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points by ordu 2 days ago | 0 comments
It looks like the author is a socially clueless person, who was touched by an AI and realized they could write a code. No experience of shipping the code or a feel for what is acceptable behavior.

If it is so, it is a good reason to not include their browser into major distros, but in any case their advice "try to maintain it for longer and get some reputation first" make my (hypothetical) psychological portrait redundant. I mean, if I'm right, they would probably lose interest and/or completely alienate distros in a year or so.

[–] krapp 2 days ago
Unfortunately, "try to maintain it for longer and get some reputation first" is no longer feasible. Most software written now is vibe-coded by people with little or any experience writing code, much less shipping it, nor any respect for the culture they are supplanting. Reputation no longer comes from the old guard, it comes from hype entirely within the LLM community around projects that are pushed directly to prod without so much as a glance from a human being.

Even Linus is adding LLM generated code to the Linux kernel. No one cares anymore, that world is dead.

[–] 12_throw_away 2 days ago
> It looks like the author is a socially clueless person

xz-utils was 2 years ago now. It's surprising to me that people are still willing to apply any presumption of good faith and authenticity to interactions like this, especially after:

- "begging and praying" to include an unknown project in the distro

- offering what for all the world looks like an extremely clumsy bribe

- pushing a project full of contradictory and blatantly untrue claims

We don't have to - and in fact absolutely should not - evaluate projects based purely on "technical merit"! The people behind the project matter at least as much as "code quality."

And we absolutely should not be presuming good faith on the part of random people on the internet who have gotten ahold of our email addresses! Ask to see some credentials before turning your wallet over to the Wallet Inspector!

[–] ordu 2 days ago
> It's surprising to me that people are still willing to apply any presumption of good faith and authenticity to interactions like this

1. I don't think that that attempt for open bribery can mean anything except social cluelessness. Their intentions doesn't matter, because their actions as they are can achieve only a rejection of his package. We can try to find a hypothesis that would assume that the effect of their words is exactly what they wanted it to be, but I think it would be too much into the opposite territory, the territory of paranoia, "ahh all people are trying to kill me", something like that.

2. I think you are confusing a presumption of good faith with a presumption of a basic courtesy. I can be very suspicious, but (if I were a debian maintainer) I want those maillists to be functional. And it means basic courtesy and a presumption of good faith. There is no need to accuse the other side of what you suspect them to explain your suspicions to them and everyone watching.

And if my words seem to you like I have no suspicions or ignore them, well... I'll treat it as an evidence of how good I am.

If you read my message, it doesn't presume bad faith, but it doesn't presume good either. It focuses on observable behavior, proposes a hypothesis about personal traits, but it touches their motivation only in passing. "they realized they can write a code" can be seen as a description of a motivation, but for me it is not, because it doesn't explain their particular way to apply their new abilities to write code. Why browser, why to package it for debian? Why they are so insistent on it?

[–] ordu 2 days ago
edit. Ah, I forgot, there was a weak attempt at humor too. You see, the person is definitely socially clueless, but they try to social engineer their way into debian. I was laughing while reading their communications, because if they are of a bad faith, they are hopeless.
[–] c22 2 days ago
Hey! Who are you? The credentials inspector? Now hand over that wallet...