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AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere
271–275 of 275 posts
Re: AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere
#272I Was trying to install Fedora Workstation 44 on my Minibook N150 last night (10 pm, 116 AEDT). The grub menu booting from the install USB drive gave a bunch of syntax errors in the background. The media check failed at about 4%. Re-downloading the file gave the same errors. Trying the 43 version also failed with similar errors. Ubuntu 26 worked fine.
Something is definitely scrogged in their install images.
Re: AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you feel they are toxic or harassing you and you don't want to deal with them anymore. If you're overwhelmed, say that you're busy and will attend to issues and PRs when you have the time. If you want to be accommodating, have good build instructions or action workflows so that people can easily fork and build it themselves. If you ask me, LLM-generated things should just be banned outright, but I suppose other…
> If you ask me, LLM-generated things should just be banned outright, Why? In the end it's a patch's quality that counts. Regardless who or what contributed it. Bad patch from trusted contributor is still a bad patch. Perhaps this is more a management problem. How to best use developer's time, where to use AI (vs blindly deploy AI to generate patches & swamp developers with that). Or do some rate-limiting? "Sorry, we…
It's a bad signal. Someone who is lazy and using an LLM was probably too lazy to do another number of things you want a contributor to do.
Re: AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should not gate keep writing software
Anyone can write software, you can't stop them. What we can gatekeep is the building, distribution, installation, and running of software that affects critical systems, like one of the most popular OSes. The XZ backdoor affected millions of computers, with the potential to effect hundreds of millions of computers, many of which had the capacity to affect billions of people. From one completely unregulated software li…
“Mam, you’re son is in a lot of trouble”
“Oh god, what did he do?!”
“He was committing open source code without a license”
Re: AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think everyone / every project needs to adopt a strategy consistent with their values. Unfortunately, I see the choice space here as having "developer effort" anti-correlated with "negative repercussions". On one end of the distribution, a "hair trigger ban" strategy is low-effort for the developer but will have some fraction of false positives and some fraction of those impacted will complain to "the socials" and…
I think we can learn about the extent to which this is an adversarial relationship from fighting email spam. By that, I mean the attackers adapt to exploit loopholes in the system, and different attackers have different profiles (eg obviously fake looking for fools vs spear phishing). Which is to say, your system sounds good but I expect much more complicated defenses are needed.
Yes, the spam arms race is a really good analogy. In that light, my thoughts are aligned with heuristics that might be applied with procmail or in the original, pre-learning, spamassassin.
A fight-fire-with-fire is to insert an LLM to judge and/or respond to new pull requests and issues. This brings its own risk as it lets anyone who can make a PR/issue inject a prompt. It would also put one more wedge between the real human contributors and the real human developers.
A "humanity score" could also be an ingredient. GitHub or 3rd parties, could maintain a score of how human an account is. The "humanity" of all text produced by an account could be judged by LLM and/or humans. This could be centralized or based on a web-of-trust. Actually, I'd also like to have such a thing for reading HN and reddit comments.
But still, any system we can dream up can be attacked and we are back to an arms race.