Are.

You.

Fucking.

KIDDING.

Me?

https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2026/08/msg00197.html

In the midst of a heavy discussion and voting about whether this should be at all allowed…

one arsehole, with a history of shoving slop into people’s faces and shoving people’s mails into slop, decides to present a vommit ostensibly fixing an issue in the program used to tally Debian project voting, …

… AND THE PROJECT SECRETARY, WHO RUNS THE VOTING, SAYS HE WILL JUST FUCKING MERGE IT‽

I just…

I just CANNOT.

This is in-your-face. This is beyond pale. This is multiple insults in one. Even if this were legit, it would be in utterly bad taste at this precise point in #Debian project history.

Let’s rename to Slopbian, will you?

oh for fuck’s sake, jrtc29 pointed it out, and the slop arsehole just said he is “interested in closing this topic as soon as possible” and meanwhile “do[es]n't see why [he] should respect a rule that does not exist yet”

I absolutely cannot even.

the slop user cannot possibly stop responding, it’s a trainwreck in the pipermail

mhonarc, whatever, thankfully not that mailman3 thingy

why is devotee (Debian vote engine) not packaged?

the delusions of some of those slop advocates…

It's not a "better autocomplete". It is a pattern matcher. It looks at a text and detects patterns in it - double linked list here, factory pattern there, singleton here, regex for an IP address here, ... And then when generating text it can apply all the patterns it knows

“it knows” 😹

Someone clearly doesn’t know how LLMs work.

there’s just so much wrong in both the underbelly and in areas I rarely have reason to engage with, as I’m normally just quietly doing my thing and using the same software I did decades ago plusminus very few bits…

@lanodan the buildds are, nowadays, but, yeah

@mirabilos What, writing stuff (& coding) is not primarily about pattern-matching with thought-terminating clichés?

@tkchia LLMs cannot recognise patterns (as claimed by AIgars), is what I wanted to say

@werdahias yeah, when people, including among their numbers some whom you liked, trusted, worked with before, who you would have thought to know better, both hand-before-the-eyes and deliberately are setting new fires to FOSS and other areas touching you and your life while you’re busy trying to put them out and trying to figure out how to save what’s left, while at the same time quite literally setting fires to the planet (we’ve had hundreds of hectares of forest fires worryingly close to ::1, one of the fires alone having been larger than all forest fires of the state of the last eight years together), then…

… then you’re entering fatigue.

@mirabilos True that. LLMs are based on fuzzy probabilities rather than clear-cut patterns.

@mirabilos Some things I've observed when playing around with GitHub Copilot (the free offering) on my own code:
- it's pretty good at "understanding" things such as, say, "x *= A" means to multiply x by the constant A;
- if it seems to "understand" the high-level reason I did something a certain way, it's because I explicitly wrote it down somewhere;
- it keeps trying to rewrite a non-GitHub project URL to point into GitHub (wot)...

@tkchia no, it physically literally cannot understand

@lanodan @dalias @ska btw the slop user referred to above, and with a less bloomed label in the OP, had the nerve to today be cited by @distrowatch as saying:

expressed regret on the results of the vote, writing: "On a very personal note, I regret that the winning option does not acknowledge all the legitimate concerns around AI: environmental impact, copyright and licensing uncertainty, the health of Free Software communities, and the strain of aggressive scraping on the open web."

The sheer nerve of that has-been!

And tech news are obviously part of the problem.

I produced¹ another version of the results graph […[

¹ obligatory disclosure: the script used is AI-generated

He really cannot stop posting and getting into everyone’s faces.

@mirabilos Do not get mad; get even?

@tkchia nah, fatigued

@mirabilos is there a mirror for the link? lists.debian.org insists that i (specifically) am not allowed to see their mailing lists, for reasons entirely beyond my understanding

@mewsleah probably not

@mirabilos That such a thing would even be tolerated in the midst of voting shows the Debian Project was already lost.

https://theonion.com/man-who-thought-hed-lost-all-hope-loses-last-additional-1819565674/

@mirabilos I'm obligated to remind myself of Mariame Kaba's point that hope is not optimism and it's not an emotion; that hope is a discipline.

@foolishowl oh yes, what the link states is a weekly occurrence for me lately

@mewsleah @CowMan I just wrote an HTML to Markdown converter, so I can provide you a screenshot of that page https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2026/08/msg00197.html inline:

• To: debian-vote@lists.debian.org, Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org>
• Subject: Re: Number of options
• From: Kurt Roeckx <kurt@roeckx.be>
• Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:55:38 +0800
• Message-id: <[🔎] BBE1FA4B-67D0-4D0F-A3D2-E07566AEE59E@roeckx.be>
• In-reply-to: <[🔎] an1UICJe0if8d890@grub.nussbaum.fr>
• References: <[🔎] 2C045BA7-3ACA-4AE9-9799-04560136A5D3@roeckx.be> <[🔎] an1UICJe0if8d890@grub.nussbaum.fr>

On August 13, 2026 1:20:32 PM GMT+08:00, Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org> wrote:
>On 13/08/26 at 08:04 +0800, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
>> As far as I know, devotee has never been tried with 10 options. I
>> think it only supports 1 digit for the ranking, and might use base 36.
>> If 10 options make it, I will probably have to test this first and
>> might postpone the vote until I can confirm it works properly.
> 
>If you don't mind reading AI-generated commits,
><https://salsa.debian.org/lucas/devotee/-/commits/35options> might be
>helpful. (The commits are intentionally verbose, and you probably don't
>want to add doc/max-options.md and AGENTS.md, but I left them in the
>commit history)

Thanks for looking at this Lucas. Those patches look like they make sense. I would probably have spend a lot of time trying to fix all those issues.

I'll look at merging them, even when we don't need it.

Kurt

Reply to:

• debian-vote@lists.debian.org
• Kurt Roeckx (on-list)
• Kurt Roeckx (off-list)

• References:

  • Number of options
    • From: Kurt Roeckx kurt@roeckx.be
  • Re: Number of options
    • From: Lucas Nussbaum lucas@debian.org

• Prev by Date: Re: Ballot option: Further Discussion

• Next by Date: Re: Ballot option: Debian is created by humans

• Previous by thread: Re: Number of options

• Next by thread: Re: Number of options

• Index(es):

  • Date
  • Thread

@mewsleah @CowMan (ok, I mostly had that converter lying around from my RSS2Fedi bots, and I merely needed it to adjust a bit… and learnt that it needs even more improvement…)