It looks like the article was AI, it’s been pulled from the site.
I wonder what this means for Linux Journal as a platform.
They’re publishing articles that are completely false, which suggests failures are the writing and editorial levels, whether or nit they use an LLM. It’s going to take a lot of high quality, accurate, articles to regain my trust.
I’m really suspicious about this. First,
Warning: Arch Linux only has official support for systemd. [1] When using a different init system, please mention so in support requests.
- From the Arch wiki.
None of the init systems listed on that wiki are written in Rust.
Rye is some sort of Python environment configuration system. There is a Rust process manager, but it’s designed for containers. There’s a drop in systemd service definition runner; last updated two years ago. There are at least three init systems written in Rust, but one was last changed 4 years ago, another 5 years ago, and the third 6 years ago.
I can’t find any reference that doesn’t lead back to the LJ article, and nothing that comes from Arch.
Artix supports three init systems, no-one of which are written in Rust.
This has the stench is AI.
So I was interested to dig more into this…, but I wasn’t able to find any other source that talked about this. Furthermore, while some digging suggests that the author is a real person, the text didn’t score well on https://undetectable.ai/ . Do with that whatever you will*
FWIW, trying to install it within a distrobox container gave the following error:
error: target not found: rye-initWhich, AFAIK, suggests that the package is not found in the repo. Nor does going through https://archlinux.org/packages/ yield any results. At this point, my best best would be to spin up a VM and see if that makes a difference. But I’m not really in the mood at the moment.
Regardless, has somebody checked the package out for themselves? Or, have they seen discussions on it elsewhere?
I tried to search for a source to see what license this supposed new init would be using. Couldn’t find it in the official or AUR repos and couldn’t find a git hosted anywhere.
This article is entirely Ai slop…
checks
It’s dated June 17, so it’s not an April Fool’s Day article.
EDIT: I was gonna say that Linux Journal has been around for a while, and I’ve seen material from them over the years, so they should be reputable. It does look like they were purchased a couple years ago…but by Slashdot, of all places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Journal
Linux Journal (LJ) is an American monthly technology magazine originally published by Specialized System Consultants, Inc. (SSC) in Seattle, Washington since 1994.[1] In December 2006 the publisher changed to Belltown Media, Inc. in Houston, Texas. Since 2017, the publisher was Linux Journal, LLC. located in Denver, Colorado. The magazine focused specifically on Linux, allowing the content to be a highly specialized source of information for open source enthusiasts.[2] The magazine was published from March 1994 to August 2019, over 25 years,[3][4] before being bought by Slashdot Media in 2020.[5]
I wouldn’t expect Slashdot to be putting out incorrect material either.
shrugs
Maybe the site was compromised and someone decided to put up a joke article?
Look at the other articles on the site. They are all just AI garbage.
Yeah lol. There are definitely some oddities going on that I find hard to wrap my head around.
For example, last week this article was published on the same website and attributed to the same author. In the article, the author talks about the release of Fedora 41. The thing is, however, that Fedora 41 was released last October. Heck, Fedora 42 has been released for two months now. Like, why wouldn’t they want to talk about Fedora 42 instead?
Hmm.
Maybe they’re trying to do LLM-generated articles and are screwing up?
Problem is, some of the text doesn’t seem like something that an AI would come up with. I mean, I can get minor errors, but describing an entire nonexistent init system without some kind of directive in that direction?
but describing an entire nonexistent init system without some kind of directive in that direction?
Someone else, i.e. the user called “notabot”, had already made the following interesting observations:
ryeis software that actually exists and is found within the reposryeis written in rustryehas an init command;rye init
I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to think that an LLM is aware of the above. But, it failed to understand what
ryeactually is and how its init command isn’t competing with systemd.
My suspicion grows. Check this one out. It’s a literal translation of the Linux Journal article. Same format. I don’t know French well enough to detect of it’s a transliteration, but it looks like one.
There are more translations. Some links return 404 already
I haven’t used Arch in a while but from this news bulletin it looks like the [Community] repository doesn’t even exist anymore, which is where the OP article supposedly says
rye-initresides.Excellent find.
I also noticed this, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt as Arch is a community-driven distro and perhaps they were trying to allude to that fact.
Blast. This sounded like really positive news, linux as an ecosystem desperately needs to revisit its init process choices, but there really doesn’t seem to be any hint of it elsewhere. There is a
ryethat’s written in rust and which has an init commandrye init. I wonder if it’s a case of an LLM latching on to that and just making up the rest?This sounded like really positive news, linux as an ecosystem desperately needs to revisit its init process choices, but there really doesn’t seem to be any hint of it elsewhere.
I’d also love to see something like this come into fruition. And hate the fact that everything points towards this being some LLM-hallucination. Thankfully, while not written in Rust, we have dinit to be excited/optimistic about.
There is a
ryethat’s written in rust and which has an init commandrye init. I wonder if it’s a case of an LLM latching on to that and just making up the rest?Excellent observation! That’s probably it.
This seems like a heavily AI-written article with all the bullet points, weak arguments and general air of positivity. Doesn’t help that rye-init is nowhere to be found in the AUR either.
Well, that’s a bummer.
Wonder how well this works with unified kernel images, secure boot, tpm, cpu microcode, and disk encryption.
