The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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@mhoye The unfortunate thing about the move to Matrix is significantly more discussion started happening on Mozilla-internal Slack at the same time, and that really killed some of the open-by-default vibes, with some people scarcely checking Matrix.
@gsnedders That didn't happen at the same time; the reality is that IRC usability was, compared to what was available, just so bad for so long that long before a single Mozilla slack instance was blessed, long before I was sent to get us an alternative to IRC, there were already _dozens and dozens_ of private shadow Slack instances all over the place for various teams and projects. Like, on the order of 180 of them. One of the biggest impetuses for moving to Slack was... most people already had.
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@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte Yeah. I would like to be developing in public, of course, but at this point I am stuck on the point of distrusting the legal system to actually defend small timers like myself, even if there were a well-established license to satisfy my concerns.
@lykso@tiny.tilde.website @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run @mhoye@cosocial.ca @froztbyte@mastodon.social In my case I have no belief my license works as more than a statement of intent/principles.
So I try instead to compensate in things which I believe the generally applicable contribution to autonomy remains applicable regardless of whatever corposcum might copy it (whatever bastardized copy may not retain that, but the one I will continue to provide will).
I believe finding the source of things matters and that the tooling for current code helps a lot.
Ultimately of course even with protections, corposcum have very well demonstrated in book publishing just how effectively they can drown out one’s signal so that one is never heard of anyway (copyright was a monopolist and censorship tool first & foremost and it is what it does best; the same is applicable to patents in a very similar way). The system has always protected the monopolists and corposcum first, anyone else being a pretense or incidental at best.
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There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
@mhoye@cosocial.ca Mailing lists do present a good aspect.
Except that mailing lists rely on mail servers that are part of infrastructure captured by corposcum, trivially and frequently leveraged for abuse by the corposcum or various regimes.
A federation of Free NetNews servers or anything new would do a much better job of it.
The centralized forges of the moment are an active step backward, into the awfulness of server-centrism & infrastructure consolidation in reach of trivial disruption.
There is nothing fundamental about forges that requires them to be server-centric abominations. They could be user-agents for a federated or distributed protocol. Ideally a message-centric one, which is the one part email got right.
In fact, there’s nothing fundamental about email that requires it to use the compromised and taken-over SMTP corporate federation. But email has accumulated some cruft, had some of its limitations come into stark relief when used for various things and there is a good argument that something new would do it better for those things.
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@mhoye Question is: who is willing to fork pre-LLM version of Linux and maintain that? That would be the most practical solution.
AFAIK most people who care walk away from Linux to less mature NetBSD or RedoxOS, which do have strict anti-AI policy.@tapafon@isn.tapaf.onl @mhoye@cosocial.ca LLMs are the straw that broke the camel’s back.
There were already a lot of problems generating considerable discontent. They just hadn’t be quite enough for those people to decide to leave Linux entirely yet.
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@lykso@tiny.tilde.website @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run @mhoye@cosocial.ca @froztbyte@mastodon.social In my case I have no belief my license works as more than a statement of intent/principles.
So I try instead to compensate in things which I believe the generally applicable contribution to autonomy remains applicable regardless of whatever corposcum might copy it (whatever bastardized copy may not retain that, but the one I will continue to provide will).
I believe finding the source of things matters and that the tooling for current code helps a lot.
Ultimately of course even with protections, corposcum have very well demonstrated in book publishing just how effectively they can drown out one’s signal so that one is never heard of anyway (copyright was a monopolist and censorship tool first & foremost and it is what it does best; the same is applicable to patents in a very similar way). The system has always protected the monopolists and corposcum first, anyone else being a pretense or incidental at best.
@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte Yeah, this is the right attitude to have regarding licenses now, I think.
I don't think there is anything which is structurally incompatible with cooption, and if it is coopted then it becomes irrelevant whether I am maintaining a "good" version; it gets drowned out. Worse, my maintenance may be upstreamed and used to benefit the capitalist version.
1/
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@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte Yeah, this is the right attitude to have regarding licenses now, I think.
I don't think there is anything which is structurally incompatible with cooption, and if it is coopted then it becomes irrelevant whether I am maintaining a "good" version; it gets drowned out. Worse, my maintenance may be upstreamed and used to benefit the capitalist version.
1/
@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte Ideally we would be actively undermining this system.
I suspect there will be a need for good code and good systems as the diseased ones fall apart. I would like to avoid a situation where the people responsible for the disease, where the diseased system itself, can use my work to save themselves/itself. Collective access to and control of this technology is a form of power; it would be 2/
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@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte Ideally we would be actively undermining this system.
I suspect there will be a need for good code and good systems as the diseased ones fall apart. I would like to avoid a situation where the people responsible for the disease, where the diseased system itself, can use my work to save themselves/itself. Collective access to and control of this technology is a form of power; it would be 2/
@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte fantastic if I could find a way to direct that power into a political form which may challenge the current form.
And ultimately, I'd rather the diseased systems fall apart and my work be lost than my work be used to sustain and further the spread of said disease. 3/3
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@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte fantastic if I could find a way to direct that power into a political form which may challenge the current form.
And ultimately, I'd rather the diseased systems fall apart and my work be lost than my work be used to sustain and further the spread of said disease. 3/3
@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte Although it may be that the system is so diseased and falling apart so quickly that the pace of my work will render it useless in that regard. Good chance as well that the system finds no use for what I'm doing, having other tools better suited already at hand. Still, it's a risk I'd rather not take just now, I guess. 4/3
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been looking at microkernels and seems like it's a better alternative and much easier to maintain than the monolithic one that Linux has.
@cyberquixote @wronglang @mhoye iirc, that's what Linus thought: smth along the lines of "hey guys, here's a quick hack to use until that microkernel good stuff takes over"
Edit: Ish. """
[…] in a public newsgroup, Torvalds […] argu[ed] MINIX has inherent design flaws (naming the lack of multithreading as a specific example), while acknowledging that he finds the microkernel kernel design to be superior "from a theoretical and aesthetical" point of view"
""" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate -
@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte Although it may be that the system is so diseased and falling apart so quickly that the pace of my work will render it useless in that regard. Good chance as well that the system finds no use for what I'm doing, having other tools better suited already at hand. Still, it's a risk I'd rather not take just now, I guess. 4/3
@lykso@tiny.tilde.website @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run @mhoye@cosocial.ca @froztbyte@mastodon.social
It is a chosen tradeoff, I suppose.if it is coopted then it becomes irrelevant whether I am maintaining a “good” version; it gets drowned out. Worse, my maintenance may be upstreamed and used to benefit the capitalist version.
It being preserved and public does enable the chance for it to be rediscovered at any time, and possibly in ways that inconvenience malicious parties (if they haven’t died out prior).
Ideally we would be actively undermining this system.
Of course. Though the overthrow of capitalism will not come purely from software.
I would like to avoid a situation where the people responsible for the disease, where the diseased system itself, can use my work to save themselves/itself.
That would be unfortunate. Although I deem it extremely unlikely.
Most work that promotes autonomy and agency is worthless to them at best or inimical to their interests.
Most work that puts autonomy, security and control in the hands of the people/users, especially ones who use it to enact their agency & assert autonomy, is actively unwanted to the point that direct hostile intervention has been undertaken at points in the past over it.
(Not only in software work there.)
Collective access to and control of this technology is a form of power; it would be fantastic if I could find a way to direct that power into a political form which may challenge the current form.
A direct challenge seem unlikely, but if what its purpose is and what it enables is contrary to the malicious interests, then it does have good odds of providing indirect challenge or contribution to a direct challenge.
And of course, some in quest of liberation may use it to survive or save themselves long enough for the wider overthrow to take place (hopefully).
Although it may be that the system is so diseased and falling apart so quickly that the pace of my work will render it useless in that regard.
That would be a Plan9 ending.
Were you luckier, you might complete your work after the hostile system’s crumbling and see it finding use too.
Good chance as well that the system finds no use for what I’m doing, having other tools better suited already at hand.
Quite.
Still, it’s a risk I’d rather not take just now, I guess.
Fair enough. You do have that choice, and your discomfort is not groundless.
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The move to Matrix was partly driven by their open source commitments - hi, @matrix , hey yo, love you all - but they mostly won on the strength of two things. First that their accessibility posture was not just unrivalled in terms of FOSS forums but that their team jumped at the chance to work with us improve it.
But 2nd: the moderation tools are unmatched. Nothing else comes close.
Once you have tools and process in place to ablate harassment, nobody willingly goes back to not having that.
@mhoye this is a great thread, and I agree with all of it except this tangential point.
Matrix moderation tools are a chaotic mess. Some of that is inherent distsys problems, some of that is missing / bad protocol design or poor integration. Not all of it is directly related to moderation being a reactive afterthought, but is compounded by the combination of that with general matrix desync artifacts.
Speaking from experience doing matrix moderation, notably during an especially nasty period a year or two ago, there is plenty of capability left to build. While the more centralised platforms have some inherent advantages here, that's not the only reason their moderation capabilities are easier to operate effectively.
There are tools. Many different variants, even. That they are better than what IRC has is not in dispute, but that's the lowest of low bars.
ETA: The people building the tools are working on the fringes and get easily burned out, for obvious additional reasons beyond all the normal and accelerating reasons everyone else is These Days.
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@mhoye this is a great thread, and I agree with all of it except this tangential point.
Matrix moderation tools are a chaotic mess. Some of that is inherent distsys problems, some of that is missing / bad protocol design or poor integration. Not all of it is directly related to moderation being a reactive afterthought, but is compounded by the combination of that with general matrix desync artifacts.
Speaking from experience doing matrix moderation, notably during an especially nasty period a year or two ago, there is plenty of capability left to build. While the more centralised platforms have some inherent advantages here, that's not the only reason their moderation capabilities are easier to operate effectively.
There are tools. Many different variants, even. That they are better than what IRC has is not in dispute, but that's the lowest of low bars.
ETA: The people building the tools are working on the fringes and get easily burned out, for obvious additional reasons beyond all the normal and accelerating reasons everyone else is These Days.
@uep so, it’s been 3+ years admittedly but that was not my experience at all. I don’t want to tell you you’re holding it wrong, and I haven’t had an opportunity to flex the new Draupnir tooling, but my experience was definitely not what you’re describing.
(Slack’s moderation tools basically don’t exist and IRC’s are trash, on this we agree)
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@uep so, it’s been 3+ years admittedly but that was not my experience at all. I don’t want to tell you you’re holding it wrong, and I haven’t had an opportunity to flex the new Draupnir tooling, but my experience was definitely not what you’re describing.
(Slack’s moderation tools basically don’t exist and IRC’s are trash, on this we agree)
@mhoye yeah, there's good stuff, but ultimately there were two key issues (and lots of smaller ones and compounding effects)
it's largely based on reactive bots acting to delete things after the fact, so The Stuff still gets seen, and seen differently by people on different servers, clients, etc.
the attackers know the limitations and exploit them, moving to parts of the system that are not covered. Rather than spamming channels, they send DM invites with profile pics, for example. Such arms races are inevitable, but matrix can't adapt across the ecosystem nearly as quickly.
There are good community tools. Matrix itself gets used as transport so that one community's banlists get published to a channel for others to apply.
Again, though, I'm only reacting to the "nothing comes close for mod tools" aspect. There's not much else around like matrix, for good and bad. And none of it detracts from the rest of the thread.
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@denisbloodnok @waffles irc.mozilla.org was a public server, yes.
@mhoye glad to hear that it wasn’t internal abuse. but damn, would not want a job where i was expected to listen to that.
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@gsnedders That didn't happen at the same time; the reality is that IRC usability was, compared to what was available, just so bad for so long that long before a single Mozilla slack instance was blessed, long before I was sent to get us an alternative to IRC, there were already _dozens and dozens_ of private shadow Slack instances all over the place for various teams and projects. Like, on the order of 180 of them. One of the biggest impetuses for moving to Slack was... most people already had.
@mhoye My recollection is very much that enough people were vaguely on IRC, even if a lot of the discussion was happening in the Slacks, to an extent that is no longer true with Matrix?
Like, you had both having to change the communication channel that was infrequently used by many people, plus the single Slack instance made possible more cross-team communication to happen within the private channels.
Certainly the stuff I was around (mostly platform, and especially a bunch of the tools & automation stuff), it was very much around the time of the Matrix move that much more discussion moved into private spheres.
(And like, I’m not gonna say that other corporate driven projects are better in this regard, but forcing people to transition to a new tool can definitely make this worse. And I’m certainly not defending IRC here, but it was at the time of the migration that things got worse as an occasional contributor.)
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To explain what I mean by this: for a long time the Perl community took great pride in how difficult and terse the language was. The old joke that well-written perl was indistinguishable from line noise wasn't just a joke, it was a badge of honour.
That attitude was sustainable when the internet was small and alternatives were scarce. But the moment tools appeared that prioritized things like human ergonomics (python) and human interaction (ruby) the perl community started aging out and dying.
@mhoye That's not quite what happened with perl, but what actually happened was a lot closer to the narrative from the rest of your thread so it doesn't detract from your point at all. Part of it was also that Perl 6 sucked all the enthusiasm away from trying to do anything to improve Perl 5 which was hard for both technical and social reasons.
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Anyway: The worst thing an organization's leaders tolerate is what that organization becomes, and the blast radius of a single toxic contributor is huge and largely invisible. For everyone who speaks up to say this behavior isn't acceptable, there are dozens or hundreds of smart, competent people who peer into your community, see that this is how you live and move along without your ever knowing they exist, on their way to a better life somewhere else.
We don't have to live like this.
@mhoye i work and plead mors on the build tool and compiler and rest of tech tool aspect side of things with the same arguments.
And I think it is far less important than the one you point out (and probably harder to fix funnily enough).
So thank you for expressing it
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RE: https://woof.tech/@techokami/117439226690379216
The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign. It's the talking about planning succession while simultaneously complaining that nobody new wants to learn, that's the sign.
Y'all the kernel is in deep, deep trouble. We saw what happened to Perl and the kernel is in deep trouble.
@mhoye What if the two are linked, and the succession plan /is/ to drive upstream off a cliff in order to force a hard fork.
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Today the number of people under 50 who'll reach for perl or raku or who cares what it's called as their first choice of tool for anything new is zero. In practice Perl is an esolang now.
Torvalds' position is that contributing to the kernel should be _more_ difficult for everyone else, but, through LLM usage, easier for existing kernel developers.
Ted Tso's adamant position that "you can't make us learn Rust" is the same insularity.
If the kernel was a country, we'd recognize this.
@mhoye As a 34 years old Perl dev, I have to disagree on the number being zero.
