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Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

theregister.com

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Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#41

Post by rcxdude »

pessimizer wrote: post #36
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #16

Crazy how divided AI is here on HN… 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…

"Having one's head in the sand" means being unaware of something; everybody is aware of it. "Conspiracy theorists" is just a slur. If you have anything substantive to say about it that other people haven't heard, we're listening.

There do seem to be pretty wildly varying views on how heavily it is used and what value it is providing. I see a lot of people getting a lot of value from it, and some people avoiding it like the plague. I think it's getting to be a more divisive topic over time, as well.

It also seems to be fast moving and emotionally charged enough that there is often disagreement on what should be fairly objective facts. E.g. whether there is any value to generative AI tools at all, and the magnitude of their impact on the environment.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#42

Post by surajrmal »

ImaCake wrote: post #33

What an interesting cultural artifact! I note no proposals in favour of "let it rip" which is presumably because that would not be a reflection of Debian philosophy. I do think the aggressively anti AI proposals are themselves un-cautious in the extreme.

It's one thing for a maintainer to use AI, and another to review AI code sent your way. The latter has been proven to be unsustainable, low value, and ultimately a challenge for open source. Everyone acknowledges this problem exists and some corrective action is required to mitigate it.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#43

Post by singpolyma3 »

nekusar wrote: post #20

I do use and run my own LLMs locally. But I understand why Debian might ban it, under just 1 reason: 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…

There's not yet any reason to believe that mixing LLM output with your work makes it uncopyrightable any more than hitting enter in intellisense did before that.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#44

Post by rcxdude »

NateEag wrote: post #35
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #16

Crazy how divided AI is here on HN… 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…

Every non-technical person I know hates genAI and goes far out of their way to avoid it.

I suspect your sample is a bit skewed, then. I see a fair bit more diversity of genAI use amongst technical and non-technical people I know.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#45

Post by lproven »

jve wrote: post #40
lproven wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it will be ubiquitous and universal in adoption [[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 o…

I know few CEOs/Business owners who are non programmers (well one was exposed to it/learning, but didn't go down that path) and they do use AI for various work and non work related things. One told me how at manufacturing plant someone solved some unpleasant process to input specs into machine for manufacturing by having AI creating the automation. His comment to me was: People who don't embrace AI will eventually be…

Uhuh.

And what happens when the price goes up by an extra zero on the end?

And then another one?

And then the cloud stuff goes away because all the vendors go broke, despite the price rises, and you have to switch to using local models?

That is, models that are hugely slower, unless you have a computer with hardware tensor-math acceleration, which costs 10x more because of the chip famine?

And then, suddenly, those local models cost an absolute bomb to license, because the companies that bought up the wreckage of the original model creators are trying to recoup their spend?

Meanwhile the company is being hit by nuisance litigation from people whose code the bots plagiarised, or customers who are annoyed it doesn't work?

There are so many ways all this stuff can just go away.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#46

Post by lproven »

someaccount1234 wrote: post #30
VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #24

Total ban please. This nonsense needs to end. Linus Torvalds is weakly vibe coding the kernel, that's bad enough.

Then you cannot use Linux, Firefox, Chromium, Python, Rust, LLVM and so on. Hurd can't be used either. Maybe you have to switch to FreeDOS?

NetBSD is right there.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#47

Post by ragebol »

dan_gggggg wrote: post #21
ragebol wrote: post #18

> If Proposal H has a weakness, it's that it does not distinguish between local and cloud-based LLMs 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 tha…

People want to ban LLM contributors not because of energy usage, but because AI generated code is unmaintainable and the people who generate it tend to engage with others in domineering and brazenly manipulative ways.

Fair enough. My comment was however asking about the difference in climate damage from local vs cloud inference, is either better in that specific regard. Or even the energy usage between the two.

As for ethics, i don't see a meaningful difference between the two. Local strips out a big-tech middleman perhaps.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#48

Post by pama »

ragebol wrote: post #18

> If Proposal H has a weakness, it's that it does not distinguish between local and cloud-based LLMs 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 tha…

> Is the energy usage so different between local and cloud inference?

In throughput mode for agentic loads, the energy usage (tok/s/MW) of the new NVidia Vera Rubin hardware is 30x lower than that of the B300 and perhaps 450x lower then the H200 was, which in turn is hundreds of times lower than the inference for single users at home in any non-data-center hardware. It feels like comparing the momentum of an ant to the momentum of an elephant.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#49

Post by NateEag »

rcxdude wrote: post #44
NateEag wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every non-technical person I know hates genAI and goes far out of their way to avoid it.

I suspect your sample is a bit skewed, then. I see a fair bit more diversity of genAI use amongst technical and non-technical people I know.

It may be.

The fact remains that it's what I see around me, and even if I'm in an inverse bubble, it shows that "the average non-technical person uses AI daily without blinking" is probably a huge overstatement.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#50

Post by silver_silver »

jnwatson wrote: post #17

Kind of arbitrary since it doesn't impact their upstreams. 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.

There are ethical and environmental concerns arising simply from use and contribution to the industry which many people take seriously
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