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Rsync is reportedly causing backups to fail since maintainer began AI code experiment
(files.catbox.moe)
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
It would gather CVEs, yes, but at least the codebase would not change so fast that even the maintainer themselves can no longer keep up with understanding all the changes. I've looked at a few commits and there's way too many lines of code for the maintainer to have carefully reviewed and understood them all.
But an abandoned rsync would have two great advantages:
Also - if a tool finds a security risk, then I want a human maintainer to wrap their head around the attack vector to come up with the correct patch to counter the actual attack vector. Slop machines have zero understanding, so if you need to put out a house fire with people in it, a slop machine might as well drain all oxygen from the air. The fire will be gone after that. But so will the people.
...and a lot of the "security issues" being found by LLMs are not viable attack vectors. For example: in the case of rsync they just terminate a connection with no server-side effect.
Of course, there's that as well. And self-appointed "security researchers" auto-scanning repos and creating tool-submitted issues about "vulnerabilities", wasting dev time.
"Coding assistants" have to be considered what is the most likely intent: a large-scale attack of megacorporations on the open source community, and the gullible people who use them should be treated as agents of a hostile corporation.
Funny you use that analogy because I once worked in a factory where if a fire didn't get you, the fire suppression system that was basically just a few tanks of CO2 would when it pushed all the breathable air away. No AI involved at all, just a bunch of people that cared more about the equipment than the people (or were willing to go to any means to keep any fires from spreading to the offices).
No point here really, other than maybe you're overestimating people with that analogy.
Edit: also, when there's community pressure to fork a project that already isn't getting much help, I'd expect the ones who just want an AI to do it would be more likely to step up. Taking over a fork is more work than contributing to one someone else owns, though some might be attracted to that control (which may or may not work out for everyone else).