Linux

“used AI to detect a bug that they were using to crack consoles, and reported it to Sony for a bounty.”

Wow, what a fucking loser. This was probably the kid who reminded the teacher that they forgot to assign homework.

I've abandoned all my open-source projects too. I've gotten a lot of PRs lately, and each time I look, it's bad AI-generated code that I never want to merge.

That and I don't even see the point of maintaining finely-crafted handmade code in that sea of mediocre fast-paced slop. It's just not fun and I'm not interested anymore.

“used AI to detect a bug that they were using to crack consoles, and reported it to Sony for a bounty.”

Wow, that's literally "McDonalds burger flipper who narc'd on Luigi" level of stupid. And they are likely about to obtain the same amount of prize...

The problem is that AI empowers the biggest idiots

these idiots think they're helping (or rather, they want recognition without doing any work) but they're basically just creating virtual asbestos. turning in that bug bounty was especially heinous.

i was considering getting a PS5 purely for the linux stuff but i guess not now. not that i had PS5 money anyway, even gently used...

I think it’s telling that llama.cpp, the interface engine for LLMs on desktops, has blanket banned vibe coded PRs, as they simply cannot deal with them with the manpower they have.

…An LLM inference project. Banning LLM vibe coding.

I remember a collective groan from the devs when Google’s TurboQuant paper trended on Twitter, and they knew there’d be a flood of Claude PRs to “implement” the feature, even though most of it already existed in the engine.

vllm (the premiere enterprise server inference engine) is quite careful about them too, though they use bots to filter them and have more manpower to cull what slips through.

I’m exhauseted with AI and AI news. It’s why I had to leave Reddit. It has ruined everything that I enjoy.

The post that did it for me was some guy saying “I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing but I had claude port sonic cd to the Saturn”

It’s just endless hyperdrive of slop. Everyone is a “coder” now. It’s sad.

The motherfucker that snitched to Sony deserves a proper pummeling.

Vibe-coders (actually probably will steal "slop kiddies") ruin a good thing yet again.

I turn to retrocomputing to get away from it all because I would expect people in that world to generally agree this is horrible and there's somehow vibe-coding there too. I'm so tired of this.

I've said this many many times, but lowering the skill floor for tasks inevitably drops the average quality down. Mathematically provable even.

There's a reason a lot of the tech made in the 50s/60s/70s/80s was amazing because it was made by the brightest of minds whereas the everday person didn't have the skills to get over the floor. Think moon landing, xerox, and many other analog systems.

There used to be barriers for entry into these spaces that would ensure effort is done to participate, with low effort garbage being filtered by the minimum impetus. Now that writing code can be "effortless" you end up with a lot more garbage there is no filter for. Same for all skillsets impacted by AI. Graphic design being another big one that comes to mind.

Yeah, I can't imagine being an open source developer for a popular program these days. They get absolutely flooded with slop, constantly. I wouldn't be surprised if it somehow makes open source die, or at least go into the shadows.

Don't blame the guy for having to work with idiots that have no clue about the system, about the code base, how it's used, and fucks over everyone in the project because a LLM told them to just to get a thank you email by a corporation, if that.

It makes no sense, either busineswise or personally, for a very senior domain expert to waste most of their time reviewing the "work" produced by the equivalent of the a veritable army of the most junior dev imaginable blindly running random code generators to produce tons of low-value "code" and, worse, junior devs that will never fucking learn no matter how much feedback you give to them.

An overabundance of noobs is historically the reason why high level experts just stop reading and giving feedback in general subject forums - it gets really old really fast to constantly have to repeating the same basic lessons for junior level people, many who didn't even try to learn the basics from widelly available information out there.

Now imagine the same problem only the "junior" people in question are significantly more clueless (clueless zero-knowledge amateurs, so less than junior), don't even know they have a problem and basically use text generators to produce walls of code.

I suspect it's like the problems in expert Usenet groups that gave rise to using FAQs as solution and the good old Read The Fucking Faq (RTFF) response to noob questions, only 100s of times worse.

There is literally no point in engaging with slop kiddies.

(The extra sad thing in this case is how the only way to protect from slop kiddies using their slop tools to trawl the homebrew code for the hack used to go around Sony's blocking and snitching it to Sony for $$$ is to keep that code closed. In a way, this is quite similar to what's happening in Mathematics with AI were if a scientist reports on their progress to prove some theorem, somebody might very well use the AI to plagiarize what they've done so far and jump from there into producing a programatical "proof" which doesn't actually come with the theoretical underpinning explaining why and how it works)

Why the hell would you even search for an report that bug? Surely there are better bug bounties to be had...

That aside, by all means, use AI if you want to, but don't spam FOSS projects with it like wth. If you want to use AI, check the projects policy first, and if they permit it, look at the code you generated, test it and declare that you used AI so the maintainers are aware.

And please don't try to contribute code to anything if you don't know shit about coding. Nobody needs your help to write a prompt. I don't know where people get the idea that anyome needs them to tell an AI what to do. If I could just tell an AI and be done with it, I would fucking be done with it.

As someone who frequently uses open source software but doesn't code much, the prevalance of this kind of attitude is very concerning.

Don't get me wrong, I understand why the maintainers feel the way they do, I'm just worried that all the software I've come to rely on will slowly become abandoned because of it.

I'm getting a new job soon that pays more, gonna put some money every month into supporting maintainers of the software I use financially going forward, starting with the more obscure stuff. hopefully that helps ease the burden.

There are bots running round that are trying to generate revenue to pay for their token expenditure. I wonder if it was something like that flooding the bug bounties