"Theodore Tso" <[email protected]> writes: > On Tue, Oct 27, 2026 at 10:33:24AM -0500, Ben Finney wrote: > > Martin Steigerwald <[email protected]> writes: > > > > > One of the greater challenges with LLMs seems to be to guide them > > > to produce concise, accurate and to the point output. > > > > Until that day comes (if ever), I agree with other posters: This > > unreliable and non-deterministic machine should not be sending > > messages unsolicited to Debian package maintainers. > > Humans are unrelible and non-deterministic, you know.
I am deeply troubled you would equivocate between a machine and a human in this conversation. Humans are our peers. As such, we must acknowledge they are fallible like ourselves, and accord them much generosity and work with them, expecting they have needs and wants and a desire to improve and help us in return. The machines we employ in our work are owed none of those considerations. They have no needs, no wants, no intentions; we owe them no generosity nor obligations. When a machine is unreliable, we have no obligation to suffer it. We are right to complain that it is used to impose on our work and our attention. > So if you think it's a waste of time, feel free to ignore the report. Not good enough. This is the same logic of the spammer: “I'm just sending the message from my automated machine that doesn't care whether you want the message; if you feel it's not for you feel free to ignore it” does not fly for the spammer, and it does not fly in this case either. If the messages are imposed unilaterally on us by the agency of someone else, that is obnoxious and we are right to demand that it cease. Pointing out that we can simply ignore it in any instance is missing the point. Unlike the tools that existed in Debian workflows long before, LLMs are acknowledged to be non-deterministic in their output and infeasible to explain exactly how they produced that output. Until that is fixed, we should not accept that its output is imposed on the attention of those who didn't opt in. -- \ “Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require | `\ hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be | _o__) appreciated.” —Edsger W. Dijkstra | Ben Finney
