Comment by p-e-w
4 days ago
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.
The timeless debate of separating art from the artist.
In another project (literally: "Untitled") of theirs they are explicit about motivation:
> This is to fight against the trend of crappy github-powered websites that plague the internet.
I don't really see it as a question of "separating art from the artist". That's usually invoked when other aspects of the personal life of the artist has the potential to distract from the art itself.
The parent comment is closer to saying that Picasso wouldn't have been Picasso if in an alternate universe he had avoided controversial/politically charged subjects like the Spanish Civil War and instead appealed to the lowest common denominator for a mainstream commercial audience to sell postcards.
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.)
All things are built on knowledge that came before it. In what way is AI built on stolen labor?
Has anyone who contributed to producing the wealth of human knowledge, art, code, and literature making up the training data been compensated in any way?
I'm certainly still waiting for my check.
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As I understand it, the argument is about defending intellectual property. Not that strange to hear from the Free Software community, where many people have strong opinions about stuff like licensing. The "Free Imformation" (pirate) community does not fully overlap with the Free Software community.
Well, it was literally stolen in some cases, for starters.
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What an unbelievably ironic username.
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!
Rereading this I realize I might be in the running for the RMS award for technically correct social obtuseness so let me just say that my intent was not to denigrate trans at all, just saying that being trans is itself intrinsically political (as in you're going to be continually clashing with many people's default assumptions, even before the manufactured "culture war" throws gas on the fire). And then furthermore being openly trans is going to impart those politics to the project. Which is most certainly her right, as it is her project! In fact I would say that trying to push a standard of you can contribute your code but stfu about your other ideals is basically cruel.
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?
Hah! Glad I'm not the only one who has this theory https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104114
You make it sound like it's required to have nice, free things.
it absolutely is. appeasement never worked. i put my foot to the floor and that's it. without me, there would be no libreboot at all.
Richard Stallman was a noted centrist for decades after all
"I dunno about this GNU project, man. They seem like a bunch of radicals. Why do they have to impugn all proprietary software like that?"
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.
And what happens when the AI bubble pops and the various publishers and IP rights holders come around with their hands out claiming 86Box stole their code ala' SCO?
AI code is legally nebulous and relying on it for a serious project has major risks. Linux has already fended off SCO and has deep pockets to boot. Not all open source projects do.
More projects should be thinking less about the 'moral' issues (yes, they exist) and more about the nuts and bolts province and liability issues of using unverifiable code.
Yes, Linux uses it -because they're big and professional and have allies like IBM and Microsoft (ironies of ironies) on their side.
YOU do not.
> And what happens when [..] the various publishers and IP rights holders come around with their hands out claiming 86Box stole their code ala' SCO?
It won't, for a very simple reason. The same reason why the world isn't in the middle of a nuclear winter right now. Mutually assured destruction.
Every single proprietary software vendor right now is making heavy use of AI code generation, and we're already at a point of no return where pretty much every single commercially relevant codebase out there is contaminated. Do you really think companies will go on a suing spree where by doing so they will open up themselves to being sued for exactly the same reason?
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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.
US Vice Presidents have a history of inventing important new computer technologies
> Yes, anti fascism is a radical position these days.
Given that these groups are basically composed of communists, if not tankies, that's not surprising. Specially when some of those served as sabotours for the USSR (notorious for its respect for human dignity).
> https://blog.bgcarlisle.com/2025/05/16/a-plausible-scalable-...
This is an incredible piece of anti-intellectualism. Its arguments aren't compelling either: AI might flood with innacurate studies that are difficult to check. Rather than improving said check as to reduce the reliance on trust and improve science as a whole; like the good reactionary the author is, they proppose to ban this particular technology. AI also centralizes authority... because? There is also an irony in them complaining about this theoretical centralization while also trying to preserve the inherent trust-based system in academia, so I suspect they aren't actually committed to proper intellectualism. There is more to complain about this post, but, then, it would hijack this whole comment.
> Marc Andreessen have called one of the two authors of the very Fascist Manifesto his patron saint. Search for Marinetti on [...]
Is it surprising that the guy who founded Futurism, a rather radical and aggressive celebration of innovation and progress, would be mentioned in a movement about technological progress?
> 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.
JD Vance hasn't been instrumental to OpenAI's creation, and Peter Thiel is just one of its original investors. Not to mention, NRx is a mess of movement composed of contradictory ideas.
I have noticed you have been using "these LLMs". While I do agree that distancing from OpenAI's models is good (even if it's just on the basis of decentralization), the anti-AI movement either wants to monopolize AI via regulation or ban it outright.
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.
This is just as bad as blanket hating/rejecting AI without ever trying to use or understand it. I don’t care what tools a craftsman uses so long as the job is done correctly/well. If you can somehow prove that AI is necessary for this that’d be impressive.
You just have to use it for a week to realize it should be a standard part of your tool set like your ide or your debugger.
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