659
Tariffs Spark Shift to Open Source
(news.opensuse.org)
Good.
Here comes Europe, Fuck Yeah. Here to save the motherfucking day yeah.
Several EU countries already have fascists or borderline fascists in the government (Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary) or have a raising fascist force grabbing for power (e.g. Germany, Sweden).
Don't expect too much from the EU. We might very well overtake you on the road to open fascist total control.
As long as it's an OSI approved open fascist, then I'm on board
Freude, schöner Götterfunken!
(Joy, thou shining spark of God)
Tochter aus Elyyyysium
Meanwhile the EU probably pushes for the 100th time to backdoor all communication encryption backed by fascists and Spain trying to put down the Catalans...
And the UK doing the same thing and also a big surveillance state...
Sadly nowhere is great right now.
SEE!!! Trump is doing some good! It's about time the power was taken from these arrogant, invasive, Silicon Valley companies.
Isn't that what the tariffs and general idiocracy of the Republicans are for?
I'm working for the government, and most projects that were about switching to MS Teams and other US-based software suites appear to have crashed to a complete halt (which I feel no remorse over).
Not just software, but hardware too.
When each country can manufacturer everything they need because the hardware is all licensed openly, tarrifs aren't so devastating
Note: design and licensing is a far cry for semiconductor fabbing, and not every country can do the latter.
Most countries depend ridiculously much on TSMC (from Taiwan), while TSMC depends ridiculously much on instruments from ASML (from the Netherlands). Grossly simplified, getting where those two currently are takes a decade, and by that time they'll be a decade ahead (unless they get lazy).
As far as I recall, Samsung (South Korea) can fabricate large quantities of semiconductors on their own (but several times less than TSMC). Then come several Chinese companies, one in the US and one in Israel. Beyond that, there's very small fish. The only European foundry worth mentioning (X-Fab) has dropped out of the top 10.
Fortunately most applications of semiconductors dont need to be super small and fast. Getting some old tech that's 10 times the size and 10 times slower than Intel's bleeding edge is fine for most applications.
Better for some applications. Cars don't use bigass chips just cause they're cheap.
Cars are a great example where it really doesn't matter
Can I say that the issue is much deeper than just tariffs, and that Europe should not be using anything cloud or AI based? Ideally not even from EU if not fully open-source or open-data.
This is what I'm excited about. My parents are in the market for new laptops, I'm going to see if they will take a framework running popOS and make the switch to Linux. It's incredible that this option is now so approachable.
Mine are liking Mint quite a lot. They say they feel its easier to find stuff than windows.
Throw something like Mint on their old laptops and they may not need new ones at all!
Unless they don’t have current ones, then ignore me, lol.
Hey, that's a good point!
I think they're keen to buy something new, so my main excitement is hey look a shop where you can start with Linux in the first place.
But I could also end up showing them how to repurpose their current laptops as media servers or something, which would be cool!
Check NovaCustom too
Lemmy seems to be anti-AI, at least from my impression, but I am hopeful that AI will help invigorate the open source software world. If people can code better, faster, cheaper, safer (more secure) that will surely apply to open source as well. AI coding tools could bring on the Linux mainstream revolution. Imagine thousands of autonomous agents refining software for Linux. There could be a glut of driver support, apps coming to Linux, and so much more. I am hopeful about it.
I won't hold my breath on it.
Up until this minute, AI has produced plentiful examples of how it can produce anything but good code.
I'd rather have a developer writing software, slowly, because they have an intelectual itch and want to try and see the outcome of their idea than the proverbial army of monkeys furiously typing away.
It's pretty useful replacing stack overflow that could also generate code specific to your project. It's also useful for testing. Like any tool, it has its use cases.
I sometimes float the idea in my brain to learn how to code. If I ever come to it, I want to debate and discuss my work with another human. Not a machine.
Personal preference.
That's a great way to do it, but human attention on your code is a scarce and valuable resource. LLMs are great for the sort of lazy stupid questions where you benefit from a quick answer, but also don't want to waste someone else's time on. When you are learning nearly all the questions you'll have will be like this, your progress is gated on finding the answers, and even if you are taking a class and it's someone's job to look at your code and help you understand what's wrong with it, you have to wait your turn for that and only get so much help.
and there are so many cases in programming where you can save hours asking a really simple question that should be easy to figure out on your own but actually isn't.
@fubbernuckin Well yes, but those hours are called "learning". Learning must hurt, it's a change in the brain, that pain will change you, you want to be changed. You will not learn to figure things out if you just always reach for the robot at the sign of first trouble.
No, learning is there part where you have to think. That's not when you use the robot. You use the robot when the documentation is trash and unusable and every answer you find is out of date. You use the robot when you know exactly what you want to do and how to do it and you don't have time to trawl through the docs for the next 2 hours. You use the robot when the only gimp 2.10 tutorial on earth for how to write plugins tells you to use this funny program called gimptool but you're new to gimp dev so you look online to see what that is only to find that there's no mention of it literally anywhere besides your current tutorial and a disjointed man page where you can't find the source anywhere, and the devs are all on irc and you don't want to bother them and you're worried that they're just going to tell you to read the tutorial you already came from and you'll leave empty handed. That's when you ask the robot. It has a use, you don't have to substitute your thinking to use it.
@fubbernuckin Right, so you only substitute "how to read documentation" and "how to talk to people on IRC", great...
Know what, that's stupid and reductive and not even accurate to what I said, but fuck it, yes. Yes actually. Because i value my time and sanity and other people's time and sanity. Just because i eat out every now and then doesn't mean I can't cook.
@fubbernuckin Because you did spend that time to learn cooking somewhere in the past. Look, I teach IT students, and there is a very clear difference between those who use ChatGPT for everything, and those who try to figure things out. Even asking the right questions from people on IRC is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced. You don't see it, because you haven't grown up in a world with ChatGPT since the start, so you did already learn that. But can you ever stop learning?
Alright, you do have a point there. Reading docs and asking questions is a skill too, and if you haven't learned them yet then chatgpt can stunt your growth there, i agree with that much.
I still think that chatgpt, if used correctly, can be a huge boon to your education. Knowing how to interact with those bots to avoid their shortcomings and not use them as a crutch I think is also a skill worth learning.
The other problem is unlike stack overflow, a helpful answer by an AI isn't visible and indexed therefore someone else has to do another prompt for the potential answer.
If people can code better, faster, cheaper, safer (more secure) that will surely apply to open source as well.
I'm not European, but I understand that there's an old European (German?) saying that basically goes: "If I had wheels, I'd be a trolley." I understand that it's been pretty well-established that AI coding tools routinely underperform compare to humans in terms of "better" and "safer", which indirectly would also lead to it failing at "cheaper" too.
On top of that, there is another major issue with using AI for open-source code: copyright. First, you don't know if the code that you're adding through AI may be copying license-incompatible code verbatim. Because everyone has access to open-source code, it would be trivial for anyone to search and find copyright-infringing code to attack projects with. Second, the code that AI produces is also not-copyrightable, so that is another line of attack that this would make open-source projects vulnerable to. These could be used in combination as a one-two punch combination to knock out an open-source project.
I think that using AI-generated code in open-source projects is a uniquely ill-advised idea.
If only every open source software didn’t lock enterprise features behind licenses….
Companies still have to fork 90% of useful Foss projects and not upstream changes because they need to reimplement HA features and SSO etc every time
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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