Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.
I recently found out that several researchers, departments... buy a personal subscription for zoom (out of the own project money) even as our university as a MS Teams subscription. Despite if it is effectively "free" for them, they do not use it. So much on public money spend wisely and the quality of the MS Teams software...
a lot of companies migrated to teams purely because it was already included in the subscription, IIRC they were forced to take it out by EU in 2023 for being anti-competitive.
Well of course I wouldn't expect corporations to know what ethics or human decency is even if it stared them straight into the eyes, but I would expect governments to establish laws and regulations such that the psychopaths wouldn't be able to abuse people to no end.
Currently it looks more and more like goverment itself consists of a lot of psychopaths who want to abuse people. Like abusing people is the main reason people go into politics. And then voters select those who want to abuse the outgroup, but don't know that politicians consider everyone as underclass, therefore even their own voters are ripe for abuse.
My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.
Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?
I'm more interested in the cases where you buy your phone, for example, and after purchase you are asked to agree with terms and conditions. Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device. Worse still, if 2 days after thre is mandatory update that forces you to agree to new version. If you don't like them, you should be compensated for it, as it is hidden information from you as a buyer.
I've always viewed those as entirely invalid, at least from the standpoint of the spirit of our various legal systems and cultures. I recognize that any "binding arbitration" bits are enforceable (and an injustice). But the rest of it? Literal make believe. I will do as I please with the hardware that I paid for, its firmware, and any software that it came with. I will actively aid and abet anyone who seeks to reverse engineer same, circumvent associated technical measures, or evade the law while doing so. And all of that is good and virtuous behavior that improves society as far as I'm concerned.
In other words - go ahead and click "I agree" without reading it, then proceed to dump the firmware or whatever else it is that you want to do. You aren't lying or otherwise doing anything wrong. The legal system is just broken.
The fact that such a legal reality has been permitted to reach this point has to be one of the clearest illustrations that western systems of government remain highly flawed despite all that they get right.
Remove/changing functionality in a way that the original use case you had for the device, no longer applies, because of a forced software update or user agreement you have to accept, should let people return the hardware regardless of when it was purchased. Bananas that this is still legal for companies to do.
Does that need new law? The problem we have in the UK is that Trading Standards has been starved of funding for the last 16 years so they can't do their job. If they had funding I'm pretty sure they have the power to tackle this.
Well I'd like to think Charlie Brooker, like many of us, could clearly say where humanity was heading. Some of the episodes that were considered far fetched 15 years ago are probably considered plausible at best and likely at worst now.
I make dystopian adds for my game- and one of them is a company called MacroSoft, which has a product that makes you sing add jingles to measure "engagement" performance before opening a program on its operating System (called BARs). Its really insane, how my dystopian crap regularly gets overtaken by reality.
> just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.
That's true, of course, but the fact that there are people in the company thinking like that to begin with, enough to think it's worth patenting such anti-human stuff, is plenty enough for me to never want anything to do with them.
That's an accurate description of the status quo, but it's also a good example of massive inefficiencies in the EU.
FWIW, I'm not saying that I would expect the EU to do a better job than the Dutch government. Likely quite the opposite. But it's frustrating as passionate European... that these problems aren't tackled on a union level. You'd think that's their job? The EU will never compete if it stays a loose partnership of 27 countries, and if it can't even get France, Germany, and the Netherlands to work on this together instead of running 3 separate projects...
Do we even need to have a suite of tools for users to create spreadsheets, paste images into them, save them as a PDF, download to their local machine, sync to sharepoint, change permissions to include everyone in the entire universe to be able to see the file, email the link to another human in the company who opens it, uses a PDF editor to copy paste it back into excel, barely scratch the surface of tools within Excel to sum a column, reply back in a password protected word doc saying looks good to me.
I would much prefer to be using something like NixOS and not be depending on Microsoft etc but I can't imagine what the stack will look like if we don't revolutionise the work. Sensitivity labels, DLP, etc. are relics of people treating information on computers as if they are physical documents, and I can't see how I will have been paying for BP/E3/E5 licenses for users and then suddenly start to argue we don't need those features anymore after spending so long insisting users need to use them.
Awesome! I believe NixOS is perfect for systems you just want to work and track reproducibly, like appliances (which a lot of server software is supposed to be). I’m glad people smarter than me are actually able to realize its advantages =)
A note to the developers in the project, if anyone is reading: your repositories are in violation of the new Codeberg policy that forbids AI-generated code [1].
That might still be in violation but I would imagine it's low on Codeberg's radar since they're not making primary contributions there (& if I were DAWO I'd also be interested in limiting direct community agentic contrib).
clearly shows the need for federated forges, where you get to decide on your own rules but you still benefit from interacting with a broader set of collaborators.
That's likely to end up Balkanized like the fediverse, where every instance has a list of other instances they refuse to federate with, often because politics or petty drama. Though to be fair to the fediverse, sometimes it's because those other instances are full of child porn and most people just don't want to see that.
It amuses me that Mastodon Central uses corpo-friendly labels for the sites they won't federate with, e.g. (https://mastodon.social/about)
A lot of such issues could likely be resolved by a better thought out protocol. There are certainly plenty of self righteous people who would refuse to federate purely on principle but more typically the issue is simply that one does not wish to be exposed to or traffic in any way the content in question. A well thought out self categorization system could largely address that need - you'd only need to refuse to peer with those who failed to apply it. AI also makes any such effort easier than ever.
weirdly enough that reminds me of wattpad and ao3, where wattpad uses much nicer sounding terms while ao3 uses as accurate terms as possible. (which makes ao3 seem more "degenerate")
Yeah, waiting for this too, feels like the final piece of the puzzle. Tracking issue from Codeberg + more general information about the effort around the the ecosystem:
Codeberg are going to have issues in the future when all code is AI generated (except for artisanal code of course, written for the love of the craft but not to achieve anything of merit).
Because no one is going to hire developers who write code by hand, apart from a few niches. For the same reason that no one hires a courier who delivers by horse anymore, or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain, or a cooper who continues to use wooden staves and iron hoops instead of forming plastic or metal containers, or...
> or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain,
Huh. For all the "traditional", "organic", "hand crafted", and other "things" I've encountered that isn't one of them. I wonder why no one is advertising fair trade hydropower stone ground organic flour?
Policies are enacted for current reality, not fantasy futures. If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't), they can just... change their policy. Of course, you aren't thinking about practical effects of policies on platforms, only on how it's an insult to your LLM-bro way of life.
Sure. You can come gloat about how you're unemployed because nobody needs a prompt monkey when they can just prompt the LLM to produce dogshit code themselves.
I climbed out of the code trenches years ago - I have multiple small companies, I'll be fine.
And yes, they both have moats that will take AI at least 5 years to erode, at which point I'll just retire.
Regarding the dog shit code comment: this is the problem with your whole line of thinking. Customers don't care if the code is dog shit. They care if they get value from the product.
As I mentioned, there will still be some demand for devs who code by hand, similar to how theres still demand for blacksmiths who make ornamental weapons.
Dogshit code doesn't give customers value from the product. You can get away with enshittifying your code/product if you already have an iron grip on the market and network effects make it impossible to escape, eg. Windows/appleOS/Android, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc. At that point, you're relying on the inertia of community lock-in to replace product quality. However, this strategy does not work if you aren't a FAANG-scale monopolist. If your code and product is dogshit, you will never get off the ground. You need not only a better product but an overwhelmingly superior product to the competition to defeat inertia. And we see this playing out in reality: there are no vibecoded software disrupting the market. At most vibecoded software is carving out a new MLM-style pyramid of vibecoding tools, but it is not replacing hand-crafted software.
Building the product was never the hard part. Getting it in front of people is. That will continue to be true, except the build stage will be even easier.
Forgejo (the Codeberg-maintained Gitea fork) is essentially becoming an EU-based community of familiar compatible alternatives to GitHub.
It's not quite a federated/decentralised platform in the traditional sense, but the decentralised nature of Git makes it a close enough equivalent, & the fact they're built upon a shared platform makes them very easy to navigate. So setting up public instances for each government or org makes a lot of sense.
Codeberg even maintains a list of alternative pubic Forgejo instances[0], some of which are explicitly pro-AI.
Fair note, but I'd avoid the cheap shot "more open". You'll just bring up the old flame wars about whether the MIT-style or GNU-style licenses are more open.
The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?
I've seen so much commentary on the apparent strictness & extreme nature of Codeberg's approach & no actual examples of it.
They have a strict policy (which many have rightly pointed out is impossible to fully enforce), & their "enforcement" has mostly relied on good faith contributions to date. They're also accounting for the fact the ToS change came without advance notice for many of their users who were already making active use of agents, hence there remains many AI repos (I have yet to hear of any removals).
To me that seems like the best approach one can hope for - a lax policy is a slippery slope (presuming dissuading AI contrib is your goal), & wouldn't satisfy their legal concerns (hosting code of questionable copyright status), & strict enforcement isn't viable in any case (especially at their scale), so this seems to me to be the best compromise.
Did you actually read through that post you linked? You realize not every project that was ever touched by a LLM is being thrown off? Read the "Some early, but informal guidelines" particularly, as you've seemingly missed that.
They're targeting slop and essentially spam, not everything that could possibly have been built by LLMs.
> If you see yourself on this list, you don't need to move right away, but
there might be other places that better fit your needs:
- Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs
All of the commits I browsed here seem to be LLM-assisted, so these projects are in this category. The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem - "likely to be tolerated" is not a great policy to have your entire government depend on.
Personally, the refusal on "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage" is enough reason, as that's a good chunk of what I've been working on.
And that's not a bad thing. That's why they are communicating, so if you feel that is you and you're uncomfortable about it, you can move out and it's a win win.
Not everything should service all of us, especially not the smaller services. It's OK for places to have their own rules and them being upfront about this is a *good* thing.
No, the policy being fuzzy is a feature, because they're not 100% against all LLM usage, they're against slop and AI-spam, which is what they're trying to combat.
Laws are fuzzy, and we're doing mostly fine with this, of course there are edge-cases. But that's exactly why laws are fuzzy in the first place.
If you have a "automated software factory" or whatever the vibe-coders are up to today, then yes, Codeberg is probably not for you. But if you sit with a agent TUI in one tab, review things closely and don't just "throw code over the wall" without reviewing it, you have nothing to worry about with hosting code on Codeberg.
Their contention seems mainly focused on the heavy resource use of AI tooling.
They run a service: they could impose limits on the number of submissions, builds, branches, scans, etc, and give additional usage credits to the large community projects they want to encourage.
The highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.
They also have "Mijn Bureau" which I tried out and wrote about here [0] which is the MS Office alternative.
I take it this is the layer below that, an operating system?
But it all looks quite fragmented still from what I can see, especially now that it's also split across GitHub and CodeBerg as well as being split across different organizations, and trying to collaborate with other efforts by other European countries while still remaining distinct.
I’m really curious to see what the answer for MDM and Group Policy is on Linux. The SSO part is mostly
figured out, but the reason places use Windows is often manageability.
Is there anyone doing MDM or policy enforcement on Linux other than Google Workspace + chromebooks?
Well what I wrote was not on the homepage of nixos.com, or obvious after a few clicks. Claude summarised it very nicely. I now know I don't need NixOS.
Perhaps the real meatheads are the ones who spam threads with anti-ai memes, rather than looking at the utility of what the ai provided?
The nix website doesn't have the sentence that Claude gave you above, but it does describe the declarative approach to package management that nix is known for. "Having a single config file" doesn't really even describe what makes nix unique. Perhaps you should have read the website instead of skimming and asking Claude.
That's the nice part, as an admin you are familiar with the complexity and use it for good. As a user, you never have to see it. (And you can even have some freedom for installing apps using flatpack/snap if needed.)
How would you role out the same config to thousands of Arch systems? Sure Valve does it, but I still think that is a "bolted on top" solution. Bootc could be another option though, but Nix solves reproducibility more elegantly, imho. Nix went back and asked "how can this be done better", where many modern solutions took what was already there.
I can imagine. Those are often the sort of projects that struggle to put a one line description of what they are on their homepage. I inferred it was an OS, inferred it was Unix adjacent...but no answer on the rest. It could have been BSD or open Solaris based for all I could tell.
The problem with Arch is that configuration is by hand so you have to do it every time. With Nix you configure it once and then you can deploy it anywhere. Also it's pretty much impossible to break since the system is immutable and you can boot to a different revision any time.
Patent: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20260260258
The mic/camera aspect doesn’t appear on that patent, it seems to be from an abandoned Sony patent filing from 2006 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070261077A1/en?oq=US20...
It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.
Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?
Well, you can always return the phone. For online purchases you have 14 days to return it just because (you don't need to provide a reason).
In other words - go ahead and click "I agree" without reading it, then proceed to dump the firmware or whatever else it is that you want to do. You aren't lying or otherwise doing anything wrong. The legal system is just broken.
The fact that such a legal reality has been permitted to reach this point has to be one of the clearest illustrations that western systems of government remain highly flawed despite all that they get right.
Imagine if we actually had real regulations, instead of these negotiated things. Then we could just sue and normal courts could handle it.
(https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538)
I wasn’t aware of the Microsoft patent but was able to find it³. It was published less than a month ago.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
² https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/
³ https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
Meta and Google will follow soon after.
P.S.: just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.
That's true, of course, but the fact that there are people in the company thinking like that to begin with, enough to think it's worth patenting such anti-human stuff, is plenty enough for me to never want anything to do with them.
- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix a hardened/secured os
- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example an example to use securix to build an office deployment (with some packages https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example/blob/main/co... )
If one country in the UN adopted some new OS, we wouldn't expect every other country (incl the US) to adopt it too.
FWIW, I'm not saying that I would expect the EU to do a better job than the Dutch government. Likely quite the opposite. But it's frustrating as passionate European... that these problems aren't tackled on a union level. You'd think that's their job? The EU will never compete if it stays a loose partnership of 27 countries, and if it can't even get France, Germany, and the Netherlands to work on this together instead of running 3 separate projects...
Yeah what could possibly go wrong
I would much prefer to be using something like NixOS and not be depending on Microsoft etc but I can't imagine what the stack will look like if we don't revolutionise the work. Sensitivity labels, DLP, etc. are relics of people treating information on computers as if they are physical documents, and I can't see how I will have been paying for BP/E3/E5 licenses for users and then suddenly start to argue we don't need those features anymore after spending so long insisting users need to use them.
In the same space, also check out openDesk initiated by the German Government (https://www.opendesk.eu/en) and La Suite by the French one (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
AFAIK, there has been some collaboration with the German government on La Suite, not sure about the others.
[1] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
That might still be in violation but I would imagine it's low on Codeberg's radar since they're not making primary contributions there (& if I were DAWO I'd also be interested in limiting direct community agentic contrib).
However Codeberg actual "fuzzy" policy is less strict than "no LLM used ever".
But they do let me visit blog.codeberg.org
edit: looks like this was originally the case and then they moved?
It amuses me that Mastodon Central uses corpo-friendly labels for the sites they won't federate with, e.g. (https://mastodon.social/about)
Whereas the more free-wheeling sites, like the ones Mastodon Central blocks, tell it exactly how it is: (https://tsundere.love/about)- https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 ("[FEAT] implement federation")
- https://forgefed.org/
We can do big federated/distributed development with git at the project level. See the linux kernel.
If the goal is fancy UI then there are alternatives.
If the goal is to do a big multi-git with cross repo issue tracker, then that implies either:
- you're a public site for random repos like codeberg
- you're a special purpose forge and identity management is a big issue you want full control over.
IMO - For this to work, they should go with the latter and not try to offload identity into some federated scheme.
Educating oneself to provide better quality of work still requires writing code by hand, and by extend is an achievement of merit.
Huh. For all the "traditional", "organic", "hand crafted", and other "things" I've encountered that isn't one of them. I wonder why no one is advertising fair trade hydropower stone ground organic flour?
Keep huffing that copium my friend. I've set an alarm to follow up here in a couple of years.
And yes, they both have moats that will take AI at least 5 years to erode, at which point I'll just retire.
Regarding the dog shit code comment: this is the problem with your whole line of thinking. Customers don't care if the code is dog shit. They care if they get value from the product.
As I mentioned, there will still be some demand for devs who code by hand, similar to how theres still demand for blacksmiths who make ornamental weapons.
Building the product was never the hard part. Getting it in front of people is. That will continue to be true, except the build stage will be even easier.
> DAWO Core has moved from https://code.overheid.nl to Codeberg to facilitate community collaboration.
It's not quite a federated/decentralised platform in the traditional sense, but the decentralised nature of Git makes it a close enough equivalent, & the fact they're built upon a shared platform makes them very easy to navigate. So setting up public instances for each government or org makes a lot of sense.
Codeberg even maintains a list of alternative pubic Forgejo instances[0], some of which are explicitly pro-AI.
[0] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/delightful-forgejo#publ...
The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?
There is no point in being on the extreme end around banning all code generated by AI.
Regardless, there is AI generated code in many repositories on Codeberg anyway.
They have a strict policy (which many have rightly pointed out is impossible to fully enforce), & their "enforcement" has mostly relied on good faith contributions to date. They're also accounting for the fact the ToS change came without advance notice for many of their users who were already making active use of agents, hence there remains many AI repos (I have yet to hear of any removals).
To me that seems like the best approach one can hope for - a lax policy is a slippery slope (presuming dissuading AI contrib is your goal), & wouldn't satisfy their legal concerns (hosting code of questionable copyright status), & strict enforcement isn't viable in any case (especially at their scale), so this seems to me to be the best compromise.
They're targeting slop and essentially spam, not everything that could possibly have been built by LLMs.
Personally, the refusal on "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage" is enough reason, as that's a good chunk of what I've been working on.
And that's not a bad thing. That's why they are communicating, so if you feel that is you and you're uncomfortable about it, you can move out and it's a win win.
Not everything should service all of us, especially not the smaller services. It's OK for places to have their own rules and them being upfront about this is a *good* thing.
No, the policy being fuzzy is a feature, because they're not 100% against all LLM usage, they're against slop and AI-spam, which is what they're trying to combat.
Laws are fuzzy, and we're doing mostly fine with this, of course there are edge-cases. But that's exactly why laws are fuzzy in the first place.
If you have a "automated software factory" or whatever the vibe-coders are up to today, then yes, Codeberg is probably not for you. But if you sit with a agent TUI in one tab, review things closely and don't just "throw code over the wall" without reviewing it, you have nothing to worry about with hosting code on Codeberg.
They run a service: they could impose limits on the number of submissions, builds, branches, scans, etc, and give additional usage credits to the large community projects they want to encourage.
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS
They also have "Mijn Bureau" which I tried out and wrote about here [0] which is the MS Office alternative.
I take it this is the layer below that, an operating system?
But it all looks quite fragmented still from what I can see, especially now that it's also split across GitHub and CodeBerg as well as being split across different organizations, and trying to collaborate with other efforts by other European countries while still remaining distinct.
[0] https://techstackups.com/articles/is-it-feasible-to-self-hos...
[1] https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau-infra
[2] https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO/src/branch/main/compone...
> DAWO brings public values and technology together. The community pursues five primary goals.
But fails to state what the letters in D.A.W.O. stand for
See https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO
I hope you are paying them something.
2. Because Guix is less mature and more, ehm, opinionated, than *ix + nixpkgs
Is there anyone doing MDM or policy enforcement on Linux other than Google Workspace + chromebooks?
www.dawo.community took too long to respond.
* typical deployments
* training/consulting
* compliance with Ditch regulations
* shared infrastructure for custom builds, and CVEs
"NixOS is a Linux distribution where your whole system is defined in one configuration file."
I didn't get that from looking at their website...
Perhaps the real meatheads are the ones who spam threads with anti-ai memes, rather than looking at the utility of what the ai provided?
Probably has its uses, tried it twice myself and both times were a lot of struggling.
For me even Arch was easier to configure than Nix.
How would you role out the same config to thousands of Arch systems? Sure Valve does it, but I still think that is a "bolted on top" solution. Bootc could be another option though, but Nix solves reproducibility more elegantly, imho. Nix went back and asked "how can this be done better", where many modern solutions took what was already there.
When lesser nations rally around the flag and elect dictators we have meetings and consultations.
And if I were to break it, i could just reboot into the previous system snapshot.
And I haven't read 1000 pages of docs - from my experience id doubt it even has that many docs.