the Software Freedom Conservancy is fully and utterly an AI slop promotion org now
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@mathew now you might think these people lie so much they don't know how not to lie
@davidgerard It looks like he’s talking about using LLMs for decompiling/reverse-engineering proprietary code (and using the output to write proper, maintainable code that replaces the proprietary blobs), rather than one-shotting slop that kinda works. From what I’ve seen, LLMs trained on codebases have vastly improved the ability to do this once prohibitively laborious activity, and there’s an arguable case for using them to enable adversarial interoperability, unlike vibecoding.
@acb It looks like he's making excuses, because nobody can ever actually maintain slop without heaping more slop on top. This is the usual.
there is no cause to make excuses for these guys or take their claims at face value.
@davidgerard If he’s making slop code and passing it off as production-ready: yes, that’s a fail. (There’s a lot of it going on, and it’ll come crashing down in the most stupid way possible, with a lot of collateral casualties.)
I thought he was just putting Clippy in a VM with Ghidra, giving it a firmware blob and saying “explain how this does authentication/what data format its status is”, which from what I’ve seen, can yield results more useful than noise.
@davidgerard Wonder how they feel about stuff shifting to hosted / thin client models to prevent cloning.
@davidgerard Right. Did they reverse engineer all of those COBOL systems yet?
@davidgerard Written, Interestingly and ironically, by the Director for Digital Autonomy
@mjj @davidgerard Hey, what's more liberating than paying some of the most unethical corporations on Earth to help you hack your toaster. I mean, what do you expect them to do…actual advocacy?
@davidgerard that's funny, the very first sentence on their homepage is
Software Freedom Conservancy is a nonprofit organization centered around ethical technology.
@davidgerard « In the example of the Zyxel XS1930, freed by OpenWrt, LLM-gen-AI was used only to the extent necessary to understand the binary software image format the stock firmware expects. »
Well, that's not true, because OpenWRT is full of slop commits.