Mastodawn

https://medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0
by the #rsync author

rsync and outrage

I gave up blogging a long time ago (apart from an occasional thing about ArduPilot), I tend to just write code and hope people find it…

Medium

Csillag Tamás 19h ago

small, vengeful, mouse-shaped rock formation 21h ago

Rsync and Outrage

In which our antagonist foolishly decided that the solution for useless and overwhelming AI bug reports is not to move off of the biggest slop perpetrator platform, not to hand over the reins to someone with more time, but to come out of retirement, and throw more slop at it.

Clearly, these "tools" that time and time again drive people into desperate psychosis, these "agents" that have no other purpose than to exhaust maintainers and push them off a cliff, these are The Right Tools to address the original problem.

Our antagonist then goes on to defend it further, and assert that their 40+ years of work makes them able to use the Slop™ responsibly. Reality has not hit them yet - that's apparently a thing only we, users, have to deal with.

Aging white men: please, stay retired, or seek therapy. Or both.

#algernonReviewsHackerNews

Csillag Tamás 3d ago

Josh 3d ago

1/2 In honor of #Netflix new "Lord of the Flies" reboot, here's the true story of compassion and mutual aid that really happened when a group of schoolboys was shipwrecked for 15 months.

BTW William Golding who wrote the awful fiction was an alcoholic child abuser and sex abuser, expressed sympathy for Nazis, and professed that he wrote the hateful story based on his understanding of human nature. <archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/in-unpublished-memoir-lord-of-the-flies-author-is-said-to-hae-admitted-rape-attempt> #LordOfTheFlies

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently to William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman

The Guardian

Csillag Tamás 3d ago

BeyondMachines

3d ago

You gave a stranger with no soul and no skin in the game the keys to everything you own.

Csillag Tamás 3d ago

#ai
https://teh.entar.net/@spacehobo/116659545246426837

Space Hobo (@[email protected])

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/116654345332213390 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. No one.

teh.entar.net

Csillag Tamás 5d ago

highvoltage 5d ago

Colleague: My computer is broken! I had an NVidia error and typed this command that Claude said I must type!

Me: That doesn't look right. And before removing the packages, you should've been prompted with a "Yes, do what I say!" prompt to protect you.

Colleague: It did!

Me: So why did you do it?

Colleague: Because Claude said so!

I got >< this close to telling her "If Claude told you to jump off a cliff would you also do it!?", thankfully my self-control is slightly better these days.

Csillag Tamás May 26