The last time I saw a news article about this it was talking about how many Airbnb kitchens in SF had been wrecked by teams running field tests for robots doing dishes. Excited to hear about the damage actual plumbing jobs would cause.
Reading up on some of these systems is wild. For example THAAD munitions are wildly expensive, but also a ballistic projectile that physically knocks hypersonic missiles out of the air in flight 200km away. Ultimately $13 million seems reasonable to save a few city blocks in a major city. It just doesn't make sense to use against small arms like disposable drones.
$13 million to save a few city blocks is good. But it won’t be $13 million. You station an interceptor, and attack is so much cheaper, so they’ll add a second attacker. Now it’s $26 million to save those blocks. Still a good deal. Except now they’ll send three missiles. Extrapolate until one of you is unwilling or unable to spend more. (And this isn’t even getting into interception success rates or the fact that an attacker can attack anywhere but a defender needs to defend everywhere, both of which make it worse than one interceptor to shoot down one missile.) Hence this equation only works out for the defender if the attacker is much less willing or able to spend. It works pretty well for Israel versus militants, or for US versus North Korea. It starts to break down a bit when the adversary is even as capable as Iran, let alone anything like a peer.
Theoretically, assuming you get the supply chain optimized - this would be the biggest challenge, as US manufacturing has taken a nosedive after decades of being out-competed by lower-wage countries (and free capitalism being more than happy to save costs by moving production to said countries)
US manufacturing is bigger than ever. However it is concentrated in highly automated areas, and high value add. The share of labor in manufacturing has taken a nosedive. The manufacturing is still here though.
Eh, maybe. But even if you’re right, would anything short of an existential threat to US soil result in that capacity being re-tooled to make armaments?
I think the spectrum between where we are now and “existentially threatened wartime economy” is nonlinear: if there’s not an existential threat, but there is instead a popular foreign war (e.g. post 9/11), the fraction of defense economic capacity that gets unlocked is very small—still pretty close to what we have now. Which is a lot, but it’s far from efficient.
It seems like the better strategy is to not be worth bombing to begin with. It can be extremely expensive to act like israel on the global stage and I strongly recommend we don't do that any more than we already are. Americans are pretty notorious at encouraging and being unwilling to avoid blowback and avoiding all sense, and this seems trivially avoidable by not using our military to perpetrate evil. For the eighth fucking decade in a row.
You'll get downvoted for this because the US believes it is in the right.
The US sees itself as a "policeman" not a "gangster", they are out to save the world, not conquer it.
And yet, the line between the two is very blurry. Kuwait was justified, Iraq contrived. Afghanistan meaningless. Iran is a solution looking for a problem (nooo they can't have nuclear weapons, but who trashed JPOA?)
The 20th century was no better. The righteous of WW2 allows any excess, Vietnam being a poster child.
For the US to change they first need to accept they are the bad guy. And that's a very difficult thing to accept. The shiny uniform for example is what the good guy wears.
But in the end the gangster and police can be hard to tell apart.
Even in the past, US was more of a gangster supporting its gang rather than a fair hearted policeman. Its support to Pakistan during Bangladesh (East Pakistan) genocide is well known.
Or the Indonesian genocide. Or giving Pol Pot diplomatic cover as soon as they saw him as an enemy to Vietnam. Or couping essentially every country in Latin America.
The "policeman" narrative has always been propaganda.
The key point is not what they have done (too many examples of bad behavior to list.)
The key point is how they see themselves. The average American sees the US as "the good guys". This is not a self-image lightly over-turned. Regardless of how the rest of the world views them.
This is subjective, but I think this image wasn't uncommon in US-aligned countries either, but at least this seems to have changed in the last decade or so.
Anyway the part that makes the us unique is pretending to be ethical, which makes a farce of the entire concept of ethics. Admitting the entire concept of america is based on justification via violence would be a massive step forward
The job of the hegemon is to maintain the status quo, proper order. Hegemony, the maritime order, global currency (US dollar), and forever war are inseparable. The cliché "if you want peace, prepare for war." Some low-level, mostly contained, amount of violence is the price for a larger "peace".
Post WWII, the USA did not engage in total war or seek unconditional surrender. Because breaking the equilibrium wrecks hegemony. As demonstrated by GWB's ill-advised conquest of Iraq, which (IMHO) was the deflection point for Pax Americana.
The notion of just war and world cop is mythmaking, rationalization. So the citizens will keep subsidizing the hegemony. (h/t Niall Ferguson) Any notions of justice, human rights, and whatnot were savvy marketing, born of (PR) competition with other hegemons.
As bad as Pax American hegemony has been for all participants, I'm certain we'll look back with nostalgia. In that "What has Rome ever done for us?!" sort of way. The ~70 years of (relative) peace was kind of incredible.
The emerging multi-polar world (and poly-crisis) is more chaotic, violent, and terrible. And will prove ever more so over time.
I let them install the free ISP router a year back when they installed fiber in the neighborhood. I assumed I would swap it out the next day, but I haven't had any issues like back in the day. I love shopping for a nice router as much as the next tech nerd, but decent drop-in home networking seems to be pretty commodity now days.
We do a run of 250 similar badges for a non-tech convention every year. ~$10 per badge is about right all in. We've also done runs without ICs (just LEDs, a switch, and button cell battery) for about ~$4 some years.
That's awesome! I'm really happy to see non-tech conventions running badges. It's so cool that with today's technology you truly can "just make things".
Agreed that's the best policy for the real contributors, but how do you fight back against the folks using your reviewer's good nature to test their coding agents?
Also, Linus is also comfortable closing 100 PRs as "this looks like garbage". Many communities are softer and try to be more helpful with new contributors.
Yeah, fair point. I laughed out loud when I read this part:
> Also, Linus is also comfortable closing 100 PRs as "this looks like garbage".
Probably, as LLMs get much, much better, most open source projects will be overwhelmed with submissions. I guess this is a good problem to have. Some projects will scale (more maintainers/reviews); others will become more harsh.
At Plotly we are dealing with similar issues. We're doing our best to keep up, but it's genuinely hard not to just cut our losses on passer-by community contributions. 3 page issue writeups nobody has proofread, nobody but a bot to follow up with when we try, huge volume of plausible but weak PRs eating up reviewer time. All while we have core work we really want to be focused on rather than merging another bug fix we don't expect anyone but this bot has really run into.
This has basically been the story for us at Hatchet too, and it’s been similarly challenging. A lot of the OSS PR reviews I’ve done lately from non-core contributors are basically just me going back and forth with Claude via someone else, which is frustrating when I feel like I could 1) just not or 2) do the back and forth with Claude myself and cut out the middle man.
I have a sneaking suspicion that people are having some agent check out 500 repos and just prompting with “find a bug in this repo and fix it” and submitting the results blindly.
> I have a sneaking suspicion that people are having some agent check out 500 repos and just prompting with “find a bug in this repo and fix it” and submitting the results blindly.
From the reports coming from a number of places, I'm absolutely sure this is what is happening. People want the glory of finding a named bug, perhaps they believe some more widely useful reputation gain is heading their way if something that their bot finds is actually massively significant. Though it isn't limited to 500 repos, they tell it to just keep going after every one it scans.
>I have a sneaking suspicion that people are having some agent check out 500 repos and just prompting with “find a bug in this repo and fix it” and submitting the results blindly.
This is unironically suggested as a way to 'get in the door' both in bootcamps and 'spammy' universities.
Well, contributing to FOSS is a prestige accomplishment. It's viewed as a way in. It's now just a metric to game, and to automate that process is too easy.
Combine this with a growing sense of being "left behind" and a highly publicized collapse in software jobs coming any day now and any proof of contribution is highly prized. So why not?
They'll destroy the prestige of it by doing this, though. Unfortunately the OSS model will have to change to cut them off now, and the more people rush it the faster that response will happen.
On the contrary, the prestige will go up - filtering mechanisms, fatigue, and general banning of AI contributions will make it harder to get a PR accepted. If you make it past all that, you are a real one now.
I've seen this with godot. People are letting their agents blindly file AI generated PRs even though Godot specifically bans this, and then coming in and giving a very weak apology when they get called out by the devs. A lot of the bugs are incredibly low priority bugs as well that no reasonable person would ever really run into, with these huge long wordy slop reports
Its kind of appalling that people think this is an acceptable way to behave
We disabled PRs for PgDog, but left the issues open, for now.
Most bugs that are reported via AI-generated GitHub issues are edge cases, which are technically bugs, but not something anyone actually ran into.
Contributions are exclusively AI-generated, and it's much easier to just go off of a GitHub issue myself than asking the bot behind the GH account to remove the 5 redundant tests it added, or to refactor what has become a 3k line file.
AI doesn't care about code quality, maintenability, or long term goals. It's just a local maximum optimized with RL. Great for debugging, OK for reviews, but can't produce anything that's above average.
This is pretty spot on. AI will find some off the ball edge case that is a valid edge case but perhaps an undefined expectation of the code. Avoiding the additional complexity of handling it keep everything more grokable and clean.
Sadly, people seem to think all these edges AI finds are valid and must be fix and were never thought about. Most were thought about and deemed not worth the additional 50 if statements to handle. Cyclomatic complexity has exploded exponentially with AI and everyones response is “no no no you just need to use opus 6.5 and it will work”
Yeah I sympathize with this, but I’ve experienced the other side of this: I ran into a bug (an integration for home assistant has to be manually kicked every time HA restarts due to a bug in the integration) that my AI fixed with a one-liner. It works great for me. I submitted a PR which is languishing for weeks. No problem. My AI will just maintain a personal fork with my patch until my PR gets merged (or not). Previously it was way too much work maintaining your own fork, merging in upstream changes, and keeping your patch working.
I think this is going to be a common outcome from the fact that many people have AI agents that can one-shot fix and deploy. Maybe it’s not a bad thing for those people and the maintainers who each get what they want.
I feel this is something of a temporary and unstable equilibrium. Once the maintainers figure out how to harness agents more effectively, they can just have a daily bot job to poll all the forks and pull back stuff that looks good. We just don’t quite have the tooling and practices to scale the contributor side effectively.
I think OSS is going to look more like the original Git model, or perhaps even further towards “horizontal gene transfer” where memes/alleles get copied across various repos, rather than having a single lineage of phenotypes.
I would be interested if a common outcome was to have a fork with AI PRs and one with AI contributions disabled. Not only does it satisfy both camps, but it provides a longterm anecdote of the effects of agentic code quality and maintainability.
Yeah. I did almost the same with KDE Spectacle. It lacks good shortcut keys for annotations. I've just asked AI to add them. Sent a manually reviewed TINY patch to maintainers, never heard back.
The linux kernel team set something up that they are pretty happy with. I don't know the details, but they have dealt with the influx and feel comfortable their solution will last.
One thing I've been thinking is something like the DCO checks. Set up some account bridge between (eg.) Discord and GitHub, then auto close anything submitted by accounts not sufficiently involved with a message linking to the new contributor policy and rationale.
Low quality PRs, along sometimes with concerns of providence that might cause future licensing issues, were a problem before the Eternal LLM September made it easy for far less capable (or caring) people to submit them than before. This is at least part of why a number of projects switched to being “open source but not open contribution”.
I’m a little perplexed though. The problem as stated is there’s too many drive-by contributions with AI slop. Isn’t the solution to define a contributor network (eg a GitHub org that you can apply to) based on trust?
The other option they proposed was a proof-of-humanity by payment, which seems much more in line with the above.
The problem with just banning AI is you didn’t solve trust, and your untrusted users are just going to drop drive-by PRs anyway. How do you know if an untrusted user did or did not use AI? In practice this likely means just aggressively closing “slop-looking” PRs from users you don’t recognize?
But then, you’re preventing your trusted community members from benefiting from AI assistance.
I’ve been advocating for defining a higher standard for AI contributors, eg an AGENTS.md that specifies some meaningful correctness bar. In this case, perhaps the PR that adds you to CONTRIBUTORS.md could to add a large novel and non-trivial end-to-end test; if you can construct problems that are easy to verify but hard to get right, then this is your “proof of work” to establish competence.
From reading the GH issue it does seem this is a placeholder solution, so I hope they find a more stable long-term resolution.
> Isn’t the solution to define a contributor network (eg a GitHub org that you can apply to) based on trust?
Yes but this is fairly tedious people work that most open source maintainers are not interested in. Once the tooling is available to make that easy, it will become more popular.
I was ok with the AI writing until I got to the fact that they added Triggers in 2.0 and the article decided that was meh compared to optimizing workers for S3 file access on slow connections. Nope. I'll read the release notes myself.
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