LLMs and xfwl4 – Brian Tarricone
www.spurint.org

It’s hard for me how he recognizes all the (social) issues with LLMs and still comes to the conclusion that he isn’t in part responsible for them.

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
    194·
    4 days ago

    Wow.

    I’m astonished (though maybe I shouldn’t be?) that the dev gives such self-centered answers. Like how can they not know how bad that’ll come off?

    But here I am, with a Claude Max 5x subscription for the past year and a half. I’m not comfortable with it, but the utility is just too great for me to take a principled stance here. I like it, and I want it, so I’m using it. Maybe that’s morally questionable, or worse. But, as I said: here I am.

    All of his answers are complete cop-out sidesteps, but that line in particular, I mean… Fuck, dude.

    I previously held quite positive feelings about Xfce finally getting the last piece of the puzzle to switch to wayland, but uh, yeah. Not anymore.

    I’m curious if the Xfce developers that decided to hire Brian knew he’d be so heavily using LLM’s to develop xfwl4, if that would’ve given them pause or not. It would appear that he got the money first, then decided to disclose all of his LLM use.

    Xfce was always known as the stable, conservative, slow, reliable DE. I just can’t see its userbase being too happy about this announcement. I’m certainly not. I use it on a very weak laptop with Debian 13, but I think I may switch to a different lightweight DE when Debian 14 comes around, perhaps LXQt or a window manager.

    • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      I’ve been happily using lxqt for 6+ months. Their matrix channel is very alive and knowledgeable.

        • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          Thanks for the update.

          So far the only OS / DE I’ve found that explicitly bans LLM contributions is Haiku OS.

          • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            I believe FreeBSD currently doesn’t allow LLM’s either, at least for now due to licensing concerns (I get the vibe they’d be open to it if it was deemed ‘safe’ from a licensing standpoint, so if the court ever made a decisions that makes them feel safe, they’d probably open it up to it).

            Realistically though, both BSD and Haiku would be a pretty drastic downgrade in overall usability from reduced software and hardware support compared to Linux, and at least at this point, that’s a bit too big of a sacrifice to make :(

            I plan to start probing other DE’s who have yet to make a public stance on LLMs in hope of finding at least a few that can be considered a safe haven.