There is a brilliant book which helped me a lot to get started with LaTeX,

Leslie Lamport, LaTeX: A Document preparation system.

It is itself a masterpiece of good technical writing. My copy is now 30 years old, and I still use it.

So, their fix for spying is gaslighting?

I don’t want to be funny, but that’s not mutually exclusive.

1. Given known empirical numbers of bugs per per one thousand lines of code (which is between a few and about 25) … and the size of Microsoft products, how many bugs do they probably have in total?

2. Given how “productive” LLMs are at adding lines of code, how many new bugs are there likely added per month?

As I wrote below, it is a matter of boundaries.

Bad maintainer throws hissy fit when caught breaking the rules for contribution.

Do people do that because of AI mania?

But yes, I think this will bring the Void Linux distribution a couple of supportive users, some new people curious to try it, and perhaps new maintainers which share their view.

They mean no one can be reasonably be up to date on software security updates, and (ideally) ensuring all packages changes are not malicious (as well as the small stuff like properly integrating to the distro, but idk how void works enough to comment on that)

Some people do an astounding amount of work.

And then there are many, many, which help a little.

Also, if, say, somebody finds that in Debian testing is a malicious package, people which maintain Arch will learn that. Open information sharing between many thousands of people willing to coordinate is a superpower.

AI or not, I refuse to believe anyone is capable of being the sole maintainer of 100+ anything while preserving any kind of quality. Most of these packages were probably functionally abandoned already, if not technically.

He/She was maintainer of the Void Linux packages, that is the package build scripts, updates, etc., not the projects and source code which these packages are based on.

For example, Guix has now over 32000 packages, including an Emacs package. But of course, they did not re-create Emacs to make that package - they just made a build definition which uses the Emacs git repo, in order to build the Guix package. Or in the case of Ubuntu, it is based on the package definitions in Debian testing, so the Ubuntu maintainers do not have to write all the build scripts or package definitions - but they still have to do significant work in order to adapt them that everything fits together.

Or with Arch Linux, the packages are taken relatively vanilla from upstream, they package stuff more “as is” as compared to Debian. Which means less work, and often more clarity for experienced users.

Coming back to Void Linux, this means for these 100+ Void Linux packages which are currently orphaned, it is feasible that other people with good Linux experience adopt these, with a reasonable effort - some are important.

You are absolutely right about Sartre. Some bad nights I dream I am talking with confused bots, and can’t exit by switching off the box.

You argue that it is not possible to keep up such rules.

Do we need to live in a police state to keep people from stealing?

i need proof of the already proben impact of AI and AI datacenters over territories in the country i live in?

No, proof about the maintainers intentions. Because you make a statement about them.

(And besides, making statements about other people’s intentions is already stirring conflict, because normally only a person theirself knows what is happening in their mind and their heart, so stating what is happening inside somebody else is already a kind of transgression, a violation of boundaries. Which stirs empty conflict, whether you want that or not.)

I totally agree that there are very strong reasons to avoid LLM use (“AI”). Also fed up with the ham-fisted manners it is shoved in every place by companies, like github copilot. Also, all the BS in advertising it, with dishonest arguments. Also, its glaring links to authoritarianism. And I am extremely worried about the implications of “AI” as well.

And: Some people which take over this corporate ham-fistedness into personal behaviour might need to be informed about boundaries. This is good. We need to define and keep boundaries on that (such as the above policy of the Void Linux project).

But: you do not win this discussion by name-calling. Are you aware that the Linux community is also a target of trolling? Have you perhaps heard that polarizing topics (for example right now, gas prices, or migration) are absolutely used in a kind of information warfare to break communities and civil society? This topic is one of them.

i would rewrite the title as “Slopper tried to be a maintainer on void linux: abducted and orphaned 100 packages they maintained after being discovered and forced to comply”

To say that, you would need proof that this was in bad faith, wouldn’t you? I wrote this comment about polarization for a reason.

Also, polarization is another danger, it can seriously hurt communities, and also can be used against them. So, PLEASE be careful about polarization and trolling, as trolls like to play on people’s emotions like a fiddle.

(Sadly, I saw that with some dance communities during COVID, which went into very personal and hurtful fights about adherence to social distancing rules, which had become a topic of information warfare.) “AI” is a polarizing topic, too, and for the FOSS community much more dangerous than the old humorous dispute whether Emacs or vim is better. We need to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis here, or possibly even avoid an ill-advised journey between them.

FOSS isn’t entirely immune to AI mania (or rather, LLM mania, because no ‘intelligence’ is inside).

I think LLMs can tentatively be used for some useful things, like checking for security bugs in new kernel code. But this does not answer the difficult question whether it should be used, because there are many important points in contra. Apart from massive pollution of the biosphere, it causes also a kind of pollution of collective knowledge and understanding. Which is a very important aspect of FOSS, and one of the things which bring us together.

For example, as Joey Hess wrote, if a distribution’s package build code is done by LLMs, it is likely to become harder to understand over time. This is probably not the kind of technical debt which a distribution with limited resources wants to have. And you see, the decisions of individuals affect other people too, which is why we have rules.

They can’t go public.

I think that rising interest rates (e.g. by the ECB) because of more expensive oil and empty national reserves wouldn’t make that easier.

If you think hard about it…

in 100 years, by all experience the current wars will be so irrelevant that nobody will even bother to piss on the current warmongers graves. They will be mostly forgotten.

In 100 years, our today’s leaders inactivity on imminent climate destruction - and transitively, our collective inaction - will be daily cause for deep desperation and the darkest curses which childs of the human race have ever uttered. For what we know sufficiently, people will likely witness the disintegration of our current technical civilization. Because 3 degrees warming is way too much for a technical civilization to survive.

Maybe because of my lack of expertise in history, but I can´t imagine find any example in history of such epic stupidity. Remember that qualitatively, we know exactly what will happen.

I have a LaTeX file from 1993 in my archive dir that I can format and print at a whim. It is a technical manua from an uni research hardware project written in Spanish, initially on an ULTRIX or DEC system, and I converted it once to ISO 8859-1 encoding and once to UTF-8.

You mean of the above comment? Yes.

Not sure whether this is favoured here but I am thinking that some of you might appreciate some positive news, too.

Let’s make one thing clear: The “extinction warning” was marketing.

Funny that it works well to distract from the real extinction we are facing, an absolutely serious, scientifically proven threath to all of humanity: Accelerated climate change if we do not get away now from fossil fuels. A world with 3 ° C warming, which is the path we are on, will not be survivable for technical civilizations. And time is running out. A problem to which AI data centers are only contributing to.

How would such a Turing tarpit work that delivers good-looking, plausible, but very subtly non-functional code? So subtly that it takes an above-average developer to fix the result?