Comment by ImaCake

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.

You realize that it is their "radicalism" that gives us the Libreboot project to begin with, right?

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.

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.

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.

I put "de-slopping" in the same bucket as "rolling your own crypto" and "let's rewrite done software in Rust just because".

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...

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"]

> 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.

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.