This guy has used on working with people that understand the scene, it seems that they were in contact, they agreed on something and then the next day they did something different.

This is really important in the context of what happened and probably the cherry on top of the current "hacking" cake, with the bar being lowered so much that anybody can jump in with some minor skill and luck and get something just for themselves.

Why not set up a triage bot with only read permissions on the project and restricted network access in order to triage issues?

Perhaps this way one could turn the influx of spam into a source of useful information.

At first, my brain parsed "spam" as in ye olde email spam. It took a moment for it to sink in that you meant code spam, instead.

But now that the two concepts are linked in my little pea brain: I kind of want to see how a system like SpamAssassin would work when applied to pull requests like it has been applied to email.

It can use reputation, real-time blacklists, triggers for form, and et cetera, with weighted scores for every aspect that are ultimately factored into one final score.

If final score is passing, the PR is presented for a human to review like a PR was (say) 5 years ago. If the final score fails, it goes into the circular file where it will probably die.

This is definitely the case for me. Before AI tools became mainstream, it was already a difficult proposition to find other smart people who you could get along with and talk to, do something interesting together. The Internet made all the difference in my life because I was able to get outside my geographic region to do big things through open source and hacker communities. Now, that very important filter mechanism no longer works. It's Eternal September all over again. In a way, it's very much a domination of "ends" over "means" in the wider community that is being forced upon those who long focused on "means". For a lot of intelligent people, understanding something is /valuable on its own/, but for the wider world there is no value in simply knowing things, but what you do with that knowledge (or now that lack of knowledge). I even experienced this recently at DEFCON 34 where I saw other participants in some of the CTFs with me using AI tools and not really understanding what the tools were doing or what was happening, but just kind of bruteforcing/tokenmaxxing their way through. This isn't to say that those AI tools are fundamentally a bad thing to use in building open source software, security research, or even as a tool in a CTF, but that the "understanding" step needs to still be present or it destroys the fun in everything.

I'm certainly not having as much fun with computers these days, even as I've invested a lot of effort myself in local LLMs and trying to understand the tools and understand how to apply them reasonably, I've found I prefer much more analog entertainments. Thankfully there's always photography and lockpicking to entertain me at the moment and provide a pathway to meet other interesting fellows.

Same thing did happen to many work places. People at all levels proxy questions through LLMs and don't even bother to read/trim/edit the response.

Funny, how suddenly a tight, 1-2 sentence response on point is a sign of skill.

It is insane just how miserable the experience of FOSS hardware hacking in public is.

The expectation does not even the slightest match reality. You'd think "ah yes many eyes meaning all bugs get shallow", but instead you get worst of XDA-Developers and toxic wastelands where no sane person even answers anymore.

But this predates LLMs and was as miserable as it is now before as well.

In fact, I might even argue that LLMs made this _better_, because you can now avoid the "opening up in hopes of finding 1 helpful person below 99 annoying ones" through simple GPU compute.

Previously, you had to hope that through this self-inflicted horror, you'd find an expert that can augment you. Now that expert rests on huggingface.

It's still.. not perfect, of course. But it might be less miserable - provided that you adapt to the current state of things and stop with the "trawling for volunteers".

__

Of course, this does not help you against "skids let claude find bugs that you'd need and burn it for no reason" as per the twitter thread, but I wouldn't rule out that they would not have done that, if less information was public.

And.. that too was an issue before LLMs.

Information wants to be free, but so does your cat, and your cat gets run over by some crackhead in a 30 year old rusty pickup if you just put it outside without thinking.

So don't let it go out unattended.

That said, this "pep talk" is more directed at myself than at poor Andy. This must all suck big time.

the idea of gatekeeping is often seen as elitist or exclusionary (fairly enough in many cases) but i think this can be an exaggerated description of a culture that necessarily requires a standard of... let's say, desire to engage with material on a sufficiently deep level. many things can be for anybody, but they are not for everybody.

in the past i've seen the phenomenon of "opening up" subcultures or previously-niche intellectual/art fields described as democratization but i think that ignores a big part of what causes this, which can more accurately be described as commodification. access to difficult things was formerly measured by one's ability to expend effort in order to get there (ignoring, for now, the structural conditions that set one up for success in that effort). when these things are commodified, these efforts and identities become products to purchase, the right to which is nearly never limited; in fact, it's almost seen as evil to imply that they should not be available to any individual at any time that individual may desire access.

i know we all have to start somewhere, but there has always been some historical filtration that leads people who are not truly engaged with a subject on a deep level to disengage at some point. that's changing at a novel rate and scale across so many subcultures. it seems like a lot of us are just surprised at how many people even want access to what were once our sanctuaries and we're not capable of grappling with what it takes to adapt to these changes.

i don't think this will pass or that things will return to "the way they were" but there will always be pockets that resemble previous subcultural forms. we just have to re-learn how to identify them with a keener eye and how to better avoid or more-appropriately interact with those who have a more superficial interest in them.

And once in a blue moon something good comes out of it back to the real project.