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Debian developer Antoine Le Gonidec resigns after Pro-AI option wins vote (lists.debian.org)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/debian@lemmy.ml
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[–] 50 points 2 months ago (12 children)

Was expecting something along the lines of "I didn't agree, so will step down"... but (edited):

... I want the consequences of Debian fully embracing fascist-backed technology to be known.

I can not support the current decision of Debian about LLM use, and am no longer willing to be seen as a part of Debian under these new rules. Pretending to have a "neutral stance" when faced with fascism is not neutrality, it’s active collaboration.

Fuck that, I’m out, ...

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (11 children)

    What makes them call LLMs “fascist”? I guess you could say that individuals who aren't super rich can't train them by themselves, so relying on them currently means you're relying on these fuckers.

    That would be quite the stretch though …

    The response to the mail seems to think the same:

    Not sure if there's any point in saying this, but the fact that the technology has notable companies pushing it forward that are often associated with fascism does not mean that the technology itself is somehow inextricably linked to fascism, just like how Microsoft making an operating system doesn't associate operating systems in general with Microsoft or their goals. The GR was concerned with the technology as a whole AFAICT, not the companies developing some variants of it.

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  • [–] 44 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I suspect it's because the juggernauts of the AI industry are mostly American companies, owned by billionaires, and are in Trump's current circle of buddies.

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  • [–] 32 points 2 months ago

    There are billionaires who are "just" enemies of the working class, and then there are american billionaires from silicon valley, who want to actively destroy democracy and serve in a proto facist government they are very entangled in

    Ofc (the currently popular) ai models are tools of facism, what else would they be?

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I like the response someone left to that response: https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/no-such-thing-as-just-a-tool

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    Great article, I'm going to send this one around, thanks!

    But I'd like to make a distinction: LLMs are not just tools, it's more basic; they're just math.

    As the author themself said: Claude, Codex, and so on are tools built using LLMs.

    They drive you towards slop not least because they're only available as subscription models that you pay for by token.

    Maybe commodification will lead to super terse models that run on personal or institutional servers, and exist as an advanced rubber duck to test your assumptions against. Totally thinkable with LLMs, yet very far from our current reality.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

    Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

    - 1984, George Orwell

    We would do better at recognising the tools of fascism if more people engaged with the literature of our culture. It's there right under our noses.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I'm surprised you didn't go for

    Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor...

    She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

    , also from Nineteen Eighty-Four

    It's... optimistic about how much AI users know about the internal workings of AI, expecting them to be engineers rather than commodity consumers, but the disdain for what is produced is on point. As is its role in maintaining a post-truth society.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

    I said something along these lines in the linux community and got downvoted into oblivion.

    Just because billionaire facists have taken control of the tech, doesnt make it inherently facist....

    We could implement these things in a more ethical way but its difficult and expensive.

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