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We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

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Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#491

Post by latexr »

Cort3z wrote: post #364

I wonder if there is a way to blanket prevent these types of problems. Possible solutions I can think of: - Require an account with a paid service. Fix = require money - Require an account verified with real ID/passport etc. Fix = link to real person - Automated reply system to "waste tokens" if it is an AI that is responding. Fix is increased cost of spammer. - Have some kind of "vetting system" where you get on an…

A lot of solutions have been suggested over the past few months, including those. They have drawbacks and it’s not how they want to run the project.

https://youtu.be/6n2eDcRjSsk?t=1664

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#493

Post by latexr »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #144

Every site and every service is going to be swamped with AI-generated slop and will have to deal with it by banning it, and then detecting and deleting it. This was entirely predictable. When you give everyone the ability to be good at something with no effort, everyone is going to do it (and think they are the first). My partner recently bought a book from Amazon, and when it arrived, I looked at the cover, flicked…

> When you give everyone the ability to be good at something with no effort

When you give them the ability to think they’re good. If they truly became good, this wouldn’t be an issue.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#494

Post by boredtofears »

ryandrake wrote: post #422
emmaviolet wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub PM here working on how we can make this problem feel better for maintainers. Really appreciate how tiring this can be, especially when even low volume is sustained for many months. Would love your thoughts on some of the things we're thinking about: - Would it help to disable all PRs? All non-contributor PRs? - Would a "close as admin" button help address the issue of not wanting to be rude or discouraging? -…

As someone on the other side of the PR, the current situation makes things awkward for me, too. Occasionally, I'll make an actual fix to scratch some particular itch I have with the software, and I'm hesitant to even open a PR, because it's just going to 1. pile yet another PR onto the maintainer, and 2. might get dismissed out of hand because it's mistaken for AI slop or other low-effort spam that these attackers ar…

Yeah, I kinda stopped involving myself in other people's OSS projects a while ago for that reason. If I have an itch to scratch, I just use my fork. It usually feels like my itch isn't theirs and I always feel like I'm imposing on the maintainer's vision or at best just taking time away from them. I think maintainers have a lot of pressure to accept things because "open source!".

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#495

Post by carlosjobim »

nmz wrote: post #490
mixedbit wrote: post #156

Long time ago Sourceforge and then GitHub promoted into the current default the model of open source distribution which is not sustainable and I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Open source licenses are about freedom of using and modifying software. The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user to…

I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created, if the user wants feature X then he should be able to give an incentive towards that feature to be added into the software that they use, developers do bounties instead, the user doesn't have to give much only a dollar, but if many users want feature X, then the money/donations pool creating h…

Those normal users are better off instead purchasing software. Then they will be listened to by developers if they report a bug or suggest a feature. Because they represent an incredibly valuable user segment: paying customers.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#496

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

nlawalker wrote: post #396
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid. It is paid, even if not in money. It seems like maybe you lack awareness of the other forms of capital and reward that exist, because your framing implicitly insists that financial capital is the only form of capital and that monetary reward is the only form of reward. But there are also a bunch of other forms of capital, like social, cultural, symbolic, etc…

>people maintain things literally all the time either purely for prestige, or because being a contributing member of a community, even a small one, makes them feel good, or because knowing that maintaining things leads others to also maintain things. True, but the expectation means that taking on maintenance involves taking on and leveraging a large amount of reputational debt in a very risky way. If you release some…

It is incontrovertible that the entirety of the open source / free software world exists, in a very fundamental way, because people experience personal reward by doing work that they give away for zero dollars.

The existence of risk does not eliminate the existence of reward. It's called "expected value", and it's non-zero, and it's for the person to manage for themself like everything else in life. Working for equity also involves risk, and nobody says that it's not compensation.

> If you release something to the world and place yourself in a high-visibility maintainer position, burn out on it and then decide to drop it, it's very hard to ensure that your legacy and reputation in perpetuity will be "released something great and did the world a solid by maintaining it for a while" as opposed to "person who overcommits, bails, and leaves the world in a jam".

This is like saying you suffer reputational damage by retiring from a career. The claim is clearly absurd. It's not hard to step down from leading a project in a way that preserves reputation in the same way that it's not hard to leave a company without burning bridges. Some people are bad at being people and fail at both.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#497

Post by cdman »

sersi wrote: post #274
freakynit wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indian here (~15+ years in tech). I've seen this behavior a lot, and unfortunately, I did some of this myself earlier in my career. Based on my own experience, here are a few reasons (could be a lot more): 1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as…

> 1. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society. Having worked in Japan, while there is a strong respect for authority, there's also much less hesitation about asking for clarification. I worked with an Indian offshore team and in a Japanese company and, while there's a lot to dislike in Japanese office culture, this kind of p…

I also worked with japanese, including on site in Tokyo and quickly learned that asking "did you understand it?" is useless. I always had to keep in mind to ask "what did you understand?".

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#498

Post by freakynit »

blindstitch wrote: post #411
freakynit wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indian here (~15+ years in tech). I've seen this behavior a lot, and unfortunately, I did some of this myself earlier in my career. Based on my own experience, here are a few reasons (could be a lot more): 1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as…

Thanks for all this, what you wrote and the discussion that followed has been genuinely helpful, and I think it might help bridge some cultural divides that I've experienced when working with Indian people. Another question I'd like to ask of you is, do you see any aspects of the western style of cooperation that are the inverse? i.e. which create divides in which the westerner's ways of working can be the source of…

1. Same here. I too learnt a lot more from the following discussions.

2. None. We absolutely adore the ways westerners work. Your ethics, discipline, hardwork, attention to detail, inventive and creative nature, the support structures, and fair pay (and many more).

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#499

Post by vpribish »

causalscience wrote: post #44
nchmy wrote: post #11

I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…

> Indian students Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I cal…

there are definitely cultural issues you have to be aware of, and it's not just India, there are many cultures where questioning authority or admitting to uncertainty are less welcome - and some companies and managers reinforce these.

Always consider relative status and power imbalance regardless of nationality too. If someone is afraid to say no you have to factor that in - and 'calling them out on it' is maybe not the most effective reaction, especially if in public.

I always had frustrations with this as a manager until I could establish a personal relationship. Sounds extra hard with short-term remote contractors!

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#500

Post by DominikPeters »

chrisjj wrote: post #444
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've seen an interesting behavior in India. If I ask someone on the street for directions, they will always give me an answer, even if they don't know. If they don't know, they'll make something up. Isn’t this the precise failure pattern that everybody shits on LLMs for?

Only on surface. The difference is the LLM doesn't know it doesn't know. An LLM provides the best solition it has regardless of whether that solution is in any way fit for purpose.

If you inspect the Chain of Thought summaries, the LLM often knows full well what it is doing.
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