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brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:") wrote:
I drafted a post on the latest article that is getting boosted onto my feed - https://pointieststick.com/2026/09/23/kde-and-ai-and-you-and-me/, for reference - and then helpfully I clicked the wrong button and deleted it.
Now, harassment is never okay, Nate is right to call out any harassment that happens. Mastodon does have an issue with dogpiling and I've been mostly staying out of the drama because of it. But, argh, this article has given me opinions. I flicked through it, went "oh that's reasonable", then looked a little closer and realise it left a very bad taste in my mouth. Allow me to explain.
First, it's inaccurate, it claims that KDE is only taking money from Framework after it disavowed its connections with DHH and Omarchy, yet those links are still present on their webpage. And Hyprland too, which is not much better. Is Nate acting on non-public information or something?
Second of all, there's all this talk of AI being powerful, which is a line that very much gets used to boost the technology and get it into places it might otherwise be rejected. Yes, yes, it can produce a bunch of code/hack into things/solve Navier-Stokes but it is doing so on the back of an ungodly amount of theft and fascist money. The power isn't so much with the tech itself but rather with all of the powerful people that are funding it and pushing it. It seems like a semantic quibble, but I think it gets to the heart of a lot of this discourse -- we're not pushing back against LLMs simply because of the tech or simply because of externalities but rather because of inherent properties of the technology and who's behind it.
The Open Source community is currently going through a Nazi Bar problem. LLMs are a technology which is very much intertwined with fascism. As in, Elon Musk founds xAI and xAI gets into a partnership with Anthropic and Anthropic is making this little Claude Code tool which is hailed as oh-so-powerful. Oh, and Elon Musk did an actual fucking Nazi salute. Anthropic is funding Omarchy and DHH too. It's all a big money circlejerk of fascism and AI companies are very much involved. And I think "kicking out the Nazi tech" is very much a corollary of "kicking out the Nazis". And I wish Open Source communities -- Nate included -- would actually wrestle with this rather than treating the bad LLM stuff as externalities that can be dealt with with enough reasonableness.
I've spent far too much time giving brain-space to this godforsaken piece of drama so I'm going to leave it there. I'm not going to ping anyone because I think Nate and the KDE devs are getting enough shit as it is.