“I genuinely believe that if Debian were to say we will never use AI for anything, they would just drown and would never be able to keep up.” Will Cooke · Late Night Linux

Yeah, it is. It's completely my fault.

Such a depressing take.

I don't like it. And some Debian developers don't either. And they've left. At least one of them has left very publicly. And I think that this is like system D all over again. There was this big debate and vote and they went with system D and that pissed people off and we ended up with Dev1 and who knows what's going to happen this time. I mean, you could argue that there's no real way to know if people are using Gen AI and they can just hide it and lie. But I don't know. It would have been nice for them to take a stand, but they didn't. So here we are. And I will just be upset.

What I found interesting was I looked a little bit into the voting mechanics of how these sorts of votes work. There's a thousand and something contributors to Debian and they all have a vote in this. And so 600 people around that cast a vote, but only 450 were valid. And I immediately was like, oh my God, this is a conspiracy. They're silencing the anti-AI voters. And when I learned the truth, I really empathize with the Debian developers. The real reason is that half of those submissions, 150 that weren't valid, were failed GPG checks. The vote is done through email and GPG infrastructure and people just had expired or wrong keys or the other half were basically like people who had incorrectly filled out the ballot in their email. I just found it really, I don't know if it's ironic or just funny that like we're going to vote on the use of AI in Debian and it's just this archaic voting system that like a quarter of their own contributors couldn't couldn't couldn't work out.

Feels very Debian to me.