Kristof Provost @kp@bsd.network

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the right time to try to sue LLM vendors for copyright infringement is after the bubble starts to burst. At the moment, politicians buy the line that these machines will magically cause massive economic growth (and, because politicians think the stock market reflects the economy, they even see some evidence of this).

That means that they're seeing it as a choice between protecting existing industries and protecting a new major source of growth. Even ignoring the massive bribes that the industry is paying, that's a difficult choice. Big economic growth often comes with killing off existing industries, so they're weighing known slow growth (or decline) against the promise of big growth.

Lawsuits now are very high risk. If the LLM vendor wins, they establish precedent. If they lose, they encourage special-case laws.

It's far better strategy to sue them after the bubble starts to collapse. Given the choice between an industry that employs a load of people and one that's causing the economy to implode, politicians have a much simpler choice.

Of course, this means you won't be able to get a cut of the VC bubble money. But I expect Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft to all survive the bubble bursting in some form, so there will still be a few companies with deep pockets as good targets.

I just read a third or possibly fourth news article where the reality of an 'AI has discovered something marvellous!' story turns out to be GenAI somehow accessed material it had no permissions for, which was the outcome of an expert's years of work, and presented it without attribution.

GenAI is a fraud. Whatever it offers is generated from work stolen from humans who know what they're doing. There is no intelligence in LLMs.

saw someone on HN say they will never contribute to Nura again since we ban LLM generated contributions (they had receipts too, they had contributed in the past)

their argument was that having done device porting manually before, doing it with an LLM was something like 10x faster

having seen the various LLM driven ports going around, we can't deny that LLMs are capable of doing kernel bringup, finding a functional implementation, and making many more attempts to trial and error than we humans are.

of course, this doesn't come without a cost, as with most technical advancements this cost is mostly offloaded onto those without the resources to prevent it -- the under educated working class and the global south, those who will be most affected by droughts and worsening climate change

this is reason enough to disengage from this technology, at least the implementations of it that cause most of this harm, but there is another more devious issue that i haven't seen mentioned a whole lot

in the same way that huge retail chains and global shipping extract wealth from small towns, LLMs extract knowledge from communities

the Nura wiki and other infrastructure was unusable for days at a time due to web scraping, and now imposes a proof of work on visitors (which also prevents access from old devices)

now that this data is in accessible models, people who aren't active in our community can use an LLM to port a device, to generate their own private documentation, they can enable devices in the mainline kernel or contribute to other upstreams if their LLM patches are accepted. People that may normally have become active members of the Nura community instead engage with a chatbot operated by big tech, which of course uses their chat history for training new models

As maintainers, for us to allow LLMs into our community would in my opinion be the beginning of the end, as our community knowledge base would be gutted, developers would become burnt out and disillusioned, and our culture would be erased.

A lot of devs are obviously struggling with complex communication problems currently, so as someone with a modest linguistics background, I offer this helpful template:

"We do not allow LLM generated code in our project's codebase."

I give away all IP rights to the above sentence. It is free to use and reproduce.

i'm a reasonable person with even keeled views and i think we can all agree as reasonable even keeled people that i'm basically a saint for proposing the compromise position that it's ok to take a massive dump in the pool if you're really careful about it. now, i know that taking a massive disgusting shit in the pool is horrifically unhygienic, and it could cause tiny little babies to get sick, but you also have to admit that it saves a lot of time and is basically the future.

So we hear people complaining wind turbine blades supposedly can't be recycled. This isn't true, but even if it were: over its lifetime, a large wind turbine (11MW, offshore), will generate the electrical equivalent of burning ~200,000 tons of coal in an efficient thermal power plant. The total weight of these terrible blades? 100 tons. So spare me the whining.

A picture I took last night.

Two things can be true.
1. Gas prices are skyrocketing because of Trump's illegal war and that's bad for consumers and the economy.
2. Gas prices should be higher because their cost doesn't include the massive environmental and #climate damages fossil fuels cause.

@jzb

100% agreed and I’d also add: there is very rarely a disadvantage to adopting a technology late.

Of the people who adopt early (assuming a technology that has real benefits), a few will make massive wins. A lot will make mistakes in the adoption and end up with no benefits and a big opportunity cost.

How are all of the early adopters of NFTs going?

As I recall, OpenBSD (might have been NetBSD) was one of the first F/OSS projects to have a public revision-control repository, rather than a private one and publish tarballs for non-committers to use. How did being first help them relative to people doing this later? They’re still using CVS, if that helps answer the question.

Apple entered a smartphone market dominated by other players, but did it at exactly the point where capacitive touchscreens were mature enough to replace resistive ones, were getting high enough yields that large ones were feasible and cheap, and when data plans had caps that were just about usable. How did coming late to the market harm them?

These are, of course, cherry picked examples. More broadly, look at companies that jumped on the web bandwagon before and after the .com boom. A lot that were all-in early went bankrupt. A few became enormous businesses. But most of the late adopters did reasonably well. Facebook wasn’t founded until after the crash. Most of the online supermarket delivery market in the UK is held by companies that didn’t do delivery until after the crash (though the leader has had one of the longest online presences of any UK retailer: they started on CompuServe back before anyone took web-based shops seriously).

A ‘wait and see’ attitude to new tech generally doesn’t hurt.

A thought on considering AI policies for FOSS projects: who will you attract , and who will you repel with the policy?

If you reverse the polarity later, will the “damage” on either side be repairable if the policy turned out to be bad?

e.g. if you say “no LLMs for now, maybe never” what’s the downside, and the upside? And vice versa: what’s the one-year, two-year risk of accepting LLM content?

ISTM that a no-LLM policy, for code, content, communications, is lower risk than a pro- or tolerant policy. But maybe I’m missing something.

From a purely pragmatic POV, I there are still risks from accepting LLM code just based on maintainability, sustainability, and institutional knowledge. My theory is that LLM using contributors are going to show less attachment to a project, because the way that LLMs (seemingly) reduce friction to creating PRs.

From an adoption standpoint, I wonder: which and how many users will be put off if a project goes LLM, versus the other way?

I’m sure there are some people who’ll drop a project if it declares a no-LLM policy, but ISTM fewer people in that camp and … well, it’s a value judgement which camp you’d rather nurture.

#EuroBSDCon2026 has finished for me. I had a blast. @EuroBSDCon thank you for a well organized event. I had a flawless experience.

I wasn't even going to post it here, because it's just a rant that felt good to jot down, but since it's now been on the hackernews front page and shared elsewhere, it looks like it touched a nerve:

(Read the comments at your own risk. There's brain worms there, too.)

https://www.netmeister.org/blog/everybodys-lost-their-minds.html

If you were unable to attend EuroBSDCon 2026 in Brussels, or had to choose between parallel sessions, you can now see the talks directly from the talk descriptions on the program page https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2026/schedule/ or peertube: https://exquisite.tube/c/ebc2026/videos

@eurobsdcon #eurobsdcon #bsd #openbsd #netbsd #freebsd #unix #unixlike #freesoftware #libresoftware

So, OpenAI admits two things in disclosures presented to the court:

• That their products are utterly dependent on work ingested without compensation.
• That their derived product is directly substituting for this work, removing the economic incentive to perform that work in the first place.

Meanwhile, the EFF filed an amicus brief in the case claiming that this use is exactly what was intended by the ‘To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts’ justification for the existence of copyright in the US Constitution.

FACTS!

The church of AI.

#ArtificialIntelligence #BigTech #AIslop

Hot take: drug decriminalisation isn't enough.

Legalise it.

Just fucking rip the bandaid off.

Give a legal supply route, tax it, discourage it. People clearly get drugs anyway. You might as well ensure the supply is clean.

Telling people what to do with their bodies is a failed policy that never works in the long-run. The state should not have an interest in what people do with their bodies.

Treat it as a public health issue, not a criminal issue at all.