A lot of us in the free software space are stinging rn, watching slop worm its way into our communities, tools, perhaps even the philosophy itself. I'm seeing justifiably protectionist language like infiltration, infestation, infection. & while from a security standpoint, vibed code can oft be compared to digital asbestos, I find myself reaching more for organic vs inorganic (code), bc just as it's very hard to live without plastic, it's already very difficult to avoid slop in free software 1/n
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Jonathan Lamothe
@me@social.jlamothe.net
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5 hr. ago
@JulianOliver How people can't see that vibe-coding is completely counter productive to the whole Free Software movement is completely beyond me.
@me I agree. Our mutual surprise signals we have much to learn.
I write this with plastic on my walls, around my food, in my body, on a device with plastic in its bones, running an aftermarket de-Googled ROM tainted with slop, on a federated network tainted with slop, provided by server infrastructure tainted with slop.
I monomaniacally run Debian GNU/Linux (26 yrs), which tragically recently took a soft hand on vibed code. I could switch to, say, Asahi or Gentoo, but it would just take a single library & the plastic would be back in the body
2/n
Just as with plastic, I can reduce exposure, but if I want a return to the 'purity' of before, purging all projects using slop, it would effectively end my work.
We will have to find a place for free software where we can still use & celebrate it for all the good it continues to do - privacy, sovereignty, self-determination, the fundamental right to read, to modify - (fsck y em dash) while working to turn back the tide
Bc the alt is to recede into disempowering rarity, & now's not the time 3/n
@JulianOliver programmers should absolutely withhold their labor from slop projects. For me, it's about consent. I didn't consent to having my code stolen, I didn't consent to read slop, and I'm not going to force anyone else to interact with slop either. I remain convinced that slop abstainers will lap sloperators and slop apologists over the long term.
@countryepidermis I would agree, albeit optimistically. Very few of us are slop abstainers as users however, not truly, at this stage. As I understand it, unless you use one of a handful of BSD's, and as true as possible to vanilla, screening every blob & library you pull in, you will be running tainted kit.
And that's before touching the www, for instance writing on tainted platforms like the one you and I are using now.
Talking free software OS's for a moment, there could be no greater example of dependency than the kernel.
The last untainted Linux kernel was v6.16.7 (ref https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#linux-based). That's a lot of commits ago. And so yes, of the tiny handful of GNU/Linux OS's taking a stand (like 8 of hundreds), the very skeleton of their projects is itself tainted. Too late.
So what does that leave us with? CoffeeBSD?
Either we keep going & push for culture shift, or dust out a cave & wave goodbye 4/n
@JulianOliver As I understand things, OpenBSD takes the position that AI code cannot meet their copyright requirements, so I'm not sure that repo's claim is correct (via https://lingo.lol/@river/117351976858029780)
However aiming for "purity" is impossible, as we don't know how the hardware/firmware components are made either. And building your own devices seems a bit too extreme ...
@JulianOliver the failure of the OSS industry for falling head over heals into slop is immense
