Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 308 posts

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

#271

Post by raptor99 »

mr-wendel wrote: post #58

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…

lol You are actually trying to argue and say "Oh actually, I love how AI fucks up, it makes me keep on my toes."

That's like saying I love hiring fuck ups that randomly do out of context and out of ruleset work for me when I ask them to perform tasks.

I would also argue to you that "folks" have done more well to debate the upsides of AI. It is pretty much all I ever see when I come to this website any more the last couple of years. Oh, and by coincidence, the operator/owner of the website just happens to be at the helm of ChatGPT. How convenient.

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

#272

Post by izacus »

cortesoft wrote: post #242
gwbas1c wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How is an AI policy going to help prevent bad faith actors, though? People who are doing those harmful things with AI aren’t going to stop because of a policy. They are just going to lie and not admit their submissions are AI generated. At that point, you will still have to review the code and reject it if it is bad quality, just like you had to without an AI policy. The policy doesn’t make it any easier to filter ou…

Policies protect people on the project by making rejection of bad faith actors easier on them (less energy spent, less work needed).

They're also a statement of organizational's support for people who reject slop PRs and help when the AI using author generates a smear blog post against the reviewer like we've seen before.

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

#274

Post by poulpy123 »

mr-wendel wrote: post #58

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…

On the code side of the issue, I would say that AI completion and chat are ok because people are still forced to interact with the generated code. When coding with agents people have to go out of their way to do it

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

#276

Post by throwaway2037 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #216
gwbas1c wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The rumors we hear have to do with projects inundated with more pull requests that they can review, the pull requests are obviously low quality, and the contributors' motives are selfish. IE, the PRs are to get credit for their Github profile. In this case, the pull requests aren't opened with the same good faith that you're putting into your work. "Open source" does not mean "open contribution", i.e. just because…

Google Guava Java library is very similar -- open source, but almost never accepts outside contributions. Is the golang base library similar?

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

#277

Post by alexey-pelykh »

sothatsit wrote: post #70

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…

[dead]

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

#278

Post by glhaynes »

duskdozer wrote: post #251
glhaynes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An argument that I have some sympathy for, while still being moderately+ in favor of gun control (here in the USA where I'm a citizen). It seems that gun control—though imperfect—in regions that have implemented it has had a good bit of success and the legitimate/non-harmful capabilities lost seem worth it to me in trade for the gains. (Reasonable people can disagree here!) Whereas it seems to me that if we accept th…

The AI hype machine is pushing the "inevitability" and "left behind" sentiments to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance , and they have the profit and power incentives to do so and drive mass adoption. It is far from certain that AI will be indispensable or that people will "fall behind" for not using it. Why would the AI-fans even care if others who decide not…

If you're addressing this to me: you need to separate my description of how I perceive things from any effort/desire on my part to make that come to pass. I don't expect to stand to gain if AI continues to get better at coding — most likely just the opposite; this is the first time in my career that I've ever felt much anxiety about whether I'd be able to find work in my field in the future.

There are many others like me who share this expectation, and, while we certainly may be wrong, it's not because of some sinister plan to make the prophecy come true. (There are certainly some who do have sinister/profit-seeking motives, of course!)

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

#279

Post by MarsIronPI »

yodsanklai wrote: post #227
mr-wendel wrote: post #58

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…

> without a battle of ego. This resonates. Recently, I've started to consider Claude as a partner. I like how he's willing to accept he's wrong when you provide evidence. It can be more pleasant than working with humans.

Please don't anthropomorphize LLMs even further by assigning them gendered pronouns. LLMs are always "it"s. They're not alive, they're just really complicated linear algebra expressions. Prematurely anthropomorphizing them, even subtly like this, will come back to bite us if we keep doing it.

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

#280

Post by pixl97 »

thunderfork wrote: post #209
pixl97 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the no true Scotsman theory.

Arguing that "doesn't secretly, sneakily break project rules" is an essential component of a quality contributor isn't a "no true scotsman" argument, it's a statement about qualifications

You see where this becomes a religious like argument right? Since it's secretly and sneakily there is no way to measure it. So as far as any other participant knows there is no measurable difference, hence your argument depends on said agents to be 'pure' and 'true', hence the exact definition of the no true Scotsman fallacy.

I hope you see how this quickly will advance from a project being about accomplishing some goal, to a project becoming about humans showing they are the ones writing code. Much like we see in religions where people don't give money to the poor to benefit the poor, but show they give money to the poor to benefit themselves. Hence the game playing will continue and the underlying problem will never be addressed.

Post reply on HN