news
News About Debian-based Sparky and "Debian Has Fallen" as Slop Plagiarism Tolerated (for Volunteers to Assess Botspam)
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Sparky GNU/Linux ☛ Sparky news 2026/08
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PulkoMandy ☛ Debian has fallen
For me, that tells a different story. How did we get there? How did this become normal? Sadly, I think it comes from a much more difficult to fight enemy: people stopped to care. They chose comfort and convenience. Writing and maintaining code is hard and thankless. People demand things from you. They are not happy about your choices. In open source, you usually don't even get paid for it. If you are a new developer, you hit a lot of missing documentation, unclear processes, folklore to understand before you can meaningfully contribute. If you've been there a long time, you're tired of explaining the same thing, over and over again, and seeing people making the same wrong assumption and falling in the same trap.
I think, collectively, we failed. Building an open source ecosystem that works requires a lot of care. Fixing bugs, writing documentation, helping new developers get started. But, unfortunately, a lot of projects don't do a great job at that (including some of mine, I don't pretend to have a solution here). The sourcecode is big and complicated, the developers are overworked and can't help users and newcomers, sometimes there is some elitism and gatekeeping driving people away. And then, a small group of people is left alone steering the ship. They are the ones who managed to jump all these hoops, and don't even notice how difficult it was to get there, or maybe it was easy when they did it and it became more complicated later on.
We built a place where people will rather talk to an LLM than to a fellow human. Because the human will be annoyed by having to reply, could be rude, may not reply at all, or maybe none of these, but the fear that one such thing may happen. We built projects with sourcecode that is complicated to navigate, and didn't provide a map. You have to hire a guide to be safe. And now it turns out LLMs are taking the job of the guides.
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The Verge ☛ Debian won’t ban AI code from its Linux distribution [Ed: LLM slop is not "AI"]
Debian voted to allow developers to use AI tools in their contributions to the Linux distribution’s “development, maintenance, [and] documentation.” The new policy on AI acknowledges that “responsible” use of AI can improve developers’ productivity, and goes on to say, “generative AI is neither exempt from nor subject to special rules beyond the standards already expected of Debian contributors.”