@eschwartz I am absolutely eying Gentoo. When I introduced the concept of build profiles in Debian 13 years ago (lol time flies), I was shamelessly getting myself inspired by Gentoo USE flags.
https://wiki.debian.org/BuildProfileSpec
@cwebber

@joeyh I am looking forward to reading where you will end up. I am a big admirer of your work and "using the distro Joey is using" is something I am considering for my life after Debian. @cwebber

@woo Oh the climate catastrophe... Did you hear that #Greenpeace loves LLMs? I had a talk with the technical staff of Greenpeace Germany and they are convinced that "AI is unavoidable" so they started using a chat bot to generate emails to city mayors. The fun twist: that was a campaign about taxing billionaires I was involved in the Greenpeace group in my local city but left Greenpeace when this happened. @TFF

@boud Yes, the DFSG team might implement some changes after having received quite a bit of feedback on this topic now. But even if they change it, I worry about the long-term situation. If I start having to worry "what problem will it be today?" when I wake up, then this hobby will become more dread and less fun and then I will just put my priorities elsewhere. @mildpeach @Lamuchan

@giacomo Oh yes, I absolutely am trying out #NetBSD on my hardware https://community.mnt.re/t/status-of-netbsd-on-the-rk3588-pocket-reform/4699

@alxndr Oh dear, that reminds me of this screenshot somebody shared of a prompt they had with some chatbot where they said "no" only for the chatbot to then go on and write "you said no but i think what you really mean is..." and then went on to ignore the "no" and do the opposite... Sigh...

@rick Thank you, much appreciated!

@bremner Uff thank you. I must admit that I tried very, very hard not to be too passive aggressive. I deleted *a lot* of things which just showed my frustration from early drafts of this mail and it was @werdahias who sent me his own draft privately a few days prior who motivated me to write up my own mail on the topic. I really dislike conflict which is also why I plan to not say more about this on d-devel. I've said what I came to say.

@soapdog I have worked with computers so much in my life that more and more I'm in the camp of "maybe it would be better to live somewhere in the mountains with some goats and lots of nature around" The more I do with computers, the more I find myself learning to appreciate how friggin' beautiful it is outside and even how nice it feels to have your fingers burn when you bike through the rain because heck it reminds you that yes, you are alive and life and this planet are so amazing.

@debacle Yes, I actually think the Debian GR debate made me *less* extreme in this topic. Reading others on the mailing list and talking to people like Helmut made me realize that there are many, many shades of gray to consider when talking about this topic. We are probably unfortunately still at the stage where the mostly bad part far outweighs the parts where we use this technology responsibly and avoid most of its downsides. Yes, we must connect as humans again. @spanezz @olasd

@spanezz I started moving some of my packages into the "Debian Commons" team for similar reasons. They can use their tokens to maintain these packages for all I care. Rest assured I'll keep following your account here last but not least to learn where you (and others) might move your FOSS involvement to. Debian is its people and if the people I like are elsewhere, then we will just work together on free software elsewhere. @olasd

@cwebber Please note, that I will still remain a Debian Developer with uploading rights. I will also still upload packages. I will just no longer upload to NEW as long as this situation persists.

But yes, it is becoming more and more frustrating and I'm eying other projects like #Gentoo or #NetBSD and of course #MNT remains my Nr1 hobby, so no worries

This specific issue will probably get addressed but when your hobby involves more and more "pushing back" then yes, priorities will change...

For now, I will no longer be uploading to the #Debian NEW queue.

And yes, I will now go outside and do something nice instead of trying to argue on mailing lists about #LLM use in #FOSS. Maybe do the same. The weather is great outside.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/10/msg00263.html

The best thing about computers is that they will always do the same thing given
the same input. They cannot do anything else because what they do is determined by an algorithm.

Did software become better, more reliable or more secure now that so many started using LLMs? No, now we just have more badly maintained software.

9/9

> Both technologies increase coding productivity. However, productivity gains do not fully pass through to changes in software output or employment. For AI agents, this incomplete pass-through reflects a bottleneck from code review: review times increase, a larger share of code updates require revisions, and reviews involve more comments.

8.5/9

> We study the impacts of AI coding assistants and agents on software engineering work, using a novel proprietary dataset from an engineering analytics platform, covering 300 million work events -- including GitHub coding activity, Jira issues, and Google Calendar events -- across 718 firms. [...]

"Artificial Intelligence in the Firm: Bottlenecks in Software Production" by Fiona Chen and James Stratton, Harvard University https://fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

8/9

A graph from the paper "The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education" by David Strömberg, Victor Lei, Yanhui Wu. The graph shows how students who who were using genAI scored much higher in their homeworks but much lower in their exams. For students who didn't use genAI, one can see an about linear dependency between homework scores and exam scores in the graph.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6868618

7/9

> Using 30 months of panel data on 26,811 Chinese students in grades 7-12, we study how generative AI affects homework productivity and learning. [...] AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%,

"The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education" by David Strömberg, Victor Lei, Yanhui Wu https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6868618

6/9

Don't take this from me. Take this from 28 people who have been awarded the Fields Medal in mathematics.

> But solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal. Indeed, the mass production at faster and faster pace of "true/false" statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas.

https://mathandai.org/

5/9

> Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?

https://www.aitrainingstatement.org/

4.5/9