Tea.xyz causes a flood of spam pull requests to open source projects | Hacker News Reader

Tea.xyz causes a flood of spam pull requests to open source projects

web3isgoinggreat.com

107 pointshealsdata33 comments

That reminds me of hacktoberfest, it's not crypto related, but people were creating similarly pointless pull requests for t-shirts.

https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628342

Technically speaking, it was always possible for random people to spam PRs to open source before, but it wasn't a problem until someone put the idea of it out there on a platform with even the most trivial reason (a dumb tshirt or a few cents worth of crypto).

I expect there's going to be plenty of growing pains as people push for the democratization of everything.

Man people who complain about cryptocurrencies need to stop calling it "crypto". Crypto is cryptography. People who evangelize cryptocurrencies won't stop calling it "crypto", but the rest of us shouldn't just give that word to them.

I feel you, but, sadly, I came to the conclusion that this war is lost.

If I speak to an audience I want them to understand exactly what I mean. So, I only use "cryptography" and "cryptocurrency" explicitly.

Yeah, I think that's the best solution in practice; use "cryptography" and "cryptocurrency". Certainly don't use "crypto" for cryptocurrency.

that, and "confabulation" versus "hallucination" :-(

> to fill in gaps in memory by fabrication <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/confabulation>

I mean, come on, perfect. But, it seems even M-W has done what a reasonable dictionary should(?) do and has updated the entry to add a "3: (computing)" entry to reflect its modern usage https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hallucination

No, hallucination is a better term. It conveys the important fact -- "these chatbots will just confidently state things as facts even though they're completely made up" -- in a way that everyone understands. If you used the term "confabulation" you'd have to start by explaining what "confabulation" means any time you wanted to talk about a chatbot making something up.

It's not even more accurate. The problem with hallucinations isn't a "gap in memory". The fundamental problem is that the chatbots are "plausible English text" generators(*), not intelligent agents. As such, no existing term is going to fit perfectly -- it neither hallucinates nor confabulates, it just generates probable token sequences(*) -- so we may as well use a word people know.

(*) I know it's slightly more complicated, especially with RLHF and stuff, but you know what I mean.

Wait til you learn what "web 3" meant before cryptoscams started to also use this term.

I don't remember accurately. What did Web3 mean prior to cyptoscams?

The Semantic Web:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web?wprov=sfla1

It's over and lost, get over it. this is such a tired point and people have been saying it for 10 years now

People have correctly been saying it for 10 years now, it's time people start listening.

Ugh let it go, pick another battle it's OVER

I'm not limited to one battle at a time :)

> Crypto is cryptography

No. And astrology isn’t astronomy. And cryptography isn’t crypto. Cryptography is a legitimate field of science, crypto is not.

The word "crypto" means cryptography. Always has. The scam currencies are called cryptocurrencies, not "crypto".

Also discussed a few days ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39510756 (78 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39529980 (15 comments)

In a very similar vein, a projected called Starknet recently airdropped tokens to early adopters/developers/supporters, the claim process for developers was tied to the GitHub names.

Two issues arose:

- GitHub names can change, this lead to race to squat names that had rights to the airdrop for any since changed names

- it’s incentivised those who are “farming” airdrops, ie creating multiple personas/wallets in an attempt to get larger allocations, to now add making low value pull requests to GitHub projects

[Dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39510756

"This why people hate on crypto" Exactly

I mean, yes, but this is a bit like saying “this is why people hate on money”

It’s essentially a problem with capitalism or the easy exchange of any kind of value.

With recent PR DoS attacks, GitHub and other git hosts should provide more tools for issue and PR moderation, e.g. allow maintainers to set conditions that have to be met in order to create issue/PR. Account age, blacklisted files, etc.

Otherwise OSS development could literally halt because of how cluttered issue/PR management gets.

The two filters you mention could likely be implemented by anyone with reusable Github Actions workflows.

Title needs to be corrected by appending "on github".

Sourcehut users unaffected.

If only git had a mechanism to verify contributors to a repository./s

This response from one of the Tea developers seems disingenuous https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/pull/19743#issuecomment-19...

How could they not have predicted this outcome?

Incompetance, and a need to promote yourself. When you want to execute on something the people who are moderately successful just execute and do not think. Thinking means you will do less stuff and that lowers your productivity.

And by "one of the tea developers" you mean a core contributor and the guy who build the Homebrew package manager.

Which makes it even weirder as he, being a popular open source maintainer, should be aware of how annoying spam PRs can be.

It doesn't read disingenuous to me, it's just wildly out of touch.

Yeah, after everything we’ve seen with crypto, where there are always grifters lining up around the block to exploit everything, mxcl should really have seen this coming.

Uh, can't believe it's this person again. He was involved also a couple of days ago in another GitHub drama related to AI with another project he manages.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39499734

A blocked xyz. in my DNS server configuration the day I learned about it and have yet to be pro en wrong.

Geocode.xyz [0] is quite a useful service.

[0] https://geocode.xyz/

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