I'm gonna try something a bit heavy here, and I'll ask that you read with a bit of nuance (with the caveat that nuance is not inherently good or bad, some things should be nuanced, other things shouldn't be). I don't ask good faith, as I don't think that's a reasonable policy, but I do ask that you read the following few posts *carefully* especially if you disagree.
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@whitequark @xgranade No one would trust vibe coded software to not send them to jail though, move fast and break things would never have happened.
There would likely be a lot less software, but it would be a lot higher quality, which is my main concern. Open source is a tool to good software and it is failing at it's purpose.
@whitequark @xgranade So why is it that the person who designs the hardware of a pacemaker takes that risk, but the person who designs the software doesn't?
With that hell of a preface in place, consider a thought experiment. There's a piece of open source software you use on the daily, offered by its developers and maintainers completely free of monetary cost.
It is, notably, somewhat aggressive about auto-updating. Perhaps it has a nontrivial security surface, such that this is justified, but it's part of the thought experiment regardless.
Suppose one day it gets a new splash screen, including a very prominent swastika.
How should you respond?
This is obviously contrived. While there are outspoken Nazis in open source (DHH and the hyprland folks come to mind), they generally engage in more cryptonazi shit and don't advertise quite that way.
But this is a thought experiment. It is, moreover, *my* thought experiment that I'm inviting you on.
Given those caveats, that this is contrived and artificial, what emotions would you find yourself feeling in that moment, launching a previously beloved app?
It is, to be absolutely clear, *not your project*. In a very real (if narrow) sense, the developers and maintainers are well within their rights to publish that update to *their* application, to *their* project. There might be issues with the code of conduct or terms of service on their forge, but that's aside from the point of the thought experiment: there is a thing you use on the daily that now presents very clear and strong fascist imagery directly into your eyeballs.
A few questions, then, with respect to this *highly contrived* thought experiment:
• What right, if any, do the developers and maintainers have to push that update onto your machine?
• What right, if any, do you have to object to how the developers and maintainers manage their project?
• Do your answers change if the fascist imagery is softer; say it's a MAGA hat instead of a swastika, perhaps.
• Do your answers change if the fascist imagery is soft enough to be plausibly deniable?
That last question is where things start to get really dicey and subtle, I think. If it's something like adopting fascist terminology that one may very plausibly might not know to be fascist, then you may have to start asking to what extent the fascist imagery is intentional or unintentional.
The developers and maintainers, if they are acting in good faith but are unaware of the implications, may even be surprised at the backlash.
I am a physicist no longer, but I'm still a physicist by training, and one of the more useful mental practices I learned from that background is some problems are easier to understand if you start from the extremes and then walk backwards until you get to the bulk.
In this case, starting from the extreme in-your-face swastika thought experiment helps establish that there is a boundary past which it's not helpful to think in terms of what the maintainer has the right to do.
So where is that boundary, where do we move from "this is a legitimate difference of opinion in software project management" to"this is an active malware threat and should be identified as such"?
Critically, I don't think there is a single unambiguous line between "puts a swastika in your face" and "introduces a feature I don't like" that all of us can agree on.
If you know me, you can probably guess where I'm going with all of this. I think AI (in the sense of the marketing term for a loose collection of ML techniques being pushed by a eugenics cult) is fascism. I will necessarily as a result view the addition of AI features or development practices as being closer to the fascist extreme of that thought experiment than the difference of opinion extreme. Still somewhere between the two extremes, but closer to one end.
I offer the thought experiment, and invite you to join in it for a moment, by way of trying to explain some of the intense conflict that we've seen in OSS as of late, and where I come from in that conflict — perhaps where others who think similarly to me might be coming from as well.
To reiterate the nuance here, I am not saying that the inclusion of AI in your project is the same as a swastika splash screen: I'm saying that it lies on a continuum with one endpoint at the swastika case.
I beg you to please keep in mind the "exploring the extremes to understand the bulk" tradition of thought described above as you read my thread.
