Rsync and AI [LWN.net]

Rsync and AI

Posted Jun 4, 2026 10:24 UTC (Thu) by amacater (subscriber, #790)
Parent article: Tridgell: rsync and outrage

I think the blog post from Tridge is very clear and outlines the competing pressures. LWN has another golden quote in today's Brief quotes.

This is *hard* - the oss-security mailing list is currently tearing itself into pieces over what to do about AI bug reports and the fact that many of them are scatter-gun and pull up irrelevancies. The push to use AI for everything doesn't help but "AI slop" isn't an unconditional dismissal that will make what AI has uncovered irrelevant or unworthy of discussion.

This is the Internet's "eternal September" all over again: the people who don't yet understand the need for doing things one way get criticised by everyone else for not following the one way and not wanting to understand ... Understanding by humans on all sides would be helpful here but the last 30 years of Internet history don't make me optimistic :)

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Rsync and AI

Posted Jun 4, 2026 16:25 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

My fear is that we end up with some obnoxious policy like "you must own or contribute to GitHub projects worth a total of at least N stars to file or comment on bugs, except for bugs on projects you own or contribute to." Which, y'know, would probably *work,* at least to some extent, but have a ton of unwanted side effects:

* People looking to move from closed source to FOSS, or start in FOSS, will find it more difficult because they have no established history.
* Somebody will create a Hello World project whose sole purpose is to collect stars and grant contributor status to as many people as possible. GitHub will have to do something about that, and all options are bad in one way or another.
* Real projects will get more bad pull requests from people who don't know what they're doing.

Rsync and AI

Posted Jun 5, 2026 1:51 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Stars are already gamed, so I put them more on the "noise" than "signal" side of the equation. Personally, I use them as pseudo-bookmarks (the categorization thing is something I requested years ago).