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this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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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.
OSS maintenance is a thankless job for the most part and the reaction in this thread proves the point.
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.
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.
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 harder🙄
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.
Yes what a reasonable comparison to make. Being held captive and made to labor against your will, with no rights of your own, is literally the same as choosing to use free tools which were developed in a way that doesn't 100% align with your preferences.
Totally normal thing that totally normal people will say.
Being provocative always pulls people who don't understand comparisons out of the woodwork.
You know you can compare apples and oranges, right? Both are fruit. Neither are root vegetables. Look, we're learning things.
Yadi yada so you're an entitled bully but also an ignorant asshole what a lovely person. You should probably go back to 4chan where your kind belongs.
I think you just don't like the idea that using AI says anything about you as a person. It does though. It tells me where you're willing to compromise.
I think like all bullies you like to dominate and degrade, then you pin fictional ideals on it to make it feel like you're doing good.
This would be absolutely scathing if I wasn't correct that you don't want to do anything about AI.
See that's the psychotic part right here. "Nice try making me feel bad about cyber-bullying a volunteer, when really you're the bad guy for not hating some computer program enough". You have to realize how silly this sounds.
Feel bad? Not at all.
See, unlike you, I fully own my positions. Andrew Tridgell should, and I mean this, I love seeing people improve, stop using this demon technology created by vampires to suck the life out good natured folk. And if he doesn't, I will stop associating with him, because he's siding with vampires. Simple as.
From your perspective this would seem horribly evil because you also side with vampires. I don't care that you think this.
Your position is that you looove AI and sucking vampire dick, but you won't say that because you know it's harder to defend here on the, let me check... right, the FuckAI board.
Just be honest, man. You don't want to do anything about AI. You are a pro AI individual. Shouldn't that be easy? I don't shy away from my own beliefs.
Don't they all haha. I was under no illusion that you would suddenly start feeling empathy.
Apocalyptic religious sentiment doesn't work on me. You forgot to mention that this technology was also created by Ialdabaoth, Cthulhu, Lord Voldemort and the ghost of Genghis Khan.
That's a wild extrapolation. What makes you think i would find it evil to refuse to use a piece of software ? Or to disassociate with someone for any reason whatsoever ? What does that have to do with my position that we shouldn't dogpile on open source maintainers who have been begging for help for ~~years~~ decades and, when nobody stepped up, started using AI to feel the gap ?
To tell you the truth i've been contributing to those "Ai-free software" lists because i think informed choice is awesome and is at the heart of the open source community. In my ideal world people would have all the information to make choices that align with their values. Notice that i never said people should be free to gang up and harass some poor sap whose only crime is to have thanklessly made their lives easier for 30 years.
Thanks for the homophobic drive-by, real classy. What a nice piece of character development. Can't say i'm surprised.
I don't see how that is relevant to my position on cyber bullying. I don't shy away from my own beliefs including on circlejerk communities such as this one, and my comment history is ample proof of that. Yeah I like AI how cool is that ? I've said it left and right on this godforsaken website, what makes you think i wouldn't dare say the words ? I like AI, i love open source, i hate US tech and hope their CEOs meet a fiery end. I hate that in the current political climate, psychopaths are empowered to proudly display their penchant for violence and domination while still claiming they have the moral high ground. You guys have won, everywhere, you are the most prolific ideological faction in the modern world, what more do you want ?
And yeah i know i'm screaming into the void. You don't ever doubt yourself, you think AI is an apocalyptic religious threat, you think anyone who doesn't share all of your values is in league with demonic entities (in a weirdly homoerotic way for some reason), and anything you do to your perceived enemies is fair game. Everybody understands what you are.
I should have been more clear. To disassociate in this case means to excommunicate from the industry. He's behaving like a scab, so I think it's only fair.
Why does he need this speed, exactly?
Thank you. You realize that this is a vector by which we excommunicate bad actors, right?
The point of talking, "harassing" as you say, to Andrew Tridgell about this directly is that I don't want him to be excommunicated. I want him to see the light of humanity. I don't want rsync to be thrown in with the wolves.
Because you weren't, and that's exactly the thing I'm critical of. If you were anti AI, you wouldn't be here... doing what you're doing.
Not disclosing this to the crowd I think is a bit dishonest. So for that, I offer you congratulations. I do appreciate it.
Doesn't this seem a bit hypocritical of you? You can see where a bit of antipathy is useful in one case but not in this other one with Tridgell?
I don't want him to meet a fiery end, I just want him to stop siding with vampires.
Absolute facts. So true.
xD
Listen, I have sucked dick, I would never suck vampire dick. It's gotta be soo dry.
No. Tridgell is just some dude who's been writing code to the benefit of everyone for 30 years. A literal ally, hailing back from more idealistic times, and a part of the movement that gave us the language and means to fight technological hegemony in all its forms. Tech CEOs can eat my shit all they do is build closed gardens and use lawfare to protect them.
Making non-technical github issues to insult a maintainer and demand they take certain actions is not talking. Circulating links to those issues on /c/fuck_ai so people pile up with demeaning walls of text and hundreds of emoji reactions is harassing. There are more people parading their contempt for him in those threads, than the total number of people who contributed tickets or code to the project in 30 years. I can't stop thinking about that, it's so fucking cruel. No help, no thank you, just contempt the minute you displease your masters.
Minimizing the harm done is exactly what bullies do. "I didn't do it but if i did it then it wasn't that bad" yeah i know the lyrics too.
No you just want
rsyncto remain available to you free of charge, while being maintained in a way that perfectly suits your ideals, without it costing you a dollar or even a minute of effort.Because you're not helping him. Because he's been calling for help which isn't coming, and he's starting to burnout but the software he created is now load bearing and the responsibility is enormous. Also because LLMs are getting semi-good at finding vulnerabilities so anybody with 500$ of tokens can find critical bugs in virtually any software, which they have, which is why this release that is being shat on closes 6 CVEs that may otherwise have taken months to address.
And now instead of pitching in with repro tickets and code to help fix the issues introduced by this version, people are calling to spite-fork the whole thing and revert it to a pre-slop commit. As if the community which didn't help when the project was "pure" would now magically find the time and energy to maintain it long term.
Yeah, but this is the problem. You understand strong political fervor in cases you agree with, but you refuse to in any other. Zos, I really, really dislike AI. It should not be surprising to you that I also dislike its users.
You brought up homophobia as something you dislike earlier. If Tridgell had instead gone on some f-slur, f-slur, f-slur bender with his Medium account, don't you think that this "oh, but he's an uwu smol bean volunteer" thing wouldn't really fly? If he had said he said those slurs because he was upset that no one was helping him, would that really be enough for you? Just a pat on the back and a "yeah, everyone goes on a homophobic rant every now and again."
1, I took a look and I mostly see people being annoying more than rude.
2, the nature of protest is to be uncomfortable. Sticking forks into the gears of the machine is par for the course. This is, like... centuries old knowledge.
He's welcome to start charging. I would prefer that over what he's doing now.
This is not actually an answer.
If things were acceptably moving at a "snail's pace" before AI, what has changed? It's load bearing? It was already, but also, that's exactly why he shouldn't be using AI.
I have to reiterate, it is really obvious that your contention here is only with punishing people for their bad behavior. Because you are pro AI. On the FuckAI board. Is this like a masochist thing? Like, what are you doing here?
It sure doesn't make Sam Altman uncomfortable. It just sends the message that open source contributors are at our service and they better behave exactly the way we want or they get the paddle. We will continue not helping them, but we will also actively attack them if they displease us.
Surely that will not encourage grey beards to finally retire in peace, and discourage new maintainers from stepping up.
As i said, what has changed is that AI can now find security issues and all major projects are hit by a flurry of legitimate security flaws. These affect all deployed instances of rsync, so basically most of the world's tech infrastructure. Leaving those gaping holes open is much more detrimental to the common good than fixing them. And that goes even if the fixes are not perfect and break marginal existing use cases.
I'm here cause i don't mind being disagreed with, in fact i need to be disagreed with if i don't want to fall into a fact-starved self-selected cognitive bubble. I'm also active on LinkedIn punching libertarian hustlers in the dick when they need it. You gotta make sure some asshole you disagree with isn't accidentally making a great point you have failed to identify.
I'm not against AI but i'm also not "pro AI", any more than i am pro mouse or pro keyboard. But i am definitely against bullying our few remaining open source contributors.
Well, this one's about Andrew Tridgell, so that would make sense.
Do you... not even realize that you are demanding work from him? The thing you are accusing me of doing.
If you need these security fixes so badly, shouldn't you be paying him? Or making your own contributions? The merge request form is right there, man, why are you just sitting here on your self-entitled ass.
Yeah, if he wants to. I'm not saying this to be spiteful, like "yeah! he should step down!" I mean, genuinely, it sounds like he wants to go sailing, he should do that. That sounds fun.
You have a whole John Galt attitude about this retiring thing, it's weird.
You are. You are doing that thing that centrists do where they're "not against gay people" but they do mind when "people get uppity with the cops" which means you are pro AI. White people pretending that reconstruction in the US wasn't their problem—the list goes on and on.
I don't know why you're insisting on this anyway; you've already said you like AI.
my guess would be low executive function and a smidge of autism
C'mon, you don't have to be mean to yourself.
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.
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.
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.
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.