This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
They should make a separate mailing list specifically for people who use AI, to concatenate their results and boil it down to something manageable for a human to review.
It's like having a porch light a few feet away from the door to attract all the moths so they don't come inside whenever you open the door.
Maybe they could use an LLM to make a summary of the results!
Ideally, If the AI was truly any good at finding the bugs, a well trained AI could give it the ole wheat and chaff action.
we're not there yet.
they should make another mailing list for ai generated reports that they totally read, and ban anyone who submits slop to the main one. not sure how feasible it is since spammers will just generate new emails, but at least they would have something clear to point out the malicious intent.
The problem isn't that AI is maliciously spamming the mailing list, it's that AI is able to find and report real or potential security vulnerabilities at rates that no human organization can process fast enough. Open source browsers and Linux have been slammed lately with vulnerabilities found by Mythos.
It would likely create more work and just result in two unmanageable mailing lists. Doubling the problem.
Sounds like the perfect solution!
the point being the mail list for ai slop is there just so it doesnt clog the actual one and anyone who breaks that can be blacklisted as malicious actor.
We truly are witnessing the death of open source in real time. Thanks AI!
Let's not being over-drammic here. They just need a better way to filter off AI junk request. They should be the one to do it? No, it suck. Is it fair? Not at all. Still this is what things are now.
Btw. People using Linux should remember that just because " it's free" doesn't mean it don't cost money and resources to keep going. So:
DO YOUR PART AND DONATE TO YOUR DISTRO DEVELOPERS.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/donate
The reports don't have to be irrelevant slop to be overwhelming.
indeed! The open source community should adopt LLM powered mailing list filters. Basically new age version of "protection money" as you pay AI firms to stop other AI firms from drowning your organization.
Joking aside, the dead Internet theory is unfortunately looking pretty accurate.
LLM powered mailing list filters.
Deep Seek and other locally hosted options should be up to this task...
To be fair, there's no difference between a ai junk report and a human junk report. Literally not a single difference.
The problem is ai junk reports are easier to make and thus there's more of them.
This EXACT same problem could have existed at any point in the past, and it's been a problem in the past to a lesser degree.
No one ever bothered to fix it cause it resolved it self by virtue of people being lazy. Now the barrier is low enough that the problem they should have fixed two+ decades ago is biting them in the fucking ass.
This isn't ai's fault. Its entirely on developers fault as a whole. No one has ever figured out a way to deal with massive amounts of spam reliably. Because the solution has ALWAYS been to just ignore it till it goes away.
So now the devs of basically every community not just the Linux world. Has to figure out how to fix a decades old problem because their only solution has stopped working.
So while I agree it's annoying that ai slop is being spammed to devs, and that the people doing it are fucking annoying twats. Its not their fault this is a problem. They are THE problem, they are not the cause or reason it IS a problem tho.
This is something I don't think people are internalizing about (agentic) AI. Its disruption doesn't stem from its "intelligence", but in its persistence. We are very rapidly approaching an era of infinite agency, but our entire society is designed around people having limited agency. Everything assumes that a vast majority of people won't bother to use their agency. Sending complaints to local government agencies, waiting in line for concert tickets, starting an online business, submitting pull requests, etc.; they all assume most people won't bother; they'll choose to use their limited agency on something else. Agentic AI will blow that all up; you'll be able to point the AI at a goal on your behalf and not think about it again.
AI slop will hypothetically vanish as AI improves, but that doesn't do anything to address the fact that we'll all have effectively infinite agency.
they all assume most people won’t bother
There's a sort of built-in compensation for "response rates" or "perception rates" - in my industry we trend customer complaints and act according to the data we receive, but we also know that for every complaint we receive there are typically 30 similar events that go unreported. We also know that certain "responders" are outliers and will report every single instance they experience (and sometimes embellish and create additional instances for dramatic effect) but these are exceedingly rare and usually "adjusted" to normal responder levels once identified.
Now, when people create AI agents to file the complaints for them... that's a new level of response rates. 25 years ago I came close to doing this for airport flyover noise complaints - our local (international) airport had an obscure portal for local residents to complain when they were bothered by jet flyovers - and our neighborhood would get dozens of events per month where the noise was so loud you couldn't hear the other side of a phone call INSIDE your house with the windows shut. Thousands of homes were impacted by this, often 4 or 5 times in a row within an hour or two. But, the complaint channel was so obscure and the reporting process inconvenient enough that very few complaints were recorded, and they loved to point out that 40% of their complaints came from a single resident. Smart phones weren't a widespread thing yet, if they were I would have "made an app for that" where anytime you were "impacted" by a jet flyover all you would have to do is pull out your phone and tap the app to file a report. (I considered developing it for Palm Pilot, but I doubt even 10 residents would have carried Palm Pilots for the purpose of filing reports...) If we got a couple hundred residents across the neighborhood reporting even 10% of the troublesome flyovers, we might have changed the conversation - as it was the airport used the lack of complaints to justify no change in flight patterns.
We had a good idea early on for email spam, but we didn't use it. There was a proposal for basically proof of work, sort of like what's used in cryptocurrency, as a requirement to accept an email. While the threshold to defeat a lot of spam was low enough to not bother the average individual sending mail, businesses hated it because it would make it more expensive to bulk mail their users. Every time I see the thousands of bullshit emails in my inbox, I'm reminded that we endure spam to protect that.
I'm reading this as: we endure spam to protect spam
I'm just imagining a bunch of sweaties telling people they work for Linux as a cybersec expert, burning through $300 of tokens a day.
For which they haven't yet paid a single penny, because AI corpos need people to get addicted to their products.
This ai shit is fucking everything up for everyone.
I hate it with a passion.
When decade after decade the general solution to low effort spam bug reports was mostly just ignore it till it goes away cause people are lazy. Its not surprising it's suddenly a massive problem when the barrier to entry to make a bug report dropped though the floor.
No one has ever bothered to figure out a proper solution to the problem. So kicking the can down the road is biting everyone in the ass at the same time.
Over the last 20 years every time iv seen devs bitch about spam bug reports iv always wondered why no one ever tries to find a long term reliable method to dealing with it. At best you see token efforts. Kinda funny to be honest.
Why does everyone always use the old photos of chubby Linus?
Because they have to nerf him somehow, can't just have worlds sexiest kernel developer getting everyone soaking wet all the time.
He looks so friendly and approachable in that picture
kinda like an anglerfish in that you are lured into a false sense of security which makes the straight to the jugular scathing responses even more effective.
Naaahhh, he's not like that... I never met him but he can't be like that; I mean look at him.
He's getting older. Maybe they just want a younger shot.
Middle of last year:
Damn, I had no clue he looks like that now. He could be a captain on Starship Enterprise.
He needs an AI to fight the other AI
