Unfortunately, OpenMandriva’s president (warning, lunduke link as evidence) has declared the project “non-woke” and “anti-DEI”, which has resulted in it attracting a hard right community.

Unfortunately, OpenMandriva’s president (warning, lunduke link as evidence) has declared the project “non-woke” and “anti-DEI”, which has resulted in it attracting a hard right community.

TIL!

(though personally I don’t consider Elementary’s Pantheon desktop a ‘major’ DE, since it’s only used by 1 other obscure distro besides Elementary according to distrowatch, and AFAIK elementary itself isn’t super popular).

Did you mean to have that be a response to a different comment?

The Apertus Swiss AI unfortunately doesn’t seem to live up to its claims, and they have been silent on the issue brought up there. I honestly suspect the same of IBM’s Granite, but have not investigated.

They have not, they do accept AI contributions, however their policy is a bit more restrictive than Debian’s in that Fedora at least requires contributors to disclose LLM use in pull requests.

There are a few distros that do reject all AI code, which you can find in these two lists:

https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#linux-based (under the ‘Alternative Linux-based operating systems’ section).

There’s some serious concerns with corporate AI that, IMO, make it a no-go under almost any scenario.

But if we ignore those and instead focus purely on self-hosted AI, we’re still going to run into some roadblocks :\

Unfortunately, there does not currently exist a self-hosted LLM model that wasn’t trained unethically on copyrighted code (the ones that do claim to be ethical have not lived up to that claim).

Realistically, even with an unethically trained local LLM, I don’t think using the available self-hosted LLMs to try to find bugs in some code is terribly unethical or damaging, that’s probably the only use-case I would sign-off on within a FLOSS project. I also don’t think it would matter too much if someone wanted to use a self-hosted AI to code some changes to a personal project, like modding an old C64 game source code with some new features. Go for it.

But once we start getting into distributing software, or contributing code to existing FLOSS projects, none of the current models are safe to use, as they all are prone to generating parts of the copyrighted code they were trained on (potentially each prompt can have a 3 to 10% chance of generating a perfect copy of copyrighted code). That is a legal minefield waiting to be stepped on, and could be disastrous for projects that accept a large portion of LLM code, as it may become unfeasible to re-write that code, or to survive a legal battle from a company claiming damages.

It’s also quite unsettled on whether or not LLM output can even be copyrighted at all, stripping any LLM generated code of the ability to be protected with copyleft licenses like the GPL (this would in effect allow companies to take FLOSS project and close source it, using the free labor of the project, but without any ability for the FLOSS project to do the same back, it would be a one-way pillaging).

Until there’s a a truly ethical and non-infringing self-hosted LLM available, there really is no middle ground for a FLOSS project to take. And if/when one is available, there will still be a concern of skill loss/critical thinking atrophy that seems to be likely with extended LLM use, like a sort’ve Wall-E effect (example 1, example 2).

Some people will absolutely lie, but I suspect most contributors will respect the rules, and ultimately cut down on AI PRs overall, as those AI contributors switch to projects who are pro-AI.

“Is the code good” is literally all that matters.

Only if one ignores the ethical, environmental, and copyright concerns.

The rural parts of vermont lose power so frequently from storms causing trees to fall on power lines, it makes financial sense to the power company to install a battery that can last long enough until the line is fixed and power can be returned, charging the battery back up in the process.

That’s not insurmountable to learn, even something like watching Cody’s Labs videos on gold reclamation would be a good starting point.

Overall it would still be tricky to fully pull off without raising suspicion unless the amounts were kept consistently low, at least if you kept it to a 1 person operation.

If you started a gold mining company, hired people to run it legitimately, you could fudge the books on how much was actually mined, sifted, and processed, that probably wouldn’t get a close inspection.

Long term plan, but…

Begin legitimately prospecting a piece of land legally in Alaska, document that you do so, do some substantial digging/panning etc.

Melt a large bar down into much smaller amounts that are worth only around $500 to $1000 in weight. Sell the melted gold at a local gold precious metals dealer in small batches over the course of many months/years. Claim the profit on your taxes as spoils from your prospecting.

This technique would not work with huge amounts or quantities, and even as I described it, it may bring an audit, since it is likely most prospectors are not that successful.

Oh it’s wasting water and electricity? The water and electricity were already wasted by training, you can’t un-waste the water or electricity.

Water and electricity are wasted running the data centers on really inefficient power generators at the plant.

While BSD did get some help from the corps basing off it, ultimately it is a roll of the dice if they decide to contribute back, where as with GPL, it is enforced at a license level, and the newer AGPL license helps avoid the issue you describe with Netflix not being legally obligated to contribute back code that’s distributed under the normal GPL.

I personally think GPL/AGPL provides a better outcome for regular users, and empowers them to not be beholden to closed gardens and proprietary software, where as the BSD enables corporations to enshittify forks by legally allowing them to become closed and proprietary.

Also @Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip

The last time I investigated Solus, there seemed to be difficulty getting a new ISO out (which admittedly was quite a while ago). However your AI policy announcement even says to bear in mind Solus is a “small team” (I assume to justify the use of AI?).

Thanks for the info, I was going off stuff I’d read years ago, but I should’ve done more research to verify.

Looks like Mac OS is indeed still mostly a continuation of NextStep, though the original NextStep itself seems to have incorporated a decent amount from BSD. I was misinformed about the Switch, it looks like there was a fair amount of threads from a decade ago perpetuating that it ran on a BSD of some sort, and never came across the corrections. I edited my post to reflect that new info.

Too many negatives to alcohol for me. Even a single beer with a meal can make it more difficult to sleep sometimes, which isn’t worth the relaxation it brings.

I tried some non alcoholic beer when it was at Costco once, and actually really liked it, but it’s way too expensive normally (more than regular beer!), and Costco dropped it fast, so I just stick with flavored sugar free drink mixes sometimes mixed with flavored seltzer water.

It’s an open source license that lets anyone take the code and relicense it under a proprietary license. That enables corporations to take the code, make it closed source, and profit from it without legally having to give anything back to the project that made the code in the first place (as an example, the PS3, PS4 and PS5 are all forks of BSD. And some parts of Mac OS and the Nintendo Switches take some parts from BSD. All of them were able to close source the code, making them proprietary).

Since they don’t have to contribute back to the original project, BSD itself didn’t benefit as much from all those corporations using it, despite the billions they made doing so, and all the users of those products were stuck with a closed source OS they couldn’t modify.

In comparison, Linux projects generally use the GPL license, which doesn’t allow anyone who forks the code to change the license to something other than GPL. That means if they distribute their forked version publicly, they are legally obligated to provide access to the source code to whomever requests it. So any beneficial changes they made can make it back upstream to the original project, as well as ensuring the end-users are never trapped in a closed ecosystem, since they can always fork it if a corporation goes rogue and enshittifies.

The other devs were generally against any form of disclosure, saying that they didn’t want to ‘shame’ developers who used it.

The discussion was locked and then removed from public view due to public backlash.

Solus mostly has just a skeleton crew left after the created, Ikey Doherty, abandoned it suddenly. I personally didn’t think it’d be around long-term even before this new policy.