Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people. It's definitely become a game of just spam claude for answers with zero understanding or care for how anything actually works. That's fine to get things done and fine for a lot of side projects, but it definitely ruins the joy that people have in understanding systems and working with intellectuals.
Wasn't there an article here, or was it under another HN post as a comment? Someone pointed out that the before the dawn of LLMs, "bad contributors" had a rate limiter of sorts. Now anyone can prompt their LLM and throw their output at you, shifting the burden entirely on the reviewer at highest possible speed.
It's so much worse than just that. Because they will also decide on how problem should be solved by prompting LLM and ask you to argument doing it any other way vs the LLM slop they pasted
Just this morning I had a senior manager say to me "I was trying to do someone else's job and give them all the info so they can review it as I have no knowledge" in response to me asking for them to please filter the Claude word salad using the meat proxy. I'm pretty tired of having to do the job of filtering the low-effort copy-paste walls of text
Similar to sending a "Let Me Google That For You" except somehow because it was an LLM not Google, they've forgotten it's more insulting than helpful, and aren't even in on the joke they themselves are making.
Well - the "let me google that for you" nowadays barely works, because google ruined the search engine. The search engine sucks now - and by default the first results are AI slop summaries that are IMO worthless.
I agree, anecdotally I've always noticed a huge amount of my peers lacked professional communication skills even pre-LLMs.
A lot of people get this idea that "more verbosity = better" instead of optimizing for conciseness and information-density. I largely blame minimum word-count essays from school assignments.
Verbosity can be fine, but you'd want a simple enough text, with the verbosity separated. I still write emails with footnotes, and thanks to UTF-8 I now have all the numbers available.
Amusingly enough the advent of HTML-emails didn't produce any better formatted mails, despite the extra formatting options, than what you can do with a plain text email supported by a proper text editor.
Depends. A lot of the 1-2 sentence rapid responders from my past jobs weren’t really understanding the problem. They were virtue signaling that they were confident, fast to respond, and understood immediately (without elaborating)
It’s easy to send a pithy response that suggests experience and understanding without having either. Think of a middle manager spouting pithy buzzword laden cliches confidently in response to every request, then transferring the real problem to the grumbling employees who have to solve the actual hard parts of the problem which lie in the nuance.
In my hobby groups there has always been a second, smaller, more intimate invite-only space for people doing the deep work. It’s the only way to do the work in the age of 1000-member Discords where important conversations get lost in the scroll back instantly.
The experience in these spaces is largely the same. LLMs can be used there, too, but when the experts are using them with experience to back it up the results are a lot better.
The people who are really struggling in my few hobby groups (not PS5) are those who enjoyed some social status from their knowledge. They were heros and people sought them out and revered their work in 2023. LLMs came along and partially leveled the playing field. When a determined kid with a Deepseek subscription can produce a sloppy version of what took you years to find, that sense of being a heroic figure at the next level is gone.
I think this reveals another wrinkle, which is that the status hierarchy wasn’t that solid or worthwhile anyway. Outside of a few vocal people trying to enforce the status hierarchy, most people don’t care who releases their jailbreak or PS5 exploit. They just want it. Whoever gets it to them first becomes the new king.
This PS5 incident has some strange element where supposedly keeping the reveal secret for 2 more weeks would have changed something with the GTA6 release. There were also 3 people who found the same exploit independent and some large amount of money on the line for the first of them to report it. The person who reported it signed off to spend time with his dying mother, so can’t really fault them for doing the thing they earned according to the rules of the program.
The status thing is probably part of it, but I'm not sure "a kid with Deepseek can make a sloppy version" actually shows that the old hierarchy was meaningless.
I meant that it was a slight illusion. These hierarchies can flip overnight when someone new enters the scene and delivers the thing the community wants.
An old guard always tries to enforce an ordering of respect based on seniority and who they think has earned it the most. Outside of a terminally online circle of Discord users few people care. They only want the thing so they can use it.
LLMs are a big disruption because now because effort and results have never been more uncoupled. When a kid with an LLM can do a sloppy but good enough version of the work in 1/100th of the time with 1/100th of the experience, the social hierarchy only matters to people who value it above the outcome itself.
> Outside of a few vocal people trying to enforce the status hierarchy, most people don’t care who releases their jailbreak or PS5 exploit. They just want it. Whoever gets it to them first becomes the new king.
"Commodification" might be a relevant word here.
You can fight that by "building a personal brand", but then you're suddenly brand building instead of hacking, and hacking was what you actually wanted to do.
I guess it works best if you're not in it for clout but because you want something to exist. But even then it is difficult.
> There were also 3 people who found the same exploit independent and some large amount of money on the line for the first of them to report it.
> Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people
It is insane just how miserable the experience of FOSS hardware hacking in public is.
The expectation does not even the slightest match reality.
You'd think "ah yes many eyes meaning all bugs get shallow", but instead you get worst of XDA-Developers and toxic wastelands where no sane person even answers anymore.
But this predates LLMs and was as miserable as it is now before as well.
In fact, I might even argue that LLMs made this _better_, because you can now avoid the "opening up in hopes of finding 1 helpful person below 99 annoying ones" through simple GPU compute.
Previously, you had to hope that through this self-inflicted horror, you'd find an expert that can augment you. Now that expert rests on huggingface.
It's still.. not perfect, of course. But it might be less miserable - provided that you adapt to the current state of things and stop with the "trawling for volunteers".
__
Of course, this does not help you against "skids let claude find bugs that you'd need and burn it for no reason" as per the twitter thread, but I wouldn't rule out that they would not have done that, if less information was public.
And.. that too was an issue before LLMs.
Information wants to be free, but so does your cat, and your cat gets run over by some crackhead in a 30 year old rusty pickup if you just put it outside without thinking.
So don't let it go out unattended.
That said, this "pep talk" is more directed at myself than at poor Andy.
This must all suck big time.
Projects like this probably need a dedicated noob-fork where 'anything goes', so the noobs feel like they're contributing but where their blast radius is contained.
And once in a blue moon something good comes out of it back to the real project.
> Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people.
This is definitely the case for me. Before AI tools became mainstream, it was already a difficult proposition to find other smart people who you could get along with and talk to, do something interesting together. The Internet made all the difference in my life because I was able to get outside my geographic region to do big things through open source and hacker communities. Now, that very important filter mechanism no longer works. It's Eternal September all over again. In a way, it's very much a domination of "ends" over "means" in the wider community that is being forced upon those who long focused on "means". For a lot of intelligent people, understanding something is /valuable on its own/, but for the wider world there is no value in simply knowing things, but what you do with that knowledge (or now that lack of knowledge). I even experienced this recently at DEFCON 34 where I saw other participants in some of the CTFs with me using AI tools and not really understanding what the tools were doing or what was happening, but just kind of bruteforcing/tokenmaxxing their way through. This isn't to say that those AI tools are fundamentally a bad thing to use in building open source software, security research, or even as a tool in a CTF, but that the "understanding" step needs to still be present or it destroys the fun in everything.
I'm certainly not having as much fun with computers these days, even as I've invested a lot of effort myself in local LLMs and trying to understand the tools and understand how to apply them reasonably, I've found I prefer much more analog entertainments. Thankfully there's always photography and lockpicking to entertain me at the moment and provide a pathway to meet other interesting fellows.
completely different world, but i've seen this happen in music spaces as well.
the idea of gatekeeping is often seen as elitist or exclusionary (fairly enough in many cases) but i think this can be an exaggerated description of a culture that necessarily requires a standard of... let's say, desire to engage with material on a sufficiently deep level. many things can be for anybody, but they are not for everybody.
in the past i've seen the phenomenon of "opening up" subcultures or previously-niche intellectual/art fields described as democratization but i think that ignores a big part of what causes this, which can more accurately be described as commodification. access to difficult things was formerly measured by one's ability to expend effort in order to get there (ignoring, for now, the structural conditions that set one up for success in that effort). when these things are commodified, these efforts and identities become products to purchase, the right to which is nearly never limited; in fact, it's almost seen as evil to imply that they should not be available to any individual at any time that individual may desire access.
i know we all have to start somewhere, but there has always been some historical filtration that leads people who are not truly engaged with a subject on a deep level to disengage at some point. that's changing at a novel rate and scale across so many subcultures. it seems like a lot of us are just surprised at how many people even want access to what were once our sanctuaries and we're not capable of grappling with what it takes to adapt to these changes.
i don't think this will pass or that things will return to "the way they were" but there will always be pockets that resemble previous subcultural forms. we just have to re-learn how to identify them with a keener eye and how to better avoid or more-appropriately interact with those who have a more superficial interest in them.
While you might have access to the subculture, there is no obligation for anyone else to respond, collaborate or engage with random you. This is a common mistaken understanding about open-source software projects where users often believe they have "rights" to compel or coerce volunteer developers to listen or reply to them. Developers collaborating together isn't a conspiracy, it's just preferences getting played out. No, I don't want to collaborate with someone that I don't like.... duh?
It gets bad when the subculture inhabitants get confused and adopt the social norms of the passer bys instead of remembering the importance of well-kept gardens. And then they start to introduce "policy".. which is just a backdoor for attackers to destroy your well-kept garden by arguing policy (as if that was what the subculture was about!).
In general, society is experience a decoupling of fun from work. I can't say I enjoy every aspect of my job, but it's nice to enjoy some of it, and lots of people do find a lot of their job at least somewhat rewarding.
People who hate their job of course like to come out of the woodwork and say no one should enjoy it, but isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people can enjoy their work? I used to enjoy teaching but I'd never get a teaching job now because of how AI is being used in that sector.
Technophiles will say that we should embrace the future because its inevitable but how many good people quitting does it take before they realize that a vibe-coded future of fun isn't all there is to life?
> but isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people can enjoy their work?
That’s an interesting question. I thought about it for a minute and was surprised that I came to the conclusion that the answer isn’t obviously “yes”.
An analogous question is “isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people are rich?”, and I think that question should make it clearer to many people why that is so.
> An analogous question is “isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people are rich?”
There’s a crucial difference between the two questions. “Rich” is a relative term: If everyone had the same amount of money, no one would be rich, you need someone to be worse off (poor) to have someone better off (rich). But someone enjoying their work has no bearing on someone else’s enjoyment of theirs.
you need someone to be worse off (poor) to have someone better off (rich).
The fact that so many people believe this is what bums me out.
You need to understand something: the people who want you to think this way do not have your best interests in mind, any more than the rabid right-wing Trumpers do.
In no way do I mean that someone has to suffer for someone else to thrive. We could (and should) all thrive and have our needs met.
I’m just saying the term is relative, like “tall” and “short”. If we were all the same height, no one would be tall or short, we’d just be. If we all had the same amount of money, no one would be rich or poor.
An economy isn't a zero-sum game. Wealth doesn't just pop into existence when someone in the government clicks a button on a screen. Money is created that way, but wealth isn't. It has to be created by creating something that someone else values enough to pay for willingly.
No one has to lose anything, in the sense that no one has to give up more than they think the product or service is worth to them. In your example, it's possible for everyone to grow taller.
This space is where AI usage is most confounding to me. Regardless of your stance on AI, this work does not need to be done. So if you don't enjoy it enough to actually do it, why are you even here? If you do enjoy the work, why are you letting the AI do your hobby? Don't you miss it?
now imagine how many other devs and maintainers are contemplating this but just haven't been pushed to their personal breaking point yet. or take note of how many, when asked about the spam problem, just nervously go "yeah it's kinda rough haha...". or how many will vent about it on their twitter-like of choice with increasing frequency.
remember hacktoberfest 2020? that's just all public-facing source 365 days a year now, except instead of "updated README.md" it's some vaguely-plausible fix... then you read the PR body and someone couldn't even be bothered to, or, just as likely couldn't explain it themselves. and that sort of sinking dread sets in.
> now imagine how many other devs and maintainers are contemplating this but just haven't been pushed to their personal breaking point yet. or take note of how many, when asked about the spam problem, just nervously go "yeah it's kinda rough haha..."
At first, my brain parsed "spam" as in ye olde email spam. It took a moment for it to sink in that you meant code spam, instead.
But now that the two concepts are linked in my little pea brain: I kind of want to see how a system like SpamAssassin would work when applied to pull requests like it has been applied to email.
It can use reputation, real-time blacklists, triggers for form, and et cetera, with weighted scores for every aspect that are ultimately factored into one final score.
If final score is passing, the PR is presented for a human to review like a PR was (say) 5 years ago. If the final score fails, it goes into the circular file where it will probably die.
I would guess we'll start seeing more open source projects with much tighter restrictions on who can participate. Closed contributions and heavily automated (or even closed) issue tracking is probably already happening and will spread faster.
I entirely sympathize with these maintainers too. I've had 2 instances where an LLM has surfaced a bug and I just couldn't get myself to open a PR and dump more work onto these maintainers, even after manually writing one up (neither were critical bugs, it's fine).
Seeing popular projects (like hermes) having 5k issues and 5k pull requests is madness.
These exist. Very elaborate systems in many cases. Otherwise Hermes would probably have 30,000. Like a lot of agent tools they merge a ton of slop though so I wouldn’t consider them leaders.
On the other hand we'll probably see a lot more fully vibecoded projects gaining traction, because of the rate at which they can move once human design and review gets taken out of the equation.
For example, I recently came across Hucre, https://github.com/productdevbook/hucre, which is a JS spreadsheet library apparently developed entirely in the past few months and which has already gained 2.2k GH stars.
Is it any good? Who knows, but the alternatives for spreadsheet handling in JS aren't great, either being limited, semi-commercial, or unmaintained. And creating a new one without LLM-assistance is a huge, painful, mostly thankless undertaking. It's not surprising that a zero-dependency option that promises to do everything this can do would be popular.
Everyone has had the experience of butting their head against functionality limitations of open-source libraries. Fully vibecoded libraries will be able to add functionality at a rate that human-authored ones can't. Code quality might suffer, but if a library has a feature you need, and you've got a deadline to hit, are you going to avoid using it? Is the average developer? Or the average LLM?
I think we're about to hit an interesting period of human-only projects competing with vibecoded ones, and it'll be an acid test as to whether the pro and anti claims about AI-coding bear out in terms of code reliably.
You know, it’s petty, but I think one of the things I hate the most about AI is that it surpassed front end JavaScript frameworks in terms of changing what the standard is every few years.
What’s the point of learning anything if it becomes obsolete faster than the seasons change?
Yea. I've evaluated these AI development patterns 3-4 times over the past year while applying for jobs.
I've been told by currently employed engineers that I was at state of the art development after a week of using them each time.
This also seems to have played out in hiring as every interview I've managed to pull has been completely schizophrenic with the interviewers wanting me to show AI fluency(for whatever that means) and then seemingly panicking mid way through as I start using the AI that can immediately solve the bog standard interview questions and then switch to having me manually build things.
There are a massive number of people who want the ends of programming and geekery but lacked the means. They are overjoyed that they can abrogate the means and enjoy the reflected light of achievement, especially if it cheapens the part they feel inferior about: namely, actually understanding and learning about the systems.
As such, to them, it’s a BENEFIT if the systems change at a rate no mortal would ever agree to. Why learn anything, after all?
Just so you know, the frontend framework wars started and ended pretty quickly in the latter half of the 2010s.
It was the downstream effect of the browser wars settling down and W3C making big moves on getting vendors to finally implement standards that were sorely needed. It had nothing to do with web dev culture.
> Just so you know, the frontend framework wars started and ended pretty quickly in the latter half of the 2010s.
Funny thing on HN. I saw people actively complaining about “JavaScript framework of the week” posts well into the early 2020s… when they were no longer really a thing.
I found it a bit hard to understand this discussion because I wasn't familiar with the background. If I've got this right, his project let you run Linux on a PlayStation 5 (thus also providing the ability to run modern games).
Slop kiddies using AI discovered the PS5 hypervisor exploit it relied on for installation. Initially they agreed to his request to delay reporting it to Sony until after GTA6 came out (so users could at least install and enjoy that highly anticipated game). But then they turned around and disclosed it anyway (the same or next day?).
They presumably gained a nominal bounty, but nuked the project he'd poured so much hard work into. Including support for the PS5 Pro he was preparing to release next year.
The community used to be a group of talented researchers, but he's frustrated it's diluted into participants who aren't aligned with his values and don't even understand the hacks they produce.
> The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony.
I don’t know if he’s mad AI scooped a bug? Or that LLM slop kiddies don’t pay attention to that something is already known?
Reading all of the quotes it seems he's more annoyed that they disclosed the bug to Sony to collect the bounty, and that they're using AI as an afterthought
> The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony.
Sounds like he is salty that somebody found an exploit using LLM that he found manually (which probably took a significant amount of time.) I can partly understand it, but I mean that's also just the game that somebody else might find an exploit, LLMs just make it easier. LLMs finding bugs is not a bad thing, just sucks for enjoyers of open source software in this particular case.
>I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead.
This guy has used on working with people that understand the scene, it seems that they were in contact, they agreed on something and then the next day they did something different.
This is really important in the context of what happened and probably the cherry on top of the current "hacking" cake, with the bar being lowered so much that anybody can jump in with some minor skill and luck and get something just for themselves.
> Sounds like he is salty that somebody found an exploit using LLM that he found manually
Nope. He is salty because someone made public the secret exploit that Linux-on-PS5 apparently relies upon to bypass Sony's hypervisor protection. Now Sony will fix the exploit, and there will be no more Linux on the PS5 until another exploit is found.
It sounds like he had already found it the old fashioned way, then the noobs sic'd the LLMs on it, found it, and he told them "hey chill, we knew about this, don't ruin it" and they ruined it.
To quote Dr Ian Malcolm:
"If I may... Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now
[bangs on the table]"
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I've seen this behavior from others in the space before too, it's not a one-off. They refuse to use LLMs themselves, and state as much publicly "I simply don't need to resort to using the slop machine, my skills are superior", yet FUME when others they deem as "lesser" are able to use it to achieve the same results as them, oftentimes faster.
I can guarantee this post would not have been made had he not been the one to find that vuln first.
"Sounds like he is salty that somebody found an exploit using LLM that he found manually"
No, he's salty that this last remaining hypervisor exploit is going to get patched, causing his PS5 Linux project to get wholly-fucked as now there will be no (currently-known) way to sideload the OS. Reading comprehension is very important here.
This sounds like LLM noobs ruined the chance of legally playing GTA6 and habe Linux support and he seems pretty frustrated about it
> I am stepping away from the ps5 scene and stopping all my work on ps5 linux.
After pouring my heart and months of my life into it, including plans to finish ps5 pro support and release in 2027, it's all down the sink.
> The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony.
> I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead.
This title and the first quote are misleading. A dev found an undisclosed hypervisor exploit using AI that TheFlow0 had been using and keeping secret, but the other dev had informed Sony to collect the bug bounty.
It's an issue that the dev attempted to collect the bug bounty, AI or no
Ok, that's indeed much different from what title implies, essentially attempting to contribute with AI code/reviews. Sony pays $$$$ for security exploits. If indeed a "slop kiddy", i.e. a noob fooling around with an LLM, found it, and if they aren't interested in homebrew scene like theflow, makes no sense not to report it and wait, as it's a bug that's now trivial to find, and can expect many others to.
> it seems that vibe-coders, or “slop kiddies” as the modder dubbed them, used AI to detect a bug that they were using to crack consoles, and reported it to Sony for a bounty.
That would indeed be incredibly demoralizing, even crushing. Quite a dick move.
Now that said, I imagine it was only a matter of time anyway until Sony found/fixed or someone else did the same thing. It's just a different world now.
As much as I'd love a non locked down PS5, anyone buying one knows what they're getting. If you care about user empowerment, PC (Valve hardware, etc) is the place to put your money and time. Sony is actively hostile toward you and wants you locked down, and trying to fight it with exploits is destined to be a nasty cat and mouse game. Go with a vendor that is more aligned to your values.
So the non-noob-but-asshole (supposedly talented) dev was relying on the fact that Sony would not run the same tools "noobs" did. Well, that's.. not smart.
It's strange working on Opensource these days. I've mostly worked on my own stuff alone which usually doesn't get much attention/additional contribution. Then I see on Reddit, HN or LinkedIn someone creating a major App or Plugin in a weekend. Sometimes I take a closer look the artisanal quality is effectively unmaintainable, at least for humans. But in the end it's hard to get a good overview, and the sheer quantity seems to dwarf any other efforts.
Not to mention how the code can then be sourced by an AI model in an instant without any credit.
There’s also the other side of the same coin where maintainers ignore your contributions. I’m happily forking things permanently and will likely rewrite them on cleaner foundations. I’ve never loved my tools more than I do now when I can get them coded at the same pace I think of them.
On the other hand, it’s been clear for a while that software as we knew will end up at a close to 0 marginal value.
We've solved this in our FOSS project by requiring all PRs to have been tested and manually signed off by a human. It significantly decreased the amount of spammy LLM made PRs, while empowering the core contributors to move faster.
I've seen kiddies take advantage of homebrew developers to develop game piracy many times, but this is the first time I've seen kiddies do it to fix the exploit for the bug bounty. How the times have changed.
The headline here is off, PS5 Linux relies on bugs for installs, and the project couldn’t keep the last know hypervisor bug secret:
> Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony,” the modder said on social media. “I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead.”
So what has really happened is the LLMs have lowered the participation floor for this space enough the dynamics are changing. The new comers would rather have a few dollars vs. the founders who would rather have a project. It’s likely the projects days were numbered either way because Sony could also just take a frontier LLM and examine any released installer for the project and reverse engineer and bug.
Everyone in this scene knows upgrading your console is sure path to getting yourself locked out of current and probably future exploits. I don't think anything really changed here. The moment these exploits go public, they'll be patched in the next version.
This vulnerability will still exist in older versions. The project can still continue development of Linux on PS5 and, eventually, another exploit will be found that enables the installation on a later version.
Frankly, based on the language used, a resignation over this seems to have a lot more to do with the person being upset that LLMs are lowering the bar for entry. They seem more upset that their skills aren't as useful as they were.
It seems like the reputation as a PS5 hacker was the objective, not getting Linux running on PS5.
I think the reason to not invest your time in PS5 linux is that sony hates it and will patch it away over and over, and nobody really wants it. It's $200, mediocre hardware.
I might be showing a lot of unc energy here, but if you can't afford a raspberry pi or something to play with linux, or a used pc, gaming and having a playstation 5 should be de prioritized for a bit while you get your life together.
> I might be showing a lot of unc energy here, but if you can't afford a raspberry pi or something to play with linux, or a used pc, gaming and having a playstation 5 should be de prioritized for a bit while you get your life together.
Your comment is framed as though Linux usage and what you deem an unstable lifestyle (lack of monetary means in your judgment) are mutually exclusive. Open-source software is for everybody, including the messy or disenfranchised. Would you frame a kid who got a PS5 for Christmas who doesn't have an allowance or job as a failure because they don't have $100 to spend on a Pi? It sounds like you just look down on people playing video games even when they want to use the very thing you're implicitly deriding to do the thing that you think they should be doing... doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
You've misunderstood something deeply. PS5 Linux doesn't exist because running Linux on PS5 is something useful or practical. Exists due to the curiosity and fun of running a free OS on a locked-down device. Maybe some nostalgia mixed in as Linux has existed in every other PS (even PSP/PS Vita).
Fascinating times we live in, when "the last hypervisor bug" in what is presumably one of the most hardened pieces of consumer hardware can be found by "noobs" and "slop kiddies".
I say it's only because LLMs came out after the PS5 was developed. Presumably, future generations of hw (if there are any) will use the same methods to harden the attack surface. Good ole cat and mouse.
No, it doesn't. Nobody would go do this just to report it to Sony for a few pennies. That is a non-existent motivation for people in the know, who understand the opportunity cost.
> “Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony,” the modder said on social media. “I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead.”
Ever since consoles became moving targets there's been deliberate gatekeeping - specifically, drip-feeding of bugs - to maximize the chance someone can actually use them to break DRM and install Linux. This relies on the fact that most people do not want to have to become FreeBSD kernel experts in order to install non-PlayStation software on their PlayStation. But if everyone is vibe-hacking their PS5s then none of this logic applies. Any bug Claude can find is one Sony also knows about and will get patched, possibly before you even release an exploit for it.
How this ultimately plays out depends on if it's even possible to write software without bugs. Maybe this reaches a new equilibrium where people are paying Claude to vibe-code jailbreaks - as I'd initially hoped. But it's equally as likely that this winds up reinforcing DRM rather than weakening it, for a few reasons:
1. Anthropic's AI safetyism culture encourages the prohibition of vibe-coded jailbreaks. The fact that the model runs on a server and people are spying on your chatlogs means Anthropic has actual knowledge of who is actually using their service to find PS5 hypervisor bugs. Letting Claude break DRM is legally risky; DMCA 1201 implies the only lawful way to break DRM is for you to find your own bugs. So it's probably not going to be long until everyone vibe-coding jailbreaks will get banned.
2. Sony will not be getting banned from these services, they will get trusted access as they're big enough for Anthropic to sue if it gets misused.
3. The attack surface of the thing you have to actually compromise to get code execution on any locked-down system is really small. The Xbox 360 had a 15+ year gap[0] of no softmodding because they'd isolated all the memory protection into a hypervisor. Apple learned the same lesson and iPhone jailbreaking went from incredibly commonplace to "if you know how to do it someone at Zerodium will hand you a million dollars to write spyware with it".
[0] AFAIK, the only two actual softmoddable bugs on Xbox 360 were the King Kong hack right at launch, which got patched in like a week, and that BadUpdate thing last year.
> “Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony,” the modder said on social media. “I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead.”
If one user could have found this using AI. Then I would imagine anyone else could have found it.
Then I would imagine anyone else could have found it.
Right, including Sony. AI finding security flaws is very good in general, but one downside is that it will become easier to make "secure" devices that are hostile toward their owners.
Sure, but that wasn't what I was getting at. The guy is complaining about the exploit being disclosed to Sony, but anyone who used the same tools could have found it. It's kind of like complaining that someone has spoilt the ending to a film when it been out for over a year.
> If one user could have found this using AI. Then I would imagine anyone else could have found it.
People are still fixated on using AI to produce code (to reduce salary costs/dev time) rather than using it to audit bugs in one own's code, which they are better at.
LLMs have taken over so many projects already. If I were young,
would I want to contribute to projects maintained these days via
AI slop? I would not find that interesting at all.
Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people. It's definitely become a game of just spam claude for answers with zero understanding or care for how anything actually works. That's fine to get things done and fine for a lot of side projects, but it definitely ruins the joy that people have in understanding systems and working with intellectuals.
> Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people.
Same thing did happen to many work places. People at all levels proxy questions through LLMs and don't even bother to read/trim/edit the response.
Funny, how suddenly a tight, 1-2 sentence response on point is a sign of skill.
Wasn't there an article here, or was it under another HN post as a comment? Someone pointed out that the before the dawn of LLMs, "bad contributors" had a rate limiter of sorts. Now anyone can prompt their LLM and throw their output at you, shifting the burden entirely on the reviewer at highest possible speed.
It's so much worse than just that. Because they will also decide on how problem should be solved by prompting LLM and ask you to argument doing it any other way vs the LLM slop they pasted
It which point you reject the PR and suggest them to maintain a fork themselves.
Just this morning I had a senior manager say to me "I was trying to do someone else's job and give them all the info so they can review it as I have no knowledge" in response to me asking for them to please filter the Claude word salad using the meat proxy. I'm pretty tired of having to do the job of filtering the low-effort copy-paste walls of text
Similar to sending a "Let Me Google That For You" except somehow because it was an LLM not Google, they've forgotten it's more insulting than helpful, and aren't even in on the joke they themselves are making.
Well - the "let me google that for you" nowadays barely works, because google ruined the search engine. The search engine sucks now - and by default the first results are AI slop summaries that are IMO worthless.
I saw a product manager that used to do that, just ask developers to verify the Claude hallucination and placeholder numbers.
He got fired quite quickly after his boss realized it was all bullshit.
> Funny, how suddenly a tight, 1-2 sentence response on point is a sign of skill.
Wasn't it always?
I agree, anecdotally I've always noticed a huge amount of my peers lacked professional communication skills even pre-LLMs.
A lot of people get this idea that "more verbosity = better" instead of optimizing for conciseness and information-density. I largely blame minimum word-count essays from school assignments.
Verbosity can be fine, but you'd want a simple enough text, with the verbosity separated. I still write emails with footnotes, and thanks to UTF-8 I now have all the numbers available.
Amusingly enough the advent of HTML-emails didn't produce any better formatted mails, despite the extra formatting options, than what you can do with a plain text email supported by a proper text editor.
Would you like me to edit this mess for you? You’re way too verbose..
"As brevity is the soul of wit, I shall be brief. [then bloviates on and on.]" ~Polonius
I’d have written a shorter comment, but I didn’t have the time.
That's the essence of it, I suppose. Cheap walls of text.
Edit: although another quote comes to mind- "Quantity has a quality of its own."
Was also a power signal, often demonstrated by execs who send three or four word replies to everything, often also in lower case with no punctuation.
Depends. A lot of the 1-2 sentence rapid responders from my past jobs weren’t really understanding the problem. They were virtue signaling that they were confident, fast to respond, and understood immediately (without elaborating)
It’s easy to send a pithy response that suggests experience and understanding without having either. Think of a middle manager spouting pithy buzzword laden cliches confidently in response to every request, then transferring the real problem to the grumbling employees who have to solve the actual hard parts of the problem which lie in the nuance.
I think a lot of workplaces would do well to ban LLM-based replies in certain spaces.
Meat proxies. Artificially intelligent.
That's why I tell my Claude to keep its responses short :V
caveman mode good
https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman
> Funny, how suddenly a tight, 1-2 sentence response on point is a sign of skill.
Communicating well has always been a sign of skill. Talking to most devs was like pulling teeth even before LLMs.
In my hobby groups there has always been a second, smaller, more intimate invite-only space for people doing the deep work. It’s the only way to do the work in the age of 1000-member Discords where important conversations get lost in the scroll back instantly.
The experience in these spaces is largely the same. LLMs can be used there, too, but when the experts are using them with experience to back it up the results are a lot better.
The people who are really struggling in my few hobby groups (not PS5) are those who enjoyed some social status from their knowledge. They were heros and people sought them out and revered their work in 2023. LLMs came along and partially leveled the playing field. When a determined kid with a Deepseek subscription can produce a sloppy version of what took you years to find, that sense of being a heroic figure at the next level is gone.
I think this reveals another wrinkle, which is that the status hierarchy wasn’t that solid or worthwhile anyway. Outside of a few vocal people trying to enforce the status hierarchy, most people don’t care who releases their jailbreak or PS5 exploit. They just want it. Whoever gets it to them first becomes the new king.
This PS5 incident has some strange element where supposedly keeping the reveal secret for 2 more weeks would have changed something with the GTA6 release. There were also 3 people who found the same exploit independent and some large amount of money on the line for the first of them to report it. The person who reported it signed off to spend time with his dying mother, so can’t really fault them for doing the thing they earned according to the rules of the program.
The status thing is probably part of it, but I'm not sure "a kid with Deepseek can make a sloppy version" actually shows that the old hierarchy was meaningless.
I meant that it was a slight illusion. These hierarchies can flip overnight when someone new enters the scene and delivers the thing the community wants.
An old guard always tries to enforce an ordering of respect based on seniority and who they think has earned it the most. Outside of a terminally online circle of Discord users few people care. They only want the thing so they can use it.
LLMs are a big disruption because now because effort and results have never been more uncoupled. When a kid with an LLM can do a sloppy but good enough version of the work in 1/100th of the time with 1/100th of the experience, the social hierarchy only matters to people who value it above the outcome itself.
> Outside of a few vocal people trying to enforce the status hierarchy, most people don’t care who releases their jailbreak or PS5 exploit. They just want it. Whoever gets it to them first becomes the new king.
"Commodification" might be a relevant word here.
You can fight that by "building a personal brand", but then you're suddenly brand building instead of hacking, and hacking was what you actually wanted to do.
I guess it works best if you're not in it for clout but because you want something to exist. But even then it is difficult.
> There were also 3 people who found the same exploit independent and some large amount of money on the line for the first of them to report it.
Ah yes, game theory. Oof.
> Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people
It is insane just how miserable the experience of FOSS hardware hacking in public is.
The expectation does not even the slightest match reality. You'd think "ah yes many eyes meaning all bugs get shallow", but instead you get worst of XDA-Developers and toxic wastelands where no sane person even answers anymore.
But this predates LLMs and was as miserable as it is now before as well.
In fact, I might even argue that LLMs made this _better_, because you can now avoid the "opening up in hopes of finding 1 helpful person below 99 annoying ones" through simple GPU compute.
Previously, you had to hope that through this self-inflicted horror, you'd find an expert that can augment you. Now that expert rests on huggingface.
It's still.. not perfect, of course. But it might be less miserable - provided that you adapt to the current state of things and stop with the "trawling for volunteers".
__
Of course, this does not help you against "skids let claude find bugs that you'd need and burn it for no reason" as per the twitter thread, but I wouldn't rule out that they would not have done that, if less information was public.
And.. that too was an issue before LLMs.
Information wants to be free, but so does your cat, and your cat gets run over by some crackhead in a 30 year old rusty pickup if you just put it outside without thinking.
So don't let it go out unattended.
That said, this "pep talk" is more directed at myself than at poor Andy. This must all suck big time.
Projects like this probably need a dedicated noob-fork where 'anything goes', so the noobs feel like they're contributing but where their blast radius is contained.
And once in a blue moon something good comes out of it back to the real project.
With how verbose LLMs are and how much code churn they generate, it will be very difficult to extract anything and apply it back upstream
For a hobby community, getting to the answer isn't necessarily the main value
> Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people.
This is definitely the case for me. Before AI tools became mainstream, it was already a difficult proposition to find other smart people who you could get along with and talk to, do something interesting together. The Internet made all the difference in my life because I was able to get outside my geographic region to do big things through open source and hacker communities. Now, that very important filter mechanism no longer works. It's Eternal September all over again. In a way, it's very much a domination of "ends" over "means" in the wider community that is being forced upon those who long focused on "means". For a lot of intelligent people, understanding something is /valuable on its own/, but for the wider world there is no value in simply knowing things, but what you do with that knowledge (or now that lack of knowledge). I even experienced this recently at DEFCON 34 where I saw other participants in some of the CTFs with me using AI tools and not really understanding what the tools were doing or what was happening, but just kind of bruteforcing/tokenmaxxing their way through. This isn't to say that those AI tools are fundamentally a bad thing to use in building open source software, security research, or even as a tool in a CTF, but that the "understanding" step needs to still be present or it destroys the fun in everything.
I'm certainly not having as much fun with computers these days, even as I've invested a lot of effort myself in local LLMs and trying to understand the tools and understand how to apply them reasonably, I've found I prefer much more analog entertainments. Thankfully there's always photography and lockpicking to entertain me at the moment and provide a pathway to meet other interesting fellows.
It is not fine.
completely different world, but i've seen this happen in music spaces as well.
the idea of gatekeeping is often seen as elitist or exclusionary (fairly enough in many cases) but i think this can be an exaggerated description of a culture that necessarily requires a standard of... let's say, desire to engage with material on a sufficiently deep level. many things can be for anybody, but they are not for everybody.
in the past i've seen the phenomenon of "opening up" subcultures or previously-niche intellectual/art fields described as democratization but i think that ignores a big part of what causes this, which can more accurately be described as commodification. access to difficult things was formerly measured by one's ability to expend effort in order to get there (ignoring, for now, the structural conditions that set one up for success in that effort). when these things are commodified, these efforts and identities become products to purchase, the right to which is nearly never limited; in fact, it's almost seen as evil to imply that they should not be available to any individual at any time that individual may desire access.
i know we all have to start somewhere, but there has always been some historical filtration that leads people who are not truly engaged with a subject on a deep level to disengage at some point. that's changing at a novel rate and scale across so many subcultures. it seems like a lot of us are just surprised at how many people even want access to what were once our sanctuaries and we're not capable of grappling with what it takes to adapt to these changes.
i don't think this will pass or that things will return to "the way they were" but there will always be pockets that resemble previous subcultural forms. we just have to re-learn how to identify them with a keener eye and how to better avoid or more-appropriately interact with those who have a more superficial interest in them.
While you might have access to the subculture, there is no obligation for anyone else to respond, collaborate or engage with random you. This is a common mistaken understanding about open-source software projects where users often believe they have "rights" to compel or coerce volunteer developers to listen or reply to them. Developers collaborating together isn't a conspiracy, it's just preferences getting played out. No, I don't want to collaborate with someone that I don't like.... duh?
It gets bad when the subculture inhabitants get confused and adopt the social norms of the passer bys instead of remembering the importance of well-kept gardens. And then they start to introduce "policy".. which is just a backdoor for attackers to destroy your well-kept garden by arguing policy (as if that was what the subculture was about!).
In general, society is experience a decoupling of fun from work. I can't say I enjoy every aspect of my job, but it's nice to enjoy some of it, and lots of people do find a lot of their job at least somewhat rewarding.
People who hate their job of course like to come out of the woodwork and say no one should enjoy it, but isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people can enjoy their work? I used to enjoy teaching but I'd never get a teaching job now because of how AI is being used in that sector.
Technophiles will say that we should embrace the future because its inevitable but how many good people quitting does it take before they realize that a vibe-coded future of fun isn't all there is to life?
> but isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people can enjoy their work?
That’s an interesting question. I thought about it for a minute and was surprised that I came to the conclusion that the answer isn’t obviously “yes”.
An analogous question is “isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people are rich?”, and I think that question should make it clearer to many people why that is so.
> An analogous question is “isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people are rich?”
There’s a crucial difference between the two questions. “Rich” is a relative term: If everyone had the same amount of money, no one would be rich, you need someone to be worse off (poor) to have someone better off (rich). But someone enjoying their work has no bearing on someone else’s enjoyment of theirs.
you need someone to be worse off (poor) to have someone better off (rich).
The fact that so many people believe this is what bums me out.
You need to understand something: the people who want you to think this way do not have your best interests in mind, any more than the rabid right-wing Trumpers do.
You completely misunderstood the point.
In no way do I mean that someone has to suffer for someone else to thrive. We could (and should) all thrive and have our needs met.
I’m just saying the term is relative, like “tall” and “short”. If we were all the same height, no one would be tall or short, we’d just be. If we all had the same amount of money, no one would be rich or poor.
An economy isn't a zero-sum game. Wealth doesn't just pop into existence when someone in the government clicks a button on a screen. Money is created that way, but wealth isn't. It has to be created by creating something that someone else values enough to pay for willingly.
No one has to lose anything, in the sense that no one has to give up more than they think the product or service is worth to them. In your example, it's possible for everyone to grow taller.
This space is where AI usage is most confounding to me. Regardless of your stance on AI, this work does not need to be done. So if you don't enjoy it enough to actually do it, why are you even here? If you do enjoy the work, why are you letting the AI do your hobby? Don't you miss it?
Some people get value out of finding results not the actual work. It is still work, just different kind of work.
Power. It's people jockeying for power over groups.
It doesn't matter if you have no interest in <autistic specialty>, the point is that you can force a bunch of nerds to bend to your will.
now imagine how many other devs and maintainers are contemplating this but just haven't been pushed to their personal breaking point yet. or take note of how many, when asked about the spam problem, just nervously go "yeah it's kinda rough haha...". or how many will vent about it on their twitter-like of choice with increasing frequency.
remember hacktoberfest 2020? that's just all public-facing source 365 days a year now, except instead of "updated README.md" it's some vaguely-plausible fix... then you read the PR body and someone couldn't even be bothered to, or, just as likely couldn't explain it themselves. and that sort of sinking dread sets in.
> remember hacktoberfest 2020?
Oh man, if you read the threads about that it's such a time capsule of a different era:
e.g. from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628342
> I am honestly surprised how little SPAM there is on GitHub in general. Please don’t take that as a challenge!
Microsoft took it as a challenge.
> now imagine how many other devs and maintainers are contemplating this but just haven't been pushed to their personal breaking point yet. or take note of how many, when asked about the spam problem, just nervously go "yeah it's kinda rough haha..."
At first, my brain parsed "spam" as in ye olde email spam. It took a moment for it to sink in that you meant code spam, instead.
But now that the two concepts are linked in my little pea brain: I kind of want to see how a system like SpamAssassin would work when applied to pull requests like it has been applied to email.
It can use reputation, real-time blacklists, triggers for form, and et cetera, with weighted scores for every aspect that are ultimately factored into one final score.
If final score is passing, the PR is presented for a human to review like a PR was (say) 5 years ago. If the final score fails, it goes into the circular file where it will probably die.
There are reputation and vouch systems but there is definitely room for innovation; I don’t think there is any clear leader.
The funny part is that we'd probably recreate the entire email spam arms race
The asymmetry is what makes this feel unsustainable
I would guess we'll start seeing more open source projects with much tighter restrictions on who can participate. Closed contributions and heavily automated (or even closed) issue tracking is probably already happening and will spread faster.
I entirely sympathize with these maintainers too. I've had 2 instances where an LLM has surfaced a bug and I just couldn't get myself to open a PR and dump more work onto these maintainers, even after manually writing one up (neither were critical bugs, it's fine).
Seeing popular projects (like hermes) having 5k issues and 5k pull requests is madness.
> Seeing popular projects (like hermes) having 5k issues and 5k pull requests is madness.
It's actually got nearly 30k open pull requests!
Modern problems require modern solutions.
Why not set up a triage bot with only read permissions on the project and restricted network access in order to triage issues?
Perhaps this way one could turn the influx of spam into a source of useful information.
These exist. Very elaborate systems in many cases. Otherwise Hermes would probably have 30,000. Like a lot of agent tools they merge a ton of slop though so I wouldn’t consider them leaders.
> Otherwise Hermes would probably have 30,000.
It already does!
On the other hand we'll probably see a lot more fully vibecoded projects gaining traction, because of the rate at which they can move once human design and review gets taken out of the equation.
For example, I recently came across Hucre, https://github.com/productdevbook/hucre, which is a JS spreadsheet library apparently developed entirely in the past few months and which has already gained 2.2k GH stars.
Is it any good? Who knows, but the alternatives for spreadsheet handling in JS aren't great, either being limited, semi-commercial, or unmaintained. And creating a new one without LLM-assistance is a huge, painful, mostly thankless undertaking. It's not surprising that a zero-dependency option that promises to do everything this can do would be popular.
Everyone has had the experience of butting their head against functionality limitations of open-source libraries. Fully vibecoded libraries will be able to add functionality at a rate that human-authored ones can't. Code quality might suffer, but if a library has a feature you need, and you've got a deadline to hit, are you going to avoid using it? Is the average developer? Or the average LLM?
I think we're about to hit an interesting period of human-only projects competing with vibecoded ones, and it'll be an acid test as to whether the pro and anti claims about AI-coding bear out in terms of code reliably.
Misleading title, there's another major reason: it's an embargo agreement violation that jeopardizes Linux support on PS5.
https://x.com/theflow0/status/2099987019954831744
Nothing misleading about the title and you are splitting hairs.
Omitting half of the story is misleading, this isn't a pro/anti LLM story.
Vibecoding has been the norm for months, it's the embargo violation today that triggered his resignation.
> Vibecoding has been the norm for months
That's your editorialization.
The headline accurately summarizes the main point of the story, and the part that is emphasized is from the subject of the story.
Just because something is the norm, which I doubt, doesn’t mean it’s good.
Eventually comes the straw that brakes the camel‘s back
> …been the norm for months…
You know, it’s petty, but I think one of the things I hate the most about AI is that it surpassed front end JavaScript frameworks in terms of changing what the standard is every few years.
What’s the point of learning anything if it becomes obsolete faster than the seasons change?
It's the fear of being left behind that fuels both these things.
Left behind what?
If AI works as promised coming late to the game is an advantage.
How many tricks for prompts are already obsolete, how many tools, harnesses etc. are already replaced by better alternatives?
It’s the difference between knowing a foreign language and only using a translator.
The former changes you brain structure and your way of thinking, the latter don’t.
Yea. I've evaluated these AI development patterns 3-4 times over the past year while applying for jobs.
I've been told by currently employed engineers that I was at state of the art development after a week of using them each time.
This also seems to have played out in hiring as every interview I've managed to pull has been completely schizophrenic with the interviewers wanting me to show AI fluency(for whatever that means) and then seemingly panicking mid way through as I start using the AI that can immediately solve the bog standard interview questions and then switch to having me manually build things.
There are a massive number of people who want the ends of programming and geekery but lacked the means. They are overjoyed that they can abrogate the means and enjoy the reflected light of achievement, especially if it cheapens the part they feel inferior about: namely, actually understanding and learning about the systems.
As such, to them, it’s a BENEFIT if the systems change at a rate no mortal would ever agree to. Why learn anything, after all?
Just so you know, the frontend framework wars started and ended pretty quickly in the latter half of the 2010s.
It was the downstream effect of the browser wars settling down and W3C making big moves on getting vendors to finally implement standards that were sorely needed. It had nothing to do with web dev culture.
> Just so you know, the frontend framework wars started and ended pretty quickly in the latter half of the 2010s.
Funny thing on HN. I saw people actively complaining about “JavaScript framework of the week” posts well into the early 2020s… when they were no longer really a thing.
> It had nothing to do with web dev culture.
It may not have been started because of web dev culture, but it definitely influenced web dev culture.
Are you a web developer?
I was before the market crunched.
What's the reason for the credential check?
To be fair the JS frontend communities brought this to themselves way before LLM slop.
For those without X accounts (now that Nitter an XCancel are down): https://archive.ph/GQLvx
xxcancel.com is up and working.
I found it a bit hard to understand this discussion because I wasn't familiar with the background. If I've got this right, his project let you run Linux on a PlayStation 5 (thus also providing the ability to run modern games).
Slop kiddies using AI discovered the PS5 hypervisor exploit it relied on for installation. Initially they agreed to his request to delay reporting it to Sony until after GTA6 came out (so users could at least install and enjoy that highly anticipated game). But then they turned around and disclosed it anyway (the same or next day?).
They presumably gained a nominal bounty, but nuked the project he'd poured so much hard work into. Including support for the PS5 Pro he was preparing to release next year.
The community used to be a group of talented researchers, but he's frustrated it's diluted into participants who aren't aligned with his values and don't even understand the hacks they produce.
> The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony.
I don’t know if he’s mad AI scooped a bug? Or that LLM slop kiddies don’t pay attention to that something is already known?
Reading all of the quotes it seems he's more annoyed that they disclosed the bug to Sony to collect the bounty, and that they're using AI as an afterthought
Did you even click the link? That's not true at all. The title matches the tin.
> The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony.
Sounds like he is salty that somebody found an exploit using LLM that he found manually (which probably took a significant amount of time.) I can partly understand it, but I mean that's also just the game that somebody else might find an exploit, LLMs just make it easier. LLMs finding bugs is not a bad thing, just sucks for enjoyers of open source software in this particular case.
You can probably find more though.
>I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead.
This guy has used on working with people that understand the scene, it seems that they were in contact, they agreed on something and then the next day they did something different.
This is really important in the context of what happened and probably the cherry on top of the current "hacking" cake, with the bar being lowered so much that anybody can jump in with some minor skill and luck and get something just for themselves.
Rather, he's annoyed because the LLM User submitted the exploit to Sony (to get paid) and killed the only known viable path forward for development.
Any noticing what it paid?
yeah, and tbh he should be, one douche ruined it for the rest of us
> Sounds like he is salty that somebody found an exploit using LLM that he found manually
Nope. He is salty because someone made public the secret exploit that Linux-on-PS5 apparently relies upon to bypass Sony's hypervisor protection. Now Sony will fix the exploit, and there will be no more Linux on the PS5 until another exploit is found.
Okay, I misunderstood. But it wasn't particularly secret if 'noobs' had access then?
You didn't misunderstand. Misundertanding requires a higher level of engagement than you have demonstrated.
> But it wasn't particularly secret if 'noobs' had access then?
And you persist.
It sounds like he had already found it the old fashioned way, then the noobs sic'd the LLMs on it, found it, and he told them "hey chill, we knew about this, don't ruin it" and they ruined it.
To quote Dr Ian Malcolm:
"If I may... Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now [bangs on the table]"
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I've seen this behavior from others in the space before too, it's not a one-off. They refuse to use LLMs themselves, and state as much publicly "I simply don't need to resort to using the slop machine, my skills are superior", yet FUME when others they deem as "lesser" are able to use it to achieve the same results as them, oftentimes faster.
I can guarantee this post would not have been made had he not been the one to find that vuln first.
In this case, the "same result" was killing the project for money. But yeah, lol he mad, xd, etc. What a quality contribution.
"Sounds like he is salty that somebody found an exploit using LLM that he found manually"
No, he's salty that this last remaining hypervisor exploit is going to get patched, causing his PS5 Linux project to get wholly-fucked as now there will be no (currently-known) way to sideload the OS. Reading comprehension is very important here.
All Sony had to do was give us a path forward to run our own code on the PS5.
But I guess Sony being a gatekeeper wasn't a gatekeeper enough for certain regulatory agencies.
This sounds like LLM noobs ruined the chance of legally playing GTA6 and habe Linux support and he seems pretty frustrated about it
> I am stepping away from the ps5 scene and stopping all my work on ps5 linux. After pouring my heart and months of my life into it, including plans to finish ps5 pro support and release in 2027, it's all down the sink.
> The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony.
> I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead.
This title and the first quote are misleading. A dev found an undisclosed hypervisor exploit using AI that TheFlow0 had been using and keeping secret, but the other dev had informed Sony to collect the bug bounty.
It's an issue that the dev attempted to collect the bug bounty, AI or no
“Using and keeping secret” - for nefarious purposes? Or to make Linux work on PS5?
Well given his history, it's almost definitely to make linux work
Ok, that's indeed much different from what title implies, essentially attempting to contribute with AI code/reviews. Sony pays $$$$ for security exploits. If indeed a "slop kiddy", i.e. a noob fooling around with an LLM, found it, and if they aren't interested in homebrew scene like theflow, makes no sense not to report it and wait, as it's a bug that's now trivial to find, and can expect many others to.
> it seems that vibe-coders, or “slop kiddies” as the modder dubbed them, used AI to detect a bug that they were using to crack consoles, and reported it to Sony for a bounty.
That would indeed be incredibly demoralizing, even crushing. Quite a dick move.
Now that said, I imagine it was only a matter of time anyway until Sony found/fixed or someone else did the same thing. It's just a different world now.
As much as I'd love a non locked down PS5, anyone buying one knows what they're getting. If you care about user empowerment, PC (Valve hardware, etc) is the place to put your money and time. Sony is actively hostile toward you and wants you locked down, and trying to fight it with exploits is destined to be a nasty cat and mouse game. Go with a vendor that is more aligned to your values.
So the non-noob-but-asshole (supposedly talented) dev was relying on the fact that Sony would not run the same tools "noobs" did. Well, that's.. not smart.
It's strange working on Opensource these days. I've mostly worked on my own stuff alone which usually doesn't get much attention/additional contribution. Then I see on Reddit, HN or LinkedIn someone creating a major App or Plugin in a weekend. Sometimes I take a closer look the artisanal quality is effectively unmaintainable, at least for humans. But in the end it's hard to get a good overview, and the sheer quantity seems to dwarf any other efforts.
Not to mention how the code can then be sourced by an AI model in an instant without any credit.
There’s also the other side of the same coin where maintainers ignore your contributions. I’m happily forking things permanently and will likely rewrite them on cleaner foundations. I’ve never loved my tools more than I do now when I can get them coded at the same pace I think of them.
On the other hand, it’s been clear for a while that software as we knew will end up at a close to 0 marginal value.
This qualifies as "AI took away my job" but we are dismissing that because the AI influence was indirectly responsible for the job loss.
We've solved this in our FOSS project by requiring all PRs to have been tested and manually signed off by a human. It significantly decreased the amount of spammy LLM made PRs, while empowering the core contributors to move faster.
I've seen kiddies take advantage of homebrew developers to develop game piracy many times, but this is the first time I've seen kiddies do it to fix the exploit for the bug bounty. How the times have changed.
The headline here is off, PS5 Linux relies on bugs for installs, and the project couldn’t keep the last know hypervisor bug secret:
> Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony,” the modder said on social media. “I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead.”
So what has really happened is the LLMs have lowered the participation floor for this space enough the dynamics are changing. The new comers would rather have a few dollars vs. the founders who would rather have a project. It’s likely the projects days were numbered either way because Sony could also just take a frontier LLM and examine any released installer for the project and reverse engineer and bug.
Lowered the barrier to entry, but also raised the stakes. My money is on dedication to the high-stakes problem.
How old was this bug? How much energy has been devoted to RE of this proprietary console? Not enough, apparently.
So the slop kiddies both don’t understand what they are doing, and they ruin the party for everyone else. Nice.
As usual: Normies end up destroying every community they get into
Everyone in this scene knows upgrading your console is sure path to getting yourself locked out of current and probably future exploits. I don't think anything really changed here. The moment these exploits go public, they'll be patched in the next version.
This vulnerability will still exist in older versions. The project can still continue development of Linux on PS5 and, eventually, another exploit will be found that enables the installation on a later version.
Frankly, based on the language used, a resignation over this seems to have a lot more to do with the person being upset that LLMs are lowering the bar for entry. They seem more upset that their skills aren't as useful as they were.
It seems like the reputation as a PS5 hacker was the objective, not getting Linux running on PS5.
I think the reason to not invest your time in PS5 linux is that sony hates it and will patch it away over and over, and nobody really wants it. It's $200, mediocre hardware.
I might be showing a lot of unc energy here, but if you can't afford a raspberry pi or something to play with linux, or a used pc, gaming and having a playstation 5 should be de prioritized for a bit while you get your life together.
> I might be showing a lot of unc energy here, but if you can't afford a raspberry pi or something to play with linux, or a used pc, gaming and having a playstation 5 should be de prioritized for a bit while you get your life together.
Your comment is framed as though Linux usage and what you deem an unstable lifestyle (lack of monetary means in your judgment) are mutually exclusive. Open-source software is for everybody, including the messy or disenfranchised. Would you frame a kid who got a PS5 for Christmas who doesn't have an allowance or job as a failure because they don't have $100 to spend on a Pi? It sounds like you just look down on people playing video games even when they want to use the very thing you're implicitly deriding to do the thing that you think they should be doing... doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
You've misunderstood something deeply. PS5 Linux doesn't exist because running Linux on PS5 is something useful or practical. Exists due to the curiosity and fun of running a free OS on a locked-down device. Maybe some nostalgia mixed in as Linux has existed in every other PS (even PSP/PS Vita).
Fascinating times we live in, when "the last hypervisor bug" in what is presumably one of the most hardened pieces of consumer hardware can be found by "noobs" and "slop kiddies".
I say it's only because LLMs came out after the PS5 was developed. Presumably, future generations of hw (if there are any) will use the same methods to harden the attack surface. Good ole cat and mouse.
Makes you wonder if it really was "noobs" and "slop kiddies" that found it.
No, it doesn't. Nobody would go do this just to report it to Sony for a few pennies. That is a non-existent motivation for people in the know, who understand the opportunity cost.
Unless they didn't want to actually make money from anything nefarious, and the bounty was more than just "a few pennies"
Well, sure, the same way that I can "cook" a three michelin star meal by going out to eat at the French Laundry.
It's just boring. And the people that crow about "their" accomplishments are tiresome.
Hypervisor bugs are boring? Maybe to you.
Hiring someone else to find them is boring as hell. If you only care about being spoonfed results, I don't think there's much to talk about.
Good, hopefully "noobs" with LLMs will replace assholes.
Gatekeeping at its finest
There's no gatekeeping here.
Too many people are reading at the momment. Check it here https://web.archive.org/web/20260916123755/https://frvr.com/...
Hopefully "people" doesn't mean scrapers
> “Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony,” the modder said on social media. “I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead.”
Ever since consoles became moving targets there's been deliberate gatekeeping - specifically, drip-feeding of bugs - to maximize the chance someone can actually use them to break DRM and install Linux. This relies on the fact that most people do not want to have to become FreeBSD kernel experts in order to install non-PlayStation software on their PlayStation. But if everyone is vibe-hacking their PS5s then none of this logic applies. Any bug Claude can find is one Sony also knows about and will get patched, possibly before you even release an exploit for it.
How this ultimately plays out depends on if it's even possible to write software without bugs. Maybe this reaches a new equilibrium where people are paying Claude to vibe-code jailbreaks - as I'd initially hoped. But it's equally as likely that this winds up reinforcing DRM rather than weakening it, for a few reasons:
1. Anthropic's AI safetyism culture encourages the prohibition of vibe-coded jailbreaks. The fact that the model runs on a server and people are spying on your chatlogs means Anthropic has actual knowledge of who is actually using their service to find PS5 hypervisor bugs. Letting Claude break DRM is legally risky; DMCA 1201 implies the only lawful way to break DRM is for you to find your own bugs. So it's probably not going to be long until everyone vibe-coding jailbreaks will get banned.
2. Sony will not be getting banned from these services, they will get trusted access as they're big enough for Anthropic to sue if it gets misused.
3. The attack surface of the thing you have to actually compromise to get code execution on any locked-down system is really small. The Xbox 360 had a 15+ year gap[0] of no softmodding because they'd isolated all the memory protection into a hypervisor. Apple learned the same lesson and iPhone jailbreaking went from incredibly commonplace to "if you know how to do it someone at Zerodium will hand you a million dollars to write spyware with it".
[0] AFAIK, the only two actual softmoddable bugs on Xbox 360 were the King Kong hack right at launch, which got patched in like a week, and that BadUpdate thing last year.
> “Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony,” the modder said on social media. “I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead.”
If one user could have found this using AI. Then I would imagine anyone else could have found it.
Then I would imagine anyone else could have found it.
Right, including Sony. AI finding security flaws is very good in general, but one downside is that it will become easier to make "secure" devices that are hostile toward their owners.
Sure, but that wasn't what I was getting at. The guy is complaining about the exploit being disclosed to Sony, but anyone who used the same tools could have found it. It's kind of like complaining that someone has spoilt the ending to a film when it been out for over a year.
> If one user could have found this using AI. Then I would imagine anyone else could have found it.
People are still fixated on using AI to produce code (to reduce salary costs/dev time) rather than using it to audit bugs in one own's code, which they are better at.
The latter has "always" been obvious to me.
Folks,
AI skynet is currently winning the war.
LLMs have taken over so many projects already. If I were young, would I want to contribute to projects maintained these days via AI slop? I would not find that interesting at all.
I mean, it sounds like a ton of inexperienced developers are finding it quite enjoyable, because they’re doing it in massive numbers.
It seems more like a spirit drainer for the experienced maintainers who have to deal with the onslaught.
I suspect we’re going to see much more strict projects with fewer allowed contributors going forward.
Though on the upside, an experienced dev can use AI to become more productive, so perhaps they will be less dependent on contributions.