[chmod775]

Keeping up with this stuff is for people who define their identity through virtue signalling and whatever personality trait they have decided to make the problem of everyone around them.

Let them have their little corner of the internet and just stay away. There's plenty of alternatives run by people who don't feel the need to bring their personal baggage into a cooperative environment.

[lkey]

The article calls another entity exerting its right of free association 'censorship'. This too is signaling a certain set of values.

Even Immoral and Amoral companies serve values that others might consider 'baggage'.

Palantir worshipping death and war has caused their civilian contracts to suffer and languish. This is baggage; It may be their own death knell.

'(amorally) maximizing shareholder value (for the next quarter)' is (for me) an insane value system on its face, and makes problems for everyone around them, yet who argue like you are here don't see that as 'personal baggage' at all.

[zelphirkalt]

Are you consciously choosing to completely ignore large parts of Codeberg's explanations, regarding the amount of traffic they get from one-man LLM shows, and additionally completely fail to consider the type of organization, that Codeberg is, in order to label this as merely virtue signaling?

[infecto]

Sure but wouldn’t the sensible rule be implementing a user rate limit?

[zelphirkalt]

I think that can be argued for, yes.

[infecto]

I would fear it’s too little too late. If the concern was the frequency and utilization of resources from agents coding that would have been the instant and fair fix. As it stand it’s a statement about AI usage which is fine but I think the better alternative would be to start a new nonprofit service that was unbiased.

[chmod775]

> Are you consciously choosing to completely ignore

Yes. Let me stop you right there: Yes, absolutely. Whatever they claim their reasons are, it's not my problem. I don't care.

The last Codeberg story that popped up here just this week was something about them banning Bitcoin. At that pace you should worry whether you're next.

Which is why my advice is: Avoid the headache. Go somewhere else.

[cush]

>> Are you consciously choosing to completely ignore > Let me stop you right there: Yes

Reading this in text is unreasonably funny. Thanks for the chuckle

[rpdillon]

Yeah, it's pretty clear that they're instituting rules that they haven't thought about deeply, and they just need to reduce traffic by any means necessary, and they'll use any excuse they can to minimize traffic, whether that's banning LLM code because it could be malicious and has unclear copyright status, or any other reason that they can come up with. The fact that their terms of use don't match up with their blog post about it demonstrates this pretty clearly.

But I don't have a horse in this race. I self-host my code using Fossil.

[beepbooptheory]

I get your point but by your own reasoning here you can't ignore these things because you are also choosing to be principled in your own way here, right? Like you need to know, at the very least, what to avoid if you absolutely must steer clear of all the politics you hate right? Like if you don't even know and choose not to know, how will you have the early warning that the SaaS is gonna ban your hypothetical crypto repo?

You can't let your strong principles get in the way of being practical in this kind of world! It's kinda impossible to be as absolute as you want to be but also have your head-in-the-sand about it. You kinda gotta pick one of those..

At the very least, just not a good look from the outside IMO.

[andsoitis]

One helpful way to think about is to what extent your principles are rooted in emotions or rigidity, or whether your principles are rooted more in realism and practicality.

Put differently: are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted with the goal of CHANGING the world? Or are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted to NAVIGATE a dynamic, fuzzy, ever-changing world?

[ragall]

> Put differently: are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted with the goal of CHANGING the world? Or are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted to NAVIGATE a dynamic, fuzzy, ever-changing world?

Why would the latter be better than the former ?

[beepbooptheory]

In your mind, why are the second kinds of things here not "criteria" or "heuristics"?

(Also you can enclose things in * to emphasize on this site btw. There is a little grey 'help' next to the comment box.)

[andsoitis]

> why are the second kinds of things here not "criteria" or "heuristics"?

I think you're asking why I call the heuristics for navigating the world "principles"?

Principles come in 3 distinct flavors:

a) Rule of conduct. The standard you hold yourself to regardless of circumstance or convenience. Examples can be honesty, fairness, loyalty, or non-violence.

b) Organizing idea in a field. General concept that explains or governs range of specific cases. They're not moral rules, they're explanatory or decision-making frameworks.

c) Foundational truth or law. Basic proposition that underlies a system of thought. E.g. conservation of energy is principle that isn't proven within the system but a foundation the rest of the system is built on. Axioms play the same role in logic or mathematics.

In this thread, I'm using principles in the (b) sense, whereas I think the author of the article and some of the sentiment in the discussion anchor on the (a) sense.

In practice, one has to find a balance you can live with between (a) and (b), since they can be in tension.

[ragall]

> The last Codeberg story that popped up here just this week was something about them banning Bitcoin. At that pace you should worry whether you're next.

No. LLMs and blockchain are the same kind of shit.

[allarm]

What do you mean by no? Can you read their minds? Their reputation suggests that, yes, they’ll likely block something else.

[ragall]

Your words betray your prejudice, nothing more.

[allarm]

There's a thing called reputation. It has nothing to do with prejudice.

[throwayay4929]

Imaging where the world would be if Firefox, when it came out, went deep on the Iraq war? Or if RMS got involved in, I don't know, the Lewinsky affair in the 1990s, and made it a core part of the FSF?

We'd all be using WinXP SE and IE6.

"The personal is political" is a truly toxic idea that's been corroding nice things since it's inception.

[y0ssar1an]

> We'd all be using WinXP SE and IE6.

the reason we have linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand. i understand that you can't fight every battle, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't fight any battles.

you're making a rationalization because taking a stand is usually inconvenient, and you don't want to be inconvenienced by anything.

[throwayay4929]

Supposing you know someone's motivation as if you have access to their psyche is a very unproductive way to participate in a discussion.

The reason we have a Linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand on an issue they cared about and _focused on_. We wouldn't have Linux if the project also took on matters like teenage pregnancy, surveillance, and gerrymandering.

[lostmsu]

That's a very good point. What if codeberg decides tomorrow that they got weary of all worldly affairs, and from then on will only host dev tools?

[veeti]

Yet those same Linux geeks have now decided not to take a "stand" against AI, but rather embrace it. Twenty years ago when the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars raged on, did they oppose working with the military contractors at Red Hat or the NSA? No, they focused on the mission.

[squigz]

Using RMS as an example of "how to not be political" is uh... interesting.

[tbrownaw]

> Using RMS as an example of "how to not be political" is uh... interesting.

He's known for staying focused on one single issue, which is important for personal reasons unrelated to group affiliations.

[veeti]

When even RMS seems like a more level headed political actor, you know you've gone off the deep end.

[squigz]

Haha, "RMS has more level-headed politics than Codeberg taking a position against LLMs" is a fun take.

[allarm]

Did RMS ever call people fascists for simply trying to discuss the proposed change?

[pessimizer]

RMS headed a political organization, and kept his political campaigning to things directly related to the politics that his organization represented.

The people who were angry at RMS's "politics" were always actually mad at the concept of Free Software in general, and the fact that RMS thinks that software that is not Free is bad software (and does not think you are an exception.) He wasn't banging on about trans rights or Muslamic invasions, but people being enslaved by machines run by the powerful.

Doesn't mean that he didn't have opinions, he just knew why people cared what he thought. When he ventured a bad (but common) opinion about sleeping with teenagers, it opened a hole that his enemies drove a truck through. It's also notable that he did this to defend his friend Minsky; people often compromise their professionalism over personal relationships and interests.

[amiga386]

> Doesn't mean that he didn't have opinions

Strong agree. He has millions of opinions, all nicely catalogued on his personal website. He even has an RSS feed: https://stallman.org/rss/rss.xml if you're keen to know what he thinks about this or that US politics issue.

But he didn't abuse his control of the FSF to pursue his own politics, he kept the organisation strictly focused on software freedom. It's at risk of being completely irrelevant if tries to expand beyond its niche of software freedom.

The ethics of AI, code generation, and hosted software would be within the FSF's remit, though I think the policies of any specific code hosting site wouldn't be.

[squigz]

Taking a stand against LLMs certainly seems pretty related to the politics of the FOSS movement.

[inigyou]

Wasn't it because he said it was okay to breed 16 year old girls or something?

[graemep]

The point is that he did not even try to link his view about sex and age of consent into anything to do with open source.

I have not read much of what he said about it, but he recently said that it is absurd that variations in the age of consent means something can be rape in one country but completely legal in another (e.g. US vs UK vs Italy).

He also earlier claimed that that minors could consent to sex and not be harmed. While I loathe that claim, it does not seem right that many other people who made the same claim (a number of British politicians and civil rights activists have endorsed, as have similar people in other countries) it seems odd that the latter get away with it and Stallman does not. I think its the people in positions of power (e.g. politicians) who most need to resign (permanently!) for having held those views.

[ngcazz]

"nice things" you mean upholding the harm of the status quo by not criticizing it

[throwayay4929]

So youre proposing that everyone should always be criticizing every unjust thing in the world or else they're upholding the status quo?

By that silly logic I guess codeberg is supporting the uyghur genocide because they don't mention it.

[ngcazz]

No, I mean that voicing opinions in specialist spaces is rarely seen as bothersome when they uphold the status quo, but the minute they don't they're "making it political"

Edit: casual sinophobia BTW

[jraph]

Until proven otherwise, Codeberg's operations have nothing to do with the uyghur genocide though.

[throwayay4929]

There's nothing to prove when you posit your responsibility is limitless.

Codeberg is in Germany yet I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine, which they helped finance by building their economy on cheap Russian oil and gas. I guess by ops logic that means codeberg is in favor of Russian aggression.

[jraph]

Again, Codeberg is not involved in anything related to Russian war in Ukraine, and is not responsible for Germany building their economy on cheap Russian oil and gas, so they could not possibly be assumed to be in favor of Russian agression unless they made a statement towards this.

Yet,

> I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine

that's because you didn't bother to check, you just assumed they didn't.

https://blog.codeberg.org/one-year-into-the-war-your-help-is...

> I guess by ops logic

I don't think so. Them being involved or not in the thing makes all the difference.

[inigyou]

Could be. Why not ask them and find out? Or upload a project to help the Russian war and see if they take it down?

[kkkdkxbxb]

Rather using self-hosted Gitea, software developed by a for-profit Chinese company, is actually supporting the uyghur genocide. Shame on you.

[mrngld]

But do people look at installing a formulae in brew and wonder "what's their position on Uyghur oppression in Western China?" Like, wow, jxl is pretty neat, but they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?

Insanity. IMO. Keep that stuff at home.

[jraph]

Well if I had to install something and knew their authors were in favor of genocides, I would look elsewhere.

> they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?

This is a strawman. You go from "they are in favor of something horrible, should I use them?" to "they haven't expressed a position on stuff, should I use them?".

[natbennett]

Firefox is an interesting choice as a company that wasn’t affected by identity politics given how Brendan Eich left the company

[missinglugnut]

Early Firefox was the example. Looking at Firefox's market share decline since Eich got replaced reinforces the point though.

[infecto]

I get tired of it because it just becomes a tit for tat war and you end up with these extremely polarized communities.

Codeberg is not for me, I could never get over them keeping the anubis anime girls on, but it would be nice if open source communities were a bit more open. There will always be a line to draw but some of the current rules feel arbitrary.

[chmod775]

> Codeberg is not for me, I could never get over them keeping the anubis anime girls on

To be fair, that seems like a bit of an odd detail to obsess over.

A service could be bright pink for all I care* as long as it just works without me having to worry about checking their blog for the latest decrees being handed down on a daily basis.

* Take that with a grain of salt because my - in some people's eyes - questionable stylistic choices are the direct cause of a couple hundred userstyles and scripts out there.

[infecto]

How is that fair or odd? I don’t want to pop up anime furry girls while I am using a service? Not sure why you think or suggest I am obsessed with it just a choice. Odd comment to make.

It’s a choice to not use it but also a choice the folks that decide to keep it shown.

It is absolutely that communities choice but I see it as a tell for how the folks think about running their community and as these new rules are being made aligns with the assumptions I already made.

Similar to how I migrated from post hog when then created that fabulously confusing OS UI. Or I wouldn’t use a service that used Pepe memes.

[m4rtink]

The whole Fedora infrastructure shows the default cute Anubis character (while protecting said infrastructure from AI scrappers) & I don't see any problems with that. :)

[hedora]

Is there a bypass for those yet? Not all of the machines I have run it at a reasonable pace, so I'd like to just farm the challenge to some other machine.

My nice desktop that I use for C++/Rust/Formal Verification takes multiple minutes sometimes, and I'd rather not replace the motherboard over this, or figure out why it's not using the GPU/whatever.

OTOH, I have a MacBook with Apple's terrible window manager. It blows through it in a few seconds. The same is true of my ancient phone, and some newer low-power mini-pc's, etc.

[CaptainFever]

It exists. Search up POW blocker or Anubis blocker extensions.

[account42]

Just set your user agent to wget.

[infecto]

I don’t object to anime or furry art. I just think shared infrastructure serving a broad technical audience is better off staying visually neutral. Once branding starts signaling subcultures, the discussion too often shifts from the software to identity. Given the other decisions some of these communities have made it makes sense. Not for me but that’s ok!

[layer8]

What are these plentiful alternatives? SourceHut also comes with “personal baggage”.

[Zambyte]

Just host your own git server, it's an afternoon project. Use other forges as mirrors.

[gregdaniels421]

Forgejo is pretty crazy easy to setup if you have a server with some storage already. It can be set to lock out people by default

[layer8]

I have been self-hosting Gitea since long before Forgejo existed, but I understood the parent to be talking about third-party hosting with a FOSS community around it.

[48terry]

No one's guaranteed to third-party hosting or communities. The software is there. Host it.

If no third-party or community wants to take you in, then I suppose you're going to have to start one for like-minded people. If there aren't any, then I suppose you've lost the marketplace of ideas.

Isn't that how this is supposed to work?

[kkkdkxbxb]

Gitea is china-ware that doesn’t share values with most FOSS.

[inigyou]

if you have ssh access to a server, setup is as easy as

    ssh user@host
    mkdir myproject
    git init --bare myproject

Done.

The remote URL is user@host:myproject (relative to user home dir) or user@host:/home/user/myproject (absolute path)

[Zambyte]

That works for private repositories, but public facing ones require a little more than that.

[ErroneousBosh]

  docker run data.forgejo.org/forgejo/runner:12 forgejo-runner

I thought this was supposed to be a site for hackers? Apply some Hacker Nature to the problem.

[layer8]

I have been self-hosting Gitea since long before Forgejo existed, but I understood the parent to be talking about third-party hosting with a FOSS community around it.

[chmod775]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source-code-host...

[grumbel]

There is Radicle for completely distributed hosting.

[Hendrikto]

It really is a shame Drew is so opinionated and dogmatic.

I like most of his work, but his politics make Source Hut too shaky of a foundation to build on.

[inigyou]

Amuses me that Codeberg and Sourcehut have the same naming scheme. What's next - SLoCbarn? Header Haven? Function City?

[queenkjuul]

Repohaus

[myaccountonhn]

ssh server git init --bare repo.git && git clone server:repo.git

[negura]

we're rapidly movement towards an internet where it will be the bad actors hiding their "personal baggage", who will end up in a little corner. as it should be. it's those people who have harmed the world at a global scale. by asking to separate technology from personal & societal values

[sscaryterry]

Well said. This is one of the most concise and from my point of view accurate accounts of what is happening right now.

I'm personally sick of all the politics in OSS development, as such, I no longer actively contribute.

Different strokes for different blokes/whatever floats your boat. I don't care, do as you please.