Fuck AI

I wonder about the timing of this. I just got a backup NAS out at my mom's house some miles away and for one or two beautiful days I was sending Rsync differential backup jobs through the vendor interface for backups over Wireguard. The NAS is still on my network over WG, comes back up in that way after a reboot…but for the last week, those backup jobs just break with a useless error. I haven't had the time to look under the hood at logs but I've been assuming this was slopping config on my part cause I'm new at it. But it would almost be a relief if it was just a bad update (before the graver implications of the situation set in on my mind). I wish I had enough background in this stuff to be useful, but I'm just a bystander and a grateful, useless end user.

For those who don't know, "tridge" is legendary.

He casually reverse engineered Microsoft's SMB protocol, creating Samba, back when windows file sharing was a key part of Microsoft's lock in. He also isn't just the maintainer of rsync, he invented the algorithms it uses. People who worked with him consider him a genius and a guru.

Just gonna copy what tridge said:

bottom line is if you want to be useful then pick holes in the test suite, find things it doesn't cover, find interactions between options it doesn't pin down, report those and offer fixes for that.

Why ask for forks or alternatives?

You may not like it, but this is what 10x productivity looks like.

I'm starting to think that I don't want to use Arch anymore and thus always be among the first to get all the new slop.

What is it about LLMs that makes so many devs' brains melt?

The project's issue tracker has been pretty wild recently, for example https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929

Wherein backups falling consists entirely of one self report of the users self written backup script not working followed by him seeing commit messages indicating usage of ai with zero effort to show work diagnose the cause or bisect to failing commit despite poster being a hobbyist who dabbles in programming.

Trust me bro.

Honestly what happened to language models is a shame. Good tools perverted to try and do every job. LLMs dont really have a place and eat up so much resources with what effects to a okay scaffolding tool in code, and a piece of shit liar everywhere else. I remember seeing this shit being used in medicine almost 15 years ago thinking thats gonna be a cool technology to we expand. It was fucken not.