I saw a wild take where someone said distributions are fascist for using systemd because systemd now uses Claude for code review.

[dalias@hachyderm.io]

@ariadne I think bullet point 2 is the biggest immediatly actionable thing. If a package that's been zero churn except for an occasional bug/security fix every few years suddenly has massive new development (harfbuzz? chardet?), you have to deem that a malicious fork and stick with the last known-good version.

[bluca@fosstodon.org]

@lanodan @ariadne @thesamesam the 70% of valid-bugs-but-not-vulnerabilities is kinda 50-50 our fault and the bots fault. The bots fault because it's a dumb LLM in the end, it doesn't understand the big picture (well doesn't "understand", full stop). Our fault because a lot of the security models are pretty much implicit, and scarcely documented if at all, so the bot has nothing to keep it grounded to reality

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@bluca @lanodan @thesamesam yes, in our own experiments at work, we are having to write a lot into the system prompt in order to inform claude about the threat model.

otherwise it does silly things like "zones have device nodes in them that allow accessing hypervisor services"

well, yes.

i would hope so.

considering that it's running in a hypervisor, and you need those services to access secure enclaves, for example.

[bluca@fosstodon.org]

@ariadne @thesamesam @lanodan yeah that's obviously the end goal of all this wild and absurd speculation, but capitalism gotta capitalism. At some point the bubble will pop and then we'll see what's left standing

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@omnirabbit @ariadne I'm a pragmatist, but do appreciate it there being an effort to denounce and fight these kinds of involutions, even when it is taken to extremes I disagree with. It's the most practical example of the Overton window. Without the shift to the opposite extreme, the situation would devolve much faster.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@omnirabbit @ariadne (let's say that the age thing doesn't shine a positive light on systemd either)

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@oblomov @omnirabbit what "age thing"

it's a fucking optional field in a user database for birthdate

they aren't enforcing anything or anything like that.

it is a field in a schema.

vcard also has a field for birthdate. is it also fascist?

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@ariadne

why was the field added?

(VCARD has a lot of field for PII. Heck's, it's basically just PII> That doesn't mean that systemd should have that same information. They are different tools for different purposes.)

@omnirabbit

[brib@bribstodon.xyz]

@ariadne honestly i don't have the resources to ensure that every part of my stack is untainted and i've slowly made peace with this. I expect software quality to degrade, and I'm keeping that largely to the sphere outside my control, although I do try to keep make a note of projects which are not doing that (https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index).

But I haven't made peace with working with code which has been slop generated without hefty hazard pay. I used to love the idea of open source as a digital commons and really wanted to contribute to it, but the recent sloppification has really crushed my dreams in this area

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@brib fwiw, pkgconf does not allow agents to work autonomously in our tree as a matter of policy:

pkgconf/CONTRIBUTING.md at master · pkgconf/pkgconf

package compiler and linker metadata toolkit. Contribute to pkgconf/pkgconf development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub (github.com)

[teftuft@leporid.net]

@ariadne yeah, its looks like more and more code it going to be tainted or produced by LLMs in some way. It seems unavoidable, so I guess we need more ergonomic tools for safely running untrusted code to protect as much as is possible from its flaws. But, I think even before there were LLMs this was the case. I haven't audited all of the code my computer runs and some is very flawed I'm sure.

[aronowski@furry.engineer]

@ariadne @thesamesam @bluca @lanodan The end-user should always be responsible for what they deliver, no matter the tools. Then any excuses like "AI wrote it" would not have any rights to defend the user.

[distractions@mastodon.social]

@ariadne well, as a developer who has been writing linux kernel code since back in about 2001 or so (actually I think it was something alsa/bluetooth related so probably user space at that point, but … I remember digging deep) - I don’t think it’s feasible to continue OSS without making use of gen AI in development.

Its like saying we can’t use C, everything has to be ASM.

That doesn’t mean developers don’t need to read or understand the code anymore before committing. But a hard ban? Idk.

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@aronowski @thesamesam @bluca @lanodan yes, that is basically the pkgconf contribution policy in a nutshell.

we have taken some steps to tell agentic tools to fuck off though, because i do not want to deal with it

[matt@toot.cafe]

@omnirabbit @ariadne I'm not sure. Cory Doctorow had a well-known post a month or so ago where he described a hard anti-LLM stance as "purity culture", and that produced a significant backlash, with people saying that the moral issue in this case was clear enough to justify complete abstinence. But I guess that doesn't necessarily extend to considering non-abstaining dependencies as tainted.

[matt@toot.cafe]

@omnirabbit @ariadne Your argument resonates with me, because I grew up immersed in evangelicalism, so I realize that I still need to deprogram the broader religious dogmatic patterns. But then you have people, especialy here on fedi, who are absolutely certain that using LLMs is bad and that the analogy to religious purity is wrong.

[dysfun@social.treehouse.systems]

@ariadne @distractions i feel like the decades we've managed already are worth something.

[kirakira@furry.engineer]

@ariadne i do wonder what a path away from this (that isn't "everyone agrees that doing that is bad") looks like

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@lproven they may not allow agentic development, but i guarantee you there are people using AI tools to develop changesets.

[distractions@mastodon.social]

@ariadne well, because the world already has been changed. That’s a historic hard fact. Pretending it hasn’t won’t stop the wheel from turning. Anyone can set up a new project on GitHub (or CodeBerg for that matter) and put anything up there, and if it somehow does the trick, people won’t care how it does. It’s sad, but that’s how things progress.

I believe it more worthwhile to harden our processes **around** and with gAI, not against it. Because the train will roll.