Proposals like these are arrogant and obnoxious. You aren’t going to tell me what tools I can use.
LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
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Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
#42Gentoo chose to ban LLMs two years ago. They seem to be doing well.
Funny because out of all the distros, Gentoo benefits from LLM usage, at least as a power user. I have fixed many-an-issues just having LLMs write patches in a way that portage automatically builds them, or rapidly put together ebuilds. I respect upstream decision though and don't share my changes (and realistically who would want them)
Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
#43Don't misinterpret this link as representing a final decision. It's actually three separate proposals which will be debated and then voted on. Proposal A is "expressly forbid any contributions to Debian written with the use or assistance of large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI tools." Proposal B is "The Debian project allows AI-assisted contributions (partially or fully generated by an LLM), provided t…
There actually seem to be 4 separate proposals right now, maybe another was just added?
Proposal D is "Accept AI contributions for Debian specific work"
Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how they can reconcile the stricter proposals with the LLM usage in kernel development. That seems totally untenable. I mean it all seems untenable, but with the kernel especially. Also, what about when you inevitably get a situation where a critical vulnerability is discovered, and the only patch available is LLM generated? Do they have to wait to patch until some person who hasn't seen the LLM-generated pa…
Kernel development is excluded from this, because it's covered by "Upstream projects using LLMs for development". On security, I worry that proposal A's "forbid any contributions to Debian written with the use or assistance of large language models", as written, excludes contributions where the LLM assisted in discovering the vulnerability. That's clearly a bad policy, and they should update their wording to clarify…
I read the question more as, if AI is working out for the kernel, why not a distro? (This is a question with valid answers, like the kernel having more devs paid to handle things while maintaining quality, but it's a fair question)
Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
#45This set of proposals, are (sorry) just stupid. It's like saying to someone, you are not allowed to saw wood using an electric saw, you must do it by hand. What are we doing here?! LLM(s) are just a tool. Use it as such. You should own the work anyway.
It's more like: food processing tool A is known to be defective. We ask employees of this restaurant and supply chains to avoid food processing tool A. This seems eminently reasonable. The question is whether the tool is in fact defective.
Sure, kind of, if the supposed defect is only one of the reasons, and if ‘food processing tool A’ was a hot-button topic that many people have deeply philosophical and ideological opinions about. Oh, and for good measure, if the proposed ban is for ‘food processors’ in general, and a material amount of pushback is coming from a bunch of greybeard industrial cooks that used one particular food processor a couple of years ago, weren’t all that impressed, and have been railing against food processors ever since.
Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
#46This set of proposals, are (sorry) just stupid. It's like saying to someone, you are not allowed to saw wood using an electric saw, you must do it by hand. What are we doing here?! LLM(s) are just a tool. Use it as such. You should own the work anyway.
> This set of proposals, are (sorry) just stupid. It's like saying to someone, you are not allowed to saw wood using an electric saw, you must do it by hand. Stupid? Since when has there been a lack of clarity in copyright status with electric vs. hand saws?
Probably since we all started getting our legal advice from you and every other “I think that it’s illegal so it’s illegal” developer-turned-fake-lawyer on the Internet.
Oh, wait, that never happened.
Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
this doesn't prevent you from reading documentation in whatever language you like. If you're saying this is the end of someone communicating with you through an LLM despite not speaking the language, that should never happen and I've never been in any technical organization where that was considered appropriate, if you want to work in international software projects you need to have at least a functional grasp of Eng…
most documentation is not translated to spanish, for example. working on international projects is the exception, not the rule. Spanish speakers just use LLMs because searching on google in spanish yields no results, because the info they need is in english so google doesn't show it to spanish speakers or by searching it in spanish. Spanish speakers have their search result language set to spanish by default based on…
and they still can do this. Again nobody, by definition, can stop you from consuming documentation using machine translation, what you cannot do per these guidelines is contribute translations or documentation using an LLM or pretend you speak a language to contribute, and that is eminently reasonable.
You will continue to be able to translate the English documentation into Spanish but they will understandably not publish machine translation as authoritative technical documentation.
Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
#48Gentoo chose to ban LLMs two years ago. They seem to be doing well.
Gentoo is doing as well as it’s always done. It’s clearly a very niche distribution. I say this as someone that used Gentoo for years.
They are free to keep pretending that they aren’t receiving covert AI contributions, because I’d bet the farm that they are.
Debian has a little more ‘general interest’