> Contributions from people from identities known and consistent before the AI-age are fine

Unfortunately, according to the article:

> Giovannini has participated in discussions at least as far back as 2018, and his activity in Bugzilla goes back to at least 2016. He does not appear to have been a particularly active contributor to the project, but his involvement clearly predates the agentic AI era. Whether his account is now being operated by a human attacker, an agentic AI, or a mix of both, it has a legitimate history prior to its recent activity.

So people would have to not only verify the age of Giovanni’s accounts, but judge whether his behaviour was normal.

And what’s stopping an AI agent from throwing in a casual NATCIOS here and there?

I too have see the fnords

Read closer - Giovanni’s accounts may have been compromised.

Read closer, it's "Giovannini". However, I still think it's an apt name for a villain. Did the Fedora team not watch Pokémon?

Given the history of the account it does not seem reasonable to take that claim seriously.

Sure, but I would expect that the compromise and the agent were both done by some person or group, not by an agent going rogue

Near the top, the page claims it’s about learning the difference between checking, saving and money market accounts.

In the entire linked article, where is the explanation for what a savings account is? Most of the early paragraphs are just waffling about how “Types of Accounts” are important. I’m pretty sure I read the phrase “money is emotional” before even getting to any description of any type of account. The word “savings” almost never appears and none of the instances seemed to define a savings account.

Honestly, is this content written by AI? In my opinion it’s acceptable to use AI to replace the boilerplate HTML, JavaScript and CSS of your site. But using AI for the actual writing risks turning your “educational tool” into a tool for misinformation.

EDIT: according to Pangram, 100% of the first two paragraphs are AI generated. Which is not a surprise at all, I don’t see how a human tasked with describing types of bank accounts would struggle this hard.

How exactly would BlackSmith enforce the overdue payment? By sending the user to court?

Unlikely. But it is likely they will need to pay before resuming usage as a paying customer.

They could if they feel it's worthwhile. Most companies don't, but most companies don't do most of the stuff mentioned in this article, because they're lazy. If they're not lazy they can absolutely follow up any unpaid debt in court, no matter whether you tried to use a virtual credit card or anything like that.

In German-speaking (DACH) countries the companies aren't lazy and they will take you to court and the court will make you pay all legal and court fees as well as the debt. It's a near certainty they will bother. In the USA you're hoping they won't bother and they'll be satisfied with just banning you as a customer. I think this is because each party pays their own legal fees in the USA.

Yes, civil legal proceedings (and/or hiring a collections agency) are generally how debts are pursued in the United States.

The offering in question is "A better GitHub" so you are correct. That is an actual quote from the FAQ [0] by the way.

In comparison CodeBerg [1] and SourceHut [2] both offer Git hosting but don't merely describe themselves as "GitHub but X".

[0] https://gitdot.io/faq

[1] https://codeberg.org/

[2] https://sourcehut.org/

Point #5 seems near impossible and even furthermore undesirable. Unless we are envisioning an application with all the characteristics of a web browser, but using different layout languages.

Is this a trend? Do you have any other examples? And what division would a world flag generate??

> And what division would a world flag generate?

It's just a way of saying that you're too good for your neighbors. That's why it would appeal to liberals and libertarians alike.

Some enjoy their local cultures, customs and sovereignty and do not wish to dissolve into a homogenized nowhere-land of world culture/governance. Some people do not cheer for dystopia.

Continue with the scold though, very convincing argument so far.

Mukbangs are a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukbang

When I look at the commits themselves, most of the ones generated by Claude are testsuite changes, or at least labelled as such.

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/

Aren’t LLMs notorious for just making tests pass and not actually testing functionality?

I’ve never seen Claude do that. It makes the new tests pass by fixing previously unknown bugs in my experience.

I had it do it about a month ago. It changed test data which caused another test to fail and instead of isolating things it decided to flip an assert.

That's because Opus needed vacation and they routed your requests to its less sophisticated cousin, Claude Dynamite. ;)

I love Claude but on several occasions I've had it do some really funky stuff just to get tests passing

Yeah, in 2024.

You have to keep an eye on them, but they don't just make tests pass.

Claude sonnet 4 (this time last year) did do this. It once made simulation if a test script passing. Literally a script that just echoed test names and then said pass.

Change happens fast, a year old model is pretty outdated.

I'm sure it can happen, hence why I said to keep an eye out. Its main mode of operation is not to cook the tests however.

Happened to me, 3 days ago - deleted some tests and flipped assertions after outlining that it wasn't to change any assertions.

Our team was doing a similar task to move between test frameworks, and I had to do a git diff of hundreds of thousands of lines to try and work out where a test had disappeared to.

> 3 days ago

Your fault. You should have used a model from 0.000005 seconds ago!

Reading is difficult.

> Change happens fast, a year old model is pretty outdated.

What change? That you should not fake the results of a test because that defeats the whole purpose of a test has been known before there were computers.

I don't know, the weather?

Is that suppose to make this better? IME the most valuable tests are those that test specific regressions. It's the scaffolding we build for ourselves to enable feature development. Remove that scaffolding and you get accidents. Pray to your god of choice these accidents don't cause harm or loss of life.

It should really be considered negligence at this point. Some of this software is extremely valuable, it's how we flourish as humans. Purposely fucking with that should bear some real world consequence. We do the same in every other industry, software is just as important too.

In my perspective, "Analyze code, come up with edge cases and gaps and create unit tests for them" is one of the use-cases where AI was starting to get really good at, so I can see why someone would want to extend their test-suite dramatically using it.

But yes, using AI to then generate code that still causes regressions doesn't quite square with that. Given the huge amount of test-changes I'd still assume good faith by the maintainer; possibly just a bit of overexcitement paired with a dash of too much confidence into the new tools that is now hitting reality.

> Is that suppose to make this better?

When I first saw the 26k changes statistic I was shocked. It made me think a large chunk of code running on people’s machines was AI-generated.

But the knowledge that a lot of the changes might be testsuite changes made me change my perspective. If for instance 25k of the changes were test changes and only 1k of the changes actually affected the .so and other artifacts used downstream, that would be a lot less dramatic.

I haven’t reviewed the code, only the messages, so I don’t know if these changes were removing or adding test cases. And there are a minority of Claude-assisted changes which are not listed as tests.

Taken at face value, most commit descriptions mention adding - not skipping - tests and assertions.

So basically, we're all in our high horses, not reviewing code, scalding the unpaid maintainer for … not reviewing code.

Time for - whoever actually cares - to do better.

I hear you, OTOH if this software was so valuable how come we aren’t funding it? A lot of the world runs on OSS with a coupe overwhelmed maintainers who get treated as if they owed everybody working software yet can’t make a living off it.

We should fund it. Go read the types of comments I make in my profile. I always advocate for explicitly taxing big tech to publicly fund open source development.

Also it's why we need to pass things like medicare for all and universal childcare to give workers some breathing room if they want to change jobs/industries without condemning them to death or poverty.

The correctness of tests is as important as the correctness of the main code. Changing test code isn’t somehow less critical than changing the main code.