Sounds like they’ve now become completely dependent on AI to make the simplest, smallest changes. 😬
Yeah, even when he has a huge staff of himself to do everything.
🤷♂️ I’m the sole developer at my project at work and I don’t use AI. 👍 Especially not for editing a markdown file. I know how to paste links and phrase sentences and I don’t intend to dull that skill by using AI.
While that is definitely a risk one Claude commit in what might have been a larger MR doesn’t really tell you much.
It could have been a single item in a long list the agent just put it in its own commit.
doesn’t really tell you much
Yep, hence the “sounds like”. Can’t know for sure, obviously. But such trivial things shouldn’t be hard to do “manually”. Just paste a link and write some text.
You can even have it split and reorder commits.
No - you can fork and continue the development. It’s open source - you dont depend on shit. Except stepping up and chipping in, it does take that
“No”?
I was referring to the developer, that they’ve become dependent on AI.
For those who’ve never heard of him, Andrew Tridgell is not just some kid cosplaying as a programmer, he’s an open source legend. Apart from rsync he created Samba. Oh, and apparently he annoyed Linus Torvalds into inventing git lmao
Sure, it looks like he’s made a blunder or two but let’s not dogpile on him please. This is Fuck AI, not Fuck People.
Doing absolutely nothing would be better than the current travesty.
Oh so you’d rather fuck your ai gf than a person?
为什么不能两个都要
Gallons of water and who knows how much power to add a discord link on a text document?
Even more egregious waste of resources than most uses of the hallucination machines.
Seems like the real story here is one guy maintaining a critical infrastructure begging for volunteers to help out and nobody steps up. So yeah, I really don’t like what he does. And also the OSS community is failing him.
It wouldn’t surprise me if one day it comes out that these harassment campaigns against crucial FOSS infrastructure/chokepoint maintainers were funded by Thiel.
Think bigger.
Remember the XZ hack a few years ago? That whole mess started with a targeted harassment campaign towards the project’s lone maintainer. Eventually the sock puppet accounts wore him down and he was convinced to bring on a second maintainer to help with the project… who also turned out to be a sock puppet and who introduced the critical backdoor into XZ.
A lot of research has been done into this event since it happened, and the current consensus seems to be that both the harassment campaign and the malware creation were done on behalf of the Russian government.
So we’re now in the era where FOSS maintainers have become the targets of literal nation-states.
That was my take on it. It isn’t the only case.
I know, this is about AI, but can we stop for a minute and rage about the fact that fucking open source projects use a fucking spyware as a service that collects massive amounts of user data?
Guess it’s time to seek out rsync alternatives
Openrsync from openbsd (disclaimer: have not tried it)
Or maybe the corporations that heavily depend on rsync (ie, all of them) can donate some of their developers’ time to help the maintainer out.
Borg for backups, sftp for file transfer
I get the hate, but I wonder if the guy is just tired of the work… Would explain the need for crutches.
That’s a big vibe I get from a lot of heavy LLM users. They are burnt out on actually coding
I wonder when they will add layers of abstraction. Using one AI model to tell another AI model what to do.
My sweet child… that’s exactly what the ‘agentic’ shit is about, llms spinning up more instances and going back and forth between them… and that’s why you read those stories about the monthly bills shooting up like crazy
I should not be surprised, but this level of stupid still manages to surprise me.
This is already how subagent workflows work
Yes, they’ve been doing this for a while: https://openai.com/index/building-self-improving-tax-agents-with-codex/
Half the devs using AI have handed their critical thought over to it, so they’re already basically an AI model telling another AI model what to do.
Probably using speech to text so, that’s already happening.
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I’m no fan of vibe coded apps but rsync is literally free software with a free licence… forking it seems like less work than harrassing the guy who maintains in the hope that he capitulates.
We dont have the capacity to replace like 50% of all open source devs. We just have to hope that they get their shit together again.
It’s up to them how they develop their completely free software. If you’re not happy with it and can’t stop using it, you can fork it. If you can’t do it yourself, you pay someone else to. If it suddenly seems like paying for 50% of your FOSS is too much, then consider that the FOSS devs themselves pay for most of it with their largely uncompensated free time and probably want to have a bit more of said free time back.
How do they make money? Like they’re consultants and make plenty of money and then spend some free time maintaining OSS projects?
Usually they’re just regular software engineers who spend some of their free time on FOSS. Very few projects earn enough in donations to pay salaries.
I don’t see anyone here quietly hoping
Indeed.
What I see: A world class software engineer (Samba, rsync, linux, and more) is learning how to use the latest tech that is vastly changing the industry he works in. It would be both foolish and irresponsible to not learn it and embrace it responsibly. If anyone is in a good position to direct and judge the output of LLMs, it will be engineers like Andrew who have spent their life applying critical thinking and good judgement.
And on the opposing side, we see a bunch of droll jammerlappies, pitching tents on the side of a highway, waving their fists at the world zooming by.
Worse even because they’re not waving their fists at “the world”, they’re waving them at a person.
Honestly I would not be shocked if years from now we discover these harassment campaigns are funded by Thiel.
OSS maintenance is a thankless job for the most part and the reaction in this thread proves the point.
It honestly sucks that the #1 requirement to being an effective FOSS maintainer (above even coding talent) is the skill of enforcing healthy emotional boundaries.
literally free software with a free licence… just fork it
maintaining a fork is a lot of work and currently there is nobody even helping review commits in the mainline version.
i am also disgusted by the use of discord but i recommend reading tridge’s messages yesterday in this log of the rsync discord for some context about recent events.
tldr: it isn’t that he just decided to start changing things using claude and broke a bunch of stuff; the bugs he introduced recently are side effects of security fixes for the onslaught of security vulnerabilities which other people are finding using LLMs.
So you don’t have the capacity to create something yourself but you seem to have a lot of capacity to pile on and bully someone who is literally working for free.
I can’t wait to see how this strategy pays off. I’m sure your “hard work” will pay off!! 😉
I think you’ve misunderstood me :)
I am advocating for having some sympathy for the guy working for free, and pointing out that your capacity for saying “just fork it” most likely does not translate into capacity to actually fork it.
I didn’t say it did, I’m saying help or get out of the way.
Bitching and moaning and making demands of a volunteer until they do what you want them to is not going to produce the results you want.
The current maintainer, Andrew Tridgell, is one of the two original authors, and was dragged back into maintaining this in 2024 because rsync is so important and nobody else was stepping up to replace Wayne Davison, who was the primary maintainer from 2002 to 2024.
If this project had people eager to fork it, that probably wouldn’t have happened in 2024.
you’re absolutely right the only solution remaining is to harass the dev harder🙄
