Technical debt is aptly named. From time to time it demands it's interest in the form of delaying a new feature, but as long as your overall technical revenue is positive, it's fine.
I don't agree with that, I can very well still discuss that. He clearly sounds like someone who doesn't want to do this work anymore and should have searched for a successor.
That's my impression from that sentence, at least. Don't you agree?
So, why didn't he do it? Because just firing up Claude and let it rip is way easier than finding real people and building up trust?
Did Claude increase bugs in rsync? Or did Claude just gave some basically retired programmer, who doesn't even want to work on his project anymore, the impression that he can replace finding a successor with just handing it to AI?
> “I’d rather be out sailing than working on rsync security issues, so I have reached for several AI tools to help with what needs to be done,”
Well, then maybe it's already overdue to find a new maintainer for the project and let someone else continue it? The tool will not get better from someone working on it who doesn't want to.
Also the amount of commits is suspicious. In the last two months, rsync had about as much commits as in the last two years before that. Most of them written with claude. And then stuff like this is in there.
That's exactly what I'd expect when someone is excited about AI usage and becomes... well, sloppy.
Legacy, I guess. Every product consists of six cameras and they get IPv4 192.168.223.(1-6).
And that is what everybody knows and everybody uses to interact with them. The serial numbers of devices are rarely used.
However, now that I think of it, IPv6 addresses that are constructed from the serial number of the whole device and the position of each camera would be useful. I'll check it out, thanks.
I wonder why IPv6 didn't catch on! It's just unergonomic and ugly!
At work, I have a rare case of a useful application of IPv6: setting IPv4 addresses. We have multiple embedded devices in one product which all got the same default IPv4. But their serials map to their MACs which map to their link-local IPv6.
So workers scan the serial and I connect to all devices at once via their IPv6 address. Then, I set their individual IPv4 address and that's all I do via IPv6.
Like I said: I think I write like this on some occasions.
I wouldn't know how I would search for examples. I guess you'd have to search old reddit comment threads or something. But yeah, I have no motivation to do that, tbh.
It could be that it's hard to find examples because they are scattered about in countless comment threads and single posts on countless platforms. Things I rarely keep links to, things nobody indexed on a large scale before LLMs.
It may be that it wasn't a very popular style of writing, because most people don't like writing a lot and keep their texts on the internet short. LLMs exaggerate this style because they generate exaggerative amounts of text in general. The style wasn't particularly annoying in the past because it wasn't that popular. It's annoying now because LLMs flood the internet with it.
The quoted example in particular didn't appear uncanny to me. And it still doesn't. I can see myself writing like that.
I'm sorry I have no example for you. But I'm genuinely unsure whether I'm oblivious to the patterns others see, or whether others see patterns because they want to see them.
The part you'd like to remove ("Not managing code...") may be not required to convey the objective meaning of the sentence, but humans have emotions, too. I could have written stuff like that. To build up a bigger emotional picture.
> The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended.
This sentence may not be relevant for whatever you experience to be the relevant message of the text. But it still says something the remaining paragraph does not. And also something I can relate to.
Also, as LLMs are statistical models, one has to assume that they write like this because their training data tells them to. Because humans write like this. Not when they do professional writing maybe, but when they just ramble. Not all blogs are written by professionals. I'd say most aren't. LLM training data consists mostly of humans rambling.
I also sometimes write long comments on the internet. And while I have no example to check, I feel like I do write such sentences, expanding on details to express more emotional context. Because I'm not a robot and I like writing a lot. I think it's a perfectly human thing to do. I find it sad that "writing more than absolutely needed" is now regarded as a sign of AI writing.
Then again, I have a rough idea on how I could implement this check with some (language-dependent) accuracy in a linter. With LLM's I... just hope and pray?
It's JSON with some simple idea of RPC added to it. With the main idea apparently being that it is human-readable.
We've been using Varlink for one project, but I've never found myself in a situation where I had any benefit from the data being JSON. You rarely read the raw data. But compared to gRPC or CapnProto, you lost compile-time type checking and now you need 10mins of testing a vending machine before you get a "key not found"-error because you missed one spot on renaming.
Also, I've written varlink-cpp building on asio and nl-json at some point: https://github.com/wolletd/varlink-cpp.
But as our varlink usage declined, it never found much usage and isn't maintained.