In which I attempt to have a nuanced discussion about #AI and #LLM, which I will probably regret. But whatever, I don't think that black-and-white thinking tends to be useful. So grab a cup of your beverage of choice and settle in for a reasoned conversation. https://changelog.complete.org/archives/44740-ai-in-debian-the-vote-proposals-and-nuance
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John Goerzen
@jgoerzen@floss.social
mastodon 4.7.3Hacker, dad, pilot, amateur radio operator, activist, guy that is susceptible to new hobbies. Former president of Software in the Public Interest.
I live miles from the nearest paved road in #Kansas.
Interests: #rust #debian #linux #pilot #flying #hamradio #emacs #orgmode #kansas #floss #kansas #raspberrypi #programming #parenting #retrocomputing
SRE at Google. I do not speak for my employer; views expressed here are my own.
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Joined November 19, 2020
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Highlights of my past posts (thread):
Replying to
Also see my dedication to Frank da Cruz in the changelog at https://github.com/OpenKermit/ckermit/releases/tag/v11.0.506 . Frank was one of the designers of #Kermit in 1981, and was actively involved in the project until last year -- 44 years, which I believe is a record for the involvement of a project founder in an Open Source project!
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@paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange Right on! I asked my first question about #Kermit on Usenet in 1996!
If you happened to enjoy using #BBSes back in the day, Kermit's character set translation feature makes it really easy to connect to a telnet #BBS and see ANSI CP437 graphics in today's UTF-8 world. https://www.openkermit.org/ckermit/bbs/ tells how.
One command does it: "set terminal character-set cp437 utf8". Also it's bidirectional!
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@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social I resurrected Gopher just before it faded into total oblivion. Now #gopher and #GeminiProtocol are communities with many implementations and are used by probably hundreds of people worldwide.
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@thomholwerda@exquisite.social #Debian. I've been using it for literally 30 years. In all that time, it has remained community-owned, with assets held by a non-profit. Its founding documents say that the priorities are its users and Free Software. I personally have used it for everything from large-scale deployments, Rasberry Pis. Its policy of backporting security fixes means things like automated security patches are much more practical than with rolling releases.
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@paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange Also given your username, I should mention I added IPv6 support to Kermit, and have a whole page about it at https://www.openkermit.org/ckermit/ipv6/
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@desantis@mastodon.bida.im Yep, I love it for just that reason! I have two pages talking about it. There's a quick tour as part of the intro at https://www.openkermit.org/ckermit/intro/#quick-tour-as-a-ssh-wrapper and then a more elaborate exposition at https://www.openkermit.org/ckermit/ssh/ .
Long before #LLMs, two of the biggest uses for #AI were (and still are):
To show us ads we don't want to see (on the web)
To block ads we don't want to see (in email)
Funny how so many uses of AI are to make things we don't want.
Maybe in the future we'll burn a bunch of gigawatts with the ad-blocking AIs fighting the ad-injecting AIs, all to capture the attention of humans.
Or, who am I kidding, they'll probably be fighting to capture the attention of agentic AIs.
In which I try to look at #AI with a balanced frame of mind: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/42503-artificial-intelligence-shades-of-gray
I also discuss building a LLM email classifier using solar-powered local models, which a useful degree of success.
I'm neither a cheerleader nor a doomsayer. More a tinkerer.
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@babble_endanger@freeradical.zone @thomholwerda@exquisite.social Actually both! There are translation teams for human languages. And there tends to be team maintenance for programming languages that have large package ecosystems outside Debian (eg, Python, Go, Rust)
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@babble_endanger@freeradical.zone @thomholwerda@exquisite.social Absolutely! A lot of packages are on salsa.debian.org, and language teams in particular might be easy places to jump in. I am happy to help you find a place to plug in with your interests also if you like.
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@alienghic@timeloop.cafe @thomholwerda@exquisite.social Agreed, she is right about that!
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@mirth@mastodon.sdf.org Quite right, and as a published author, I am quite well aware of this, unfortunately.
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@Yung_Lyun @climagic On mobile, but this is to be expected if /home isn't a symlink. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/readlink.2.html
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@Yung_Lyun @climagic Feel free to ask more questions and tag me! Low-level Linux is something I'm familiar with.
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@KimCrayton1@dair-community.social It was surprisingly difficult to find the actual RSS feed of this podcast, so I could listen to it. For others, the link is https://anchor.fm/s/10490423c/podcast/rss
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@EricAlper@mastodon.social The ignorance and lack of thought on this is so astounding. Even if you don't remember how old England is, if you remember the USA gained independence from someone, surely it stands to reason that country is older?
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@njsg@mementomori.social @jgoerzen@changelog.complete.org Yes, exactly. If you have more insights, I'd welcome them!
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@alienghic@timeloop.cafe @thomholwerda@exquisite.social I think that headline and article conflates the unique demands of the DPL with the general contributor experience.