[antirez]

A few years ago, the probability of such shit reaching the Hacker News home page was near zero, because regardless of the merits, here was not full of normies that could not understand when a behavior is unacceptable (I'm referring to the violence of the language of the issue). And now, here we are, surrounded by people that can't tell the most obvious things.

[themgt]

Opening an issue consisting only of some twitter clone screenshot with some "literally who" who found a bug called "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software" ain't it. That's not a way to tell a maintainer that you disagree with the direction they're taking. This issue is entirely useless. A "fucked up vibe coded" bug report would have been better.

This nailed it. None of the bug reports even attempt to document the claimed "--compare-dest=" regression. I did ctrl-f and I didn't even see anyone mention "compare-dest" again? The people posting worthless AI rage comments could have asked Opus 4.8 to spin up rysnc 3.4.3 vs. 3.4.1, thoroughly document the regression and git bisect the commit that broke it and filed a 1000x more professional and useful bug report.

If you want society to value your human work more than AI work, try to avoid acting like a uniquely human bozo.

[eudamoniac]

They're not mad about the bug, they're mad about the cause of the bug. This is like city council starts flinging stones with a trebuchet into streets, and you're expected to calmly file pothole reports instead of complaining about the trebuchet.

[soerxpso]

Bugs exist in human code too. The AI derangement crowd pounces on any small bug as evidence that AI is a trebuchet, and thinks that if only we didn't use AI there would never be any bugs (like five years ago when all software was perfect, was not being enshittified, and had 0 bugs).

[bakugo]

> Bugs exist in human code too.

These bugs did not exist in human code. They were introduced by AI.

> thinks that if only we didn't use AI there would never be any bugs

Strawman. These bugs would not exist if not introduced by AI.

[Sacho]

The bugs were introduced because rsync had security issues(i.e. bugs) in it, presumably written into the code by humans.

It's really baffling to see so many people in this thread maintain the position that somehow software was clean and pristine until AI touched it with its evil.

Please try to at least put some sort of constructive argument forward, for example - I don't like AI because it might introduce more bugs than a careful human reviewer. Then we could discuss why a single maintainer is responsible for rsync and how they should handle the pressure of keeping it up to date - should they just stop making further changes, should they look for tools that might help them?

(By the way, if your position is that rsync was perfect before AI got its hands on it, you have a clear solution to all your problems - simply do not update to any newer versions)

Either way, move away from this absolutist nonsense that has no bearing to reality.

[bakugo]

> It's really baffling to see so many people in this thread maintain the position that somehow software was clean and pristine until AI touched it with its evil.

Nobody maintains this position. Again, it's a strawman you made up, because it's easier to dismiss such "absolutist nonsense" than it is to just admit that these specific bugs were introduced as a direct result of careless AI usage.

If the developer is overwhelmed by the maintenance burden (they aren't, judging by how many AI commits they've been making to a large number of repositories), then that's an entirely different problem that deserves a good faith discussion, but delegating the work to AI is not the correct solution.

> By the way, if your position is that rsync was perfect before AI got its hands on it

Again, strawman, nobody said this either. In fact, quite the opposite - we want rsync to continue to be maintained by a human. If the current developer isn't interested in or capable of maintaining the project anymore, they should just say so instead of quietly letting AI take over, because then the likelihood of someone else stepping up to contribute would be much higher.

[ofjcihen]

You could also say that about using dismissive language like “normies”.

Regarding it reaching the front page: is it possible that’s because others feel the same way about a software they might use daily for important work?

Trite as the gh issue is and surely this is thankless work, the bottom line and reality is that rsync is a cornerstone for a lot of sensitive pipelines.

[stevenally]

"Trite as the gh issue is and surely this is thankless work, the bottom line and reality is that rsync is a cornerstone for a lot of sensitive pipelines".

Maybe don't piss off the maintainer then?

[ofjcihen]

Maintainers aren’t infallible. Could he have been nicer? Sure. But we don’t need to walk on eggshells around maintainers.

That’s stupid and inefficient.

[latexr]

I think you’re looking at it through rose-coloured glasses. Controversial issues like this which fall outside regular bug reporting have always been submitted and became popular on HN. And developers are capable of such language, we have a reputation for being rude and even used to have a poster boy for it. Blaming this on “normies” (itself typically a dismissive word) is ignoring the problem has always been there and our responsibility in it.

[roxolotl]

Describing the issue as “violent” is wild. Reading through a bit, it’s massive, it’s clear no one involved has the moral high ground here. The polite response is to close the issue if you believe it’s genuinely off topic.

Still not quite sure what you mean by obvious because to me “Stop. You know nothing. You have shipped 0 features by hand. No one has ever depended on your code.” Is much more violent than “please do not vibe fuckup this software”.

[craigmart]

The "Stop. You know nothing." comment was apparently a reference to this tweet. https://x.com/CodyRhodes/status/980680154098757632

Embarassing nonetheless

[margalabargala]

That doesn't make it any better. At all.

[dormento]

That's some very embarassing american (I guess) defaultism.

[bakugo]

Similarly, a few years ago, I would've never expected "my magic code generation machine is doing all my work for me now, I don't even bother looking at what it does anymore!" to reach the Hacker News home page on a regular basis, either, yet here we are.

Irrational actions lead to irrational reactions.

[pacifika]

That’s not how LLMs are used by experienced engineers.

[izacus]

And yet this is exactly how it was used for rsync which caused the outrage you're all complaining about.

You're being dishonest with what you wrote when the proof is literally in this article.

[RugnirViking]

its not an article, its a github issue. There is no proof, someone posted a screenshot of another person on twitter complaining about a vague bug they experienced. It's certainly not clear the maintainer used an llm in the way described (how would you know unless they told you?). Its not even clear what issues there are specifically, or whether they were caused by ai usage.

[weiliddat]

Maybe I'm getting too skeptical. I have a feeling increasingly many of the comments on HN and the GitHub issue are just bots ragebaiting other people (incl. the maintainer)...

[moi2388]

There is no violence in the language. Violence is intentional use of physical force.

[cafebabbe]

Love that your comment is ambiguous enough to apply to both sides here :)

[antirez]

Nope my comment is against the folks that are criticizing rsync author. Editing the comment to make it more clear, thanks.

[mhitza]

The way Code of Conducts where being pushed on some open source projects in the past, there was enough vitriol and cross-platform harassment.

This one is "tamer", a bit, because the hate goes towards the AI usage, not the person.