Mesa Project Adds Code Comprehension Requirement After AI Slop Incident
Recently [Faith Ekstrand] announced on Mastodon that Mesa was updating its contributor guide. This follows a recent AI slop incident where someone submitted a massive patch to the Mesa project with the claim that this would improve performance ‘by a few percent’. The catch? The entire patch was generated by ChatGPT, with the submitter becoming somewhat irate when the very patient Mesa developers tried to explain that they’d happily look at the issue after the submitter had condensed the purported ‘improvement’ into a bite-sized patch.
The entire saga is summarized in a recent video by [Brodie Robertson] which highlights both how incredibly friendly the Mesa developers are, and how the use of ChatGPT and kin has made some people with zero programming skills apparently believe that they can now contribute code to OSS projects. Unsurprisingly, the Mesa developers were unable to disabuse this particular individual from that notion, but the diff to the Mesa contributor guide by [Timur Kristóf] should make abundantly clear that someone playing Telephone between a chatbot and OSS project developers is neither desirable nor helpful.
That said, [Brodie] also highlights a recent post by [Daniel Stenberg] of Curl fame, who thanked [Joshua Rogers] for contributing a massive list of potential issues that were found using ‘AI-assisted tools’, as detailed in this blog post by [Joshua]. An important point here is that these ‘AI tools’ are not LLM-based chatbots, but rather tweaked existing tools like static code analyzers with more smarts bolted on. They’re purpose-made tools that still require you to know what you’re doing, but they can be a real asset to a developer, and a heck of a lot more useful to a project like Curl than getting sent fake bug reports by a confabulating chatbot as has happened previously.
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Mesa is working to update our contributor guide. Can you guess why?Did you guess AI?
Because if you did, you'd be right. I don't want to put anyone on blast here so please don't go digging to find the motivating MR and harass the contributor or anything like that.
But the situation was exactly what you might think. Someone ran ChatGPT on the code and asked it for suggestions on making it more performant. They applied a bunch of the changes against their local branch, tested it, and found that it gave maybe a 0.5-1.0% perf boost in some titles.
That's totally fine. I don't care what tools you use to find a bottleneck. I'll happily take more FPS, no matter who found the issue or how. If some AI assistant helps you find things no one else has found and lets us make drivers faster, great!
But that's not what happened.
What happened next is that they then tried to make it the Mesa project maintainers' job to sort through the shit ChatGPT spit out and decide what's useful and what's not and why the changes helped and whether or not they were correct. The contributor had no no idea and, more importantly, they had no desire to actually learn about the Mesa code-base or the hardware in question. They just wanted to run ChatGPT and send its suggestions towards upstream.
This is not useful. This is not contributing. It's just burning maintainer time sorting through AI hallucinations. We have enough mediocre code to review that comes from actual humans who are actually trying to learn about Mesa and help out. We don't need to add AI shit to the merge request pile. If you don't understand the patch well enough to be able to describe what it does and why it makes things faster, don't submit it.
So now we're making it really clear: If you submit the merge request, you're responsible for the code change as if you typed it yourself. You don't get to claim ignorance and "because the AI said so". It's your responsibility to do due diligence to make sure it's correct and to accurately describe the change in the commit message.
Some things shouldn't have to be explicitly written down but here we are... 😩
Electric Surfboard Gets Thrust Vectoring Upgrade
The internet has already taught us that an electric surfboard is a great way to get around on the water while looking like an absolute badass. [RCLifeOn] is continuing to push the boat forward in this regard, however, adding thrust vectoring technology to his already-impressive build.
Traditionally, these craft are steered simply by leaning and twisting as a surfer would with a traditional board. However, more dynamic control is possible if you add a way to aim the thrust coming from the propulsion system. [RCLifeOn] achieved this by adding steerable nozzles behind the ducted fan thrusters, controlled with big hobby servos to handle the forces involved. The result is a more controllable electric surfboard that can seriously carve through the turns. Plus, it’s now effectively an RC boat all on its own, as it no longer needs a rider on board to steer.
We’ve covered various developments in this surfboard’s history before, too. Video after the break.
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E il 3 ottobre sciopero generale
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/10/e-il-3-…
Dopo l’abbordaggio da parte delle navi israeliane, le principali sigle sindacali hanno indetto la manifestazione generale per il 3 ottobre. L’Italia scende in piazza. “L’aggressione contro navi civili che trasportano cittadine e cittadini italiani, rappresenta un fatto di
A Gubbio incontro sull’informazione a Gaza
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/10/a-gubbi…
Più di 250 giornalisti uccisi in due anni, in media 11 al mese. Mai così tanti, in nessun altro conflitto. A cui si aggiunge il divieto d’ingresso per la stampa internazionale. Quello che sta succedendo a Gaza viene raccontato, tra mille rischi
Israele ha bloccato la Flotilla alle 21
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/10/israele…
Le immagini delle telecamere, che in contemporanea trasmettono un video delle dirette della navigazione, cominciano a spegnersi con le prime manovre di abbordaggio dei soldati: in meno di un’ora le connessioni cadono man mano, formando sul display una
L’Italia nelle piazze per sostenere la Flotilla. Sit in spontanei, pacifici, solidali
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/10/litalia…
Non appena si è diffusa la notizia del blocco della Global Sumud Flotilla, decine di migliaia di cittadini in tutta Italia si
Phantom Taurus: dettagli sull’APT cinese
@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁)
Phantom Taurus. Questo gruppo APT, legato alla Repubblica Popolare Cinese, è emerso dopo oltre due anni di monitoraggio da parte dei ricercatori di Unit 42 di Palo Alto Networks. Le sue operazioni di spionaggio, concentrate su enti governativi e di telecomunicazioni in Africa, Medio Oriente e Asia, rivelano un livello di
reshared this
‘I cannot overstate how disgusting I find this kind of AI dog shit in the first place, never mind under these circumstances.’#News
AI-Generated Biography on Amazon Tries to Capitalize on the Death of a Beloved Writer Kaleb Horton
On September 27, several writers published obituaries about writer and photographer Kaleb Horton, who recently died. The obituaries were written by friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, but all of them revered him as a writer and photographer, whose work has appeared in GQ, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and VICE.Some of these obituary writers were shocked and disgusted to discover an AI-generated “biography” of Kaleb Horton was suddenly for sale on Amazon.
“I cannot overstate how disgusting I find this kind of ‘A.I.’ dog shit in the first place, never mind under these circumstances,” writer Luke O’Neil, who wrote an obituary for Horton, told me in an email. “This predatory slop is understandably upsetting to his family and friends and fans and an affront to his specific life and to life itself. Especially days after his death. All week people have been eulogizing Kaleb as one of the best, although sadly not widely read enough, writers of his generation, and some piece of shit pressed a button and took 30 seconds or whatever it is to set up a tollbooth to divert the many people just learning about him away from his real and vital work. And for what? To make maybe a few dollars? By tricking people? I can't say what I think should happen to thieves like this.”
The book, titled KALEB HORTON: A BIOGRAPHY OF WORDS AND IMAGES: The Life Of A Writer And Photographer From The American West, was published on September 27 as well, is 74 pages long, and has all the familiar signs of the kind of AI-generated books that flood Amazon’s store on a daily basis.
Even at just 74 pages, the book was produced at superhuman speed. That appears to be the normal cadence for the author, Jack C. Cambron, who has no online footprint outside of online bookstores, and who has written dozens of biographies and cookbooks since his career as an author appeared out of thin air earlier in September. He has written biographies about director Cameron Crowe, Fulton County, Georgia district attorney Fani Willis, and pop singer Madison Beer, to name just a few. There’s no consistent pattern to these biographies other than a lot of the people they’re about have been in the news recently.
All these books also have obviously AI-generated covers, which is the most obvious and one of the most insulting signs that Horton’s biography is AI-generated as well: The person on the cover looks nothing like him.
AI-generated books on Amazon are extremely common and often attempt to monetize whatever is happening in the news or that people are searching for at any given time. For example, last year we wrote about a flood of AI-generated books about the journalist Kara Swisher appearing on Amazon leading up to the release of her memoir Burn Book. In theory, someone who might be interested in the book or Swisher might search for her name on Amazon and buy one of those AI-generated books without realizing it’s AI-generated. We’ve seen this same strategy flood public libraries with AI-generated books as well.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has said that it does not want these books in its store in response to our story about the AI-generated Kara Swisher books last year, but obviously is not taking any meaningful action to stop them.
“We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience for customers and authors and have content guidelines governing which books may be listed for sale," Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told me in an email last year. "We do not allow AI-generated content that creates a poor customer experience. We have proactive and reactive measures to evaluate content in our store. We have removed a number of titles that violated our guidelines.”
AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library
Librarians say that taxpayers are already paying for low quality AI-generated ebooks in public libraries.Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)
Saremo in piazza ovunque si manifesterà contro il genocidio e contro l’aggressione alla Flotilla per Gaza
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/10/saremo-…
Condividiamo le parole di Maurizio Landini. Saremo in
Francy 🌻
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