[naturalmovement]

> AI slop is a real problem and annoying. Just because it exists does not mean every vulnerability report is AI slop.

Ok but who is going to sift through it all to triage the good bits when you're working on something for free?

> Ffmpeg devs are free not to care, but then they cant complain when they start to get a bad reputation

Who gives a shit about reputation when you're the only game in town?

There is nothing out there that even attempts to approximate an ffmpeg clone. They are the Swiss army knife of media encoding and all complainers have produced are plastic sporks.

[notenlish]

Its not as full featured as ffmpeg but I remember hearing about mediabunny, It's a web native ffmpeg alternative, and according to its website, seems to be a lot faster than ffmpeg.wasm

[bawolff]

> Ok but who is going to sift through it all to triage the good bits when you're working on something for free?

Its like anything else in open source. Maintainers will do so if they care. Maybe they decide they don't care. That is always their decision to make but there are consequences for the project. Maybe those consequences make sense. Being a maintainer is all about making cost-benefit trade offs.

> Who gives a shit about reputation when you're the only game in town?

Its up to the maintainers whether they care or not. It depends on what they value.

Ultimately if maintainers make decisions that are at odds with what their userbase want, someone eventually forks and people vote with their feet.

[naturalmovement]

Security is a bit different.

Today it's an industry driven by unscrupulous clout-chasers and a commitment to quantity over quality.

There is a difference between going through patches and pull requests vs. the endless stream of LLM-assisted bullshit that has started cluttering security inboxes in the last few years.

[tptacek]

Vulnerability researchers don't create the vulnerabilities they report. The vulnerabilities exist whether or not they're reported by "clout chasers".

[dspillett]

There is a difference between a proper vulnerability researcher and a clout chaser calling themselves a vulnerability researcher. Research for a start, to assess the problem to see if it is genuine and if so if there are significant mitigating factors (by default or that can be implemented), and checking if it hasn't already been reported, instead of just copypasting some LLM output with minimal review. And to many clout chasers everything they find is a grade A world wrecking highest possible priority "if you don't drop everything else and fix this now you are a kitten murderer and I'm going to release the information to the world in 24 hours" level issue (they know this because they suggested it to an LLM and it told them they were so right).

[tptacek]

No there isn't. The vulnerability is either real or it isn't. How you feel about the researchers doesn't enter into it. People angry about vulnerability research have been making this argument since 1992.

[dspillett]

> No there isn't.

Yes there is, because:

> The vulnerability is either real or it isn't.

this, exactly: sometimes the vulnerability isn't, or isn't a fraction as serious as it is made out to be because it doesn't affect any sane configuration. And the project contributors don't know this until they've wasted time looking into it, time that could be spent looking into actual serious problems.

The extra problem right now is several people/groups dropping the same set of vulnerabilities with not coordination because they've got this great new tool to garner attention and want to be first. So projects have several things to look into that turn out to be exactly the same thing.

[dspillett]

> Maintainers will do so if they care.

Caring is only part of the problem. If you are inundated by low quality reports, or many duplicates of what turn out to effectively be the same problem, that you have to sift through to find the useful reports, then by the time you have something actionable you have no time left to take action on it.

The amount of reports coming in, particularly the low/zero quality ones, is apparently growing at a much faster rate than the time volunteers have for dealing with them.

Caring does not magically solve problems without enough people with enough time.

[RossBencina]

"care" is not a viable metric for prioritising the allocation of a scarce resource.

[eipi10_hn]

Yes, and people will sit there and sip tea while waiting for "someone"? For how long?

[bawolff]

> Yes, and people will sit there and sip tea while waiting for "someone"? For how long?

Until someone cares enough to do it. This is open source software. When it comes to open source, the golden rule is you either do the things you care about yourself or stfu.

Given the libav fork wasn't all that long ago, it can obviously happen to ffmpeg just as much as it can happen to any other project.