Very disappointing. There is no "neutral" for AI, so this is effectively a vote for slop.
Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
401–410 of 483 posts
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#402Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this self-assessed AI level for contributions [1] to be extremely useful Why would you trust the bot to self-assess truthfully? That's like trusting a spammer to tag his emails as spam.
a spammer is motivated by self-enrichment AI agents are grounded on the user provided direction. If it doesn't work well then it naturally loses trust.
> If it doesn't work well then it naturally loses trust
Too late. If it doesn't work well then it has already naturally destroyed trust.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how context is managed between reasoning traces and actual output in Claude / claude code, but if the reasoning trace is in the context of the question for "why did you do that", it can actually answer why it did that.
Reasoning traces are also probable explanations.
Not if the reasoning trace happened before they actually did the change.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#405Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not dumb. They just don't care. They didn't before either. Now they just have an easy excuse.
Completely wrong generalization. I'm a person who is over-reliant on LLMs, doesn't know how most of the things in the codebase work, and is atrophying both in programming and in general cognition. I used to care, a lot. And I still do.
What are you trying to do to halt that atrophy, then?
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was one proposal that focused on environmental issues with AI. This is indeed pretty disconnected from reality when you consider that Debian doesn’t have any policy requiring you to be vegan in order to contribute
What is “disconnected from reality” about environmental considerations regarding AI? Growing AI usage = growing data center power draw = higher emissions from any non-renewable sources contributing to that power, as well as increased freshwater consumption which is itself a considerably difficult resource to renew. That’s about as direct of a causal link between point A (power hungry AI being used for Debian developm…
AI data centers need electricity, which can be from renewable sources and non-renewable sources, and the exact mix can change from day to day as well as long after these data centers are constructed. The electricity grid is decarbonizing at the fastest pace yet. It's simply a tenuous link. On the other hand there are clear non-renewable fossil fuel being used in our daily lives that desperately need to be electrified, think non-electric vehicles and commercial flights. Even without considering more renewable sources of electricity in the future, ask yourself, on a same carbon emission basis, how much can an AI data center accomplish versus a flight from JFK to SFO? How would the utility function even look like?
The way I see it, modern environmentalists like to pick on data centers just because it’s an easy target without entrenched lobbying. The fossil fuel industry is way worse but they have tremendous lobbying.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue that open source projects are facing at the moment is that it takes significantly less effort to submit a patch for review. A lot of developers who are submitting these AI patches don't necessarily understand the patch, so the onus is on the reviewer/code-owner. The reviewers are getting swamped (some reviewers are receiving 100s or patches per month). If feedback is provided at lot of the time the patch au…
The question becomes, does it take more time to create or review in the Grand scheme of the software life cycle? Because if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct? I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?
> The question becomes [...]
"A question is...". To my mind not the most important question, if one plays-out to a logical conclusion the scenario you're proposing.
> [...] if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct?
No - and that's bordering-on (if not fully) rude disrespect of reviewers time and effort. One way to think of this is in terms of Brandolinis Law[0]. Pushing work back to submitters is going to have to happen. Low-effort "submissions" are first and foremost "low-effort" - that's going to have to be driven home.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I experiment much more. It's easier to justify, and, perhaps more importantly, just WAY psychologically easier to throw away a 20 minute experiment that your robot wrote for you than the same when it took you a week of tedious manual coding.
Yeah experimentation is probably the best use case of LLMs
And at the end of the experiment I usually have my solution
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#410Better heads prevail - this is a good start and the right decision. The agent/bot is controlled by some entity, ergo that entity is responsible for everything it does. I relate that to how a Physician's Assistant gets their authority to treat patients from the Doctor they work under. The Doctor's credentials are on the line if their PA screws up.
a decent comparison because they both seem like some type of responsibility laundering, and LLMs/PAs are being given continually increasing autonomy for economic reasons