Regardless of the actual merits or downsides of the use of AI, it is increasingly obvious that AI boosters are not the kind of people you want to let anywhere near your project. Or indeed your drink.

It turns out that @freecad is the latest project to fall victim to slop. To their partial credit, they are acknowledging it's controversial and are retooting a sample of pro and anti responses they've had.

The difference in the responses is stark.

The anti-slop responses relate disappointment, betrayal, and concern for the future of the project. These are mostly people who have at least some investment in the project even if "just" users and not contributors.

The pro-slop responses are purely pushback and not constructive: Fork the project. Write your own replacement. Use something else. Ad hominem attacks. These people are not invested in the project at all, they're just interested in pushing their agenda. Come back in a week and they'll be vociferously defending slop on another project, having forgotten that FreeCAD ever existed.

This may be news to some, but while the first few years of the Linux kernel were very rocky while bad design choices were slowly refactored into something maintainable, it basically worked by about 1996. The last 30 years have been little more than refinements and adding drivers for newer hardware.

The Linux kernel is well over forty million lines of code. That's what happens when you start off with a monolithic mudball and keep piling on hacks. The L4 microkernel is around ten thousand lines.

Linus age 21: Hacked together a basic 386 protected mode task-switcher before handing it over for others to finish.
…35 years pass, none of which had slaves whispering in his ear "Remember you are mortal"…
Linus age 56: Can't figure out how to do a routine task in a text editor and has to ask an LLM to do it.

Was Finland particularly hard-hit by COVID-19?

Linus Torvalds claims that AI is not causing problems with Linux but blather blather derp derp derp.

The real reason can of course be found by him looking in a mirror. Where there will also be Ted T'so stood right behind him.

"Sudden drop in Cloudflare bot traffic after strike on Yandex datacenter" is one hell of a headline.

RE: https://oldbytes.space/@kenshirriff/117417871495191080

The more I see the hacks used inside chips, the more I think we should have stopped at relays and thermionic valves…

It was basically spagbol. For those from Forrin who are unfamiliar with this dish, it is a uniquely British take on spaghetti bolognese. This dish causes Italian men to break down in tears, and not out of joy. The traditional Italian recipe doesn't involve leeks for a start. Nor macaroni. And definitely not tomato ketchup and Marmite.

Tonight's tea is going to involve a pack of "Chief Marco Pasta", with a picture of a chef with a moustache to imply it's Italian, but actually seems to be from the nearby country of Lithuania. But hey, it was €0.69. Nice.

Here's hoping it fares better than the noodles which turned out to be weird Indian takes vaguely inspired by Chinese regional cuisine, labelled in German and sold in the Netherlands at eight packs for a euro, which should have been a massive red flag.

Not all fusion cuisine is successful.

If you are rooting through the bins round the back of a restaurant, you don't get to kick in the door to complain that it didn't come with a recipe and that the restaurant should run free cookery courses for novices.

#OpenSource

Fortunately, I have now scored lurgi medicine: a 600g bag of own-brand Engelse Drop. I shall look like Bertie Bassett by the end of it.

Today in brain-eating lurgi with extra chest grot:

I hadn't replaced the tub in the coffee grinder so it sprayed ground coffee all over the kitchen, and after cleaning that mess up and restarting, I hadn't replaced the coffee jug in the machine so it sprayed hot coffee all over the kitchen. The third attempt has finally produced coffee rather than housework.

Anyway, it's perfectly safe to let me have root on your systems today, honest guv.

Q: How many Open Source maintainers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None, being burnt-out is the new normal.

We have finally identified the cause of squeaky bicycles in Amsterdam:

It's excellent news that all of the UK's major problems have been solved and MPs have time on their hands to do this sort of thing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmvgy3pdv612o.

As to Anubis, I noticed that bots seemed to be bypassing it. To understand the traffic, I configured Anubis to return a 499 status code to make it easier to grep in logs. And with that one weird trick, the bot traffic went away.

It's almost as if they told vibe-coded something to solve Anubis challenges and didn't bother to check edge cases. I can't see this one lasting for long though so I'm going to have to come up with something a bit more robust.

Your occasional reminder that OpenAI's definition of Artificial General Intelligence is "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work".

Have a think about that choice of wording. How does it align with your own idea of intelligence?

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/117236126658335889

One thing that I have thought about which seems obvious, but doesn't appear to get mentioned by others, is that to make one's model better than a competitor's involves finding non-public data to scrape into the model. Bypassing Anubis is almost not worthy of comment, but scraping your private email, private source repositories, and snapshotting and OCRing your desktop is where it gets extra-dubious.

At such, it is basically Industrial Espionage As A Service, as apparently demonstrated here. The mistake made was that the industry was academia instead of something really corrupt and so they found a whistleblower.

You're seeing "Post removed by author" because the manbaby blocked me for daring to question his massive sense of entitlement. (This is no great loss.) The quoted toot was https://mastodon.social/@Edent/117226370108485316.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Edent/117226370108485316

Remember, if you write some code and throw it on GitHub because it might be useful to somebody else, you have formed a contractually-binding support agreement with every drive-by rando and are obliged to spoon-feed them on how to use a computer.

[https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch14-04-installing-binaries.html](Top hit on DDG for "install rust binary".)