Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | Quarrel's commentslogin

wtf is this comment section?

The author of these commits were tridge & claude.

What does tridge have to do to convince the open source community that he might be a legit programmer & have a clue?

Samba? Whats that? Rsync? Never heard of it. Tivo? No clue (maybe more Australian context here than others, but still).

Even the comments on the github issue, are totally devoid of the context that this is a very senior open source contributer who has maintained this project since he came up with the diff algorithm during his Phd, started the project and now chooses to acknowledge that he's using claude.

Is there any evidence that the bug rate on rsync is any worse than it used to be? or just a screenshot from mastadon?

It is just so bizarre to me.


I'm not sure about tridge personally, but I've regularly seen real competent engineers introduce obvious hallucinations when using coding agents. Review fatigue is real, and you just cannot own the code you didn't write to the same degree as the one you wrote

My consistent observation is that seniors who do only or mostly code reviews for several months end up making worst and worst code review. They nitpick thinks that dont matter more and more ... and miss big architectural issues, maintennability issues and bugs more amd more.

There is no reason to think reviewing AI code more then writing own wont have the same effect.


> this is a very senior open source contributer who has maintained this project since he came up with the diff algorithm during his Phd

People change. You can be Linus Torvalds for all I care, if one day you wake up and start pushing 9000 line commits created by LLM and with regressions, you're not that person anymore.


Also, a real example is Steve Yegge.

I still have no idea what on earth why or is Gas Town. Also, he facilitated a crypto rug pull around it because he claimed the money to help support Gas Town was too good to pass up. People have lost their minds with this.

This is just a tool and it’s making people have brain damage. I don’t want this reality. It’s too stupid.


But DID anything change?

Of course I know that some people can just becoming psychotic out of nowhere. But why would I assume it?


According to the thread rsync broke for incremental backups and increases the cpu load heavily. The whole thread only started because people noticed regressions and were wondering what happened.

Since I quite a few users are using distros that won't update for a while it gets even better: this trend may continue and as soon as the update actually happens we'll be so far down the road that it will be too late to take a step back and reconsider due to the delayed feedback. This is pretty much about the few people _already_ having issues with it.

That being said, if the creator wants to use AI to work on the project they are free to do so. I just hope nothing of value is lost because of it.

P.S.: If you stop writing by hand and start delegating - to AI or other people - something has changed. There shouldn't be any discussion about it. Delegation is different than writing it yourself.


Yes, according to the git diff and the comment here https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen....

A change in the sys calls that are used. That's pretty sensitive in general I think; I can see if it were introduced by an LLM why people would be upset if they experienced data loss from it.


Do you think LLM use is evidence of psychosis? I think it's a widespread problem but probably not psychosis.

At least once a week we have a post on HN about CEOs having AI paychosis. Maybe there is something to it.

> Is there any evidence that the bug rate on rsync is any worse than it used to be? or just a screenshot from mastadon?

There's plenty of evidence that rsync 3.4.3 has broken a bunch of features like incremental copies, yes.

Which is why your post is a great proof of how AI derangement can make previously great engineers output broken dangerous slop.


Has rsync never broken features before, without AI?

Have features been broken in patch versions?

I don't remember of any examples, no. I'm sure you can use your clanker to answer that though and also plot out the number of occurences.

[flagged]


Those posts may not have been visible to everyone. The posts you're referencing are hidden for me behind a link "33 Remaining Items (load more)". Without the update, I didn't know to go look for them.

And honestly I noped out of scanning the entire comment thread by about #5 or #6... I could tell there was nothing productive in the remainder of the comments.


Actually it is, someone compiled allll the actual bug reports tracing back to AI:

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen...


"antisemitism" loses it's meaning if you are using it this way.

> Then somebody screenshots the geographical location "Israel" to attack another commenter. He gets lots of upvotes for it, too.

And you got downvoted for calling out that crap. A sad state this world is in.


Yep.

When someone does that, he gets rightfully called out.

On the other side, accusations of being Russian trol are pretty common, even here on HN.

Why are people more sensitive to antisemitism than to antislavism?

Double standards, or just a hate induced by decades / centuries of indoctrination?


> Why are people more sensitive to antisemitism than to antislavism?

Calling someone a vatnik or Russian troll is mostly because the statement that provokes such a callout reproduces Russian propaganda talking points, and Russia has been running propaganda campaigns for well over a decade now. Similarly, ordinary Russians aren't called orcs, but Russian soldiers are called that because of their despicable behavior in the war theatre.


Replace Russia with Israel and everything you said also applies.

That's not an answer to the question you quoted.


[flagged]


Your opinion reminds me of the narrative about cheaters in the speedrunning community. The cheaters say they cheat not because they feel superior, but because they feel “they could achieve good results if they put in the time”. They feel entitled to cheating.

Thanks very much for this- I had not seen it.

It does not paint a pretty picture, and I did not know this context.

Perhap the tridge I knew is also of the past, but I hope not.


I have quite an early memory of being on the somewhat remote property in Australia that my mother grew up on (Central NSW, near Condobolin).

My Uncle, who then ran the property, walked over to a rock, whacks it with a hammer or similar, shows me a bit of a trilobite (which are totally different to our sort of bytes). He did this a bunch of times. I still have the rocks. No amazing full horizontal cross-sections, but it certainly got my very young mind excited.

There were fossils RIGHT THERE from before there were dinosaurs!

Oh, and that central Australia used to be an Ocean!

These clear demos to young kids, or adults, are great, and the many other examples here in the comments are a testament to that (Vienna? wtf!).


and in the meantime, just a sweep of the committed code (or the to-be-committed code for lots of us) and the code it interacts with, is increasingly catching lots of problems.

It's just such an old old business school idea. Metrics matter.

The classic example is the Second Fleet of convicts that were sent to Australia - they were paid per convict that boarded the ships. 40% of them died. Unsurprisingly perhaps, slave traders won that contract.

They started paying per live convict landed in Australia after that.

A COO at a ~$150B firm like Uber certainly should know what the outcome will be before the leaderboard goes up. Really makes you wonder if the board was incentivising him to increase AI usage; job done, bonus unlocked.


Or maybe it’s just what it looks like: A good old boys network of incompetent inbreds whose only qualification is that their parents could buy them memberships in the right clubs.

> Stop payment resulted in the US pulling from the pre payment for the F35s...

Which Switzerland then reluctantly agreed was allowed under the terms.

As you say, totally being taken to the cleaners, and it is unclear how they escape in the short term.

The more this happens though, the more deals like Italy's make senese, irrespective of the performance comparison of the two planes.

If the US is going to be an unreliable partner, that will filter through in many many ways, and the US can hardly blame anyone but themselves (well, I'm sure some fingers will get pointed internally).


It’s not just Europeans who are beginning to realize that the U.S. can’t be trusted; Australians are still waiting for a hypothetical delivery date for their AUKUS submarines.

The Gulf states find themselves with too few interceptor missiles and a war in Iran.

The Japanese and Koreans are building as many war ships as they can.


I don't understand why US weapons manufactures are not lobbying harder. They are losing the European market just as the largest rearmament since ww2 happens.

Maybe they are and its just a lost cause with the US administration.


> I don't understand why US weapons manufactures are not lobbying harder

It doesn’t really matter if your product is better or cheaper, if the customer thinks that service and spare parts might possibly be withdrawn in the future for political (or whatever) reasons they won’t buy your product.


That is what they need the political lobbying for. Obviously not to help their pricing.

If you mean they need to lobby the US government to be less schizophrenic, I agree. Though I suspect the government would just decide to start more wars.

If you mean they need to lobby the other governments, I don't think that'll work, the decreasing trust is associated with the US government's actions, not as related to the arms dealers' actions.


Can you lobby to make Trump become not Trump?

Yes.

He’s a simple creature. Just pay the man and/or his kids off. Remember the funny video comparing Oracle and Larry Ellison to a lawn mower? He is the same.


You can lobby congress to put him in a 6x6 cell. For any reason whatsoever, including no reason whatsoever. Their trials are ultimately a yes/no vote, the facts don't matter.

They are just as complicit in failing to exercise their power.


There are other rich people lobbying harder to protect other businesses not impacted by the ally double-crossing.

So they need lobbying to lie to customers? Why would that help people choose Boeing when it ultimately is up the whims of one single individual that can drastically change moods every four years?

There is a reason why imperialism ultimately always fails.


No. You do understand how lobbying works right? You don't lobby your customers, you lobby that single individual. Which has never been easier as the current one takes bribes almost directly and has no true opinions.

A major issue is that the US manufacturers cannot keep up with demand even as they scale up production capacity. The current order backlog of approved foreign military sales of US weapons systems is approaching $1T and growing faster than they can fill the orders.

This is creating secondary fallout as the orders from various countries get re-prioritized. It is not strictly first-come, first-served order fulfillment; you can find your order pushed back in the queue for reasons.


This is why nations need to have their own industrial capacity. Because when shit hits the fan everyone needs guns- and they have a limited time frame until war breaks out.

They're very scared of their boss and the CEOs are short sighted by virtue of their compensation packages.

The rearmament is mostly happening because the US has shown itself a bad unreliable partner that abuses interdependence.

No lobbying can change the risk assessment where America is the risk factor.


Don’t think of them as companies in the normal sense. There’s no meaningful competition anymore and they have rolled everything up. They are essentially national industries now.

itll be hard for US weapons manufacturers to win when a big part of the rearmament is going to be around deterring the US just as much as deterring Russia

You have to understand that the smartest people in the US didn’t vote for this administration and are just as horrified as everyone else with how inept and pathetic this administration is. Unfortunately we’re a minority, the senate’s design (Wyoming has the same number of senators as California even though a small city in CA may have more people than the whole state) and the US is so ridiculously gerrymandered.

Sorry everybody but we just have to wait this stupidity out.


This stupidity is not going to simply be waited out. It is becoming even further entrenched.

There are a lot of issues in the American political system but the structure of the Senate is not one of those.

It was explicitly created as a way to balance sovereignty of the states against populism, such as that enacted by MAGA or leftists.

If you are a small state like Vermont, you don’t want to just have California, New York, and Texas dictating all rules and laws for the country by sheer weight of their population sizes. That is expressed in the House, but the Senate serves to balance that and ensure that populists don’t run roughshod over the country.

Without such a structure states with less population would either band together and create their own super states - and you can see where this leads, or they wouldn’t have agreed to join the US in the first place.


> That is expressed in the House, but the Senate serves to balance that and ensure that populists don’t run roughshod over the country.

Yet that is exactly what has been happening twice now.


Well, dissolving the Senate would just make that problem even worse if that's your viewpoint. "Twice now" seems to be a dig at Trump as though MAGA is the only populist movement, but ANTIFA/BLM and other, similar populist groups have taken hold of power in various forms as well, primarily in certain west coast states and cities.

Antifa and BLM have the political power of a mouse fart. Please don't compare them to the elephant in the room.

Politicians with similar far-left populist political leanings have won elections in various cities and states. I'm just pointing out that removing the Senate empowers more of these populist groups with destructive and authoritarian ideologies.

When they'll get a president with a subservient congress elected twice, and go on to drive the country into a burning dumpster, I will be willing to entertain the possibility that the existence of the Senate protects us from their destructive and authoritarian ideologies. (Despite it demonstrably failing to do so, twice.)

---

(I'm not even going to bother to ask how a movement for police accountability is a 'destructive and authoritarian ideology'. I guess making cops not murder people for no good reason, and then lying about is called 'authoritarian' by FOX, but how can any rational person repeat that?)


From the prospective of many millions of Americans, and me to some extent (actions that align with my interests and ideology are good regardless of political leadership) the country is going in the right direction.

If you throw the Senate out you'd just further embolden those in power today.


The current senate would rubber-stamp maga dropping a nuclear bomb on Seattle.

There does not seem to be any red line for them when it comes to support of the unterfuhrer.


Ok now switch the team colors and then drop the bomb on Miami or something.

Besides, this is temporary, and even now Republican senators have publicly pushed back on various things. A recent example is the $1.8 bn slush fund.


Yes, if anything the issue is that the House was capped in seats in 1929 and the population has tripled. Smaller states have an outsized representation in Congress currently.

I'm strongly in favor of expanding the House. I failed to mention that in my original post.

Vermonters might not want that because they hold outsized influence on the direction of the country, but then they shouldn't pretend to believe in Democracy.

So, yes, 50 million people should have more say over the country's direction than 1 million. We should stop pretending we have 55 mini countries, because the Supreme Court has stopped pretending we have a 10th Amendment.


> Vermonters might not want that because they hold outsized influence on the direction of the country, but then they shouldn't pretend to believe in Democracy.

A Republic is a form of democracy. Having a Senate in the structure that we do is entirely consistent with democratic principles. To suggest otherwise is incorrect and counter to established definitions in the realm of political philosophy.

> So, yes, 50 million people should have more say over the country's direction than 1 million. We should stop pretending we have 55 mini countries, because the Supreme Court has stopped pretending we have a 10th Amendment.

Right, like how Donald Trump and his 75 million voters get to have more sway of Kamala Harris' voters (I don't recall the exact losing number)?

Nevermind that the state of Vermont is a sovereign entity in our constitutional republic. To modify this existing arrangement you give opportunity for certain states to leave (pro-Russian viewpoints try break up the US - don't fall for them!) since they are deciding as sovereign entities whether or not to participate in the Republic. If you are upset about the 10th Amendment or whatever then you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and inviting a Civil War or something similar. I say nah to that. We'll keep the existing system because it's pretty damn good.


We are supposed to have a REPRESENTATIVE Democratic Republic, but it's no longer representative when you have orders of magnitude difference in representation.

> Right, like how Donald Trump and his 75 million voters get to have more sway of Kamala Harris' voters

They do in the Presidential race (and only because of FPTP and because we don't have i.e. approval voting), but they shouldn't control the House as well (because trump voters don't always vote R for reps).

States aren't sovereign entities -- they can't make agreements with foreign countries that isn't granted by Congress.


> States aren't sovereign entities -- they can't make agreements with foreign countries that isn't granted by Congress.

This is incorrect. They can't make "agreements" with foreign countries but that's because of the Constitution they all agreed to, not because they aren't sovereign.


https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sovereignty

> supreme power especially over a body politic

> freedom from external control

States aren't sovereign. The state legislatures don't even control their Senators anymore. The fiction of "collection of independent states" is just that: fiction. If nothing else, the American Civil War put an end to that. The Senate is just an unjust system which causes California to have to remit 33% of taxes to other states, while those are state's Senators vote to strip the rights Californians wish to have.


> It was explicitly created as a way to balance sovereignty of the states against populism, such as that enacted by MAGA or leftists.

that only works if the smaller states are not representative of the larger majority of the population.

instead, nowadays the smaller states are actually over-representative of the populist mass - e.g Wyoming is 80% white.


You're misunderstanding the purpose of the Senate, whether Wyoming is 80% white or black or any other random race. The point is that it exists as a sovereignty vote. To take it away would be to cause a civil war or at least a dissolution of the United States because smaller states will walk away.

A lot of the anti-American, anti-Senate, &c. stuff is Russian propaganda precisely because to continue to sow division and encourage populism is to invite destruction and disunity upon the United States.


i understand the purpose of the senate and believe that bicameralism is a good idea and populism is generally bad.

you seem to not understand my point so ill give it one more try:

senate was indeed formed as a bulwark against populism, but the founders didnt anticipate a 68 to 1 population difference between the largest and smallest states (california vs. wyoming), nor the vast differences in composition of their populations. when a tiny fraction of the population holds that much disproportionate veto power, the senate no longer checks populism, it actively empowers a specific, rural populist minority to override the majority.


No I understood your point, but you seem to be ignoring mine. The Senate wasn't just a bulwark against populism, it serves as a way to express the sovereignty of individual states in a way to balance states with very high populations from running roughshod over the rest of the states.

You have two things at play here:

1. Population size 2. State sovereignty

You're ignoring the 2nd, but they are inseparable when it comes to understanding the function and purpose of the Senate.


This might have made sense for the original 13 colonies but after westward expansion, it clearly does not. Most of the western state borders were formed for administrative reasons

It still makes sense today. It's not perfect but it's a pretty good balance most of the time.

Congress is completely nonfunctional. It doesn't work. Americans are just too dedicated to American civic religion to admit it isn't working.

Americans get the government they deserve. Changing how it works doesn't change the fundamental problem there - we'd just make changes and then those wouldn't work too.

I would be incredibly against any action to remove the Constitution and civil liberties we have today especially as populism is rising and needs to be squashed. It's very similar to calls from the far-right to destroy the FDA, DOE, or other federal institutions - we shouldn't get rid of them without clearly better alternatives.


Waiting it out was the first strategy in Europe but it's clearly moving into something else.

> Sorry everybody but we just have to wait this stupidity out.

And the rest of the world has to suffer the consequences. It has been incredible watching americans shrugging off any responsibility.

Insufferable hypocrites.


> the smartest people in the US didn’t vote for this administration

Trump has support from SV and Wall Street leaders, and the whole Republican Party.

> gerrymandered

Trump won the popular vote, and iirc the GOP got more total votes for the House of Representatives. What about for the Senate? Sure NY and CA are big, but so are FL and TX.


Are SV and Wall Street leaders demonstrably the smartest people in the U.S.? Or just the greediest and most venal?

See: Borromean rings.

You can’t lobby the Trump or “America First” crowd to not be themselves.

If nothing else, rosmine's DFT [1], which is what they were working on with this setup, seems like a worthwhile investigation.

While I'm skeptical that there is much of a moat, at least for the large players, it should at least hopefully set rosmine up with for the next job :)

It does seem to fix the current biggest issues with using LLMs for writing at various publishers. If you're The Economist, you have a very specific house style and you have a decent corpus of articles written in that style. At least on my reading of it, rosmine can use DFT to get a model to closely match its outputs, in terms of the language quirks that are generated, to that of the corpus it is fine tuned on. ie it will very much match the house style, particularly as it is used in writing, vs giving a system prompt to an LLM that has some Economist articles in its vast training set, and telling it to write in that style- it will do an ok job, but still exhibit LLM language quirks despite itself. Even if you feed it the specific "style guide" that they give their authors, I dare say the reality of their writing is the best place to learn, and it sounds like DFT can ground the writing of a model in a specific corpus like that.

[1]: https://rosmine.ai/2026/05/18/fixing-llm-writing-with-distri...


Giving an LLM samples and tell it to apply the style in the sample works a lot better than just telling it to copy a style it may have seen, or a list of rules.

They do it well enough that it'd take really good output to beat.


They really don't.

If your goal is to say, write science fiction, their reversion to classic LLM-isms, is really distracting and is what makes people say from a glance that it was written by an LLM. You basically can't use them at the moment in any real "natural" long-form writing. Everyone will call "slop" pretty quickly on the current frontier models.

Rosmin's DFT paper is worth a read.


I have seen examples that shows otherwise, including from a client that tested it extensively by paying people who thought they were paid to help detect AI generated content. They did little more than what I described. It works very well. Some people still insist they are able to tell the difference, but in the tests I saw, people did little better than random chance.

Some of it you could probably tell with statistical analysis, but actualy people are far worse at judging whether content is AI generated than they think they are.

If you need to beat an AI testing tool, you need to do marginally more work than to stop people from recognising it, but not all that much.

The nature of it is that you don't "see" most of the stuff that is well done because few people want to talk about it.


WTF is up with Luxembourg on that graph?

It is a tax haven, with one of the highest GDP / person in the world, why is it, by magnitudes, the biggest recipient of EU largesse / person??!


Lots of people who work in Luxembourg don't live there so anything "per capita" is a bit misleading.

Additionally a lot of the EU's institutions are based there or have offices there, some of which might count as investments as well.

Lastly, everything there is really expensive. So you need to invest a larger amount to achieve the same thing as elsewhere.


These are reasons why it might not be the largest provider of funds per capita, not why it would be by orders of magnitude the biggest recipient.

I have been to Luxembourg and to Hungary, Bulgaria & Greece - the otherwise obvious contenders for "poorest" in the EU and Luxembourg should not be in the picture.


If it gets funds for restoring one railway bridge or something of that sort the fact the population is tiny makes the per capita investment look huge, just usual tiny country effects.


A bunch of foreign companies also incorporate their EU subsidiaries there (presumably due to some tax benefit). I imagine that distorts their GDP quite badly as well.


I presume this is because of the EU institutions there and that expenditure to maintain those institutions counts towards receipts (and this effect is then exaggerated due to Luxembourg's small population). Certainly no one in the EU is under any illusion that Luxembourg is poor, much less vastly poorer than the next poorest EU country.


Notoriously difficult to portray correctly in EU money-shuffling statistics. Some money not granted to the grand duchy still filed under "beneficiary country: Luxembourg" due to some program or institution being headquartered there. And it is essentially impossible to compare apples to apples what happens in actual EU budget and what happens in Kirchberg, home to EIB.


Small population plus lots of EU institutions.


They're chimps that are on the other side of the Congo river (and both types of genus Pan can't swim).

They're super close to chimps (and definitely much closer than us), rather than "a very different species".


Right?

There are lots of reasons this stuff happens, but one of them is definitely that some kids aren't acting out for school reasons but for attention from their parents.


Way back whenever I first read Dune, this seemed like such weird niche ban. I don't think I had a lot of respect for it.

Now, like all good SciFi, it seems fairly prescient ....


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: