Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

I do not worry about being "left behind" due to the adoption of LLM coding agents. I worry about a massive dip in the quality of software that's already been moldering for years due to the adoption of LLM coding agents. I worry about the FOSS maintainers who are already under-compensated for their work burning out entirely having to deal with the adoption of LLM coding agents. I worry about the environmental impact of the adoption of LLM coding agents. I worry about the laundering of FOSS (and non-FOSS source available!) code into projects that are now legally culpable due to the adoption of LLM coding agents. I worry about the people who can no longer write code without leaning on an LLM coding agent becoming helpless without spending ridiculous (and increasing) amounts of money to companies that may or may not exist in a year due to the adoption of LLM coding agents. I do not worry about being "left behind" when it all comes crashing down and people who are actually skilled have to pick up the pieces and rebuild due to the adoption of LLM coding agents.

Liberation isn't something you rent. Or buy. Liberation is about us together embracing each other's dignity and our duty to take care of each other.
Nobody is free until everyone is free.

People like Sam Altman want the opposite.

That's why there is no "leftist case" for "AI".

We need more people in this world willing to make illegal large tensegrity icosahedrons

TIL. In April 1974, in the middle of the night, a small group of conspirators secretly installed a large tensegrity icosahedron made from discarded telephone poles on the campus of Twente University in the Netherlands.

It’s still there. People call it Het Ding (“the thing”).

https://www.utwente.nl/en/alumni/inspiring-alumni/ut-canon/stories/het-ding/

Looks like they're also using Claude for PR review https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/9a70fdcb741fc62af82427696c05560f4d70e4de

Which probably means systemd is now the most attractive target in FOSS for an AI prompt injection attack to insert a backdoor

🤮 Don't buy Palmer Luckey's 'retro N64 style' clone console- if you see one, steer clear. Palmer is a shitty fucking warmongering asshole, and you can read about his shitty warmongering in this very article. Fuck this bullshit.

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/console-gaming/oculus-founder-seeks-1bn-valuation-for-modretro-as-n64-console-launch-nears

#RetroGaming #FuckPalmerLuckey #assholes #WarmongeringAssholes #gaming #emulation #M64 #ModRetro

LLM slop is just one part of the broader systemd/Linux sloperating system.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/AGENTS.md

just realized that "microslop" is all well and good but we can go even further and bring back the old ways. it's "Micro$lop" now

GNU Terry Pratchett - Tiffany Aching fan-art

#krita #speedpainting #discworld

Last thing: When I said "No" is a Privacy-Enhancing Technology, I didn't just mean an opt-out.

I mean the engineers growing a fucking spine and telling their boss, "No, we shouldn't collect this data."

"No" is a better privacy-enhancing technology than the state-of-the-art differential privacy techniques.

It's efficient! Not collecting data requires at most O(1) bandwidth, O(1) storage, and O(1) compute.

"No" is not "Maybe later".

"No" is not "Ask me again in 3 days".

"No" is not "Maybe after a few more beers", since many of the people that need to hear the first part of his message likely also needs the second.

Here's a privacy-enhancing technology for you to consider:

"No."

You don't need to know. You don't need to measure. The efficacy of an advertising campaigns, market segmentation, and relevance targeting should be minimized for the good of humanity.

At #RealWorldCrypto this year, there was a session on "privacy-enhancing technologies".

The first talk in the session was about a new encryption method for Tor.

The next two were painful examples of "a person cannot be convinced of something when their salary depends on them not knowing it".

Advertisers wants to collect signals about populations without being individually identifying. So let's talk about differential privacy techniques to let them do that.

One example was "Meta wants to know what percentage of its teneage users blocked a contact today".

At no point did they address the elephants in the room.

• Why do they want this data in the first place?
• What are they even doing with this signal?
• Have you considered telling them to fuck off and not collect it in the first place?

As tempting as it might be to hand wave it and say "well yes but their business model depends on it" to which I say "then perish".