Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
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.
