Comment by CursedSilicon
1 day ago
I saw an exceptionally long and thoughtful post on Mastodon from "Space Hobo" https://teh.entar.net/@spacehobo that definitely deserves reprinting here
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I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room.
Tridge almost walked backwards into implementing the Windows SMB protocol (he was just debugging some funny NetBIOS extensions IIRC). But his paper on the #rsync algorithm was groundbreaking, and actually writing the tool to implement it was brilliant. It's become one of those tools like #curl that just forms one of the major structural supports of the modern Internet. I still remember the day that the SSH transport became the default, and I remember being able to thank him in person when he came to the San Francisco office (although IIRC by that point he'd handed control of rsync over to mbp).
I remember at my next job he came to a summit of folks working on print driver/spooler software. When he pointed out that some problems were effectively a cache-consistency algorithm, we all kind of put our fingers to our temples and said "Oh wow, you're SO right!" He was always insightful and sharp, while being gentle and approachable.
I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with him in two decades, and only know what I see him put out. A friend of mine in Australia noted that he hasn't posted to the Canberra LUG list since 2020, thanking someone for congratulating him on receiving the Medal of the Order of Australia. He's very much alive, but from what little I see I grow concerned for him.
In 2024 he took over maintenance of rsync once more. The 3.3.0 release was the last one from the previous maintainer, and Tridge is currently working on 3.4.x releases.
Well... Tridge and #Claude, it seems: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345...
The issue tracker for rsync has recently lit up with regressions, showing features that worked reliably for almost 30 years are suddenly coming crashing down in 3.4.2 and 3.4.3. People are scrambling to find ways to pin rsync to known-good versions. The considerate, incisive mind I briefly knew is letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him, and it just seems so astonishingly unlike the person I met back in the day.
I am still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope all is well for him, but I will not cast aspersions on his goals or his abilities. No, instead I draw this conclusion:
If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.
That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.
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“letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him” or “overwhelmed with publicly released vulnerabilities and using any tool he can find to stop the bleeding”; same same.
>I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with [Andrew Tridgell] in two decades
But err, don't let that stop you, Space Hobo! I'm not sure how anyone is taking this Mastodon post seriously. The author barely knows Tridgell, but is supposedly 'concerned' because he hasn't posted to his local LUG mailing list for a few years. Isn't this the logic of the terminally online?
I notice that Space Hobo has a lot of posts warning about the dangers of AI slop. Given the rate at which they're able to produce copious quantities of their own artisanal variety, I can't imagine they have much to fear.
> If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.
> That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.
I disagree. The amount of commits is not from somebody who is carefully reviewing the new code and considering the changes done. It's from somebody who thinks they are in control and think they can guardrail the AI.
I've seen this at work as well. Maybe it's a small case of the braineater that so many tech bros get when they get older. But they talk about the AI as if it were a being that can be reasoned with and not that it's just a statistical interpolator and autocompleter.
I know when I'm vibe coding. Just last week I needed 5 colors for a green to read gradient for visualisation some states. I ended up with a script that outputs arbitray color gradients in 5 different colorspaces (including a colorspace for which AFAIK there's no support in Ruby as of now) and additionally also considers different color vision deficiencies.
Is it useful? Yes. Would I run this code in production? Hell no.
This is a common fallacy: that vibecoding is not that bad if one carefully reviews the output. It's true in a vacuum, but what happens when you're late and stressed out and can't be bothered with doing a proper job.
Humans are lazy, and the mistakes of being lazy when vibe coding are orders of magnitude larger than being lazy when you have to do the damn thing yourself. In fact in the latter case, laziness is a feature.
If the AI-powered software world depends on humans not being lazy, we're all fucked.
or more generously, replace lazy with tired. even if you have all the intention of reading all the code in detail, when you are tired you are less attentive.
finally, reading code can never achieve the same detailed understanding that you would get from writing it. reading anything in general can't achieve the same understanding as writing. our brain tries to optimize. you see something familiar, you skip over it because you recognize it, and that causes you to miss subtle details.
the one thing i wonder though is, how much would it help if i use AI to generate some code but then, instead of just copying the whole thing, i type it all in by hand. does that give me enough attention to review? does that still give me any benefit of using AI with less downsides?
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