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

curl.se

601–610 of 653 posts

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

#601
post #200

It sounds funny, but it's not. I once issued a bug to them that didn't have enough information about how to reproduce... and I was lambasted on Reddit and eventually just deleted my account there it was so terrifying. Some dev teams do not mess around. In fact I've shied off most social media since and no longer issue bug reports to any company, I was scarred deep over the treatment.

He rubs me the wrong way, too. Curl is overhyped and a pain to work with. And he's getting high on the "success" while crying about not being paid for something he offers for free. I think Americans have a nice phrase about having cake and eating it, too.

Not only is cURL not overhyped, it’s absolutely false that Daniel “[cries] about not being paid for something he offers for free”. He does get paid for cURL support.

https://daniel.haxx.se/job.html

He does criticise rich companies who don’t do anything to support cURL and demand preferential support, but that’s not the same thing (and does warrant criticism).

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

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I contribute regularly to some major open source projects and it’s happening here too. So many issues that aren’t issues. Constant “fixing” of documentation that doesn’t need to be fixed. Bug reports that aren’t bugs, followed by a bad PR “fixing” the “bug.” Or YOLOing an LLM PR to change major behavior that users are relying on. And I click and the authors are always brand new, with only vibe coded or examples proje…

GitHub PM here. From what we've seen, you're right about the motivation; I've also seen plenty of job ads where "significant contribution to open source" is something that's called out explicitly as a valid substitute for professional experience in the area. While that's always well-intentioned and creates many benefits for the OSS community, the flip side is that it can also lead to the kind of problems you're seein…

Maybe you a mysterious hidden ELO score that effectively shadow bans people if they get a negative report from a high ELO maintainer. Perhaps look at how dating apps do it as they have to deal with a many persistent undesirable people.

Or just throw up a money hurdle. The reason you're seeing so many hustle bros from poorer countries is simply because the cost of accessing the internet is now effectively zero.

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

#603
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…

Usually the protection against such spam is social shame but the internet is now full of people who have no shame because shame was never part of their culture. It would be more effective to use GeoIP in this case.

I wonder how much of it could be stopped just by charging $5 a month to contribute to public open source repos. Even if github gave the $5 back in LLM credits or something it would at least put up a barrier. The reason there is so much traffic from third world countries is because the cost of accessing the internet is effectively zero.

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

#604
post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually the protection against such spam is social shame but the internet is now full of people who have no shame because shame was never part of their culture. It would be more effective to use GeoIP in this case.

I wonder how much of it could be stopped just by charging $5 a month to contribute to public open source repos. Even if github gave the $5 back in LLM credits or something it would at least put up a barrier. The reason there is so much traffic from third world countries is because the cost of accessing the internet is effectively zero.

GitHub has zero incentive to do this because it would hurt their analytics/metrics.

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

#605
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Indian students How do you know this?

Because their usernames are Indian and profiles have links to Indian universities, and sometimes descriptions of the 101 classes they're currently taking. That doesn't stop them from saying things like "I see this sort of vulnerability all the time"

Don't worry they'll change that too. Sadly I think we're going to need some kind of internet licence like a drivers license that they'd at least have to bribe their way into.

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

#606
post #490

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…

> 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

It might be good to have such a system as an option, but I wouldn't want it to become an expectation. I've got a couple of side projects that are out on GitHub. They have open source licenses and anyone is welcome to fork them, send bug reports, or pull requests, but I don't want to have any obligation of supporting those projects.

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

#607
post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they fee…

Do you mean that they were dinged if a PR they opened received too many comments? Can you elaborate on how the communication style changed after this? Like they were more willing to seek clarification/discussion?

> Can you elaborate on how the communication style changed after this? Like they were more willing to seek clarification/discussion?

More willing to seek clarification and less likely to try to defend choices with 'This is what the scope of work said'. And also more willing to jump in on colleagues and my own PRs to provide feedback.

Which was also an important part of how to frame the communication "I'm not telling them they are doing their jobs wrong, I am telling them how to do it better to make all the stakeholders happier."

> Do you mean that they were dinged if a PR they opened received too many comments?

It was never explicitly said at first, however the communication was inspired by past work experiences where yes, too many comments on a PR or similar review could get held against you for far longer than was productive or even healthy, and yes it was something the whole team had to deal with (i.e. very much a shared experience amongst colleagues.)

In fact I'd argue that the time I've been at shops where people weren't afraid to give feedback has been about 50-50, while also noting that the shops that had a culture shift where giving feedback became OK and safe for all parties, quickly became more productive.

Cause, the other thing to consider, is that people don't necessarily want to risk causing animosity by jumping into a colleague's PR and pointing out a problem, they don't want to be the guy that makes their colleague "look bad". Which is of course unhealthy, but again by re-framing the context of PR feedback for Taylorist robot management, you get better response from their management as far as buy in.

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

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is cultural - the whole "not losing face" thing. In a project, I once was squad lead - I was onsite, my squad members were in Bangalore of course. Same experience as you. Once I wanted to talk about a piece of code that we need to improve and refactor, and I was acting in good faith calling the dev that commited that code. When I braught up the code on my screen to start a pair programming, he immediately denied h…

Pretty sure the right move as soon as he said "I didn't write that" was to just say. "It isn't important who wrote it, we all make mistakes, let's see together how we could have done better."

If someone isn't willing to admit a mistake, it's not someone you ever want to work with. Or live with for that matter.

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

#609
post #200

It sounds funny, but it's not. I once issued a bug to them that didn't have enough information about how to reproduce... and I was lambasted on Reddit and eventually just deleted my account there it was so terrifying. Some dev teams do not mess around. In fact I've shied off most social media since and no longer issue bug reports to any company, I was scarred deep over the treatment.

What was the bug?

It sounds like a karma farm victim fish story.

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

#610
post #5

The new era of AI.

Everybody saw it coming. Frankly I'm surprised it took this long.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

It's kind of like people who live at the base of a giant dam but cannot comprehend that it could ever fail.

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