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Comment by spijdar | Hacker News Reader

Because one of the biggest hurdles to porting the Linux kernel and device-specific software to more hardware and making existing hardware work better is one of the things that "AI" can (seemingly, caveat) do surprisingly well?

Not to say PM (or any other project) should/shouldn't use AI. There are plenty of other salient reasons to reject AI. But given (from what I remember) postmarket's goal is basically saving as many phones from becoming ewaste as possible, well, an LLM could actually be a formidable way to get more hardware than ever running.

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This.

Why would you waste 2 years to port Linux to an old / a device when you can literally do it in ~10 days and save many devices from turning into e-waste?

I really don't get their approach. Besides, Linux (and Linus) accepts and are doing AI contributions, so their argument makes no sense (since they're a Linux distro)

I would also add on top of those points that nobody will ever get paid for mainlining old phones, these are side projects by nature, meaning, not full time.

And since it's such a hard task without AI (and it's still not easy even with it), almost none will ever be mainlined just because of the size of the task

Ever? Nobody?

>I really don't get their approach. Besides, Linux (and Linus) accepts and are doing AI contributions, so their argument makes no sense (since they're a Linux distro)

Sometimes the base has to fight the insanity coming from the top down.

Correction:

Linux accepts AI assisted contribution. A human still has to review the output before submitting the code.

This is a big difference as it prevents raw genAI code to be part of the codebase.

pmOS might accept this in the future, as it is slowly becoming the standard.

You're only looking at the happy path here.

The output is only ever as good as the prompt.

There is a lot of people who don't know how to prompt well, don't understand the underlying task at hand and will just ask Claude a single line question without any reviewing of said output.

The Shopify CEO calls this a "Slop grenade".

That being said, I hope that postmarketos can move away from a flat out "No Gen AI" stance. Maybe the PR should include the prompts used, perhaps?

I hope this doesn't just result in a forked project.

Couldn't these concerns be addressed through two potential angles ?

- You make your AI do all that work, pay xxx tokens worth to get something running and you can use your old phone while taking full responsability for your vibe code. Each user will have to do it, but the whole path could be optimize LLM side as well, after all you're just renting it.

- You use AI to find a working solution but vet it and write everything's needed to meet the submission standard. You put the time needed for it to be accepted as non AI, and proudly put your name on the line as the final author of everything you submit.

Except nothing about AI produces properly open source code? You can't prove it didn't pull from closed source code, no more clean room approaches if everyone just wants to bow to the LLMs.

Even beyond all the other ethical issues I don't see how the open source world accepts this.

Same reason/way projects like ReactOS/Wine and friends exist in a world where source code from early 21st century Windows is literally sitting in a bunch of 6+ year old Github repositories, I guess. Or any number of other proprietary codebases. Legal limbo, effectively.

I'm not saying that's an equivalent problem to LLM taint, but it's not exactly unrelated, either. It may be the case that all LLM output is tainted, but it's also likely the case legally that you can't meaningfully prove that contributions from random people to FOSS aren't tainted.

Legally proving that an LLM hasn't pulled from proprietary software is probably in the same ballpark as proving some Wine contributor hasn't looked at any of those Github repos.

I dunno how ReactOS/Wine manages that threat/exposure. But I'm pretty sure both have fairly liberal contributor policies. They're not Compaq reversing the IBM PC BIOS.

Yes, the difference here is that most projects don't have to accept that (level of) risk, while ReactOS/Wine don't have a choice. But they do still trudge on regardless.

I guess in the same way we accept that the open source & licensed code was used to train the models, or in the same way we accept that Google / Meta / Anthropic and all the others use copyrighted material to get the degree of intelligence that it needs.

If you extend this thought and this rationale to humans as well, we shouldn't be allowed to "get smarter" by consuming copyrighted content (movies, books) or anything really - as we might end up referencing them.

I think copyright laws are being bended a lot here - and I don't think (as a copyright holder myself) I'm too concerned about that - if this then allows humanity to move forward. It's a philosophical topic really, more than a legal one

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