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He is not polite, he is of the utmost rudeness. As a reply to being pointed to the fact that he copied so much code that the generated code included someone else's name in the License, his reply was https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369/changes/ce372a60bd...

I struggle to think how someone thinks this is polite. Is politeness to you just not using curse words?



Admittedly, his handling of this aspect was perhaps less than ideal, but I cannot see any impoliteness here whatsoever. As a matter of fact, I struggle to think how you could think otherwise.

But I am biased. After having lived a number of years in a country where I would say the average understanding of politeness is vastly different from where I've grown up, I've learned that there is just a difference of opinion of what is polite and what isn't. I have probably been affected by that too.


You sound like you'd characterize a thief as polite if he asked you please when taking your wallet.


Ah, I see what you mean - you're making a distinction between someone's speech and someone's acts. Fair enough. In that sense, you would argue that the action of dropping a 13k loc PR is impolite, and I can see that.

It's just that in my reading, I did not find his demeanor in the comment thread to be impolite. He was trying to sell his contribution and I think that whatever he wrote was using respectful language.


Dropping an unreviewable 13000 lines PR is disrespectful to the reviewers and their time.

Doing it without any prior discussion with the maintainers is disrespectful to the maintainers and the architecture work they put in.

Trying to "sell" your contribution is disrespectful and implies you know better than the maintainers.

Cockily saying "the AI knows better than you" is disrespectful.

Respectful and polite language does not prevent being disrespectful.


He responds to a thoughtful and detailed 600-word comment from a maintainer with a dismissive "Here's the AI-written copyright analysis..." + thousands of words of slop.

The effort asymmetry is what's rude. The maintainers take their project very seriously (as they should) and are generous enough with their time to invite contribution from outsiders. Showing up and dropping 13k lines of code, posting comments copy+pasted from a chat window, and insisting that your contribution is trustworthy not because you thought it through but because you fed it through a few LLMs shows that you don't respect the maintainers' time. In other words: you are being rude. They would have to put in more upfront effort to review your contribution than you put in to create it! Then they have to maintain it in perpetuity.


interpreting his words on a literal basis , the PR submitter isn't being directly impolite ...

if you will , place yourself in the shoes of the repository maintainer. a random person (with a personal agenda) has popped up trying to sell you a solution (that he doesn't understand) to a problem (that you don't see as problematic). after you spending literal hours patiently explaining why the proposition is not acceptable , this random person still continues attempting to sell his solution.

do you see any impoliteness in the reframed scenario ?


I think there's nothing wrong with trying to sell your solution, and I'm skeptical about the "literal hours" that you claim.

The way I interpret this thread is that the PR poster had a certain itch and came up with a vibe-coded solution that helped him. Now he's trying to make that available for others too. The maintainers don't want it because it's too large a PR to review properly and because they don't want to have to maintain it afterwards.

I can totally see both positions.

I was just referring to the fact that - in my opinion - unlike others here, his writing did not appear impolite to me. But you know, that's just me. I thought that he was trying to sell his code, and it's not unusual to get rejected at first, so I can't blame him for trying to defend his contribution. All I'm saying is that I thought he did so in a respectful manner, but of course you could argue that the whole endeavor was already an act of impoliteness, in a way?!


> his writing did not appear impolite to me

I learnt something from this thread.

That, respectfulness and politeness are more from intentions/actions than from speech alone. Politeness of language without any respect for the actual function of that speech is pointless. Indeed, that this what the LLMs are trained for. Form over function. And many humans get fooled by it and are also clueless like the person dropping the steaming turd of a PR.


that is indeed what is being argued , is it possible to screw someone over politely ?


> but I cannot see any impoliteness here whatsoever.

Ah yes. "It's AI I don't care" and "AI has very deep reasoning about code, prove me wrong" are the height of politeness.


Well, I wouldn't necessarily call it "going out of your way to be accommodating", but impolite is just not the word I'd choose to characterize it. I can see why others might but it's just my personal feeling that I don't think that this is the correct adjective here.

That said, I don't feel like this topic is important enough to go on about it, I probably spend enough keystrokes on it already.


That's how politicians and passive-aggressive people hide their rudeness/impoliteness: under a veneer of polite-sounding phrases.

But I guess we could've used a few other synonyms: https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/impolite inconsiderate, thoughtless, impertinent (2nd meaning) :)




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