this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026
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These are supply chain attacks and in the case of xz utils, the attacker had gone to extreme lenghts to hide the attack from a well-meaning, good-hearthed but overworked and burnt out solo maintainer.
To compare this to bugs that people unwittingly introduce in normal human-written code is not sincere.
Okay, but they still happen with orders of magnitude less frequency than bugs in AI code. Consider that the time between when rsync first adopted LLM-generated code and users en masse reporting rsync internal protocol errors during a backup was on the order of months.
The author of that article admits that the sample size is not large enough to draw meaningful conclusions.
But besides that, I believe LLM code generators can be a useful tool, provided you are willing to go over their output with a fine-tooth comb and assume it is broken until you have proven otherwise, because the hallucination problem is inherent to the technology and they're never going to completely solve it, and are willing to overlook the myriad ethical issues with all major LLMs in existence today.
I'd really like to see a source for the first guy's numbers, especially how he accounts for things like training and water usage at the power plant, and as for the second guy, Anthropic is not preserving shit. The Internet Archive preserves books. Anthropic scans them and doesn't publish the scans so that they can train an LLM that might or might not be able to regurgitate some fragments of that text, and publish that. That's preservation in the same way that painting a picture of you is keeping you alive forever.
Also, neither of those address the effects on creatives' livelihoods or the mental health of LLM users. Chatbot psychosis is real. People who routinely use LLMs to do things provably become worse at doing them without them. Students use LLMs to make an end run around having to learn everything they need to know to be effective members of a society, like how to articulate their points, how not to fall for rhetorical traps, what history was really like, and between that and the disastrous effects of No Child Left Behind, teachers are quitting in droves and there's a literacy crisis.
I froze my rsync package the day that was announced. fuck the dev :(