Hacktoberfest
2025-Nov-03, Monday 11:21![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Tagged this Festival which I guess is technically true!
So, I'm on the dev team for the hit zombie apocalypse survival game Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. I do quite a few PRs every week--I've already hit over a thousand PRs in a few years--and so a week or so ago when someone on the Discord posted about Hacktoberfest, I thought "Oh, huh, I should sign up for that. I'm going to be doing all of these PRs anyway and none of them are junk."
By junk, I'm referring to something that seems obvious when you think about it but which I hadn't previously considered: low quality contributions. People just submitting one-line doc fixes or reordering things to have a PR so they can get a t-shirt. Or, worse, people making repositories using AI and then submitting AI contributions just because they want a t-shirt.
Well, today at around 10 a.m. I got a series of emails and here's the end result:
Final count: 43 PRs.
I did get a t-shirt, which surprised me--or at least, I got a code to go to the store and get a t-shirt for free, so we'll see if I actually get one sent to me. And they also planted a tree in my name in California, an incense cedar right around here. Maybe I'll go visit it someday.
I'll probably do this again next year, if I'm still contributing to CDDA. Assuming my current pace continues, I probably will be.
Edit: Well, I got a shipping confirmation for the t-shirt, so it seems like it's coming after all.
So, I'm on the dev team for the hit zombie apocalypse survival game Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. I do quite a few PRs every week--I've already hit over a thousand PRs in a few years--and so a week or so ago when someone on the Discord posted about Hacktoberfest, I thought "Oh, huh, I should sign up for that. I'm going to be doing all of these PRs anyway and none of them are junk."
By junk, I'm referring to something that seems obvious when you think about it but which I hadn't previously considered: low quality contributions. People just submitting one-line doc fixes or reordering things to have a PR so they can get a t-shirt. Or, worse, people making repositories using AI and then submitting AI contributions just because they want a t-shirt.
So many repos follow the same pattern, littered with emojis and fully fleshed out readme pages for simple todo apps. And so many fucking rocketship emojis. Everyone is going to the moon with their AI generated todo and OpenAI wrapper apps.Fortunately CDDA bans all AI-related contributions--the license requires we provide attribution to all contributors and if an LLM does most of the PR who is the actual "contributor"?--and I had already done over thirty contributions before I even signed up, so they immediately populated my backlog of contributions that the team (I assume there's a team) were looking into.
Well, today at around 10 a.m. I got a series of emails and here's the end result:
Final count: 43 PRs.
I did get a t-shirt, which surprised me--or at least, I got a code to go to the store and get a t-shirt for free, so we'll see if I actually get one sent to me. And they also planted a tree in my name in California, an incense cedar right around here. Maybe I'll go visit it someday.
I'll probably do this again next year, if I'm still contributing to CDDA. Assuming my current pace continues, I probably will be.
Edit: Well, I got a shipping confirmation for the t-shirt, so it seems like it's coming after all.
no subject
Date: 2025-Nov-03, Monday 18:19 (UTC)I don't get people who do AI crap like that just for a shirt (I mean I guess if you are desperate for a shirt cuz you're broke? but... I doubt that's the case for most of these folks).
It's like cheating, what a fucking bunch of losers. Congrats on the super contrib award! And tree! :)
no subject
Date: 2025-Nov-03, Monday 18:56 (UTC)And yeah, I submitted so many PRs for two stable verisons running that they were like "We gotta bring this guy on."
Since it's open-source there's no salary or perks associated with it, just bragging rights, but I can say I'm game developer now.
(It is also game I play, though some of my game time is now dev time)
no subject
Date: 2025-Nov-03, Monday 19:55 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-Nov-04, Tuesday 15:53 (UTC)It sounds convincing, because it always speaks with 100% confidence about what it says. And even when you say, "You're wrong, I literally just told you the opposite thing 10 minutes ago and now you're making things up" it will apologize and then be 100% confident as it switches around and tells you the total opposite.