for people wondering what “folios” in Linux memory management are: https://lwn.net/Articles/937239/

Are Anti-AI Linux distributions practical?

It’s not possible to have a 100% no-LLM-coding-involved Linux distro anymore now that the kernel itself is welcoming LLM-assisted contributions, but it’s still possible to say that everything which the distro produces itself will not use AI.

How can AI commits be responsible?

What Debian means is: by reading what it produces and not just blindly accepting it but having humans review it carefully. The quality of LLM-assisted software is highly variable. Experienced people like Debian and Linux kernel developers are much less likely to publish very bad slop than inexperienced developers who are newly able to make a thing work well enough to ship it.

I am concerned about the extent of Debian’s embrace of LLMs but I still have a lot more confidence in them than most other distros (especially small hardcore-anti-AI distro projects lacking sufficient developer capacity to even keep up with security updates).

I expect we’ll be seeing lots more things like this non-upstreamable-because-AI hardware enablement and distros like Nura (formerly postmarketOS) will either either adopt more nuanced LLM policies or be forked.

I am doubtful about if there will be any serious distros with hard LLM bans in a few years from now. But also, perhaps the bubble will have burst by then, so hosted inference won’t be so cheap and the use of LLMs will probably be quite different.

the primary reason is AI is a thief

This is not the primary reason for most people, I don’t think. I think the fact that it increases complexity while reducing human understanding is the biggest problem; it’s possible (easy even) now to produce mountains of good-enough-by-many-metrics source code which the person doing the prompting has very little comprehension of. The fact that it is also a plagiarism machine is far less of a problem than this. (There are a litany of other problems too of course, several others of which I would also rate as worse than the plagiarism aspect.)

Arch doesn’t seem to have an ARM version

it’s “unofficial” but arch has had an arm port for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Linux_ARM / https://archlinuxarm.org/

where is the source code?

Steam has a bunch of code on the page you linked, including some Steam Frame-specific code. Note however that SteamOS is not an entirely free software (open source) operating system; it contains lots of free/libre software but also contains some proprietary parts. They are only required to ship source code for the copyleft-licensed components in it; nothing requires them to actually distribute a complete working distribution for hardware they don’t want to. And, it appears that in the case of their ARM port, they do not currently distribute an image for anything besides their Frame device.

As you can see, it says nothing about researching, troubleshooting, reverse-engineering, etc. As long as you write and understand the code yourself AI is allowed for everything else. As long as you’re not using generative AI it’s fine.

I’m not sure if you’re joking or legitimately confused, but, assuming the latter, fyi the “AI” that people use for “researching, troubleshooting, reverse-engineering, etc” is part of what is called “generative AI”. Given this, it’s not much a stretch to read it as saying that even posting in Nura forums about the existence of @[email protected]’s github repo would actually be a violation of Nura’s policy (as of today; I expect it will evolve in the not-too-distant future).

Nura will not accept generated patches, by the way.

If you click OP’s github link and scroll down you’ll find this section which acknowledges that: https://github.com/sv1sjp/mi-max2-oxygen-msm8953-nura-drivers#about-ai-assistance-and-contributing-upstream

The drivers, patches, scripts and write-ups here were produced in collaboration with an AI assistant and tested on a real Mi Max 2 (oxygen).

The Nura project does not accept LLM-generated contributions. One of its maintainers explains the reasons in this post: the social and environmental cost of these models, and the risk that people use them to produce private knowledge instead of joining and strengthening the community whose work the models learned from. We respect that decision. So:

• This repository is not a contribution to Nura or pmaports, and its code should not be submitted there as it is.
• It is public documentation, not private notes. The reusable part is the knowledge: how the hardware is wired, register addresses and meanings, root causes, what was tried and ruled out, and how to test safely. These are facts anyone can check on their own device. It can save time for anyone who wants to understand what works and what does not, and then write their own code to submit upstream.
• If you want to get this into Nura or upstream, learn from it, verify it on your hardware and write your own implementation, following the rules of the project you contribute to (Nura, the Linux kernel and libcamera each have their own contribution policies).
• Please engage with the community. The Nura wiki, the msm8953-mainline project and the people credited below did the groundwork this builds on.

@OP (@[email protected]) what isn’t clear to me is why you don’t try to upstream the kernel parts, since Linux is accepting LLM-assisted contributions (as is Nura actually, just only indirectly after their upstreams like Linux accept them).

This might be useful for some Linux users who want (but don’t need) to run Microsoft 365 occasionally, but actually relying on this kind of hack is a terrible idea.

Once fully implemented, this will help draw in people into Linux, as many shudder at the thought of switching to the platform because their preferred office suite doesn’t work here.

I certainly hope this doesn’t “help draw in people into Linux”. It’s sad to think about people and organizations switching to Linux on the basis of someone misleading them into thinking that relying on this kind of thing is a good idea because when it breaks it will give them a bad impression and they’ll blame “Linux” instead of Microsoft (or Bottles or whoever told them it was a good idea).

When the lack of a Linux version of a specific proprietary program is the blocker preventing someone from switching to Linux, relying on a workaround which remains unsupported by the proprietary/adversarial software vendor is… a recipe for a bad time.

Even if this mostly works today, it is extremely likely that (either intentionally or inadvertently) Microsoft will break it in the future.

So, although I do see how this can be useful for some people when/while it works, in my opinion Linux and the world at large would be better off if this software didn’t exist. I hope Microsoft breaks it sooner than later!

iirc the Linux kernel dropped support for pre-Pentium x86 in the last few years, so any distro with 486 support now would be using an unmaintained kernel.

I think if you want a maintained operating system for your 486 today, NetBSD is probably the thing to run.

These are all blatant lies

The comment you’re replying to contains an opinion, two statements of fact, two more opinions, an historical assessment couched in “i don’t really think”, and finally closes with giggles and lol.

I don’t see any lies there; if you think the factual claims in it are wrong I encourage you to read up: the PRC and ROC actually do both claim all of China, and the PRC’s foreign policy is largely non-interventionist.

thanks for proving me right, bot

Do you find many people online with opinions differing from your own who you don’t think are bots?

I suppose it runs on an Arm-Processor

It would be odd if a device labeled “Wintel Pro” had an arm CPU.

Wintel means Windows on Intel, or more broadly Windows on any x86 or x86_64 processor.

the info line contains the answer:

Info: applications using this runtime: io.github.Hexchat

You need to remove Hexchat if you want to remove the end-of-life runtimes it requires.

I regret to inform you that the maintainer wrote in February 2024: This will be the last release I make of HexChat. The project has largely been unmaintained for years now and nobody else stepped up to do that work.

My computer uses both system and user remotes.

Because my .var directory is almost full, […]

If you’re low on disk space you probably want to have everything installed as either user or system, to avoid having some runtimes installed in both.

Thanks for pointing this out. Looking closer I see that that “journal” was definitely not something I want to be sending traffic to, for a whole bunch of reasons - besides anti-vax they’re also anti-trans, and they’re gold bugs… and they’re asking tough questions like “do viruses exist” 🤡

I edited the post to link to MIT instead, and added a note in the post body explaining why.

in the computing context, “lock-in” is shorthand for vendor lock-in.

How exactly do they hope to lock devs in github??? That’s absurd, there’s no way they can achieve that. I can always take my projects elsewhere and there’s nothing they can do to stop me.

I can’t tell if you’re joking? If not, what do you think “lock-in” actually means?

It doesn’t mean that it is impossible to leave, it means that there is substantial switching cost. And, that is certainly the case for github-hosted projects: all active contributors need to make a new account somewhere else, issues and discussions need to be migrated, CI workflows typically need to be rewritten, and good luck finding something that gives as much free compute for CI as github does. Yes, it’s easy to mirror a git repo onto another service, but github is much much more than just git repo hosting and each of their features have their own switching cost.

Also, OP actually said “lock devs in” rather than “lock projects in” - I actually am forced to have a github account if i want to contribute to projects which refuse to move their issues off of it 😢 … and the difficulty in creating new accounts anonymously these days prevents me from contributing to several things (lemmy, for instance) which i otherwise would.

paywall bypass: https://archive.is/mdi9x

some context.

(tldr: libxslt is a significant source of vulnerabilities and it should absolutely be removed from browsers ASAP.)

It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Distrowatch is dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Distrowatch community […]

“spoke out against” is an understatement:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallica_v._Napster,_Inc
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dre#Copyright_lawsuits

…besides contributing to the eventual shut down of napster, Metallica first compelled it to ban hundreds of thousands of their fans - who’s usernames they delivered to them. Lars Ulrich responded to the backlash by saying “If you’d stop being a Metallica fan because I won’t give you my music for free, then fuck you. I don’t want you to be a Metallica fan.”

you can still use OpenRC instead if you want, and sxmo will continue to do so by default.

you can read here about why they added systemd.

I’m planning on revitalizing and bringing this old Itautec to the 21st century

I think it was born in the 21st century? From this it looks like the first Celeron M was in 2004, and the first at that clockspeed was 2005.

Also, 2GB of RAM is plenty for many purposes - that’s more than any Raspberry Pi before the Pi 4 had!