Post by @zzt@mas.to

it sure is weird how having anyone associated with Palantir or Anduril or any of the companies whose purpose is making software that kills (“are you ok with your software being used to kill people” is a standard Palantir interview question, no I’m not kidding) in an open source project always leads to control over key parts of the project being yielded to untalented right-wing stooges, an exodus of core maintainers due directly to the actions of the Palantir/whoever plants, and a barely functioning project overall

there’s lots and lots and lots of nontechnical reasons to not allow fascists who write software for murder in your project, but uhhh the technical end ain’t looking good

if you don’t believe me you can look at Rust, NixOS, and neovim

no I won’t just tell you what happened to these projects. what happened was public and loud, and you weren’t paying attention. it’s time for you to learn what a fascist takeover looks like and what happens when it works.

2 Replies

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datarama

@datarama@hachyderm.io 14 hr. ago

@zzt I've been struggling with depression, severe anxiety, and keeping *just* on the right side of total burnout for three years at this point, and I really have a hard time keeping my ear to the ground about all the software I use - when I come home from work, I'm usually all out of spoons. So until this weekend, I genuinely had no idea that there were Palantir employees or other fascists among the neovim core maintainers.

(I *did* discover a while ago that Vim itself is apparently primarily maintained by Claude now - and the actual lead maintainer calls Claude "he" and "him" now.)

So, as someone who pays less attention than you: Do we know if Helix is maintained by AI goons or fascists? If I have to move away from Vim entirely (after *30 fucking years* at this point), another spin at "modal editing on top of treesitter and LSPs" seems to be what's most appealing to me.,

(Still hoping for a viable neovim community fork.)

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@zzt@mas.to 14 hr. ago

@datarama I’m sorry about the depression, anxiety, and burnout. I can definitely relate.

helix seems mostly ok right now, though this is a bit concerning: https://chaos.social/@grimmauld/117172148714146244 there’s a lot of community demand for an anti-AI policy, and the maintainers are just ignoring it. that’s something to keep an eye on, as usually this ends with a project slow-walking embracing slop.

of course my own editor (emacs) isn’t any better right now, and I know stallman’s a dickhead. the one saving grace for emacs is that a lot of the people actually working on the editor are very good (the ones I know at least), but it’s gonna get utterly kneecapped unless it adopts an explicit anti-AI policy. unfortunately that can only come from stallman, and I don’t think he’s smart enough.

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