8mo ago

Censorship is getting out of hand

102 comments

Tangentially related rant: We had a new contributor open up a pull request today and I gave their changes an initial look to make sure no malicious code is included.
I couldn't see anything wrong with it. The PR was certainly a bit short, but the task they tackled was pretty much a matter of either it works or it doesn't. And I figured, if they open a PR, they'll have a working solution.
...well, I tell the CI/CD runner to get going and it immediately runs into a compile error. Not an exotic compile error, the person who submitted the PR had never even tried to compile it.
Then it dawned on me. They had included a link to a GitHub Copilot workspace, supposedly just for context.
In reality, they had asked the dumbass LLM to do the change described in the ticket and figured, it would produce a working PR right off the bat. No need to even check it, just let the maintainer do the validation.
In an attempt to give them constructive feedback, I tried to figure out, if this GitHub Copilot workspace thingamabob had a Compile-button that they just forgot to click, so I actually watched Microsoft's ad video for it.
And sure enough, I saw right then and there, who really was at fault for this abomination of a PR.
The ad showed exactly that. Just chat a bit with the LLM and then directly create a PR. Which, yes, there is a theoretical chance of this possibly making sense, like when rewording the documentation. But for any actual code changes? Fuck no.
So, most sincerely: Fuck you, Microsoft.
- Surely you have to blame the idiot human here who actually has the ability to reason (in theory)
  
  You think the decision to build this bot like that was not made by a human? Its idiot humans all the way down.
  
  Well, for reasons, I happen to know that this person is a student, who has effectively no experience dealing with real-world codebases.
  It's possible that the LLM produced good results for the small codebases and well-known exercises that they had to deal with so far.
  I'm also guessing, they're learning what a PR is for the first time just now. And then being taught by Microsoft that you can just fire off PRs without a care in the world, like, yeah, how should they know any better?
  
  ultimately the people responsible are the ones giving people tools that can be misused, you don't hand a gun to a child.
- Commit with Co-authored-by: Copilot
  or maybe better --author=Copilot
  It would certainly help evaluate submissions to have that context

We will never solve the Scunthorpe Problem.
- It's a clbuttic
  
  Truly in a clbottom of its own
- Hasn't it been proven unsolvable?
  
  Impossible. There is always some mf named like cum-sock, smh
  
  Proven? I don't think so. I don't think there's a way to devise a formal proof around it. But there's a lot of evidence that, even if it's technically solvable, we're nowhere close.
- there's a very trivial solution that always works actually, it's called "stop being a prude"
- I mean, you could just use a vaguely smarter filter. A tiny "L"LM might have different problems, but not this one.
  
  So a TLM?
  
  Indeed; it definitely would show some promise. At that point, you'd run into the problem of needing to continually update its weighting and models to account for evolving language, but that's probably not a completely unsolvable problem.
  So maybe "never" is an exaggeration. As currently expressed, though, I think I can probably stand by my assertion.
- Scunthorpe Problem
  If only one could buttassinate censorship...
  
  Don't you mean buttbuttinate?
- It causes so much dawizard.

I had a Pycharm linter with "inconsiderate writing list" flag my use of "bi" as inappropriate, recommending to use "bisexual" instead. In my data job, BI, means business intelligence, it's everywhere.
- Gotta love Microsoft Power Bisexual
  
  I now identify as a Power Bisexual.
- How is that inconsiderate? That's just informal
  (Using "bi" to mean "bisexual", I mean, not "business intelligence" lol)
  
  No, it's right.
  Business intelligence is inconsiderate and must be stopped!
  
  I think it's probably because it is informal or maybe ambiguous.
- I'm confused how bi is inappropriate
- Huh, I’ve only heard business logic before.
  
  Business intelligence is in the context of analytics. It means something very different from "business logic", in case you're thinking they're synonyms...
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence

Holy shit, 10,000 commits because each change was individual (I'm assuming automated).
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/29798
- Those commit messages though 🤣
  
  They automated randomization of the commit messages? Wtf?
- oh god
  
  yeah, no. haha
- And they're all with different commit message:
  "switched arse to bottom to create a more uplifting vibe"
  "took arse out and put bottom in to keep my language warm and friendly"
  "thought bottom would sound a lot nicer than arse, so I used it"
  And so on..
- lol😁
- wtf it was real?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- The problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL's profanity filter prevented residents of the town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England, from creating accounts with AOL, because the town's name contains the substring "cunt".
  haha

It’s a clbuttic mistake.

I've been tempted to create a bot that does nothing but search comments in code for misspelled words and create pull requests for them.
If it stays in comments, little chance in breaking a working codebase and I'd have an insane amount of commits and contributions to a wide variety of codebases for my resume.
I'll never be a top tier coder. But I might make management.
- In case that wasn’t satire, please don’t 🥲 A small typo in a comment is not a big issue, and even if the PR is straightforward, a maintainer still has to take some time reviewing it, which takes time away from fixing actual bugs 😢
  
  But think of the gains!
  
  Simple changes require only simple reviews.
- A better use of your time is to improve documentation. Developers generally hate documentation so it's often in need of improvement. Rewrite confusing sentences. Add tutorials that are missing. Things like that. You don't necessarily have to be a good developer or even understand the code of the project; you just have to have some knowledge of the project as an end user.
- I have nominated you to the who's who in america award

I am in doubt. That wouldn't even compile. But who am I to think somebody changing something like this would actually do a test compilation afterwards....
- HTML isn't compiled, and unknown attributes are allowed. The best practice is to prefix non-standard attributes with data- (e.g. <div data-foo="test">) but nothing enforces that. Custom attributes can be retrieved in JavaScript or targeted in CSS rules.

clbottomt when the chtopt shows up [imagine this as that popular GIF meme]

It's time for chbottomt and clbottom to finally become valid HTML statements.
- Or just have some random subset of browsers support them for some reason and other browsers not so much. It’s the html way.

What is a 'charset' in this depraved persons mind? A corset? Must be a mighty kinky corset.
- It's replacing all instances of arse and ass with bottom...but doing so in about the most naïve way possible.
  
  Aah yeah, thanks!
  
  Someone needs to learn regular expressions.
- It's got an arse in there

Fucking Scunthorpes!

OMG this took me way too long to get. They replace the substring "ass" 😭😭
- and "arse", as seen in charset

Ok, how is "charset" vulgar?
Edit: got it; arse
- got it; arse
  It would certainly be an issue if you didn't have one

The ol' master/ slave configuration again....
- those are terms, this is substrings within words
  I haven't seen branches or variables being called arse
  Then again, I do like to catch exceptions as up so I can throw up
- At least for that we have replacement names that make sense (like primary and secondary or replica).

Luckily the feck attribute is too obscure to be in the line of fire.

Thank you so much I so desperately needed that chuckle right now

I have a friend that works at Salesforce, he told me that they made him change the name of some classes that used the term Blacklist because of inclusivity
- My previous workplace did the same thing around 2020 with the words whitelist and blacklist and some other words.
  It was around the same time when there was news about GitHub moving from master to main/mainline as the default Git branch.
- This kind of thing is infuriating. Especially when the actual etymology of "blacklist" is a 17th century play where a list of nobles scheming against the British monarchy is described as a blacklist.
  
  But the word black is used so clearly it's racist, right? How can we be woke if we don't randomly ban words because of their alternate meanings?

Must be a TikTok influencer

anal-ytics
- holytics

The wke agenda ...
- weke? It's the Internet, you can say weke
  
  they mean the wake agenda, all these boats disturbing the water's surface are going to bring an end to society
  
  Thanks that you allowe it but I'm not so sure about the mds

Wow they really went into their stupid useless plan in the most ham-fisted way

When you give the task to an intern-to-be.

“censorship” yeah no

102 comments