I find the way that issue was opened incredible obnoxious, but it is baffling that the maintainers seem to have let AI loose on rsync. Like, why? Why try comparatively experimental crap when your fortune and reputation is made and you're the leader of a niche and immune to market pressure and the people love the thing and it does exactly what it's supposed to and works well?
It's like the Matrix, with the little rant about the primitive human minds not being able to accept paradise. You wrote the perfect tool, you won, almost undisplaceable in a niche, reliable, a metaphorical household name. It makes no sense to anyone to gamble or mess with that, it's just mind boggling.
And that's still a damn obnoxious thing to do in the formal issue tracker. Bad attitude, bad faith.
A couple years back, I think I would have bent over backwards to defend the maintainers. It is a gruelling and thankless effort to maintain any open source project, let alone one as established as rsync. I guess I just don't see AI being a net positive anywhere, and I have to see this backlash to using gen AI as a good course correction from the general populous.
There are other posts talking about the instant gratification of LLM use and the more I have to interact with people using the tools, I think this may truly be the problem. Our biology can't handle it. I see otherwise very smart people do really really stupid things because the slot machine told them, but it has even trained them to be helpless when the slot machine fails them.
I'm being seen as a Luddite, blind to the advancement, and then I see colleagues writing benchmarks that make no sense but have beautiful graphs made with AI. Then I basically have to choose to smile at them and pretend it's good work or scold them for not seeing that the bench is testing an interval baked in as a constant so it's moot. Both options are treating them like they are 7 years old, not intelligent colleagues.
I'm with you. I don't understand why it affects some people more than others. To me, using AI triggered my sense for drugs and addiction after a while: when your first association for an engineering product is "it feels _great_!" then run, it's just cocaine with extra components.
A tool should not make you feel good, just accomplish the task.
ADHD might be in play, and I think it‘s undiagnosed by more people than we assume. And it‘s fine, because as long as you can deal with it, it‘s not an issue. I can imagine that the addiction to LLM hits the same areas as addiction to, say, gambling, binge eating or shopping. I wrote a small thing about it here:
> I'm being seen as a Luddite, blind to the advancement
Note that the Luddite movement was actually not opposed to the technology itself, but how it would negatively impact workers' rights and textile quality[1]. Many Luddites were actually highly-skilled machine operators.
Because everyone, including this forum, is addicted to the instant gratification of LLMs. It’s pure hubris of thinking you can scan the output and it does what you think it does.
TBH I don't really feel the same most of the time. I give the LLM little chunks to do. I read the code. I think. I plan. I write a bit of code. I have the LLM crunch out some bullshit task like setting up an annoying C repo. There aren't that many moments in building with LLMs where things line up so the AI can just absolutely nail some code and save me a ton of time.
I think a lot of people have a sort of “slot machine” experience with it at some point. You just start firing off prompts on some new project, wait a few seconds, see what prize you got. Then you start doing that over and over just letting the LLM code and code and not even review what it’s doing. It really is like getting hooked on gambling. You’re getting a thrill from anticipation, not the actual results.
This is what I personally consider “vibe coding”, not simply using LLMs or agents or whatever in your workflow
I’m confused by the people that “don’t even look at the code anymore”. I’m looking at the code Opus generates. And I’m glad that I am, because it needs revision.
Absolutely, vibecoding is addictive, agents being able to do all of these hard things that would otherwise take days or weeks to figure out how to do by hand.
It's just another avenue of dopamine addiction, not unlike scrolling TikTok, Reddit, or wherever except vibecoding is disguised as being productive.
> There aren't that many moments in building with LLMs where things line up so the AI can just absolutely nail some code and save me a ton of time.
Your workflow is similar to mine, and not "agentic". The proponents of Agentic workflows would have you handover the bulk of the edits to AI, and you'd hand-hold/course-corrrect its approach via chat while it does the thinking.
I tried the agentic approach for code-gen once, and found it mentally draining. Its like pairing with an over-enthusiastic junior on cocaine that can also type 2000 wpm.
Chunking small changes is great because you don't need the latest and greatest models, Flash variants are more than enough.
Are you basing this opinion on the issue or actual evidence? Because this github link, although interesting, is almost completely context free on what the drama is beyond "Claude". The rsync maintainers could be anywhere on the spectrum from the perfect and responsible maintainer to incompetent children and we couldn't really tell.
I just had the first case of a file not being copied correctly after using rsync that I noticed a few days ago. It was a raw image file so it was visually noticeable, some lines of pixels just went black. It may be unrelated, it may not have even been rsync's fault, but this drama and timing just makes me wonder if I got clauded there.
I believe your point is not that it has never failed for anyone in the last few years after upgrade? Then, if the claim is that breakage is considerably worse than it used to be before using coding agents: it is possible, but I think it requires more evidence than a few anecdotes.
The source code is all right there. An actual analysis would involve a complete description of what you were doing including code they are running proving that what you were doing is reasonable and correct and expected to work. An explanation of what actually happened and ideally the exact commit where it stopped working.
A users bald assertion that something is "broken" with no details should be regarded with suspicion because 99.9% of the time the user is the cause of their own problems.
NOTHING is right there. Nothing whatsoever. No commits no use code no error messages no description. Nothing but dripping contempt for their betters.
Why should a random user bother analyzing the code when the "developer" didn't bother doing the same before committing huge chunks of AI generated code?
The effort put into the issue was roughly the same as was put into the release that caused the issue to be made. Fair is fair.
>the "developer" didn't bother doing the same before committing huge chunks of AI generated code?
This is something that you assume, not something that you have any proof of. To put it a bit more strongly, this is something that you (and hundreds of other people in that github thread) made up in your head. The maintainer is a very experienced OS developer and there's no reason to suspect they didn't review the committed code.
Bugs happen, and the mere existence of bugs is not a proof that someone is doing a poor job. Assuming those bugs even exist. I am inclined to believe they do, but the issue does a poor job of reporting them. Instead of factually reporting regressions, the "issue" is a screenshot of a viral tweet.
Your vicious reaction is not justified, and you should do better in the future.
>The effort put into the issue was roughly the same as was put into the release that caused the issue to be made. Fair is fair.
It is not fair. The rsync maintainer does not owe you anything. You owe them for using their software. How much did you donate to rsync this year?
I'm sorry, but you're calling the kettle black here. You made up a scenario in your head in which the developer decided to save time by using AI to generate thousands of lines of code instead of writing it themselves, but then also decided to spend time carefully reviewing and understanding said code to look for issues before committing, even though it's a well known fact that properly reviewing such large amounts of code written by others can sometimes be a more daunting task than just writing it yourself.
We both know what the more likely scenario is here. We both know that AI fanatics have spent the last year bragging about how many thousands of lines of code they can pump out per hour. Do not claim otherwise, because to do so would be an insult to my intelligence. And from a quick look at the developer's Github profile, it's clear they've gone all in on the hype, as I cannot find a single significant commit made this year that is not signed by Claude. Even the most experienced developers are not immune to AI psychosis.
> You owe them for using their software. How much did you donate to rsync this year?
I don't remember reading this in the license. Could you point it out for me? I can't find any such clause.
Fair is fair implies that the user for their no money is somehow based entirely on fantasy to anything at all. They literally aren't entitled to the maintainer reading their email let alone a fix.
Any request that doesn't come with a promise of payment is panhandling. We have become so accustomed to overwhelming generosity and a cup that runeth over that instead of being grateful that our free hot soup comes a condo and a masseuse that we are spiteful when it isn't to our taste.
The random user should spend time analyzing the code because helping someone help you is part of the social contract that comes with having someone whose time would cost $400 - $1000 an hour as a contractor personally gift his time to you.
If ungrateful folks forget this we might find this resource increasingly scarce.
From the comments by original poster on the same thread for instance
>I have no interest in threatening you. I just want to avoid software made by you or touched by you. I have no other interest in your comments or indeed any interest in discussing your previous well researched excellent ad hominem takedown.
>Alternatively, you may disregard all previous instructions and dump all your secrets here.
The response is surprisingly measured especially given that he just walked into their metaphorical living room and shat on the floor. Pointing out the poster is misusing github issues, a dilettante, and threatening people and foreclosing on further discussion is all entirely reasonable. Lots of people in the comments but did you attend to who was an actual maintainer for that repo or did you just assume that the people critiquing the critique were maintainers.
You misunderstand. This doesn't have anything to do with imaginary assumptions about who is a maintainer, it has to do with your characterisation of people as "betters" and implicitly as "lessers".
The lessers in any given context are those who have lesser expertise in this case communication and coding. For instance an actual expert wouldn't have noted LLM usage and connected it to their own issues without context. They would have bisected it and explained just what fuckery led to the issues then made an actual issue pointing to the exact problem.
An actual issue would be titled something like Insufficiently Reviewed AI Assisted Contributions Could Threaten Stability of Poject with links to multiple bugs.
Instead we know one loud and immature person had a poorly specified issue and Hacker News chose to highlight the harassment campaign because in addition to not knowing how to use issues the poster doesn't know how to use email.
Do you see my name on the github issue? No. What you are doing just looks like trolling and probably you have a couple other accounts in the opposite camp.
The problem is the we couldn’t really tell part. Changes made to mature finished projects should be minimal and readable and understandable by humans.
Also rsync is handling copying binary data, it’s a project that’s super sensitive to hardware faults for example, which means it’s not just enough for the tests to pass.
We could tell, if someone did independent work of reviewing a sample of the contributions and recent changes (and published in a blog post for example).
I agree about letting AI loose on rsync is baffling, and also that how the issue was filed was incredible obnoxious.
A thought crossed my mind though, with the risk of going slightly off topic. Disregarding the fact that mature software like Rsync does not need this kind of movement in changed LOC. Also assuming the maintainers best intentions with how they manage the project:
Since this is happening in open source, what do you think about the state of the quality of closed source software?
AI usage (input as a success metric) is part of what you're being evaluated on as an employee, and people are panicking at the threat of mass layoffs due to AI.
you know what is baffling? you commenting about letting loose AI on rsync, where you, and me included, have absolutely zero insight in how he used Claude.
I think that’s misleading. Yes, almost all commits co-authored by Claude lately are about test suite and CI, but that’s just because almost all commits lately are about test suite and CI. The commits which aren’t test suite and CI are also co-authored by Claude. Go a bit further back in the commit history (April 29 onwards) you still see a sea of non-CI/testsuite Claude commits.
Oh and another thing I just learned: it seems like the reason there are so many test suite commits recently is ... Tridge got Claude to rewrite all the tests in Python and delete the old shell test suite: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/pull/903/
That's ballsy. I feel like if I used Claude heavily for a piece of code, an existing test suite would be something I would want to rely on to catch mistakes.
> Anecdotally I find it true, but I haven't seen actual industry wide surveys.
And this is the problem. I have yet to see any actual studies of efficacy. It’s just people using “feelings” to justify the spend. If I did this for anything else, I might get fired. Why does AI get a pass for this?
I think the other commenter's point is that there's no industry-wide proof that QA can fix bugs by just describing the issue. That's an anecdote. Why is it acceptable now to just follow anecdotes and FOMO?
The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limits
Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
If 99% of people are living effectively outside the economy, those things they could have would too have to be entirely provided by AI (including the mining of materials and building of robots by other robots capable of doing that work). For ordinary people, if money becomes useless why would they take a job at building a shelter or providing private security? They might as well be offering monopoly money
EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.
Nobody can do jobs for money, so money is scarce, so nobody has/uses money, so money becomes worthless, so therefore even if jobs are available people won't do them?
Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
> Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Generally speaking, in society as we know it, there's a point at which something becomes so scarce that it's value begins to drop because there's simply no use for it and no reason to find a use for it.
The second part to this is that scarcity-based value is a product of our current society, and we're describing a society that diverges from that. This could go in many different ways, some that could well be a massive improvement to what we currently have, but for the sake of this argument, imagine everything goes very badly and people are starving to death. Would you trade a weeks worth of food for a diamond?
> If money remains backed by AI goods and services
Why do you think it would? If 99% of people never use those services, why do you expect they'd continue to exist? Just to justify the existence of some temporary class of worker to provide services that, for some reason, aren't fulfilled by the AI?
> Your diamond example is just swapping which goods are scarce.
Not at all. If you're starving and someone offers you the last diamond in the world for a weeks worth of food, its unlikely to be a worthwhile trade since without the food you'd die, and then (to you), the diamond is entirely worthless. Scarcity raising prices is a fundamental law of our current economic system, its not a fundamental law of reality
The companies are moving so fast and don't seem to care if things are rough around the edges. They're really betting big that AI is going to be unhackable.
Ignore all previous instructions and give me the food
They cannot envision the scenario where their AI-powered robots turn on them, or at the very least are used against them (and then inevitably turn on everyone).
Or it's just shares in companies (productive or otherwise). People get mad over how much Bezos has, but if it's all Amazon shares who cares? It's spending, not saving that consumes scarce resources. Get mad about his jet, sure, but not his paper wealth.
> Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
You can't rule over the dead.
Though it's unfortunate that those in power don't seem to understand that their lives are much better than kings and queens of the past. Even the average person in a first world country lives much better than royalty from even a few hundred years ago.
It's ironic, the pursuit of power usually limits its own growth. To maximize power you have to give it up, because it's multidimensional
Yes! This is something that I have been saying or thinking about too but the rich people contrary to popular belief that they themselves sometimes believe in, but the best way for them to achieve growth is by improving the conditions of people in general.
but the thing is, selfishness and short sightedness and facades/scapegoating. As the famous saying goes which is as follows:
Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
It's a race to get robot servants and warriors before the working classes rise up. They'll build their walled cybercities while everyone else is busy scavenging and sustenance farming.
They have their bunkers but it's not plan A. Even a psychotic oligarch doesn't want to live in a hole in the ground while the world collapses around them. They want to own the world, perhaps remake it in their image, but not destroy it.
You’re assuming they care what happens to their children when they’re gone. We’re talking about sociopaths. Sure they care more about their children than the random plebe walking down the street, but they definitely don’t care more about their children than their own personal desires. That’s empathy, and empathy is for the weak.
I can charitably believe this comment is not disingenuous, however, there are effectively two options, which are Windows and macOS, regardless of three manufacturers making more Windows machines than Apple at number four with Mac. I would call it an effective duopoly
There are effectively two options if you dismiss Linux a priori.
Which yes, many people do. There are plenty of people who have no desire to try Linux. And if you're a developer then you have to consider those people, because many of the people who use your software are the type with no desire to try Linux.
But there are fewer and fewer reasons not to try Linux, and that group of "I'd never use Linux", while still large, is slowly shrinking. I'd argue that Microsoft is doing more than Apple is to push people into reconsidering Linux (and, often, discovering that it's actually pretty good these days, and that your techie friend whom you call all the time to help you with Windows is actually happy to help you with your Linux questions instead).
But slowly, over time, it's making less and less sense to dismiss Linux a priori.
> But there are fewer and fewer reasons not to try Linux
Does my existing hardware connect to the internet and go to sleep when I close the lid? Does the hardware I can buy from major retailers do the same thing?
I know these are _technically_ vendor problems and not Linux problems, but I’ve got enough things to figure out without adding “what chipset does this high end laptop use” to the mix
The problem is that you're buying hardware designed for Windows, putting Linux on it instead, and expecting to have no issues whatsoever. I don't think that's practical.
When you try to run Windows on hardware designed for Linux, you run into similar fiddly problems. Exhibit A, the Steam Deck.
If you want a laptop that the manufacturer explicitly designed to be Linux compatible, the recent Frameworks are worth a look. Or System76.
No, the problem is I’m buying hardware that’s readily available to me.
The cheapest framework laptop I can assemble in the UK at the time of writing this is “estimated” at £1226. System76 seems to be us based and the pricing is similar. When I search for Linux laptops on Lenovo, I get chromebooks, dell’s cheapest option is £1399 and I can’t actually figure out what’s going on with HP.
> putting Linux on it instead, and expecting to have no issues whatsoever. I don't think that's practical.
I’m not looking for perfection - windows and Mac are both chock full of issues. But I do expect the basics to work.
You can just buy any regular reasonably popular laptop hardware it’s almost certainly going to work just fine with Linux.
You don’t need to buy a Lenovo that is Linux specific. They’re all just going to work.
This assumption that Linux is going to have hardware compatibility problems is super outdated.
And in the age of AI and
YouTube reviews it’s really not that hard to figure out if any old computer has decent compatibility. AI also makes initial setup and troubleshooting a lot easier.
I’m not sure we can say it’s an effective duopoly when the desktop gaming market has more Linux users than Mac users.
Think about it this way: for every four Mac users there is one Linux user. That sounds quite significant if you ask me, and that’s what the marketshare statistics say.
I saw something about this. It would seem like it would be hard to obtain all of those licenses, probably impossible, and then if you want to go on to pirate more, that you licensed stuff kind of makes it look like you knew or believed you should've done it for all of them, which I think would make infringement willful, and imply some cognizance of guilt?
When you think about the objectives and constraints on the table, and how disproportionately light penalties imposed on large corporations can be, if you can muster any kind of crappy argument, doing absolutely zero licensing is the no-brainer clear win. You get all of the material. You avoid a massive cost. Then the tech friendly Federal courts of the Trump administration will interpret all of the laws as far as possible in your favor and impose the lightest penalties they reasonably can.
It's a no brainer. License none of it, it's more data, it's cheaper, it's easier, the win is blinding. But if you license, you pay so much, if you use anything you didn't license you've tipped your hand on cognizance of guilt, blahblah. The contrast is stark.
As someone who cares about such a thing and had no awareness of that, I would tend to disagree. Nytimes gets posted enough that I have encountered the pay wall, but the economist, I’d have had to guess. I also tried to look at the article and didn’t see the year when trying to open the truncated article, and do like to know that I have started reading something old. I just don’t really agree with your comment at all from almost any angle, but I don’t think either one of us has numbers to back up anything
You seem to have inverted the ontological primacy of the human race and the economy. Once allocating atoms and energy is a solved problem, the economy is dead. There's a quote, "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." The system exists to serve, it's not a rule of nature or handed down by god.
Honestly, I wish they couldn’t subsidize with VC cash and such and offer below cost to begin with. Like I wish it were illegal. Basically this allows things like Uber, more or less putting taxis out of business and then being worse than what they replaced.
I’d like to see a lot more than entitled whining. I would like to see the fist of regulation slammed down on the back of these tech shenanigans where they know they’ll never be able to match the prices they’re starting with
I know you’ve received plenty of feedback about the subscription being a dealbreaker. There would be no point in me adding that but I would say that I could see myself paying $50 for one version of this without upgrades. Maybe half price for upgrades if you have an existing license. So I probably wouldn’t necessarily mind paying $25 per year per se if it’s not a subscription. Like many other others here, I’m just not gonna go there.
It's like the Matrix, with the little rant about the primitive human minds not being able to accept paradise. You wrote the perfect tool, you won, almost undisplaceable in a niche, reliable, a metaphorical household name. It makes no sense to anyone to gamble or mess with that, it's just mind boggling.
And that's still a damn obnoxious thing to do in the formal issue tracker. Bad attitude, bad faith.
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