Ariadne Conill 🐰6h ago

I saw a wild take where someone said distributions are fascist for using systemd because systemd now uses Claude for code review.

okay. fine, I guess.

but if we are rejecting dependencies that use AI tooling, where do we go?

seriously. where do we go?

if the Linux kernel is using AI tools for codegen, then where do we go?

FreeBSD? I would put money on it that they use AI tools.

OpenBSD? NetBSD? HURD?

do we hard fork every dependency that is now tainted? do we even have the resources to do it?

FreeBSD and Illumos are the only ones reasonably close in the tech tree and I suspect both use AI tools too, as their development, like Linux, is driven by capital.

Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰
i guess my point here is that reactionary behavior does not really benefit anyone and just leads to bad decisions
12:55pmWeb
Show threadOmniRabbit4h ago

@ariadne it's protestantism but swapping the god from the ethereal one to "reason". if you are bad you are tainted permanently and must stone; if they stopped using AI tools it would also not be enough because they are "tainted".

this pattern repeats over and over from people who unlearned one piece but didn't deprogram the religious dogmatic patterns, and you end up here.

is Linux foundation funding the destruction of jobs, removing human contributions, destroying the world with debt, any of that? of course not! but it's still dogma.

I don't have a good answer to this, just to remind people what the actual goals and actions of orgs are and hope they listen.

Show threadOmniRabbit4h ago
@ariadne I don't want to see the world eaten by AI but people use the tool and it drives results for them. There's nowhere much else to go.
It's like Stallman arguing for owning every piece of your machine - eventually, you have some closed source firmware blob. Purity vs reality.
Show threadOmniRabbit4h ago

@ariadne also, you should be more concerned about whether you are actually doing fascism (i.e. snitching on your neighbors, working for the actual fascist goon army) versus vague ideological debates that the people doing Real Fascism will never even give a second thought to.

if systemd is actually fascist. You Will Know.

Show threadOblomov4h ago
@omnirabbit @ariadne (let's say that the age thing doesn't shine a positive light on systemd either)
Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰4h ago

@oblomov @omnirabbit what "age thing"

it's a fucking optional field in a user database for birthdate

they aren't enforcing anything or anything like that.

it is a field in a schema.

vcard also has a field for birthdate. is it also fascist?

Show threadOblomov4h ago

@ariadne

why was the field added?

(VCARD has a lot of field for PII. Heck's, it's basically just PII> That doesn't mean that systemd should have that same information. They are different tools for different purposes.)

@omnirabbit

Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰1h ago
@oblomov @omnirabbit if you think systemd should not have the information, then don't give systemd the information?
Show threadOblomov4h ago
@omnirabbit @ariadne I'm a pragmatist, but do appreciate it there being an effort to denounce and fight these kinds of involutions, even when it is taken to extremes I disagree with. It's the most practical example of the Overton window. Without the shift to the opposite extreme, the situation would devolve much faster.
Show threadMatt Campbell3h ago
@omnirabbit @ariadne I'm not sure. Cory Doctorow had a well-known post a month or so ago where he described a hard anti-LLM stance as "purity culture", and that produced a significant backlash, with people saying that the moral issue in this case was clear enough to justify complete abstinence. But I guess that doesn't necessarily extend to considering non-abstaining dependencies as tainted.
Show threadMatt Campbell3h ago
@omnirabbit @ariadne Your argument resonates with me, because I grew up immersed in evangelicalism, so I realize that I still need to deprogram the broader religious dogmatic patterns. But then you have people, especialy here on fedi, who are absolutely certain that using LLMs is bad and that the analogy to religious purity is wrong.