deadbeef79000 50 points a month ago

Was expecting something along the lines of "I didn't agree, so will step down"... but (edited):

... I want the consequences of Debian fully embracing fascist-backed technology to be known.

I can not support the current decision of Debian about LLM use, and am no longer willing to be seen as a part of Debian under these new rules. Pretending to have a "neutral stance" when faced with fascism is not neutrality, it’s active collaboration.

Fuck that, I’m out, ...

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flying_sheep 1 point a month ago

What makes them call LLMs “fascist”? I guess you could say that individuals who aren't super rich can't train them by themselves, so relying on them currently means you're relying on these fuckers.

That would be quite the stretch though …

The response to the mail seems to think the same:

Not sure if there's any point in saying this, but the fact that the technology has notable companies pushing it forward that are often associated with fascism does not mean that the technology itself is somehow inextricably linked to fascism, just like how Microsoft making an operating system doesn't associate operating systems in general with Microsoft or their goals. The GR was concerned with the technology as a whole AFAICT, not the companies developing some variants of it.

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deadbeef79000 43 points a month ago

I suspect it's because the juggernauts of the AI industry are mostly American companies, owned by billionaires, and are in Trump's current circle of buddies.

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Jean_le_Flambeur 31 points a month ago

There are billionaires who are "just" enemies of the working class, and then there are american billionaires from silicon valley, who want to actively destroy democracy and serve in a proto facist government they are very entangled in

Ofc (the currently popular) ai models are tools of facism, what else would they be?

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eleijeep 18 points a month ago

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

- 1984, George Orwell

We would do better at recognising the tools of fascism if more people engaged with the literature of our culture. It's there right under our noses.

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Tiresia 20 points a month ago

I'm surprised you didn't go for

Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor...

She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

, also from Nineteen Eighty-Four

It's... optimistic about how much AI users know about the internal workings of AI, expecting them to be engineers rather than commodity consumers, but the disdain for what is produced is on point. As is its role in maintaining a post-truth society.

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eleijeep 10 points a month ago

That's another good one. There are so many parts of that book that are directly relevant today. It boggles my mind that people in general are not furious about what is happening.

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SocialistVibes01 0 points a month ago

Ofc a random@piefed.social would be referencing George Orwell. 🤦‍♂️

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ProdigalFrog 6 points a month ago

I like the response someone left to that response: https://deadsimpletech.com/...

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flying_sheep 3 points a month ago

Great article, I'm going to send this one around, thanks!

But I'd like to make a distinction: LLMs are not just tools, it's more basic; they're just math.

As the author themself said: Claude, Codex, and so on are tools built using LLMs.

They drive you towards slop not least because they're only available as subscription models that you pay for by token.

Maybe commodification will lead to super terse models that run on personal or institutional servers, and exist as an advanced rubber duck to test your assumptions against. Totally thinkable with LLMs, yet very far from our current reality.

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9488fcea02a9 3 points a month ago

I said something along these lines in the linux community and got downvoted into oblivion.

Just because billionaire facists have taken control of the tech, doesnt make it inherently facist....

We could implement these things in a more ethical way but its difficult and expensive.

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flying_sheep 2 points a month ago

People are. They're not training frontier models yet but scientific supercomputers exist.

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9488fcea02a9 2 points a month ago

Yes but lemmy would have you believe that is also facism ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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flying_sheep 10 points a month ago

I guess you could frame a neutral stance that way as it doesn't ban AI.

But to me “pro AI” sounds like embracing it, building it into processes, …

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brucethemoose -2 points a month ago

Yeah, the headlines is editorialized.

"Neutral" is right if you read the proposals: https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002#quorum

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Epp 1 point a month ago

Apparently the hive mind is angry you didn't demonize AI. You need to call it a "fascist world-destroyer" otherwise you get down votes from the zealots.

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coolasbreeze 2 points a month ago

I mean he is right, I feel like this decision spits in the face of the spirit of the Debian social contract but whatever I guess... Considering Debian's position and how many projects rely on it I understand why the decision has been reached but that tells me it is thinking of itself as a business and not a community first.

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Wronnay 2 points a month ago

Not sure if there's any point in saying this, but the fact that the technology has notable companies pushing it forward that are often associated with fascism does not mean that the technology itself is somehow inextricably linked to fascism, just like how Microsoft making an operating system doesn't associate operating systems in general with Microsoft or their goals. The GR was concerned with the technology as a whole AFAICT, not the companies developing some variants of it.

I like this reply.

LLM in the open source world seem to be seen as evil things but the tech doesn’t have to be trained on copyrighted material and doesn’t have to be run by evil companies.

I don’t like the anti sentiment which Codeberg also seems to share… there is nothing bad with LLMs themselves, just with implementations of them.

Celebrating anti-AI is like fighting the Internet in the early 2000s or steam machines in the industrial age… Of course some companies are doing bad things like always but the technology makes our lives easier

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mindlesscrollyparrot 23 points a month ago

There would be nothing bad with LLMs provided that:

They weren't based on colossal scale appropriation of people's copyrighted work - are there any like that? The companies are actually laundering their IP addresses so that they can't be blocked (see recent article on the LKML for an example). I don't call that "fair use".

They weren't being powered by building new fossil-fuel generators in the middle of heatwaves that make it very clear that the climate emergency is here and now (the idea that LLMs are going to solve that problem for us is laughable).

I could go on. Nothing bad, so long as we ignore all the bad parts.

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brucethemoose 6 points a month ago

The closest to what you want is probably the Nvidia Nemotron series, which uses an open dataset. It used a sizable GPU cluster to train, but nothing on the scale of what OpenAI/Anthropic are guzzling. That, and Nvidia makes a point to advertise high utilization/efficiency.

There are smaller scale truly open LLMs like the Olmo series, but Nemotron is the most practical to use.

Then there are the Chinese "open weights" LLMs, which tend to be trained on more modest Huawei ASICs instead of GPUs, and probably with a good chunk of renewables. The dataset is closed, and who knows what is in there, but at least the training scale is much smaller

They are Apache licensed.

Another thing is that both these group pitch LLMs as modular tools to customize, not magic black boxes to rent.

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Tiresia 11 points a month ago

Celebrating anti-AI is like fighting [...] steam machines in the industrial age…

So what you're saying that anti-AI is like fighting the machines that have made the planet uninhabitable in under two centuries of use, thus being responsible for billions of deaths and the collapse of this wave of civilization?

huh.

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amelore 6 points a month ago

Okay so where are the good LLMs managed by good organizations and practical for programmers?

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Skullgrid 5 points a month ago

On your local machine, after having fed your ops DBs and codebases into it?

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