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Discussion (39 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The very first thing I used GenAI for was fixing build and CI pipeline issues, exactly the drudgery no one cares about. Today, LLMs are excellent at the yeoman's work of maintaining patches across multiple versions and upstream, which is what I imagine a lot of Debian devs do.
Why you wouldn't want to hand that off to a computer program is beyond me.
Is the energy usage so different between local and cloud inference? Both require electricity, the local option even more than the better optimized cloud variant even perhaps. How either is powered makes the crucial difference I suppose. Both can potentially run on solar as well as gas or nuclear.
It's the training that takes the most energy, and that needs to happen for locally running or cloud models regardless.
What am I missing here? EDIT:
Proposal H mentions "LLM usage accelerates the destruction of our ecosystem"
I was thinking solely about energy usage, but there is of course also water usage. A local setup is not water-evaporator cooled most likely.
"Why not both?"
Surely these are not just Debian-owned packages. Whatever Debian decides won’t apply to packages not owned by Debian
So, yes, all those packages are maintained either by an individual Debian Developer or a team of them.
There are third party repos, but they're (currently) neither as widespread nor as commonly-used as those for other major distros. This vote won't affect them, and you might potentially expect to see their use grow if one of the harsher options in this GR were to pass.
If they ban AI, they won't stop packaging apps and libraries from parties that do use AI. They wouldn't even know who does or doesn't.
LLM outputs cannot be copyrighted.
That alone starts to invalidate the GPL and other FLOSS licenses. It overall weakens the project the more you accept. And companies (MS, Amazon, etm) will gleefully loot anything marked with "LLM" as a free-for-all.
Until the whole copyright situation can be finalized, I'd understand for any FLOSS org to refuse all LLM code.
(Its also the same reason why Oracle also forbids all LLM code in Java and their DB. Same reason.)
If a total ban were to happen, wouldn't that make Debian a target for hackers who can use LLMs to find vulnerabilities?
How would Debian keep up with the influx of AI assisted 0 days?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind
Wouldn't it be better to reduce slop, no matter how it was produced, instead of only AI-generated contributions, including non-slop contributions?
Irrelevant to post it here then with your reasons because it only concerns Debian developers
I want to spread awareness that it's happening -- it only has a couple of days to run.
So far there are only ~350 votes:
https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_llm/
Circa 270 people have voted:
https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_llm/tally.txt
(My reckoning; could well be wrong!)
With a project the size of Debian, I feel sure that is a tiny fraction of eligible developers.
We’re almost to the point where the average non-technical person uses AI daily (just like phones and the internet were once only used by the technocrats) without blinking, it will be ubiquitous and universal in adoption, yet comments here on HN from people that have the vantage point of seeing AND understanding how AI works, and who can also predict the inevitable integration of AI in society, have got their collective heads in the sand to the point they’re soon going to sound like conspiracy theorists.
[[citation needed]]
Which is gonna be tricky as I am confident you don't have a time machine.
I think generative AI as a whole is a total scam. It has uses, but not many, and outside of translation, not good ones... and yet, it is running at truly epic financial losses. Multiple trillions of dollars are being pumped into this.
I think the next AI Winter, the 3rd big one, is coming very soon.
There's going to be a market crash to dwarf the dot-com crash and 20087 financial crisis (both of which I worked through as an employed adult), and a lot of the current tech industry will be wiped out.
I've watched that happen before as well.
I am quite looking forward to it. I have no stocks or shares in anything anywhere, few savings, no loans, no debt... but all my immediate family own their own homes outright, and I am close to retirement age.
Let it all burn.
His comment to me was: People who don't embrace AI will eventually be outcompeted by the ones who do.
Citation needed.
If you have anything substantive to say about it that other people haven't heard, we're listening.
Maybe you have to switch to FreeDOS?