eesmith

Yes, that's what I wrote. "They were opposed to bad labor practices, with machine-breaking as way of applying pressure on employers."

Otherwise it would be like claiming that an industrial union is opposed to people working in factories by pointing to a strike action and concluding they members just want to stand around outside the factory instead of work.

Recall that my comment is in response to "it is economically infeasible for me to be a luddite".

If that means something like "infeasible for me to oppose bad labor practices" then collective action is the typical response to bad labor practices.

If that means something like "infeasible for me to destroy the employer's use of AI" then I think that's mistaking what Luddites did as being the Luddite goal.

Products in most organizations are an end to making profit.

The job value of an SWE is to maximize that profit. It doesn't matter if the product is better to use, faster, with more features users like - that's an early 20th century model of value production.

What matters is how much money the company can extract from its customers, and how little it can pay its employees. Use dark patterns, increase lock-in, and switch to a rental system with recurrent payments. Minimize employee benefits, require broad non-compete agreements, have long vesting periods and lay people off before its reached, or simply fire them and order the others to pick up the slack using AI.

If you want to write software meant to please the user, do that for fun in your spare time -- though remember that your employer still owns your IP, so it's not like you can create a market competitor.

Alas, the above was meant in sarcasm but is all too true.

The Luddites were not opposed to machines. They were opposed to bad labor practices, with machine-breaking as way of applying pressure on employers.

Global thermonuclear war could possibly end humanity. How were humans in the 1960s supposed to process that?

We got close to nuclear war several times (thank you Stanislav Petrov!). This AI concern seems small potatoes to anyone who had nightmares from Threads, The Day After, or (a generation earlier) On the Beach.

Plus, any effort to really address climate warning will necessarily prohibit large fossil fuel consumption, so lets just fix global warming, through the same international collaboration we did to prevent global warming and to repair at least some of the ozone hole damage caused by CFCs.

Yes, the author gives many examples of how different students and interviewees draw different lines about when to use it and how to use it ... or not use it.

I found this line particularly poignant: "Torn between their values and their pragmatism, the desire to improve themselves and the fear of being left behind, they’re arguing with each other about AI even more than the faculty are."

Thing is, "And funnily enough, DeVault himself awkwardly failed to state his own flawed policy. ... One of the most consequential pieces of free software on the planet, and the guy writing the rule can't tell you which side it lands on." is a misinterpretation.

That text points to the discussion topic, dated 19 Aug 2026, when the policy was not yet decided and in flux.

The final policy is "original content written with or which facilitates the use of LLMs (large language models) or other generative AI technologies", with interpretation at https://sourcehut.org/blog/2026-08-27-tos-changes-and-llms/ posted 27 Aug 2026.

>Drew DeVault: This policy is worded carefully to allow some room for reasonable interpretation. For instance, the choice to target “original” content in the policy is intended to allow you to host mirrors of major codebases that may have more lenient LLM policies, such as the Linux kernel. An individual who contributes to a project like Linux can host their personal tree and stage patches on SourceHut, and a Linux kernel subsystem which has an internal policy on LLM use which aligns with SourceHut is welcome to host their tree, mailing lists, and so on, on our platform, without worrying about the impact of AI-assisted code in the rest of Linux. However, SourceHut would not be suitable as the upstream platform for the broader Linux project as a consequence of their liberal LLM policy.

> That's the actual thing wrong here. Not that they have opinions today, but that you can never know what they'll have opinions about tomorrow, and they'll never tell you in advance.

I've used Sourceforge, Google Code, GitHub, BitBucket, and others.

Over time these added annoying ads, mandated 2FA, shut down, and dropped support for Mercurial support, as examples.

The lesson learned it that organizational interests always override your interests. Every single one is a potential trap with a grace period - and I got trapped by each and every one.

> Now imagine you were one of the people who put a crypto project on Codeberg in 2020, or used AI assistance for your SourceHut-hosted project in 2025, built years of community around it, and then saw the headline on HN. Your work didn't get banned for what it was. It got banned for what the platform silently decided to become, several years after you signed up for something else entirely.

For a specific example, I migrated to Sourcehut because BitBucket decided to drop Mercurial support, so my way of doing development "got banned", including code repos I made available for scientific research.

But I didn't cry out "censorship!" This is the way life is, if you depend on external services. If you want something different, set up a contract with them.

> What got pitched was an alternative, and thousands of people built repositories, communities, and reputations on top of that pitch in good faith.

We can see what got pitched at from https://drewdevault.com/blog/sr.ht-general-availability/

"The 500 foot view is that sr.ht is a 100% free and open source software forge, with a hosted version of the services running at sr.ht for your convenience. Unlike GitHub, which is almost entirely closed source, and Gitlab, which is mostly open source but with a proprietary premium offering, all of sr.ht is completely open source, with a copyleft license. You’re welcome to install it on your own hardware, and detailed instructions are available for those who want to do so. You can also send patches upstream, which are then integrated into the hosted version."

The primary pitch was a forge you could use sr.ht on your own hardware, with the option of running on sr.ht services. The first helps avoid the trap of using the second.

> Now I beg that GitHub fixes its issues so people stop migrating away. Because

That's what happens when you depend on a non-free forge - you have no choice but to beg them to change.

> one of the most fundamental gifts GitHub gave to the world: Not having opinions about software.

GitHub has opinions. Its AUP says you may not use GitHub to develop "software for generating unauthorized product licensing keys, or software for bypassing checks for product licensing keys, including extension of a free license beyond its trial period".

> Malware [on GitHub]? Also welcome!

Then that should have been a clue. Malware development has never been allowed on hosted sr.ht. https://web.archive.org/web/20190819052848/https://man.sr.ht... .

> Now imagine this scenario: Bob hates GitHub. Bob has a legit Crypto project on Codeberg.

Now imagine this scenario. Alice, Carol, Dave, Erin, and Frank hate cryptocurrency schemes and believe it can never be a legitimate use of their dues. All have legit projects on Codeberg, but after the organization decides to support crypto projects they decide to self-host Forgejo on their own respective hardware.

How is this better for the environment?

> Or they imply that their ban meaningfully affects projects' progress and visibility, which is literally censorship

By the definition every forge does censorship because every forge has policies which meaningfully affect projects' progress and visibility.

Also, https://xkcd.com/1357/ .

My point is that your claim 'This administration has done nothing to end or undermine the antitrust cases against Google.' is incorrect if you also include European antitrust cases.

Yes, the last 50 years of post-Borkianism has resulted in an entire judicial system having a very narrow and essentially useless definition of anti-trust, far different from its original goals. That's part of the broader neo-liberal movement which started around the time of Carter, gained strength with Reagan, continued with Clinton's "triangulation" and NAFTA, and is still with us.

Yes, the League of Women Voters warned us about what you term the "two private clubs" back in 1988 when they decided to stop hosting the United States presidential debates saying that following the demands of the two parties would "perpetrate a fraud on the American voter".

Yet you seem to think I'm somehow shocked that same aged corporate Democrats who supported Obama, and who now fight tooth and nail against the democratic socialist arm of their party, are somehow in actually in favor of effective antitrust enforcement?

Your rant makes it seem like you're just easily triggered by the least bit of correction.

> I want to see a third Trump term.

Ahh, you're one of those anti-Constitution people. I remember as a kid people calling out "four more years" in support of a 3rd Reagan term, as their hero worship made them forget the lesson of FDR and the Twenty-second Amendment.

Just like those people who forget the lesson of Guiteau about a consequence of whims and bribes as a way to run a government.

Perhaps not US cases, but those aren't the only antitrust cases against Google.

What about Trump's threats after Google was hit with a 2.95 billion Euro fine from the European Commission's antitrust investigation?

From last year: "EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič on Monday made an 11th-hour intervention to stop the European Commission from issuing a penalty against American tech giant Google for its search advertising practices, amid continued trade threats from U.S. President Donald Trump." https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-google-antitrust-decision...

Or from https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/google-meta-big-tech-6-billi... "In February, Trump signed a memorandum stating the U.S. would consider tariffs to “combat digital service taxes (DSTs), fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies.”"

That memorandum is at https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr...

I am well aware of US immigration law history and the views of the current administration regarding immigration.

How does reading up on the history change how the stated reason for this pause has nothing to do with the meritocracy issues, fraudulent H1B visas, etc. that you complained about?

Do you think those labor issues will be improved after the training is finished, and if so, why?

How does your earlier comment explain why visas based on family preference are also apparently on pause as well?

Of course if we look at the history of US immigration we can easily see how for over 150 years it was explicitly set up to support a white supremacist race-based culture, which broke down with the civil rights movement and the incoherency of "whiteness" as a legal or scientific definition (are Arabs white? Are Asian Indians white? Are Chinese immigrants in Mississippi "white"? - https://archive.org/details/mississippichine0000loew/page/n7...).

With the current reactionary administration's antipathy towards nearly all immigration, except seemingly white South Africans and Nordics, it's far easier to interpret this action as deliberately gumming up the works and causing distress, rather than some systemic beneficial labor reform like what you want.

I assume that's what you mean by reading up on how we got here?

I simply do not know how you can use "meritocracy" to support your position, while also supporting an artificial barrier to free movement which prevents a more competent foreign worker from moving to the US to displace you from your job.

I guess I will remain unenlightened.

Is an un-rigged and meritocratic system possible if there are border controls?

If not, then using words like "rigged" and "meritocratic" as a complaint about the current system can only mean that you want no border controls.

If so, how? Every system I can think of can be rigged, and exclude people who have merit, resulting in a system which favors the rich and powerful.

If true, that interpretation hardly seems relevant given that all immigrant visa applications are paused, with the goal of determining whether immigrants are likely to become dependent on public benefits in the US.

It's not simply a pause on immigration by people applying for a category which requires special expertise.

Are you calling for open border with no controls? That's the only way to get meritocracy.

The system is set up so the casino wins. You cannot, with a straight face, argue the odds are in your favor, but there are rules about how the casino works, both formal and informal.

When a casino only investigates cases where someone wins $1 million on the slots, to see if there's a fault in the system, while never investigating all the times that people lose, that's technically within the legal system, but the spirit of gambling is not being upheld, and people get upset. Just ask Katerina Bookman.

The immigration system, with the thumb firmly in favor of the interests of capital, is still based on the expectation of good faith by those running the system, as doing otherwise results in orders of magnitude more rules, or an alternate set of unspoken rules based more on vibes.

"Pausing" is a bad faith breaking of the spirit of the system.

It means no use of Visa or American Express bank cards, which are US companies.

I think SWIFT transactions are under US control.

No use of Apple, Google, Amazon, AirBnB, Uber, or other US-based services.

Eg, "Canadian judge Kimberly Prost is unable to use credit cards or access everyday services in what she calls an attack on the independence of the judiciary " - https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-u...

The HN submission link is incorrectly titled.

The blog is titled "Merchants of Insecurity". The word "hole" does not exist anywhere on the page, the HTML, or the HTTP headers.

Yesterday's submission used the correct title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49433378

Is this a "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" objection, where even the slightest bit of hypocrisy or impurity justifies rejecting the argument?

If a vegetarian, who became a vegetarian because of the high environmental impact of meat production, berates you for defending data center water use, would that convince you to change your mind?

What about a vegan, who also stopped flying and doesn't drive, and is organizing a protest to shut down the local golf course?

Yes, the intro paragraph at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood highlights how it's a controversial subject.

You are, I presume, arguing that companies should not have personhood.

I think any definition is going to have caveats. When does a fetus gain volition? Does someone in an irreversible permanent vegetative state lose personhood? Do apes or cetaceans have volition and thus personhood?

The Wikipedia page also points out that "volition" comes from a certain Western philosophical viewpoint, but other philosophies have a different idea of what personhood means.

In any case, "personhood" doesn't mean that all persons have equal legal rights. A 10 year old has personhood but, for example, cannot vote.

"personhood" doesn't require voting rights. Babies have personhood even if they cannot vote.

Personhood can be applied to "natural persons", like people, and "judicial persons", like companies.

Personhood can also be applied to, for example, rivers.

"Put some Ethyl in your Tank!"

Ethyl lead, that is.

Yes, photo safaris have been a thing since at least the 1960s, when it was all film cameras, and the term "shutterbugs" used since at least the 1940s.

Indeed, now that you bring it up, I think a good interpretation of this survey is that more people now are doing photo safaris than they did some decades ago, where "safari" takes on a broader meaning tied to popular culture trends.

It think it's like how many people go to the Louvre for the sole purpose of seeing (and photographing) the Mona Lisa, or (more distantly) the standard itinerary of the Grand Tour, both done because that's what everyone else (that they care about) thinks is the right or cool thing to do.

The survey result is 'nearly four in ten travellers (39%) say they have visited a tourist site mainly to take a photo or record a video.'

You, I believe, are making a different observation, which is that taking a photo or recording a film has long been a component of many tourist trips. Which is of course true.

I'll add that likely more people would have done so had film and film development been a lot cheaper. We certainly did trips in the 1980s where we took no camera, or if we did, only a few pictures or perhaps a single roll.

At the end it explained why they think it's troubling:

"American competitiveness abroad is not just a commercial concern, but a strategic imperative. Protecting the United States’ continued economic supremacy on a world stage starts by defeating legislation that threatens it."

But that is still not "corporatism" ("corporativismo" in Italian), as used in Mussolini's fascism. From the Snopes page:

> In his Dictionary of Political Thought, Roger Scruton describes corporatism in this way:

> The economy was divided into associations (called 'syndicates') of workers, employers and the professions; only one syndicate was allowed in each branch of industry, and all officials were either fascist politicians or else loyal to the fascist cause. According to law the syndicates were autonomous, but in fact they were run by the state. The 'corporations' united the syndicates in a given industry, but made no pretence at autonomy from the state.

That is nothing at all like what is happening with Western economies, so it is not "corporatism", so it is not "textbook fascism".

You can read the various definitions of fascism at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism and verify that none align with 'marriage of corporations and government'.

FWIW, surely the Dutch East Indies company was a marriage of corporation and government, yes?

I believe you are referring to the misquote described by McKay as 'Benito Mussolini created the word "fascism." He defined it as "the merging of the state and the corporation."'?

I'll now quote from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fascism-corporations-corpo... , which thoroughly rejects that interpretation:

"In other words, corporatism in Mussolini's fascism was not a free-market capitalist system. Far from it. It did not allow for the kind of competition, innovation, market entry, and research and development characteristic of modern capitalism, and it was closely ruled in every way by the state with Mussolini at its head.

Anything that draws a direct link between what are now referred to as corporations (large, powerful private companies operating in a modern free-market capitalist system) and Mussolini's corporatism, is founded on a misunderstanding — most likely caused by the similarity between the words."

And then there's People Express Airlines in the 1980s, which let you pay the fare in cash, after takeoff. Just walk onboard and take a seat.

I also know someone who publishes their JAR files under the MIT license, though they don't publish the source code, so ... have fun reverse-engineering!

I also failed to follow the logic of that quoted part.

Free software is the four freedoms you mentioned - use, study, modify, and redistribute. There is no obligation to accept anything, for any reason.

I don't think the argument that AI is a tool, combined with the disbelief that people would reject a tool due to "the circumstances of the contribution’s creation, and not due to its quality" is a strong argument for broad AI use, because we know examples were many people stopped using high quality tools due to the circumstances of its creation.

The Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy was created by the Nazi Eduard Pernkopf and his four Nazi artist assistants. It is a "scientific and artistic masterpiece" ... created as the result of Nazi medical research on the corpses of executed political prisoners, and containing Nazi symbols in the original artwork which were airbrushed out for wider, post-war release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Pernkopf

Sure, for some the book fundamentally a tool, but "[o]pponents have asserted that any use of the atlas makes the user complicit in Nazi crimes".

The Wikipedia entry ends with a quote from Pieter Carstens: "Beautiful anatomical drawings were created, but this was only made possible by the unethical and unlawful procurement of the anatomical remains of murdered victims of an evil Nazi regime–thus beauty and evil were fused. This fusion not only perverts and diminishes the status and content of the Pernkopf Atlas, but also explains why it should be rejected. / [It] should be permitted to show its duplicitous face only rarely and then for very good reason in the teaching of history, medical ethics and medical law so that its lessons will be learned and its history never repeated."

This is not a call for a ban of this tool (the atlas), but rather a call for highly limited use, for very specific purposes.

Since I think I would be one of those opponents to widespread use of the atlas, you can see how I would factor in "the circumstances of the contribution’s creation", even for a high quality contribution.

"Other than TSA" sounds to me very much like "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

In the early 1990s, my girlfriend was scared of flying. I went with her to the gate for emotional support. I also sometimes met people when they arrived at the gate. No longer, at least, not without some planning.

In the early 1990s, full names and id checks were not required. This made for an active resale market which has since disappeared, with the profit going to the airliners. My mother and I share the same first initial, which proved personally useful one time when we booked the ticket as "E. Smith" since we weren't sure which of us was going make the trip. No longer.

In the 1990s, from drop-off to gate in the small city I lived was about 5 minutes, for carry-on. Check-in at the gate by showing the ticket. The only inspection was for guns. I regularly carried a pocket knife back then, even on planes. No longer.

In the early 2000s I traveled international. My carry-on at times included bottles of beer (to share with people in Europe) and wine (returning from South Africa), since I thought that would be safer than in my luggage. I bought them in regular stores. No longer.

Around 2008 I made the mistake once of returning international via SFO to visit friends there. I knew where they lived - I've driven there many times. But I didn't know their zip, only their street address, and there was no way for me to check in the new automated kiosk without that vital piece of useless information. I was able to look it up, but I was flustered and in panic that I would miss the flight.

Back in the 1990s, as US citizen I could just show up in most countries, with only my passport - no visa, no fingerprinting, no automated facial recognition, and no "electronic system for travel authorization" or rather its foreign equivalents.

It even worked the other way. I had friends of mine from South Africa going to Canada for a conference, with a transfer in the US. They didn't know they were supposed to get a US visa even though they didn't leave the airport. But the US at the time did have the TWOV (Transit Without Visa) program, which meant they were able to get to the conference and back home. They even had a comfortable TWOV room at the airport, and an escort for those who needed to step outside for a smoke. The TWOV program was suspended in 2003 and has not been restored.

Air travel in the 1990s felt like freedom. Now it feels like a key part of modern government security and control, with little leeway for humanity.

This UN report isn't about "foolish uses of freshwater."

This report praises AI as a part of the next technological revolution, but points out there are problems that should and can be addressed to make its benefits more equitably distributed, to minimize its negatives, to promote transparency in resource use, and to address sovereignty issues.

Discussion of water rights reform, water use for almonds, alfalfa, and golf courses, etc. are completely irrelevant to the goal of this report.

Yes, I've mostly stopped eating meat because of its environmental impact. I've also stopped flying, and buy most of my clothes second-hand. So of course it makes sense to also minimize AI use. We can easily do many things, and unlike animal products, AI tools like image generation are not embedded in millennia of culture.

FWIW, I have a hard time evaluating the validity of "A glass of cow’s milk costs weeks worth of the average AI user’s resource usage."

My back-of-the-envelope estimation, with total power and water consumed, ended up with a few un-resolvable factors.

First, what is "the average AI user"? Is that just people, or does it include businesses, militaries, the police and other government surveillance organizations, etc?

As specific points, does the data collection and AI analysis by both the NSA and McDonald's count as part of the average AI user’s resource usage?

The report says "A spam filter and an image generator are both forms of AI" so am I an AI user because I have a Bayesian filter built into my email client? Because if so, my minuscule power use is nothing like the what's needed for typical image generation, causing the overall average use to decrease.

Second, the wholesale prices I see for power, water, and milk, are all subsidized values, either from direct government subsidizes (like funding dams in the US southwest, or farm subsidizes) or from incomplete pricing (like the environmental impact of burning natural gas for AI). How do I even convert a hundredweight of milk for the wholesale price into the size of a glass? Or did you use the retail price of milk?

In other words, how did you end up with your conclusion?