At first I was afraid that they would allow for an irresponsible use. But no, they explicitly say “responsible”, so that danger is no more. I’m very much relieved.
Also they explicitly mention that humans will remain accountable. Not Nature, or Fate, or the gods; mark that. Good thinking there!
Problems solved.
Former Debian Project Leader Lucas Nussbaum expressed regret on the results of the vote, writing: “On a very personal note, I regret that the winning option does not acknowledge all the legitimate concerns around AI: environmental impact, copyright and licensing uncertainty, the health of Free Software communities, and the strain of aggressive scraping on the open web.”
So I’m going quitting Debian. Not only quitting it, but I’m seriously considering starting to actively boycott and sabotage them. I know that I may not achieve any big change on my own, or even if I had collaborators, but at least I will know that I was on the right side of history.
By all means quit using Debian. That’s your prerogative. But claiming you are going to sabotage a community volunteer run, non profit, open source community is just dumb. Good news is that you won’t actually do it, but still, you sound dumb.
That’s very Linus of them:
The mass-extinction causing orphan-crushing torment nexus is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.
There are other questions around it, like if we should be complicit in killing billions of people, and making more than 50% of genera go extinct, via its CO2e releases and water use, but “is it useful” is no longer one of those questions.
The Debian project has been and will continue to be about the technology.
Sure, the people who use it is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that’s a side benefit, not the point of the project.
In the Debian community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of ethical reasons.
And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of causing a mass extinction.
/s
I’d expect this from Ubuntu but I was hoping for better from Debian… You know… Being as their whole shtick is stability.
Agreed, that was a large part of why I chose debian (and never considered ubuntu) as my ‘back up’ distro, just in case my distro of choice (or arch above it) decided to do something daft.
Debian seemed like the logical choice
Rip Debian
Get ready for the ISO to double in size
IMHO: They talk about having it go through the exact same due diligence as normal contribs and a human has to be responsible. I think it’s an acceptable compromise.
Debian was already vibe led, being vide coded now is just par for the course.
If this AI distro crap keeps going, I’m going back to using my Android (Pixel 10a and GrapheneOS) phone for everything. Not the best option but better than using a vibe-coded distro.
All I need is a monitor and wall mount for the monitor. Connect a hub and charger (phone does pass-through charging), a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Some workflow will have to change, Cryptpad instead of LibreOffice for example.
If you think Gemini isn’t deep in android development now, you’re mistaken.
Maybe you’re ok if you stay on 13 or maybe 14.
No Gemini in GrapheneOS.
Graphene isn’t using Gemini, nor including the Gemini app in user space.
But they’re still ingesting AOSP from Google’s source drops and Google is 100% using Gemini to make that.
Same as Debian is going to allow devs to use LLMs to develop for Debian.
People out there who think they can avoid AI this way are really just delusional. Its everywhere at this point.
If its not in the software you are using, the software that runs the software has it. Or the software that runs the software that runs the software. Its inescapable.
You’re on the internet? Millions of lines of AI code are probably involved in you seeing this message across the entire infrastructure needed to allow this.
I will wait to see if it actually comes at the detriment of the program.
Deeply disappointing. I was hoping it would be a refuge from AI infection.
from my POV Debian has fallen already.
I hope either Alpine does not commit the same mistake or Chimera becomes a major distro.
It’s worth looking at the full results
Alright, what are the alternatives folks?
Gentoo? Gentoo!
(But I’ll keep watch to see of they don’t revert course because “the models are now too powerful”, since it is a policy from 2024)
The policy
Gentoo Council has voted on 2024-04-14 on the following policy:
It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case be made for such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns.
This policy affects Gentoo contributions and the official Gentoo projects. It does not prohibit adding packages for AI-related software or software that is being developed with the help of such tools upstream.
I genuinely wonder how they’re going to square this policy with LLM code in the kernel.
Personally, I’m guessing that all distros will eventually bend and allow LLM code.
When an LLM agent reports a huge security bug and provides the solution and the only solution is explicitly exactly what it wrote.
Checkmate!
I think this bit makes it clear that shipping LLM code from the kernel that wasn’t contributed by Gentoo is fine:
This policy affects Gentoo contributions and the official Gentoo projects. It does not prohibit adding packages for AI-related software or software that is being developed with the help of such tools upstream.
