Debian had the coolest possibility of banning AI use, or at the very least limiting it and enforcing disclosure. Instead they’ve decided against it, sigh. Respect to Antoine.
This is what happens when FLOSS projects get tied up in big money - people start chasing the money, regardless of the consequences. Is there no refuge in the Linux world from this bullshit?
reminder: https://tante.cc/2026/04/21/ai-as-a-fascist-artifact/
No such thing as “just a tool”
It’s the “without disclosure” that sucks here people. That means that people like Antoine will have to review thousands of lines of slop from corporate PRs that will absolutely be locked in an arms race to introduce 0-days that only they know about.
The tools also suck and were made by being evil and exploitative, are a naked attempt to enclose the commons, pay no respect to the entire foundation of free software and thus all extant software and prior art, encourage lazy and bad practice, introduce subtle and not so subtle problems into a code base increasing the work of reviewers and maintainers (famously easy and pleasant jobs), continue to exact an enormous time and monetary toll on open web operators as aggressive scrapers hammer the internet, and are an opportunity for the people making them to subtly distort reality in difficult to detect ways by biasing training data and in post training weight adjustments.
But yes, non disclosure is also extremely bad and is such a basic thing. Being against transparency and disclosure in FOSS of all things is hilarious. The bar is so low that sloppers are playing limbo in hell.
Saying “I don’t want to disclose that I use AI” is the same as refusing a breathalyzer when you’re clearly wasted lol. Everyone already knows and denying it isn’t really helping anyone.
Between this and the kernel devs allowing it as well (though with mention of its use), this all sucks. The rot will spread, and security will suffer. I’ll probably end up on FreeBSD.
CW: ableism
good riddance, antoine the fascist. you love causing damage to the debian project and now you’re throwing a temper tantrum like a five-year old child because you can’t comprehend the ai evolution. you are nothing more than a deranged person who spits at people’s work and expects people to follow their unhinged beliefs, a waste of human space. you are the one who is being fascist here.
Least reactionary AI booster.
that user was rebuked and blocked from the mailing list for that. but yeah
not the mailing list
from what I (mis)understand, those mailing lists are kinda the backbone for organizing development
fascist
spits at people’s work
waste of human space
fascist
Wait, is the Debian guy being called a fascist here?
Is he actually problematic? Or is this an AI pilled dingus just using whatever words they want?
Antoine correctly called AI “fascist-backed” in their resignation, and the AI booster said “no u”
Ok ok ok, I got it now. Thanks for the clarification.
So I’ve contributed to Debian in the past and its my understanding that a lot of X11 fanatics (who happen to be led by a Nazi developer) harassed this guy for being on the list of people wanting a switch to Wayland (an actually properly maintained protocol). I support use of LLMs though, I think its ridiculous to be against them, they are useful and even Linus Torvalds uses them for debugging for high level kernel work. If the kernel uses them the argument kinda falls apart on the distro level. Saying a use of a tool is inherently fascist (??) is a little ridiculous, especially when you can run Chinese LLMs locally. In general there is a lot of fash-jacketing in the Debian mailing lists, almost no one really understands what a fascist or a communist even is there, I feel this kind of discussion is ultimately wrecker shit.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2025/10/msg00013.html
I took his comment not to mean that LLMs are inherently fascist, but that within professional production environments in the US and Europe, where a lot of the maintainers are from and who also work on open source projects like Debian, it is near impossible to use a tool that is disconnected from the death merchants that are Meta, Google, Nvidia, etc. You can individually choose to use Deepseek or Kimi, but you have much less control over your organization purchasing boat loads of Nvidia GPUs or buying Claude subscriptions for all their workers. And it isn’t a lie that a significant push for the continued development and adoption of the technology comes from those companies, even if there is opposition elsewhere.
That is the charitable way to take it, yes. There is a concern about having a corporate LLM create whole features, that could lead to security problems. Most distro work isn’t like that, though, its largely playing with legoes and doing small tweaks. There is also no real way to 100% determine that a commit wasn’t done by an LLM, people can obfuscate that.
I don’t know very many Foss projects with an explicit anti DEI policy
Which one is this? Xlibre? Yeah theyre fash
Then what fash jacketing are you talking about?
The guy that replied to Antoine Le Gonidec. Antoine also says llms are a ‘fascist backed technology’ which implies anyone that uses them are fascist sympathizers. He also said Debian was becoming a Nazi bar.
The reality is that LLMs are tools. It doesn’t even matter if a fascist made a tool if you are able to expropriate that tool (e.g. open weights models, picking up a Luger to shoot a Nazi doesn’t make you a Nazi).
llms are a ‘fascist backed technology’
That’s a factual statement.
Thanks for the clarification I definitely misunderstood about bit of the exchanges happening here.
And kinda as an aside, Debian and Fedora are imo the most important programming projects for communists to get involved in. Fedora I think has greater potential, atomic desktops allow a good communist developer to maintain standards easier and uplift ideologically aligned projects. Both are fairly strict about nonfree software, which is good for helping communists in AES countries get ahold of quality software as FOSS software is able to deftly dodge sanctions.
Fedora
Red Hat explicitly partner with the US DoW, actively work with the Israel military, raise funds for BDS’d anti-Palestinian orgs, were caught bragging about their ability to “compress the kill-cycle” - the list goes on. I would specifically argue against any communist developer getting involved with it.
I say this as a Fedora user, but I actively rally against any support for it. I do worry about your awareness of these projects if you’re promulgating it so.
Obviously fascists can use any FLOSS software, but Red Hat do effectively own Fedora in most regards and directly benefit from its improvement and uptake.
Yeah I don’t think Antoine is particularly problematic but even he did fash jacketing so
From group chats afaik he’s an anarchist of some kind, idk what his stance is on China. I guess he assumes they’re fascist if he thinks all LLMs are fascist. If that is the case its pretty funny because China provides state funding to universities to host Debian, and it is the most widely distributed distro by universities in China as it lets them thread the needle on certain sanctions relating to copyright.
Yeah I don’t like AI or support the widespread use in the way we are seeing. However I do see the nuances to the various models and their use cases within reason.
Broad statements about AI/LLMs based solely on the evil corporate corner of the space doesn’t benefit anyone.
I wonder if it’s that guy
