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STOP OMARCHY: Boycott Tech's Far-Right Backers (stopomarchy.neocities.org)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Protest against the Omarchy/Omacom Foundation and the tech companies and executives funding far-right open source.

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[–] 15 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (7 children)

I am not trying to argue this, but some people will say "It just looks like a linux distro that is designed to be more agentic friendly, even if some of its backers have unscrupulous pasts." What is the response to this? Because I'm sure it's vibe-coded and insecure, but there aren't really linux distros that are agentic first distros and some computer enthusiasts really like AI. And yes, people can just install Jan or LM Studio on their own in another distro, but some people may want open source code and linux designed for AI. I know people on Lemmy often hate AI, so please don't hate me for writing this. I just don't totally get the reasoning aside from some people involved in the project seem to be assholes... or is that the reasoning?

To be honest, if not for security concerns I'd probably try this distro if it weren't somehow linked to anti-trans things, which makes anything completely toxic. But I looked at the Omarchy page just to see what it looked like and conceptually for people interested in agentic stuff, it didn't look that bad, it seemed sort of interesting.

Trans people are some of the best network engineers and coders out there and greatly help the open source community. Any open source project that isn't kind to trans people should be ignored. Maybe that's the point? That normally a project like this linked to anything anti-trans would be rejected by the open source community and it's only through soulless corporations and right wing tech bros that this is existing?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

    This isn't just a case of some abrasive people involved. The guy who runs the project, DHH, is an open and proud racist. He posts his very straightforward racist beliefs on his blog. He made ruby on rails, and after being rejected from the ruby community he's now trying to insert himself into the Linux/open source community. On top of that, the "distro" is Arch + some dot files. Despite that, he's managed to raise millions of dollars in outside funding, which is insane for open source project. Either his industry connections are willing to look past the racism and hand him a bunch of money anyway, or they actively agree with him and want to build a space for racists in the open source community.

    Add in the AI stuff and people have plenty of reason to boycott this project.

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  • [–] 5 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

    Well, the AI (LLM stuff) is right wing. It makes the last thing neoliberalism didn't make obsolete useless. Who cares if you actually understand what you're doing and are able to do it way better than a LLM. "You are now useless. Fuck you."

    The neoliberal ideology now made everyone useless. How can a person still be a neoliberal when you can see none of us really have any value (intellectual or otherwise), we never did. The only thing humans had was pretending to be useful (or competent in any way) and they are taking it away from us little by little.

    That's why I'm a leftist, I've seen basic human dignity being taken away from people since my childhood and experienced repression (as much as a minority in a non third world country can) and I know many people have it worse.

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  • [–] 2 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

    I don't know if I agree with you because someone still needs to tell an LLM what the project is for it to work and a normal person who has no science or computer science background can't do that efficiently or check the technical aspects of a project to make sure the AI isn't doing something incorrectly (and eventually the AI will do something incorrectly usually). I think we need UBI sooner rather than later because so many jobs will be obsolete, but if I'm chatting with an LLM or you are and we say "is the docker container up?" or "you built a page and there's no clear way to navigate it" or "test for what would be exposed data in the case of a breach" the AI can do that, but a normal person doesn't even understand any of that stuff to chat with an AI about that. I know it's awful right now for coders who are getting paid less or are underemployed, but that seems to be more of a UBI problem instead of an LLM problem. There are legitimate environmental fears however, but LLMs and data centers seem to be a cherry on top of egregious environmental policy. Environmental catastrophe is headed this way with or without the cherry and it's not clear to me if we had good universal public transportation and banned gasoline that somehow data centers would still be an existential human risk.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    I think the problem is that decision makers /people in power often don’t understand the technical jargon either. All that matters is, “is it working?” So once they see that they can get it “working” without paying for the expertise, they will take it.

    The thing is also - the LLM will eventually get it wrong, but the frontier models are pretty good at fixing it if you can articulate the problem. Even non technically.

    Under the hood? Impossible to understand. But it works!

    Counterpoint - system architecture is really built around helping humans to build mental models of systems. If your plan is to have LLMs to all the work in the future, those mental models no longer matter the way they did in the past.

    Probably, systems will break, and LLM costs will rise, and the arithmetic will shift - but that isn’t happening fast enough to stop the brain drain and negative pressure on employment and compensation.

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