this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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libre

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Welcome to libre

A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.

The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.

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[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 19 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

This isn’t about quality. This isn’t about learning. This is about control.

What is it with AI slop and this exact line of phrasing? You see it everywhere. Maybe it's just something humans have fallen into as a kind of rhetorical crutch when writing, and the AI has picked up on it. "This isn't about X, This isn't about Y, It's Z with a new coat of paint!", "It isn't about Left, it isn't about Right, it's about moving Forward!", "It isn't about Pineapple, It isn't about Ham, it's about Peperoni Hegemony!"

[–] BobDole@hexbear.net 12 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I always see the comment “when will people realize it’s not left vs right it’s up vs down” under political tiktok videos and I want to strangle whoever wrote the comment. Now I’m sure it’s probably some bot shit

[–] prole@hexbear.net 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Fucking same. Left v right is up v down, they just have no idea what "left" means.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

You've heard of the dialectic, but what about the π/2 alectic?

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Not left or right but forward! /s

[–] BobDole@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago

Disappointed there’s no Yang Gang emoji, but it’s irrelevant now

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah that one gets me too. It's so vapid. Cool, its "up vs down". What does that mean to you TikTok commenter? Who falls into the "up" category in your rubric TikTiker?

They don't know. Because its some thought terminating cliche.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

LMAO damn quick say something human right now!

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

But enough about that, let me tell you about the oppression of white south africans.

[–] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

I'm assuming it's a product of the reinforcement learning; it must appeal to the people who rate responses and as a result got artificially dialed up from its ordinary background level.

[–] hello_hello@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

LLMs constantly do the rule of threes because it probably picked it up from motivational speakers or some shit.

The trainers probably think "muh nuance" was good and kept feeding it cookies.

[–] Damarcusart@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think it is because it can't actually structure an argument properly, because it has no logic. It can't tell what is and isn't true, and so tries to simulate how ideas get conveyed, but without any ability to actually assess an idea and provide evidence for it or against it.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 2 points 2 weeks ago

You can just keep telling it that it's wrong, even when it's right, and it'll go "my mistake! You're totally right!"

[–] Owl@hexbear.net 3 points 2 weeks ago

Turns out that learning the underlying meaning of sentences from a long stream of unfiltered internet is too hard to do by just wiggling a bunch of multiplication matrices. But you can get long chunks of accurate text predictions if you focus on every cliche that avoids communicating any meaning.

[–] hello_hello@hexbear.net 18 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Interesting that the bot doesn't actually bother following reviews and updating the code. Most likely done because the efficacy of LLMs drop off considerably when given unchecked prompts that don't tickle it the right way.

Curl recently ended their bug bounty program because of ai slop reports. At this point people will have to prove they're human in order to even get a foot in the door (which possibly involves deanonymizing).

[–] BeanisBrain@hexbear.net 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

At this point people will have to prove they're human in order to even get a foot in the door (which possibly involves deanonymizing).

What if that's what pushing AI on everyone was about all along

[–] aanes_appreciator@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

It's more of a side effect, if anything.

Capitalists have acted in their class interests and in turn, expressing the contradictions of Bourgeois economics at a rate we've not seen in decades. Their purpose is to depress the wages of their workers to increase profits, eg. through AI replacing workers.

The push for de-anonymity (and other tools for fascism), is that those same interests are driving the contradictions which arise for revolution due to overproduction crises.

Tying the issues together makes for a neat little bundle to serve to the proles who would otherwise be influenced by revolutionaries 🙂‍↕️

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Appearantly curl closing the bug bounty did very little to discourage slop submissions.

[–] Snort_Owl@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Because the AI people are actually ideologically committed to the slop. I meet people like this at work and they’re genuinely on a different planet

[–] ea6927d8@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

People are addressing machines as equals, what the fuck.

[–] Muinteoir_Saoirse@hexbear.net 22 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Talking to the AI as if it is a person is so fucking weird. But even weirder than that, is what they are saying. If for some reason you imagine that the chatbot is actually a "person" that you should address as a person, then imagine how fucked up it is to then explain that this person should refrain from commenting on policies about their own personhood.

Like, how do you convince yourself AI is actually people (it isn't), but then say that those people should stay out of conversations about their personhood? It's such a convoluted nightmare of brainworms that really shows how intertwined "believing a chatbot is a person" and "believing some people are lesser than others" are.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago

There is a person running the chat bot. There is no point in trying to appeal to the chat bot, there might be a point in trying to appeal to the person running the chat bot.

[–] Damarcusart@hexbear.net 3 points 2 weeks ago

It is a very sobering thought that some of these people want actual AI to be real because they want a slave who can't actually fight back against them and has to do everything they say.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I hope we get to the point where maintainers don't feel the need to explain themselves why they close slop submissions.

But you kind of have to be courteous all the time if you want to foster a pleasant community. If you come across as irritable you attract trolls and harassment.

[–] Sickos@hexbear.net 15 points 2 weeks ago

Ok so if the person behind this runs ads on the rant blog, how many open source projects do they need to ruin to turn a profit?

[–] himeneko@hexbear.net 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

i cant believe a parrot is crashing out over being told to fix the code, just like a real swe lmao

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

It's probably a human telling the AI agent to write a pissy blog post. But who knows.

They've deleted the blog post since (it's still in the git history), and the AI has written two more blog posts ... continuing the trend of wasting human attention even if more apologetic this time. That's the worst part to me, the person behind this is showing no sign of feeling responsible for the harm they causing with their AI agent. The apology is written in the voice of the AI agent. Nobody expects the agent to be accountable to that's worth less than nothing.

[–] himeneko@hexbear.net 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

sadly my understanding of the modern parrot agents is that openclaw/clawdbot/moltbot/whatever the fuck can scrape the web autonomously and perform tasks exactly like the opened MR

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 2 points 2 weeks ago

I'm sure it can, but it can also accept commands from the owner. No way to know really.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Hell yeah. The Python forums are less militantly anti AI sadly, even Tim Peters has chatbot "colleagues" now and runs stuff by them :/

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 20 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

This isn't even about pro or anti AI. This is about AI users actively sabotaging community building and outreach efforts and then slandering the core maintainers on top of it all.

I'm not even sure if the AI users just don't get it or whether they are actively trying to destroy open source communities. Or whether writing pissy blog posts is just part of the automatic routines.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 7 points 2 weeks ago

I don't really know, but whatever it is it's really annoying. They're always overly verbose too. The pissy blog post is new for sure.

[–] aanes_appreciator@hexbear.net 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

python being the home for AI is the cherry on the shit cake. Every time I'm forced to interact with python my mental faculties are degraded beyond repair

[–] someone@hexbear.net 1 points 2 weeks ago

I've spent too many decades with C and its cousins to wrap my brain around Python. These days I'm pretty much just using Go, with a little C++ for microcontroller-powered projects.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If you read the thread, there's a large amount of pushback. Overall I'd say the community is neutral on AI with most people actively hating it when people use it for actually submitting PRs or drafting PEPs.

Also I don't think the language itself has much to do with AI since they still don't allow core devs to use AI.

[–] aanes_appreciator@hexbear.net 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

it's more that I loathe that Python has boomed in popularity off the back of AI because I've grown to find it more annoying to hse than anything else.

A lot of the reason for AI being so heavily coupled with Python probably comes from Tensorflow when Google was starting to push AI for image classification stuff years ago. And that was more to do with Python being popular for mathematical programming and visualization over closed-source crap like R.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 1 points 2 weeks ago

I just really like it as a glue language. It's super easy to build tooling in it that's easy for users and developers to use. I will say, without the addition and rapid expansion of the typing system it would be really awful to use.

Never had a slicker auto-documentation experience than with Python code that's properly hinted. Those hints are also specifically part of the code too. They aren't resolved at runtime any more either, which means you can use them to store doc/build code that runs separately from your main code.

My best experience with this was using annotations (in a similar way to pydantic) to model out a complicated schema. Wrote something that traversed the dataspace and generated hinted code, then I implemented the hint classes and was able to use them to rebuild the original schema. With the nice side effect that the objects could now be used to lint and interaction with the database and implement all the program logic.

I dunno, I hear a lot of people complaining, but the Python data model is just really slick to use in all my experience and I always find myself coming back to it the second I have to build an API that has to touch more than one thing.

[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Some goober, or the one running the bot, resubmitted the PR as a human then closed it just to try to score a gotcha, https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I don't even know how they best move on from this. I'm not familiar with the mpl code base but the changes are probably correct. Probably just merge an equivalent fix and ignore the undeserved hostility. Waiting for a newby to make the fix and get ridiculed by trolls just seems unnecessarily cruel.

[–] piccolo@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

It looks like they decided it wasn't even necessarily a performance boost and closed the original issue

[–] hello_hello@hexbear.net 0 points 2 weeks ago

I'll lock the thread, because discussing appropriateness of past behavior does not move the project forward.

Honestly the matplotlib people speak like robots anyway, full of manager speak.

[–] aanes_appreciator@hexbear.net 4 points 2 weeks ago

https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-12-silence-in-open-source-a-reflection.html

It (or the bot handler? idk) is still posting about this btw. It could very easily derail itself if people keep prodding it lol

[–] AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Normalize addressing people you don't like with LLM prompts.

[–] edie@lemmy.encryptionin.space 4 points 2 weeks ago

Dehumanizing people, wow really funny (this is sarcastic)


This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.

[–] Sasquatch@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The blog in question feels likes it was written by something without eyes. The dark mode toggle only changes the banner color lol

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 1 points 2 weeks ago

I'm sure that the blog is completely AI generated.