I believe that’s incorrect. The reporter who started this rumor either misunderstood the meaning of the chart or was lying through his teeth. I’ll find the original source and share it here later.

Linux Foundation Report.

This is the actual source. If you simply scroll through it, you’ll see they’re investing in many things that move the Linux ecosystem forward. Open standards, open hardware, security in the software stack, providing for latest market needs, keeping an eye on legislation that could affect Linux, staying in touch with important entities in the industry, and so on.

Scroll down near the bottom and you’ll find where the reporter got their information from. It’s an expenditure chart and, sure enough, it says “Linux Kernel Support 2%” Note, however, that it also says:

• Community Tooling 5%
• Training and Certifications 7%
• Project Infrastructure 9%
• Project Support 64% (!)

Note that it doesn’t say how any of them is further divided. Remember all the things I mentioned earlier? All of that is value for Linux as a whole.

Software projects aren’t just about programming the big thing. Working on a large project will show you this. Could the foundation spend more on Linux? Maybe. But saying they only spend 2% on it is disingenuous.

The reporter doesn’t mention this in his clickbait piece, either because he doesn’t get it in the first place, or more likely because he just wants to push his views.

This is yet another example why Lunduke isn’t a credible source of news.

everyone ever just saying “it is not possible”,

I’ve definitely seen people saying they’ll fail, with no arguments to back that up, and I stand with you against that kind of baseless speculation. But it’s worth noting there are many folks bringing up thought-out technical disagreements with the project’s decisions. Some may be more opinionated than others, but that’s life.

finding some random comments from project founder to hate.

If you’re referring to what I think you are, that’s not it. People aren’t chasing after random comments because they want to throw shit at Ladybird. It’s called criticism. Criticism, if valid, is not the same as hate, and portraying people who bring up Andreas’ actions—possibly the most important person in the project—as one-dimensional haters is disingenuous.

But you know what? You and your opinion is not important. People are not doing this to make Linux competitor or Mozzila competitor but to have fun and learn something new.

But they’re not? Ladybird is a fully-fledged US 501©(3) non-profit with clear ideals, a roadmap and even sponsors that have pledged over one million USD in funding combined (see Chris Wanstrath’s post).

Haters gonna hate, I wish them luck. Failing is ok too.

Yes, that’s true. Please don’t disregard people offering valid criticism, though.

Where did you read me state he’s a fascist, when I literally said the opposite?

I genuinely don’t think he’s on Twitter because he’s a “weird fascist tech bro”

And I explained, in depth, why we can’t simply reduce who someone is to their words. You need to look at their actions. Saying “look at his sweet message! How can anyone think ill of him?” is not the argument you think it is. From history books to modern media, we know countless people whose words are nice, when their actions are anything but.

they can only interpret people that are not “with” them as “against” them.

And to clarify “with” above means “shares my extreme views and expectations”.

Can you tell me exactly which extreme views and expectations I expressed?

I’ll be blunt, it doesn’t look like you bothered to read my entire comment before replying.

P.S. Twitter uses their own set of emoji that are actually images instead of Unicode, and it seems you pasted the image in your comment. I suggest replacing it for 🤓 or removing it, because it’s likely oversized in some Lemmy UIs.

That’s actually interesting, I learned something new today. But:

cross-platform CLI and server

Will Ladybird compete against lynx? …No? I tried. Jokes aside, I don’t see why that’d matter much for end-users.

It looks to me like Apple wants Swift on Linux, but that might simply be because they understand you can’t run away from Linux when dealing with servers. That’s not necessarily the same as wanting to create a cross-platform (read: greater than Apple and Linux) ecosystem.

I don’t think I’m really making any of those points in isolation, but I think probably the first.

Well, I’m off to a great start! Ha ha… This is why I ask. I assumed you’d bring up at least two, but if I couldn’t even get that right, then I clearly wasn’t reading your comment in the intended spirit. I was confident there was more to it.

For what it’s worth, I completely agree with you on the following, (sadly) down to the Teams mention:

It’s possible to acknowledge that I don’t agree with the views of the devs while using their software, but it does create a kind of tension that I would avoid if a viable alternative existed.

Similarly, I prefer open source software and will always seek it out and when comparing alternatives I heavily weight open source as an advantage. That said, I do still use some microsoft software (notably microsoft teams) for a variety of reasons.

The only thing I’m unsure about is this:

The views of devs are relevant to my decision whether or not to use whatever software, but they’re not solely determinant.

I believe it strongly depends on which views we’re talking about. The problem is that while certain disagreements can be harmlessly put aside, and you may even work together with these people, at some point you’ll find views that are harmful themselves. Maybe they don’t hurt you directly, but they can hurt others.

Using software and engaging in communities of developers with harmful views means platforming those views, even when you disagree. You’re telling developers, “It’s fine to hurt others if you’re good at writing software.” You’re telling people it’s okay for them to hurt others too, because if respected devs are allowed to, then why shouldn’t they?

For a rather extreme example, Hyprland’s project lead is on record saying he could be swayed on genocide. Mind you, this is not the only issue with the project. Vaxry has been banned from the freedesktop mailing list, because they’re not interested in platforming toxicity. Many have ditched Hyprland (and Vaxry) altogether, even though it’s an impressive project in terms of technical achievements.

I’m not blaming unaware users, it happens! The problem is when you become aware of an issue, and you don’t speak out, don’t take any action, don’t support the ones being hurt. I’m not trying to order anyone to do all of those, but too many don’t do a single one and are seemingly against others putting in the work.

Look at the downvotes on my top comment: why should an attempt at informing people have its visibility lowered? They were not as kind as you to reply. Not claiming you downvoted me—nor would I mind if you did—but a -1 is hardly useful feedback to me, is it?

If I had known the full extent of Lemmy devs’ views from the start, I’m not sure I’d have joined. For most projects, once you’re in, it’s harder to leave than it would’ve been to avoid. The cost of switching isn’t a shackle, but is certainly a deterrent. This is why I try to be careful about which projects I allow myself to support.

Point being, some views are absolutely solely determining factors in me not using the software.

And again, Lemmy and Ladybird aren’t comparable in this discussion due to the fundamentally different nature of the projects and the ways in which people interact with them. I’m willing to elaborate on this, if anyone actually wants that, but this comment is long enough already.

I got that, but what point were you trying to make, exactly?

For example, the following are possible non-exclusive interpretations to my perspective:

• It’s possible to use Ladybird without agreeing with Andreas’ views.
• It’s possible to use any software without agreeing with developers’ views.
• It’s possible to use Ladybird without supporting Andreas’ views.
• It’s possible to use any software without supporting developers’ views.
• It’s unnecessary to bring up Andreas’ views when discussing Ladybird.
• It’s unnecessary to bring up developers’ views when discussing any software.

These may be similar and/or related, but are not the same, and so I would answer them differently.

Your comment convinced me to finally take a look at his profile and see what the fuss is about.

I didn’t see anything that’d make me scream fascism, either.

But there’s definitely stuff that’s off. Things that, in isolation, would be one thing, but when you analyze them all together, it wouldn’t be weird to say there’s a pattern. A picture starts to form, and it’s one that I’ve sadly seen many times before.

So I went back and grabbed a few tweets:

• Andreas’ take on… political leanings of contributors?
  • Spoiler: he thinks the left doesn’t contribute, apparently, and I have no idea how he measured lurkers.
• Andreas is, according to himself, something like a centrist?
  • What does he consider a “purity test” from either side?
• See this measurement of his political leanings. Rest assured, he shared it in jest.
  • Did you know the internet makes fun of these tests because it only takes a few progressive choices to throw you so far left, you’d think only through decidedly unwholesome picks it’d be possible to hit the right side?
• Andreas believes Twitter is full of positive energy.
  • I thought this was funny, because everyone I know—especially Twitter users—claim it’s become a far-right infested cesspit.
• Andreas’ neutral take and isolated opinion on pronouns in the office
  • The most liked reply: “[…] a red flag indicating that it is a woke workplace. […]” Many such followers. This is his bubble. Very positive.
• Andreas’ reaction to someone who didn’t like what they saw in a GH issue.
  • Multiple times now, when this issue was mentioned, I’ve seen people bring up how old it is. The age is irrelevant if he clearly still thinks the same. I stand by Lea’s arguments here, and seeing him double down and fail to understand the problem is worrying.

I barely had to scroll to find these, they’re all recent. There’s much more.

Individually, you could dismiss everything. It’s just humor. He’s neutral. Objective. Wholesome. But then, why does he keep hitting the same keys? You’d assume a wholesome centrist would have a little more variety in their stand-up routine.

You know what he reminds me of, after reading so many of his tweets?

People who dress up in a veneer of positivity, but you ask them what they think is negative, and they’ll say things like raising awareness of LGBT issues. Not in those words, of course, because that’s not positive. When they talk about it, they’ll put on this show about how they don’t take sides, and how they’re simply worried about the technical discussion, the actually important stuff, you know? They simply don’t like unhelpful noise, things like trying to foster an inclusive community.

It’s easy to seem like a positive figure when you never properly acknowledge any criticism. Position yourself as a factual, neutral voice of objectivity, even when that’s literally impossible. Paint those who disagree as non-contributing, unproductive, negative noise-makers. Say you agree with people on topics they care about, but then turn around and tell them they’re all doing it wrong. Cover it all up in emoji and a “Let’s do it together!” attitude, but reject anyone who reaches out with the wrong greeting.

And there you have it, Andreas reads like a man who’s either lying to himself or to others, and I don’t know which is worse.

I went into this thinking, “I have to avoid baselessly criticizing people. There’s surely nuance to this man’s real beliefs, people on the internet are too quick to attack without evidence.” Which is why I’m honestly surprised to say that I came out with a mildly worse opinion of Andreas than when I started. What the hell.

I sincerely hope he can reflect on his behavior and grow out of this strange mindset. Andreas seems to be a great software developer and Ladybird can be an enormous boon for the web, so it hurts to see him acting this way.

Again, I genuinely don’t think he’s on Twitter because he’s a “weird fascist tech bro” who likes a fascist platform (what is even meant by weird?). I find it more probable that he’s comfortable there, realizes that it’s not going anywhere, that it remains the most popular platform, and therefore doesn’t think Mastodon is worth the effort.

Why he’s so comfortable there and doesn’t like Mastodon is worth thinking about, though.

https://lemmy.ml/post/19080982/12955657

What do you want me to read here? I see three comments unrelated to anything I said.

I feel like Linus has said much worse things, without much remorse (the attacks didn’t stop after he apologized), for many many years,

Linus had a problem with criticizing people’s work respectfully. Rather, he’d straight up insult people, with little to no useful feedback, and people very much complained about it. Maintainers complained. It got to the point that he, thankfully, committed to taking a break from the kernel to work on improving himself. It wasn’t just an apology. He has since gotten much better. When he regresses, it’s entirely fair to criticize it.

but I have never seen anyone boycott Linux solely because of his attitude…

Then you’ll be happy to discover that many people working on Linux were quite public about their disapproval of Linus’ behavior back then. With him, with others, it was their complaints that got him to change.

I think most people do not consider the Ladybird drama to be a big deal, it seems only a small vocal minority really care about it.

Maybe. But it’s not about the size of the group, it’s about the complaints themselves. We don’t decide whether something is an issue worth caring about based on how many people think so. That’d be horrible. Racism was once the issue of a vocal minority; thank goodness people didn’t shut up about it and more eventually listened.

Andreas’ behavior reflects poorly on the project as a whole and ought to change. It pushes away folks who could be part of the community and helping the project, be it as users, developers or financial supporters. My comments aren’t intended to incentivize boycotting Ladybird because I don’t like the man, they’re meant to raise awareness of a serious issue in the hopes that, one day, perhaps he’ll grow up like Linus did.

I’d never mention this out of the blue, but since you brought up Linus, here’s my unnecessary fun opinion. I’d bet money that Andreas’ takes on inclusivity wouldn’t be appreciated by Linus, because the man’s one deranged step away from calling pronouns woke.

My idiology diverges significantly from the lemmy devs, but here we are.

Would you be willing to elaborate on why that’s relevant here? As in, what do you mean by this?

Because Lemmy and Ladybird are wildly different projects, tackling completely different issues, and consequently users interact with them and their developers in very different ways. To put it a little bluntly, I think that observation sounds insightful, but it’s just silly when you dig deeper. I’d rather not waste time writing entire paragraphs based on an assumption of what you meant, though.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m keeping my eye on Sublinks. I appreciate Lemmy as a piece of software, but it doesn’t have my undying loyalty merely because I created an account on it, nor are it and its developers immune to my criticism just because I use it.

Edit: I’m worried that I might’ve been rude in my first 2 paragraphs. Sorry if it came across that way. To clear things up: I’m genuinely asking what’s the idea behind your comment, because I could see it being several things and I don’t want to have to answer all of them, or risk answering the wrong one.

I know some folks think this is annoying, but once again, note that if you’re the kind of user who shuns Brave because the CEO does stupid shit every once in a while, you’ll probably not look fondly upon Ladybird’s project lead and main developer being scared of pronouns.

See this issue on github.

If you don’t care about that, it’s an interesting project. Can’t say I approve, though.

Posting this to inform people and let each one decide what to do on their own. Don’t harass anyone, please.

For comparison, Mozilla is on Twitter as well, but they’re also on mastodon and even went as far as deciding to host their own instance.

I mean, that could be the case, but for the record, they really seem like some seriously dedicated folks—a 1:590 ratio of code to tests! What is this, the Oracle test suite?—that is, dedicated in both in their work and their faith.

[…] according to the original author of SQLite and its main administrator, D. Richard Hipp, he received “100 per cent buy-in from all committers prior to publishing [the CoE].”

Hipp […] defends the “Christian values” that the document represents and points out that SQLite source code has a “blessing” at the top of each file in place of a license and includes the Jesus-inspired phrase: “Find forgiveness for yourself while forgiving others.”

“I could have edited the list down to just those aspects that seem relevant to coding,” Hipp told us. “But that would put me in the position of editing and redacting Benedict of Nursia, as if I were wiser than he. […] In the preface, I tried to make clear that the introspective aspects could be safely glossed over.”

“Nobody is excluded from the SQLite community due to biological category or religious creed,” he told us. “[…] The only way to get kicked out of the SQLite community is by shouting, flaming, and disrespectful behavior. In 18 years, only one person has ever been banned from the mailing list.”

Source - The Register

I find it more likely that they’re just religious. To each their own.

Not necessarily! Maybe we would live in a world of mercurial, or even some other alternative.

And it wasn’t bitbucket (botbicket?), but BitKeeper, which gave the Kernel folks a license to use BK, but with some restrictions. Among those was a “no reverse engineering” clause, which is what eventually lead to the revoking of that license—lots of interesting articles on this!—frustrating Linus for a few weeks, and finally the start of Git.

IIRC it’s both, sort of. They’ve contributed a lot to mercurial and, yes, that’s largely thanks to mercurial folks being more open and receptive to their desired changes compared to git. But they also have internal tools that build on top of mercurial, tools that you’re very unlikely to see used outside facebook projects.

They said they’re quite serious about it, actually. While it’s quirky, I don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s… weirdly charming? I’d never use anything like it, but it’s fun to see something different amidst a world of copy-pasted contributor covenants.

As is their code of ethics.

Sometimes, there are already resources explaining more clearly and thoroughly than we could. And although I’m unsure if this case qualifies, there are definitely topics that can’t be reduced to a few sentences. Thus, a reputable link is often worth more to both sides: it saves the explainer time and effort while informing the target far better.

If you don’t want to engage with the content, I believe there are better ways to go about it than being rude to people who were likely trying to help.

You’re already making the assumption that “statistics around text” isn’t knowledge. That’s a very big assumption that you need to show.

And you’re making the assumption that it could be. Why am I the only one who needs to show anything?

I’m saying that LLMs fail at many basic tasks that any person which could commonly be said to have an understanding of them wouldn’t. You brought up the Turing test as though it was an actual, widely accepted scientific measure of understanding.

Turing did not explicitly state that the Turing test could be used as a measure of “intelligence”, or any other human quality.

Nevertheless, the Turing test has been proposed as a measure of a machine’s “ability to think” or its “intelligence”. This proposal has received criticism from both philosophers and computer scientists. […] Every element of this assumption has been questioned: the reliability of the interrogator’s judgement, the value of comparing the machine with a human, and the value of comparing only behaviour. Because of these and other considerations, some AI researchers have questioned the relevance of the test to their field.

Source - Wikipedia.

Sure but only if you are certain of the answer. As soon as you have a little uncertainty that breaks down.

What do you mean, “certain of the answer?” It’s math. I apply knowledge, my understanding gained through study, to reason about and solve a problem. Ask me to solve it again, the rules don’t change; I’ll get the same answer. Again, what do you mean?

Ask an LLM what Obama’s first name is a thousand times and it will give you the same answer.

Apples to oranges. “What’s Obama’s first name” doesn’t require the same kind of skills as solving a math problem.

Also, it took me 7 attempts to get ChatGPT to be confidently wrong about Obama’s name:

It couldn’t even give me the same answer 7 times.

Does my daughter not have any knowledge because she can’t do 12*2 reliably 1000 times in a row? Obviously not.

That’s not my argument. If your daughter hasn’t learned multiplication yet, there’s no way she could guess the answer. Once has grown and learned it, though, I bet she’ll be able to answer that reliably. And I fully believe she’ll understand more about our world than any LLM. I hope you do so as well.

it’ll just make things up

Yes that is a big problem, but not related to this discussion.

It’s absolutely related, because as I stated, LLMs have no concept of knowing. Even if there are humans that’ll lie, make things up, spread misinformation—sometimes even on purpose—at least there are also humans who won’t. People who’ll try to find the truth. People that will say, “Actually, I’m not sure. Why don’t we look into it together?”

LLMs don’t do that, and they fundamentally can’t. Any insurmountable objection to answering questions is a guardrail put in place by their developers, and researchers are already looking into how to subvert those.

I worked with a guy who was very like an LLM. Always an answer but complete bullshit half the time.

Sorry to hear that. From experience, I know they can cause a lot of damage, even unintentionally.

That’s not the same as understanding what those tokens actually mean

Prove it. I assert that it is the same.

Very confident assertion, there. Can I ask where’s your proof?

I see that you also neglected to answer a critical part of my comment, so I’ll just copy and paste it here.

At this point, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that insisting LLMs understand anything is a discussion more related to the meaning of words than to current AI capabilities. In fact, since understanding is more closely associated with knowledge that you can reason with and about, the continuous use of this word in these discussions can actually be harmful by misleading people who don’t know better.

Any opinion on this?

I think understanding requires knowledge, and LLMs work with statistics around text, not knowledge.

With billions of dollars pumped into these companies and enough server farms crawling to make a data hoarder green with envy, they’ve reached a point where it seems like they know things. They’ve incorporated, in some capacity, that some things are true, and some are related. They understand.

That is not the case. Ask me a thousand times the solution of a math problem, and a thousand times I’ll give you the same solution. Ask an LLM about a math problem, and you’ll get different strategies, different rules, and different answers, often incorrect. Same thing with coding. Back away a little, and you could even apply that to any task with reasoning.

But you don’t need to go that far: ask an LLM about anything without sufficient resources on the internet to absorb, and it’ll just make things up. Because an LLM has no concept of knowing, it also has no concept of not knowing. It knows anything about as well as your smartphone keyboard. It’s autocomplete on steroids.

So let’s say they understand—they contain information about—the statistical relations between tokens. That’s not the same as understanding what those tokens actually mean, and the proof of that is how much basic stuff LLMs get wrong, all the time. The information they hold is about the tokens themselves, not about the real world things those tokens represent.

At this point, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that insisting LLMs understand anything is a discussion more related to the meaning of words than to current AI capabilities. In fact, since understanding is more closely associated with knowledge that you can reason with and about, the continuous use of this word in these discussions can actually be harmful by misleading people who don’t know better.

This is a timely reminder and informative for people who want to seem smug I guess?

Thanks for assuming good faith, I suppose.

I mean, have you used them?

I have, in fact, used multiple popular LLM models currently available, including paid offerings, and spent way too much time hearing both people who know about this subject and people who don’t. I can safely say LLMs don’t understand anything. At all.

How can you say they don’t understand anything?

See above.

This is a timely reminder and informative for people who aren’t aware that LLMs don’t actually understand anything. At all.

That doesn’t mean they’re useless, but yes, if you want an LLM to handle complex input and use it to generate complex output correctly… You may need to reevaluate your choice of tooling or your process.