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Was expecting something along the lines of “I didn’t agree, so will step down”… but (edited):
… I want the consequences of Debian fully embracing fascist-backed technology to be known.
I can not support the current decision of Debian about LLM use, and am no longer willing to be seen as a part of Debian under these new rules. Pretending to have a “neutral stance” when faced with fascism is not neutrality, it’s active collaboration.
Fuck that, I’m out, …
What makes them call LLMs “fascist”? I guess you could say that individuals who aren’t super rich can’t train them by themselves, so relying on them currently means you’re relying on these fuckers.
That would be quite the stretch though …
The response to the mail seems to think the same:
Not sure if there’s any point in saying this, but the fact that the technology has notable companies pushing it forward that are often associated with fascism does not mean that the technology itself is somehow inextricably linked to fascism, just like how Microsoft making an operating system doesn’t associate operating systems in general with Microsoft or their goals. The GR was concerned with the technology as a whole AFAICT, not the companies developing some variants of it.
I suspect it’s because the juggernauts of the AI industry are mostly American companies, owned by billionaires, and are in Trump’s current circle of buddies.
There are billionaires who are “just” enemies of the working class, and then there are american billionaires from silicon valley, who want to actively destroy democracy and serve in a proto facist government they are very entangled in
Ofc (the currently popular) ai models are tools of facism, what else would they be?
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
- 1984, George Orwell
We would do better at recognising the tools of fascism if more people engaged with the literature of our culture. It’s there right under our noses.
Ofc a random@piefed.social would be referencing George Orwell. 🤦♂️
I’m surprised you didn’t go for
Julia was twenty-six years old… and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor…
She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She “didn’t much care for reading,” she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
, also from Nineteen Eighty-Four
It’s… optimistic about how much AI users know about the internal workings of AI, expecting them to be engineers rather than commodity consumers, but the disdain for what is produced is on point. As is its role in maintaining a post-truth society.
That’s another good one. There are so many parts of that book that are directly relevant today. It boggles my mind that people in general are not furious about what is happening.
Not sure if there’s any point in saying this, but the fact that the technology has notable companies pushing it forward that are often associated with fascism does not mean that the technology itself is somehow inextricably linked to fascism, just like how Microsoft making an operating system doesn’t associate operating systems in general with Microsoft or their goals. The GR was concerned with the technology as a whole AFAICT, not the companies developing some variants of it.
I like this reply.
LLM in the open source world seem to be seen as evil things but the tech doesn’t have to be trained on copyrighted material and doesn’t have to be run by evil companies.
I don’t like the anti sentiment which Codeberg also seems to share… there is nothing bad with LLMs themselves, just with implementations of them.
Celebrating anti-AI is like fighting the Internet in the early 2000s or steam machines in the industrial age… Of course some companies are doing bad things like always but the technology makes our lives easier
Okay so where are the good LLMs managed by good organizations and practical for programmers?
On your local machine, after having fed your ops DBs and codebases into it?
There would be nothing bad with LLMs provided that:
They weren’t based on colossal scale appropriation of people’s copyrighted work - are there any like that? The companies are actually laundering their IP addresses so that they can’t be blocked (see recent article on the LKML for an example). I don’t call that “fair use”.
They weren’t being powered by building new fossil-fuel generators in the middle of heatwaves that make it very clear that the climate emergency is here and now (the idea that LLMs are going to solve that problem for us is laughable).
I could go on. Nothing bad, so long as we ignore all the bad parts.
The closest to what you want is probably the Nvidia Nemotron series, which uses an open dataset. It used a sizable GPU cluster to train, but nothing on the scale of what OpenAI/Anthropic are guzzling. That, and Nvidia makes a point to advertise high utilization/efficiency.
There are smaller scale truly open LLMs like the Olmo series, but Nemotron is the most practical to use.
Then there are the Chinese “open weights” LLMs, which tend to be trained on more modest Huawei ASICs instead of GPUs, and probably with a good chunk of renewables. The dataset is closed, and who knows what is in there, but at least the training scale is much smaller
They are Apache licensed.
Another thing is that both these group pitch LLMs as modular tools to customize, not magic black boxes to rent.
Celebrating anti-AI is like fighting […] steam machines in the industrial age…
So what you’re saying that anti-AI is like fighting the machines that have made the planet uninhabitable in under two centuries of use, thus being responsible for billions of deaths and the collapse of this wave of civilization?
huh.
but the tech doesn’t have to be trained on copyrighted material and doesn’t have to be run by evil companies.
This argument is being made quite regularly, but I don’t think it holds weight. Whether it has to be, or not, is quite unimportant when you consider how it is. Considering the power and influence of the driving forces behind ‘AI’, it’s naive to think that Debian, or any other open-source project can have a meaningful impact in its’ direction.
I simply don’t agree that this technology is being pushed in order to make our lives easier. The levels of investment, and indeed the sources of that investment, are cause for grave concern.
but the tech doesn’t have to be trained on copyrighted material and doesn’t have to be run by evil companies.
This argument is being made quite regularly, but I don’t think it holds weight. Whether it has to be, or not, is quite unimportant when you consider how it is. Considering the power and influence of the driving forces behind ‘AI’, it’s naive to think that Debian, or any other open-source project can have a meaningful impact in its’ direction.
I simply don’t agree that this technology is being pushed in order to make our lives easier. The levels of investment, and indeed the sources of that investment, are cause for grave concern.
And, an important point in my opinion, it makes us stupider.
I guess you could frame a neutral stance that way as it doesn’t ban AI.
But to me “pro AI” sounds like embracing it, building it into processes, …
Yeah, the headlines is editorialized.
“Neutral” is right if you read the proposals: https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002#quorum
