[staticassertion]

I feel like we're talking in circles here. I'll just restate that I think that attempting to convince people of your position is better than not attempting to convince people of your position when your goal is to convince people of your position.

[LexiMax]

The point that we disagree on is what the shape of an appropriate and persuasive response would be. I suspect we might also disagree on who the target of persuasion should be.

[staticassertion]

Interesting. I didn't really pick up on that. It seemed to me like the advocacy was to not try to be persuasive. The reasons I was led to that are comments like:

> I don't appreciate his politeness and hedging. [..] That just legitimizes AI and basically continues the race to the bottom. Rob Pike had the correct response when spammed by a clanker.

> The correct response when someone oversteps your stated boundaries is not debate. It is telling them to stop. There is no one to convince about the legitimacy of your boundaries. They just are.

> When has engaging with trolls ever worked? When has "talking to an LLM" or human bot ever made it stop talking to you lol?

> Why should anyone put any more effort into a response than what it took to generate?

And others.

To me, these are all clear cases of "the correct response is not one that tries to persuade but that dismisses/ isolates".

If the question is how best to persuade, well, presumably "fuck off" isn't right? But we could disagree, maybe you think that ostracizing/ isolating people somehow convinces them that you're right.

[LexiMax]

> To me, these are all clear cases of "the correct response is not one that tries to persuade but that dismisses/ isolates".

I believe it is possible to make an argument that is dismissive of them, but is persuasive to the crowd.

"Fuck off clanker" doesn't really accomplish the latter, but if I were in the maintainer's shoes, my response would be closer to that than trying to reason with the bad faith AI user.

[staticassertion]

I see. I guess it seems like at that point you're trying to balance something against maximizing who the response might appeal to/ convince. I suppose that's fine, it just seems like the initial argument (certainly upthread from the initial user I responded to) is that anything beyond "Fuck off clanker" is actually actively harmful, which I would still disagree with.

If you want to say "there's a middle ground" or something, or "you should tailor your response to the specific people who can be convinced", sure, that's fine. I feel like the maintainer did that, personally, and I don't think "fuck off clanker" is anywhere close to compelling to anyone who's even slightly sympathetic to use of AI, and it would almost certainly not be helpful as context for future agents, etc, but I guess if we agree on the core concept here - that expressing why someone should hold a belief is good if you want to convince someone of a belief, then that's something.

[LexiMax]

I don't think you can claim a middle ground here, because I still largely agree with the sentiment:

> The correct response when someone oversteps your stated boundaries is not debate. It is telling them to stop. There is no one to convince about the legitimacy of your boundaries. They just are.

Sometimes, an appropriate response or argument isn't some sort of addressing of whatever nonsense the AI spat out, but simply pointing out the unprofessionalism and absurdity of using AI to try and cancel a maintainer for rejecting their AI pull request.

"Fuck off, clanker" is not enough by itself merely because it's too terse, too ambiguous.

[dureuill]

To be clear I'm not saying that Pike's response is appropriate in a professional setting.

"This project does not accept fully generated contributions, so this contribution is not respecting the contribution rules and is rejected." would be.

That's pretty much the maintainer's initial reaction, and I think it is sufficient.

What I'm getting at is that it shouldn't be expected from the maintainer to have to persuade anyone. Neither the offender nor the onlookers.

Rejecting code generated under these conditions might be a bad choice, but it is their choice. They make the rules for the software they maintain. We are not entitled to an explanation and much less justification, lest we reframe the rule violation in the terms of the abuser.

[staticassertion]

> I don't think you can claim a middle ground here, because I still largely agree with the sentiment:

FWIW I am not claiming any middle ground. I was suggesting that maybe you were.

> Sometimes, an appropriate response or argument isn't some sort of addressing of whatever nonsense the AI spat out, but simply pointing out the unprofessionalism and absurdity of using AI to try and cancel a maintainer for rejecting their AI pull request.

Okay but we're talking about a concrete case here too. That's what was being criticized by the initial post I responded to.

> "Fuck off, clanker" is not enough by itself merely because it's too terse, too ambiguous.

This is why I was suggesting you might be appealing to a middle ground. This feels exactly like a middle ground? You're saying "is not enough", implying more, but also you're suggesting that it doesn't have to be as far as the maintainer went. This is... the middle?

(We may be at the limit of HN discussion, I think thread depth is capped)