Post #4872451 · Elektrine

2026-09-27 17:27 UTC

And while I'm just one person, LLMs are very very unpopular. It is an attempt to industrially incept a grim future into our imaginations and realities, and most people want nothing to do with it, it's just hard to avoid right now. I think a lot of people will jive with my goals here. Now contrast this with the open source maintainer motivation to have a userbase. Yes, a userbase is annoying - an unpaid burden of care where a lot of your dependents show up to your issue tracker with their most entitled asshole shirt on. It is known, it has been known. And yet that impact is validating. People react to your name with reverence. "Oh, you're the Foo developer! Holy shit, I can't believe I met you in person!" You get invited to conferences. People care what you have to say. There can be serious downsides to this slice of human nature, but it's not my goal to go to war with it, like Caligula vs The Sea. Rather, it's leverage for an ultimatum. You want an audience? That will increasingly require zero-LLM policy.

Replies (1)

@MaddieM4@raphus.social 2026-09-27 17:33

Ultimately, this is just part of the big picture that FOSS *operators* have always been guided by. "I want software that, for all the rough edges it might have, is made with good intentions by people who are not actively attempting to screw me over (and will not in the future), because there's a lot of software in my life, and I do not want to spend my finite afternoons continually *reacting* to malfeasance, post-malfeasance. This is my proactivity." That's not some new social contract - it was so widely and implicitly accepted that it led to the trust issues in the design of most of our package managers, that you ask for software by its name and let the ecosystem's guardians figure out which fork is correct, that you can assume the package is not malicious without reading every line of it yourself, that you can and should blindly install updates from upstream and these will increase your security instead of decrease it. We have bad actors in that space because it was a beautiful succulent commons to eat.

Open ##4872448