Greetings. Ben Finney - 27.10.26, 05:19:31 CET: > "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.
Important aspect and I completely missed it. Thus quoting in entirety. Thanks for bringing this into awareness, Ben! It is important. Of course also any obligation to suffer on the behavior of a human being is limited and in the end still a choice to make. But I get what you mean. I have seen it in mailing lists, on the KDE bug tracker and I have experienced in my own experiments. LLMs have no trouble throwing almost endless amounts of text at you, without the text really having much of a meaning. And it can be tedious to get to the bits of the output that actually matter. I do not see human beings writing like this usually. > > 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. Investing time into Debian and work for other free software projects is a choice. It should never be imposed on anyone unless there is a clear need for the project to do it. Of cause any package upload needs to meet a certain quality. So if you choose to contribute a package, you need to go the full way. But requiring that every maintainer reads those LLM reports or even is just subjected to them, does not feel right to me. It should be a choice. Even if declined by maintainer, a report could still be generated and accessible on a web page or in a special mailing list for the DFSG team. Best, -- Martin
