At the rate Ian Murdock must be spinning in his grave right now, what with #Debian developers becoming dependent non-free Microsoft tools to develop Debian, perhaps we ought to attach him to a generator. Mitigate the environmental impact, at least. 😒

“I'm not quite sure what I did to these, but at least they compile now.” —a commit message I once wrote

That sure isn't comforting…

Saw a Reddit bot say “beep boop I'm a bot” (as is tradition on that platform) and a song appeared:

Beep boop I'm a bot I said beep boop I'm a bot

Beep boop I'm a bot I said beep boop I'm a bot

(sung to the melody of the #asdfmovie “I'm a sheep” song)

Quoth Nussbaum at #Debian:

“I view the spread of AI we've seen over the past two years as a revolution similar in impact to the generalization of Internet access to the wider public since the mid 90s.”

I don't remember the head of AOL publishing any weird manifestos about how [your] democracy is incompatible with [his] freedom.

I don't remember the head of CompuServe performing any “Roman” salutes at any government functions.

I don't remember the Internet being meant to replace all humans.

Quoth Bas Wijnen at #Debian:

“Coding can be largely
automated, so what remains are questions about general strategy,
technological choices, specification and consistency with requirements,
design, architecture, test, verification, codebase consistency, etc.”

Coding is already automated. That's what compilers do.

But compilers do their job correctly every time, and any instance in which they don't is a bug that gets fixed.

In a system of rigorous logic, non-deterministic automation is poison.

Everyone and everything is dying 😭

So uh, now that #Debian did the thing, what's everybody going to use from now on?

I'm trying to calibrate my fear on a rather scary scenario in the back of my mind.

At some point, #AI companies are going to start feeling pressure from investors to turn a profit, pressure from regulators to avoid environmental damage, and so on. That'll make them desperate for money.

What if, at that point, they take a bunch of money from nation-state spooks to program their coding agents to insert malware into major #FOSS projects like #Debian and #Linux?

In light of this dark day…year…decade…lifetime…

Here's “Darkest Hour” by Tristan Clark.

It seems fitting. 😔

https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/117/177/358/192/287/612/original/54c5168590446958.mp3

I see the #ageVerification backlash is getting heated.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/texas-man-arrested-ranting-age-161532035.html

I'm not saying we should start stabbing each other, but this guy is right to be angry—age verification is a menace to society, not to mention a flagrant violation of American values—and a flood of irate voicemails from outraged constituents would do wonders in getting age verification laws repealed and settlements renegotiated.

This accursed decade has robbed me of so many heroes and so much hope. 😢

#Debian #Linux

Looks like #Debian will be staying out of the AI debate.

Their newly adopted AI policy https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002#texte neither endorses nor prohibits the use of AI in developing Debian, and places all responsibility for AI use on the individual who's using it.

I had long viewed Debian as an anti-corporate rebellion as much as a software project, but perhaps it was so only in my imagination.

If my own life wasn't so hectic and precarious, I'd start dabbling in more rebellious OSes right about now…