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I don't think you want to store your source code in a place where they ban projects based on politics [1]: > Allowing these projects is not a neutral stance; t

by bArray 2mo ago

I don't think you want to store your source code in a place where they ban projects based on politics [1]: > Allowing these projects is not a neutral stance; the effects to the environment are severe. The "DarkFi" (seemingly some crypto designed for criminals, citing an FBI director) project for example uses a "PoW blockchain" (per their readme). PoW (Proof-Of-Work) projects waste an astonishing amount of computational energy, with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands. This energy is almost always from fossil fuels, which directly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and undermining any global efforts to fight climate change. > This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop. Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine? What next? Maybe you can't store your simulation source there because it is deemed to resource intensive for the expected results? When did source code itself become dangerous? It looks like we need more alternatives... [1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184 https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184

rhaskell 2mo ago
[dead]
bramhaag 2mo ago
> Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine? No. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
- spacechild1 2mo ago
  That is actually a great blog post! I wholeheartedly agree with the points they are making.
- bArray 2mo ago
  The core argument they are making is one of resources, I can find myself seeing their point. Another abuse of the service would be to convert videos into ASCII text and check them into git, for example. The issue with the crypto argument is that it is purely political, it is not affecting the service at all. You may think that you agree because it happens to align with your political sentiment, but it's entirely possible they come for your projects next.
28304283409234 2mo ago
If you avoid the discussion, you never get anywhere. Kudos to Codeberg for taking position.
- bravetraveler 2mo ago
  Or as Poppa liked to remind me, if you don't stand for something (of your choosing)... you'll stand for anything. Kudos to Codeberg, indeed. What's more... why aim for a single perfect 'remote'; they're literally free. Be selfish: find several that suit your interests.
hogwasher 2mo ago
I'd rather companies actually care (or even just care about seeming to care) about ethics, rather than only caring what makes the line go up the fastest, yes. A company that treats ethics as optional, or that thinks "it's a business" excuses every imaginable sin, is one that will happily screw you and me over too. Also, in the long term, making climate change worse is a catastrophically bad decision for absolutely everybody. Companies just have to look past the ends of their own noses to see the immediate, quick payout of not giving a fuck about it is like accepting payment to dig their own graves. Also, this is probably, in part, about all the cryto scams everywhere. Companies don't like legal trouble. Anyway, anybody who's sane backs up their source code. If a company burns you, and it's not a monopoly, you leave it. It's not a problem.
- bko 2mo ago
  I'd rather companies just provide me a service at a reasonable price. I don't need a corporation imposing it's ethics on me.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Well this is a charity providing services for free. If you want to be provided a service for a price, go elsewhere.
    - tarpitt 2mo ago
      That money had to have come from somewhere, whether it was taxpayers or individuals. What if I donated? Is it cool to just roll over and allow political groups to hijack a previously neutral service? Also there are other projects hosted there, and network effects involved.
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        Probably if you become a member you'll have more ability to discuss with the other members and the board and the operators, yes. Clearly they are setting limits on a case-by-case basis where needed. If something like GNOME was on Codeberg, they'd happily raise the storage quota for them. So they can also exempt you from the AI code rule if you have a really good reason, which you don't. They have noted somewhere (it's linked in this thread) that most vibe-coders act like they're big and valuable software projects (like GNOME), and use commensurate resources, even though they aren't. This is what they want to block. If you were actually GNOME and you were vibe-coding, they'd probably let you.
zombot 2mo ago
Companies chasing profitmaxxing (to use a fashionable pattern) are just as political, do you complain about those too? Anyway, the answer is the same here: If you don't like it, just don't use them.
surgical_fire 2mo ago
Are we going to pretend that hosting open sourse software for free is an apolitical thing? Neutrality itself is very political. You may prefer it, and that is fine; sometimes I prefer it as well. But within the confined of the law, it should be a non-issue that a free service is not neutral. To be frank, I think that the majority of people screeching about Codeberg here are totally fine with "right to refuse service" when it comes to businesses (as if that was not political at all).
sunshine-o 2mo ago
Yes if you compare a proof of stake blockchains (most of them) and the banking industry, crypto has a far smaller environmental footprint. Ethereum (since PoS) was designed to allow anybody to run a validator or even a full node out of modest hardware. The result is that the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank.
- curiousObject 2mo ago
  >the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank What research or statistics can you suggest to bolster this argument?
  - tripzilch 2mo ago
    While I can't confirm comparisons to a "small/medium size bank" specifically (cause I have no idea how), I can perhaps clarify a bit Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, and it was initially expected to use only 1% of the energy it used when it was proof-of-work. Turned out they were under-estimating the savings. According to studies by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Ethereum's 2022 switch to Proof-of-Stake reduced its global network energy consumption by over 99.98% overnight. As far as I understand, this was made possible because the Ethereum protocol was set up to be made extensible like this (even though big changes like these are hard), while Bitcoin on the other hand, is stuck on proof-of-work forever, since its protocol does not allow for changing it.
    - dlubarov 2mo ago
      There isn't really a technical difference that made PoS viable for Ethereum but not Bitcoin; it's a hard fork in either case. The differences are more cultural - - For better or worse, Ethereum has more centralized leadership (mainly the EF) which helps coordinate upgrades. Hard forks happen pretty regularly, and don't typically risk fracturing the community, unless the changes are particularly controversial (see Ethereum Classic). - PoS wasn't that controversial, since it was planned from the beginning (see the difficulty bomb). Some users still resisted the switch - see the EthereumPoW fork - but for the most part the community was on board. - The Bitcoin community OTOH values ossification. It rarely accepts proposed hard forks as "still Bitcoin"; that has only happened a few times in its history. The community's response to most proposed hard forks is "interesting, but that's not Bitcoin, call it something else." - The Bitcoin community is also more ideologically and economically invested in PoW, so a proposed PoS fork would be extremely controversial, and would fracture the community (at best, if it gained any traction at all).
NotGMan 2mo ago
The problem with imposing ethics is that, in the future, they might change their views or mark other political problems as verboten. No serious business or open source project can be built or such shifting sands.
NetOpWibby 2mo ago
They really quoted the FBI Director in their reasoning? Unserious people. Anything law enforcement can’t peek into is “designed for criminals.” EDIT: This person echoes my sentiment completely; https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19918579 https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19...
selfmodruntime 2mo ago
I'm out. No place that has ever publicly advertised itself to be "political" has ever changed for the beter.
tripzilch 2mo ago
> with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would be to consider that air condition uses 20x the amount of electricity globally compared to what Bitcoin uses. You can find a whole lot of other comparisons here: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons (the airco comparison is about halfway on the page). Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. It's still a lot of energy and proof-of-work does seem really wasteful. Fortunately not all crypto currencies use proof-of-work. It's just ... it's a stupid comparison. it doesn't really make anything any clearer to the reader by knowing that the global energy usage of Bitcoin ranges between NL and Argentina. Anyway, it's not wrong. it's just .. yeah it's a lot? I guess? a country is a lot? Is it just households or also the country's industry? Anyway. My main point, however, is that quoting a ~4 year old piece of not-so-great journalism shows exactly how much original thought these people gave to the subject. They're basically repeating a line that hardly made sense 4 years ago. Edit: BTW I want to add, they're giving away a service for free and therefore it's their good right to decide who gets it and who doesn't. And it's my good right to think those reasons are stupid.
- KetoManx64 2mo ago
  > Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.
  - allarm 2mo ago
    > Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. Which is a waste of energy.
qwm 2mo ago
Not the biggest fan of crypto myself, but allowing LLMs and "AI" stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious. They should just say they don't like crypto at that point, because LLMs and datacenters for them are causing way more harm. Even if their qualms are fraud and abuse, I have some bad news for them about what people are using LLMs for lol
- no-name-here 2mo ago
  > allowing LLMs and “AI” stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious. They ban projects that are mostly AI, and I’d characterize them more as generally against AI: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
insane_dreamer 2mo ago
I'd say Microsoft is pretty political. But you're welcome to continue using Github. No one's asking you to host your FOSS projects (for free) on Codeberg.
21asdffdsa12 2mo ago
A million scammers forked around and found out - and to ban that is politics? At least you went straight to whataboutisms - instead of introspection. "Why cant we have the sweets, the others are getting-" instead of "Why did we built something that allows the worst of human nature to run rampant- and how could we do better"..

by bArray 2mo ago

rhaskell 2mo ago

[dead]

bramhaag 2mo ago

> Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine? No. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

spacechild1 2mo ago
That is actually a great blog post! I wholeheartedly agree with the points they are making.
bArray 2mo ago
The core argument they are making is one of resources, I can find myself seeing their point. Another abuse of the service would be to convert videos into ASCII text and check them into git, for example. The issue with the crypto argument is that it is purely political, it is not affecting the service at all. You may think that you agree because it happens to align with your political sentiment, but it's entirely possible they come for your projects next.

28304283409234 2mo ago

If you avoid the discussion, you never get anywhere. Kudos to Codeberg for taking position.

bravetraveler 2mo ago
Or as Poppa liked to remind me, if you don't stand for something (of your choosing)... you'll stand for anything. Kudos to Codeberg, indeed. What's more... why aim for a single perfect 'remote'; they're literally free. Be selfish: find several that suit your interests.

hogwasher 2mo ago

I'd rather companies actually care (or even just care about seeming to care) about ethics, rather than only caring what makes the line go up the fastest, yes. A company that treats ethics as optional, or that thinks "it's a business" excuses every imaginable sin, is one that will happily screw you and me over too. Also, in the long term, making climate change worse is a catastrophically bad decision for absolutely everybody. Companies just have to look past the ends of their own noses to see the immediate, quick payout of not giving a fuck about it is like accepting payment to dig their own graves. Also, this is probably, in part, about all the cryto scams everywhere. Companies don't like legal trouble. Anyway, anybody who's sane backs up their source code. If a company burns you, and it's not a monopoly, you leave it. It's not a problem.

bko 2mo ago
I'd rather companies just provide me a service at a reasonable price. I don't need a corporation imposing it's ethics on me.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Well this is a charity providing services for free. If you want to be provided a service for a price, go elsewhere.
  - tarpitt 2mo ago
    That money had to have come from somewhere, whether it was taxpayers or individuals. What if I donated? Is it cool to just roll over and allow political groups to hijack a previously neutral service? Also there are other projects hosted there, and network effects involved.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Probably if you become a member you'll have more ability to discuss with the other members and the board and the operators, yes. Clearly they are setting limits on a case-by-case basis where needed. If something like GNOME was on Codeberg, they'd happily raise the storage quota for them. So they can also exempt you from the AI code rule if you have a really good reason, which you don't. They have noted somewhere (it's linked in this thread) that most vibe-coders act like they're big and valuable software projects (like GNOME), and use commensurate resources, even though they aren't. This is what they want to block. If you were actually GNOME and you were vibe-coding, they'd probably let you.

zombot 2mo ago

Companies chasing profitmaxxing (to use a fashionable pattern) are just as political, do you complain about those too? Anyway, the answer is the same here: If you don't like it, just don't use them.

surgical_fire 2mo ago

Are we going to pretend that hosting open sourse software for free is an apolitical thing? Neutrality itself is very political. You may prefer it, and that is fine; sometimes I prefer it as well. But within the confined of the law, it should be a non-issue that a free service is not neutral. To be frank, I think that the majority of people screeching about Codeberg here are totally fine with "right to refuse service" when it comes to businesses (as if that was not political at all).

sunshine-o 2mo ago

Yes if you compare a proof of stake blockchains (most of them) and the banking industry, crypto has a far smaller environmental footprint. Ethereum (since PoS) was designed to allow anybody to run a validator or even a full node out of modest hardware. The result is that the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank.

curiousObject 2mo ago
>the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank What research or statistics can you suggest to bolster this argument?
- tripzilch 2mo ago
  While I can't confirm comparisons to a "small/medium size bank" specifically (cause I have no idea how), I can perhaps clarify a bit Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, and it was initially expected to use only 1% of the energy it used when it was proof-of-work. Turned out they were under-estimating the savings. According to studies by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Ethereum's 2022 switch to Proof-of-Stake reduced its global network energy consumption by over 99.98% overnight. As far as I understand, this was made possible because the Ethereum protocol was set up to be made extensible like this (even though big changes like these are hard), while Bitcoin on the other hand, is stuck on proof-of-work forever, since its protocol does not allow for changing it.
  - dlubarov 2mo ago
    There isn't really a technical difference that made PoS viable for Ethereum but not Bitcoin; it's a hard fork in either case. The differences are more cultural - - For better or worse, Ethereum has more centralized leadership (mainly the EF) which helps coordinate upgrades. Hard forks happen pretty regularly, and don't typically risk fracturing the community, unless the changes are particularly controversial (see Ethereum Classic). - PoS wasn't that controversial, since it was planned from the beginning (see the difficulty bomb). Some users still resisted the switch - see the EthereumPoW fork - but for the most part the community was on board. - The Bitcoin community OTOH values ossification. It rarely accepts proposed hard forks as "still Bitcoin"; that has only happened a few times in its history. The community's response to most proposed hard forks is "interesting, but that's not Bitcoin, call it something else." - The Bitcoin community is also more ideologically and economically invested in PoW, so a proposed PoS fork would be extremely controversial, and would fracture the community (at best, if it gained any traction at all).

NotGMan 2mo ago

The problem with imposing ethics is that, in the future, they might change their views or mark other political problems as verboten. No serious business or open source project can be built or such shifting sands.

NetOpWibby 2mo ago

They really quoted the FBI Director in their reasoning? Unserious people. Anything law enforcement can’t peek into is “designed for criminals.” EDIT: This person echoes my sentiment completely; https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19918579 https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19...

selfmodruntime 2mo ago

I'm out. No place that has ever publicly advertised itself to be "political" has ever changed for the beter.

tripzilch 2mo ago

> with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would be to consider that air condition uses 20x the amount of electricity globally compared to what Bitcoin uses. You can find a whole lot of other comparisons here: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons (the airco comparison is about halfway on the page). Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. It's still a lot of energy and proof-of-work does seem really wasteful. Fortunately not all crypto currencies use proof-of-work. It's just ... it's a stupid comparison. it doesn't really make anything any clearer to the reader by knowing that the global energy usage of Bitcoin ranges between NL and Argentina. Anyway, it's not wrong. it's just .. yeah it's a lot? I guess? a country is a lot? Is it just households or also the country's industry? Anyway. My main point, however, is that quoting a ~4 year old piece of not-so-great journalism shows exactly how much original thought these people gave to the subject. They're basically repeating a line that hardly made sense 4 years ago. Edit: BTW I want to add, they're giving away a service for free and therefore it's their good right to decide who gets it and who doesn't. And it's my good right to think those reasons are stupid.

KetoManx64 2mo ago
> Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.
- allarm 2mo ago
  > Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. Which is a waste of energy.

qwm 2mo ago

Not the biggest fan of crypto myself, but allowing LLMs and "AI" stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious. They should just say they don't like crypto at that point, because LLMs and datacenters for them are causing way more harm. Even if their qualms are fraud and abuse, I have some bad news for them about what people are using LLMs for lol

no-name-here 2mo ago
> allowing LLMs and “AI” stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious. They ban projects that are mostly AI, and I’d characterize them more as generally against AI: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

insane_dreamer 2mo ago

I'd say Microsoft is pretty political. But you're welcome to continue using Github. No one's asking you to host your FOSS projects (for free) on Codeberg.

21asdffdsa12 2mo ago

A million scammers forked around and found out - and to ban that is politics? At least you went straight to whataboutisms - instead of introspection. "Why cant we have the sweets, the others are getting-" instead of "Why did we built something that allows the worst of human nature to run rampant- and how could we do better"..