The Era of Software Quality, or the Era of Ostriches?

The Era of Software Quality, or the Era of Ostriches?(blogs.gnome.org)

35 points by birdculture 2 hours ago | 10 comments

nottorp 8 minutes ago |

Hey does that mean they'll use "AI" to allow users to customize the desktop environment again?

someonebaggy 1 minute ago | |

Non-customizability is a design goal of the GNOME desktop, so no.

Everything coming from GNOME about software quality should be taken with a Strategic Petroleum Reserve of salt.

While other projects rewrite things in memory-safe ways, GNOME's response is to ask a chatbox if there are any memory vulnerabilities.

tom_ 1 hour ago | |

Say what you like about the random word sequence generation machine, but it does actually seem to be usefully good at generating sequences of random words that correspond to problems in your software. And if you're inclined to write the code by hand, it's probably going to be easier to fix up your existing shit than rewrite it all. (And if you're going to use AI, then you're hardly going to listen to me.)

jeremyjh 1 hour ago | |

The purpose of this is to address a practice common in certain open source ideologies of banning all AI contributions - including vulnerability reports. Basically they are choosing to ignore security vulnerabilities because they had to read too much slop last year.

lelanthran 56 minutes ago | | |

> Basically they are choosing to ignore security vulnerabilities because they had to read too much slop last year.

That's not only an uncharitable take, it's also wrong.

If 999 out of every 1000 "reports" from a specific source is wrong, then it is not irrational to disregard all 1000, especially when they can be generated faster than you can read.

I mean, it's just probabilities, right? If you're okay trusting output from an LLM, you should be okay with using statistics in general as a source for informing decision-making.