(h/t Technokami)

The Git project has put its current LLM policy (which currently blocks some AI use) up to a vote. An easily manipulated vote, like the kind Debian did. For the version control software used by the vast majority of software projects across the world.

Unity jumped on the slop train some time ago, so I’m chalking that up to the codebase being flooded with slop.

The Free Software movement doesn’t pursue the goal of “liberty for all humanity”. If you think it does, you are gravely mistaken. Our goals are different, and are well described elsewhere.

Never thought I’d see someone make a moral argument against Free Software, but here we are.

An interesting question from mcc:

I wonder if at this exact moment one could succeed in filing a issue against an open source project for an entirely ficticious vulnerability, get it assigned a CVE and a github score, and then get the upstream project to accept your patch for the vulnerability, with all these things presented as the issue, the CVE, and the PR being written by generative AI, but in fact you wrote them substantially by hand and the patch for your nonexistent vuln is actually a backdoor

Very probably the more your submission appeared to be written by generative AI, the more likely it would be to be accepted. If some person came in with an ungainly, unreadable patch and was aggressively pushing a project to accept it you’d get suspicious and wonder why but if an AI did that you’d be oh well AIs are just like that and AI written code is just like that

Likely Pivot candidate just dropped:

VRChat refused to add an AI label despite 95% of respondents on their own survey supporting it.

Fresh and high-grade sneer just crossed my eyes: AI is Fake People

Same issue as before - ctrl+K clipped the https:// prefix. Fixed it now.

Starting this Stubsack off: a pentester talks about testing an AI chatbot and its associated API, finding vulnerabilities they hadn’t seen in a decade.

We talking about Allen Wittman’s joke product, or Apple’s joke of a UI design?

(Its obviously the latter - Apple’s Temu frutiger aero is a fucking insult to my eyes)

To wow people who need a computer to think for them?

Quick follow-up, for the sake of furthering my argument:

Baldur, whilst talking about the aforementioned loss of FOSS surplus, laid out a worst-case scenario, where a vicious cycle collapses the FOSS ecosystem:

1. Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.

2. Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay^[sic] on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.

3. OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable. [This drives away users as a result.]

4. That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back. [return to step 1]

As a consequence of the slop-nami, I’d argue the perfect conditions for this vicious cycle have already emerged:

1. The slopnami has done plenty to exacerbate existing burnout in current maintainers - slop bug reports, scrapers and AI bros DDoSing services, AI bros in general and the myriad other negative externalities of this bubble have been utterly draining to deal with.

2. As (indirectly) mentioned before, the slopnami has given a variety of serious bugs and security issues - rsync’s broken backups, the rise of slopsquatting and prompt injection attacks, Linux’s recent race condition mishap, the list goes on.

There’s also a part in the denouement where he says a possible solution to improving slop code quality and safety standards is uploading the code to public repositories so similarly inclined people can engage with it

Which assumes people actually want to deal with slop code. An assumption that can be proven wrong by simply looking at the slopnami’s effect on the open source ecosystem. Speaking of which:

which, I don’t know, seems kind of familiar if you’ve been a programming adjacent for two seconds. But then you’d also be aware what the slopnami is already doing to the open source ecosystem.

Honestly, I’d be willing to bet good money on the ecosystem’s collapse at this point - the slopnami has tanked software quality across the board, the plague of scraping has made sharing source code deeply unattractive, the flood of LLM bug reports has crippled FOSS’s ability to find and fix bugs/vulnerabilities (which combos nicely with LLMs increasing bugcounts), and, as Baldur’s noted, the labour surplus FOSS relied upon has gone down the shitter.

On top of that, senior devs are burning out and deciding to GTFO en masse, and junior devs are getting deskilled, burnt out and/or laid off, crippling FOSS’s ability to replace any maintainers they lose.

The purpose of LLMs is theft, part infinity: AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work

Glyph recently convinced a project to stop doing updates altogether by accident, and has had some thoughts about it.

For the second time I think I have accidentally convinced a project to just … stop doing security updates on a critical dependency forever, because they’d assumed the LLM usage problem wasn’t as bad as it is.

Both of these are offline things that are not at all security-sensitive, but I am starting to worry that in the “dark matter” of the broader developer community there is a meaningful plurality of people who are just going to stop updating e.g. the Linux kernel because of broken trust

(Recommend checking the full thread)

Continuing on the Resident Evil talk, the T-Virus itself was the product of an eugenics program called Project W (aka: the Wesker Program), an eugenics program set on creating A Superior Breed of Man™, which would line up real nicely with the rats’ beliefs.

(They’d need to ignore Umbrella and its associates being complicit in over a dozen zombie outbreaks/apocalypses, but they can always rely on longtermism for that)

Zero advice on how to resist the siren song of a rogue AI trying to escape it’s box and zero insight on how OR WHY it might try to achieve that.

The best advice probably boils down to “Don’t be a rat in the first place”. As Soyweiser’s already mentioned, the AI only escapes if Yud’s playing against LW insiders.

Premium-quality sneer ran across my eyes recently: All A.I. Projects Are Digital Asbestos

Starting things off with a fresh sneer I recently ran across (and put in the wrong place):

You do not have to hand IT to the techbros

Starting things off with a fresh sneer I recently ran across:

You do not have to hand IT to the techbros

Using AI is a skill issue in and of itself, adding some accidental irony to the title