Mastodawn

Pendell 🔜 TFF 5h ago

My desire to use Mastodon is basically at zero now because post-"Claude", hanging out here means inevitably I'm going to have a conversation with someone who tolerates, or even uses, "generative AI". And what's the point of being in a community where that's a risk. Interestingly* there is absolutely no chance of this on Bluesky, because there are artists there

* And oddly, given how "AI"-brained the *admins* there are

No longer interested in talking about open source unless the conversation starts with how to build an alternate open source community without "AI code assistant" users contributing to it

AI is not a "tool". It is the users of AI who are tools HEYOOOOOOOOOO

Josh Jersild 9h ago

@mcc the "best" part is, it's funny but also unironically correct

@JoshJers "Bro. Bro u r being instrumentalized"

australopithecus 4h ago

@mcc @JoshJers
[Ralph Wiggum voice] I'm instrumental!

@mcc I've noticed that artists, overall, do a much better job at resisting AI than programmers.

Notably, I have heard gamedevs often side with artists on this front.

In general, seeing programmers embrace the slop machine has really broken any final strand of trust I had in the profession. It's sad to see so many people I once looked up to treat generating the next likely word as some sort of industry best practice

Furbland's Very Cool Mastodon™6h ago

@brib @mcc absolutely. honestly I think it would be nice to build some sort of coalition of anti-AI instances

Furbland's Very Cool Mastodon™5h ago

@brib @mcc ...maybe @vantablack can help with organizing this?

@mcc want this for you 🙏🏻

@mcc

step 1 probably boils down to a culture in which open source can be developed without corporate involvement/investor interests in mind

a lot of developers I've heard have "AI quotas" mandated by higher execs because they (execs) are desperately trying to integrate something they've invested in somehow

and this happens all the time, see NFTs and whatnot, all this AI stuff is just an especially egregious example of it, it has kinda "ripped the bandaid off" so to speak

.......now, as per how to do that, I'm a bit puzzled. just seems like a task that's a bit too large for me to define alone

@mcc and no, licenses (a-la "free software") isn't the solution here, as just setting a license doesn't provide a developer with an environment that let's them survive

Irenes (many)8h ago

@mcc yeah that makes sense tbh

Cassandra is only carbon now 8h ago

@ireneista @mcc Open source without labor ideals is just scab labor.

Irenes (many)8h ago

@xgranade @mcc yeah. yeah, that's become quite clear over the last year.

Irenes (many)8h ago

@xgranade @mcc we still feel like there has to be something to the whole thing of trying to envision something outside capitalism and acting as if it already exists

we don't know how to reconcile that with the problems that have become obvious

Cassandrich 7h ago

@mcc I'm here for that.

gaytabase 7h ago

@mcc i'm afraid that out of necessity, we will have to rely on existing trust/reputation somehow.

this isn't what i signed up for.

Bruce Simpson, Ph.D.7h ago

@mcc Sadly the Copilot monster came to #FreeBSD on GitHub last week.

@bms48 @mcc Wait, how did copilot "come" to FreeBSD ?

Bruce Simpson, Ph.D.6h ago

@trashheap @mcc The LLM-driven entity is submitting AI slop bug reports and "reviews".

@bms48 @mcc Ewww...

Last I heard FreeBSD was working on a draft policy. that was leaning towards actually banning LLM code. (This was discussed at BSDCan last year). That hasn't changed has it?

@trashheap @bms48 last I heard netbsd had done this but don't cite me

@mcc @bms48 YEAH NetBSD has, and im really hoping FreeBSD does the right thing and follow their lead.

@mcc @trashheap @bms48 last summer FreeBSD leaned strongly towards no (see https://reviews.freebsd.org/D50650 ), but the more recent "accepted" change is weaker (see https://reviews.freebsd.org/D54817 ). I don't like the weasel words in the newer proposal, and the proposed "developer's guide" doc (which you have to be logged in to see) is overlong and makes it too easy to miss the actual point.

@fedward @bms48 @mcc WELL fuck me.

@trashheap @bms48 @mcc yeah, I think "I considered it and decided I didn't care" is going to happen a lot if that policy goes into place. But the proposed change currently depends on a proposed doc that hasn't been approved, so maybe other people will agree with me that it's a shitty proposed policy and just decide not to accept it.

@fedward @bms48 @mcc Here is hoping.

ghosttie 6h ago

@mcc Human Source

Cassandra is only carbon now 9h ago

@mcc That's surprising to me, every time I've accidentally waded into Bluesky, I immediately run into AI bros. Like, in seconds.

@xgranade Hm. I'm blocking 11,142 people, so maybe that has something to do with it. Have you considered blocking 11,142 people?

Cassandra is only carbon now 9h ago

@mcc Ah, that would indeed do it. I don't know how to block people over the bridge or without logging into Bluesky TOS-gated logins other than going to the lengths you have with self-host.

And frankly, I'm just not interested in doing that to get on a techbro network, which has been my experience of Bluesky.

@xgranade *update, two minutes later* Sorry, 11,144

✧✦Catherine✦✧9h ago

@mcc @xgranade can you not do the same on fedi? to me bsky is where i go watch middle aged men have borderline psychotic episodes over llms

@whitequark @xgranade My takeaway from this conversation is that my experience on Bluesky has nothing to do with the community there and is exclusively an artifact of me following exclusively people from game development and independent comics there, and not following any programmers (because any programmers I knew I was usually already following on Mastodon)

Cassandra is only carbon now 9h ago

@mcc @whitequark I can see that, yeah. Just out of sheer laziness on my part, I've only followed artists on Bluesky who have bridging enabled, most of whom are already here... which is probably why my experience is so very different.

Cassandra is only carbon now 9h ago

@mcc @whitequark Also, it seems anecdotally like specfic writers are epsilon more likely to be on fedi than artists in general.

@xgranade @whitequark this seems to be true with science fiction at least

✧✦Catherine✦✧9h ago

@mcc @xgranade yeah that checks out

Outfrost 9h ago

@mcc @whitequark @xgranade i would add that my experience on fedi for the most part has been coming across people angry at, disapproving of, or disinterested in genai. this is of course down to the circles i follow and interact with, which i feel i have much more control over than on corporates like bsky and twitter. also i ignore all of fosstodon

Cassandra is only carbon now 9h ago

@outfrost @mcc @whitequark Ignoring fosstodon helps with that, yeah. There's some good folks on there, but also some obnoxious trolls.

That said, I find my Mastodon environment on genAI ranges from "AI is fashware" to "I am better than you because I do not have an opinion on AI, and also AI is just a tool." I try not to follow the latter, obviously, but it does get boosted in to a nontrivial degree.

I wouldn't say that fedi is anywhere near consensus on AI, and that fucking sucks.

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial 9h ago

@mcc @xgranade that seems like a full time job

aburka 🫣9h ago

@mcc @xgranade you certainly will not regret blocking 11,142 people

Tim Bray 9h ago

@mcc @xgranade I'm so impressed. Do you have a mass-block tool or some such?

@timbray okay so confession I'm only blocking about 800 people and the remainder are the "jesse singal followers blocklist", which I would highly recommend for anyone considering using bluesky as it is a *very* strong antiquality signal

jmelesky 8h ago

@mcc @timbray This strikes me as a very high-quality life hack.

Tim Bray 6h ago

@mcc 800 is still an admirable total. Fortunately, we don’t have Singal on Fedi afaik.

@mcc You certainly will not regret blocking 11,142 people straight from the jar. 😁

technomancy 9h ago

@xgranade @mcc yeah, every other platform I've seen has significantly worse ratio of AI boosters than fedi

(but that might be because I have mastodon.social as a "limited domain" so I don't see too many users from that instance; would not surprise me if this were a Flagship Instance Problem)

Timothy Perfitt 9h ago

@mcc It is exhausting.