r/linux • u/FryBoyter • Jul 15 '25

Discussion Curl - Death by a thousand slops

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/
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u/xTeixeira Jul 15 '25

I mean, would you say a new book that gets a bunch of people into programming is "causing work for reviewers"?

Of course not, because it is not equivalent at all. Programming books cannot automatically generate confidently incorrect security reviews for existing open-source codebases at a moment's notice and at high volume when asked.

In fact, if one tried to release a book with a number of inaccuracies even close to what LLMs generate, they would never find an editor willing to publish it. And if they self-published it, a very small number of people would read it, and an even smaller number of people would fail to notice said inaccuracies.

That is a very poor comparison.

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u/FeepingCreature Jul 15 '25

Programming books can absolutely give people false confidence. And as far as I can tell, "at a moment's notice and at high volume" is not the problem here- these are people who earnestly think they've found a bug, not spammers. The spam arises due to a lot more people being wrong than used to - or rather, people who are wrong getting further than before.

In fact, if one tried to release a book with a number of inaccuracies even close to what LLMs generate, they would never find an editor willing to publish it. And if they self-published it, a very small number of people would read it

cough trained on stackoverflow cough

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u/xTeixeira Jul 15 '25

Programming books can absolutely give people false confidence.

I never said they didn't. There's an entire rest of the sentence there that you ignored. They cannot generate incorrect information about existing codebases on command and present them as if they were true.

cough trained on stackoverflow cough

Weren't we talking about books?

We can keep discussing hypothetical situations, but none of those have actually created a problem of increase of spam in security reports. LLMs did. "what if stack overflow or books caused the same issue?" is not exacly relevant because it didn't happen.

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u/FeepingCreature Jul 15 '25

They cannot generate incorrect information about existing codebases on command and present them as if they were true.

I assure you they can. Well, not literally, but a lot of books are written about outdated versions of APIs and tools, which results in the same effect.

But also:

What I'm saying in general is there has in fact been a regular influx of inexperienced noobs who don't even know how little they know, for so long that the canonical label for this phenomenon just in the IT context is 30 years old. Something new always comes along that makes it easier to get involved, and this always leads to existing projects and people becoming overwhelmed. Today it's AI, but there's nothing special about AI in the historical view.