Mastodawn

I have seen many people announcing that they will no longer *consume* the output of a free software project, because they deviate from their ideological take on AI or some other threat. Often, but not always, it's based on partial information, and is reactionary.

Before you do this, please consider the following:

- The community is those doing the work together.

- Prioritizing your consumption, over those showing up with work to share, is selfish.

- Performative object choice as a consumer of gifts while chastising those who give them, is not defending community.

Respect those doing the work.

I can assure you that no rationalization for being a reactionary twat will change these facts.

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Jamie Cullen Mar 20

@craigbro

Imagine a hypothetical user whose main argument was that they don't want to be in any way associated with tools which facilitate U.S. wars, up to and including selecting which human beings to bomb.

Compared to the mainstream view, that would perhaps be a hard line from this user. But, it would arguably be based in reality.

In June of 2025, four execs - one from each of Meta, OpenAI, Palantir, and Thinking Machines Lab, got sworn in as Lieutenant Colonels of the US military.

So that's OpenAI, the leader in this space. Anthropic's Claude, the other big player, is all over the news this last couple of weeks for being central to the ongoing operation in Iran, used alongside Palantir's Project Maven for selecting targets, and other intelligence work.

There are plenty of articles on both these points; it's not like the companies are hiding their joy at receiving these lucrative military contracts, and deepening ties.

If a user decided they want nothing to do with OpenAI and Anthropic for this reason, and would therefore like to try do their computing as far away from these projects as possible, and they state this publically...

That user is, without exception, a "reactionary twat"?

It reads like the answer would be yes, which would seem pretty wild to me, but perhaps I'm misreading.

Obviously, some users (well, some people) are reactionary twats. But I don't see how we could say that *all* users who have ethical issues with these developments are, no matter what their reasons... without being extremely reactionary, of course 😅

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Craig Brozefsky Mar 20

@jbc I didn't say any such thing, and you have mis-read what I wrote, glossing over the statement that some, not all of these announcements are misinformed and reactionary, and my calling out the chastising of projects.

Maybe ask yourself why you ignored the content about how they relate to those who share with them, what makes up the communities, and respecting others -- but wrote several paragraphs justifying one of the many ethical positions used to justify these performative consumer choice announcements. Why did you have to make a comment caricaturing what I said? Was that really your intent? I suspect not, and don't take it personally.

I think avoiding AI produced code is a reasonable ethical position to take about ones computing environment. That's orthogonal to my comment. Some who share that position have taken more productive approaches, and are collaborating and sharing to actually produce the tools they need which meet those requirements.