RE: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117441841785502664
I'd like to tell you a story about a contributor who came to us at Mozilla, in the first two or three years working there. I never met them, I don't know their name, and I still think about few times a year.
They came to us with questions, as they were struggling to build Firefox on their computer, and they were getting error message that nobody had ever seen. And I don't just mean "unfamiliar to our engineers", I mean "we can't figure out how or why our build system would emit that string."
Linux kernel goes full AI slop code, hides chatbot commits
‘The kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ARF2KcDgc&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA&index=1&pp=iAQBsAgC - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261014-linux-kernel-goes-full-ai-slop-code-hides-chatbot-commits - podcast
time: 13 min 43 sec
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/10/14/linux-kernel-goes-full-ai-slop-code-hides-chatbot-commits/ - blog post
So, after going back and forth a bit with person, who it turns out is in their early teens, we asking about their hardware, what setup they've got that's doing this. Maybe this person's got some new system we've never seen, maybe they're running in some novel context we need to know about. Is this an edge case, or is this a leading-edge case? Outliers are always interesting.
I've seen some Pretty Far Out There systems, I run a few myself, and this kid's system is Out There.