Joe Brockmeier

This weather is making Cupcake and Sir Wobbles sleepy. #CatsOfMastodon

@alexchapman@vee.seedy.cc @dansup@mastodon.social LLMs generate code faster, we all agree right? Thus it results in more for humans to review. “Coding by hand” is just coding. Just like writing. You want to use LLMs for your own stuff? No one is stopping you. You’re lobbying for others to have to accept code that you didn’t even write. That’s a big difference. It’s a joke that being anti-AI is extreme. LLMs weren’t even a thing until recently. There’s no reason that people should immediately have to accept them.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glynmoody/117388721160448007 "Some of you will suffer, but that is a sacrifice that I am willing to make." It would be funny how tone-deaf and asinine Altman is if it weren't for all of the damage he's causing. He'd be an absolutely fantastic movie villain. Lousy real-life human being, though.

RE: https://sfba.social/@drahardja/117312373576583428 “Listen, meth is supposed to make you more productive. I have no idea why the quality of your work is so shit and everybody is so hostile lately.”

A thought on considering AI policies for FOSS projects: who will you attract , and who will you repel with the policy? If you reverse the polarity later, will the “damage” on either side be repairable if the policy turned out to be bad? e.g. if you say “no LLMs for now, maybe never” what’s the downside, and the upside? And vice versa: what’s the one-year, two-year risk of accepting LLM content? ISTM that a no-LLM policy, for code, content, communications, is lower risk than a pro- or tolerant policy. But maybe I’m missing something. From a purely pragmatic POV, I there are still risks from accepting LLM code just based on maintainability, sustainability, and institutional knowledge. My theory is that LLM using contributors are going to show less attachment to a project, because the way that LLMs (seemingly) reduce friction to creating PRs. From an adoption standpoint, I wonder: which and how many users will be put off if a project goes LLM, versus the other way? I’m sure there are some people who’ll drop a project if it declares a no-LLM policy, but ISTM fewer people in that camp and … well, it’s a value judgement which camp you’d rather nurture.

RE: https://toot.cat/@zeenix/117326398656330874 I'm sure this will be dismissed by some folks as "tone policing" but I'll once again try to make this case: the overheated, straight-to-rage reactions are so detrimental to the cause of keeping LLMs/AIs out of FOSS projects. I am not saying that people aren't justified in their feelings. I am saying that every person is responsible for what they do with their feelings, and I have less than zero sympathy for the argument that when a person is angry they are not responsible for managing their response. One of the reasons I'm passionately in favor of projects adopting anti-LLM policies is that I still believe in the Apache Software Foundation's motto of "community over code". My love of FOSS has always been mixed with the appreciation of the people and communities behind the code. LLMs are, at best, rejection of community ethos. They are the "go alone" in the saying "If you want to go far, go together. If you want to go fast, go alone". But hate and contempt are always, always, always corrosive. You cannot build on that foundation, and you cannot persuade people when you're demonstrating naked contempt for them. You cannot. The attempt to create a hostile environment for FOSS maintainers in order to coerce them into anti-LLM policies is not going to preserve a FOSS culture we want to be part of. It is counter-productive to swarm project issue trackers and discussion fora with angry messages calling people names. Believe it or not, if you've never spoken up in a project before, now is probably *not* the time to create an account and start angrily posting that the project is "mask off" because it's considering an LLM policy shy of absolute LLM banishment. I think the "KDE for people" thing is fine. I think KDE Eco's statement was good. Talking on social media about this is fine - without the contempt. I get that there's so much to be angry about right now that it's really hard to keep it focused where it needs to be. But if we turn the anger on each other, we're hosed. Just absolutely hosed. I'm sure that the Sam Altmans, Elon Musks, and DHHs of the world are absolutely thrilled to see the anti-LLM folks going full PETA in these discussions, because they fracture communities that could stand up against them.

There's a lot of folks complaining (rightfully) about the money being thrown toward Omarchy while other FOSS projects are struggling for funds. I'm not a tech billionaire or millionaire (thousandaire, maybe?) but all this reminds me I could do better at donating to things I use myself. So I'm going to throw some money at two projects I use, and try to remember to keep doing that more regularly. I humbly suggest other folks do the same. It'd be great to see a few FOSS projects report a big bump in donations as a protest against DHH. A lot is being said about DHH's politics and the silliness of throwing money at what amounts to a pile of configuration scripts -- but there's something else at play here: it is an us-against-them play by a minority of wealthy folks who like keeping other people divided. FOSS isn't about that: open source became mighty because of its community. If we lose that, we lose everything. A handful of people with too much money have managed to funnel something like $13 million into Omarchy for the next few years. What can millions of people do? Let's see. #OpenSource

@alexchapman@vee.seedy.cc @dansup@mastodon.social if a maintainer wants LLM-generated contributions, they can do the prompting themselves. Why would they need to accept outside contributions from users who may or may not know a damn thing about the project? A random person with an LLM adds no value. We’ve survived without LLMs for thousands of years: I think we can keep surviving a few more years without having to use them everywhere. Get used to the idea that people can choose to say no to them.

In addition to the steady stream of LLM-generated pitches we're seeing at LWN, I'm also seeing an uptick in pitches for LLM-generated projects and distributions.

While we do write about projects, like the Linux kernel, that are using LLMs somewhere in the process, I'm not going to be writing about any of these flash-in-the-pan projects anytime soon.

• Generally, I don't write a review of a project that I wouldn't use myself.

• I also am wary of writing about a project until I feel confident it's going to be around for a while, and there's either some community behind it or at least a dedicated maintainer who will likely stick with the project. (Nothing is promised, of course - sometimes things happen.)

• I see no point in spotlighting something that a person slapped together with Claude credits in a few days when other users can do the same thing, and more appropriate to their very specific use case.

A few interesting, perhaps, observations:

• I've been writing about FOSS for 27 years, off and on. Getting actual maintainers to pitch their projects is usually like pulling teeth. I've had so many conversations at events with people who maintain projects or who know about projects to pitch them to publications so everybody can learn about them.

• LLMs come along and we get a steady stream of "oh, look at my project".

• Zero of the people who are pitching are up-front about the projects being LLM-assisted or LLM-generated.

I think there's a lesson or three in there somewhere about the impacts and motivations around these tools, what they mean for community, and the downward slope we're already on.

@alexchapman@vee.seedy.cc @dansup@mastodon.social how do I know which is which without having to review it? I don’t. I’ll say again: we got by just fine without LLMs this far. They’re not necessary, they’re not inevitable, and the negatives far outweigh any positives. People, being people, have choices. We can say “no.” People are saying no. Deal with it.

Continuing to see a steady trickle of LLM-assisted or LLM-created pitches for LWN, some of which don't even seem to have a meat proxy at the wheel; just somebody turning loose an AI agent with instructions to try to scam a publication for a few bucks. I don't like the adoption of LLM tools by FOSS maintainers and contributors, but I can understand the appeal (kind of) and that doesn't feel malicious or scammy to me. (I understand some people disagree there. That's fine. No need to reply.) But the "pretend an LLM's work is human authorship" people? I have nothing but contempt for that. You want to "write" with an LLM? Keep it to yourself. Why the hell would we pay you to fondle prompts when we could do it ourselves, and better? Our subscribers don't want to read that. We don't want to try to edit it. And you don't deserve a pat on the head, much less a check, for "I asked Claude, and it vomited out this sludge." #LLMs

RE: https://social.ginny.today/@ginny/117312913530116961 "You fucking capitalist perverts" is going to be a new go-to phrase for me, so thanks for that.

RE: https://zirk.us/@CindyWeinstein/117311695606112636 Perhaps a “allow hunting of billionaires for sport” proposition would be better. You can obtain a hunting license for $50. If you bag a billionaire you receive 1% of their assets, the other 99% is absorbed by the state. You’re not allowed to taxidermy them. We’re not monsters. For people who don’t want to kill, they can “catch and release” the billionaire. Same rules otherwise apply: a successful capture nets the hunter 1% of the billionaire’s assets, 99% goes to the state, after deducting a modest amount to allow the billionaire a stipend to live on, say 1.5x minimum wage in whatever state they live in, plus they can enroll in the least-good health insurance program that they offer to their employees. Don’t worry, they’ll no doubt use their superior intellect and skills to become a billionaire again in no time - and thus be eligible to be caught and released again! They’ll have fun. They love to say how much other people love to work, so they’ll appreciate both being shown mercy and having the opportunity to win capitalism all over again.

By default any application capable of showing / emitting notifications should have them all turned off by default. All of them. Do not make users wonder, "Where did that sound come from?" "What was that pop-up that just appeared and disappeared in the corner of my monitor?" I'm sure some folks want, for example, their terminal's "visual bell" to emit a sound or pop up a dialog. They can open the preferences and enable it if so. It's not something that users should have to hunt down and turn off. Application developers: remember that your application is probably one of 20 that is running on somebody's desktop. It needs to coexist nicely, not scream for attention. Otherwise we have 20 applications that need their notifications smacked down so people can get work done without distractions.

A user asked in a project forum, reasonably, "does the widely reported X security vulnerability that affects the project that this was forked from affect this project as well?" They were told, basically, that they should report such an issue in private. Um, no. Sorry - thats dumb. It's public knowledge that Project B is a fork of Project A from a specific version. If X security flaw affects A, then it's not exactly a big stretch for anybody to conclude that B may also be afflicted. It's not on users to quietly ask those developers "does that security hole affect us too?" It's already out there. If anything, it's a failure on the part of project B to not have made an announcement right away that either they are working on a fix (affected) or have concluded it's not an issue (not affected). It's rare that I feel like open-source maintainers owe anybody anything -- when it breaks, you get to keep both pieces and your money back! -- but don't chide people for asking an obvious question that you've failed to communicate about.

@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social @neatnik@social.lol Um. I think this depends a lot on what one means by "develop a distro". It takes *a lot* of money if the distribution is actually employing people to work on core technologies (e.g., Fedora, openSUSE), maintain build systems, and so forth. Omarchy, though? No. Not so much. Even if its founder was otherwise unobjectionable (sadly, not) there's no reason that an Arch-based project that largely consists of minor tweaks should need anywhere near that kind of funding. It's shameful that people are supporting not only DHH's politics, but firehosing him with more money while projects like GNOME, KDE, LibreOffice, Python, and many others struggle for funding.

“Are you awake? Good. There’s an emergency. I can see the bottom of my food bowl.” - Willow #catsofmastodon

@yaelwrites@mastodon.social "Our founder only endorses genocide on his own time. When he clocks in, he magically becomes a politics-free being that has no adverse opinions that could impact our users."

Just a random "thank you" to all the folks who post random pet pictures, scenery, crafts, musings on music or entertainment, and all other manner of creative wonderfulness that pops up in my timeline in between all the (necessary!) discussions of everything going wrong. It's so important. It's the flowers growing in the pavement cracks. Reminds me of what's good.

The upstairs trio have become, shall we say, accustomed to receiving treats when I’m in the kitchen. Here they are, just watching me expectantly until I do the right thing… #catsofmastodon #cats

@dgar@aus.social "A computer cannot wreck a hotel room, therefore a computer should not be allowed to make music."

RE: https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/116997366488785600

If you accept something is unethical, its usefulness is irrelevant, isn't it?

Unrestrained medical testing on humans would be useful* -- but we oppose that because it's wildly unethical.

We may have learned more from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study than we could have any other way; you can argue that it was "useful" but it was not ethical. Nobody should have to weigh its usefulness in saying, "We should not conduct medical studies on unsuspecting humans."

That is, of course, an extreme example. But it's ridiculous to complain that people who find something unethical won't consider the usefulness of the thing. This is just trying to pave the way for sweeping the ethical considerations under the rug because - if we stop to actually consider the ethical implications - then the conclusion might be, "We should not use this."

And that's why society is the way it is today: if something serves capitalism, the ethics have to be swept aside.

I've said this before, but if the roles were reversed and AI usage benefitted workers -- if the driver of LLM usage was bottom-up and people were using it to do the same amount of work in half the time and then futzing off the rest of the day to play with their kids or pursue hobbies while collecting the same pay -- suddenly business would care a great deal about the ethics of using these tools to "steal" time from their employers.

But because all of the negative impact is on workers, communities, and even other companies not involved in the whole AI push, we dare not consider the ethics - only the utility of these things - lest we decide, "Let's stuff that genie back in the bottle and throw it out to sea."

• In the long run, though perhaps not for those particular humans.

My wake-up call today was Willow deciding to leave her bed and curl up next to my head to purr at top volume at about 6 a.m. Since she's about 40% subwoofer by weight and has a window-rattling purr, it was impossible to sleep through but not a terrible way to wake up. #catsofmastodon #Cat

It’s Friday, and our deck replacement/catio is now fully operational. Took about ten days from demolition of the old deck to finishing the new one (minus staining it, which has to wait, apparently). It would seem that the cats approve. Hope they really enjoy the outdoors. #catsofmastodon #catio

Additional views from the #catio. My mothers in law and daughter came over to see it this afternoon. Meg’s mom said it reminded her of a treehouse and I think that’s about right. Great space to just hang out and enjoy nature. Going to be doing a lot of reading out here.

@briankrebs@infosec.exchange Thursday night - still debating ignoring it or drinking every time he lies. My liver is begging me to ignore it.

@michaelormsby@mastodon.art I mean, "passed out" is probably the best way to experience 2026.

@doctormo@floss.social @RickiTarr@beige.party Conservatives, IME, tend to think they won't personally be affected by things until they are personally affected by things. It doesn't matter to them if my child or your child is impacted; only if their child is impacted, and maybe not even then. ("Well, they just have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, like I did.") There's a huge lack of empathy and logic when it comes to policy for conservatives. A short-term win of punishing the "weak" or the other is worth the (not so) long-term risk that they'll be harmed. There's plenty of interviews now with FAFO'ed conservatives who are being bitten by Trump's policies, and it's amazing how few are introspective enough to see that they did it to themselves. They really thought they'd be exempted from consequences.

It continues to suck that the people at the top who pursue these follies just keep on collecting obscene paychecks while the folks who do the work get kicked to the curb. 21,000 people. They didn't decide that Oracle should fund AI crap. 21,000 people whose families are going to, at best, feel the pinch on their finances while somebody in the house has to look for another job. Many of those families, if based in the U.S., are going to either pay out the nose for health insurance via COBRA, or have no medical coverage. Meanwhile, the Ellison family is trying to buy up Warner Brothers and will gut those properties and try to turn its news assets into more right-wing propaganda farms. https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/tech-and-start-ups/article-903442

I don’t think people are taking enough about Big Raisin and its evil work infesting perfectly good foods with raisins like oatmeal cookies and cinnamon bagels.

RE: https://beige.party/@maxleibman/116948585713420593 Until we get the all-clear on lettuce again, I'm just substituting french fries for salad. OK, I was doing that before too, but.

@_elena@mastodon.social I'm curious, what are you using to learn German or what method? I had a good streak with Duolingo some years ago, but I understand it's become AI'ified.

I've usually relied on K3b for burning data and music CDs, but it's been a few years since I looked for any alternatives.

This is probably not a task that's receiving a lot of attention these days, though maybe discontent with streaming services has encouraged people to think more about it lately.

I haven't been doing much of it myself, but my daughter asked me recently to show her how to burn music CDs* and I've been poking at it again.

Does anybody have a better suggestion for making music CDs? Only open-source applications that work on Linux need apply...

• Yes, I was very excited to show her how to do this. If I were younger and less fat, I would've done a cartwheel.

#K3b #MusicCD #Lazyweb #BurnCD #OpenSource

My current theory is that the pharmacy business is just a sideline for CVS and its primary mission is wasting paper...

@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io That sounds so much like how I wound up with Laney. I was volunteering at a shelter and she demanded my attention until she had it, and then when I got her out of her crate and took her to the socialization area, she just laid down and put her little head on my hand for 30 minutes. She'd been in the shelter for two years. I already had a cat, and tried and tried to persuade various friends they should consider adopting her. Nobody bit. After two months, I caved and brought her home. She was about 8 years old when I got her, she lived to be about 16 or 17. She was an opinionated, demanding senior torbie who knew exactly what she wanted and expected to get it. And she did. Every day with her was a gift. What was your kitty's name? She was beautiful!

What are you thinking about that's interesting and not about AI/LLMs or politics these days?

@aabh@functional.cafe @LJ@sunny.garden I wonder what Firefox would be like if the browser believers were in charge.

@severin@hci.social "I want to contribute to a world where people own their tech stack, and do not depend on the whims of a few capitalist actors." I like this vision. It is also, IMO, completely incompatible with depending on LLM tools like Claude. This is one of the things that many old-timers in FOSS are trying to wave people away from: depending on proprietary tools just to move faster. There is, AFAICT, zero way for the FOSS community right now to engage with LLMs in a way that doesn't depend on "a few capitalist actors" -- even in a scenario using local models rather than Claude, we're still dependent on black-box models that cost millions of dollars to train using undisclosed data sets and high-end hardware for developers. Totally with you on the idea of people owning their own tech stack, but this is not the way.

@tantramar@zeroes.ca I’m just so-so on raisins alone, okay with them in trail mix and Raisin Bran, they just ruin baked goods IMO. The weird thing is I don’t know anybody who likes them in cookies, bread, bagels, etc. but they persist.

@jalefkowit@hachyderm.io I'll add it to the pile. The pile is probably an OSHA hazard at this point, but I'm sure they scrapped OSHA enforcement too.

@timbray@cosocial.ca we're never going to have a Star Trek-like utopia without an apocalyptic crash of civilization first. I guess they're just doing future generations a favor. Not, you know, us. We're hosed. But maybe humans will turn it all around by 2226 or so.

@petergleick@fediscience.org by some miracle if the Trump regime doesn't rig the midterms and 2028 elections, Rubio and company are going to be in deep trouble if they want to actually leave the U.S. for any reason. If by an even greater miracle they're actually held accountable for their crimes domestically, it would make fleeing the country a bit hard. Between Iran, the illegal targeting of boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and who knows what else, the ICC could be a major threat for them.

@wplalonde@lgbtqia.space One of the joys of walking the dog this time of year is seeing all the different flowers and such that are blooming. Great picture!

Just bought for Bandcamp Friday, "Eghass Malan" by Les Filles de Illighadad. Described as "Tuareg guitar mixed with traditional rural folk". Great stuff. Give it a listen! #BandcampFridayhttps://lesfillesdeillighadad.bandcamp.com/album/eghass-malan

@matt@toot.cafe I feel that. We have an extended family chat and each time someone sends, say, a picture of one of my nieces it blows up my phone for hours with replies and reaction emojis.

@EdTheDev@infosec.exchange I guess LibreOffice Base doesn't fit their use case? I never really used MSFT Access.

@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net I hope that is the case. (That they're not being irretrievably lost.) The silver lining is that it seems like used booksellers might be having a good year for once.