1/ You can think that Tridge made some mistakes (I do, and he acknowledges them) and disagree with his take on GenAI (I do) but the pitchfork-wielding burn-the-witch mob being led by @davidgerard should show some humility and humanity.
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2/ Furthermore I should point out that whatever you think of LLM/GenAI, if it unearths security bugs that Tridge thinks are serious (I would tend to trust his take) then they are accessible right now today to every third rate script kiddie who can run an LLM.
@timbray yeah, i think this was missing from the discussion--like, some breakages were from fixes to symlink bugs, which are a legit common source of security issues that can be hard to fix backwards compatibly. and backcompat is hard for something that handles a million use cases.
seems plausible there'd've been regressions if he'd produced the changes a different way, and ignoring the issues has significant problems.
i just read his response. mostly despairing simply 'cause it reads as fighty so it will probably put fuel on the fire. but the underlying problem seems a lot thornier than the simple story the discussion online made it.
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@timbray I've been skeptical for a while about LLM/AI stuff, but I'm seeing people actually accomplishing tasks that they would've had to have paid someone to do if they had the money. A non-dev friend developed an app that was a very complicated excel spreadsheet.
I don't like a lot of things about LLM/AI. The linked video (no c-suite execs)has pushed me over the edge into it's here to stay and it's useful. Sitting on the sidelines yelling at the clouds doesn't help.
https://youtu.be/xviXW7C7My8?si=Y7ZIF3ljkpju6BDj@jameshubbard @timbray Any discussion of LLMs that doesn't acknowledge and address that all public LLMs are built on copyright infringement, sweatshop labor, and environmental destruction is unserious and not worth anyone's time.
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@jameshubbard @timbray Any discussion of LLMs that doesn't acknowledge and address that all public LLMs are built on copyright infringement, sweatshop labor, and environmental destruction is unserious and not worth anyone's time.
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
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1/ You can think that Tridge made some mistakes (I do, and he acknowledges them) and disagree with his take on GenAI (I do) but the pitchfork-wielding burn-the-witch mob being led by @davidgerard should show some humility and humanity. I acknowledge I'm a bit prejudiced based on having for a few decades used Tridge's work to save my ass and achieve results that seem miraculous.
@timbray I don't much like the ethics of GenAI either (which is an understatement).
And yet I see where tridge is coming from and thought his response was quite reasonable.
They exist. They're are a systematic evil. AI psychosis is real. Yet, the individual is often placed in a spot where their use is almost unavoidable.
I'd go a step further: where their use is better than not.
Nobody stepped forward to do the work tridge did.
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1/ You can think that Tridge made some mistakes (I do, and he acknowledges them) and disagree with his take on GenAI (I do) but the pitchfork-wielding burn-the-witch mob being led by @davidgerard should show some humility and humanity. I acknowledge I'm a bit prejudiced based on having for a few decades used Tridge's work to save my ass and achieve results that seem miraculous.
@timbray @davidgerard I've relied on rsync for decades. It's currently how I deploy my static website to a VPS. And now I'm having to deal with figuring out a replacement strategy that isn't a total nightmare across two different package ecosystems (Arch locally, Debian remotely), because the guy betrayed the public trust.
I try not to think about people in simple "good vs evil" terms - sometimes I fail or forget, because I'm human, but I try. I don't want this story to be about that, I don't care about classifying Tridge in those terms. But this *is* a situation where a previously trustworthy person is now creating ecosystem problems, and it needs to be addressed, and it affects a lot of people. At bare minimum, I'm allowed to be upset about being put in this position by a stranger. And I'm sure not going to carry water for that stranger while he's still actively being a problem.
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1/ You can think that Tridge made some mistakes (I do, and he acknowledges them) and disagree with his take on GenAI (I do) but the pitchfork-wielding burn-the-witch mob being led by @davidgerard should show some humility and humanity. I acknowledge I'm a bit prejudiced based on having for a few decades used Tridge's work to save my ass and achieve results that seem miraculous.
@timbray The people howling at Tridge over his use of Claude have probably been using Samba and rsync for years, explicitly or otherwise. Thanking Tridge for his service would be a good place to start.
I’m reminded of historic totalitarian regimes where some famous scientist becomes an unperson as a result of perceived sudden ideological impurity.
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1/ You can think that Tridge made some mistakes (I do, and he acknowledges them) and disagree with his take on GenAI (I do) but the pitchfork-wielding burn-the-witch mob being led by @davidgerard should show some humility and humanity. I acknowledge I'm a bit prejudiced based on having for a few decades used Tridge's work to save my ass and achieve results that seem miraculous.
For context: Andrew Tridgell's post, linked in David Gerard's post: https://medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0
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3/ And to those who say he should hand it off to one or more younger people who have the resources and skill to take good care of it, I agree and I bet he’d love that. I would prefer actual concrete people rather than an abstract assumption they exist. A good place to start would be, as Tridge asks, sending a few PRs to help restore order. Assuming the people howling for his head know what a PR is or how to build one.
@timbray I'm not calling for his head, but I have a deep concern about letting vibe coded stuff (and the code that is under discussion here was, according to git, authored by "tridge and claude", which appears to confirm it was vibe coded - this isn't about using LLMs to *find* bugs, it's about using them to code fixes to bugs) anywhere near where I need secure, bug free, code.
I have massive respect for Tridge. At the same time, this isn't something I'm comfortable with, and I can't support it just because it's Tridge.
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@timbray The people howling at Tridge over his use of Claude have probably been using Samba and rsync for years, explicitly or otherwise. Thanking Tridge for his service would be a good place to start.
I’m reminded of historic totalitarian regimes where some famous scientist becomes an unperson as a result of perceived sudden ideological impurity.
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1/ You can think that Tridge made some mistakes (I do, and he acknowledges them) and disagree with his take on GenAI (I do) but the pitchfork-wielding burn-the-witch mob being led by @davidgerard should show some humility and humanity. I acknowledge I'm a bit prejudiced based on having for a few decades used Tridge's work to save my ass and achieve results that seem miraculous.
@timbray @davidgerard all in all I think it's just very sad and another example that one-time brilliance does not guarantee that it flows on, like Linus Pauling trying to cure everything with vitamin C. Or Watson and Crick being racist and eugenicist.
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@davidgerard Whatever one may think about what you said, the comment thread is full of hateful trolling of the flavor that I decline to link to.
@timbray that's a weird way of admitting that your characterization was, to be circumspect about it, a bit off.
[ed: correcting autocorrect.]
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@timbray that's a weird way of admitting that your characterization was, to be circumspect about it, a bit off.
[ed: correcting autocorrect.]
@mawhrin Huh? I stand by every word.
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@mawhrin Huh? I stand by every word.
@timbray did you not write that david leads a pitchfork-wielding burn-the-witch mob?
i just finished reading that thread, and while some people weren't too pleasant, accusing david of organising a harassment campaign – which you just did – is inappropriate.
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@timbray did you not write that david leads a pitchfork-wielding burn-the-witch mob?
i just finished reading that thread, and while some people weren't too pleasant, accusing david of organising a harassment campaign – which you just did – is inappropriate.
@mawhrin That's exactly what David did. He posted a cartoonishly and maliciously distorted precis of what Tridge said, and as anyone who's been online for a while knows, most people aren't gonna follow the link, they're just gonna react to the post. Really shameful.
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@timbray did you not write that david leads a pitchfork-wielding burn-the-witch mob?
i just finished reading that thread, and while some people weren't too pleasant, accusing david of organising a harassment campaign – which you just did – is inappropriate.
@timbray (i'm really tired watching people excuse the Great Men Of Free Software of characterising other people's reasonable criticism as “foaming off the mouth”, a direct reference to rabies, while tone policing everyone else)
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@mawhrin That's exactly what David did. He posted a cartoonishly and maliciously distorted precis of what Tridge said, and as anyone who's been online for a while knows, most people aren't gonna follow the link, they're just gonna react to the post. Really shameful.
@timbray @mawhrin no I just checked again. It's an entirely accurate and even-handed summary of Tridge's incredibly tone-deaf blog post.
He's just repeating the same old LLM apologia and characterizing everyone who is criticizing him as ignorant. It's a super bad look and the blog itself is WAY more damning than David's summary. -
@mawhrin That's exactly what David did. He posted a cartoonishly and maliciously distorted precis of what Tridge said, and as anyone who's been online for a while knows, most people aren't gonna follow the link, they're just gonna react to the post. Really shameful.
@timbray i would perhaps believe you if i didn't read the following thread. but i did, and i call bullshit: this simply did not happen.
(and you can't even tell me i did not see all the replies: we're running the mastodon version that includes the improvements that complete the comment threads.)
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For context: Andrew Tridgell's post, linked in David Gerard's post: https://medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0
@golemwire @timbray thank you for posting this...
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@timbray @davidgerard all in all I think it's just very sad and another example that one-time brilliance does not guarantee that it flows on, like Linus Pauling trying to cure everything with vitamin C. Or Watson and Crick being racist and eugenicist.
@carbsrule_en @timbray @davidgerard what do you mean?
He is doing brilliant work reacting to the torrent of valid AI generated security issues.
