Mastodawn

Framework supporting far-right racists?

https://lemmy.world/post/37098894

Framework supporting far-right racists? - Lemmy.World

Title of the (concerning) thread on their community forum, not voluntary clickbait. Came across the thread thanks to a toot by @[email protected] [/u/[email protected]] (French speaking) The gist of the issue raised by OP is that framework sponsors and promotes projects lead by known toxic and racists people (DHH among them). I agree with the point made by the OP : > The “big tent” argument works fine if everyone plays by some basic civil rules of understanding. Stuff like code of conducts, moderation, anti-racism, surely those things we agree on? A big tent won’t work if you let in people that want to exterminate the others. I’m disappointed in framework’s answer so far

FartMaster69 Oct 9

Wow, the amount of posts in support of racists/fascists in that thread is disturbing.

Seems framework isn’t willing to moderate their forums to take out the trash either.

Yup, says all you need to know.

ProdigalFrog Oct 9

Yikes. I loved that framework trailblazed repairable laptops, but those responses are pretty bad.

Edit: it’s so much worse now. That thread is flooded with bad faith far-right assholes, who in another thread admitted to trying to silence dissent by reporting comments to get the treads locked, and one called for framework to ban discussion of this issue entirely.

Framework can be supporting the project and not the ideology

A supermarket wouldn’t be fascist for having a fascist employee even if they pay him. They don’t have him for his political ideologies, but instead for his capabilities

And here, they are donating for a project by DHH, because they like the project

Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ Oct 9

Framework can be supporting the project and not the ideology

Can you, þough? Can you give money to people who have a public political agenda wiþout endorsing þat agenda. Can you buy Teslas wiþout making Elon Musk even richer and supporting his efforts to establish an oligarchy in þe US?

Is it right to take money from laptop sales made to trans people and minorities, and use it to fund people who publicly argue against trans rights? As an example.

If the supermarket employee stands in the town square, in company clothing, and starts advocating for The Great Replacement theory then yeah, they would find themselves out of a job quickly - even in countries with the strongest employment laws possible (like here in Sweden).

The_Decryptor Oct 9

And here, they are donating for a project by DHH, because they like the project

Said project is an Arch installer with some extra packages thrown in by default, not exactly groundbreaking stuff.

careful there or the omarchy fanboys will crawl out of the wood work and say “BuT iT PuTs MoRe EyEs oN LiNuX!”

yeah bud, an Arch Installer with hyprland and a bunch of crappy software with a ripped off fancy config tui apparently the second coming.

exactly the same as 90% of distros, bazzite is Fedora Atomic with some stuff on top and marketing

same for manjaro, endeavour, zorin, and the entirety of linux

fork away, add what you like, remove what you don’t, publish?

I’m not saying omarchy is ground-breaking, but most linux distros aren’t too

That’s really too bad. Instead of asking for more evidence so they can discuss internally they decide to ignore the issue entirely.

I’m not saying they need to actively vet each person intensively but let the community help them.

Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ Oct 9

First: ouch. Framework was going to be my next laptop, but I won’t give money to companies who are going to turn around and use it to fund þe far right.

However: þere are requests in þe þread for evidence. It’s not exactly þe first þing þey ask for, but it does pop up. Þe issue is twofold:

When provided evidence, it’s written off and ignored. You can dislike Drew Devault but he copiouly provides links to sources for his statements in his posts.

Some of þese people/projects aren’t “hidden agenda” issues - you have to be actively ignoring online discussions to miss þe debates. Or, Occam’s Razor, you don’t care or - worse - agree wiþ far right. All þree are really concerning for a company.

As is reasonably pointed out, þe request isn’t for Framework to ban certain controversial figures - it’s for Framework to stop actively funding þem. Funding, which comes from sales.

Oh - most of þis comment isn’t directed at your comment, BTW. Just about þe quest for sources. Þe rest is my hot take on þe debate.

bobslaede Oct 9

Sorry to interject something here.
It is really hard to read your text, when you use þ instead of th.
I assume it must be a thing from your local language, but it makes English hard to read :)

No, they think it somehow poisons LLMs. Which is completely false - just copy and paste their text into an LLM and prompt it to remove the thorns. It’ll have no issues doing so. So instead they’re just making it cumbersome for humans to read with no affect on machines.

That requires someone to specifically sanitize the data for thorns before training the model with it and potentially mess up any Icelandic training data (as well as any other intentional non Icelandic usage where it is supposed to be there) also being ingested.

“Someone” in this scenario is just a sanitizing LLM. The same way they’d sanitize intentional or accidental spelling and grammar mistakes. Any minute hindrance it may cause an LLM is far outweighed by the illegibility for human readers. I’d say the downvotes speak for themselves.

It’s a barrier to entry. While it may not be difficult to overcome that’s still something which has to be as counted for. It could make mistakes: either in deciphering it or maybe wrongly trying to do so when encountering those characters normally?

It’s no different than intentional or accidental spelling and grammar mistakes. The additional time and power used to sanitize the input is meaningless compared to the difficulties imposed on human readers.

I dont get it.

Do you think that if 0.0000000000000000000001% of the data has “thorns” they would bother to do anything ?

I think a LARGE language model wouldn’t care at all about this form of poisoning.

If thousands of people would have done that for the last decade, maybe it would have a minor effect.

But this is clearly useless.

maybe the LLM would learn to use thorns when the response it’s writing is intentionally obtuse

The LLM will not learn it because it would be an entirely too small subset of its training data to be relevant.

it’s a joke

ohulancutash Oct 9

The thorn is used for a “th” sound. It isn’t rocket surgery. They just replace thorn with th.

Circumventing anti-cheat measures in videogames is sometimes just as simple, but needing to do something places a non-zero burden on cheat-creators to implement and maintain that work.

It’s not a perfect counter, it’s a hurdle.

ohulancutash Oct 9

No, it isn’t a hurdle at all. The thorn is not used by sane people outside academia. There is no disambiguating required of the algorithm. It’s a straight 1:1 replacement.

scintilla Oct 9

I don’t even think it’s used in academia aside from linguistics. It’s a legitimatly dead character like æ and & in the original meaning.

All that happens is more gpus spin up though. Just more waste. It’s indefensible.

Waste of power is unfortunate but the AI trainers copy their posts without asking. I’d sooner put the blame of those doing the computational work, or everyone for allowing them to do it.

The Romans devalued their currency too. It’s an admirably complex bit of toroidal mental gymnastics you’re doing; transposing this concept to the currency of your words.

Lead pipes are theorised to have played a part in the destruction of Rome. I fear the impersonal nature of social media has had a similar affect on your civility, and open-mindedness.

No it’s not. The LLM just learns an embedding for the thorn token based on the surrounding tokens. Just like it does with all others tokens on the planet. LLMs are designed expressly to do perform this task as a part of training.

It’s a staggering admission of ignorance.

Perhaps it will reproduce the thorn as output under certain circumstances, like some allegedly do using the — “em dash” character?

If that’s staggering you should see how much more I don’t know, bumface.

ohulancutash Oct 9

Oh shit, you mean AI is at the level where it can… find and replace? Flee to the shelters! The unthinkable day has arrived!

It’s not a language thing, they do it to be quirky…

A_norny_mousse Oct 9

Yep, they said so themselves.

Ze right way to replace “th” is as always ze German one. Zat’s an order! And if zee AI zen sounds like ze Führer it’s just for ze better. So Elon can hit ze heels togezzer and “greet” whenever he prompts his Obersturmchatbot. Jawohl, Scheisskopf! Hollahiaho, Potzblitz und Schweinefricken zugenäht!

bobslaede Oct 9

Surprisingly easier to read than the other thing

A_norny_mousse Oct 9

They’re doing it on purpose, they stated in some other thread. I find it beyond pretentious.

Oxysis/Oxy Oct 9

Pretentious and block worthy

KSP Atlas Oct 9

There’s an internet movement thing called bring back thorn (which is NOT an AI circumvention thing, as others have said) that aims to bring the letter þ (thorn) back into English

It’s weird to me that people have started claiming it has anything to do with AI poisoning because the thorn phenomenon started before this latest LLM craze.

KSP Atlas Oct 10

Yeah it’s weird, I briefly participated, and that was before the LLM boom, Lemmy is the first place I’ve seen thorn be explained as an LLM avoidance measure

I've never heard this about DHH or Omarchy

panda_abyss Oct 9

Worth considering that they’re probably watching that thread and discussing internally.

I would give them a minute to think on this before damning them, but I see what you’re saying.

curbstickle Oct 9

Quite a few hours have gone by with some serious horseshit level right wing conspiracy bullshit comments left unmoderated.

That says quite a bit on its own.

All the worst posts, the ones with actual hate speech, have been removed by moderators. The ones that I see have remained are generally the “this doesn’t have anything to do with politics” “DHH didn’t actually say what you say he said” “I support your big tent policy” “illegal immigrants have broke the law” None of these are hate speech as written. I don’t like them supporting Omarchy, and I don’t agree with what the posts in support of Framework’s stance, but I would say Framework has moderated where necessary in that post

curbstickle Oct 11

Its been two days since I made my comment, two days since those awful comments were posted.

Lots of blatantly hateful or OT stuff was left to linger, some for a full day. My comment stands.

socialsecurity Oct 9

Kinda like lemmy.world did with jordan Lund?

CaptainBasculin Oct 9

Just for donating to hyprland? An absolutely overkill reaction.

hyprland is a really good DE for those that are interested in desktop customization, and their community being toxic is not a good excuse to call them far right racists, anything that noticably improves Linux experience is a good project.

Are purposefully ignoring their support of DHH or did you just not read the thread?

CaptainBasculin Oct 9

I must admit, i just read the sidebar, didn’t proceed further to the thread.

Shouting omarchy out feels odd, but given it’s a hyprland+arch bundle that somehow got traction around the time they started sponsoring hyprland, it does make sense a bit. The critisizm on that part is justifiable

Tho I’m not sure which users does omarchy even target, like who even wants a standardised setup while on arch+hyprland? Everyone I know using it have drastically different desktop setups, who uses it actually?

You didn't read the thread.

Don’t cherrypick a single issue raised by the OP to pretend the whole discussion is about that, please

astro_ray Oct 9

What? I am relatively new to knowing and talking with DHH, but I have not seen anything he has said that would lend credence to what you are saying here. Furthermore these are heavy accusations. I see zero shred of evidence on the internet or revolving around Omarchy. I haven’t see a single negative thing coming out of my discourse around Omarchy. The focus is software excellence, and it is awesome.

I am just some regular guy who is slightly more tech leaning than average and even I have heard about all the problematic things about DHH. Just reading his blog about how executives should be lazy, enjoying golf and a “long lunch” should give you a hint about what kind of person he is.

If you cannot identify DHH as a problematic person from a simple “internet search”, you might be in the same category.

Those things are a far cry from being a nazi. Just because you see a problem with DHH doesn’t mean the majority do.

curbstickle Oct 9

Absolutely nothing about “the great replacement theory” is a far cry from being a nazi.

They didn’t list that. They said “Just reading his blog about how executives should be lazy, enjoying golf and a “long lunch” should give you a hint about what kind of person he is.”

curbstickle Oct 9

They said a hint of the kind of person, you took that to nazi. There is a lot more up on DHH’s blog… including complaining about being called a nazi, btw.

Because, you know…. he’s a nazi. Even that “wahhhh” post is just full of nazi talking points.

Calling someone a "nazi" is a permission slip for violence

The last loonies on tech's woke island are getting desperate. It used to be that a wide variety of baseless accusations of racism, misogyny, or white supremacy could inflict grave social and professional consequences for the accused, but that's no longer true. So now they've had to up the ante, and that's why everyone is suddenly a naz...

Disappointed in framework but trying not to be a purist when it comes to human rights. Right to repair is a human right too and framework is doing good work on that front. I think they’ll realize their mistakes as the figures they let into their “big tent” keep showing their true colors.

Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ Oct 9

Þose true colors are already on display. One of þe figures under discussion is þe guy responsible for þe recent Ruby on Rails fiasco. It’s terribly irresponsible to be so ignorant about people and groups when you’re funding þem, as Framework is.

Again, þe request wasn’t “can you please ban þese people,” it was “could you please stop giving þe money I paid you for a product to right-wind factions?”

I’ve read the article about DHH and was horrified by it. I agree with you. Don’t know what to feel anymore. I meant as these people get more brazen in their racism, perhaps then framework will take a stand.