So Open-Source and FOSS projects collectively decided that they want to jump on half-sunken ship in the middle of the ocean?
Amazing.
Sheesh get a grip.
Look if you contributed to Linux you are already an active fascist supporter because fascists use your technology, so do baby rapists and all the worse people in the world.
No it doesn’t work like that? But it does apparently. If you have ever contributed to privacy preserving projects you are actively enabling paedophiles this is no exaggeration this is how responsibility works, apparently.
This person knew all this they knew the kind of people that use their technology but they draw the line at another technology that could be used to catch a predator.
K
Looks like I better start learning OpenBSD ASAP. I really like my distro of choice, but if the distro it’s based off of is shooting itself in the foot, I have to switch over massive ethical concerns!
Second I find out I can put a second drive in my desktop, I plan on using it to learn to make something a lot less hostile to the actual people helping develop the OS. And OpenBSD sounds like a fun choice for now… at least until I find they have started betraying the actual people.
NetBSD is also worth a look, especially with the MicroVM kernel stuff in 11. You can look at smolBSD to start playing with it immediately.
If you’re worried about LLM generated code you better stop using computers altogether.
I’d rather spend my time using technology to spread the word that the creatures who use genAI can become human again through reeducation against genAI. Sounds much more productive.
Sure, just accept you will be using technology build with genAI.
Return to monke. Literally.
Or maybe just get off the grid
From what I understand, while OpenBSD is currently not accepting LLM contributions, they mostly made that choice out of legal copyright concerns, and seem like they would jump on the bandwagon when they consider it to be safer legally.
Then I hope now for it to never become legally safe to use LLM code. LLMs have poisoned literally everything pure and holy and I hate them for it!
Initially sent to debian-private, shared here because I want the consequences of Debian fully embracing fascist-backed technology to be known.
That seems to be a bit far reached and naive. Hopefully Antoine isn’t driving cars, because there are several brands that were supported by Nazi’s at one time in the past.
Besides that, I think it is good to have a discussion about the use or LLM. I just think that the reason here is a bit unusual.
Brain rot comparison.
Buying a car does nothing to support fascists from the 1940s. Meanwhile paying meta/google etc or using their products directly funds their influence campaigns to hide crimes against humanity taking place every day.
So what is your suggestion? Where do you draw the line? Because obviously it is not just about LLM.
because there are several brands that were supported by Nazi’s at one time in the past.
The AI’s that most people use support fascists in the present.
Same goes for PayPal, and yet everybody keeps using it. Not saying that this is a reason to use Frontier models. But calling the whole technology fascist is simply not true.
That’s what a fascist would say
Surveillence is not fascist.
Do most people use nemotron models?
When the surveillance is being sold to fascist governments to identify, suppress and imprison dissidents, it is fascist.
The German Nazis stored people data on Hollerith punch cards supplied by US company IBM.
https://ahrp.org/30999-2/So maybe you should’ve started with that as your argument?
What’s Devuan’s position on this? They already forked after the SystemD switch. Here’s to hoping they also flip the bird to AI.
I doubt Devuan will stop basing their distro on Debian. Or at least I hope they don’t. I specifically use Devuan because it’s basically just OG Debian.
Doesn’t really matter because they still use the Linux kernel, which AFAIK allows LLM contributions.
AFAIK they do not yet have an official stance on AI/LLM use within the project.
Not yet. I suppose it shouldn’t be long…
The without disclosure part tells everything you need to know here. If it’s such a benign and maybe even beneficial thing to do then why are you hiding it? What possible reason could you have not to label that? In an open source Community shouldn’t everything like that be known?
There are so many levels of LLM involvement and once you make this distinction you actually have to devote some of your limited resources to define and enforce it. So I think it might not be strictly beneficial, but possibly also have downsides.
Where would you draw the line at which point it counts as LLM involvement? Having one run as some sort of spell/syntax checker? Doing some research (and being influenced by it) before hand coding something? Having it create a working prototype and then reimplementing it by hand? If you use code from somewhere else to solve a problem and ai use has not been disclosed for this code, do you automatically have to assume LLM usage was involved or is there plausible deniability?
I think in the end you’d have to use too many resources check it and debate where the line is drawn, when the real question is how you retain human knowledge and engagement within your community.
I wonder what’s the reason to make it optional? I think I’ve seen this approach with other projects as well. Isn’t transparency and accountability a good thing? Also, this kind of information helps immensely when reading pull requests or silly bug reports. And Debian acknowledge there might be licensing issues. So it might become some sort of liability to them once it taints everything and we can’t even tell?! So why? What’s the upside? Adorn oneself with borrowed plumes and not being forced to disclose the fact? Or too much bookkeeping?
I think it’s just the simple fact that there’s no way to enforce it
Which tells a lot about how good they are. Slop is slop because it’s bad, but a high quality PR isn’t
Conversely… if it’s so benign, why should it have a label?
Not really worth discussing - it’s not benign, and it can be made purposefully not benign by a third party without notification or knowledge. A third party who has already demonstrated a penchant for world domination, both technologically and physically.
Code in general is proven not to be benign
I should hope that open source developers are exclusively using open source models that are trained on open source projects.
I mean, I would think, at least. It seems to me that most of the people in charge of big projects are usually FOSS purists.
That’s part of the reason why AI scrapers are breaking the small web. FOSS purists really have no significant defense against it aside from Anubis.
Real DoS protection comes from capacity, which costs serious dollars, especially in this day and age where botfarms can be hired by the hour for rather cheap and record-breaking attacks seem to happen like monthly.
The alternative is using a CDN, but there are none that align with FOSS ideals. And for CDNs to be really effective, you need them to break open TLS and handle the decrypted traffic, which raises privacy concerns on top.
But anyways…most license agreements would make it a requirement that if you’re using an open-source model, that it be properly attributed, right?
I should hope that open source developers are exclusively using open source models that are trained on open source projects.
Most developers who use these tools (even FLOSS developers) appear to be using the corporate owned models that were definitely trained on both proprietary source code and code that is incompatible with the GPL license. Some EU courts have also already judged that LLM code cannot be copyrighted, which also means it cannot be licensed as GPL.
Currently, all code generated with an LLM has a 3 to 10% chance of unknowingly plagiarizing the copyrighted code it was trained on, and any FLOSS project that uses it is making a huge gamble that their codebase won’t be scanned by corporations in the future looking for violations to sue about, shut down rival FLOSS projects, etc.
Eye contact is benign for most of us. We still give it a context warning in civilized circles. It costs us almost nothing, and lets people make an informed decision what you engage with.
It would be Useful for doing a retrospective on whether AI is helpful or not
deleted by creator
debian maintainer resigns
Is fedora gonna get worse?
Did you even read the dann blog post?
Respect to Antoine. Having principles that are worth a damn is a rare trait amongst developers these days.
“AI scrapers break the web, to use this page you’ll need JavaScript enabled.”
The ironic…
The world needs more people that act on principles and take a stance.
Weird that he didn’t care when Linus Torvalds adopted basically the same policy to the kernel that serves as the foundation of the main Debian distribution. I have an inkling that there is more going on at Debian, not LLM use alone.
didn’t he? have you checked?
the main thing is that it’s an upstream problem. the linux kernel is used in nuclear missiles. if you want to stay on that kernel you have to take what you are given. in your own organisation you can at least try to change things.
I don’t think so. I got no sources or anything, but I think most nuclear missile silos and their software predate the linux kernel. And since we don’t really build nuclear weapons anymore but stick with the ones we already have, I don’t think that the linux kernel is really used in these kinds of sites.
However, that’s me guessing - wouldn’t say that I’m even 50% confident.
the linux kernel is used in nuclear missiles
source:
Idk anything about this…but here is my Google results
Don’t think golden dome is actually implemented, though just some trump delusion…but apparently this Redhawk Linux is used in…
Nuclear missiles probably run vxworks or another rtos, not linux
FOSS nukes when?
If he resigned only now, he didn’t resign before. What is there to check? That is common sense. Linus allowed LLM use and he was fine with Debian building on it. After all, all LLM use is literal fascism in his eyes.
He didn’t leave the Linux-based OS for Linus Torvalds himself stating a similar policy for the Linux kernel before Debian did.
Debian has a history of maintaining ancient kernels. But it’s hard to believe that he assumed Debian to just fork Linux…
Fascism is when AI.
How is AI fascist?
Is it ultranationalist? Rejecting democracy? Anticommunist or antiliberal? Third position in economics? Anti egalitarian? Racist? Traditianolist socially?
I could maybe see an argument for it being anti egalitarian, but besides that, LLMs have none of those traits.
Most developers using AI/LLMs use corporate owned LLM’s, not local models (and almost certainly never a local model that is trained in a way to not introduce legal plagiarism into a FLOSS project).
Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of the big tech companies that host them (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are owned by right-wing CEO’s who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated and receive lucritive government contracts. Many of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.
That’s still not fascism.
Also, your logic is flawed: Some CEOs are right wing, so they would be willing to support fascism (because as we know, right wing = fascism)
In my opinion CEOs of most tech companies are just opurtunistic.
If a corporation helping a fascist government surveil and detain citizens in opposition to the government securing more totalitarian power isn’t fascist then… What would you consider fascist behavior?
This doesn’t mean all corporations are like that
Most are operated by sociopaths and psychopaths.
Assuming it is true, it doesn’t mean that they’re all fascist.
Did you watch it? It compares corporations itself to psychopaths, it’s nowhere said that CEOs/upper management are psychopaths.
Opportunistic people supporting fascism and actual fascist true believers are indistinguishable in how they behave, right? The only difference would be if/when fascism is no longer an opportunity to make money.
You don’t understand… ‘fascism’ today means something along the lines of ‘I don’t like it’, like ‘gay’ in the 90s…
Some of them are owned by fascists but I do agree with you
@ProdigalFrog
> “Pretending to have a “neutral stance” when faced with fascism is not neutrality, it’s active collaboration.”Bars. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision, I hope Antoine gets to keep his peace undisturbed.
Fascism is when people can use AI.
and the death blow is when more like-minded developers do the same… there won’t be enough left that would vote to change policy to try to lure some back.
Didn’t we have the same outrage and series of rage-quitting when SystemD was introduced?
i understand there are a lot of facist AI companies, but how can an entire technology be facist?
That’s like saying space travel is facist because pretty much all of it was built on work by literal nazi scientists.
Do we throw out all the related advances too? Satellite communications, GPS, etc.?
Honestly it feels like I’m taking crazy pills some days. I run local models on my system, and the technology is legitimately fascinating. I am not talking about the broligarchy, merely the underlying technology is weird and fun to play with.
One thing is for certain - the box Pandora had this thing lying around in has been kicked open, and it cannot be shut. We’ll just have to figure out what that means for all of us.
Good question. I think there’s some truth to it. Somehow a lot of fascist people love AI. For example a certain president posts a lot of gen AI pictures, sometimes videos of himself dropping poo on the citizens. Other regimes just use it to manifest some video surveillance dystopia. And to be frank, there is no other tech to enable surveillance on that level.
It’s also a good tool to manipulate people on a grand scale, make custom propaganda, exploit psychology…
LLMs and related systems are made in a completely top-down way. They’re under control of the Chinese government and a few select US tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and their companies. They get to shape it. And they’re kind of Anti-Robin-Hoods. They steal from the poor, the workers and artists, and give to the rich. They get more power and money. And I didn’t yet mention Peter Thiel and some other companies who are working on some AI assisted version of doomsday, or at minimum some scifi dystopia with predictive policing and that kind of stuff.
Also comes with a few fascist side-effects. Like disposession of land, polluting the environment and poor people get to suffer the consequences of climate change. Rich people can just buy a new house and clean water…
I mean not all AI is fascist. But I see lots of reason to believe it aligns well with fascist wet dreams. And not so much with their opponents’.
On contrary: Space travel helps all of us. I get to learn new science things. Get to use my sat nav in the car… 400 TV channels… a more precise weather forecast… We needed to advance material science for space travel, push solar cell technology, which I can make use of as of today to break free from big oil… I also got to contribute some taxpayer money to make it happen, so it wasn’t just forced upon me by oligarchs…
The printing press has been a crucial tool for fascist propagandists ever since its inception. Does that make the technology fascist?
I just got done reading The Demon Haunted World, and can’t help but draw a comparison. It’s perfectly reasonable to be afraid for the future of democracy right now, but it really feels like people think AI is powered by literal sprites, dancing around on puppet strings at the whim of the fascists who summoned them. It’s math. Math isn’t ideological. It is simply a fact of the universe that an LLM is possible.
Yeah, we have to make sure it is applied responsibly, because yeah it’s a very powerful phenomenon. Yes, they were made using stolen information, and I fully believe that all LLMs and training data should be fully open sourced for public use as a result, and making any profit from them is unethical. It’s stealing from Peter and Paul to sell to Peter and Paul.
But one day fascists are bound to fail, and you know what will still exist in the world that comes next? AI/LLMs/some future iteration of a transformer-based neural network. It’s not the first technology loved and/or invented by fascists, and it won’t be the last. But I think in a panic, people are willing to burn down anything in an 50ft radius of any fascist. Keep the knowledge, ditch the fascism, stop acting out of fear.
I really think those are two different pairs of shoes. The printing press allowed people to make information more accessible to the masses. A lot of people got more educated because of it. Of course as a tool it can also be used for evil. But in reality that’s not what happened. It’s mainly been used for good. It displaced some jobs, but that wasn’t the people’s jobs, but monks in the scriptorium. Other people got to learn to read and write because of it. In fact we went from being able to read as something special, to almost everyone gets to learn to read because of it.
With AI on the other hand (or foot, to stick with the ‘pairs of shoes’ metaphor) it’s gonna be your job and the monks/aristocrats get their scriptorium back to cook up the information of tomorrow, it’s the other way round. It’ll cost entry level jobs. We have reports on how it leads to deskilling. There’s a good chance it’ll make people more stupid. And on average they already got a 30sec attention span thanks to AI’s online predecessors.
And once we adopt it without “fear”, you’ll get schoolbooks with the information/propaganda the ministry of education prompted for.
It’ll also intensify all the biases and stereotypes out there. If you’re gay or black and the AI has been trained on white straight men’s information… Tough luck. It won’t work for you. I already got this, and I’m not even any of that. Called some shitty AI customer service and twice I had some non-standard issues. It’s never of any help with those. It’s good and efficient at handling the standard customer service case. But once you’re the outlier… There’s no training material and no proper procedure in the harness and you’re basically screwed. I think that’s kinda fascist to demand all people are some homogeneous flock of sheep, and the company never makes mistakes while selling something, otherwise consumers (inadvertandly?) get thrown overboard.
We can also see how it’s a burden on my favourite Free Software projects and independent internet infrastructure. We get hammered by the scrapers, bot armies, everyone gets drowned in pull requests and exploits. While Microsoft and Facebook get to make a profit. They also get to release a new Windows version with a botched German translation. But I don’t think I see a lot of yield for the Free Software community. I’ve tried a few AI-assisted and vibe-coded projects. And they’re mostly shit. And/or discontinued after a week. Counterexamples do exist, but they’re really far and in between. While I and my peer group, we’re still at the receiving end of all the harm caused.
The printing press is way more egalitarian. It doesn’t favour printing the bible over any other book. Heck, you can even print radical new ideas. AI will try to push you towards the old stuff it’s seen in the training material due to the way it works. And whatever the tech oligarchs deem acceptable. (And that’s another factor, the printing press isn’t controlled by the Chinese government, nor the corrupt US tech bros.)
I really don’t think it’s a neutral tool. It’s the opposite of that. And many tools aren’t neutral. For example guns. Some countries hand them out like there’s no tomorrow. Issue is, they’re force intensifiers and disproportionately used by criminals, mentally ill people… people with a will to use them for what they’re good at, accidents happen… You can have a look at the numbers and compare it to other countried where the citizens are more fearful of guns. Those put strict regulation on top and get 10x less crime in return. And an ungodly amount less gun violence. That’s because the world isn’t neutral towards small metal barrels which fire projectiles. You’d think they’re just a device. But it’s way more complicated than that once we factor in reality.
But yeah, you’re right. Issue isn’t the maths… It’s the fascists being in control of it. We need to get rid of those. After that we can try to come up with some hypothetical, better version of AI. One that comes with equity, a level playing field. Something which doesn’t reinforce stereotypes. Doesn’t steal from poor people and return investment to the rich and powerful. It’s a massive challenge, and completely science fiction unless we do the first step.
Idk, maybe I’m just more subscribed to realism. I’m not opposed to the existence of the concept of mathematics. But I’ll judge a tool by what it’s actually used for. Not what could happen if the world were a different one than the one we live in.
You can train a model. Today.
I’m flattered you think I have the money for that, but I really don’t. People do all kinds of silly stuff as a hobby. But even engineering an airplane in my garage is more achievable than this. And then they bought up all the computer chips and GPUs to make it even more unaffordable. And the way law works, I’ll go to jail after pirating 20 books. It’s just the tech oligarchy who’s allowed to steal. That’s another level of associated fascism. We don’t get equity. There’s different rules for different people.
For Zuck et al it’s alright to torrent porn, pirate all the Hollywood movies out there, music… Musk can keep his revenge porn service… But @hendrik: Straight to jail if they try.
You got a spare $80 million laying around to train one?
Search up on TESCREAL!
Why would I of you’re not even impressed or shocked or whatever by it to tell us what it is or why we would want to
tools shape our perception of the world, and in turn us. neutrality is tacit approval. when a fascist company develops a technology, and some people say “we don’t want technology developed by fascists”, the “compromise” position is “you could have some technology developed by fascists”
if you look into operation paperclip and all the politics following that, you’ll see that there was a ton of pushback. the german scientists were literal nazis, but in the worst way; they were the compromising kind. only that the compromise was between “kill people” and “don’t kill people”, so the result was “kill some people”. and living in that environment changes your perception of the world. as the song goes, “once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? that’s not my department” says wehrner von braun
“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”
Over the past 5 years or so, I have really come to despise the phrase “just a tool”.
Honestly “just a tool” is the same as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. The phrase frames the context as if EVERY tool can have plenty of reasonable non-destructive purposes.
One argument is that those who make LLMs have a high amount of control their output. It’s giving a lot of control of open source to the whims of those companies to become reliant on LLMs
Think about the potential for providers to add plausibly deniable backdoors, general lower quality code, etc. when they think you are working on a project they care about. The precedent is there with Anthropic publicly stating that Fable was built to intentional sabotage quality when they think you are working on AI research related tasks or distillation. That kind of stuff can be subtly baked into open models as well
Tell us more. Your ideas sound unique.
Go fuck yourself with your tired, “bUt WhAt aBoUt VaCciNeS,” argument.
