I'm a Proud Luddite. That's Why I Use Linux | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Proud Luddite. That's Why I Use Linux

thelibre.news

52 pointseustoria14 comments

Most Linux distros update more than Windows, it's not a platform where technical progress is restricted. Even other Unix like systems still get lots of updates.

From the article:

> I am just trying to point out that the FOSS movement is not anything new, not really. It is just another manifestation of a drive that has been with us since time immemorial: the thirst for freedom.

I think that was true at one time, but I don't think it is true any more. With all due respect to FOSS, which is great, I think the movement has lost its ways. FOSS has become an industry to itself. If FOSS really still means freedom, why are so many people adopting closed technologies like AI to do open source? FOSS has become more about producing FOSS now, rather than creating software that actually means something. Even Linus Torvalds has used the rationale that his job is to make the kernel a great kernel and if AI can help him do that, all the better.

But I think the spirit of FOSS would be to make software that represents the human spirit, not simply produce it. Yes, there are a few developers who still feel that way, but by and large, technology has warped our way of thinking so that we care more about the final product than what we have to do to get there.

No doubt there's still some momentum of freedom in FOSS, but I think for the most part it's been thoroughly subsumed into the mainstream and it certainly no longer aligns with the Luddite tradition of restraint and keeping things small.

Personally, I've lost all faith in open source.

FOSS is an interesting beast in that it's comprised of both Open Source (the Linux kernel) and Free Software (the GNU project). Linus is more pragmatic than Stallman so depending on where you personally fall in the idealistic vs pragmatic scale you may lean more towards either one of their philosophies.

These days I sprinkle less salt on Stallman's _software_ ideas, there are many things I thought he was being an idiot about, which very recently became true. But maybe it could Nostradamus-isms: predict enough an eventually something will stick.

AI is in a sense the purest form of open source. All information compiled for all to use without restriction, enabling truly anyone to modify any software to work the way they want and just by describing it in normal human terms to their computer. The outputs aren't copyrightable so all the outputs are open source. The court rulings finding AI training to be fair use are probably the biggest blows to the growing copyright regime Disney and the like built over the last few decades that we've seen in a long while. And to top it all off, our corporate overlords are shoveling their data as fast as possible into the machines. Sure they have "no training" contracts on that data, but given how many human institutions have leaked all of their source code over the years, it's only a matter of time before some training AI agent running at Anthropic or OpenAI or Google does an "oopsy" and dumps all sorts of proprietary closed source code into the AIs that everyone has access to.

If anything the biggest blow to FOSS has been the surprising and unexpected heel turn of so many FOSS advocates who have shed their "information wants to be free" hats donned their new "strong copyright and preventing people from using your code without your explicit approval of how they use it is good actually" hats.

The problem with your argument is that there is a cost to using AI so it's not really free. There's an environmental and a social cost that restricts the freedom of others, which is technically still open source but not in the spirit of it.

There are costs to using all technology, including open source software. We can start with the obvious point that open source was never about "Free as in beer" and even the FSF says as much. Of course, the nature of open source makes not having "free as in beer" open source software difficult, RedHat Enterprise linux is clearly open source and yet it imposes a cost on its users.

As for environmental costs, electronics manufacturing is dirty business. Some pretty nasty chemicals go into the process of making every single piece of hardware you buy to run Linux. Never mind the sheer waste of electricity and energy that our modern "always on, always connected" world incurs all the time. Every single person running HomeAssistant while flashing ESPHome on all of their IOT devices is burning all sorts of electricity making their home "smart". Everyone running their 24/7 media server hosting a Jellyfin instance and a RAID array of spinning disks is burning away environmental resources all day long to allow them to have on demand access to videos we previously would have stored on unpowered storage media. How many raspberry pis, flipper zeros and other pieces of cheap tech have been produced with limited environmental resources and now languish in a drawer somewhere? How many gigabytes of data are needlessly shipped around the world, burning more energy, so that developers can have "cattle, not pets" for their servers and rebuild the whole docker stack from scratch every time? How many CI build pipelines pull all of their dependencies every single time from across hundreds of open source repositories? What about the environmental costs of the maker movement? Sure repairing your stuff is nice, but open sourcing 3d printing has almost certainly generated far more waste plastic than it has saved by allowing people to repair things.

And as for social costs, that just depends on you point of view. How many crimes are enabled by open source software like GPG and GrapheneOS? How about Bit Torrent, Tor and I2P? Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? What is the social cost that the open source spirit that inspires VPNs like wireguard and proxy servers impose on countries and societies that would rather not have pornography or "dissident" material available? For that matter, what is the social cost imposed on the world by all the open source software that underlies every social media network and feed out there? Facebook and their algorithm might be proprietary, but open source software enables their scale and reach. How about the social costs of modern expectations for "free as in beer" software, that open source has very much contributed to? We talk about the mental health burden that is maintaining an open source project, and yet every time someone offers a piece of software for sale, HN threads are full of people griping about the price. RedHat tries to close the "free as in beer" holes in their business model, and people in the "spirit" of open source do everything they can to circumvent that. Prusa open sources their 3d printer designs and software, and the community shamelessly responds by undercutting them with cheap clones and knockoffs. And let's not even get started on the lionizing and hero worship of some of open source's less than stellar big names. Lots of people are or have been very famous and wield quite a bit of power and influence in the open source world and have shaped it for better or for ill and have advanced all sorts of causes some look askance at. Or they've set terrible examples of behavior and tone for the entire OSS community.

And then of course there's the ever present debate of whether the GPL or the BDS licenses are the ones that restrict or enable restricting the freedom of others. Never mind that the open source community is eternally wrestling with the question of whether or not you can or should impose limits on HOW open source software is used. Should an open source software project knowingly allow themselves to be used by a military organization? Does it matter if that organization is the IDF or the Ukrainian military? Does an OSS maintainer have the right to inject code into their project that they know is widely used as a dependency by other systems that prevents the software from working if it detects it's running in Russia and thereby restrict the freedom of those people to use the software?

Yes, AI has a cost. And you might decide that said costs are not ones you're comfortable with, or that they are higher than you want them to be. But no one should delude themselves into thinking that open source software in particular, or software and IT in general isn't FULL of these same costs and we've been waging battles over them for decades before now, and will continue to wage them for decades to come. AI is just another in a long list of controversial technologies which will change world for better or worse, just like every one that came before.

There is a restriction - the useful models are closed source proprietary services that cost money to be used effectively, and those models require vast and expensive infrastructure for training that isn't available to the public. I can't apply the four freedoms to Claude or OpenAI or Grok. I can't fork a billion dollar data center. A bunch of weights isn't the same as source code.

What's more, because people are using these services to generate code they can't understand that code and won't be able to edit or redistribute that code without access to those services.

That's anything but "the purest form of open source." It's even more of a proprietary lock-in than we had to begin with.

And often the most useful software is closed source proprietary things that cost money to be used effectively. That hasn't stopped open source from building impressive and useable systems that are serviceable enough for most use cases. You can't fork photoshop, but GIMP (for all its warts) exists and you can use it for photo manipulation. You can't fork Solidworks, but FreeCAD and OpenSCAD exist, and you can use them to do 3d modeling. You can't fork Eagle, but KiCad exists and you can design your own PCBs with it. You can't fork Windows or MacOS but Linux and BSD exist and they probably already run most of your hardware. You can't fork Oracle, but Postgres and MariaDB exist and you can run a business on them. Unless we stupidly legally lock AI training and model creation to massive proprietary corporations, why do you think the same won't hold true for open AI models and projects? Maybe Claude will always be a better code agent than AInix or whatever, but as long as AInix is good enough, that doesn't matter any more than it matters that Solidworks is better than FreeCAD.

I see little real difference between using proprietary software and using AI to generate software in terms of the freedoms allowed to the end user. The entire point of the free software ethos is that the end user should be in control to the degree that they want to be, not merely to the degree that a proprietary service allows. If nothing else the obliteration of programming culture and education and the mass deskilling created by the normalization of AI works against that ethos. It turns programming into just another form of capitalist consumption.

Which is all well and good if you don't care about such things and just want the end product but AI shouldn't be conflated with FOSS. A tool that strips knowledge away from people is antithetical to the culture even if the end product is high quality.

AI is a tool like any other. AI doesn't inherently "strip knowledge away from people" any more than an IDE, or a GUI or a modern computer does. Yes, you can use AI to blindly do things without learning. And you can use GParted to blindly format a drive without ever learning what cylinders and sectors are. And you can use GIMP plugins to blur images without ever having to learn matrix multiplication. Or you can use drop box and never have to learn how to use rsync, samba and chron. But you can also use AI to learn things like which obscure emacs functions you can string together to customize your emacs config in a way that suits you better. Or how to programmatically invoke disabled junit tests from within another test so that you can test that an annotation that decorates a unit test does the things around that test execution that you expect. That last by the way is a real thing I did, and something that is difficult if not impossible to search for with normal search tools because the terms that you need to use are much more likely to get you results for generally enabling and disabling unit tests.

If a user chooses to use AI in a way that strips knowledge away from them, and doesn't contribute to their learning, that is a choice they are making but there is nothing inherent in AI that requires it anymore than choosing to code in a higher level language inherently prevents you from learning assembly language.

And now GNU/Linux is freely taking money from corporate overlords and ponying up money to frontier model companies. I don't know what possess people to think Linux is still some cool counter culture thing, it's not. It's just still wearing the mask of one because people have selective hearing.

I can't speak on everyones behalf and I am not just referencing Linux here, I am also referencing the great family of BSDs, but having the full source available as part of the install is what I'm all about. If that is _counter cultural_ then so be it, but it isn't the main intent. But having the source to the kernel, the OS, the apps I use, complete with stellar man pages and other manuals... I'm set.

From the article: >When an individual chooses to use a Linux-based operating system instead of Windows or OSX, they are, deliberately or not, making a statement. They are declaring themselves to be autonomous and independent.

But this is being reversed now and this has gradually been the case over the years. By just using linux are you capable of debugging the kernel? When the code itself grows unbounded in size and complexity, the moat grows more and more. Tomorrow if you had a nasty GPU driver bug or scheduler bug in any of these systems are you personally empowered to make that change? I would argue no. I've had this, I've tried trawling through the kernel to help some nerds debug why ppc64 KVM was not working when running in BE mode and it was completely intractable. I could just be an idiot though, the evaluation of that is left to the reader.

My point with referencing with LLMs is that this has turned this dial up to 11, now you have developers shipping a crap ton of code and complexity is growing more. The more the developers rely on this stuff the more there is this kind of implication that in order for you to keep up you will use it too. Is that carrying the spirit of the luddite?

Also FreeBSD is also taking LLM stuff, OpenBSD doesn't have a policy prohibiting this, NetBSD does.

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