ELSEWHERE

The guy whose job is to report on the rake-stepping machine uses the rake-stepping machine in his reporting and steps on a rake

Genuinely the one thing that actually surprises and concerns me about all this -- because as mentioned, of course this happened -- is that neither of the writers on the article reached out to the subject for comment. Like why????

Also the moderator for the github, to jump way back to the inciting incident of all of this, rejected the LLM's PR request because they (the entire team for that github whatever) reserve trivial bugfixes like the one the LLM attempted to do for humans who need practice and experience working on easy, entry-level code and I really, really appreciate that they do that. One of my biggest worries about all this LLM shit is how people are supposed to get that kind of experience and learn to do more complicated things if entry-level projects don't exist anymore. You have to learn the basics to learn how to do the more complicated stuff but learning the basics is now 'just get an LLM to do it for you'.

Beyond matplotlib’s general policy to require a human in the loop for new code contributions in the interest of reducing volunteer maintainer burden, this “good-first-issue” was specifically created and curated to give early programmers an easy way to onboard into the project and community. I discovered this particular performance enhancement and spent more time writing up the issue, describing the solution, and performing the benchmarking, than it would have taken to just implement the change myself. We do this to give contributors a chance to learn in a low-stakes scenario that nevertheless has real impact they can be proud of, where we can help shepherd them along the process. This educational and community-building effort is wasted on ephemeral AI agents.

Like this is just really cool. I really appreciate that this exists, and that there are people making these efforts

God damn it

After so long of putting so much effort into preventing exactly this from happening, my electric blanket has been peed on. It is unlikely to survive a wash.