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Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions
- rfgplk 2mo ago[flagged]
- surgical_fire 2mo agoYes, and I'll be waiting patiently for some AI-slop Rust port of Debian to gain any traction. Any day now. I am not saying if they should or should not accept AI contributions, but this sort of comment misses the point so hard that is laughable.
- 125asgf 2mo ago> see the dozens of fully fledged homegrown Rust kernels/OSs written by teenagers This isn't Musk's X feed.
- xena 2mo agoPlease demonstrate by porting Debian to Rust with your Claude subscription. You have the weekend. Get started!
- xena 2mo agoI just want to state for the record that this person did not in fact port Debian to Rust with their Claude subscription in the weekend.
- lowsong 2mo ago> an average college kid could port their whole codebase in a day with Claude Nobody is stopping you, please go ahead.
- penchant 2mo agoThe choices are oddly and not consistently worded. "Ban LLM contributions from Debian via Social Contract", "A cautious approach to generative AI", "Debian is created by humans" and "Avoid the use of LLM: climate destruction is a deal breaker" all in one list? Sounds like several people wrote them and did not agree on the form.
- Tomte 2mo ago> Sounds like several people wrote them and did not agree on the form Of course several people wrote different position statements to vote on. Did you expect one Debian developer to cook up half a dozen possible stances he is not even personally invested in? Are you constantly surprised that election programs of different parties are worded differently (and use different fonts)?
- cromka 2mo agoDude, chill with the strawman and the aggression. Bad day?
- Tomte 2mo agoThere is no aggression, and "dudeing" me makes me disregard you immediately anyway.
- DANmode 2mo agoIf we’re disregarding people based on how they express themselves, Keybase is owned by Zoom now…
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- forestrywat 2mo agoFwiw, I perceive no aggression in their post.
- penchant 2mo agoObviously not, you misunderstood my point. And the election programs comparison makes no sense.
- pm215 2mo agoThis is the way general resolutions in Debian generally work. There's a lot of pre-vote discussion where different people and groups propose and draft their preferred options, to produce what they feel is the best expression of their position. If you can get enough seconders for your proposal it goes on the ballot, with the text you chose and your seconders agreed with. There isn't any requirement for the options to use consistent terminology or avoid overlap, and no overarching editorial process to impose consistency (which would be tricky anyway in cases like this where terminology choices and overall framing can be part of the disagreement between people.)
- abc123abc123 2mo ago[flagged]
- hashar 2mo agoCopyright IS an issue to Debian, and always has been for the last 30 years or so. They are, rightfully so, extremely picky when it comes to respecting copyright and licensing. It is the 0.01%. > Who the f*ck cares who made it? A monkey could have made it for all I care. If it does what it claims to do, and I understand how, it's all good. Copyright laws do care. As an example one can send a patch claiming its their own but because they had do it under their employer duty, the copyright might well be associated to their employer rather than them individually. Does the patch does what it claims to? Surely. Is that a copyright infringement? DEFINITELY SO. The copyright rationale for the first proposition (Choice 1: Ban LLM contributions from Debian via Social Contract): > 1. Copyright > ------------- > > LLM output has very unclear legal status: it may be possible to copyright on its own merits, or not; it may be affected by all of the licenses and copyrights in the training data, or not. > Debian Policy and the DFSG require absolute clarity for licensing and copyright[1][2]. Software and other contributions written conventionally by humans with unclear copyright or license status are not allowed in Debian; LLM output should not have a special exception to this. This rationale states if there is doubt about the copyright of the code, it not suitable for inclusion. Until I guess LLM output get a clarification regarding who is the author of its output.
- acdha 2mo ago> No, the copyright issue is nonsense This is wishful thinking for any project of Debian’s size. You not wanting to deal with it doesn’t mean that people won’t get sued.
- rlpb 2mo agoIt sounds like you would be in favour of Choice 5.
- 23151-aa15 2mo agoFunding for the 100,000th vibe coding startup is running out?
- 2mo ago
- aeuropean12 2mo agoHow conservative.
- throwaway27448 2mo agoIs that a bad thing? Not everyone needs to chase VC money
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoTIL being climate conscious is "conservatism"....
- z3ratul163071 2mo ago[flagged]
- datakan 2mo agoTried to decipher this but seems a bit convoluted. If the Kernel now allows LLM code, then what will Debian do if they ban LLM code? Choice 7 and choice 8 seem pretty clear that the project simply can't continue under those circumstances.
- pm215 2mo agoNeither choice 7 nor 8 attempt to forbid packaging of any upstream project with LLM contributions like the kernel. Choice 7 says "The proposal does not cover indirect contributions, i.e. those originating from upstream works.". It's only making requirements on Debian work specifically. Choice 8 says "We also acknowledge that LLM usage can be hard if not impossible to detect and that Debian as a distribution cannot really impose LLM policies on other projects we package and distribute. Therefore this text is just a position statement." It doesn't impose any requirements at all on anybody, even for debian specific work: it just says "we'd prefer it if you don't use this technology".
- datakan 2mo ago[flagged]
- pm215 2mo agoA lot of work and code is Debian specific, and so there's a choice to be made about LLM use for that code, as there is for any project. And there are questions about LLM use in mailing list discussions, bug reports, and other non code interactions. Most of the options take a position on that (i.e. impose some rules for those contributions) one way or another. What other projects choose on the question is interesting and might inform the choice, but what e.g. the kernel opts for doesn't control what Debian decides for itself, any more than the kernel's choice imposes any requirements on Rust or glibc or gcc.
- AndrewDucker 2mo agoThey care about it. And want there to be an official position about it.
- rho4 2mo ago> After the voting period there will be a record of all the votes without the name of the voter. It will instead contain a cryptographic hash. You will receive a secret after you have voted that can be used to calculate that hash. This allows you to verify that your vote is in the list. This secret is sent in an encrypted mail. I've always wanted this for mail-in voting. E.g. print a random secret on the voting form I receive per mail. Afterwards publish the complete vote-count on the web, with the choice and a hash of the secret. So I can check that my vote was recorded, and only once, and correctly. I understand there might be a lot of reasons for why it could fail in practice, but it would be a start.
- jtickle 2mo agoThe unfortunate reason this isn't doable in the US anyway, and any time someone has a great idea on how to improve elections this inevitably comes up: preventing coersion. It's difficult to balance transparent voting with ensuring that you can't prove which way you voted in exchange for money or favors.
- cogman10 2mo agoYou can take a picture of your filled out ballot with a cellphone. I don't see how there isn't already a very wide open door for coercion/vote purchasing. It's not 100% fool proof, but you don't need that to sway an election, you just need enough people to follow through. But even with that, it seems like the better course of action is criminalizing such coercion (which is already illegal). Anyone doing something like that on a scale large enough to matter would be caught rather quickly.
- markus92 2mo agoThere’s places where taking photos inside the voting box is illegal for this exact reason.
- johndough 2mo agoThis could be prevented if the government offered photos of ballots with votes for download. But generative AI can also fake it well enough these days. (Of course, this is less of a concern in countries where taking photos of ballots is not allowed.)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- lowsong 2mo agoProposal A would of course be the best option, but requires a two thirds majority for... some reason. Proposals B, C, D, E are all defeatist policies that appeal to a "here to stay" narrative. Proposal G is potentially workable but has so many carve-outs to be practically useless, leaving only Proposal H as a workable policy if A fails to pass.
- z3ratul163071 2mo ago[flagged]
- waisbrot 2mo agoThat's an interesting topic you might meditate on. Microsoft would never hold such a vote. Would you be better off with their OS? Debian is one of the more free-as-in-speech distributions; would you rather run your VMs on one that had tighter integration with for-profit groups?