Your making a big assumption extrapolating from one particular study involving Java code and a static analyser.

How is that patch sloppy?

I feel the term slop is being overused to cover anything an LLM has touched. If I ask an agent to re-read a mail thread for me and apply the changes to my tree to review is that slop? Would you feel better about it if I copy and paste from email to code in my editor?

I’ve just been doing a bunch of bug triage which was mostly driven by the agent although I checked the issues where it had commented. Was that slop? Ironically a lot of the issues where AI generated although for the most part more complete than a lot of the purely human submissions we get. Are those bug reports slop? What about the poorly drafted human ones?

That’s not kernel policy but LF guidance. From the kernel’s point of view patches still have a high bar to pass to get merged and I don’t think we have enough data yet to see if LLM based submissions to the kernel have a higher or lower error rate than humans.

I certainly feel the uptick in LLM reports though - one of the projects I’m working on is seeing a deluge of them at the moment.

At 43 that’s probably a little earlier than the OP expected and if their daughter wasn’t planning on starting that early it’s going to affect school and job prospects.

That’s not too say it can’t work. One of my in-laws had their first at 18 and now as their last leaves for uni they are still fit and young enough to enjoy the empty nest experience.

Even Debian has popcon as an opt in. I can see why collecting data about hardware and package choices is useful to Ubuntu. I didn’t think they collected any personally identifying information.

It will be fun watching those users who first make the jump to the new project.

If it’s finding valid vulnerabilities then it’s just another tool like static analysis, fuzzers and sanitizers. There definitely seems to be a difference in quality compared to earlier generations that were behind the sloppy avalanch of reports.

I was glad to see Niko publish his initial work and look forward to seeing how it’s gone.

So algorithms then?

LLMs have some interesting properties and certainly can do a good job sifting through large amounts of raw data. They are however a very brute force approach compared to say a network routing protocol. Sooner or later people will start to realise (again) that engineering is about trade offs and you need to work out what your constraints are and stop trying to solve every problem with massive amounts of multiplication.

I swear people have rose tinted glasses as to the state of the init system before the current generation of system management daemons.

If you really want to have Debian without systemd there is always Duvean but the Debian architects are free to choose the technologies that solve the very real system orchestration problems that exist.

Is that really the case? I work for a multi national FLOSS organisation but every additional country you want to hire from requires additional compliance overhead so in practice we generally hire from countries where we already have the legal setup to employee people.

How big an org is Signal?

Vampire Survivors is still my go-to as I only get a little time here and there and the 30min cap on a run fits nicely.

Who are the community employing? Why do they need consulting before code changes are made?

What a pointless drama article this is. FLOSS software does stuff for legal compliance more often than you’d think. The whole point is people can contribute fly by patches and the maintainers make the decision to merge. It seems like being an optional field but potentially providing useful functionality is enough for systemd. If you don’t like it I’m sure there are forks you could join or even use a different init system. No one’s freedom is being oppressed here.

The western nations had a similar problem with debathification in Iraq. When a system invades and takes over a state how do you keep things running while ripping it’s influence out?

There’s a scene at the end of Band of Brothers where the guy from Easy company is taking to a German who’s recollecting the countries he’s visited while at war. It’s a reminder that not everyone in Germany was a Nazi but it was hard to sit it out in a nation committed to Total War. It might be easy to say you’d never sign up to the party but if the choice was between staying in the civil service or being shipped off into the meat grinder? Where else could you go?

We never really have the luxury of tearing down whole societies and rebuilding from scratch in a more prefect form. Generally the countries that have gone through such radical changes have paid for it with a lot of suffering.

Stable package > back port package > flatpak/snap.

Basically I want everything as stable as possible unless I have a particular need for a newer feature.

The main things I run from flatpak/snap are browsers and the Minecraft launcher because they are both regularly updated.

When it comes to export controls and sanctioned entities it doesn’t really matter what Red Hat would like to do - they have to comply with the law in the jurisdictions they work in. Even if it was purely a community project individual contributors face a similar liability if based in those jurisdictions.

When it comes to sanction lists there is a fair amount of commonalty between the US and Europe. This is really something to complain to government about.

What was wrong with working with Godot that made them want to fork?

I guess somewhere between 6 and 7…urm 6/7 👐 (and my kids say I don’t understand memes 😅).

I think the OP’s analysis might have made a bit of a jump from overall levels of hobbyist maintainers to what percentage of shipping code is maintained by people in their spare time.

While the experiences of OpenSSL and xz should certainly drive us find better ways of funding underlying infrastructure you do see a higher participation rates of paid maintainers where the returns are more obvious. The silicon vendors get involved in the kernel because it’s in their underlying interests to do so - and the kernel benefits as a result.

I maintain a couple of hobbyist packages on my spare time but it will never be a funded gig because comparatively fewer people use them compared to DAYJOB’s project which can make a difference to companies bottom lines.