Thanks for all the work you’re putting in on this and for taking the time to honestly express your views on AI and development.

I’ll be the first to admit that in general I’m an AI hater, and think that in the big picture this current cycle has done a lot of damage to society in terms of wasted resources (natural and financial) and accelerated us all into a place where what we see and hear simply can’t be trusted any longer. It’s gross to think of the hundreds of billions being spent on it while people are starving and homeless.

At the same time, I also see that some of the latest models are incredible tools for software development, and have made it possible to get some things done that are sorely needed in OSS. It’s my understanding that a lot of the open source models that can be run on affordable hardware are not that far behind the big expensive frontier models. While I really do believe that the current OpenAI/Athropic rise is a bubble that needs to pop sooner than later to prevent greater damage to society, I also think there’s no sense in wasting a good tool.

The fact is that Pandora’s Box has been opened. Even if the big players all shut down development tomorrow, the tools are still out there and will still be used. For better or worse, outright bans on LLM-generated code will only cause the people using the tools to try to hide what they’ve done.

My sense is that there’s a growing distinction between “slop” and useful output (for lack of a better term). It’s easy to churn out slop that might get the job done while making a mess of things, but a capable human in the loop directing things and working to achieve the goal with top quality will likely always make the difference. Software development is particularly well suited to this because of its iterative nature.

In our increasingly polarized society with increasingly short attention spans, we all want simple black-and-white answers to things. I hope that developers, maintainers, and enthusiasts can come to appreciate the nuance of the situation. And I think your post describes that nuance well.

Take care of yourself, and I wish you the best in your endeavors.

I’m curious what it’ll mean for this one: https://openrepos.net/content/munkstolen/fiat-pons-native-qobuz-client

Says it’s built on a qbz-qobuz rust library, so if that’s from the same qbz developer and the library got pulled, it’ll make things difficult moving forward for them.

That’s what baffles me in this kind of situation. The dev basically did their job for them, and now they’re leaving happy paying Linux subscribers out in the cold. Just hire the clearly passionate and talented developer and make the product offering that much better!

Now when I look for Qobuz apps for Linux, all I’m seeing are weird little download utilities to essentially steal music from the service. Gabe Newell sure had it right.

There were still a couple of up-to-date repos out there as of yesterday. They may have all been scrubbed by now.

Not a definition of intelligence, but something I often come back to is what it does at rest.

To the best of my understanding of how LLMs work, if you’re not feeding the thing inputs, the program is doing absolutely nothing. It isn’t curious and doesn’t seek new information or stimuli. It effectively is just on pause until the next prompt. There is nothing akin to an inner monologue or thought process happening in absence of what is fed to it.

I’m not up on all of the epistemology or theory of mind type stuff, but I’d imagine some might argue about that distinction in humans; we are always processing input in some form as the input from our senses is never shut off until we’re dead. But I think the “at rest” case is a relevant distinction that does get at motivation and real thought born of real intelligence.

That’s fantastic that so much is getting upstreamed!

I hope that the PMOS folks will take a more nuanced stance in the future, or at the very least someone with the coding skills will take your work as proof of concept to do a manual bringup of the same features.

Again, I really appreciate the work you have done! This is truly the first hardware+software stack that I’m aware of that’s running real Linux with all of the parts working. There are still some rough edges, as one would expect, but I think it’s amazing and deserves a lot more credit.

I wish you the best in both life and your mobile Linux endeavors.

Besides donating (done) are there any other ways to support what you’re doing?

Mr. Cat, I really appreciate your work!

I’m in the USA and picked up a FP6+ and flashed your image a few days ago. I’ve spent a lot of time with the original PinePhone and it’s refreshing to see Plasma Mobile running on capable hardware with all of the things working.

I hope you’re taking care of yourself and feel for whatever you’re going through on the mental health front.

I’m curious about where things fall in terms of maintainability. PostmarketOS is pretty clear about not accepting contributions authored with LLMs (and I am sympathetic to their reasons), but the Linux kernel and projects like Debian are taking more nuanced approaches. I’d rate my coding skills at the level of a script kiddy on my best days, so I haven’t been able to get a handle on how much of your work is eligible for mainlining and how much has to always remain downstream, at least under current contribution policies. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

That’s up to Microsoft.