@lhp@mastodon.social
This last weeks has been pretty bad for my mood. I am very pessimistic about the free software desktop right now. A lot of irreplaceable projects have eagerly adopted LLMs in their development. People who really should know better. The FOSS desktop is very dear to me and I have been enthusiastic about it for a long time. So this has been exceptionally hard to watch and I am not sure how much of my enthusiasm has survived.
Effectively all relevant code I have ever written depends, either directly or indirectly, on projects that have adopted LLMs. And those are hard to replace dependencies, like font drawing or the kernel itself. The laptop I am typing this on probably already has LLM generated code on it, without my knowledge or consent.
I am effectively forced to unwillingly support rent-seeking fascists with every line of code I write, every time I turn on my computer, even if I don't use any of it directly.
I am currently investigating whether it's viable to run a desktop operating system fully free of LLM generated output, either by just sticking to older versions or perhaps even switching to the BSDs.
Either way, FOSS isn't fun anymore. I think part of my bad mood is that my subconscious has already started grieving the loss of programming and FOSS as an interest. I am currently unsure if I will continue to engage with FOSS in the future or if I'll continue contributing to it in any capacity.
