What is the point of converting this software?
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@sanityinc It’s gonna make a line go up somewhere, sadly.
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@samir "rust rewrite" is rapidly becoming a nebulously security-flavored term that people lacquer onto something indiscriminately, like "encryption" or "vpn". all things that are real and work and are good, but lacking any of the context of when or why they are good
@samir i don't this think this take will surprise anyone on fedi but this is looking more and more like they're just trying to solve the 'problem' of needing expertise and healthy culture to solve complicated domain specific problems. once upon a time you would handle this by doing things like hiring people & mentoring jr's & maintaining your spaces and stuff so there would be a constant flow of reliable people who do this type of thing
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194
What is the point of converting this software?
Who’s gonna maintain it?
Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.
I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.
Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.
Burn AI written code, burn it in a furnace.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194
What is the point of converting this software?
Who’s gonna maintain it?
Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.
I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.
Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.
@samir thanks for pointing out the invisible work that keeps so many systems operating
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194
What is the point of converting this software?
Who’s gonna maintain it?
Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.
I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.
Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.
@samir fish has successfully been rewritten in Rust. By the maintainer, because he wanted to do it, bit by bit.
As you say, the people are the important part. Everyone wants to replace them with slop these days. Until the house of cards crashes down and the slop spills everywhere.
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R ActivityRelay shared this topic
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194
What is the point of converting this software?
Who’s gonna maintain it?
Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.
I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.
Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.
@samir I think there’s a lot of magical thinking about rust. ‘Rust is memory-safe’ is somehow enough on its own to outweigh all of the other reasons not to rewrite software from scratch, and all of the other potential sources of bugs get forgotten about.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194
What is the point of converting this software?
Who’s gonna maintain it?
Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.
I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.
Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.
@samir Thing is, we're not critical. We're fungible assets.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194
What is the point of converting this software?
Who’s gonna maintain it?
Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.
I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.
Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.
@samir I heard that Rust has one of those packaging systems like Python, NodeJS etc where anyone can simply upload a package for others to import, with no checking whatsoever. These are rife with abuse and if Rust indeed has an equivalent system, it is certainly not more secure.
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@datarama We better add another digit to the CVE numbers.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194
What is the point of converting this software?
Who’s gonna maintain it?
Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.
I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.
Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.
@samir
It's not safer if it was done by "AI" -
@samir I heard that Rust has one of those packaging systems like Python, NodeJS etc where anyone can simply upload a package for others to import, with no checking whatsoever. These are rife with abuse and if Rust indeed has an equivalent system, it is certainly not more secure.
@mkoek It does, but I dispute that this is any less secure than e.g. GitHub.
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@samir Thing is, we're not critical. We're fungible assets.
@drwho Only until stuff breaks.
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@samir I think there’s a lot of magical thinking about rust. ‘Rust is memory-safe’ is somehow enough on its own to outweigh all of the other reasons not to rewrite software from scratch, and all of the other potential sources of bugs get forgotten about.
@benjamineskola Yeah, it’s nonsense. But I think it’s intentional nonsense. The organisers of this project are trying to take control of fundamental tools, probably with more liberal licences.
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@samir fish has successfully been rewritten in Rust. By the maintainer, because he wanted to do it, bit by bit.
As you say, the people are the important part. Everyone wants to replace them with slop these days. Until the house of cards crashes down and the slop spills everywhere.
@toni Yeah, fish is a great example of a maintainer-led approach which actually worked!
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@samir i don't this think this take will surprise anyone on fedi but this is looking more and more like they're just trying to solve the 'problem' of needing expertise and healthy culture to solve complicated domain specific problems. once upon a time you would handle this by doing things like hiring people & mentoring jr's & maintaining your spaces and stuff so there would be a constant flow of reliable people who do this type of thing
@kirakira It’s all power plays nowadays, isn’t it? The software is incidental.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194
What is the point of converting this software?
Who’s gonna maintain it?
Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.
I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.
Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.
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@drwho Only until stuff breaks.
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@drwho Never works, but they are welcome to try.
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@samir Just let the AI maintain it… I’m sure a prompt like “Maintain this code base.” would do the trick… /s
All we then need is somebody to actually use the slop. Maybe AI could do that too. Seems best…
@samir But bottom line (almost literally) the whole thing seems to be about getting it funded…
“Perhaps the biggest barrier, however, will be convincing the U.S. government to fund the project, says Ji, particularly at the scale envisaged. She thinks a more realistic goal might be to solicit funding from the private sector for a proof of concept.”
It’s a get rich quick plan. 🤮
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@mkoek It does, but I dispute that this is any less secure than e.g. GitHub.
@samir AI often hallucinates package names. Bad guys squat malware on those names. I don’t think that’s easily done with a C/C++ codebase. With AI-translated Rust code, it could happen. A bigger risk than potential buffer overflows in a mature C program, I think.
