This whole brigading is bizzarre and some people are behaving like irrational animals. I potentially understand the motivations that might bring one to want to "win" this battle but this really isn't it - it just makes you sound like a fanatic.
It takes 5 minutes to search for "regression" on the issue page and go through the 17 results. There are potentially even more on the tracker used prior to github.
I think this behavior is very silly and people are just trying to justify their hate to AI by latching onto every possible thing, seemingly forgetting that before AI people did mistakes as well.
If you have proof that AI involvement in rsync has lead to a significant increase in open issues please show it to me - I'll be happy to change my mind.
> I think this behavior is very silly and people are just trying to justify their hate to AI by latching onto every possible thing
It's not silly to have issues with something. People act on their issues. Possibly not the issue underlying the commit at hand here but something else, and act on it which makes it something to consider. My guess is people are tired of the "AI is the greatest thing since [cultural reference]" being forced down their throat and grasp at every straw to combat it, which is a sane response in my opinion and should be taken into account.
> and grasp at every straw to combat it, which is a sane response
Attacking every open source maintainer who might use AI for the sin of having used AI because one hates AI is just abusive behavior, not "sane response".
What would the "sane response" be for people tired of the "AI is being forced down my throat and I need to combat it by attacking open source maintainers" side? Grasp at every straw to combat such behavior?
It looks like they’re being attacked because their mission critical software is suddenly experiencing regressions, and the evidence suggests those regressions are in part caused by AI.
The regressions are the issue. If the software was working as expected, no one would be coming after them for “the sin of using AI”.
Their mission critical software has bugs in it - security issues, which the rsync maintainer is trying to fix. In his attempt, he introduced regressions*(maybe - because some of the reported regressions list exactly the security issue that is being fixed as their use case...). This happens every day to thousands and thousands of software projects. This is why we have pinned versions, release schedules, different release philosophies...none of this is new.
I don't understand what novel problem you think you've uncovered here.
I thunk you are right. This is just the same old stuff. I think people are reacting because AI is doing something, and that something seems to be accelerating the process of software development. So what people are seeing is the same issues we have always had compressed into tiny time frames.
But there is good news, at least I think. AI is also moving processes ideas and safety guards along at a faster rate. The only real downside is right now, at least, the amount of code being created outside of our safeguards has accelerated much much faster. This has happened in the past with software, so I am not too worried.
> Attacking every open source maintainer who might use AI for the sin of having used AI because one hates AI is just abusive behavior, not "sane response".
That's not what happened, and I think you know it. The number of LOC introduced in the last 2 versions of rsync is off the charts. And there are bugs. I've been in a situation like the author of that issue. Upgrade a package and things fall apart and it would be very, very expensive to debug it to file the appropriate bug reports... so I roll back to a known good version.
Yes, the language the person used wasn't the greatest.
IMO, this is a litmus test for how you feel about AI. For the people that hate it, it's just a big pile on and "I told you so" ... we don't have enough info about the author to know if they are anti-AI. We know they are against using AI in a BAD WAY.
I absolutely understand and agree. As I said, I understand the underlying reason.
The silly part is the brigading - issues should be adressed on their own merits. The specific GH issue, and some of the comments therein, make the whole crowd they're affiliated with look bad. (imho)
I'd argue there would be two lanes as well: one where the issues are addressed in code, the other being the discussion of why people think this is a bad idea and speak so openly about it. This topic is the second I guess. Looking at the flow there is quite a bit of flamebait by the LLM and non-LLM camps which only muddies the water and doesn't resolve anything. The better discussion (imo) would be to decide if the vide coded fixes are worth it and if not, fork the project somewhere and let the distro's chip in to maintain that.
idk maybe LLM people should only commit what they actually understand, only in bite-size (maximum few lines in few files)
and with at least 1~5 tests that shows the edge cases
drive-by 20-file pull-requests that ultimately end up costing maintainer's burden seems to hit hard here.
They’re just picking easy targets to bully. There is undoubtedly AI-written code in the Linux kernel now, but are they out there harassing those maintainers? No. rsync GitHub is easier to brigade.
> My guess is people are tired of the "AI is the greatest thing since [cultural reference]" being forced down their throat and grasp at every straw to combat it, which is a sane response in my opinion and should be taken into account.
Let's engage in some parallelism then
This happens with literally everything in our society. Right now, every single food product seems to be infused with protein. In the past, they've had GMOs removed, MSG removed, been Fiber-infused... the list goes on and on.
We don't see people bullying and threatening grocery store clerks and managers over clear hype-cycle bullshit. Why? Because every rational person knows this is pure nonsense.
This behavior is NOT sane.
As many others have pointed out, this is just a regression that occurred during regular software development. There's nothing remarkable here that makes it AI-specific, other than that the contributions were AI-assisted. Regressions in software happen. You roll back to a stable version and make a bug report. You don't shit your diaper and sling it at the maintainer.
Acting like a giant fucking douche is NOT NORMAL BEHAVIOR.
> this is just a regression that occurred during regular software development
From a cursory look, it looks like a security fix in response to a CVE surfaced a coding error which (as far as i bothered to check) has been present in the code since 2007.
This is so banal that it's actually hilarious to see people lose their shit over it. But of course nobody is talking about the actual issue but about the _hypothetical potential for issue_ introduced by potential use of AI. It's so meta i don't even know how to make sense of it.
What does your strawman argument about a hypothetical regression in SQLite have to do with this? What would a regression in the Windows Calculator have to do with this? What does your whataboutism prove here? Nothing.
A mistake was made. There are well worn paths for fixing the mistake. Acting like a giant fucking petulant pissbaby is not the critical path to getting things fixed and is deeply corrosive to the positive collaborative environment we’ve all spent decades building within shared, community software.
For some critical software, open-source or not, a regression could literally kills, that's why I put SQLite as an example. A simple miss should NOT pass into stable, if it's an edge case due then yeah learn from it and built a test suite for that if possible
rsync is highly popular tools and a lot of people depends on them, whether you like it or not. At a certain point (I don't know what point, 10k, 20k, 500k users?) maintainers should respect the user expectations over their own ego and convenience
This is a problem for OSS in general, people treats their project like a hobby because it didn't pay enough, or corporates uses it without contributing back
Note this is not what OP called silly. It's possible to take legitimate issue with something, then act silly about it. People are free to their opinions but not necessarily to (as an extreme example) write their opinions on the wall with their excrement. Regardless of any veracity behind the opinion, some decorum is expected in its expression. (I guess unless one is explicitly doing away with decorum but that's when violence takes its place.)
The way it is done with meme pictures is bizarre. The language used is the same that Tridgell knows from the LKML, so that is not the primary concern.
How are maintainers supposed to know that users don't trust AI if no one voices that concern? rsync was very stable. Should people silently move to Openrsync and never say anything?
How are the maintainers supposed to know that the users don’t trust VS Code if no one voices their concerns like a rabid mob? Seriously why should the maintainer care what users think about how they produce code?
Bugs happen, regressions happen regardless of whether it’s human or AI written. The only valid criticism is that he’s moving too fast for quality code review by others. That said, I bet if you search through the issues you’ll find multiple places where users have complained about their bug staying open for too long without being addressed.
The only thing AI and VS Code have in common is that they are both tools. But thats where it stops.
The workflow is totally different, even though the output might look the same. When coding "by hand", thinking and reasoning is mandatory. When using LLMs its optional.
If you look through that thread, it’s very clearly an online hate mob whipped into a frenzy by someone on mastodon. They should all go back to mastodon and reddit and stop bothering people who actually work on important things.
They’re also all completely disingenuous (“I’ll have to stop using rsync now”) given that 99.99% of software now includes AI-written code, whether it’s known or not.
I haven't decided where I land on this idea of pointing llms at mature, human-crafted software projects (again, assuming they are moderately mature projects).
It's clearly a win for 1-man projects and greenfield projects, but maybe not for what's described above ...__yet__.
AI has become a partisan political issue with all of the attendant consequences. At this point you may as well complain about the sun rising in the east :(
I'm not sure how partisan it is but it's certainly politicized. Regular people also weren't the ones that politicized it. These AI companies knew the risks they were taking on when they donated to Trump, bought out local city boards, heavily invested in lobbying campaigns, etc. They are betting that the federal government will protect them from the consequences of their meddling by positioning themselves as a geopolitical priority. Claude has already been used to plan and prioritize targets in Iran
> As planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance, said two of the people. The pairing of Maven and Claude has created a tool that is speeding the pace of the campaign, reducing Iran’s ability to counterstrike and turning weeks-long battle planning into real-time operations, said one of the people. The AI tools also evaluate a strike after it is initiated, the person said.
> The Pentagon began to integrate Anthropic’s Claude chatbot into Maven in late 2024, according to public announcements. The system has been used to generate proposed targets, to track logistics and provide summaries of intelligence coming in from the field. The Trump administration has vastly expanded the use of Maven into many other parts of the military, with over 20,000 military personnel using it as of last May.
I think people are very justifiably angry that a very stable, well trusted tool, has started to immediately go downhill. The Linux Mint Timeshift tool has an issue open documenting a number of regressions that are currently open on the rsync issues page, that were only introduced post-vibecoding (https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift/issues/548), one of those links goes to a larger aggregate of bugs reported downstream (https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/issues/60825). I think it is incredibly rational and sane, given the reputation of vibecoded software as-such (where every professional who loves it is saying "you have to hold it in this very specific way so it doesn't cause bugs, and also you should probably only use it for version 0s so you can map out the domain"), for people to be angry that their load-bearing industry standard backup tool that is very, very well respected is suddenly pulling the rug out from under them because the maintainer wants to "add more features" and is doing it in what is clearly an unsafe way. Also from the timeshift thread:
> not sure if this is just me, but after updating rsync, my cpu usage got so bad during my daily backups that i had to stop timeshift from running forever
Or, phrased differently - People are frustrated and annoyed that the tool they trusted with their backups and data are seeing a huge number of regressions and new bugs that break their entire backup infrastructure, all because the main dev is vibecoding that software. Vibecoding experts like Simon Wilson explicitly state that vibecoding is 'viable' in the sense of "only if you hold the tool in a specific way", and this person is either not doing that, or that statement is untruthful. If you actually read the thread in question and just skim over the argument two people are having, there are multiple reports from users in industrial and government settings that now have to go through whole processes to update this software, simply because the software has become immediately untrustworthy in a way that directly harms users and defeats the entire point of the software in question.
I think I would also be mad if I relied on this software for my 500gb+ backups, and I wonder how many more issues have been introduced that we simply won't learn about until a company has a $10 million dollar data loss because they were not testing their backups consistently.
> The Linux Mint Timeshift tool has an issue open documenting a number of regressions that are currently open on the rsync issues page, that were only introduced post-vibecoding (https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift/issues/548)
There are four actual regressions there. The commits that introduced two of them have been identified, and neither neither of those mentions Claude (or another LLM).
If you look at the actual commits that credit Claude, they are not huge commits (many are a few lines), most are tests and config. This is not vibe-coding.
> there are multiple reports from users in industrial and government settings that now have to go through whole processes to update this software
If people are handling such critical data with it they will be testing upgrades before deploying to production right?
> I wonder how many more issues have been introduced that we simply won't learn about until a company has a $10 million dollar data loss because they were not testing their backups consistently.
If a backup failure would cause a $10mn loss then its grossly irresponsible to not test your backups.
I don’t think people really care about rsync or the nuance. They just want to make an insta-reaction, rant about AI, then move on to the next story that raises their blood pressure.
I don't know how deeply you read into it, but people pointed out that Claude rewrote the entire testing stack in Python. Worse than that but it rolled its own unique framework. Every test file will randomly redefine its own `_run_and_capture` function
How could we even check if either human or robot code is working properly if we're not even sure the test suite works?
Also, another user[1] compiled a nonexhaustive list of 7 issues they found introduced because of the changes.
If the 7 issues three are the same underlying issue. Another two at least relate to the same commit and probably the same underlying code. One is not related to a Claude assisted commit. That leaves three that are.
Adding that to the two in the issues further up, that makes a total of five bugs in AI assisted commits.
That may or may not be true, people are justifiably (or not justifiably) angry about a lot of things all the time.
But this was very obviously a brigading attempt. It's a form of online bullying. If it had been about whether the maintainer liked striped socks, nothing else about this would have changed.
Later on the brigade can claim "oh we had a justifiable grievance" to sooth their souls, but what actually happened is what actually happened.
It's all a bit silly and childish.
(To be sure: the balance of fao_'s statement is well reasoned. It's the brigade who are being childish, and I don't think they should be rewarded for that. )
> The Linux Mint Timeshift tool has an issue open documenting a number of regressions that are currently open on the rsync issues page, that were only introduced post-vibecoding
Hi fao, the issue you linked starts with:
> Rsync 3.4.3 and newer is AI slop, and currently has several open security vulnerabilities and other critical bugs (including some link-related ones) caused by said AI slop:
It then proceeds to link to multiple functional regressions caused by (theoretically) fixes to security vulnerabilities.
This took me about 10 mins to review. It seems that the person who created the issue did not bother to spend 10 minutes to check his own work. Is this "vibe reporting"? What should we say about the irony of employing "human slop" to trash "AI slop"?
Further ironically, the "aggregate of bugs" in void-linux included an issue that was not even about rsync. More "human slop" that you are happy with?
Exactly this. The most salient comment basically said that AI use has increased the cadence of commits beyond reliable testing capacity for what was a stable product in equilibrium. It isn't an issue specific complaint so it wouldn't make sense to only flag one specific issue. In fact you'd fall behind trying to chase the AI moving head. This has everything to do with AI, and isn't a normal issue reporting situation. The other camp seems highly defensive, which reeks of indefensibility.
If that were to bethe case, a public scandal would be the last thing they need, and I would expect them to do everything in their power to keep it under wraps instead (eg privately settling)
I haven't watched this particular video, but I've read her 46 page suit. That's not the case that was lost. The case(s) that were lost are small claims actions made by the YouTuber and 9 of his friends, essentially. They got default judgments from the court on 10 claims each worth $10k. The previous owner's suit was just filed in March of this year, I believe.
Now as for the previous question of who was at the pointy end of those default judgments, I haven't been able to find that answer. I assume they should have named the local franchise as an entity and it's owners individually. Closing the store to avoid paying is arguably a fraudulent transfer of assets, but that would need to be taken to court in an enforcement action.
Oh yeah sorry, I misunderstood the suit the comment was referring to.
It is my understanding that BAM took direct ownership of the local store and therefore the small claims case was also directed against them, but at the moment I can't find where I've heard that so I'm not 100% sure.
According to the former store owner's lawsuit, and what comports with what I've seen in the original video, the store was seized by corporate and then sold quickly to the owners of the Eugene, OR BAM store.
> I feel bad for the guy who lost some LEGO sets. I do not like the podcasters and bloggers milking him for content for their media channels
The statements made by the company are simply untrue. And the guy who lost the LEGO sets (worth 100k$ btw) is directly working with the "bloggers" because they're his last avenue. He's also incredibly grateful to them because thanks to them he at least ended up winning in small claims court.
- At 3:06 they explicitly acknowledge the consignment and state they will be taking it over
- At 13:15 the CEO says he never had the LEGOs in the store and then is confronted with screenshots of said LEGOs from their official Facebook pages
- At 23:05 the new owner that took over the store (and also the LEGOs) first says he doesn't know about any LEGOs, then he says that he wasn't the one to sign the consignment and therefore doesn't have to give them back
- At 47:42 the same guy confirms again they have the LEGOs, tries to argue about the definition of theft and says that he won't give them back. (quoting "who cares if it's theft or not")
- At 49:46 the same guy admits again that he has the LEGOs and he promises to give them back if the actual owner provides him an apology and removes the negative reviews.
- At 1:00:45 corporate says "I'm not gonna distribute those things at this point. We've kept them on hold for this long so"
I recommend watching the videos and deciding for yourself. They've already won in court and nobody has paid them. How are they in the wrong at all here?
There seems to be a lot of misinformation in the comments, I would assume because the linked article doesn't cover many of the developments.
The youtuber Reckless Ben has recently covered the story and spearheaded a campaign of "provocative journalism" against the store[0]. Regardless of whether you support the way in which he goes about things, his video explains the story in much greater detail, and enormously expands on the malpractice of Bricks and Minifigs and the local police department.
Here are some bulletpoints in case you do not care to watch Part 1 + Part 2:
- Bricks and Minifigs explicitly threatened both the previous owners of the store and the original owner of the collection with lengthy legal battles
- The owner of the collection tried going the legal route but was quoted prices that he couldn't afford, so youtube was his last resort
- Bricks and Minifigs CEO publicly admitted of having the collection, being aware of the issue, and not wanting to give it back, while at the same time trying to run PR campaigns denying the allegations.
- BAM leadership went out of its way to create legal trouble for Reckless Ben, involving the police and fabricating false evidence about him
- The local police went out of its way to legally stop Ben, arrest him without probable cause, try to plant Heroin on his car, and even *ended up swatting his house*, dislocating his shoulder.
- All of this while the police department illegally scrubbed any incriminating evidence from the bodycam recordings they were obligated to provide.
This is an *insane* story that doesn't get enough credit. It not only exposes the inefficacy of (parts of) the American justice system, but also the enormous level of corruption and abuse of power of the American police (and tangentially the Mormon community)
I really recommend watching both videos. I promise you it's even more insane than it sounds like.
All the other stuff dwarfs the theft of $200K. I'm hoping this leads to financial damages that are a large multiple of that number, and multiple jail sentences.
Of course, that probably won't happen. I can imagine reform-oriented candidates running on putting an end to this sort of crap, and winning a local election or two. Speaking of which, I wonder if anything's come of the Afroman case in Ohio.
I dont see how B&M can even continue after this. The lego community is small. Why would a single person ever shop at one of their stores ever again? Maybe you can get some families trying to buy stuff for kids, but the vast majority of money here is adults that are very plugged into the lego scene and surely know about this.
This is vague definition. Does it mean that there is no ugly art? What is beautiful? How Ai could express feelings? How Ai give a purpose of making something thats come from deep life experience?
Every time a new image gen comes out I keep saying that it won't get better just to be surprised again and again. Some of the examples are incredible (and incredibly scary. I feel like this is truly the point where understanding if something is AI becomes impossible)
I'll bite: no I don't think so. If the examples are not cherry-picked and by "image model" we mean just the ability to generate pictures, this looks like parity with human excellence, there isn't much space for further improvement. The images don't just look real, they look tasteful- the model is not just generating a credible image, it's generating one that shows the talent of a good photographer/ designer/ artist.
I'm honestly unsure what could be improved at this point.
Consistency? So it fails less often?
Based on the released images, (especially the one "screenshot" of the Mac desktop) I feel like the best images from this model are so visually flawless that the only way to tell they're fake is by reasoning about the content of the image itself (ex. "Apple never made a red iPhone 15, so this image is probably fake" or "Costco prices never end in .96 so this image is probably fake")
Yep. “Where’s Waldo” has been a classic challenge for generative models for a while because it requires understanding the entire concept (there’s only one Waldo), while also holding up to scrutiny when you examine any individual, ordinary figure.
I experimented with the concept of procedural generation of Waldo-style scavenger images with Flux models with rather disappointing results. (unsurprisingly).
If you asked me what I expected, since this one has "thinking", it'd be that it would've thought to do something like generate the image without Waldo first, then insert Waldo somewhere into that image as an "edit"
I'm been impressed when testing this model today, but it still can't consistently adhere to the following prompt: make me an image of a pizza split into 10 equal slices with space in between the them, to help teach fractions to a child.
It doesn't reliably give you 10 slices, even if you ask it to number them. None of the frontier models seem to be able to get this right
> I'm honestly unsure what could be improved at this point.
That's because you're focusing a little bit too much on visual fidelity. It's still relatively trivial to create a moderately complex prompt and have it fail miserably.
Even SOTA models only scored a 12 out of 15 on my benchmarks, and that was without me deliberately trying to "flex" to break the model.
Here's one I just came up with:
A Mercator projection of earth where the land/oceans are inverted. (aka land = ocean, and oceans = land)
So I guess while "realism" (or believability) is really good now, prompt adherence has much room for improvement.
(though put it another way, realism has always been "solved" if the model gets to output whatever it wants as long as it looks realistic, though now it looks less like a malfunction and more like an inattentive human mistake or oversight, so even when it gets it wrong it's hard to tell it's wrong without knowing what the prompt was)
> it's hard to tell it's wrong without knowing what the prompt was.
Yeah this is actually a huge point of frustration on reddit where lots of people post their "impressive generative images" but fail to disclose the prompts so the audience is only able to evaluate realism/fidelity and not how faithfully the model actually followed the prompt.
reply