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rustyhancocktoday at 3:40 PM1 replyview on HN

Important though we generally assume few bad actors.

But like the XZ attack, we kind of have to assume that advanced perissitant threats are a reality for FOSS too.

I can envisage a Sybil attack where several seemingly disaparate contributors are actually one actor building a backdoor.

Right now we have a disparity in that many contributors can use LLMs but the recieving projects aren't able to review them as effectively with LLMs.

LLM generated content often (perhaps by definition) seems acceptable to LLMs. This is the critical issue.

If we had means of effectively assessing PRs objectively that would make this moot.

I wonder if those is a whole new class of issue. Is judging a PR harder than making one? It seems so right now


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vladmstoday at 3:52 PM

> Is judging a PR harder than making one?

Depends on the assumptions. If you assume good intent of the submitter and you spend time to explain what he should improve, why something is not good, etc, than it's a lot of effort. If you assume bad intent, you can just reject with something like "too large review from unproven user, please contribute something smaller first".

Yes, we might need to take things a bit slower, and build relations to the people you collaborate with in order to have some trust (this can also be attacked, but this was already possible).

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