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this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
268 points (93.5% liked)
Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I'm no fan of vibe coded apps but rsync is literally free software with a free licence... forking it seems like less work than harrassing the guy who maintains in the hope that he capitulates.
The current maintainer, Andrew Tridgell, is one of the two original authors, and was dragged back into maintaining this in 2024 because rsync is so important and nobody else was stepping up to replace Wayne Davison, who was the primary maintainer from 2002 to 2024.
If this project had people eager to fork it, that probably wouldn't have happened in 2024.
you're absolutely right the only solution remaining is to harass the dev harderš
Your only objection to this is that you feel uncomfortable being mean.
"But people could just fork it." This laissez faire attitude doesn't actually do anything, and is only fronted by people who don't want to do anything. This is a states'-right-to-slavery argument.
Wow, an openly pro-bullying position from someone on a trans-inclusive instance? I'm sure your admins will appreciate the report I just sent them.
I am militantly pro-trans and will absolutely bully in their favor. Conservative rhetoric has no place in the society I want to live in.
OSS maintenance is a thankless job for the most part and the reaction in this thread proves the point.
After the XZ debacle, it would only be harder, because they can't trust that anyone volunteering to step up is doing so with the best of intentions, and vetting someone would be adding a lot to the workload.
It honestly sucks that the #1 requirement to being an effective FOSS maintainer (above even coding talent) is the skill of enforcing healthy emotional boundaries.
maintaining a fork is a lot of work and currently there is nobody even helping review commits in the mainline version.
i am also disgusted by the use of discord but i recommend reading tridge's messages yesterday in this log of the rsync discord for some context about recent events.
tldr: it isn't that he just decided to start changing things using claude and broke a bunch of stuff; the bugs he introduced recently are side effects of security fixes for the onslaught of security vulnerabilities which other people are finding using LLMs.
I never said it wasn't a lot of work. I said we shouldn't harass someone.
I think you've misunderstood me :)
I am advocating for having some sympathy for the guy working for free, and pointing out that your capacity for saying "just fork it" most likely does not translate into capacity to actually fork it.
I didn't say it did. But we don't show sympathy to someone by harassing and bullying them.
You're so confused.
We dont have the capacity to replace like 50% of all open source devs. We just have to hope that they get their shit together again.
I mean. What they need is help. Other people who can code who are willing to contribute time to the help maintain the project.
Burnout is real and I don't think "getting their shit together" actually fixes anything. The next time they burn out we wash rinse repeat?
Considering the pool of open source power maintainers is shrinking year by year and no fresh blood seems to come forward, I wonder what next time will look like? If you add the frank hostility from the community I don't see what could motivate people to start helping on high profile projects
That's my question about people who are now looking to jump to a fork. When the fork maintainer can't keep up, what's happens?
I wish I did have a solution to put forward to get people interested in helping on these kinds of projects (or the relevant skills). I don't have an answer, but this really just sucks.
It's up to them how they develop their completely free software. If you're not happy with it and can't stop using it, you can fork it. If you can't do it yourself, you pay someone else to. If it suddenly seems like paying for 50% of your FOSS is too much, then consider that the FOSS devs themselves pay for most of it with their largely uncompensated free time and probably want to have a bit more of said free time back.
How do they make money? Like they're consultants and make plenty of money and then spend some free time maintaining OSS projects?
Usually they're just regular software engineers who spend some of their free time on FOSS. Very few projects earn enough in donations to pay salaries.
I don't see anyone here quietly hoping
Indeed.
What I see: A world class software engineer (Samba, rsync, linux, and more) is learning how to use the latest tech that is vastly changing the industry he works in. It would be both foolish and irresponsible to not learn it and embrace it responsibly. If anyone is in a good position to direct and judge the output of LLMs, it will be engineers like Andrew who have spent their life applying critical thinking and good judgement.
And on the opposing side, we see a bunch of droll jammerlappies, pitching tents on the side of a highway, waving their fists at the world zooming by.
Keep outsourcing your critical thinking to a glorified autocorrect. Hope that works out for you.
Worse even because they're not waving their fists at "the world", they're waving them at a person.
Honestly I would not be shocked if years from now we discover these harassment campaigns are funded by Thiel.