Open source has an open slop problem.
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Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
@Daojoan not a bad idea. But:
> You could imagine this layered onto GitHub
Except GitHub is owned by Microsoft who bet all their money and their entire business on the slop economy. So you'd never* get them to do something like that, that reduces the incentives to mass slopping.
*) "Never", until they jump on the next hype train going in a new exhausting direction.
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Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
This is something that has been bugging me for months. The noise to signal ratio in open source repos has gotten insane. You used to be able to trust that if something had stars and contributors it was legit. Now half of it is AI slop with a polished README and zero real usage. We need better curation, not more code
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Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
@Daojoan Interesting
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Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
@Daojoan
#Couchsurfing used to have a vouch system which worked a bit like this (once you'd been vouched for x times you could vouch for other people) -
Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
@Daojoan this vouch system has been doing the rounds…
GitHub - mitchellh/vouch: A community trust management system based on explicit vouches to participate.
A community trust management system based on explicit vouches to participate. - mitchellh/vouch
GitHub (github.com)
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Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
@Daojoan fabulous article. Thanks.
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Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
@Daojoan Didn't really read it whole, simping for monopolies is not my cup of tea.
The Romans also had many things figured out - turns out slavery is great when you want to cut costs!
That's pretty much how the intro reads to me.
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Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
@Daojoan it's hard for people to reject authoritarianism and accept freedom. I get it.
The Wake-Up Call That Looks Like an Attack - Loose Cannon
In a World That Runs on Emptiness.
(www.ctrlaltrevolt.net)
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Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
@Daojoan Hello friend Greetings
How are you doing today hope you’re feeling well and your family? You are having a direct text from Elon. -
Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
@Daojoan But Florentine weavers would also resort to burning down the workshops of outsider weavers… do we want people in the web of trust to burn down AI data cent…. never mind, proceed!
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Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
@Daojoan Love this, thinking about a practical implementation.
We could have software that generates cryptographic certificates, which anyone who already has one can issue. The new certificate would contain the issuer's certificate, which by this rule would itself contain its own issuer's certificate, and so on.
Pull requests, social media posts, whatever, could have certificates attached, and be visible to clients who would reject anything without a trusted cert somewhere in the chain.
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@Daojoan Didn't really read it whole, simping for monopolies is not my cup of tea.
The Romans also had many things figured out - turns out slavery is great when you want to cut costs!
That's pretty much how the intro reads to me.
@chrastecky @Daojoan Brother you gotta learn to spot a provocative title, and also not be commenting when you didn't read the article.
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@Daojoan Love this, thinking about a practical implementation.
We could have software that generates cryptographic certificates, which anyone who already has one can issue. The new certificate would contain the issuer's certificate, which by this rule would itself contain its own issuer's certificate, and so on.
Pull requests, social media posts, whatever, could have certificates attached, and be visible to clients who would reject anything without a trusted cert somewhere in the chain.
@Daojoan and there could be a repository to report bad activity that would notify everyone in the bad actor's cert chain so they can take action, some kind of mechanism to revoke a cert etc.
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Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.
Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)
@Daojoan When you say ‘The "open" in open source was always about access to code, not the abolition of all quality filters on human participation.’ You highlight humans making the same stupid error LLMs do. They take a word like “open” that has a variety of meanings based on context, remove all context, assign a meaning, and try to stick it back into a context it doesn’t fit.
Like an LLM discussing “diving” can easily careen between skydiving, scuba diving, and swimming diving. Snorkel? Parachute? Swimming cap?
To me, it feels like a variation on context collapse. Using the wrong sense of a word (“open”) because it has been stripped of its context (the open source tradition).
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
