They REALLY don't like AI, to the point of "wish I didn't need to rely on GCC and GRUB because they have AI in them" levels of hate AI. See this further down the linked page:
>The fork in question, of U-Boot, is heavily AI vibe-coded and thus useless to Libreboot. This is not mere conjecture; in said aforementioned U-Boot mailing list thread, the author stated thus. We will not, in any way, encourage or facilitate use of AI. It has been made clear that several projects Libreboot uses also have some AI-assisted commits; GCC, GRUB, etc. This is not our fault, but it is my intention that I and others will audit these projects in the future, de-slopping them and possibly even forking them entirely for that very reason.
> U-Boot upstream itself is staunchly anti-AI, at least at the time of this release, and much discussion of the above was had on their mailing list.
I saw this as well, which is funny because I've sent plenty of patches written using AI assistance to upstream U-Boot. It was my understanding that U-Boot was mostly following kernel conventions in general as many U-Boot drivers share code(in addition to the actual subsystem maintainers themselves) with their kernel equivalents.
I have learned to treat statements like that as a general red flag.
Someone who acts like a radical on practical issues will almost certainly act like a radical in other areas as well - including areas that matter to me.
There are debates to be had on every technology, but foaming-at-the-mouth kind of talk is a sure sign of a maintainer (and by extension a project) I want nothing to do with.
I respect projects with a no AI policy, but if that policy starts with the words “fuck no”, I’m out of there.
It's possible this type of "radical" behavior is why this project exists in the first place. I'm willing to bet if the Libreboot maintainer(s) were not "radical" they'd just be using a Mac and be content with a closed source bootloader.
Not to say this "radical" behavior is helpful, and I understand why people don't like it.
AI in its current form is a commercial product created from stolen labor.
I think there are extremely legitimate reasons to be critical of that part at the very least, and I don't think it's a particularly "radical" stance within Free Software, which is fundamentally conscientious of such questions.
(I don't know whether the Libreboot authors have this particular point in mind.)
When your project is literally writing a BIOS/ UEFI alternative that exists for the purpose of making base runtime systems open and verifiable and to improve the user’s ability to trust in their system, an opposition to unverified machine generated code seems not only justifiable but sensible.
If Leah were not taking steps to mitigate generated code in the project, the project would no longer meet my needs as a Libreboot user.
> Someone who acts like a radical on practical issues will almost certainly act like a radical in other areas as well - including areas that matter to me.
Not using LLMs is a practical choice. The tech doesn't work, and if you let it run amok in your software, your software becomes crap. I try to avoid projects that use LLMs for development as much as I can, because those projects have a much higher likelihood of being a buggy mess.
I find it hard to square treating that like such a red flag while supporting free open source software more generally. The entire ecosystem is rife with ethics/morals driving the initiative. There is a lot of flag planting and red line drawing.
People say AI or not, if the thing is good then it should be used. But if a group actively rejects it (which is valid even if I’m not that militant myself) it compromises the project suddenly?
Personally I treat whinging about other people's ideals as a red flag.
It's libreboot. The entire point of its creation was to take coreboot and rip out the non-libre blobs. Its author is trans (IIRC), which also carries its own very pointed perspective on the world.
Some of it goes too far in my own opinion - I have no problem trusting AMD's final microcode for the Opteron 63xx any differently than the baked-in mask for the 62xx. But regardless, I respect someone who is pushing the whole envelope as they see it. At the very least their effort creates a lot of things I do care about!
Well, yes, this is a project to create a fully libre, GPL'd boot chain free of binary blobs. The few users I know stick with aging ThinkPads. I'm not sure what you expected.
Likewise, it if claims something is “vibe coded” when it clearly is not (such as U-Boot).
Agentic AI has allowed 86Box to make massive strides forward. This includes a substantial contribution to emulate the Intel Inboard 386 that was created by someone who describes himself as a non-programmer. The community is now bigger and stronger, although we’ve had some aches and pains with slop AI generated PRs.
The same goes for Gravity Linux which is booting in my M4 Macs with working GPU and most other peripherals. What used to take years now takes weeks, so we can do much more thorough testing and ultimately have a better end product.
Yes, anti fascism is a radical position these days.
Already in 2022, before the rise of these LLMs, there was a book "Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence" by Dan McQuillan.
And then:
> The rapid development of digital technologies, including applications of artificial intelligence (AI), is having a significant impact on the social, economic, and political life. From the way individuals communicate and form relationships to the methods by which political discourse and economic transactions occur, digital technologies increasingly mediate our lives and societies. But while presented as milestones in innovation and progress, these technological transformations have also raised concerns about democracy (Nemitz 2018; Kreps and Kriner 2023; Jungherr 2023; Coeckelbergh 2024) and seem to introduce and support mechanisms of control, forms of organization, and ideological patterns that bear striking resemblances to historical fascist phenomena.
> being plausible but slightly wrong and un-auditable-at scale-is the killer feature of LLMs, not a bug that will ever be meaningfully addressed, and this combination of properties makes it an essentially fascist technology. By “fascist” in this context, I mean that it is well suited to centralizing authority, eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-science agenda.
I know this won't be popular with this crowd but most of you have become supporters of the rising fascism in the United States by not resisting these LLMs.
contributing to projects that have slop in them has legal liability. you'd have to essentially hardfork to remove the slop from git history and such.
for my part, when i do work on this, what i will do is this: re-use existing nuke.list mechanism in lbmk (used already to delete dubious files, e.g. code files with unclear licensing in u-boot) to delete the slopped files. then provide cleaned versions of the same files, with necessary patching re-written as necessary, and files that use it patched to include e.g. foo.deslop.c instead of foo.c - then git history is removed inside tarballs. filter out the changelogs for projects accordingly.
this is the most reasonable way to do it on projects with very little slop. with projects that become almost entirely slop, a hard fork becomes necessary.
> think for yourself. AI will only ruin your mind and deskill you. here are some articles:
> think AI makes you super hacker? think again: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 ["Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity"]
> consider that the infrastructure for AI is economically unsustainable; when the bubble bursts, and it will, we will suddenly be left with millions of people thoroughly deskilled who will be useless. lots of reeducation needed, and lots of people will just be left behind.
> consider that it is controlled by only a minority of very wealthy individuals; with it, they have unprecedented control over human thought through manipulation of information, and control over what information is presented through filtering (what they call training).
> AI is a threat to the health and democracy of our entire world.
> libreboot will not facilitate its use. AI is the most dangerous technology ever invented by human beings.
How terrible. I'm sitting on multiple AI reverse engineered firmwares that I'm not sure what to do with. I suppose they'll never make it to upstream now. My only option is to ask AI to integrate this stuff.
This conflict has come up a lot in open source lately and the answer has been to just create your own repo and space where you can dump unlimited ai output without needing anyone’s permission. If users find it useful they can use it, and there’s no conflict with maintainers who don’t want it.
Time will tell if these new AI allowed projects like artcraft will prove more popular than fully human curated ones.
Yeah, I saw this "open-slopware" list listing many battle-tested web servers as "permissive AI policy", while one of the alternatives (not all though, some inherit battle-testing) isn't really battle-tested. In fact, I saw entangled codebase and not-so-good coding practices.
This list seems...odd. For instance, the list decries the permissive AI policy of the Linux kernel, of Fedora, of Bazzite/Bluefin/etc...and then includes Secureblue as an alternative...?
Secureblue is a neat project, but as you say, this would make more sense as a generic discovery list. If you want to avoid projects with a permissive AI policy, you should probably take into account that Secureblue is based on bluebuild (from the Bazzite team), Fedora, Linux, etc etc etc.
not that im particularly pro-ai, but it seems a bit silly to rely on a paper about early-2025 ai when people are using late-2026 ai, given how different they are.
The interesting thing about that paper, I would have said, was the _perception_ gap; people believed that it was making them more productive even when it was doing the opposite. That effect presumably hasn’t gone away.
> how are they different? did the algorithms upon which they operate suddenly change?
Just like most technologies AI algorithms and tools get continuously refined/improved over time.
One thing modern AI has gotten especially good at in the last year is reverse engineering, it went from struggling and frequently making mistakes when analyzing binaries even with say a specialized Ghidra MCP integration to being able to very quickly and accurately analyze even heavily stripped BROM binaries with almost no user guidance or specialized environments. Binaries that would previously take days or weeks to analyze can be analyzed by a modern AI in minutes to hours.
The difference is massive and obvious to anyone who has been working with these tools over these time periods.
Presumably yes. It is safe to assume that algorithms running the model changed, the training procedures changed, and the scale changed. Unfortunately the AI companies refuse to disclose the details of any of this, which is a harm to human knowledge (hopefully a temporary one). Yet the results speak for themselves.
For me it's only been in the last month with Opus 5.5 that I've been seeing code quality I actually respect (though this is with substantial human effort in the loop). Though this experience is from work where I don't have access to non-Anthropic models, nor Fable.
i do not believe you are asking that question in good faith.
and, if you are the leah who wrote the policy, i am positive this would be a completely fruitless discussion as you are obviously entrenched in your beliefs. i am not under the delusion that anything i could say, show, or prove to you would change your mind.
It takes time to research and publish. It'll always be some slightly old model. Is this argument just a permanent get out of jail free card? Add 10 to each year, will we be seeing that said in the future?
i don't think models will continue to improve at the rate they have been, so eventually it will be less of an issue. there are also questions to answer and studies to be done that aren't as sensitive about the specific model.
however, productivity is sensitive to the model, and models have significantly improved in the last 1.5-2 years. sometimes things move quickly and research gets outdated. ai is not the first field where this has happened.
the research is still valuable, it just has to be acknowledged that it is specific to a point in time. using it for an argument 2 years later just shows that the leah is being intellectually dishonest, and it weakens the overall message.
There is a respectable way to approach this and this.
The right way is something like, we've been getting spammed with a bunch of PR's from AI that we find difficult to review (because AI allows the average bob who isn't technically minded to make a PR). We have therefore decided not to allow AI submissions.
---
I think the people who have some moral / ideological issue and bring that into projects kind of feel like clowns to me. I agree with Linus that the point is to make something that people find useful, and obviously you want it to be maintainable.
Saying "it makes you dumber etc" is not related to the project, with all due respect it's non of your fucking business how I learn / retain skills.
I get it, but everything is ideological -- whether you want to hear about it or not.
In a world where software exerts considerable control and influence over peoples' lives, your ability to insulate yourself from that influence is a priveledge. Software IS ideological. Free software was created so people can have the freedom to share and collaborate on their own terms. There is an extent to which it gets extreme, but without the GPL we would live in an even more monopolistic "free" market hell world than we already do. That's a moral obligation that spawned a practical one. If no one ever took a moral stance because you find it annoying, the world would be an objectively worse place.
I always find these sorts of responses fascinating. “Oh no people are being mean about our lovely robots!!” Like, people are entitled to dislike and be sceptical of LLMs.
Yeah, the (poisoned) AGENTS.md file reads lots like "f*ck AI", which feels like anti-AI dogmatism for me. If I really wanted to use this project, I would use Coreboot instead or fork it to remove proprietary blobs.
I can't use critical software that rejects AI to this degree for privacy reasons.
You can't expect to sufficiently protect your users privacy when not using AI for finding vulnerabilities.
Same thing with Asahi Linux with their highly anti-AI stance. I had a bit of hope when I saw someone was making an LLM assisted fork but it's not the same support.
While MacOS is likely becoming much more secure, Linux distros that reject AI would fall even further behind, if that's possible.
Ai and privacy in the same sentence is wierd. You supported your argument, I guess, but unless you are using local ai, the developer would be sacrificing their own privacy.
The Assisted-by: tag is no longer requirement because LLM assistance is the default.
Robot friends enable you to get much more done faster and more accurately, that if you call yourself an engineer you're a damn fool not to make use of them.
Unfortunately this is bad for one of my projects, a slop detector extension... it assumes that AGENTS.md be short in size to say stuff like "You may view and use this code but not edit or commit anything"... this rant is long enough that it classifies as slop itself!
I find this hilarious since I'm actively having my clankers work on porting EDK2 to an SoC that's used in a Chromebook, though not the ones mentioned here.
Are you publishing anywhere that I can follow? In particular, it would be really helpful if you could publish the prompts and workflow, so that the rest of us can more quickly use it to replicate your work on other machines:)
(Signed, the owner of several Chromebooks in need of better firmware)
I think it's better that some people have strong opinions. For example, the world would suck if everyone was rms, but he has nevertheless had a positive impact on the world imo.
RMS is extremely radical but he's also reasonable and consistent unlike these guys. There's also GNU Guix which recently banned AI-assisted contributions [1] due to copyright infringement concerns and licensing doubts. This is an entirely reasonable take for a hardcore free software codebase, it's literally built around this political concept.
On the contrast, libreboot's stuff reads like a parody or a shitpost. It's hard to believe they're being entirely serious.
i don't live in a free country. the UK has enacted several laws impeding fundamental civil liberties in recent years. rolling back on several human rights laws, now they're even removing the right to trial by jury, etc. it's quite troubling actually.
I'd rather have the project that works, rather than one that has the correct political stance.
You can look at what being achieved right now with AI, GoW3 (an absolute master piece BTW) on the PS4 Remaster can be played on Linux at 120FPS thanks to some decompilation/reverse engineering framework with AI.
I am generally also fed up of politics (whatever they are) forced into projects.
Also AI doesn't make you stupid. It is bullshit, he has cherry picked information to sooth his own biases.
But they're doing it under the banner of the libre software movement, whose raison d'être is free (as in liberty) software. Having political strings attached is antithetical to the movement.
Agree in general, though with Libreboot the pedantry is more or less the point of the project. You fork a project and put 'libre' in the name, I personally see that as a statement of dedication and expect you to stick to those guns. The experiment isnt much of an experiment otherwise.
When the alternative is being surrounded by rabid AI enthusiasts who absolutely lose their shit whenever anyone says "no" to them, being left behind is a great choice.
I can't be the only one who thinks the way they handled that is incredibly disrespectful right?
It's their own business to disallow AI contributions.
But instead of adding that to the Code Of Conduct they chose to knowingly misuse a file to target a group of people they don't like.
If I want to use AI on my copy of that repo, I have to delete that file and consider if the developer has added any more of what is (by intent) basically malware to the source code. Sure the file is just an unhinged rant, but now I have to wonder if they attempted to put some prompt injection in the repo.
“If I want to crawl a website with a robots file that says ‘fuck off’, I have to ignore the robots file. If I want to use AGPL code as part of a commercial web service without creating my source, I have to ignore the license.”
Like, c’mon now. This is far from the weirdest open source restriction.
I don't see how any of those things are similar, I think you've missed my point. Those hypothetical authors are using robots and license files correctly.
Would you be OK if a repo had Visual Studio files that were designed to crash visual studio if they are used, just because the maintainer hates Microsoft? That's what this feels like, a deliberate malicious abuse of the intent that adding agents.md would otherwise imply.
Linus's take is just the same nonsensical false equivalence I've seen a million times. He sure has fallen a long way since his glory days.
Someone should ask him if he's also planning on no longer reviewing patches to the kernel and just accepting them unconditionally, since AI is no different from a compiler after all, and nobody reviews compiler outputs.
You say "faith-based political filter," I say "standing on principles." Your valuation of outcomes and outputs over inputs and intent is also a faith-based political filter, in that they make the value judgement that outputs are the only thing that matter when shipping a product or managing a project.
They REALLY don't like AI, to the point of "wish I didn't need to rely on GCC and GRUB because they have AI in them" levels of hate AI. See this further down the linked page:
>The fork in question, of U-Boot, is heavily AI vibe-coded and thus useless to Libreboot. This is not mere conjecture; in said aforementioned U-Boot mailing list thread, the author stated thus. We will not, in any way, encourage or facilitate use of AI. It has been made clear that several projects Libreboot uses also have some AI-assisted commits; GCC, GRUB, etc. This is not our fault, but it is my intention that I and others will audit these projects in the future, de-slopping them and possibly even forking them entirely for that very reason.
> U-Boot upstream itself is staunchly anti-AI, at least at the time of this release, and much discussion of the above was had on their mailing list.
I saw this as well, which is funny because I've sent plenty of patches written using AI assistance to upstream U-Boot. It was my understanding that U-Boot was mostly following kernel conventions in general as many U-Boot drivers share code(in addition to the actual subsystem maintainers themselves) with their kernel equivalents.
I have learned to treat statements like that as a general red flag.
Someone who acts like a radical on practical issues will almost certainly act like a radical in other areas as well - including areas that matter to me.
There are debates to be had on every technology, but foaming-at-the-mouth kind of talk is a sure sign of a maintainer (and by extension a project) I want nothing to do with.
I respect projects with a no AI policy, but if that policy starts with the words “fuck no”, I’m out of there.
It's possible this type of "radical" behavior is why this project exists in the first place. I'm willing to bet if the Libreboot maintainer(s) were not "radical" they'd just be using a Mac and be content with a closed source bootloader.
Not to say this "radical" behavior is helpful, and I understand why people don't like it.
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AI in its current form is a commercial product created from stolen labor.
I think there are extremely legitimate reasons to be critical of that part at the very least, and I don't think it's a particularly "radical" stance within Free Software, which is fundamentally conscientious of such questions.
(I don't know whether the Libreboot authors have this particular point in mind.)
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When your project is literally writing a BIOS/ UEFI alternative that exists for the purpose of making base runtime systems open and verifiable and to improve the user’s ability to trust in their system, an opposition to unverified machine generated code seems not only justifiable but sensible. If Leah were not taking steps to mitigate generated code in the project, the project would no longer meet my needs as a Libreboot user.
> Someone who acts like a radical on practical issues will almost certainly act like a radical in other areas as well - including areas that matter to me.
Not using LLMs is a practical choice. The tech doesn't work, and if you let it run amok in your software, your software becomes crap. I try to avoid projects that use LLMs for development as much as I can, because those projects have a much higher likelihood of being a buggy mess.
I find it hard to square treating that like such a red flag while supporting free open source software more generally. The entire ecosystem is rife with ethics/morals driving the initiative. There is a lot of flag planting and red line drawing.
People say AI or not, if the thing is good then it should be used. But if a group actively rejects it (which is valid even if I’m not that militant myself) it compromises the project suddenly?
Personally I treat whinging about other people's ideals as a red flag.
It's libreboot. The entire point of its creation was to take coreboot and rip out the non-libre blobs. Its author is trans (IIRC), which also carries its own very pointed perspective on the world.
Some of it goes too far in my own opinion - I have no problem trusting AMD's final microcode for the Opteron 63xx any differently than the baked-in mask for the 62xx. But regardless, I respect someone who is pushing the whole envelope as they see it. At the very least their effort creates a lot of things I do care about!
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Well, yes, this is a project to create a fully libre, GPL'd boot chain free of binary blobs. The few users I know stick with aging ThinkPads. I'm not sure what you expected.
You realize that it is their "radicalism" that gives us the Libreboot project to begin with, right?
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Yeah its quite the contrast to the recent QGIS core "no AI" policy that very pointedly had no emotive language at all.
We've reached the godwin point quite quickly.
Likewise, it if claims something is “vibe coded” when it clearly is not (such as U-Boot).
Agentic AI has allowed 86Box to make massive strides forward. This includes a substantial contribution to emulate the Intel Inboard 386 that was created by someone who describes himself as a non-programmer. The community is now bigger and stronger, although we’ve had some aches and pains with slop AI generated PRs.
The same goes for Gravity Linux which is booting in my M4 Macs with working GPU and most other peripherals. What used to take years now takes weeks, so we can do much more thorough testing and ultimately have a better end product.
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Yes, anti fascism is a radical position these days.
Already in 2022, before the rise of these LLMs, there was a book "Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence" by Dan McQuillan.
And then:
> The rapid development of digital technologies, including applications of artificial intelligence (AI), is having a significant impact on the social, economic, and political life. From the way individuals communicate and form relationships to the methods by which political discourse and economic transactions occur, digital technologies increasingly mediate our lives and societies. But while presented as milestones in innovation and progress, these technological transformations have also raised concerns about democracy (Nemitz 2018; Kreps and Kriner 2023; Jungherr 2023; Coeckelbergh 2024) and seem to introduce and support mechanisms of control, forms of organization, and ideological patterns that bear striking resemblances to historical fascist phenomena.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-02862-9
Further,
> being plausible but slightly wrong and un-auditable-at scale-is the killer feature of LLMs, not a bug that will ever be meaningfully addressed, and this combination of properties makes it an essentially fascist technology. By “fascist” in this context, I mean that it is well suited to centralizing authority, eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-science agenda.
https://blog.bgcarlisle.com/2025/05/16/a-plausible-scalable-...
Marc Andreessen have called one of the two authors of the very Fascist Manifesto his patron saint. Search for Marinetti on https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
A very influential blogger, Curtis Yarvin who have started Dark Enlightenment, the philosophy behind it all regularly posts straight nazi shit. He also has influenced JD Vance and Peter Thiel who have been instrumental in the creation of OpenAI. https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-the-optimist-open-a... More on Dark Enlightenment https://www.cccb.org/en/w/articles/nick-land-or-the-origins-... and https://qz.com/1007144/the-neo-fascist-philosophy-that-under... "a few consistent themes, circling around technology, warfare, feudalism, corporate power, and racism".
I know this won't be popular with this crowd but most of you have become supporters of the rising fascism in the United States by not resisting these LLMs.
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I wouldn't trust their products simply because AI as a tool works and their refusal to use it means their software will be worse off for it.
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> de-slopping them and possibly even forking
Or, hear me out, they could instead just improve and contribute the code they think is suboptimal
I put "de-slopping" in the same bucket as "rolling your own crypto" and "let's rewrite done software in Rust just because".
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That's in the previous half of the sentence you removed:
> ...it is my intention that I and others will audit these projects in the future, de-slopping them...
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contributing to projects that have slop in them has legal liability. you'd have to essentially hardfork to remove the slop from git history and such.
for my part, when i do work on this, what i will do is this: re-use existing nuke.list mechanism in lbmk (used already to delete dubious files, e.g. code files with unclear licensing in u-boot) to delete the slopped files. then provide cleaned versions of the same files, with necessary patching re-written as necessary, and files that use it patched to include e.g. foo.deslop.c instead of foo.c - then git history is removed inside tarballs. filter out the changelogs for projects accordingly.
this is the most reasonable way to do it on projects with very little slop. with projects that become almost entirely slop, a hard fork becomes necessary.
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> think for yourself. AI will only ruin your mind and deskill you. here are some articles:
> think AI makes you super hacker? think again: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 ["Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity"]
> https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
> consider that the infrastructure for AI is economically unsustainable; when the bubble bursts, and it will, we will suddenly be left with millions of people thoroughly deskilled who will be useless. lots of reeducation needed, and lots of people will just be left behind.
> consider that it is controlled by only a minority of very wealthy individuals; with it, they have unprecedented control over human thought through manipulation of information, and control over what information is presented through filtering (what they call training).
> AI is a threat to the health and democracy of our entire world.
> libreboot will not facilitate its use. AI is the most dangerous technology ever invented by human beings.
...
They have plenty of reasons not to.
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Uboot on x86 is like a snowplow on a hatchback. Sure, it can work, but why?
Grub is more extensively used and has a lot of features. Or boot Linux on UEFI using a UKI executable without any bootloader.
How terrible. I'm sitting on multiple AI reverse engineered firmwares that I'm not sure what to do with. I suppose they'll never make it to upstream now. My only option is to ask AI to integrate this stuff.
This conflict has come up a lot in open source lately and the answer has been to just create your own repo and space where you can dump unlimited ai output without needing anyone’s permission. If users find it useful they can use it, and there’s no conflict with maintainers who don’t want it.
Time will tell if these new AI allowed projects like artcraft will prove more popular than fully human curated ones.
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Some of that reads really funny.
Also
> https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware
Feels more like a software discovery list than an indictment. Thanks for the categorization.
> software discovery list
You're not kidding, I feel like this is better than most of those awesome-X lists that were popular for a while.
Yeah, I saw this "open-slopware" list listing many battle-tested web servers as "permissive AI policy", while one of the alternatives (not all though, some inherit battle-testing) isn't really battle-tested. In fact, I saw entangled codebase and not-so-good coding practices.
This list seems...odd. For instance, the list decries the permissive AI policy of the Linux kernel, of Fedora, of Bazzite/Bluefin/etc...and then includes Secureblue as an alternative...?
Secureblue is a neat project, but as you say, this would make more sense as a generic discovery list. If you want to avoid projects with a permissive AI policy, you should probably take into account that Secureblue is based on bluebuild (from the Bazzite team), Fedora, Linux, etc etc etc.
It is indeed a list, though not everyone will use it the same way!
But will you still feel this way once you try to actually use that software?
They list Firefox, Chromium/Blink, Ladybird and WebKit on their no-no list.
Most people use browsers without major incidents.
Considering how popular many of these projects are, I (and likely many others on HN) already do!
So yes, yes we will.
The funniest section there is https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#desktop-brow..., which includes... all mainstream browsers? lmao
you arent kidding!
>"think AI makes you super hacker? think again: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089"
not that im particularly pro-ai, but it seems a bit silly to rely on a paper about early-2025 ai when people are using late-2026 ai, given how different they are.
The interesting thing about that paper, I would have said, was the _perception_ gap; people believed that it was making them more productive even when it was doing the opposite. That effect presumably hasn’t gone away.
how are they different? did the algorithms upon which they operate suddenly change?
> how are they different? did the algorithms upon which they operate suddenly change?
Just like most technologies AI algorithms and tools get continuously refined/improved over time.
One thing modern AI has gotten especially good at in the last year is reverse engineering, it went from struggling and frequently making mistakes when analyzing binaries even with say a specialized Ghidra MCP integration to being able to very quickly and accurately analyze even heavily stripped BROM binaries with almost no user guidance or specialized environments. Binaries that would previously take days or weeks to analyze can be analyzed by a modern AI in minutes to hours.
The difference is massive and obvious to anyone who has been working with these tools over these time periods.
Presumably yes. It is safe to assume that algorithms running the model changed, the training procedures changed, and the scale changed. Unfortunately the AI companies refuse to disclose the details of any of this, which is a harm to human knowledge (hopefully a temporary one). Yet the results speak for themselves.
For me it's only been in the last month with Opus 5.5 that I've been seeing code quality I actually respect (though this is with substantial human effort in the loop). Though this experience is from work where I don't have access to non-Anthropic models, nor Fable.
Exactly, same with personal transportation. They still need to be fed oats, right?
>how are they different?
i do not believe you are asking that question in good faith.
and, if you are the leah who wrote the policy, i am positive this would be a completely fruitless discussion as you are obviously entrenched in your beliefs. i am not under the delusion that anything i could say, show, or prove to you would change your mind.
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It takes time to research and publish. It'll always be some slightly old model. Is this argument just a permanent get out of jail free card? Add 10 to each year, will we be seeing that said in the future?
i don't think models will continue to improve at the rate they have been, so eventually it will be less of an issue. there are also questions to answer and studies to be done that aren't as sensitive about the specific model.
however, productivity is sensitive to the model, and models have significantly improved in the last 1.5-2 years. sometimes things move quickly and research gets outdated. ai is not the first field where this has happened.
the research is still valuable, it just has to be acknowledged that it is specific to a point in time. using it for an argument 2 years later just shows that the leah is being intellectually dishonest, and it weakens the overall message.
Okay? Their repo, their rules.
Fork it and use Ai if you have a problem.
There is a respectable way to approach this and this.
The right way is something like, we've been getting spammed with a bunch of PR's from AI that we find difficult to review (because AI allows the average bob who isn't technically minded to make a PR). We have therefore decided not to allow AI submissions.
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I think the people who have some moral / ideological issue and bring that into projects kind of feel like clowns to me. I agree with Linus that the point is to make something that people find useful, and obviously you want it to be maintainable.
Saying "it makes you dumber etc" is not related to the project, with all due respect it's non of your fucking business how I learn / retain skills.
Free Software was a moral & ideological issue to Stallman.
I feel people have the right to bring any sort of issue into the projects they make. Nobody is forced to participate.
I get it, but everything is ideological -- whether you want to hear about it or not.
In a world where software exerts considerable control and influence over peoples' lives, your ability to insulate yourself from that influence is a priveledge. Software IS ideological. Free software was created so people can have the freedom to share and collaborate on their own terms. There is an extent to which it gets extreme, but without the GPL we would live in an even more monopolistic "free" market hell world than we already do. That's a moral obligation that spawned a practical one. If no one ever took a moral stance because you find it annoying, the world would be an objectively worse place.
I always find these sorts of responses fascinating. “Oh no people are being mean about our lovely robots!!” Like, people are entitled to dislike and be sceptical of LLMs.
No one's claiming they don't have a right to their opinion, But just as they have a right to their opinion, I have the right to say it's silly.
I am not claiming that they must stop following their silly ideas. I am just saying they are silly.
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Yeah, the (poisoned) AGENTS.md file reads lots like "f*ck AI", which feels like anti-AI dogmatism for me. If I really wanted to use this project, I would use Coreboot instead or fork it to remove proprietary blobs.
I can't use critical software that rejects AI to this degree for privacy reasons.
You can't expect to sufficiently protect your users privacy when not using AI for finding vulnerabilities.
Same thing with Asahi Linux with their highly anti-AI stance. I had a bit of hope when I saw someone was making an LLM assisted fork but it's not the same support.
While MacOS is likely becoming much more secure, Linux distros that reject AI would fall even further behind, if that's possible.
Edit: added critical
Ai and privacy in the same sentence is wierd. You supported your argument, I guess, but unless you are using local ai, the developer would be sacrificing their own privacy.
>the developer would be sacrificing their own privacy
How so?
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The current hope is to eventually upstream the “fork” (Gravity) into the Linux kernel. The Asahi project can continue to run in parallel.
The Linux kernel extensively uses AI now; most lkml submissions have an Assisted-by: LLM tag.
The Assisted-by: tag is no longer requirement because LLM assistance is the default.
Robot friends enable you to get much more done faster and more accurately, that if you call yourself an engineer you're a damn fool not to make use of them.
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good!
Unfortunately this is bad for one of my projects, a slop detector extension... it assumes that AGENTS.md be short in size to say stuff like "You may view and use this code but not edit or commit anything"... this rant is long enough that it classifies as slop itself!
Huh, good to see sane people still exist. Good on them.
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We really don’t need to fit everything into simplistic US political memes.
I find this hilarious since I'm actively having my clankers work on porting EDK2 to an SoC that's used in a Chromebook, though not the ones mentioned here.
Are you publishing anywhere that I can follow? In particular, it would be really helpful if you could publish the prompts and workflow, so that the rest of us can more quickly use it to replicate your work on other machines:)
(Signed, the owner of several Chromebooks in need of better firmware)
Cool, that's why open source projects get left behind. The attitude
I think it's better that some people have strong opinions. For example, the world would suck if everyone was rms, but he has nevertheless had a positive impact on the world imo.
RMS is extremely radical but he's also reasonable and consistent unlike these guys. There's also GNU Guix which recently banned AI-assisted contributions [1] due to copyright infringement concerns and licensing doubts. This is an entirely reasonable take for a hardcore free software codebase, it's literally built around this political concept.
On the contrast, libreboot's stuff reads like a parody or a shitpost. It's hard to believe they're being entirely serious.
[1] https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/pulls/11407
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> Cool, that's why open source projects get left behind. The attitude
They're making a political choice. It's a free country, and more power to them.
It's not a choice that I necessarily agree with, but one that may - who knows - prove prescient 5 years down the road.
No one can predict the future, that's what politics are partly about and the reason why diversity of opinion of choice matters.
Do you have a crystal ball?
i don't live in a free country. the UK has enacted several laws impeding fundamental civil liberties in recent years. rolling back on several human rights laws, now they're even removing the right to trial by jury, etc. it's quite troubling actually.
I'd rather have the project that works, rather than one that has the correct political stance.
You can look at what being achieved right now with AI, GoW3 (an absolute master piece BTW) on the PS4 Remaster can be played on Linux at 120FPS thanks to some decompilation/reverse engineering framework with AI.
I am generally also fed up of politics (whatever they are) forced into projects.
Also AI doesn't make you stupid. It is bullshit, he has cherry picked information to sooth his own biases.
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But they're doing it under the banner of the libre software movement, whose raison d'être is free (as in liberty) software. Having political strings attached is antithetical to the movement.
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Someone can always fork it if they find themselves sufficiently outraged.
Agree in general, though with Libreboot the pedantry is more or less the point of the project. You fork a project and put 'libre' in the name, I personally see that as a statement of dedication and expect you to stick to those guns. The experiment isnt much of an experiment otherwise.
Coreboot still exists.
Libreboot is not a fork of Coreboot.
It's a distribution. That is, they build and distribute firmware images. Coreboot just ships source.
Coreboot's docs lists the variety of distributions: https://doc.coreboot.org/distributions.html
Well, maybe you can bring it into the future with your favorite LLM!
When the alternative is being surrounded by rabid AI enthusiasts who absolutely lose their shit whenever anyone says "no" to them, being left behind is a great choice.
And yet people who are training models need more and more open source software to feed the beast. Quite the conundrum.
I can't be the only one who thinks the way they handled that is incredibly disrespectful right?
It's their own business to disallow AI contributions. But instead of adding that to the Code Of Conduct they chose to knowingly misuse a file to target a group of people they don't like.
If I want to use AI on my copy of that repo, I have to delete that file and consider if the developer has added any more of what is (by intent) basically malware to the source code. Sure the file is just an unhinged rant, but now I have to wonder if they attempted to put some prompt injection in the repo.
“If I want to crawl a website with a robots file that says ‘fuck off’, I have to ignore the robots file. If I want to use AGPL code as part of a commercial web service without creating my source, I have to ignore the license.”
Like, c’mon now. This is far from the weirdest open source restriction.
I don't see how any of those things are similar, I think you've missed my point. Those hypothetical authors are using robots and license files correctly.
Would you be OK if a repo had Visual Studio files that were designed to crash visual studio if they are used, just because the maintainer hates Microsoft? That's what this feels like, a deliberate malicious abuse of the intent that adding agents.md would otherwise imply.
Anti-AI is rationally and logically incorrect, because it focuses on inputs, rather than outputs.
The Linux kernel has always been focused on outcomes and outputs, which is the right focus. Here's Linus: https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/2110524360377458786
Outputs: Code quality and long term maintenance matters. Outputs: Serving users with correctness, security and performance matters.
Focus on "purity of input" is a faith-based political filter, not engineering.
Linus's take is just the same nonsensical false equivalence I've seen a million times. He sure has fallen a long way since his glory days.
Someone should ask him if he's also planning on no longer reviewing patches to the kernel and just accepting them unconditionally, since AI is no different from a compiler after all, and nobody reviews compiler outputs.
>Linus's take is just the same nonsensical false equivalence I've seen a million times. He sure has fallen a long way since his glory days.
After the SCO mess, I'm very shocked he didn't reject AI out of hand simply for the provenance and liability issues.
the take is don't ban tools, and technically the compiler outputs are tested by the compiler projects + the automated testing infra
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You say "faith-based political filter," I say "standing on principles." Your valuation of outcomes and outputs over inputs and intent is also a faith-based political filter, in that they make the value judgement that outputs are the only thing that matter when shipping a product or managing a project.