New rule at BSD Cafe: Do not promote AI
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New rule at BSD Cafe: Do not promote AI
BSD Cafe prefers to define itself by what it supports, rather than by what it opposes.
We support people, open technologies, decentralisation, technological independence, privacy, user control, the sharing of knowledge, and communities where technology remains a tool rather than becoming the authority.
For these reasons, we cannot support the current direction of AI and the ecosystem surrounding it.
Much of today's AI technology is developed and controlled by a very small number of extremely large companies, through an unprecedented concentration of computing power, data, infrastructure, and capital. This creates dependencies that are fundamentally at odds with many of the values this community was built around.
We are also seeing increasingly direct consequences for people. Skilled professionals are losing work to automated systems. Organisations are becoming dependent on services they cannot inspect, understand, or control. AI-generated technical advice is often presented with confidence while lacking essential context. Automation is being used to scale abuse, manipulation, spam, and attacks.
At the same time, fear of these threats can itself push people and organisations towards a handful of large centralised providers, further reinforcing the same concentration of power.
The problem is not simply the existence of artificial intelligence as a technology. The problem is how these technologies are currently being developed, deployed, controlled, marketed, and increasingly presented as an inevitable replacement for human skills, judgement, creativity, and interaction.
Too often, the message coming from the companies selling these systems is essentially: *this is inevitable, it will replace what you do, and you will have to adapt to it whether you want to or not.*
At the BSD Cafe, we believe there must always be another choice.
For this reason, we ask members **not to use BSD Cafe to promote, advertise, or evangelise AI services, or the idea that replacing human work and decision-making with AI is inherently desirable, inevitable, or something everyone should simply accept.**
This does not prevent discussion.
But please do not use this community to promote the current AI-driven model of technological centralisation and human replacement.
**"Own your data" and the current state of AI are simply not compatible.**
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New rule at BSD Cafe: Do not promote AI
BSD Cafe prefers to define itself by what it supports, rather than by what it opposes.
We support people, open technologies, decentralisation, technological independence, privacy, user control, the sharing of knowledge, and communities where technology remains a tool rather than becoming the authority.
For these reasons, we cannot support the current direction of AI and the ecosystem surrounding it.
Much of today's AI technology is developed and controlled by a very small number of extremely large companies, through an unprecedented concentration of computing power, data, infrastructure, and capital. This creates dependencies that are fundamentally at odds with many of the values this community was built around.
We are also seeing increasingly direct consequences for people. Skilled professionals are losing work to automated systems. Organisations are becoming dependent on services they cannot inspect, understand, or control. AI-generated technical advice is often presented with confidence while lacking essential context. Automation is being used to scale abuse, manipulation, spam, and attacks.
At the same time, fear of these threats can itself push people and organisations towards a handful of large centralised providers, further reinforcing the same concentration of power.
The problem is not simply the existence of artificial intelligence as a technology. The problem is how these technologies are currently being developed, deployed, controlled, marketed, and increasingly presented as an inevitable replacement for human skills, judgement, creativity, and interaction.
Too often, the message coming from the companies selling these systems is essentially: *this is inevitable, it will replace what you do, and you will have to adapt to it whether you want to or not.*
At the BSD Cafe, we believe there must always be another choice.
For this reason, we ask members **not to use BSD Cafe to promote, advertise, or evangelise AI services, or the idea that replacing human work and decision-making with AI is inherently desirable, inevitable, or something everyone should simply accept.**
This does not prevent discussion.
But please do not use this community to promote the current AI-driven model of technological centralisation and human replacement.
**"Own your data" and the current state of AI are simply not compatible.**
@announcements Hi, I know the answer to my question likely requires only one web search, but humans have always been better pointers.
Which documentation and resources would you recommend to someone who has never installed or even played with BSD?
Which distro is more beginner-friendly?
I have average Linux knowledge (Debian and Debian-based). I wouldn't called it advanced but I have been using it for 20 years without major issues. The command line doesn't scare me either.
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@announcements Hi, I know the answer to my question likely requires only one web search, but humans have always been better pointers.
Which documentation and resources would you recommend to someone who has never installed or even played with BSD?
Which distro is more beginner-friendly?
I have average Linux knowledge (Debian and Debian-based). I wouldn't called it advanced but I have been using it for 20 years without major issues. The command line doesn't scare me either.
@s1m0n4 @announcements I would suggest you look at the FreeBSD documentation portal here:
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/ -
@s1m0n4 @announcements I would suggest you look at the FreeBSD documentation portal here:
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/@Triddle thanks!
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@announcements Hi, I know the answer to my question likely requires only one web search, but humans have always been better pointers.
Which documentation and resources would you recommend to someone who has never installed or even played with BSD?
Which distro is more beginner-friendly?
I have average Linux knowledge (Debian and Debian-based). I wouldn't called it advanced but I have been using it for 20 years without major issues. The command line doesn't scare me either.
@s1m0n4 @announcements I should say that NetBSD is the most likely to run on arbitrary hardware, FreeBSD is easy to use, and OpenBSD is the most secure.
Depends on your intended use.
I've been using FreeBSD for quite a few years now. Occasionally I get irritated by little things, but it just keeps working for me.
I have tried OpenBSD, but I find the differences enough to send me back to FreeBSD.
Have not run NetBSD for years, so any comments would be way out of date.
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New rule at BSD Cafe: Do not promote AI
BSD Cafe prefers to define itself by what it supports, rather than by what it opposes.
We support people, open technologies, decentralisation, technological independence, privacy, user control, the sharing of knowledge, and communities where technology remains a tool rather than becoming the authority.
For these reasons, we cannot support the current direction of AI and the ecosystem surrounding it.
Much of today's AI technology is developed and controlled by a very small number of extremely large companies, through an unprecedented concentration of computing power, data, infrastructure, and capital. This creates dependencies that are fundamentally at odds with many of the values this community was built around.
We are also seeing increasingly direct consequences for people. Skilled professionals are losing work to automated systems. Organisations are becoming dependent on services they cannot inspect, understand, or control. AI-generated technical advice is often presented with confidence while lacking essential context. Automation is being used to scale abuse, manipulation, spam, and attacks.
At the same time, fear of these threats can itself push people and organisations towards a handful of large centralised providers, further reinforcing the same concentration of power.
The problem is not simply the existence of artificial intelligence as a technology. The problem is how these technologies are currently being developed, deployed, controlled, marketed, and increasingly presented as an inevitable replacement for human skills, judgement, creativity, and interaction.
Too often, the message coming from the companies selling these systems is essentially: *this is inevitable, it will replace what you do, and you will have to adapt to it whether you want to or not.*
At the BSD Cafe, we believe there must always be another choice.
For this reason, we ask members **not to use BSD Cafe to promote, advertise, or evangelise AI services, or the idea that replacing human work and decision-making with AI is inherently desirable, inevitable, or something everyone should simply accept.**
This does not prevent discussion.
But please do not use this community to promote the current AI-driven model of technological centralisation and human replacement.
**"Own your data" and the current state of AI are simply not compatible.**
@announcements then why is your avatar and profile background generated?
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@announcements Hi, I know the answer to my question likely requires only one web search, but humans have always been better pointers.
Which documentation and resources would you recommend to someone who has never installed or even played with BSD?
Which distro is more beginner-friendly?
I have average Linux knowledge (Debian and Debian-based). I wouldn't called it advanced but I have been using it for 20 years without major issues. The command line doesn't scare me either.
@s1m0n4 Hey, I hope you don't mind me jumping in! I found the FreeBSD Handbook super helpful! Pretty much as soon as you hit the Boot Loader section (https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/bsdinstall/#bsdinstall-view-probe) it becomes a step-by-step install guide with some of the most in-depth and well-worded explanations of just about everything you'd encounter. (In my opinion!) Encrypting your disks using GELI is a simple "NO"->"YES" toggle, which is something I've been struggling with on NetBSD. (And a couple of Linux distros, although I feel far more comfortable with LUKS.)
It's pretty straightforward to get an X11 session up and running, and to me it felt not too different from something like Alpine or Debian.
A little while back, when I was much newer to FreeBSD, I did get Wayland up and running on a ThinkPad, but that was during the time where KDE+Wayland on FreeBSD had an unfortunate keymap bug (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505552) but I think (?) that's been fixed. (Haven't had a lot of free time lately because of work*, so I've just been using X11+Mate, lol.)
I have a tendency to start rambling, so I'll cut my post short! The last thing I want to mention is WiFi (in-)compatibility. My current FreeBSD machine's WiFi adapter isn't supported, and it doesn't have an ethernet port either. I've been using a cheap USB dongle, and that's been working fine.
But I'm nowhere near experienced enough in *BSD to be an authoritative source, just figured I'd try to be helpful.*Which is also why my profile is rather... blank. I know it looks bad; I promise to make it less "Default-User-87432" when I get a day off!
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@s1m0n4 Hey, I hope you don't mind me jumping in! I found the FreeBSD Handbook super helpful! Pretty much as soon as you hit the Boot Loader section (https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/bsdinstall/#bsdinstall-view-probe) it becomes a step-by-step install guide with some of the most in-depth and well-worded explanations of just about everything you'd encounter. (In my opinion!) Encrypting your disks using GELI is a simple "NO"->"YES" toggle, which is something I've been struggling with on NetBSD. (And a couple of Linux distros, although I feel far more comfortable with LUKS.)
It's pretty straightforward to get an X11 session up and running, and to me it felt not too different from something like Alpine or Debian.
A little while back, when I was much newer to FreeBSD, I did get Wayland up and running on a ThinkPad, but that was during the time where KDE+Wayland on FreeBSD had an unfortunate keymap bug (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505552) but I think (?) that's been fixed. (Haven't had a lot of free time lately because of work*, so I've just been using X11+Mate, lol.)
I have a tendency to start rambling, so I'll cut my post short! The last thing I want to mention is WiFi (in-)compatibility. My current FreeBSD machine's WiFi adapter isn't supported, and it doesn't have an ethernet port either. I've been using a cheap USB dongle, and that's been working fine.
But I'm nowhere near experienced enough in *BSD to be an authoritative source, just figured I'd try to be helpful.*Which is also why my profile is rather... blank. I know it looks bad; I promise to make it less "Default-User-87432" when I get a day off!
@HAEXEIZYWO you look like a fun person to hang out with
!Thank you for all the tips and the insight.
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@announcements Hi, I know the answer to my question likely requires only one web search, but humans have always been better pointers.
Which documentation and resources would you recommend to someone who has never installed or even played with BSD?
Which distro is more beginner-friendly?
I have average Linux knowledge (Debian and Debian-based). I wouldn't called it advanced but I have been using it for 20 years without major issues. The command line doesn't scare me either.
@s1m0n4 I think the easiest to get started with is probably FreeBSD. On the other hand if you’ve got 20 years of Linux experience and are comfortable with the command line probably all of them are fine choices. Support for laptop hardware is likely to be a bit variable but not completely unusable. (You have to be a bit more careful about choice of WiFi card, etc., than on modern Linux I think.)
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@announcements then why is your avatar and profile background generated?
@hbons There is something that only a couple of friends know, and I think it is time to make it public. At the beginning of the project, a few people wanted to contribute some images.
One of them was an artist who, unfortunately, has had their ability to create content severely limited by a degenerative illness. When they sent me their work, I felt that the human value of making this person feel useful again outweighed the risk that some of the content might have been, or might possibly have been, generated or assisted by AI. It was early 2023.
There was already some controversy about this some time ago, and this person eventually left the Fediverse altogether. Although they were not attacked directly, they felt attacked.
I have changed the images to avoid any further issues. But this is exactly why I believe witch hunts do not get us very far: the AI gurus keep using and abusing these tools to make money in ways I consider unethical, while this person, who for a while had felt useful again, has fallen back into their (semi-)isolation.
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@hbons There is something that only a couple of friends know, and I think it is time to make it public. At the beginning of the project, a few people wanted to contribute some images.
One of them was an artist who, unfortunately, has had their ability to create content severely limited by a degenerative illness. When they sent me their work, I felt that the human value of making this person feel useful again outweighed the risk that some of the content might have been, or might possibly have been, generated or assisted by AI. It was early 2023.
There was already some controversy about this some time ago, and this person eventually left the Fediverse altogether. Although they were not attacked directly, they felt attacked.
I have changed the images to avoid any further issues. But this is exactly why I believe witch hunts do not get us very far: the AI gurus keep using and abusing these tools to make money in ways I consider unethical, while this person, who for a while had felt useful again, has fallen back into their (semi-)isolation.
@announcements @hbons This is very sweet and sad.
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@announcements @hbons This is very sweet and sad.
@coreysnipes @announcements @hbons this is one of the reasons why we want to promote positivity. It's full of people having problems, full of people living bad lives. We don't want to deny this. But, when here, we want to make sure they can have a good time, feel among friends without continuously having to fight wars.
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@hbons There is something that only a couple of friends know, and I think it is time to make it public. At the beginning of the project, a few people wanted to contribute some images.
One of them was an artist who, unfortunately, has had their ability to create content severely limited by a degenerative illness. When they sent me their work, I felt that the human value of making this person feel useful again outweighed the risk that some of the content might have been, or might possibly have been, generated or assisted by AI. It was early 2023.
There was already some controversy about this some time ago, and this person eventually left the Fediverse altogether. Although they were not attacked directly, they felt attacked.
I have changed the images to avoid any further issues. But this is exactly why I believe witch hunts do not get us very far: the AI gurus keep using and abusing these tools to make money in ways I consider unethical, while this person, who for a while had felt useful again, has fallen back into their (semi-)isolation.
@announcements thanks for the clarification and hope they’re doing well.
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@coreysnipes @announcements @hbons this is one of the reasons why we want to promote positivity. It's full of people having problems, full of people living bad lives. We don't want to deny this. But, when here, we want to make sure they can have a good time, feel among friends without continuously having to fight wars.
@stefano @announcements @hbons Agreed; it's important to have spaces like that. And that kind of culture is hard to maintain. Thanks for doing what you do.
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@announcements thanks for the clarification and hope they’re doing well.
@hbons @announcements unfortunately, the physical conditions won't improve. But their mood is good enough and we kept in touch.
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@hbons There is something that only a couple of friends know, and I think it is time to make it public. At the beginning of the project, a few people wanted to contribute some images.
One of them was an artist who, unfortunately, has had their ability to create content severely limited by a degenerative illness. When they sent me their work, I felt that the human value of making this person feel useful again outweighed the risk that some of the content might have been, or might possibly have been, generated or assisted by AI. It was early 2023.
There was already some controversy about this some time ago, and this person eventually left the Fediverse altogether. Although they were not attacked directly, they felt attacked.
I have changed the images to avoid any further issues. But this is exactly why I believe witch hunts do not get us very far: the AI gurus keep using and abusing these tools to make money in ways I consider unethical, while this person, who for a while had felt useful again, has fallen back into their (semi-)isolation.
@announcements @hbons Bruh the new one is AI-generated too
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New rule at BSD Cafe: Do not promote AI
BSD Cafe prefers to define itself by what it supports, rather than by what it opposes.
We support people, open technologies, decentralisation, technological independence, privacy, user control, the sharing of knowledge, and communities where technology remains a tool rather than becoming the authority.
For these reasons, we cannot support the current direction of AI and the ecosystem surrounding it.
Much of today's AI technology is developed and controlled by a very small number of extremely large companies, through an unprecedented concentration of computing power, data, infrastructure, and capital. This creates dependencies that are fundamentally at odds with many of the values this community was built around.
We are also seeing increasingly direct consequences for people. Skilled professionals are losing work to automated systems. Organisations are becoming dependent on services they cannot inspect, understand, or control. AI-generated technical advice is often presented with confidence while lacking essential context. Automation is being used to scale abuse, manipulation, spam, and attacks.
At the same time, fear of these threats can itself push people and organisations towards a handful of large centralised providers, further reinforcing the same concentration of power.
The problem is not simply the existence of artificial intelligence as a technology. The problem is how these technologies are currently being developed, deployed, controlled, marketed, and increasingly presented as an inevitable replacement for human skills, judgement, creativity, and interaction.
Too often, the message coming from the companies selling these systems is essentially: *this is inevitable, it will replace what you do, and you will have to adapt to it whether you want to or not.*
At the BSD Cafe, we believe there must always be another choice.
For this reason, we ask members **not to use BSD Cafe to promote, advertise, or evangelise AI services, or the idea that replacing human work and decision-making with AI is inherently desirable, inevitable, or something everyone should simply accept.**
This does not prevent discussion.
But please do not use this community to promote the current AI-driven model of technological centralisation and human replacement.
**"Own your data" and the current state of AI are simply not compatible.**
@announcements this response really makes me want to try BSD
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@announcements @hbons Bruh the new one is AI-generated too
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