benefits, and that's why you're seeing the pendulum swing the other way.
this highlights the saddest thing about this whole generative ai thing. beforehand, there was opportunity to learn, deliver and prove oneself outside of classical social organization. now that's all going to go away and everyone is going to fall back on credentials and social standing. what an incredible shame for social mobility and those who for one reason or another don't fit in with traditional structures.
Your solution advocates a
( ) technical (X) social ( ) policy-based ( ) forge-based
approach to solving AI-generated pull requests to open source projects. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws.)
( ) PR spammers can easily use AI to adapt to detection methods
( ) Legitimate non-native English speakers' contributions would be affected
( ) Legitimate users of AI coding assistants would be affected
( ) It is defenseless against determined bad actors
( ) It will stop AI slop for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Project maintainers don't have time to implement it
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from maintainers at once
(X) False positives would drive away genuine new contributors
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Ease of creating new GitHub accounts
(X) Script kiddies and reputation farmers
( ) Armies of LLM-assisted coding tools in legitimate use
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all detection approaches
( ) Extreme pressure on developers to use AI tools
(X) Maintainer burnout that is unaffected by automated filtering
( ) Graduate students trying to pad their CVs
( ) The fact that AI will only get better at mimicking humans
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(X) Allowlists exclude new contributors
(X) Blocklists are circumvented in minutes
( ) We should be able to use AI tools without being censored
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually across projects
( ) Contributing to open source should be free and open
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(X) This will just make maintainer burnout worse
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out what project you maintain and
send you 50 AI-generated PRs!this highlights the saddest thing about this whole generative ai thing. beforehand, there was opportunity to learn, deliver and prove oneself outside of classical social organization. now that's all going to go away and everyone is going to fall back on credentials and social standing. what an incredible shame for social mobility and those who for one reason or another don't fit in with traditional structures.
Only if you allow people like this to normalize it.
It should just be $1 to submit PR. If PR is good, maintainer refunds you ;) I noticed the same thing in communication. Communication is now so frictionless, that almost all the communication I receive is low quality. If it cost more to communicate, the quality would increase. But the value of low quality communication is not zero: it is actively harmful, because it eats your time.
> But the value of low quality communication is not zero: it is actively harmful, because it eats your time. But a non-zero cost of communication can obviously also have negative effects. It's interesting to think about where the sweet spot would be. But it's probably very context specific. I'm okay with close people engaging in "low quality" communication with me. I'd love, on the other hand, if politicians would st…
A poorly thought out hypothetical, just to illustrate: Make a connection at a dinner party? Sure, technically it costs 10¢ make that initial text message/phone call, then the next 5 messages are 1¢ each, but thereafter all the messages are free. Existing relationships: free. New relationships, extremely cheap. Spamming at scale: more expensive.
I have no idea if that's a good idea or not, but I think that's an ok representation of the idea.
this highlights the saddest thing about this whole generative ai thing. beforehand, there was opportunity to learn, deliver and prove oneself outside of classical social organization. now that's all going to go away and everyone is going to fall back on credentials and social standing. what an incredible shame for social mobility and those who for one reason or another don't fit in with traditional structures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The real problem are reputation-farmers. They open hundreds of low-effort PRs on GitHub in the hope that some of them get merged. This will increase the reputation of their accounts, which they hope will help them stand out when applying for a job. So the solution would be for GitHub to implement a system to punish bad PRs. GitHub customers really are willing to do anything besides coming to terms with the reality…
I mean, "everyone already has an account" is already a very good reason. That doesn't mean "I automatically accept contributions from everyone", it might be "I want to make the process of contribution as easy as possible for the people I want as contributors".