Zos_Kia

It’s horrible. I have a client whose whole setup is based on Google drive and the APIs shit the bed constantly. It’s only getting worse they are so careless about these products that they might as well be legacy.

The place I work for has a hardcore vibe coder and today I found out none of the e2e tests pass because there is no db setup but it’s okay it doesn’t make the ci red as ignore_failed_tests is set to true

They are all hitting the same hard truth: making the app is kind of the easy part

Maybe you’re right

oh man while i do love being correct, deep down i hope you’re the one who’s right and i’m overreacting

If you’re making a broader point don’t single me out

Yes that is a communication lapse on my end, i try to make issues personal to emphasize them but it’s not always relevant. I don’t think it should detract from the broader point, sorry if it does.

My sensation is that we’re doing fine for now

I think the data shows that we’re far from fine and already resource-constrained on most critical projects. It’s not that people stop caring about open source, it is still fundamental to the way the web works. It’s just that they don’t feel personally compelled to pitch in because they think we’re doing fine now. The wikipedia analogy works well here : it is still fundamental to the way people get information, but it’s chronically understaffed and may already be in a death spiral.

I do contribute time and donate money to open source project so… miss?

You’re missing the point. Sure you do, that’s a nice anecdote, but the data shows most people don’t. You are part of a shrinking cohort that is already insufficient to maintain what we need in the long run.

If we can’t get enough resources to support even the most basic infrastructure then the experiment will end

And then what ? Only large corporations can finance their own in-house tools and they gain even greater advantage against the rest of society ? What a great outcome…

Your point of view is not crazy but i think it suffers from too much optimism in the face of bleak data.

I don’t know why you’re insisting on this anyway

my guess would be low executive function and a smidge of autism

Also, having critical software depend on one guy is not safe. We should avoid that. If critical software depends on one guy it should be phased out.

I’m sorry to say 90% of the internet’s load bearing infrastructure is in this situation. It’s just how the story goes, everybody wants to build low-stakes toy projects, nobody wants to do high-effort low-reward infrastructure work.

“Writing something new using modern tools” is all fun and sparkles, but then you run into the same issues as rsync except without the experience. Then you get attention from attackers, you get security issues, which you have to patch with defensive code which is not appealing to read and zero fun to write. Before you know it your project is “decades of Rust/Zig/Lisp” which nobody wants to touch and you’re back at square one. All you’ve accomplished is give the attackers a few years of low hanging fruit and easy exploits.

There’s a reason why we get a million shiny toys a year but solutions like rsync stay entrenched for decades.

I think what you’re missing is that the number of people doing step 4 has been going downhill steadily since the 2000s. People start open source projects yes, which for 99% of them don’t bring in any users and barely get maintained over the long run, but the pool of people willing to contribute to large established projects is so small it is becoming problematic.

Even Wikipedia is having its own editor crisis, where most of the power editors are greying out and barely anyone is stepping up to replace them.

And this is happening exactly because most people, like you, think that the free infrastructure around us is a fait accompli which doesn’t require us to personally get involved in their maintenance, and that we can even afford to scare away those that do contribute.

ain’t that a spicy squirrel…

I think you misread my comment. I’m depressed that people are harassing open source devs, not that open source devs use LLMs.

I don’t give a shit whether a maintainer like Tridge uses AI, because i trust them to review the AI’s code like they’ve reviewed human contributions since forever.

Oh man I’m like super agreeing with you. Also I’m in a place that actually has universal healthcare, so it’s not like it’s unworkable

I most certainly won’t lol

No disagreement here but I’m not sure that’s on the menu right now

Sorry for bringing terminally online slang to the table haha

In my head yeah it’s the pill that teaches you a bleak and depressing truth but shows you no way out of it. I may be misusing the term.

This whole debacle is making me extremely black pilled about open software in general. Just like cheap computing has died in recent years, I suspect non corporate free software is about to meet the same end to the acclaim of people who think they’re doing a good thing for the world.

But where will the maintainers for these alternatives come from, when barely anybody has stepped up in the 30 years of rsync’s existence? Your comment implies that tridge didn’t call for help before, which is far from the truth.

This is thankless maintenance on critical software, not some *-arr toy project for hobbyist self-hosters.

the nature of protest is to be uncomfortable

It sure doesn’t make Sam Altman uncomfortable. It just sends the message that open source contributors are at our service and they better behave exactly the way we want or they get the paddle. We will continue not helping them, but we will also actively attack them if they displease us.

Surely that will not encourage grey beards to finally retire in peace, and discourage new maintainers from stepping up.

If things were acceptably moving at a “snail’s pace” before AI, what has changed?

As i said, what has changed is that AI can now find security issues and all major projects are hit by a flurry of legitimate security flaws. These affect all deployed instances of rsync, so basically most of the world’s tech infrastructure. Leaving those gaping holes open is much more detrimental to the common good than fixing them. And that goes even if the fixes are not perfect and break marginal existing use cases.

you are pro AI. On the FuckAI board. Is this like a masochist thing? Like, what are you doing here?

I’m here cause i don’t mind being disagreed with, in fact i need to be disagreed with if i don’t want to fall into a fact-starved self-selected cognitive bubble. I’m also active on LinkedIn punching libertarian hustlers in the dick when they need it. You gotta make sure some asshole you disagree with isn’t accidentally making a great point you have failed to identify.

I’m not against AI but i’m also not “pro AI”, any more than i am pro mouse or pro keyboard. But i am definitely against bullying our few remaining open source contributors.

People have gaps of knowledge, sometimes unwarranted confidence, other times lack of care, or just miss things. It’s not like we’re comparing the perfect human vs faulty AI.

I went through the trouble of looking at one of the problematic changes in the latest rsync release, and what happened is that it surfaced a bug introduced in 2007 which was previously silently ignored. That’s definitely a mistake any human contributor could have made.

Doesn’t this seem a bit hypocritical of you? You can see where a bit of antipathy is useful in one case but not in this other one with Tridgell?

No. Tridgell is just some dude who’s been writing code to the benefit of everyone for 30 years. A literal ally, hailing back from more idealistic times, and a part of the movement that gave us the language and means to fight technological hegemony in all its forms. Tech CEOs can eat my shit all they do is build closed gardens and use lawfare to protect them.

The point of talking, “harassing” as you say, to Andrew Tridgell about this directly is that I don’t want him to be excommunicated

Making non-technical github issues to insult a maintainer and demand they take certain actions is not talking. Circulating links to those issues on /c/fuck_ai so people pile up with demeaning walls of text and hundreds of emoji reactions is harassing. There are more people parading their contempt for him in those threads, than the total number of people who contributed tickets or code to the project in 30 years. I can’t stop thinking about that, it’s so fucking cruel. No help, no thank you, just contempt the minute you displease your masters.

Minimizing the harm done is exactly what bullies do. “I didn’t do it but if i did it then it wasn’t that bad” yeah i know the lyrics too.

I don’t want rsync to be thrown in with the wolves.

No you just want rsync to remain available to you free of charge, while being maintained in a way that perfectly suits your ideals, without it costing you a dollar or even a minute of effort.

Why does he need this speed, exactly?

Because you’re not helping him. Because he’s been calling for help which isn’t coming, and he’s starting to burnout but the software he created is now load bearing and the responsibility is enormous. Also because LLMs are getting semi-good at finding vulnerabilities so anybody with 500$ of tokens can find critical bugs in virtually any software, which they have, which is why this release that is being shat on closes 6 CVEs that may otherwise have taken months to address.

And now instead of pitching in with repro tickets and code to help fix the issues introduced by this version, people are calling to spite-fork the whole thing and revert it to a pre-slop commit. As if the community which didn’t help when the project was “pure” would now magically find the time and energy to maintain it long term.