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[–] 31 points 4 months ago (4 children)

I've recently had to begin dealing with this type of crap at my job in the past month, and it's infuriating.

Testers using LLMs to analyze logs, said LLMs cockily composing a multi-page 'bug report' stating the supposed cause, spewing a metric tonne of mostly irrelevant context and gaslighting with authoritative-sounding conclusions about the root cause of the issue; and since it sounds so damned confident in its verbose hallucinations, I have to waste precious time explaining to the test team and my manager why the report is mostly or entirely wrong.

Goddamn, I am so ready to retire. Let these "dark factory" advocates bury themselves in their models' slop. There will be a reckoning someday for this I swear; and if, someday, a company comes to me to clean up the mess "AI" has wrought, I will demand 3-4x my regular salary to clean it up, or, if I am financially content in retirement, I will simply tell them to go fuck themselves and lay in the bed they have made.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    My company loves having people shooting out vast amounts of PRs to other teams with surface level fixes to things we’ve been working on for months. You can tell none of them have been tested and only like 50% of them work. It’s infuriating.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Oh yeah, that reminds me of yesterday. There was a problem and I was asked to look together with a guy from another team. The other guy was spinning out and spouting all sorts of wild ass guesses about the behavior and talking and talking about why it might be happening and why it calls for a change that would have been massively a pain in the ass for the user, but in principle would solve the issue if implemented, and pressuring me to make those changes right that second.

    I said just wait a moment, gave a patch that just simply fixed the problem, explained the actual root cause, why it was a very quick fix, and used the balance of the time to improve performance because the experience was slower than I liked, even if the customer had not complained about it (something took about 2 minutes that should have been near instant, but they just "assumed that's the way it is").

    No AI involved whatsoever, but a very AI like behavior of spouting nonsense that sounds right and just shotgunning off some design in hopes of it doing something, no matter how messy.

    Just an example of why AI is so "exciting" in the tech industry, so many are already used to just guessing without understanding and hoping it works.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    I'm with you, but so so far away from retiring.

    Silver lining is that the company refuses to pay for more than included GitHub copilot tokens. They are currently in denial and saying folks can just use the cheap models to build management's dream of "native agentic workflows", but I fully expect them to have to face the reality that people will get fancy tab completion and the occasional prompt and that's it. I can deal with that volume.

    But still after each model release I go to use it and save examples of it falling on its face. Because each time a new model launches management is convinced that the llms don't make mistakes anymore. If they just said it is getting better that would be one thing, but they are always convinced that new LLM was when all the issues were fixed.

    Working on open source has been tougher, since other people have blown budget on making harder to understand bug reports and pull requests.

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  • [–] 29 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (27 children)

    Actual comment proving it's bullshit: https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/7074#issuecomment-4556782893

    But the PR is still merged. What does that mean. They just accepted it anyway? 😢

    Edit: it was reverted, I hear ya 🙏🤟

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  • [–] 21 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    That's what happens when you don't actually understand the change and just listen to whoever is posting it. The disingenuous thing about LLMs is that they present their hallucinations with full confidence in a charismatic way. No matter the source, that is how anyone can mislead other humans, we're just so extremely susceptible to it.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago* (14 children)

    Looks like it was reverted shortly after the comment you posted.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (13 children)

    I didn't notice that. The fact that Redhat is merging random crap is scary.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (11 children)

    Not really, it matches the Redhat software quality that we had a joy to experience for the last 10+ years (systemd, pulseaudio, Gnome, ...)

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (9 children)

    What would you say is low quality in those projects you listed there?

    Also didn't know Redhat developed those.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    How long have you been around in the linux world? All of them were absolute dogshit when they came out and everyone complained (for Gnome, that means Gnome 3), but redhat kept pushing them anyway. For instance, when pulseaudio was new it caused crackles, noise, high cpu etc. everywhere, but they used their business connections to have vendors support pulseaudio exclusively, which meant you had to install it if you wanted to use Skype or for various games, even though ALSA was (and is) just fine. Nowadays it gets replaced by pipewire.

    I guess I don't need to explain the systemd drama; it has gotten much better, but what still sucks is that it drops you into a rescue mode when it can't mount some filesystem that is not even necessary for boot (e.g. /mnt/data). And when you do not have a root password set up, but use sudo for everything, you are screwed because systemd demands the root password nevertheless, meaning you gonna need to boot from a live usb or similar just to fix one line in fstab. That is the stupidest shit imaginable.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    I'm a user for about 20 years.

    I must be lucky. I had no issues with pulseaudio. In fact I thought it was so wonderful how you could hear multiple applications at the same time!

    I thought gnome 3 was really cool as well. I didn't use it as long as I did 2, but that's because I found out about tiling window management (and later scrolling window management). But I liked the design of Gnome 3, not sure why. Felt modern, like a bold step in a modern direction. 😊

    Systemd I just have no feelings about. I'm not well-read about the drama or how or why it's a badly designed system. I don't write my own units or whatever. I just start/enable and stop services. 😅

    But these were just examples. Maybe you mean more stuff have been bad coming from Redhat.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    In fact I thought it was so wonderful how you could hear multiple applications at the same time!

    That was possible with ALSA and the "dmix" plugin years before pulseaudio came out.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Alright. Nothing I knew about at the time.

    Still it worked really well for me, and the experience I have is basically that a working system (pulse) was replaced by another (pipe). Must've been lucky.

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  • [+] 2 points 4 months ago* (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Ah, so they blamed pulse for driver and firmware bugs? I guess that happens easily.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Well, this case the actual little 'code change' is pointless, but harmless, so not so scary. The rationale is stupid because the purported root cause makes no sense against the behavior, but preserving a custom boot parameter added to install to also apply to the installed OS is pretty milquetoast.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    Yeah, I was reading the comment before and anyone with a vague awareness of this stuff should have called bullshit immediately.

    Preserving the argument seemed an innocuous enough change though, so I could see why it was accepted, but the explanation was bafflingly stupid.

    But people who don't know eat it up. Sounded possible (until they claimed the system crashed and could not log the error, despite a log entry belt there that they ostensibly cite as the issue..).

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    I just don't understand the workflow with these people.

    You know how people say "don't run a command you are given or find online unless you know exactly what it does"?

    Why would anyone accept/merge a PR from an LLM unless they knew what the consequences were, or verified its claims. I just will never get this trust in LLMs, given I know even vaguely how they work.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago

    Wow what a massive waste of everybody's time.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Yeah, LLMs are gonna spin their wheels hard when it comes to testing anything at the kernel/os level, if you dont have automated testing with a virtual machine setup to actually be able to replicate a bug, you 100% just cannot test anything they produce or say

    As soon as you have the ability to go "Okay we have a failing test, make it pass", the LLMs get a lot less stupid, because instead of just randomly fumbling around and guessing, they have actual feedback to iterate on and can actually chew on it til they fix the issue or give up.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I'm not a programmer, but isn't reproducing a reported bug step 1?

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    Reproducing the bug with an automated test is harder, its code you can run that tests your other code.

    But allows you to just 1 click run it and get a yes/no "is this still broken" output without having to manually reproduce it by hand each time.

    Whats important is this is in the domain of what LLMs can actually work with, the output of the test is something they can parse and iterate on until it works.

    They execute the command to run the test, check the output, and keep working til the test passes.

    They can add additional tests to help isolate the problem, or strip down the existing test until its doing the absolute bare min steps to reproduce, in order to narrow the scope of whats causing it.

    But when your test involves stuff running in the kernel of an OS, your automated tests meed to effectively be code you write that bootstraps a virtual machine up and manipulates and observes that second machines kernel...

    You can do it, but its one of the most complicated forms of automated tests to design and run!

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