Tootfinder

« Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs »
Are we going back to the nineties? It remembers me when some forges disallowed to have compiled binaries for a proprietary operating system.
#llm #ai #freesoftware

In my private projects and in #Gentoo, I have a strict #NoAI policy. Any LLM-assisted contributions are closed immediately and considered tainted. Use for messaging, bug reporting, etc. also gets you a warning and a request to write yourself. And I dare say I have a heavy ban finger on this; you get one warning only. Well, unless it's clearly an automated submission, in which case you get an immediate ban.
In my dayjob and non-Gentoo work, I also follow a strict policy for my own work. I don't use any of these tools. However, I can't really stop others from doing so, even though I cringe whenever I see someone needing to use an overengineered statistical model to make a trivial change. I can't really reject bug reports, reviews, etc.
The really hard part of it is that I'm starting to have doubts. I truly hate slop in all forms, and what these tools have done to the Internet in general, and to #FreeSoftware in particular. However, I've also gotten some good reports. Like, the kind of tricky logic issues in the specification I am developing that I would have never figured out myself, and that may have never came up during the review otherwise. In other words, someone running an LLM on the specification triggered real bugs that would likely slipped through and required a post-approval specification change when someone noticed that we've introduced incompatible constraints in two different parts of the specification, that would eventually be hit in real use.
All the ethical problems are still there. All the harm is still there. However, I can't really claim that these tools vomit pure useless slop anymore. I feel that it's really time for me to retire.

Too many days working on #FLOSS feel like: "I'm not paid for this shit. I'm paid to do other shit and I have to focus on that shit, but I can't when I have to spend so much time fixing shit that apparently others are being paid to break all the time."
#Gentoo #LLVM #FreeSoftware #OpenSource

I haven't been attending #FLOSS events much for two main reasons. Firstly, because I found having to pay for attendance discriminating and against the spirit of #FreeSoftware. Secondly, because staying away from home for a few days posed problems. So I've been only attending local events that were open.
However, nowadays I doubt that I'm even going to continue that. I don't feel at home with the wider community anymore. What's for me, between nazi enablers and their apologists?
Perhaps it's time for dedicated #NoAI events.

#Gentoo has a strict #NoAI policy, so our projects are slop-free. Unfortunately, these days you cannot run an up-to-date system without tons of random slop packages, because everyone insists on using that crap.
Gentoo supports a whole bunch of architectures that probably every other distribution dumped so far. Unfortunately, these days the available software list is shrinking, as everyone insists on adding some random meaningless dependencies on #RustLang (like using uv-build, which is the single most harmful meaningless #Python project ever created).
Gentoo has a strong upstream cooperation policy. However, these days I'm afraid to file issues, because just too often they just trigger more slop. I miss the "good" old days where the worst you could expect is some toxic asshole.
The state of #FreeSoftware is truly depressing. There is little joy in distribution work these days. You're overwhelmed with shit, burned out and end up doing a shitty job. And it's bad for your health.
#FLOSS

#AI is a zombie virus.
There were so many #FreeSoftware projects that were dead and buried with honors, or at least on life support. It was unfortunate. Sometimes it involved a lot of downstream scaffolding to keep everything working. But at least we had warm memories of them and respect to their authors.
And now slop virus is taking them over, one after another. It's pulling them out of their graves or hospital beds, deformed and mutilated. All the warmth is gone. They have no purpose anymore, beyond feeding.
Sometimes this is done by kids who don't understand the first thing about the project they're defiling, who just want to get credit for something important. However, more often this is done by their original maintainers, who not only don't seem to realize their prime time is over, but who are many years detached from honest software development work.
#NoAI #NoLLM