Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by JetSetIlly 5 days ago
> As a long-time open-source maintainer, I find all the second-guessing and armchair psychoanalysis here (not just in this comment, all over HN) about Tridge's motivations, state of mind, and so on incredibly off-putting.

Much of the language from both groups is incredibly off-putting, frankly. Tridge in his blog post describes people as "foaming at the mouth"?!

The rhetoric around this has gotten way too emotional from both groups.

I'm glad I'm just a hobbyist.

2 comments

Tridge in his blog post describes people as "foaming at the mouth"?!

Did you see the picture in the article where the user posted a picture of them strangling the maintainer? I think “foaming at the mouth” is probably gentler than how I would characterise that.

IMHO, the whole episode is just embarrassing. I have no doubt he’s just trying to do the right thing. You can disagree with the tactics, but the vitriol is outrageous. rsync is a gift to the world and we should be grateful and mindful of how much it has been quietly woven into the fabric of computing. rsync is taken for granted. This is not okay.
> This is not okay.

Agreed. The way to address it though, is through calm analysis and reason. The emotional language from both groups is not helping.

If there's one problem with Claude et al, it's that it's all happened way too quickly for people to keep up. We're all at different stages of acceptance and I think that's what we're seeing manifest in the various discussions.

>We're all at different stages of acceptance

I do hope you see the irony of accusing people of armchair psychology and then hitting us with the five stages of grief.

I trust rsync (which handles critical data on my system) because I know a veteran of 40 years wrote the code it runs. If I see code like the one above posted by the OP, that the author wouldn't have written, I start to pay attention. When I then read the blog post of him saying that he'd "rather go sailing than fix rsync issues", I start to question whether the software is still written in a way I can trust and where it's going quality wise.

The problem isn't this weird gaslighting attempt that we just haven't let Claude in our hearts and souls yet which you seem to have determined is inevitable (spoiler alert, it is not), it's that a bot wrote crappy code and I wasn't even aware I was running it and now don't know to what standard this project is held.

> If I see code like the one above posted by the OP, that the author wouldn't have written, I start to pay attention.

Except the author did write it. https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/959#issuecommen...

Which is part of the problem with all of this nonsense right now - everyone is running off of emotion and not looking to see if what is being said is actually true. Which is somewhat ironic, considering the message of the article.

> I do hope you see the irony of accusing people of armchair psychology and then hitting us with the five stages of grief.

I just want to point out that those were two different commenters.

> The problem isn't this weird gaslighting attempt that we just haven't let Claude in our hearts and souls yet which you seem to have determined is inevitable (spoiler alert, it is not),

I don't believe it's inevitable and in fact, I'm thoroughly against the use of tools like Claude.

My reference to "different stages of acceptance" was only to indicate that people have embraced these things to varying degrees, and it that it seems to be this difference which is causing conflict in discussions like this. (I doubt I will ever fully accept it. A lot needs to change for that to happen).

I didn't really have the "five stages of grief" in mind when I wrote it.