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   Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Sep-2026 07:10:05 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

   I really feel like we had several prominent FOSS organizations fail us by not saying "hey hold on, don't use generative AI in FOSS projects, we're not sure what the legal, community, environmental implications of this are but there are serious problems and we have a history of taking a stand" and I worry that maybe we lost our moment to be principled, except in niche spaces, and the walls are closing in

   And... I'm really sad about it. I think we're underestimating the amount of damage that's happening. :\

   • Rich Felker repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Sep-2026 07:12:08 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     I don't think you can put all else aside, but even just focusing on the maintainability of code itself...

     Using these tools to uncover bugs, sure. Using them to generate code that nobody in your community fully understands... well...

     And I know, you say, you'll be responsible about it.

     But you won't be able to keep up, justifying keeping up with that level of review won't happen. So you'll slip. And you'll eventually embrace not knowing. And so is everyone else around you.

     And so, decades of work are knotting up and the foundations are ensaring beneath our feet.

     And we could have, collectively, organizationally, taken a stand, and we didn't.

   • Embed this notice
     Andrew Paulin (acp@sdf.land)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Sep-2026 07:23:25 JST Andrew Paulin

     in reply to

     @cwebber I expected to eventually become the Greybeard* That Knows How It All Worked if I live that long, I did not consider that it might happen before 40 and because of things our industry did to itself by choice

   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Sep-2026 10:26:02 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     @cwebber You say organizations have been failing us, but in cases where those organizations are democratic, isn't it really our peers who have been failing us? "You were supposed to destroy them, not join them!"?

     Christine Lemmer-Webber repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Gert V 🇵🇸 (gert@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Sep-2026 21:01:10 JST Gert V 🇵🇸

     in reply to

     @cwebber We may also be underestimating the number of people in FOSS who didn't even know
     where it was coming from. Later they will ask what to (quickly) do now. People
     like B.gates are getting ready to say: See? I told you so.

     AI is not real, but the damage is.

   • Embed this notice
     normy foxyoreos (foxyoreos@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Sep-2026 00:50:03 JST normy foxyoreos

     in reply to

     @cwebber

     > And I know, you say, you'll be responsible about it.

     A really important skill that we have abandoned is having the ability to say "I am not atypical and I am prone to the same mistakes as everybody else."

     We have decades of research, probably more than decades of research showing that human beings *do not consistently concentrate and are bad at vigilance".

     But no, suddenly every programmer has decided they're uniquely immune to cognitive fatigue.

     Christine Lemmer-Webber repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     normy foxyoreos (foxyoreos@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Sep-2026 01:43:04 JST normy foxyoreos

     in reply to

     @cwebber we have studies showing that when people pull out of their driveways, sometimes they hit cars because they look both ways and their brain literally doesn't register that a car is coming because they're so habituated to the view.

     And software engineers are like, "it's okay, I'LL never merge code I don't understand from all LLM. I am the programming ubermensch, I'm immune to the effects of having a human brain"

     It's... frustrating.

   • Embed this notice
     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Sep-2026 04:55:39 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     • Janneke

     @janneke I was caught by surprise when I understood that many of my peers don’t view genAI as a threat, some of them viewing it as an opportunity. I thought rejection “obviously” derived from free software principles, but evidently it doesn’t.

     Maybe that’s our bigger failure after all—to realize we don’t fully understand what our “shared values” are.

     @cwebber

   • Embed this notice
     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Sep-2026 05:07:11 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     @cwebber What these calls for inaction have achieved is the “fait accompli”: sooner or later, “generative AI” will have become pervasive in FOSS and the lock-in will be orders of magnitude stronger than that of GitHub, DRMs, CUDA, or any of these “evils” we fought in the past decades.

     At that point, whether these orgs take a stand will be irrelevant.