I’m saying other hypothetical systems would work better
Do you have an actual system in mind and a reason to believe it is more capable of handling a flood of junk reports? Otherwise this claim is a bit of a nothingburger that you can say about literally anything.
The problem with replacing e-mail is that e-mail works well enough.
Other hypothetically “superior” replacements come and go (Google Wave, Yammer, Jive) - some are sticking around in limited scopes (Slack / Teams) - but none have displaced e-mail completely. You always have to ask: “Are you on Teams/Facebook/X?” some people are, some people aren’t. Just about everyone at least has e-mail access, and uses it to some degree or another - if nothing else to verify identity for accounts on other services.
Well they worked fine until AI flooded the system. Any hypothetical system would still have that much traffic and be very hard to manage processing all that information on a human level.
No, they’ve fallen apart in the past too when there’s a wave of overzealous idiots. It’s just in the past you could ignore the problem and it would go away naturally because humans are generally speaking lazy and aren’t going to keep it up long-term.
The only thing AI has done is made the barrier to entry drop through the floor. It is made an existing problem that is always been there more noticeable.
The problem is not caused by AI. It’s not caused by the people who use AI. They are THE problem.
What caused the problem is decades of ignoring the problem and never finding a solution to a problem. Everyone with 2 seconds to stop and think about it. Knows has been a problem.
If you leave a hole in the floor, you can’t be mad. When rats start crawling up through it. The rat is a problem but you ignoring to fix the obvious problem that you’ve known about is the reason it’s a problem.
Mailing lists are great when your solution to low effort. Spam reports is to ignore them till they go away because people are generally lazy. Sadly falls apart when the barrier to entry for making a report has fallen through the floor.
Mailing lists are a really shitty way to do things if you need to actually deal with complex management problems. Like the one at hand.
Cuz they fall apart the moment. You start getting large amounts of people acting in bad faith or even acting in good faith like total idiots.
You’re putting this like llm spam is somehow a managed problem in github issues, where it’s very much the same overwhelmed system with no good solution.
Basically every system that developers use have the same problem of falling apart. When too many people try to help either for good or ill reasons.
It says always been a problem as far back as you can go. Developers whoever take 2 seconds to think about the management side of things have known. This has been a problem as far back as you can go.
This problem has cropped up over the decades over and over again. The solution up to this point has always been ignore it. It will fix itself with time because people are lazy and will eventually get bored.
Which means that no one has ever actually tried to come up with a real solution. There have been Band-Aids minor efforts shitty attempts. But a good honest effort to deal with the problems that happened when too many people try to help.
Has never been addressed. And now that AI has functionally removed the ignorant till it goes away. Solution leaving developers all over the world without a real solution.
The problem is not AI. It’s not people submitting spam reports. The problem is the lack of anyone ever actually trying to make a scalable manageable system for this problem.
Ai is like rats crawling in through a hole in the floor. They are a problem. They are not the problem. So just trying to talk about this as if AI is the problem misses the actual one and thus makes it harder to find a real solution.
How about fixing the bugs so they’re not there to report? That’s the real “unpatched hole in the floor.”
Another “fight fire with fire” approach is to let agents do the screening for “duplicate report” and also pre-verify / test reports for reproducibility.
There are many such tools for email groups, and for the included audience, whipping up exactly what was needed for the job would be a pretty trivial task.
I think it’s time the Linux maintainers put their heads together and come up with a decentralised tool for managing these issues much in the same way git was created for managing the source code of Linux
Git was created because one of those developers actually had a problem. The fact that they haven’t tried to replace the mailing list yet suggests they don’t actually have a problem with it.
The problem highlighted by this article is the flood of slop. The mailing list is almost irrelevant, because regardless of whatever alternative you use, the flood of slop will still keep overwhelming it.
Linus always praises email. He does no social media and most of his internet usage is just email is what I gather from his conversations and interviews.
There are a few thousand other developers, any one of them could start working on a replacement if it bothered them enough. Granted, a lot of them will be grey beards who are happy with mailing lists, but still, the overall friction hasn’t pushed them far enough over the edge to replace it.
Linus is also basically the most nerdy luddite to have ever existed. His opinions on a LOT of tech past the 90s is highly suspect.
Its both a upside and a downside. Its part of the reason the Linux kernel is so reliable. But it’s also been a repeating source of issues around him over the years to various degrees.
I have recurring thoughts that the kernel needs to undergo a clear fork. One branch continues on as it is today. A new branch agressively restricts scope, drops support for sub 0.1% market (in use, not last quarter’s sales) share hardware - and software. Focuses intensively on making that core functionality as reliable and secure as possible. New features? No thanks, plenty of existing features already.
I mean, seriously, what advances of the past 10 years do desktop users need? What can’t they wait 2-5 years for it to percolate down into the XLTS kernel? Mostly security, which should be mostly invisible to the users.
Email systems and mailing lists are antiquated. Dumb behaviours make management of the system even harder.
As someone who has actually contributed to the linux kernel I think the kernel maintainers are doing a great job. Mailing lists work just fine.
Nobody said kernel maintainers aren’t doing a great job
Mailing lists work. Working fine would not be having these articles
I’m saying other hypothetical systems would work better
Do you have an actual system in mind and a reason to believe it is more capable of handling a flood of junk reports? Otherwise this claim is a bit of a nothingburger that you can say about literally anything.
The problem with replacing e-mail is that e-mail works well enough.
Other hypothetically “superior” replacements come and go (Google Wave, Yammer, Jive) - some are sticking around in limited scopes (Slack / Teams) - but none have displaced e-mail completely. You always have to ask: “Are you on Teams/Facebook/X?” some people are, some people aren’t. Just about everyone at least has e-mail access, and uses it to some degree or another - if nothing else to verify identity for accounts on other services.
Well they worked fine until AI flooded the system. Any hypothetical system would still have that much traffic and be very hard to manage processing all that information on a human level.
No, they’ve fallen apart in the past too when there’s a wave of overzealous idiots. It’s just in the past you could ignore the problem and it would go away naturally because humans are generally speaking lazy and aren’t going to keep it up long-term.
The only thing AI has done is made the barrier to entry drop through the floor. It is made an existing problem that is always been there more noticeable.
The problem is not caused by AI. It’s not caused by the people who use AI. They are THE problem.
What caused the problem is decades of ignoring the problem and never finding a solution to a problem. Everyone with 2 seconds to stop and think about it. Knows has been a problem.
If you leave a hole in the floor, you can’t be mad. When rats start crawling up through it. The rat is a problem but you ignoring to fix the obvious problem that you’ve known about is the reason it’s a problem.
Mailing lists are great when your solution to low effort. Spam reports is to ignore them till they go away because people are generally lazy. Sadly falls apart when the barrier to entry for making a report has fallen through the floor.
Mailing lists are a really shitty way to do things if you need to actually deal with complex management problems. Like the one at hand.
Cuz they fall apart the moment. You start getting large amounts of people acting in bad faith or even acting in good faith like total idiots.
I agree with you. It makes interacting with Linux kernel development tedious and I think they like it that way.
It falls apart pretty quick when they reach a certain size which is what ai posts increase the chance of.
Still it has the advantages of being decentralized which keeps it off things like GitHub issues which is probably for the better.
You’re putting this like llm spam is somehow a managed problem in github issues, where it’s very much the same overwhelmed system with no good solution.
Basically every system that developers use have the same problem of falling apart. When too many people try to help either for good or ill reasons.
It says always been a problem as far back as you can go. Developers whoever take 2 seconds to think about the management side of things have known. This has been a problem as far back as you can go.
This problem has cropped up over the decades over and over again. The solution up to this point has always been ignore it. It will fix itself with time because people are lazy and will eventually get bored.
Which means that no one has ever actually tried to come up with a real solution. There have been Band-Aids minor efforts shitty attempts. But a good honest effort to deal with the problems that happened when too many people try to help.
Has never been addressed. And now that AI has functionally removed the ignorant till it goes away. Solution leaving developers all over the world without a real solution.
The problem is not AI. It’s not people submitting spam reports. The problem is the lack of anyone ever actually trying to make a scalable manageable system for this problem.
Ai is like rats crawling in through a hole in the floor. They are a problem. They are not the problem. So just trying to talk about this as if AI is the problem misses the actual one and thus makes it harder to find a real solution.
How about fixing the bugs so they’re not there to report? That’s the real “unpatched hole in the floor.”
Another “fight fire with fire” approach is to let agents do the screening for “duplicate report” and also pre-verify / test reports for reproducibility.
I’m not saying that at all.
Meh, as good as any other tool for a running private thread.
It’s not though, hence this issue. Moderation, organisation and management tools are lacking because it’s email
There are many such tools for email groups, and for the included audience, whipping up exactly what was needed for the job would be a pretty trivial task.
What do you suggest?
I think it’s time the Linux maintainers put their heads together and come up with a decentralised tool for managing these issues much in the same way git was created for managing the source code of Linux
Git was created because one of those developers actually had a problem. The fact that they haven’t tried to replace the mailing list yet suggests they don’t actually have a problem with it.
I guess the articles are about a big nothing
The problem highlighted by this article is the flood of slop. The mailing list is almost irrelevant, because regardless of whatever alternative you use, the flood of slop will still keep overwhelming it.
There are varying opinions about the quality of the reports: https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/03/26/linux-kernel-czar-says-ai-bug-reports-arent-slop-anymore/5226256
Emails don’t allow merging threads very easily. The issue is lots of duplicates. Other tools would increase the capability to handle the popularity
Linus always praises email. He does no social media and most of his internet usage is just email is what I gather from his conversations and interviews.
There are a few thousand other developers, any one of them could start working on a replacement if it bothered them enough. Granted, a lot of them will be grey beards who are happy with mailing lists, but still, the overall friction hasn’t pushed them far enough over the edge to replace it.
Linus is also basically the most nerdy luddite to have ever existed. His opinions on a LOT of tech past the 90s is highly suspect.
Its both a upside and a downside. Its part of the reason the Linux kernel is so reliable. But it’s also been a repeating source of issues around him over the years to various degrees.
I have recurring thoughts that the kernel needs to undergo a clear fork. One branch continues on as it is today. A new branch agressively restricts scope, drops support for sub 0.1% market (in use, not last quarter’s sales) share hardware - and software. Focuses intensively on making that core functionality as reliable and secure as possible. New features? No thanks, plenty of existing features already.
Almost like a Super-LTS version of the kernel?
I mean, seriously, what advances of the past 10 years do desktop users need? What can’t they wait 2-5 years for it to percolate down into the XLTS kernel? Mostly security, which should be mostly invisible to the users.