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AI Usage Policy

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Re: AI Usage Policy

#281

Post by amanaplanacanal »

pousada wrote: post #245
ryandrake wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there is a growing number of people who just can't even recognize or acknowledge shame. It's not even an emotion they are capable of or understand. So many people now respond to "You shouldn't do that..." with one or more of: - But, I'm allowed to. - But, it's legal. - But, the rules don't say I can't. - But, nobody is stopping me. The shared cultural understanding of right and wrong is shrinking. More an…

I agree and I think it’s a backlash to the 2010’s where many felt there was too much shame/shaming going on in most online spaces. Fwiw I haven’t noticed either phenomenon much irl but that might just be my bubble.

Certainly in the political arena we have people that are completely shameless. Maybe that counts as online space, but it has big effects on people's real life.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#282

Post by mr_toad »

JDye wrote: post #119
kleiba wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Other people" might also just be junior devs - I have seen time and again how (over-)confident newbies can be in their code. (I remember one case where a student suspected a bug in the JVM when some Java code of his caused an error.) It's not necessarily maliciousness or laziness, it could simply be enthusiasm paired with lack of experience.

Our postgres replication suddenly stopped working and it took three of us hours - maybe days - of looking through the postgres source before we actually accepted it wasn't us or our hosting provider being stupid and submitted a ticket. I can't imagine the level of laziness or entitlement required for a student (or any developer) to blame their tools so quickly without conducting a thorough investigation.

I had a professor who cautioned us not to assume the problem was in the compiler, or in anyone else’s code. Students assuming that there is a compiler (or similar) bug is not uncommon. Common enough he felt it necessary to pre-empt those discussions.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#283

Post by wpietri »

weinzierl wrote: post #189
wpietri wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No society can function without enforced rules. Most people do the pro-social thing most of the time. But for the rest, society must create negative experiences that help train people to do the right thing. What negative experience do you think should instead be created for people breaking these rules?

Temporary or permanent social exclusion, and consequently the loss of future cooperative benefits. A permanent public internet pillory isn’t just useless against the worst offenders, who are shameless anyway. It’s also permanently damaging to those who are still learning societal norms. The Ghostty AI policy lacks any nuance in this regard. No consideration for the age or experience of the offender. No consideration…

Drive-by PRs don't come from people interested in participating in the community in question. They have infinite places to juke their stats.

I see plenty of nuance beyond the bold print. They clearly say they love to help junior developers. Your assumption that they will apply this without thought is, well, your assumption. I'd rather see what they actually do instead of getting wrapped up in your fantasies.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#284

Post by cess11 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #268
cess11 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not. It's a funny way of compressing and querying data, nothing else.

It is probabilistic unlike a database which is not. It is also a lossy way to compress data. We could go on about the differences but those two things make it not a database. Edit: unless we are talking about MongoDB. It will only keep your data if you are lucky and might lose it. :)

No, it is still just a database. It is a way to store and query information, it is nothing else.

It's not just the weirdness in Mongo that could exhibit non-deterministic behaviour, some common indexing techniques do not guarantee order and/or exhaustiveness.

Let it go, LLM:s and related compression techniques aren't very special, and neither are chatbots or copy-paste-oriented software development. Optimising them for speed or manipulation does not change this, at least not from a technical perspective.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#285

Post by cess11 »

KronisLV wrote: post #109
cess11 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It's just a database. There is no difference in a technical sense between "hallucination" and whatever else you imagine. It's like a JPEG. Except instead of lossy compression on images that give you a pixel soup that only vaguely resembles the original if you're resource bound (and even modern SOTA models are when it comes to LLMs), instead you get stuff that looks more or less correct but just isn't.

It would be like JPEG if opening JPEG files involved pushing in a seed to get an image out. It's like a database, it just sits there until you enter a query.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#286

Post by cess11 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #113
IgorPartola wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote Luke Skywalker: Amazing. Every word of what you just said is wrong.

Which is why I keep saying that anthropomorphizing LLMs gives you good high-order intuitions about them, and should not be discouraged. Consider: GP would've been much more correct if they said "It's just a person on a chip." Still wrong, but much less, in qualitative fashion, than they are now.

No, it does not, it just adds to the risk that you'd be fooled by them or the corporations that produce them and surveil you through their SaaS-models.

It's a person in the same sense as a Markov chain is one, or the bot in the reception on Starship Titanic, i.e. not at all.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#287

Post by b3kart »

antirez wrote: post #234
b3kart wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't work in the age of AI where producing crappy results is much cheaper than verifying them. While this is the case, metadata will be important to understand if you should even bother verifying the results.

The time needed for an AI patch written with the prompt "now make it as small as possible, clean, and human coded" is as big as reviewing the patch itself.

If this were so, we wouldn’t be seeing such reactions from open source maintainers. The reality is AI makes it cheap to create large PRs with little substance.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#288

Post by pelasaco »

I’m starting to think AI will kill open source... and maybe even platforms like GitHub/GitLab as we know them.

What I’m seeing: a flood of new repos appearing on GitHub with huge codebases and "extensive" documentation, often produced in two or three commits. The problem is that nobody uses them, nobody reads the docs, and many of these projects don’t provide real value. But the infrastructure cost is real: storing it all, indexing it, scanning it, backing it up, mirroring it....

Licensing is another issue. Licenses protect against copying, but AI changes totally the game: someone can download a repo, ask Claude to analyze and understand it, and then generate a similar solution with no verbatim copying. That’s likely legal... So GPL becomes irrelevant..

If that becomes normal, I can easily imagine companies pulling back from open source. Why publish your best work if anyone can cheaply reimplement it? Code will move back to closed source and become the "secret sauce" again. A black box is harder to vibe-code than an open source repo...

Re: AI Usage Policy

#290

Post by jdxcode »

alya wrote: post #219

At the Zulip open-source project, we've had a significant onslaught of AI slop in the past few months. It gets as absurd as PR descriptions with AI-generated "screenshots" of the app to "demonstrate" the changes. We've had to start warning contributors that we won't be able to review their work if they continue misusing AI, and occasionally banning repeat offenders. It's feels draining -- we want to spend our time me…

it's really strange, I maintain a lot of OSS and I just don't see it. I've had a bit of slop, and the # of PRs I receive has 10x'ed, but the quality is generally quite good. I wonder if maybe it's because I make dev tool CLIs that are just easier for AI to work with?
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