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Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

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Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#341

Post by daishi55 »

kccqzy wrote: post #62
jhack wrote: post #14

Good to see the most common sense option winning. Some of the other proposals were so disconnected from reality I'm surprised they were even considered.

This indicates you might be in a bubble. I interact with people with a very wide range of opinions on AI and I’m not surprised by any of the proposals here.

There was one proposal that focused on environmental issues with AI. This is indeed pretty disconnected from reality when you consider that Debian doesn’t have any policy requiring you to be vegan in order to contribute

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#342

Post by ceroxylon »

olalonde wrote: post #71
baggy_trough wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can we use this coding tool amidst the general rising tide of fascism?? /s

I've seen people claim that using Claude Code makes you racist. https://bsky.app/profile/boxobark.ing/post/3mtr7j3tpok26

What's interesting is that they are trying to make a larger political point, but after boiling away all the nuance into such an aggressive and misguided statement, it makes me not want to engage at all.

Is there a term for this? Ensnarkification? I see it on X and bsky all the time.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#343

Post by localhost »

bfgeek wrote: post #263
hliyan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good thing about the "you're the author regardless of the tool you used to produce the code" policy is that if a developer repeatedly submits poor quality AI generated code, one does not blame the model or the agent, one bans/terminates the developer.

The issue that open source projects are facing at the moment is that it takes significantly less effort to submit a patch for review. A lot of developers who are submitting these AI patches don't necessarily understand the patch, so the onus is on the reviewer/code-owner. The reviewers are getting swamped (some reviewers are receiving 100s or patches per month). If feedback is provided at lot of the time the patch au…

This is Amdahl's law in action. [1]

Until we figure out a good way to leverage humans in all of this ("Attention is all you need" applies equally to humans as it does to models) productivity gains for the system will always be limited by Amdahl's law. Gwern has an excellent post on this. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law [2] https://gwern.net/guardian-angel

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#345

Post by thayne »

moring wrote: post #225
lokar wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, that touches on the central issue. I think most people support the “I don’t care about the tool, only the outcome “ But, we have long had a stable social system for collaboration, and in particular dealing with low quality contributions. Mostly (or at least ideally) it involves taking some time to look at the contribution and provide some feedback. The time invested is not worth it on a single exchange basis,…

I'm not convinced it blows up. It might also end up placing a larger burden on contributors, and especially first-time contributors, to provide concise, high-quality documentation that justifies their contribution. I'm thinking of something like: Explain, in at most 300 characters, why we should merge your change, or at least why we should invest the time to read a longer explanation (somethings things ARE complex).…

That doesn't really solve the problem. I've gotten PRs that do do an adequate job of explaining why why something should be implemented. Then I look at the code and it doesn't fully solve the problem, or it does so in a way that will obviously break something else.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#346

Post by inigyou »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #218
Aurornis wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. There are pockets of hardline anti-LLM policies for various reasons. SourceHut bans LLM generated code from their platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461724 The Asahi Linux project bans LLMs. Unfortunate as LLM reverse engineering and driver writing would bring Linux to more Mac models much faster. The Zig project rejects LLM based contributions. Some of these policies were introduced when LLMs were…

> Some groups don’t care about the quality and object on moral or copyright grounds. Precisely why Debian Project's decision is both baffling and infuriating. I hope Debian forks over this. They have severely lost their way.

Note that Debian is mostly an aggregation of packages. There's nothing wrong with Debian importing a package that was written by AI, if it's something that people want to install. The questionable copyright of that package does not taint Debian as a whole. Debian allows public domain packages, so it wouldn't even be a DFSG violation.

There's also nothing wrong with an AI-written install script (if it's correct) because those are likely too trivial to copyright anyway.

What are your specific worries? Mine is brain rot.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#347

Post by JohnHaugeland »

Aurornis wrote: post #164
dguest wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions? We've come to the same conclusion in our organization and while it felt like it needed to be discussed and stated, I've never heard of anyone coming to a different conclusion. [EDIT: I was referring specifically to the idea that you have to stand by the code that you write. Is anyone deciding on a policy that says "the AI did it" is a valid…

Yes. There are pockets of hardline anti-LLM policies for various reasons. SourceHut bans LLM generated code from their platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461724 The Asahi Linux project bans LLMs. Unfortunate as LLM reverse engineering and driver writing would bring Linux to more Mac models much faster. The Zig project rejects LLM based contributions. Some of these policies were introduced when LLMs were…

notice how mainstream those projects aren’t

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#348

Post by [deleted] »

b112 wrote: post #248
lrvick wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use agents to build exactly what I want like I am pair programming with a jr engineer, and review every line of final output before I make a PR. I would have zero tolerance if anyone that did anything less in my orgs. Owning and understanding the code you submit is the one job that matters most now.

I feel that in a few years, or even less time, we'll see a whole bunch of companies implode, whist others remain fine.

[deleted]

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#350

Post by snazz »

TZubiri wrote: post #333

What are the main workloads of Debian? It's worth noting that Debian has no code production, so the LLM debate applies differently than an open source project. I'd assume the main workload is testing, reviewing code for maliciousness or inefficiencies, adding packages, responding to issues (90% being passing the issue downstream), perhaps setting configurations, and providing some documentation. I don't quite see LLM…

Debian has quite a lot of code production. APT and dpkg are pretty standard open source projects, and Debian also maintains substantial patches for a lot of its packages. Not to mention any of the infrastructure.
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