> I thought it would be a good idea to do the core structure for the new test suite in public on master first though given all the rage that has generated maybe that was a bad idea.

I don't entirely understand what this is saying. People wouldn't have been outraged if only the tests had been updated and/or he pushed solely on master - but he pushed breaking changes onto the release branch(es) too. Breaking workflows that have worked for years is a prime way to get people irate, and then seeing "Claude" in the commits just pours gasoline onto the fire.

It seems that wasn't the Claude part, though I haven't seen a full analysis of exactly what broke. I also only saw one report: are there multiple, or do you just perceive that?

Rsync has many options: I can totally believe that fixing a bug in one place broke someone's usage, to be fair.

"yes, there were regressions in some use cases of rsync in the 3.4.3 release. I quite deliberately tried to err on the side of fixing security issues for that release, and there were some valid (but unusual) use cases that got caught up in the changes"

This should be the top comment.

I think it's pretty sad that he even had to write it. Quite a lot of judgement from people who aren't paying his bills.

Yeah a big reason you see so much pushback on clanker slop is that it's having (and there was certainly the expectation of it having) a negative impact on the ability of plenty of people to pay their bills.

Nice to know we've got slurs for LLMs and their users now. Very nice.

It's not a slur, clankers ain't people.

If corporations can be people, there is no reason why AI can't be considered a person.

Nobody human considers a corporation to be a person. It is merely a legal expedient.

I used to think that until I did a little digging into it. Specifically, corporations are considered legal persons because they are separate legal entities, thereby creating a wall between your personal affairs and your business. It protects your personal assets from any liabilities, debts, or lawsuits.

Also, since it's a separate entity, its lifetime is not tied to the owner. So if the owner dies, their shares are inherited by somebody else, and the company keeps operating.

It helps in raising money for business operations. A corporation raises capital by issuing and selling shares of stock. However, if a physical person did that, I think it would be called indentured servitude.

I'm confused about why you believe this contrasts with what the above poster said. You've described a bunch of practical reasons why this is legally expedient and also at least one that seems to contrast with your own concept of personhood

Yes, it does conflict with my own concept of personhood. I forgot to add that to my comment.

I was trying to show that it is not "merely a legal expedient", that corporate personhood had a specific purpose, and that it differed from a real person. I think that the confusion about legal personhood in corporations comes from how lawyers explain its existence. A couple of lawyers I've had explained it as, it's just like a person in the law, except where it's different.

The problem is that we haven't created a clear enough distinction between a natural person and a legal person. In many cases, corporations have rights but not the responsibility. For example, they have speech rights, but they don't go to jail when the corporation commits a crime. The judicial inequalities between ordinary people and rich people are even greater between natural persons and corporations.

It takes something far more hollow and soulless even than a clanker to type a thing like this.

Beep boop. It comes from recognizing that, yet again, humans are way too full of themselves and are not as unique as they think they are.

Corporations are aggregations of people.

Are AIs?

A corporation is a separate entity. They hire people to work for them, but any liabilities incurred by the Corporation are rarely passed through to the workers. If you pay attention, it's more likely for a worker to go to jail or be held responsible for a screw-up by the legal system than one of the suits at the top.

also people calling all AI is shite, might not have used top tier models. They put $20, tried Sonnet, got sloppy code and called it a day.

The title at least sounds less like judgement and more analysis and more about AI assistance (and claude in particular) than rsync. Maybe I am too used to postmortems!

I think they're talking about the whole twitter and github issue things.

I get that there's a lot of loud nonsense flying around about AI, both positive and negative, and I echo the sentiment that people should have some damn perspective when talking to FOSS maintainers, but I think writing a bunch of AI-assisted code that causes regressions and then responding to that by throwing out a strawman about how critics (with PhDs no less!) are telling him these things can't do anything at all and can't possibly understand how literally everything has fundamentally changed in the last few months sounds way more like a guy who has a motivated (and understandable - he's retired ffs) reason to... a little bit buy into the hype

I think he makes a lot of good points here, but also think that kind of statement is unlikely to assuage the real concerns of people using the software. I think people are more likely to fork rsync now rather than rely on a more diverged earlier alternative implementation though

I think that's an extremely well done response on his part.

> Now if any of the people posting the rage stuff want to actually review any of the code I’ve published and make constructive criticisms then that would be great!

When you quickly churn more lines of code in a few days than you changed in months, and then release them as a normal, not sure you're expecting "constructive criticism"

Also if I suspect the project is just slopping high amount of code without proper thought, I probably won't invest my time into reading those changes